skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Exams are about testing what the students have learned, not about teaching them

Your job as a prof should be teaching them and exams are a part of that - at the same time exams are typically focused on the 2 or 3 major subjects or points that were taught. And they should be, because ultimately as a benevolent and good prof, you want your students to learn the matter and get a good understanding but you cannot or should not expect them to memorize every little detail you ever taught just because your subject is clearly oh-so-important! A good prof has such a concept that spans from his classes, textbooks to the exams.

Putting in questions just to frakk with students because you don't like them sharing notes for whatever reason doesn't fit there - because I strongly doubt good notes would miss major points but rather twist a few tiny facts.

> This sounds like a great way to sort the students..

I knew this sentiment would come up and I cannot tell you how deeply I loathe it. Yes, in elementary school this approach is probably a good idea... force students to sit through each class, make them take notes, then check their homework and give them little shiny golden stars to make them happy and then make them write an exam on it. But we are talking university here, this isn't kindergarten - you should be educating and empowering growing adults, you want them to become individuals and that can only mean dropping the retarded elementary-school gold-star mentality because those aren't the people who will accomplish great things later on if you never taught them or gave them any chance to become independent.

The exam should check if I have a good understanding of the subject, it should definitely NOT check how I obtained that knowledge. But if I am a lazy and bad prof, I just dish out multi-choice tests and probably you can pass those easier by just regurgitating some facts you learned by heart from copied notes the night before. But this laziness shouldn't be encouraged by trying to limit notes to counter "learning by heart without understanding" because it is just a consequence of being a bad and lazy prof who writes horrible exams that can be passed like that, brute-force style.

Stop patronizing students, your job is to prepare them for a career and the gold-star mentality won't get you very far in the real world... whoever your customers are, they care about you getting the job done and not much else.
honesty has nothing to do with it..... referral programs are a way of marketing your product..... getting others to do yourmarketingfor you in exchange for something. sometimes cash, in this case axtra services. bringing in new customers is farmorevaluable than one subscription ( as those customers may go the referral route, etc). many online services got hugr this way..... the referral markets are big business.
I'm as tinfoily as the next guy, but I don't think buying a mask on amazon is going to land you in a reeducation camp. Wearing a mask hardly makes one a Ted Kaczynski.
Were you able to convince Google to un-suspend you?

I used to use AdWords on my own site, and my account was frozen because of "click-fraud". A few enterprising users on an unrelated forum decided to click my ads repeatedly, to support my OSS project. As a result I was denied the $10 of "legitimate clicks"

Any attempt to launch an appeal and contact Google seemed like the message was sent to their spam folder, and ignored.
How the Boehm Garbage Collector Works
I was banned from AdWords as well, and while very frustrating, I was able to get the issue resolved through email. The customer service along the way is just terrible. But if you petition for re-instatement, recognize the mistake or violation you made and resolve it, you'll probably be allowed back in.
A tablet computer did not look like the iPad until the iPad came out. Funny that, eh?

They looked like laptops with flippable screens or tablets with flip-out keyboards... all of them had stylii.
> As educators we are constantly trying to spark our student’s “intellectual curiosity”.

Rarely. Let's be honest here, most teachers are not even teaching, not to mention sparking anything. They're just (slightly) glorified babysitters maintaining a space where people store their kids during the day (vide http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html) with some supposed benefit to the kids and society at large but the results are so hard to quantify that no really knows.

You're an outlier in your field. Which is also probably why there is no popular site like HN for educators -- there are too few of you who really care, not in theory, not in declaration but in the constant effort to improve their process and results. I'm not blaming them, there are no incentives, no feedback loop, and almost no leaders to imitate.
The OP says: "traffic coming from some countries which give no profit"

But he means something else: "### Block all traffic from AFGHANISTAN (af) and CHINA (CN). Use ISO code ###"
he talked to teachers over the years while developing his philosophy of pedagogy that's actually exactly what I am advocating. I am all for subject matter exports being the people on the stage, but they need to be informed of the basics behind learning. There are many great online lectures, but finding ways to add repetition without simply watching the same video again is critical.

PS: Funding is clearly an issue, but there is a long history of education and some extremely valuable lessons have been learned the ridiculously expensive way. Leveraging that history does not take a lot of resources just a willingness to use them.
This happened to me, too. Here's my experience with how unresponsive Google was (and is):

http://www.hung-truong.com/blog/2011/11/02/dropbox-referrals...
Ups - thanks, fixed that too. I was definitely not focused enough. The whole feedback on this post is just overwhelming.
The article makes a good point. I too sometimes feel the same way in my technical career, often asking myself: "Do I really know X as much as I think I do"? I don't view it as insecurity, more often just an observation that there are real limits to my knowledge, and how I should go about improving certain skills.

