skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Small nitpick...

"As the iPhone's share of the market in terms of units shipped has grown from 3% in second quarter of 2010 to 8.7% last quarter, Apple's share of the profits has swelled from 39% to 75%"

Eyeballing the graph, it doesn't look to me like Apple's share of the profits was 39% in Q2 2010, more like 60%. Anyone else see this?
I know that I am a better teacher now than when I first started.

Sure, you know that you're a better teacher than when you started. But can you prove it? What can you do that a fresh-out-of-college teacher can't? What can you do better? How can you show that you do your job better?

As a programmer, I have a similar problem. But I don't just throw up my hands and say, "Well, some things just can't be quantified." Instead, I try to quantify them. I try to show how my estimation skills have gotten better. I try to show how my code now has fewer bugs and requires less maintenance effort.

As a teacher, what can you show me to distinguish you from a wet-behind-the-ears graduate?
Thanks this is good feedback! I def need to do a little work on the favorites.
It was a WUBI (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wubi) installer for a Linux distro. I have written it from scratch based upon needs, though.
Wow, this is really good (and the best example of page turning I've seen done in HTML+js) well done!

Wonder how stable and smooth it is with large HTML pages, do we know?

The back button stuff you could make work with the html5 history API, correct?
The about the product slide show appears to use stolen preview images from shutterstock.com.
We must have had very different experiences. I found Java to be a lot more limiting than C++, and I find them more different than similar. In C++ templates let you implement many interesting ideas in the language. The syntax would be verbose, but there is definitely a lot of room for experimentation. Smart pointers, for example, are a great concept implemented with templates and making C++ programming a lot easier than it used to be. In Java, switching to a different JVM language is pretty much the only choice if you want more power. And even these languages are constrained by JVM if what you actually want is performance and predictability.
The main strength of C++ is how easy it is to "embed" C into the more performance critical parts of the code. All the high level concepts in C++ provide easily understandable and transparent tradeoffs and can be turned off if you need to go "low level". Not every system needs this, and there are many other ways to use C with higher level languages. But there are definitely situations where C++ will be the nicest choice.
Those things are all mostly true.

But, Here's what I'm saying is that you can spend 2 - 4 years going to school to learn about big 0, or red-black trees or whatever. That's fine.

Or you could spend 2 - 4 years hacking 3/4 to 1/2 time and hanging out on HN and building cool projects and learning about those things as you go.

I will ALWAYS pick the second person after those 2 - 4 years. Always.
Give it time. With the direction healthcare costs are going it's just a matter of time before the hate enters the profession. Soon people will see doctors, nurses, and administrators for what they really are: rent-seekers gouging taxpayers for enormous amounts of money by erecting barriers to entry, keeping accountability to a minimum, and charging endless procedures to the bottomless pits that are medicare and medicaid.
By "navigating" I don't mean just moving from page to page but rather interacting with the particular page. So even if your button only does something on the current page, I would like it to be a link so that I don't have to click on it.
Large market share might also lead to more stable profits, though I'd want to look at empirical evidence before saying for sure. Large profits on small market share reeks of an unstable situation, because at least in theory very high margins shouldn't be stable in the face of functioning competitive markets. My guess would be that high profit margins can evaporate overnight more easily than large market share can evaporate overnight (look at how long AOL has been cashing in on the very slow draw-down of its once-large customer base). Though it probably depends on how fast the market typically turns over. On the other hand, arguably Apple is in something of a luxury goods segment, and economists have long recognized that luxury goods operate in strange ways when compared to "normal" neoclassical markets.
+1 Just started reading, but looks good so far.
Tom Brady: I watched the Super Bowl on an illegal site
Basically we have a server connected to STBs running C++ scripts that rotate over every channel (the STBs are operated with an IR blaster) to capture snapshots which are then uploaded to S3 (with a little node.js component) that are fed to the client app via XMPP.
Thanks for the information. Do you enter birthdays every year? Or just use sed or something to update the year? If you delete everything after the date, I guess you never need to refer to old appointments?
I'm not sure what's going on. It loaded for me once in Chrome but it took a long time.
Can't get it to load at all now. A progress bar or a error would be helpful.
i see nothing but a blank page? is that what supposed I see?
Thanks -- it looks like this is the only viable option for me.
I used to tutor math at a community college. I did mostly the basics: lots of algebra, very occasionally a little calculus. I learned two things.

First, it was usually the assumed knowledge that got them. They'd mess up at calculus because of algebra; or get algebra wrong because they couldn't add. When you don't know the basics, you get the wrong answer even when you do all the new stuff right. The whole thing starts to seem futile, like climbing a mountain of sand.

