skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I let a family stay at my home for a month, and forgot my Xbox 360 was on Netflix. Came back from a trip and the recommendations we're all kids all the time. Cancelled the Xbox account. Three months later, still all kids, all the time. Went to website and negatively rated all kids shows (though I like some things like British lit movies for kids) it suggested, mercilessly. Kept at that for two weeks. Didn't help. It kept cycling around the dregs of kids shows, surfacing Pokeman, or old Nik reruns. Found an obscure "don't consider this" button, cycled through everything again. Five months after that, our top 10 "for you" don't list kids shows any more. But, one of those precious custom genres is still always kids and family related, no matter what we try. So, we're giving up on fixing it, and just going to have a kid instead.
This adds hardly anything to the original, which is here:

http://travel.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/travel/the-mystery-of-t...
Weird. I called to cancel and specifically told them that was the only reason. I would have thought if there was a way they could enable it for me they would have to keep a customer.

Of course, I tried to deposit a check via the Chase app while I was typing this and it failed for the first time ever for me.
Facebook Unsocial Reader
WHo says they keep the guns? I guess (but I don't know) that the weapons go to law enforcement for further action; maybe a "citation"[1] or maybe arrest and prosecution.

(http://www.tsa.gov/travelers/airtravel/assistant/editorial_1...)

looking at the "Week in Review" posts you see the number of guns, handily broken down into loaded and unloaded. The charts list how many guns had a round chambered.

(http://blog.tsa.gov/search/label/guns)

I have no idea how many people the TSA screen each week; nor how many guns make it through screening; nor whether any of the people trying to take guns on board a plane have any intent to harm people.
I agree with your overall sentiment. I think most teachers are against these metrics just because they've only encountered bad ones. How to fix the metrics?

In the UK, governments have set up a system whereby schools can choose which exam board they want to have for each subject. Each exam board makes and marks its own exams.

Exam boards are motivated to be cheap, generous with the marks, and give workshops you have to pay to attend where they give you information about what will be on this year's exams.

The exam boards are not motivated to make decent exams. They are riddled with mistakes, and do not adequately test students' understanding of the subjects.

Look at some of the GCSE IS/IT/ICT exams; you can find them online. You'll see vaguely-phrased mini-essay questions, where students get marks based on how many of the required points they make, where the points are listed in the examiner's marking guide. If you make a point that wasn't anticipated by the people who set the exams, you're not getting any points.

Problem is, the questions are so open and vague that students will be fumbling around in the dark if they don't know specifically what examiners are looking for. It really is just a matter of teaching to the test. You need to have learned specifically what the examiners are looking for. It doesn't matter whether you know much about ICT or not.

So what's the point? It's supposed to be an ICT exam, not a jumping-through-examiners'-hoops exam.
ironic how education systems with "unions and bureaucracies" like Finland seem to do fine, and are best in the world.
Only Scandinavia really. All my french and spanish friends are really really jealous of our 100Mb+ connections here in sweden.
Because many of us would like to imagine we are five weeks away from being part owners in a business pulling in over $100,000 a year.
I'd be interested to know if anyone felt social isolation, or culture shock, being in a foreign country.
The next time you hire a freelancer, why don't you use his intuition about his own performance rather than measuring whether he actually built what you wanted him to build?

...good teachers being fired due to unfortunate statistical conflagrances..

How do you know they were good? Because they said so, and one of their cronies agreed?

This link is relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal-agent_problem

I'll note that you want to scrap objective metrics because they have some problems, but you don't seem to realize "teachers' intuition" also has problems. One of the biggest is comparability - how I can compare the intuition of teacher A with the intuition of teacher B?

With standardized tests, the answer is simple arithmetic.
OLPC problems in Peru
This happened to me too. I posted an article on my blog and it got on HN's front page. It was about how people have to stop sending .doc files as attachments via email and to use something like .pdf instead. (my article is here: http://maxmackie.github.com/2012/03/19/Stop-distributing-.do...)

A couple days later, this guy wrote about the same exact thing, bringing up the same exact arguments as I did (his link: http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2012/03/the-magi...).

He posted about a week after me. I didn't really do anything about it, but he could have at least mentioned where he got the idea/information. Incompetence.
Write stubs
Here come the drones: Hacks/Hackers takes to the skies (not quite yet)
Yeah, same here in Slovenia - even though FTTH providers have 100/100 available, people usually opt for cheaper 100/10 or 10/10 options because of pricing (100/100 is 100€/mo, 100/10 is 27€/mo, 10/10 is 22€/mo, which is a noticable difference).

