skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh, sure, I'll probably even start a blog out of this :P
Highly qualified students have the option to test out of the different terms of Physics 1. (I know because I graded the placement tests for five years.) I suppose some of them take the course anyway to get an easy A, but this guy I'm talking about aced Physics 1c analytical track, an E&M course that uses Purcell, and very few high schools cover material that advanced. (It's well beyond even AP Physics C material.)

Regarding grades, here's how it shakes out nowadays:

1st term: pass/fail
2nd term: "shadow" grades
3rd term: real grades

Shadow grades don't appear on your report card, and they don't count towards your GPA, but they are used for internal scholarship awards and recommendations.

Recitation section TAs in physics have been a mix of professors and grad students for as long as anyone can remember. Virtually without exception the best TAs were grad students (as measured by student reviews, section sizes, and exam results), though some of the professors weren't bad either. This jibed with my undergrad experience at Harvard: almost all my physics professors sucked, and by far my best instructor was the 22-year-old grad student who taught my freshman physics section.
"Yes. I am not a great programmer. I only started caring about it a couple of years ago and since I don't have a real education in it I am very behind in many areas. I am trying to get better, but it's not easy."

You've just put yourself ahead of 95% of the millenials here by saying that. The only way to become great at ANYTHING is to admit that you aren't, and work on improving yourself.

Being junior isn't a bad thing. Everyone starts at the beginning, even the prodigies. The bad ones are juniors that attempt to skip the learning process by claiming to be great, not the ones who do like you are and put in the effort to learn.

The difference between you and the typical millenial, at least the ones that I've had the misfortune of working with over the years, is that they think they're good, and don't listen to the folks around them who've actually DONE the work before.

"I don't know if I agree with this. Some people are born with incredible talent in various areas."

The only talent humans are born with is the ability to construct their own future.

Those who lack talent and experience often believe that success is predicated on luck. They see spectacular photographs taken in times of perfect light, and say, "Wow, you were so lucky to get such gorgeous light right when you were there with your camera!"

The smart ones eventually come to realize that you make your own luck.
I'm glad that Jason has decided to start throwing data behind his design decisions. It's certainly easy to go overboard on data collection, but a little good data is better than no data at all.

Quick story - a company I used to work for decided to A/B test their signup page. Everyone in the company could submit their "version" of the page. In the end, the best performer was the secretary, while the worst performer was the marketing guy.
When I was an undergrad, organic chemistry was widely considered to be the hardest. They eventually released some grade statistics like the ones you mentioned and it showed that organic chemistry had the highest mean grade and the highest percentage of A+'s of any course.

Of course it was full of pre-meds and chemical engineering majors (ie. pre-oil). Draw your own conclusions.

The departments that had the lowest mean grades across their courses were physics and economics. I took that to mean that physics was actually a very difficult major (I admit I'm biased here). Economics, on the other hand, was what most of the scholarship athletes majored in (my university didn't offer communications or marketing degrees that you sometimes see). Not to say that economics wasn't difficult, though I never had a chance to take any courses.
It sure wasn't that way when I was there. ;-)
"The humility in your attitude is the mark of a good programmer, not a bad one. If you really are learning and working hard at it, you'll do fine, and I'd rather have you on my team than a lot of the (apparently) super-smart guys you're feeling inferior to."

I second that!
That's why it's called a beta.
According to the latest Dust to Dust report update, the Yaris is vastly superior to the Prius. http://www.cnwmr.com/nss-folder/automotiveenergy/107%2008%20... [XLS]

In energy dollars per mile, that report shows:

Smart $0.583
Ion $0.621
Focus $0.621
Cavalier $0.655
Xb $0.683
Aveo $0.693
xA $0.713
Corolla $0.748
Fit $0.799
Yaris $0.916
Crown Victoria $1.134
Le Sabre $1.462
Lucerne $1.589
Park Avenue $1.924
Sprinter van $2.173
Prius $2.191

Here's the page showing the collection of reports: http://www.cnwmr.com/nss-folder/automotiveenergy

This is the Prius-beating Dodge Sprinter van: http://images.google.com/images?q=sprinter+van

It's big. It weighs 4,784 lbs., empty. Fully loaded, it's 11,000 lbs. http://www.google.com/search?q=sprinter+van+weight
New Year's Resolution: Do Experiments, Not Projects
Bump.