It keeps me humble, thinking, and always learning, which to me are the greatest qualities a software engineer/developer should have.
But piecing together web apps is a solved problem! Follow a tutorial, and you'll see that Django/Rails + MySQL + memcached gets you there. Toss in a bit of Twitter Bootstrap and you have a fully-styled webapp with a backend and caching. You just need to write the views.

No, I disagree with the quoted statement. Coding is hard. Try writing some code and letting it sit for 6 months. Then try to add a new feature.

Do you remember what display_user_data() does? How does that differ from format_user_data()? Wait, why did I write three model-querying subroutines when one would suffice? Oh, but now I'm passing six parameters into this subroutine...

I'm excited for everyone learning to code this year. It's a great time to learn! But remember that your code needs to (a) make sense in its design, and (b) make sense in its design six months from now. Does your code make sense after taking a vacation, working on other projects, and forgetting the abstractions you rolled with?
Out of the 27 countries in the EU, 10 still retain their own currency. The UK is in the minority, but it isn't the only country outside the Euro.

So given you've gotten that little detail wrong, forgive me if I'm a little dubious that the UK is the only EU country with personal bankruptcy and credit ratings!
Semantics point/question:

The T. gondii, as viewed from the cat's perspective might be a symbiote, but from the rat's perspective, is certainly a parasite, isn't it? The T. gondii is benefiting at the expense of the rat. Do biologists classify things as both simbiotes and parasites?
That's not an example of bad design though. It's the most elegant design possible on a tool designed for one task. In ordinary use, the design is perfectly safe because nobody has any motive to do what you'd have to do for it to be dangerous and everyone is trained to avoid that danger.

I mean, you might as well say a chainsaw was a bad design because it has moving parts that you could hurt yourself with. One does not follow on from the other.
I don't think your analogy works... there are different skill-sets. Maybe "I'm an excellent eater of hamburgers, but I'm horrible at forming patties and cooking."

Building large systems means that you're a builder -- you can take raw materials, assemble them in a coherent way, then troubleshoot/operate the thing you built. You write scripts, modify code to integrate with other components, and fix bugs. You don't need to know anything about sorting algorithms, although the thing you build sorts all sorts of data.

More knowledgeable programmers actually build the raw materials, or have an ability to dig deep into the code to fix fundamental issues. They may or may not have no knowledge of the overall system. A typical enterprise handles deep code issues by opening a ticket with their vendor.

I'm not making a "dig" at the "builder" programmers -- they are as essential as the deep-understanding programmers. The guy at Oracle who is debugging the code in the database that does sorts probably has deep mathematical knowledge... but he knows nothing about integrating ERP system components.
AT&T shipping LTE micro-SIM cards, possibly for iPad 3
You could also purchase it locally with cash at a costume/mask shop...
I also believe baby humans pass on a parasite that influences the parent to take and share voluminous photos and to regard every ounce of vomit from the child as a work of genius. This merits further study.

Hold on, my cat is trying to type sometjfkd a;dsjkf jdfmfddddddsa

fidddddddddddddddx fj
Well, the only real promise here is documentary (as it's been made clear that the game may fail)—and promo video can be counted as a pretty good demo for that.
And might get banned for it... thats blatant referral program abuse..... it isnt "free if you are clever" its "free if you bring us new people in the door"
Ask HN: I was contacted by a Google Adwords strategist. Legit? Helpful?
I got a phone call and email from someone with a @google.com email, which I believe means they are a Google employee. They wanted to do a consultation on my AdWords account. Has anyone done this? Was it useful?

Here's the email:
Hi there,

I hope you are well.

I just wanted to email you to remind you about the personalized consultation offer I sent for your AdWords account xxx-xxx-xxxx a few weeks ago. I’ve identified some new opportunities to improve the advertising performance for your website so I would like to set up a phone consultation to help your business get the most out of your Google AdWords campaigns in 2012.

As I mentioned in my previous email this is a free service that we are offering to selected customers for a limited time. If you are interested in discussing changes and improvements we can make to your account please let me know. Just reply to this email by Friday, February 24th* with your phone number and specify the best days and times for me to call you.

You’ll need to have access to your AdWords account during our phone call so we can go through things that will help your performance e.g. new features that are tailored to your advertising goals and can help you acquire more leads within your set budget or ideas that can help you increase your return-on-investment. You are also welcome to suggest other topics that are currently relevant to your AdWords advertising.

Sincerely,

xxx
Account Strategist
The Google AdWords team
Skyrim Game Jam
This is a real problem in the industry IMO. You do not need to be a good algorithmist to be one of the outstanding programmers in most industries. You just don't. The most important contributor to being a good programmer is excellent interpersonal communication - something that is unfortunately actively filtered out by many interview processes.