Also I noticed there are very rare use cases when I'm able to actually get over ~30Mbit or so downstream, usually the servers I'm downloading from aren't capable of delivering data so fast.
iTunesU. Stanford, Harvard, CMU, Madison College,... I'll be starting the CalTech machine learning course on Monday morning.
About the increasing restrictions on the tools needed to program generated by the attempt to restrict what you can do with an electronic device. He foresaw the kind of restrictions that appeared both in the iPhone and the german legislation.
After switching to 64 bit, we haven't had a single crash. So I would describe the 64 bit version as production ready. But the problems on 32 bit systems should have been documented in the release notes.

Beside this hiccup (and a week without sleep with the website on life support), Go has been a real joy to work with.
Self-employment can be a very difficult thing to manage in this business. While many of my colleagues have considered moving on from their cushy corporate gigs to working on their own, I've actually taken the leap.

Many who consider self-employment are (rightfully so) concerned about having a sufficient amount of work to make it viable. However, the flip side has to be considered as well -- taking on too much work. It's a candle that burns mentally on both ends, and it has to be managed.

I've been there before, and the feeling of being overwhelmed can strike in a moment. And recovery from those feelings don't come from simply getting things accomplished -- you have to bring your body and mind back to a level of comfort. It takes time.

My advice to others who might feel this is their situation: start by communicating with your customers, tell them what's going on, and try to find solutions that work for both of you. Do it early, don't delay. The sooner everyone understands, the better. You may well be surprised at how supportive the most demanding customers can be. Remember, in the end, a healthy you = a productive you, which means your output has a much greater chance of success.
Sounds like you were working for somebody else rather than youself. Was it a consulting startup? Did the customer force you to use some technology that was a burden rather than a boon? I work at big corp and really the only thing that causes burnout for me is being force fed a technology from on high.
Well, I don't have a Facebook account either, so perhaps I'm the wrong person to try to answer this. On the other hand, almost everyone else I know does, and it's pretty obvious to me why.

What does Facebook do that email can't do?

Simple UI.

Automatically up-to-date address book.

Reliable delivery.

RSS subscriptions to blogs

Blogs? What is this, 1990? Personal stuff is for pinmytweetbooksquaring, man. Blogs are for business spam and geeks, or something.

And what's RSS, anyway?

Also, ironically, privacy.

Phone calls

Any messaging/mailbox system is non-intrusive compared to a blaring ring-tone.

Also, not all of my friends are in the same time zone right now.

Talking to people face to face

Did I mention that not all of my friends are in the same time zone right now?

Even for those who are, and who I manage to see reasonably frequently in real life, we may still live far enough apart to make casual face-to-face discussions impractical.

Personally, I much prefer to catch up with family and old friends in person, even if it's less often. Reading the trivia of 100+ people's lives in 140 characters or fewer isn't my idea of friendship.

I recognise that this makes it harder for me to keep up with breaking news. Then again, as long as enough of my immediate family and friends do use Facebook and I see them frequently anyway, I usually hear about big news pretty quickly. And if all those people stopped using Facebook, probably my less local friends and family wouldn't rely on it so much to share their news. So I don't see the absence of Facebook as some huge void in my social life or anything.
" what makes the women chosen any better than the males who could have been chosen?"

Nothing makes them better, nothing makes them worse. The point is not to find people who are "better" but merely to fill a gap in the workforce (diversity). You can't get more diversity by hiring more of the same.
We were part of the first batch of Start-Up Chile. It's a good program if you are really at the very first stage of your product. We had just a basic prototype of GrabInbox and hence it was the right decision for us. The program gave us money to survive the 6 months and we also had enough to spend on building the product.

Can you get by easily with the maximum salary you can take?
As far as living by on the maximum salary is concerned, it can be a little difficult but it's possible. You might have to try and cook your own food at least a few times a week or may be eat at a cheaper place. The accommodation allowance is different from the salary and is more than enough.

Are the required events very time consuming?
The process for reimbursement can be a bit time consuming but if you start saving bills for your expenses and not scamper at the last minute when its time to reimburse, it would help. As I find out now, saving receipts right from the beginning is a habit I would suggest every entrepreneur to inculcate because once you start running your business it's important to stay organized. It helps in filing your tax returns.

Is it easy to find local talents with good English skills?
Local talent with good english skills is hard to find.