Any suggestion regarding how to cut down time in designing Forms and WebPage ?
Yeah I'm not sure that's actually true :)

Would you rather build a porche, or try to convert a clapped out old volvo into a porche?

Tidying up rubbish, bad architecture choices, stupid coupling etc isn't fun. It's twice the work - fixing all the stuff they did stupidly, and then implementing it how it should be done.
Agreed. It also gives a good place to point back to when recommending to go simple rather than extravagant on design decisions.
Teen2: Are you being sarcastic, dude?
Teen1: I don't even know anymore.

-http://www.snpp.com/episodes/3F21.html
PM me if you want this in Manila :)
I want to see someone make a game / game engine using Clojure plus the graphics library of their choice.
There's no argument to refute and no data to back it up. You didn't even know who Carol Bartz was an hour ago.

Maybe I'm overreacting, but I see a lot of commenting like this on HN lately. People who comment to feel superior rather than to enlighten others. I realize that Yahoo's doing poorly these days, and management has made a string of blunders. But believe it or not, that doesn't mean that everyone's half-assed opinion about what Yahoo should do is worth reading.
There are so many ugly buildings I wish would not last.

There is so much ugly undocumented software not getting scrapped because no one knows what it does exactly. Sometimes it's even built on top of frameworks no one finds valuable anymore.
Basically all classes at Caltech are curved. It actually makes a lot of sense, because it means you can make the tests really hard and leave plenty of room at the top, which among other things helps reduce the variance due to careless errors. (If you make a couple minor minus sign mistakes, but nail a hard problem most people miss, you still come out ahead.) In Physics 1, typically 90%+ was A+, ~82-89% was A.
Yes. That's true. But that's not what is being discussed. What is being discussed is whether or not frameworks and high level languages exist solely to make the bottom 90% more productive.

My comment illustrates the fact that criticizing those two things in particular is beyond silly. Essentially, I'm saying: Where is the limit? Unless you code everything, from scratch, every time, in assembler... You're using a high level language or a framework.

And you should be... The main point of them is to save time. They don't solve all problems obviously, but they solve the kinds of problems that you don't want to solve over and over and over.
That was very good! Nice examples.

You also do a good job summarizing why IO is hard in Haskell, in that you need to understand a lot about the language to understand how IO works. I guess it's up to the individual to decide whether FP is worth getting past that initial hump.
Hey, let's figure out when the next-generation game consoles will arrive
Ask YC: Is a particular methodology of customer service advocated at YC?
I've noticed that a number of YC funded startups are known for their fanatical customer service/support. ( Posterous, Wufoo ...) PG also has the issue as #24 for startups he would like to fund:

http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

Is there some institutional knowledge or methodology that YC has that is specifically useful for web startups?

Does anybody else have good systems that ensure quality customer service?
Not only that, but even if the reviews are honest, the reviewers may not be reasonable at all. For instance, there was a rash of complaints about Dreamhost a few years back because of cutting people off for too much CPU usage. This is usually from people running PhpBB and WordPress with a zillion poorly-written modules, who were too cheap to pay for a VPS or something more appropriate to their traffic levels.

A lot of them moved to places like Site5 where they tended not to cut off customers. Sounds great if you're one of these guys using all the resources, but it sucks for the other 50 people on the shared box. I experienced this firsthand where Site5 would sometimes become tremendously slow for no apparent reason, and the support staff would always just say they were "looking into it", but would never come up with a solution after months and months. Meanwhile on Dreamhost, things might not always be as fast as my Xen VPS, but neither would I log in and see a load of 10+. Plus they responded professionally and dealt with serious technical issues with refreshing candor.
Agreed; with modern CPUs there's just no excuse for the ugly typesetting in Word and OpenOffice.
Interesting discussion about tech start-ups in China (30 min video)
Analogies are not very helpful for learning or explaining monads. The more you try to anchor the idea to something you already know, the further away you understanding what's going on.

