skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't see why FB's IPO should be considered a failure, from the perspective of earlier investors. They sold stock at an IPO price even higher than the market could support. What's not to like?

Of course institutional IPO investors don't like it, because they want to buy stock at a discount and sell it with a big bump the next day. But the early investors are the losers in that scenario.

I guess you could argue that the IPO investors just won't play ball if they can't get their free money, but I think more likely they'll just be more careful about pricing next time.
Who exactly is going to teach children to build rockets and robots? As a country we have pretty much run all the vocational teachers out of the schools. The vocational teachers were good because most did contracting during the summer. Add to this the decline in schools teaching programming[1]. We need to figure a way to get qualified technical / vocational people back into the schools and realize that they need to paid more because of demand in their field.

Standardized tests suck, but they suck less than every other way we have to measure schools in a country-wide manner.

[1] I am wondering where the next generation of programmers is going to come from.
I've actually found the documentation for projects in the Ruby community, on the whole, to be quite excellent. That being said, I can sympathize with the confusion getting things deployed, if only because there are so many options. The best bet for a beginning, IMHO, is to give Heroku a try when getting your first app deployed - they have some really excellent documentation.

As a beginner, trying to deploying a rails app to production from scratch is likely to drive you a bit crazy.
It's also explicitly stated in the fourth caution item.

The author seems to be presenting the question as a boring context that students have to deal with, but there are plenty of tasks where some degree of self control is required to read and understand a few hundred words that aren't real exciting.

To me, the big problem with testing is that it is not particularly adaptive. Students that demonstrate a reasonable level of reading comprehension when they are 10 probably don't need to be evaluated for it 5 more times before they leave school (of course tests do get successively more difficult/higher level, but doing that in lockstep by age is a waste).
My dad had to explain to them how this wasn't really achievable, even should they want to, as he worked in libraries.
Running well on Wine has no correlation to running well natively. DirectX -> OpenGL, for one.
We get them mainly from whitebread America, Europe, and certain parts of East and South Asia.

I.e., they come from half the planet (Europe + USA + China + India == about 3.5 billion people) rather than the whole planet.

You are correct that the NYT has different values, and it's important to recognize what those values are: they view certain privileged [1] groups as deserving of being statistically represented in SF. Their underlying value system is basically corporatism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism

(The term "corporatism" is only peripherally related to modern LLCs. While a modern LLC may be a corporation, so are "black people", "poor people" and "long time residents" in the sense that the NYT is using them.)
Tweetbot Icon in Pure CSS
Yes. http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=macbook+air+star...
I love it, particularly the statement "Facebook should stop treating ads like they are dirty things that must be manipulated and integrated unwittingly into the Facebook experience." Totally agree. Pinterest succeeds because it is a form of content discovery. Aggregators work toward the same purpose. If I knew that FB could truly target ads to my specific situation, you bet I would be curious to look at them. Who doesn't want to find new, compelling content all the time?

I believe whoever wins the content discovery game wins the next decade. Google+ is the only one I see trying to make strides in this area, but they simply don't have the active user base to back it up. FB has the userbase, it just needs to capitalize on it. Doing so would mean a very big win for the small business sector too; for once, ads would actually engage the user and probably convert to a sale more readily.

More than ads, FB needs to provide tools to content producers, businesses, pages that enable them to capitalize on such opportunities. How difficult would it be to say, "We found that 17-23 year olds whose parents like Tom Petty are 67% more likely to like your brand. Would you like to create a targeted ad for this group?" They already have the data. Businesses would easily pay for that kind of functionality.
"You put a camera on the front of your car, and you set it to capture frequent images of the road ahead of you while you drive. At the same time, you capture all the data about your driving -- steering-wheel movement, acceleration and braking, speed"

I'm curious: How does one capture the car data? In the self driver car, the ML and camera part of it seems to be easier than the interface with the car mechanics, yet there's generally little mention of that part.
I'll preface this by saying that I hate standardized tests, but this is a good reading comprehension question (and the author clearly has poor reading comprehension.)

The description clearly says:

> 4. To avoid crushing the glass slide when focusing, begin with the lens close to the specimen and back off focusing.

This article seems to be celebrating that people can't follow instructions properly. If I were to get some students to play with robotics kits (which may or may not include microscopes) step 1 would be making sure that they understand the instructions for the kits. And a series of questions like this seems like a pretty valid way to test that. Tests are good. I'd even say tests can be crucial before you let kids play with expensive electronics and explosives.
My brother did the experiment right
Scrum as an interface?? You are talking about good specifications/good requirements.