What's the average salary for an intermediate web developer?
Won't be able to answer that as we did not hire any local developer.
Stallman is a god. He even has his own perfume, GNU.(ah, yeah I forgot it was an April's fool...).He has to be revered. I bet there's people that have his poster on their wall. Imagine, I heard there's a Stallman cult in Ohio.
I wonder why we couldn't use sound as a precise indoor positioning system. Each position has a unique reverberation signature.
My sister was a special ed. teacher in San Diego--when she started, she was making somewhere between $30-40K/year. Teacher's salaries are public, so we could look up what the current salary scale is, but I doubt it will have changed significantly. During the summer, teachers often take classes towards their certification. Later, some may take a job somewhere like a bookstore or home depot, which offers seasonal work. Many pay for supplies for students out of their own pocket. Tell me, is that a princely salary? Is that over compensated? In the past, you had a trapped population (women), so even with modest salaries, you could attract good people--now, many teachers are not that strong academically (and yes, I know that you need to be skilled at teaching--but subject matter competence is part of that--I did some volunteering during grad. school with a local middle school and even among some very motivated teachers, their math skills were very poor--at even the basic algebra level. One had trouble going from distance=rate*time, to finding time given distance and rate). Sure, you'll get some good people who still will go into the field for love, but I doubt that you would argue that just because you can find some software developers who will work for 25K/year and there are some unemployed developers, that you're going to get GOOD developers living in LA working at that salary (and no equity).
Thanks for sharing. I've been through a somewhat similar experience and wrote about it recently, as well as how I got my mojo back: http://www.earthtoneil.com/2012/03/restarting-fire.html

Interest that you mentioned knowing someone who still hasn't recovered after five years. As you'll see from my story above, that was precisely me until recently.

Ultimately, I don't think recovery is just something that happens by taking a few weeks off, or making trivial other changes. You've got to address the root cause of why you're unhappy or it will surface again later.
Having control over the software that runs on the devices you use to interact with the society of which you are a part is extremely important and the more that computation and networks are used as mechanisms of the state and statelike entities, the more important it gets.
Honestly, the aspect that originally drew me to Facebook was as an online address book that everyone updated themselves so I always had their most recent phone, email address, etc. Unfortunately now, because of all the privacy concerns most the time I can only send a message asking for their phone number or begging them to call me. A lot of people don't even have email addresses up anymore. I think the change came about around the time they let everyone have an account.
solution: log in via Facebook for corporate.
I think you are unfairly describing the situation. My friend is a teacher who readily admits it would take them about two years to get fired. Two years of essentially not doing their job.

The teachers in Atlanta that were taking their students tests for them may not even end up being fired. We aren't talking about teachers not being able to be fired on a whim. We are talking about bad teachers with a history not being able to be fired.
It's becoming more and more common in the Netherlands too. Belgium on the other hand still has data caps...
People will tell you to take a break or find a hobby - but you may be like me and have to build stuff all the time - so they're not really viable options.

I burnt out in 2001/2 - it took a while to get over it - here are some things that stopped it happening again:

- Don't stress about issues out of your control

- Don't self-medicate with alcohol etc.

- Eat something healthy for everything unhealthy (I now bake a lot of sourdough bread and cure meats which is a hobby I guess)

- Get some exercise, even if it's just 15 mins walk

- Buy the best bed and covers you can afford - and try to get 7h sleep

(it took me 15 years to work these things out for myself)
It will take a while to realize knowing English would not really help you much. IMO, it's important that you know some basic Spanish. But this isn't a deal breaker as I did not know any Spanish but eventually figured out enough words to get the job done.

Be ready to see people making out in the open, on the streets, in the metro stations and inside the metro standing beside you.

The food is generally bland, deal with it.
Sorry that was meant to be a reply to G-Garon, fat fingers and iPhones.
It'd be nice to have a civic entity to be apart of with pride and conviction.

If the defeat of SOPA is any indication, it appears that "The Children of the Internet" could be influential rather quickly and effectively.
> No, they should provide better alternative to land mines so everybody switches to it.

This is ridiculous. You're saying that anti-landmine orgs should spend their time finding more efficient ways to kill people.

> No, they should provide better more efficient alternative than child labor.

What if no such alternative exists? Just because it's economically efficient, doesn't mean it's right.
The Periodic Table Table Construction History
I was away for just over three months (16th December to 1st April)
You can use most libraries on Nintendo, just not the GPL, because you have to release source code that is nintendo IP.

I'm happy you've decided I'm a spoiled brat when I give back fixes, libraries and presentations all the time, and this includes several Linux kernel drivers.

Either way, the GPL is intentionally restrictive, in part to thwart these platforms you do not like, so perhaps we should label it so to be forthright and honest with developers so they don't find out thousands of dollars later in some GPL violation suit? Perhaps "Restrictive to persuade others to do software our way"? Or just "Restrictive"?