I think that when teaching or learning monads the concept to focus on is composing smaller units (computations) into larger ones (aggregate computations), often by passing the output from one computation into the next one. It's also important to understand that once you have composed several small computations into a large computation you do not care or necessarily even know that the large computation is composed of smaller ones.

After meditating on that idea for a while it's necessary to see many different examples of useful monads. The 'All About Monads' tutorial (probably the best monad tutorial) has a section which is all examples. You need to see as many examples as possible because you can't understand monads by looking at a single specimen.

Monads are an abstract generality which provides a similar structure to many different things that you would never have expected to have much in common. Without understanding that commonality, you're missing the point and monads will remain incomprehensible.
I was given a choice of this one or coming back as a cockroach. I chose this one. However, had I taken a closer look at life with my ex-wife, I might have chosen the cockroach.
Can a good night's sleep prevent a cold?
I've heard comments like this, but I can't say I've witnessed it. The pressure used to be on keeping kids from failing because the parents would complain. The school principals by and large took the sides of the parents. Without an outside measure of standards, teachers would pass the kids to get keep them off of their backs. Shame on them, but their pressures were real and unpleasant. At least, those were the complaints I heard from the teachers I knew (and who occasionally opined in more public fora).

When Virginia introduced the Standards of Learning tests (years before NCLB), an amazing thing happened: Teachers were still griping, but they were griping about how they were going to teach all of the stuff they now had to teach. Importantly, their conversations turned back to teaching.

Yes, there is pressure to keep kids from failing. But they simply can't be given a "social promotion" now; they are going to take an exam and will be exposed.

The teachers in the districts where I've been personally involved (via my kids) did something I think was pretty smart: they started getting the parents to sign progress reports and notices nearly continuously throughout the term. In some cases, the parents had to sign off on the assignments as they were give! So there are few surprises at the end of the term. Kind of a CYA move, but with all of the pressures (as you correctly pointed out) they had to do something.

The standards to which they are teaching aren't minimum at all. They are pretty high. My issue with them is that they are not well defined. But I'll save that for another post.

I'll conclude this post with the observation that what teachers are complaining about now is not teaching to the minimum standard tests, but rather that they have to teach to the test at all. They don't agree that what is important is being tested because it's hard to quantify. I have some sympathy for that point of view.
Ahh claims of magic :)

It does happen though, but strangely only with certain therapists. There is one where I live that is renowned for fixing almost any musculoskeletal issue in one session.

My recommendation would be to find out which one is used by pro sports teams and go to them.
Sounds like a market opportunity. No-BS Hosting Reviews. Affiliate free. Require proof of being a customer (placing an HTML file on their server) to reduce gaming. Sell ads, but make a clear distinction between reviews and ads.
But they just seem so trustworthy!

Maybe there's a market for a hosting reviews site run by some company or some person with a good existing reputation.

Same goes for domain registrations, DNS providers etc.
A web hosting review site sounds like an opportunity to make money. But like all profitable ideas, the competition reaches a critical mass and the inefficient die.
Photoshop Adbusting
That's precisely why I find sites like WebHostingTalk.com so valuable. You can talk with others who are interested in all sorts of Web Hosting-related information, moreover, you get to actually converse with some of the web hosting providers' owners.

I spend most of my time on the WHT forums in the colo section, and you see plenty of specific threads trying to find the most applicable type of hosting for a particular need ("Looking for a strong 20mbps colo host in Chicago. What do you guys recommend?").