Second, just as above. Most of my students had no idea that math, like weightlifting, is supposed to hurt a bit. They thought that heavy, stretching sensation you get when you learn new concepts meant they were stupid, that they couldn't do math. They didn't realize that every feels that, if only briefly. If you're in the bottom third of the distribution, and a third of people are, you never get to the other side of that feeling before the class moves on.

The answer isn't magic teachers. It's for kids to learn that learning is possible. You do that with practice, and feedback, until they get it right.
Peer review often works the worst when a journal asks someone who's not that qualified to peer review a paper. See the comment below from billswift about an unbelievable case of peer review going wrong, where the reviewers weren't in the research area of the target article (you need to follow the links to get the full picture).

Something doesn't have to be heavily cited for it to start getting traction, just as a website, or blog post, doesn't have to get heavily linked for it to get some traction. A friend might find the paper and share it via Twitter, their blog, or Academia.edu; this is how the social review process works on Twitter and Facebook. It might sound slow: you might wonder 'won't it take ages for a paper to get traction like that?'. But in reality, when you have social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, content can be surfaced, and whip around the world, at incredible speeds. The journal peer review process, by contrast, is several orders of magnitude slower.

The web is known for having a long tail of content: lots of content that appeals to certain niches of people. It is part of the magic of the web's discovery channels that this long tail content gets routed to the niches who care about it - via search, Facebook etc. The fact that academics overwhelmingly use the web now for research discovery is testament to how good a job the web's discovery channels are doing at surfacing good content in highly niche areas.
I first made Knot News public last September, though I didn't really have a launch. I managed to get a handful of wedding blogs to post links to Knot News at the time, which is how anybody knows about the site. Today, most of the traffic I get is direct or from Google searches for "Knot News" or something similar. I've been trying to get all of the blogs that are covered on Knot News to link back to Knot News, but it's a slow process.
Mixergy is shady as shit
Is it just me or the guys at Mixergy really kind of shady?
No i haven't talked to them but my cofounder was acting weird beacuse he is in exams, i recently talk to him.. By the way i would also need some help to develop in ios
good to see a hometown guy on the frontpage of HN ... I feel proud (for once) to be from Louisiana :P
I don't think people do treat market share as a proxy for profit share. You don't really need a proxy for profit share because it's easy to measure. And if market share is publicly avilable information, so is probably profit share. It does make some sense to treat market share as a proxy for market power, though -- business people do this all the time.

An alternative interpretation of the article is simply that Apple is targeting a more profitable segment of the market -- smartphones.

It happens to be the case that this segment has grown really fast and have both the highest margins and the highest total profits. This is perhaps not the case in most industries, which may be interesting.
Unfortunately, my clients send me PSDs at random points throughout the year, so I can't squeeze my usage into a single month. Thanks for the suggestion, though.
It has been written, I think by Dijkstra himself, that he has a (mid 20th century) European perspective on computing: that computers are prohibitively expensive and so we must go as far as we can with math before hitting he hardware. This is contrasted to the American view that hardware is free. Obviously the American view has won out over time.
Great idea, I like it !
> I think mankind should treat aging as the biggest threat it faces

This is absolutely outrageous.

We are already immortal. My children and my children's children are my continuation. They are me. More than that, your infinite existence is harmful and is a threat to your children, who are essentially you. It's very important that you die. Otherwise, your children will have to compete for resources not only with everyone else, but you as well.

On top of all of that, we all go through phases as we age. Those phases are essential to our maturing and experiencing life. To stop aging is the equivalent of stopping the maturation process and stunting life itself.

Death is as natural as birth. We are born, we grow, we experience, we die. To break that cycle is a perversion in itself and would destroy any concept of humanity that currently exists.

We should fear untimely death, certainly. However, timely death should be embraced as much as birth. It is the completion of a cycle. There is absolutely no need to fear it.
Yeah, _you_ can probably do it, but providing a public tool for scraping Facebook (or digging through caches) might be against the terms and conditions, and would probably get the hammer from Facebook counsel.
What do you mean / any for instances?
The Art of Prolog - by Sterling and Shapiro.

I accidentally found this gem and, so far, enjoying every page of it.
C++ template's aren't just unusual, they're unique among mainstream languages. They're C++'s secret weapon. These days, if you're not making heavy use of templates in your C++ code then you're using the wrong language. Like you said, many people use C++ to solve problems they could be solving more quickly and more safely with another language, but it's not C++'s fault, it's their fault.