For precise requirements I don't need Scrum or any other esoteric methodology. I just need some people who are able express themselves precisely, clearly and who can put their specifications in some tool and maintain a proper dialogue with devs (i.e. Pivotal). They don't need weird names, roles and daily standups. Scrum is heavy routine which actually wears people out and invented by people who desperately want to upvalue their shitty projectmanagement job.

The key is: just try to keep people out of your project and company who have absolutely no clue about tech/Internet/online.
I'd recommend reading Eloquent Ruby by Russ Olsen. It's a great after-Rails intro to Ruby and uses a lot of specific examples from the framework to highlight how Ruby features make some of the magic happen in Rails.
I have 5 implementable ideas how to bring out schools into the 21st century:

1) Let children solve real world problems. They learn skills that they can use in most every job.

2) Let the children decide which problem they want to tackle. Excellent skills to have: Coming up with ideas, convincing your fellow students to focus the rest of the year on that one problem and focusing on the solution for the rest of the school year. [I can't wait to find out what they will do.]

3) Share the problem, proposed solution as well as the whole process on the web with the world Wikipedia style. We live in a networked world, let’s use that opportunity to the fullest. Track progress weekly for a great review at the end of the year and for others to learn from everyones else’s progress.

4) Big hand-over of the solution via a presentation in front of students, teachers, parents, … Great skill to have to be able to present your ideas and solution in front of a larger audience.

5) Project Fridays: Every Google employees is allowed to focus 20% of their time on a project of their choosing. Let’s do the same with our children in school. 20% is the equivalent to one school day a week. Let’s do it on Friday.

My hope is that the first thing the children will do is create the environment for them to tinker to try out solutions in their schools.

Just presented these 5 ideas at TEDx Creative Coast too:
http://www.aliveschools.org/2012/06/video-replay-tedxcc-5-id...

Please join the movement to make our schools come alive:
http://www.aliveschools.org/2012/05/hello-world/

Thanks, Mark.
I agree: of course there is a lot of value to book learning as well. However, I do think that practical or hands-on learning can be a way to show the relevance of the material taught in books. I remember having trouble with probability and statistics in high school, because it was very abstract. It wasn't until university when things clicked. Mainly, because I all of a sudden saw why it was useful.

In the same way I believe you can make some of the book learning more interesting by relating it back to the hands on learning. Explaining the physics of shooting a rocket up into the air is a lot more interesting if you ran into some of these problems yourself. Of course, this isn't always practical to do for all subjects.
2013 Ford F-150 Review and Specs
[1] Brazil, Russia, India, China...
Biological Intelligence is Only a Transitory Phenomenon
Nice one! Will definitely look into them.

Thanks
I’ve not used Stripe, but I’ve used Braintree for a while. Braintree is an older company, and it seems to have a bigger, lower level API. Stripe’s is much higher level, and looks like it could be both simpler and easier to use. This is probably not just because of age, but also because Stripe wraps and owns your merchant account (it looks like), while Braintree works with a merchant account, exposing many more technical details of the payments process (thus making you manage them).

Braintree’s API, while REST underneath, is only supported at the library level and they have more languages supported for this reason than Stripe (Including mobile specific APIs). Obviously this makes it much easier to support newer, hipper languages with Stripe - just write your own wrapper to the REST API.

Most of the big features seem to be supported on both platforms, one off and reoccurring payments, token based transactions, etc.
Not sure if I am allowed to post links but I posted a blog post on this subject recently http://www.blackspiral.co.uk/blog/ comparing Trello/Redmine/Jira. Have used all three on recent projects.

If you do check out the link, the blog isn't fully featured yet so please ignore that!
I note that BI is called a "cesspool" in these comments, and that this email has been posted here so that you don't have to send any traffic to us.

Just so everyone is aware, you'd not be reading this email right now if us cesspool-splashers hadn't done the hard work of getting a copy and posting it. Now, by not linking to us, you are essentially punishing us for that work. I suppose you'd prefer a world in which you hadn't read this email.
Actually you are thinking about that a little bit backwards. That is to say, high test scores are a pretty good proxy for not only income, but other less tangible things.

Consider, you can get high income in some suburbs of rust belt cities... doesn't mean you want those kids at Governor Dummer's.

In essence, some people want to buy real estate around 'the right kind of people'. There is more to it than just income, and test scores are a good proxy for figuring that out. Of course, that's normally only for a fairly select group of 1%'ers. But that's also where your big commissions come from in real estate.
Agreed. When you're spending as much time dealing with the methodology governing a project as you are actually doing something, something is wrong.
One Rails project that provides pretty thorough installation instructions is this: https://github.com/dserban/censormenot
> Any idea what else could I do? One thing I can think of is going to more startup-y events...