You also get pretty much first-notices of downtimes there, and you even get the sweet notices of the stories such as the big break-in at CIHost chicago several years ago (where the crooks sawed through the wall, tazed the employees, and stole a bunch of servers, meanwhile CIHost was initially claiming that there was just an outage).
Very intuitive and easy to use. I'm going to use this a lot.
I'm being attacked by an evil widget on this page. There is a big-ass Javascript popup, apparently perpetrated by something called "PostRank", that obscures the page on initial load (in Safari 3/Mac). It has a list of posts labeled "Top Posts", none of which are the one I want to read. I can't figure out how to make this thing go away -- there is no close box, and clicking inside it links me away to something else -- and when I scroll the damn thing follows me to make very sure that I never get a glimpse of the actual post. I can't see around it.

Words cannot express how infuriating that widget is. It's like Snap.com only more evil. Banish it back to the nether regions from whence it came and submit this post again so I can actually read it.

UPDATE: Seriously, I can't get rid of it. Clicking inside it, clicking outside it, the Escape key, nasty words about its mother -- nothing works. I even tried following one of its links, and the resulting page had the same obscuring widget on it. Who designs the UI for these things?

I'll try restarting Safari.

FURTHER UPDATE: Nope, it's out of excuses. That is officially the suckiest non-musical widget I've ever seen.
China factory workers heading home as global economy cools
Both Paypal and Amazon do micropayments with fees of $0.05 + 5%. So basically, your fees for a $0.99 cent MP3 is around 10 cents. It definitely makes micropayments feasible.
Teachers have been complaining that students today aren't what they used to be at least since Plato -- probably even longer...
Basically, when we're depressed our brain is using the time to restructure itself so the next time an event occurs we're ready for it.

This is a highly error-prone process, though. It is very easy for a person to develop a maladaptive pattern (clinical depression, anxiety disorders, personality disorders, etc.) because the true causes of and rational responses to the situations to which we're reacting are frequently unclear. Your brain will just take whatever explanation you give it, which is at least as likely to be a spurious and emotionally-charged one as it is well-reasoned one based on observable evidence.

What you call depression here is like the pain a little boy feels if he burns his hand on the stove--like that situation the cause (you didn't pay enough attention) and the response (pay more attention to your wife) are unambiguous--and like that situation one would have be deficient in reasoning ability (not deficient in emotion) to not learn a useful adaptation from such abundantly clear evidence.

This is important, as the chance of a maladaptive response to something increases with the ambiguity of the situation.

And so, your example is a bit simplistic and misleading. Depression is an effect: it doesn't make you learn from your mistakes, it only lets you know that one has been made. To learn a new adaptation (to some stimulus, the cause of the depression) is a process of reasoning. Common anti-depressants are not known to diminish one's ability to reason, so your claim that they would prevent one from learning from their mistakes seems unfounded. It is in fact central to psychotherapy that the patient be able to make use of their reasoning abilities to correct emotion-driven adaptations.

One would hope and expect that most patients seeking treatment for depression are people who have learned some kind of maladaptive pattern (whether they know what it is or not) that is causing them real harm in life. At that point, the idea of inhibiting that maladaptive process (breaking the self-reinforcing cycle of depression) with anti-depressants and therapy is pretty attractive and useful. Moreso than assuming that it should be tolerated simply because it's natural.
Ask HN: Review my site Skuttlefish - rate videos second by second
http://www.skuttlefish.com

Skuttlefish was envisioned while watching CNN conduct those Dial Polls during the Presidential debates. Basically this very beta service will allow you to enter a video url (YouTube only for now) and rate the video as it is playing on a scale from 0 -> 10 for positive and 0 -> -10 for negative. We also store this information to provide historic data. If you bring up a video you can click on historic data points to be taken directly to a specific point in the video.

As I mentioned it is very beta, with lots of plans in the works for widgets, more video formats, comments, etc.

Let me know what you think.
Ask HN: Can you help me not confuse the Googlebot?
I have implemented the RSH library for my website www.trailbehind.com.