Take SOAP for example - that whole "bag of hurt" was created due to a lack of communication between developers (those who created HTTP and those who were developing web-based RPC (i.e. SOAP).) The accidental complexity of SOAP versus the more effective REST (leveraging the existing HTTP platform) and the problems that come with the inner platform effect have cost the industry millions (if not more.) I'm sure SOAP had some super smart guys on the team, but it took them years to speak to someone on the HTTP effort earnestly enough to realise they were replicating features of the platform they were building upon.

Or take XHTML vs HTML5 vs HTML 5 (the space before the "5" is important to the W3C apparently.) Just google for discussions about the rift between the W3C and the WHATWG - to me it smacks of "geeks" (and I use that term perjoratively, knowing that I am a geek) not communicating properly.

Finally: on spec, on time and on budget software development is far, far from a solved problem. There are so many knarly issues in most organisations - code maintainability, code testability, development process, effective test writing, refactoring, release mechanisms, team work, navigating politics... naming, even.

All this, before you worry about whether to use this library (and it usually will be a library) or that because of a slightly different algorithmic implementation.

We need the algorithmists - but we also need the guy who can break bad news to the project office, the guy who can construct beautifully simple object models and the guy who really knows what testable code looks like.

These are all orthogonal skills.
They're all opposed to how the government currently operates. I think that's something that most of the country agrees upon.
The failure of Facebook
Fiesta to shut down in less than 3 weeks
I would rather have my own group. That doesn't hide behind a computer screen.
Creating toys from Zynga's titles will be more difficult than it was for Angry Birds - they don't have any "protagonists" per se.
This seems like an AdSense vs. Adwords issue. What the forum users were doing was defrauding Adwords advertisers in an attempt to bolster your AdSense account.

Essentially committing fraud. The issue in this post is his AdWords account was banned because of x,y,z reason but not because of to many clicks. They probably saw the $100 credit beding used for affiliate direct linking and flagged the account.

Just as an aside I have 13GB on dropbox now and got the additional storage by using the technique outlined in the article. My biggest difference was that the account was seasoned and I was spending my own money, not google coupon money.
Man, this is so awesome. So soooooo awesome.

I ranted about abstractions below, but this woman shipped code. Dedicated to her boyfriend, no less! I'd be incredibly flattered if I were him, and kudos to her for launching something.
That's AdSense, not AdWords. Different policies, different teams. At AdWords you can actually call and reach a real human being and resolve your issue, even if it's a suspension for breaching one of their policies. At AdSense, there's no chance of that.
Particularly amusing is that, at least in the case of Anonymous, the anarchistic end state of the graphic novel is fairly closely mirrored.
Up to the point where he reveals that...

> And then I'll write exam questions testing on those very same mistakes. If we all did that, the market would dry up pretty quick.

...he actually DOES oppose it obviously and wants to stop it.
The vast majority of my educational career could be summarized as memorizing some notes written by myself, given by the teacher, or inscribed in hardback textbook. Getting them from another student is hardly a crime.
Ooooh, this is really cool! R is nice, but switching to it is a pain when working in python.

Together with scikits.learn, this could prove really useful in machine learning and data analysis projects.
High performance libraries in Java
https://bugs.pypy.org/
The title is misleading. It should read;
"Using free adwords credit to extend dropbox accounts doesn't work"

Google is trying to attract real customers not people who want to game the system at Google's expense. No money was ever paid, it was all done using a promo voucher.

The adwords account was specifically and exclusively set up so a dropbox account could be extended.

I am sure if you wanted to do some real advertising Google would reinstate the account.
"I am a great mountain climber, but a horrible quarterback."

Presumably, people wouldn't find this statement surprising - while mountain climbing will improve your fitness level, mountain climbing skills aren't directly transferable to football.

If you're not a good algorithmist, it's because you don't have enough experience with algorithms - which, based on the blog post, is true for the writer. I have the opposite issue - I'm decent at algorithms but not-yet-decent at programming; this is because I have a background in pure math, which lends itself to algorithms and algorithmic thinking, but comparatively little experience programming.
In the "government collapse and you need to run from nazis" scenario, if you somehow manage to only lose 30% of your value you are doing well.

I'd note that Wikipedia says:

A high quality diamond weighing as little as 2 or 3 grams could be worth as much as 100 kilos of gold. This extremely condensed value and portability does bestow diamonds as a form of emergency funding. People and populations displaced by war or extreme upheaval have utilised this portable asset successfully.[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamonds_as_an_investment (yes, it says citation needed, but nevertheless it did work in WW2.)
You missed his point. He doesn't care. He thinks the market can deal with it. He thinks the schools should stay out of it. As a professor, he can route around it by being smarter than the note sellers. You want to restrict his right to do that? Bizarre...
Hello! You can use encrypted Secure SMS for Android. The app is free, and available at:
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The instruction manual is at:
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the app needs no licensing, so can be passed from phone to phone via SD card.
Good Luck!
As a Dev and CS major I can tell you that schools have gotten to be pretty good about teaching more than just the difference between merge sort and quick sort. My school offers things like Databases, OS, and even a web dev class this semester. Schools do so much to get kids to become good developers along side good programmers.