You claim you can't afford to begin a startup, whilst thinking it's a good investment to spend money on startup-y events?

You will learn much more simply by:

a) buying a domain name

b) setting up some hosting

c) tinkering with your own ideas

...than eating a slice of pizza while listening to some startup god speak.

You can show some real progress in a few months with just 1 hour per day spent reading/thinking. Get to it!
I got a good chuckle out of this one as well: "We may end up creating a supercomputer in the cloud that calls itself Zeus and throws down lightning bolts at people." Thiel is hilarious.
I see this attitude all the time in SV techies - lets just ignore the finance because its all chatter anyway. Frankly, this line of thinking is counter-productive and quite dangerous. Macro matters much more than slapping together some code to build widgets people will want & will pay for. For one thing, most of those people who want & will pay are getting their dough from boring non-tech ventures affected entirely by macro. When things head south, people will batten down the hatches. They will neither want nor pay for, because they simply can't afford to. All of this wanting and paying for is mostly discretionary spending driven by a upbeat macro signalled by IPO markets & especially FB. Once those signals flash red, the wallet stays shut. No more app store purchases, cloud drive subscriptions, ipads, servers, what-have-you. Huge giants ( Sun, SGI, Cray...) fell by the wayside because they collectively put their head down & built what they thought people would want & would pay for. People did want those things initially, but once the economy went into a tailspin, the dot in dotcom became the dot in dot-bomb. I still have those Sun tshirts proudly proclaiming our red hot dotness. I wear them on the weekends when I take out the trash. The kids snigger and say "dot in dot com...wtf ?" and I realize...yeah, wtf were we thinking.
Oh, the beautiful but saddening irony.
Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial addresses this right away. The first chapter is called From Zero to Deploy, where he demonstrates how to set up a Ruby/Rails programming environment and deploy rails apps to Github and Heroku.
That didn't work out so well for Oracle.
Auto Transport Newark, Shipanycar
I think this is a good thing, as startup valuations are already frothy, especially when based on users instead of earnings.

Perhaps this is what's needed to bring the game back to reality so that everyone can prosper.
I agree with the article and would go further. In the modern era of information availability and the incredibly high quality of online courses and resources, school is obsolete for all but the really dumb kids that just aren't motivated because their parents are stupid or on drugs.
We had a book reading contest my fourth grade year, to read as many books as possible during the year.

At one point, after I'd read some multiple of whatever the class average was, my teacher told me to stop reading so many books. Still, all these years later, I have very negative feelings about that.

There's a lot of subpar teachers out there. In every district.
I'm asking how this "not breathing indicator" could be used to improve outcomes. What does one do if it signals a problem--are parents going to be trained to perform CPR on their infants (and would that even help if done properly)?

Pandering to parents' fears about something they can do nothing to solve does not seem to me like a productive thing.
I found Ruby for Rails very helpful when I was getting started. It helped separate Rails "magic" from the underlying language aspects in a way that most other books did not.
I was confused how Agile made it back to HN, but after a quick glance the reason is clear.

Enterprise Java has discovered Agile.
They are using gzip compression level 1. Bogus.
If those teachers had any sense of professional responsibility they'd resign en-masse, or at least drum out whoever's idea this was. Unbeliveable.
This is pretty much why you have to have standardized tests. Subpar teachers like this one. You couldn't possibly trust someone like that to make any sort of valid evaluation of her students.
OT and hijacking this thread:

1. Who is actually new to Ruby?

(After Ruby or rather the popular RoR is there almost for a decade everyone should have made some experiences with Ruby, so I am wondering if there are many new Rubiest)

2. What new language/stack did you start to learn recently?

(for me: Node.js)
Kids should be building rockets and robots, not making iPhone apps.
Many of the people I know at Facebook are talking about getting into Angel investing or starting their own companies now that they have money. I'm most worried about all that seed money flooding the market, making it even harder for existing companies to find good talent.
The writer's complaint is daft. The purpose is to test if you can read a passage and comprehend it. Has nothing to do with microscopes.

From my understanding of cognitive science, the question asked is deeply flawed if you want to test comprehension without testing knowledge of microscopes.

One approach to answering questions like this is to build a little model in your head of what is being described. You then answer questions about the model in your head. Experience with microscopes or similar devices is incredibly valuable to building such a model in your head and answering questions about it. This was one of the “big problems” in first generation AI: to answer questions, a computer must be able to construct models, and to construct models, a computer needs a huge amount of real-world experience.

What I’m saying is that answering this question well requires experience with microscopes or similar devices. Being able to answer the question without prior knowledge of what a microscope is, or how light behaves, or lenses period, or refracting telescopes, and so forth, is ridiculously hard.