In particular, the key feature of C++ templates (as opposed to other similar systems of polymorphism) is that they abstract over not just code but data representation. This is what CJefferson was getting at and it's orthogonal to macros. Ocaml and Scala don't offer it. It's about data, not code, so you'll never be able to gloss over it with extra parallelism.

In C++ a std::pair<double,double> really is just two doubles, 16 bytes. It can be passed into and returned from functions in registers. If I have a singly-linked list of them, each list cell is 24 bytes (16 for the pair, 8 for the next pointer.) In any other (mainstream) language, the pair is really a pair of pointers to boxed doubles which reside in the heap, and the list cell holds a pointer to that. The overhead of this is unacceptable in many situations, and these situations are where C++ still thrives. (cf. the Eigen linear algebra library for an example of "doing it right.")

Most languages have given up on this feature because of the drawbacks (code bloat) and the unified runtime representation of data (basically everything is a void*) makes many things easier (garbage collection, serialization, etc.) (I'm not super familiar with C# but I understand the struct types address this somewhat, but not without their own drawbacks.) But thanks to LLVM (written in C++ btw) people are pushing this area of language development forward (Rust, Deca, and others) in an attempt to fix the (many) problems of C++ while preserving its strengths.

Oh and BTW: A tank with wings is called an A-10 warthog :)
I hate things like this. Take the iPad: to turn a page, I have to wave my hand over the screen, obscuring the text in process. For no reason beyond familiarity.

There is no other benefit. It's a step backwards.
At minimum wage or slightly above, you would need to work about 60 hours a week to get by. You should make it a priority to find roommates to split costs.

California community colleges charge upwards of $500 a unit for out-of-state students. Find out what your preferred school charges and factor that into your plans.

The cheapest place to live in the Bay Area might be Vallejo, or possibly some run-down areas of the East Bay. However, moving there would put you out of daily driving range of most of the Bay Area's software companies which are on the south end of the peninsula in the Menlo Park area, or in San Jose.
It wasn't clear to me that you were trying to avoid "the filter bubble." It sounded as though you were truly paranoid/freaked out when you saw advertisers retargeting you, etc.

I din't realize inaccurate personalization could be so upsetting. I typically take everything I read or see with a grain of salt. The Internet, afterall, is made by bozos like you and me ;)
Your argument is technically right but It sounds like an excuse to punt on a practice that most of us find f$cking despicable.

I'll take that. If I have to choose between saying something true but unpopular or false but popular, I hope I'd always choose the former.
Is Google Testing Local Wireless Broadband Networks?
Yeah, as if to "treat a woman like a woman" must imply treating her like an inferior creature. Whatever.

FWIW, it just means to not treat here like some sexless thing that you have to approach with the utmost caution because the PC police might find anything and everything offensive.

(I understand that some people automatically even the second version to: "so you want to treat women like a sexist pig, slapping their asses and making vulgar comments").

It's getting all the more difficult to discuss this kind of things with americans.
This reminds me of Richard Hamming's talk "You and Your Research": http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

"I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important."
Why isn't it possible to upvote and sort people's comments on Hackernews?
Is this because Apple sells so many more high-end phones than (say) HTC? Or is this because HTC has lower margins on its high-end offerings?
I don't mean to quibble, but you should really replace Henry Ford with Karl Benz. By the time Henry Ford got into the act, cars had already proven their usefulness. Ford's innovation was making cars cheap enough for the average person to afford.
You can just tap the right corner ;)
That's usually the case for most Humanities disciplines (history, languages, literature etc), because their overheads are really low and there is an abundance of teaching professionals compared to actual audiences.

The opposite is true for "hard" sciences like chemistry, engineering or CS, where expensive laboratory equipment is necessary and where teaching resources are scarce (due to higher private-sector demand). There, courses are expensive, demanding and small in number, so they are usually inaccessible to the layman.
Also worked for Wal-Mart and Amazon. Everyone else (local bookstores, boutique retailers, etc.) is desperately trying to compete on everything but price, but Wal-Mart and Amazon continue to steamroller them primarily by winning on price.
Are you suggesting that if they're in the United States the system is not effective and thus can't be used as evidence?
Patio11 made a claim that calls for reform, school choice, testing, etc. all had as their goal employment of teachers and that education of students was a by-product. Specifically he/she said this in regard to professional development.

I responded to the professional development aspect of Patio11's comment. My point being that seasoned professionals do have wisdom to impart on less experienced colleagues. I used myself as an example but the point made is clear (I think).