Software was better before source was hidden away. While the LGPL has gone far (and I contend the Linux kernel is far closer to the LGPL than pure GPL), the GPL is still a bit too idealistic to fit the practical nature of some projects.
>or forbidding the government from enforcing copyright as a criminal offense (I'm not convinced it shouldn't be dealt with in the civil courts)...

This is a very good point. At the moment, because copyright is given criminal provisions, the big media companies get to have their investigation, their prosecution, and their punishment mostly all paid for by the taxpayers.

Yet, in the other leg of "IP", that being patents, there is no criminal provision, and so the owner of a patent has to bear the full burden of paying for the investigation and paying for the prosecution of any infringement.

So, if patents can work with only civil court procedure, where the attacker has to pay his/her full costs himself (1) why should copyright be "special" in providing for criminal prosecution?

(1) I'm skipping over "loser pays" concepts, because even with "loser pays", the attacker still has to pay up until the point they finally win in court before they get any money back. They don't get free, government tax funded, assistance right from the start.
CPU DB: Recording Microprocessor History
By his definition, musicians are artists. Their goal is to create unique products which satisfy unknown consumer desires.

In contrast, teachers are "artistic professionals" (except maybe at level of PhD advisers). Their goal is to use artistic techniques to create products which have achieved a fixed set of goals.

Bureaucratic goal setting is not desirable in all circumstances, but it is useful in some.
> scared that they're losing control and profits

Are they really using profits? There have been numerous postings on HN over the last few months all pointing out that the industries are making plenty of money.

Losing control, yes, and ultimately I suspect it is the loss of control that is the true driving force. The loss of "profit" (or of perceived possible profit) is easy to float in front of politicians and get their attention. Floating an outright argument of loss of control might not have the same effect (or would require even larger campaign contributions (bribes) to achieve the same effect).
You are probably referring to a New York Times article on teacher pay around the world. Korea is a clear outlier according to their data which makes one doubt the methodology used.

Teachers in US are paid a decent salary. For example, in New York City they earn $50k-100k per year with good health and retirement benefits. It is not easy to get that kind of job in private sector. In NYC suburbs teachers make even more, lots of them more than $100k. These jobs are very hard to get, and most require a MSc/PhD degree.
Facebook in Asia [Latest Stats]
I have been taking part in Start-up chile since January 15th. Overall - it has been a fantastic experience. I came primarily to receive the 40k but quickly realized that the connections with other entrepreneurs is the best perk. Where else can you go in the world to acquire a network of 300+ internet entrepreneurs from all over the world who are currently heads down working on their companies?!

The program does have issues - the reimbursement process is one of them. You should plan to take about a day each month to thoroughly go through your expenses documenting your expenditures for a review committee. After your claims, many times they get rejected at which time you have a day to scramble to re-submit. All in all most of the time they get accepted after a bit of a struggle.

You are also required to give back to Chile in some way (this is called RVA). The process actually isn't too time consuming and is pretty fun to get to know other aspiring entrepreneurs. The easiest way is to just mentor a Chilean student 20 hours (which fulfills your requirements) but you can go so far as to organize a conference or teach a course on entrepreneurship (i am).

About your other questions: 1 - you are allowed to draw a salary of 600 per month, you are also allowed to expense your rent. 2 - Most of the upper class in Chile speak fluent english, you'll be surprised how developed Chile is, Santiago is the most developed city in Latin America that I have visited. The metro is a dream, there's plenty of green space and things run very orderly. 3 - You can hire an intermediate web developer for between 500-1000 a month. Salaries here are much cheaper.
Ubuntu, a version of Linux, is used throughout as base operating system. ... some video production tools. (In the Pirate Party, we produce quite a bit of video.)

What are good video production tools for Linux?

[Aside: Strange how he slags Linux for development and uses Windows, but uses Linux for video production.]
The teacher in question was given high marks on review by all her superiors, not just herself. On a freelancer's results, I'm not applying a standardized test to their results so yeah, I am in fact using my intuition an brain about what they built.

Metrics are fine, they just shouldn't be fetishized, and we shouldn't allow them to make us fire good teachers. They also shouldn't dominate what's taught to the extent they do. Nation of multiple choice test-takers? That's what we want out of our school system?
Working with Apache Commons StringUtils part 1
Agreed with all of the above. For me, the road back all started out with just doing the simple things right: getting to bed on time, exercising, eating healthy. Essentially, starting to reconnect in your mind the idea of effort yielding reward. I wrote about this recently here: http://www.earthtoneil.com/2012/03/restarting-fire.html