Now, there may be a good reason why an entire test full of a variety of such questions is effective for accomplishing whatever the school board wants accomplished—getting funding, I imagine—but I stop well short of saying the author’s complaint is “daft.” I think there are good reasons to be curious about the biases inherent in this question, and about where schools end up if they build their entire approach to teaching around scoring well on questions like this.
Hey, thanks for reading + replying, my stuff is crap while I'm learning how to write properly ^_^

I haven't yet spent any money on the events, I've gotten tickets given to me by my ex boss and go to free ones.

I've got a couple of domains + some hosted space, but recently I couldn't justify the cost, I think you're right though I need to start hosting and showing some of my projects, I have one in particular but I have no idea how to progress it. I think I'll get it hosted today/this week.

Thanks !
How do multi-selects work with formParams?
An application I'm currently building (shameless plug - www.quaffic.com) will definitely benefit from this post. If nothing else, I feel affirmed that we're on the right track. From what you're saying, the value of ACRA is huge. That's my big takeaway at this point. I wondered what the normal process was for getting crash reports from users.

Also, what did you end up doing to alleviate your JSONObject problem? JSONSmart?
I'm wondering - is there a similar recipe for sorting arrays of uint32_ts ?

(Am experimenting with fast DNA matching; http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/24071805525/searc... - thoughts and hints welcome!)
Sean Parker's "Airtime" launched to Public
Unit test suggestion: testPackAndUnpack should also check double-compress and double-decompress for being identical, it'll tend to find any remaining such issues, if any.
I think that test item is a good example of the role that testing is playing in the US education system today. The real problem is that, for many students, this test item is the closest they will ever come to using a microscope.

We should be focusing on getting more students in front of a microscope, in classes where they learn effectively from texts as you describe. Instead, we are so caught up in testing that many people lose sight of this goal.
The inhabitants of a city are not limited to a single ethnicity, so it's still fundamentally wrong. However, this exchange won't get us any further. I have no doubt you won't be convinced, so there seems nothing to be gained by continuing. Feel free to use language as you will.
I reread this list every now and then, it never loses its power. I've never reviewed papers in math or hardcore CS like on topic mentioned here, but here's a similar informal list that I mentally use when I review articles for IEEE:

* Bad English: I'm not talking about a few typos here and there (although too many typos is a problem), mostly it is gross grammatical mistakes that makes sentences unparseable. The thought here is that sloppiness in language correlates with sloppiness in research.

* Omitting important references or too many self-references: This is a sure sign that the authors have not really done a good study of the area.

* Sloppy LaTex equation formatting: Similar to language sloppiness, this also shows that either the authors have not read enough technical articles to see how it's done, or that they don't care (or worse, they cannot learn).

* Glossing over outliers in results: Usually results tables would contain outcomes that don't fit into the model/approach the authors are proposing. I look to see if this is discussed.
It is a reading comprehension question. Read the text provided: "To avoid crushing the glass slide when focusing, begin with the lens close to the specimen"

The microscope lens should initially be placed close to the glass slide:
C. To avoid breaking the glass slide when adjusting the focus.
Obama administration admits cyberattack on Iran
FIRST Robotics was an amazing experience. Our sponsoring university basically let us have free reign of their machine shop and made us do all the work ourselves, They just offered assistance if asked. Some of my favorite memories of school. Likewise, when we built 6 foot tall working trebuches in Calc... that was also a blast.

I hope my future kids have these kinds of opportunities in school.
ScrewTurn Wiki - Goodbye, World
Remember, \u200B is also valid in property names, making it immune to

for(i in x){
console.log(i, "_");
}

as well. That said, this is the worst idea.
similar to JSONH, which i use to pass recordsets back and forth. there's no recursiveness for nested stuff though.

https://github.com/WebReflection/JSONH
The Nine Facets of an Awesome Command-Line App
Transit of Venus 2012—Sun Show Will Be Last for a Century
Eh. Yes and no, sales is a different beast. I'm not saying it should be, but it generally is. If you judge your sales process like your technology process (without building the right culture), you're readying yourself for a mighty flop.

By nature, the more high-contact sales people are the stronger the personalities. Documenting and tight record management just don't come naturally, and unlike engineering, are generally considered immaterial to the roles. Sales resources are hired, fired and incented by sales, and the good ones will focus only on what will help increase their sales in. Again, I see startups always overlook the dynamic and motivations they are creating, and then wonder why it didn't work out.

I'm reminded of some of the larger sales forces (fortune 50) I've interacted with. The running joke is that the sales people with the best documentation should be fired, as their sales would be the lowest. 9/10 times, this turned to be true.