The problem is that the kids aren't trying to become good developers. How many college students in a class have a github (or some online code repo) that is publicly view-able? How many have a stackoverflow account and are at least somewhat active on it. What percentage of kids in a class will code a program outside of class just because they want to code something cool.
Pages from the very origin of the internet back in 1992 still work perfectly fine today

Yeah, but none of my <marquee> tags work. Which is funny, because that was also a non-standard, browser-specific feature. If that element had been standardized, but as <marquis>, then those pages would still break.

How about doing things correctly to start with?

I thought that's what we were advocating? Using vendor specific prefixes is the same as using a non-standard tag: it will likely break, and will almost definitely not work on multiple platforms. That doesn't seem to me, though, to be an argument against them.

If you want to complain that the standardization process is too slow, and thus people are used to continue using vendor-prefixed tags longer than they should, I'll be right beside you yelling about it. But the solution, it seems to me, isn't to "break" or abolish vendor prefixes. If you want to speed up the standardization process, do what the WHATWG did.
Jamie and his wife's enthusiasm for life is infectious. That is an awesome family. I spent an hour going through his videos last night. I can't believe how much energy that guy has to do everything in his life.
Ah I see, so it's a digital only service? that makes more sense.
PaperKarma - Automatically Unsubscribe From Junk Mail (Android)
Never say never. I consider myself a designer and developer, and I feel I have a pretty good grasp of that stuff. Professionally, I am usually typecast as a programmer, so I spend at least some of my time in algorithms.

I was into art/design when I was like five years old, and I became interested in programming by the time I was in high school. That gave me quite a lot of experience in both areas. I do feel the only limiting factor is time and determination.

Of course, if you have no interest in learning those deep theories, that is cool too. Delivering value, to you or others, is ultimately the only thing that matters.
> I'm pretty sure that's a BFS, not a DFS. A DFS uses a stack, not a queue.

In the gist, queue.push adds element to the tail end, and queue.pop removes from the tail end.

For it to be behave as BFS, you will have to change queue.pop to queue.shift which will remove elements from the front.

An ideal graph search implementation will take queue as a parameter, and will use queue.enqueue and queue.dequeue. And then the injection -> implementation mapping will be:

LIFOQueue(stacks) -> DFS
FIFOQueue(regular queues) -> BFS
PriorityQueue -> Some sort of Best First Search
PriorityQueue with A* heuristics -> A* search(duh)

But I didn't want to go through all that trouble to demonstrate a simple snippet.
Great post. A keeper.

We see this same type of thinking when dealing with all sorts of other complex, multi-dimensional systems. Economics, for instance. There are a huge number of people who think economies work in this same linear fashion. Or managing large groups of developers.

In some systems that are becoming more complex, such as avionics systems for large airplanes, it's getting to the point where the old root cause analysis methodology is still being used although it's getting less and less applicable (I'm speaking specifically of the crash over the ocean of the Air France flight, but there are other examples)

Our minds desperately want to live in a world with clear causality. Do X and Y will happen. When the world doesn't live up to our expectations, many times we just get out a bigger hammer.

Looking at this problem solely from a philosophical standpoint, it looks like there is a powerful argument in place for tiered systems to have some sort of distributed goal-seeking self-programming (machine learning), especially when dealing with large numbers of identically programmed/configured computers. That way the same combination of obscure causes wouldn't have such a disastrous multiplicative effect. Would be cool to chase that down further sometime.
Turtle's all the way down

I call progress the opportunity cost of the money that went into litigation instead of product development
> We say someone "jacked off in" or "took a dump in" the code base when he did something "clever" but unskillful and damaging

I have never heard those expressions. It would be discouraged and frowned upon at my place of work.
Absolutely true. However, I think the principle of "innocent until proven guilty" ought to apply in both cases.
About 4 years ago, I made a mistake to show some ads via Google Adsense on a forum for gamers. Couple months later I got banned for 'suspicious activity'. I supplied questions and possibly offending data on multiple occasions, but I didn't get a single reply back from them. No offense big-G, but you can take your service and shove it.

Honestly, the ToS and whatever access-wall Google puts up to make the process actually work is quite astonishingly bad, but as long as everybody sucks on that teet, there will not be an improvement.
To install it under ubuntu:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mohammad-sepent/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install issh

For other distros you can grab the .deb or the source package from the given link.
Defense should be defense in depth. Just because I once left my front door open overnight doesn't mean I don't value all my possessions.