This lets me change the hash of the URL and store data when someone surfs around on my maps, so that I can provide links within the map and back button functionality.

However, I'm worried that Google and the other search engines aren't going to take kindly to these links.

I realized that Google wouldn't do things like index my page titles and other content, because they are generated when the DOM is ready via javascript.

So, for now what I've done is maintain the hard links. For example, these two URLs generate the same content:

1. http://cabin.trailbehind.com/#get_map_from_name/Yosemite_National_Park

2. http://cabin.trailbehind.com/park_map/Yosemite_National_Park/

I think the problem with this though is that if people link my site, they will end up linking the hash URLs, while Google will only check out the hard links. And thus, people blogging about me won't help my pagerank.

Has anyone ever dealt with anything similar or have thoughts on this issue? Google rankings are very important to TrailBehind, and part of our strategy (which is already working) is getting listed for the long-tail of parks and forests.
This is true. Fake review sites are one of the top categories of spam here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Jaheem12

(You have to turn on showdead in your profile to see spam.)
I get it too. Make it stop -.-
It's not an age thing, your parents are just more traditional than normal. I am 23 and I never really knew what "talking back" meant, because my parents didn't think it was wrong, and I thought it was weird that there are families where children could not speak until they were spoken to. Knowing how extremely annoying and noisy kids can get, I understand the rationale from a utilitarian standpoint. I think it's sort of backwards and encourages a submissive personality, but it's much better than just putting up with it until you snap and beat the crap out of them like I've seen in some families.

Guilt was a common disciplinary tool used and still sort of used by my mother. Guilt and getting yelled at and told you're useless and not good enough.

I think whatever method is going to encourage self-discipline is the best. A strong willpower is a very useful tool, not only to control yourself but to know when other people are trying to control you; my brother has an amazingly strong one so I guess my parents didn't mess up, I can't quite say the same for myself but I think I'm pretty stubborn and stoic.
Wow, that thing sucks. It completely obscures content on Chrome too.

[edit: It doesn't appear at all in Firefox 3.x/Win!]
It is fine in firefox but breaks in Chrome. I assume it is webkit. (Well not webkit, but the designer that didn't test in webkit.)
That would require that your users have an implicit distrust of hosting reviews, which they almost certainly don't.
Don't forget the discounts section.
To us, Wufoo is the model for customer service. So the one sentence version is: do whatever Wufoo does.

The most conspicuous thing they do is to respond very rapidly. Meaning in minutes. But they are not just fast. They listen to their users, and understanding what they need guides their future development.

That's probably the most important thing to know about customer service. It's not just something to make users feel better. It's an incomparably valuable source of information. One of the reasons we advocate launching quickly is to get access to this information quickly.
this will work in places like Afghanistan, Iraq etc. when they get into "white city" mode and/or it's "blackout" - you can ask your local courier to send a tweetbymail so that people will have a record that you "were" still alive ...
This is something that's becoming more common in the US - "personal time" replaces sick and vacation time. Ostensibly, it's to encourage people scheduling time off than feeling like they need to "burn through" their sick time every year. However, I think it may have to do with paying out accrued vacation time for employees. I'm not well enough versed in HR stuff to speak to that though.
Currently, I am fairly content with jQuery. I honestly don't do a huge amount of low level js work, but could you explain what makes this superior or different from jQuery?

It looks good, I'm just not sure that the thing that we need for a "better web" is yet another js framework.
I need a seriously good TechLead
Hi, I would like to post a job offer for your community, if this is a possibility, please let me know.

Kind regards,

Adriana
Twitter Decides To Hire Somebody Whose Job It Is to Make Money
Common table games on a torus and a Klein bottle
Thanks, that's an interesting data point.
I really liked the post the other day where they handed the interviewee a chunk of code and asked them to "make it better".
Facebook Digs Deeper into the Black Hole of Custom Markup
On Facebook's new custom FBML and why markup is the wrong way to implement an API.