Even if I really am not a better teacher now than I was 17 years ago the point is still true. Well, in order for the point not to be true one has to believe that there is no wisdom gained from experience is teaching an that this is universally true. I know of no profession in which practitioners do not generally get better over time. Indeed,there is no profession in which no practitioner gets better over time.

So what is the point of requesting that I prove that I really have gotten better over time? It's not germane to my point unless one believes that no one ever gets better over time in teaching.
Here's a very real, very dangerous example: conversion rate as a proxy for profit per visitor or # of unique people signing up.

A web page that gets users to visit an average of 2 times before buying instead of an average of 3 times seems to have a vastly improved conversion rate (depending on how you measure), but is not improving sales one whit.
It is possible to upvote people's comments on HN. Comments are sorted according to upvotes, downvotes, and time since posting. And flags too, maybe, I suppose.

Perhaps you do not have enough karma to upvote comments yet?
From my experience a significant percentage of the population already feels this way. Maybe it's because I have mostly dealt with the military health care system(which also uses civilian specialists), but most doctors seem arrogant, uncaring, and incompetent.
This is what one finds in the "About" page of Khan Academy:

> Sal also found time to get three degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard

> Shantanu (...) received four degrees from MIT

> Bilal (...) completed his MBA and MA in Education from Stanford and a BS in Actuarial Science from Urbana-Champaign

> Marcia (...) received her BS and MS in Computer Science from Stanford

> Jessica (...) is an alumna of Stanford and UC San Diego

> Desmond (...) studied mechatronics engineering at Swinburne University, Australia

> Charlotte (...) received her BA from Haverford College

> Elizabeth (...) earned a B.A. in Intellectual History at Penn

> Marcos (...) has an SB from MIT and an MFA from RISD

> James (...) received two degrees from CMU in Physics and Computer Science

> Minli (...) has a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and M.S. in Management Science & Engineering from Stanford University

http://www.khanacademy.org/about/the-team

What's the point? If traditional education is irrelevant, why does it matter whether Khan Academy's people come from the most prestigious universities...?
Micron appoints new CEO in wake of Appleton’s death
How about a "silent shadow" system? When an account reaches a slope on the negativekarma-time graph, just make it so that a very small, random group of users are the only ones who actually see what they posted. To everyone else, it would be as if they hadn't posted at all. All the while, if what they do post gets a large percentage of upvotes compared to the amount that see the post, shorten the "shadow silent" accordingly.

It will not be made known to the user that their posts cannot be seen. They will have no reason to use alts, and we will have no reason to IP tracking, which could affect non-troll users.
Works really good on iPad 2!
Don't forget about the true rent-seeking, taxpayer gouging insurance companies. I find that by the time I've paid my $950 a month in insurance, paying another $40 copay to the doctor just makes me angry. When the cost to have semi-decent insurance is the same cost as leasing a BMW it's no wonder that people don't go to the doctor's.

[Note: I realize it might just be that my insurance is ridiculous. I'm looking into alternatives.]
I personally find that even just 5 minute exercise in the morning before I take a shower gets me in the right mood.

Before I eat my breakfast or take a shower, I'll do a couple of pressups until I can't any more (usually about 40) and then some sit-ups(30 crunches and 30 normal ones). I'll then do so really light stretching (no idea what the names are: fetus position to stretching my back as I try to look at the ceiling etc...)

I'm currently living in Russia right now and trying to learn the language so my whole breakfast/exercise/shower I've got some Russian audio book playing in the background as well.
The reason why flash is (was) such a horrible horrible thing for the web is only partially because it was a shitty shitty plugin.

The real reason is things like this. Just because you CAN doesn't mean you SHOULD.
What can you do that a fresh-out-of-college teacher can't?

I can plan lessons that include activities tailored for the needs of specific students. Training teachers find this hard and tend to plan for the median.

I can plan lessons more quickly than a training teacher, thus liberating time for more tailoring. I can use technology to differentiate delivery and to save time.

My feedback to each student is more accurately geared to that student's 'zone of proximal development'. I can set targets that mean something to each student.

I can 'reflect in action' in the classroom. I can read the situation in the whole class, and I can understand the logic behind mistakes that individual students make, and suggest alternative approaches.

How can you show that you do your job better?

In the institution where I teach we have QA observations and peer observations in place. That gives me some kind of benchmark.

Education is fuzzy, hard to measure, hard to standardise and quite hard work if you do it properly. As are many human occupations.