skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What prevents the teacher from giving his class all the answers so that he doesn't have to work and doesn't get fired for his students grades being too low.
Isn't hacker news supposed to be about "hacking" ? :) If someone finds a clever way to get better results on hacker news without cheating, I do not see it as "lame", rather inventive.
Waiting for Superman. Watch it.
And Crumble is open-source! Which is awesome!

Great job, I was looking for something exactly like this - simple. Will try tomorrow
Great feedback, I don't know what your tour looked like and what the level of text was but I would hope that by keeping the individual points very simple and visually attractive they would stand a higher chance of being read?
Eric Sorenson of Puppet Labs - The Linux Admin Show (podcast)
I think the idea of the database that knows what words you know is kind of a fascinating idea in a way, in that it goes beyond personal information into personal knowledge, a digital reflection of your actual understanding which corrects itself continuously to reflect it more accurately.

Anyway, if this was a service I could actually use online, I most definitely would, and I might even pay for it (as I once did with smart.fm which became paid for a year or two ago). I'm currently learning german quite intensively, and anything that makes this highly laborious process (that of cramming new knowledge into my mind and trying to make it stick) more efficient is extremely useful to any language learner.
"Forget your silly logic and think of the children!"
I thought the dropzilla concept in the final slide looks pretty similar to what tab groups can already do. I hope they do combine them rather than having the two as separate features, otherwise it'll be splitting up bookmarks in different areas.

The Tab Groups feature is really useful but it's also quite awfully done. I particularly hate the way it resizes and moves around groups when you resize the browser. Ideally, it should use an automated layout, similar to tiling window managers, where you have a fixed master area, and a stacking area for other recently used groups. It'd also be fairly handy if you could nest groups, or have multiple panoramas, for people like me who have too many tabs open to fit on the screen at once.
It's the increased frequency (5 "story emails" in first month trump 1 "transactional (welcome. login here…) email") and the fact these emails are a chapter in a story, specifically that someone has registered for your service: you can assume that you have piqued someones curiosity with your proposition: now push (well, drip) it down their throat with a sequence.

(I would not have been so confident with my copywriting if i didn't know it.)
Agreed. Apple had a set of requirements, and Google had a set of requirements (both sets including, of course, the question of money), and they couldn't come up with a set of mutually agreeable terms, so they parted ways.

To place responsibility fully on either company is silly. No company of that size is simply going to say "no". There's always a price, and Apple decided it wasn't worthwhile.
Not exactly Sandy tracking, but this wind map is crazy to watch as storm hits http://hint.fm/wind/
Because now you can get your "startup" up and off the ground within 12 hours instead of 24!

In all seriousness though, why is this kind of thing necessary? Who exactly wins here? Certainly not developers since you'll probably never learn how to write basic HTML/CSS with this Dreamweaver approach.
It wasn't always obvious that Cook would be the CEO of Apple after Jobs left. This is the job Forstall wanted, but that Apple didn't want him for. The job went to Cook, and so Forstall was either going to have to find a place to be happy in Apple or he'd be on his way out.

This gives a smooth transition to the large teams under him over the next year or so, in exchange for more vesting of his shares.

People saying this is about Maps or Siri or Skoumorphism are focusing on relatively petty issues.

This is about how is going to be the leader of Apple. Tim Cook turned out to not just be the interim CEO, and waiting a year for the transition is respectful all around-- and is enough time for everyone to know what the right direction for their lives is.

Forstall may want to do a startup-- where he'd certainly be a CEO.
Have you used it recently?

A few versions ago, they added a feature where tab contents are only reloaded on-demand, when clicked. You no longer have a big lag when opening up the browser with many tabs, and memory usage is quite reasonable.
I love this announcement for no other reason than I've been predicting a large influx of ARM architecture into the server market. It makes a lot of sense. More importantly I believe it'll be large multi-core SoC clusters. This is the very logical transition. While a lot of our software doesn't fully utilize multiple processor support, our OSes are becoming a lot better at scheduling and are almost eliminating the impact of a context switch.
That's great and all.

And what exactly do you need that for in your phone? To watch youtube in HD?
'In my opinion, the most important question on the Y Combinator application, is this one: “Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.”'

Not a criticism per se, but pg recently said that is actually one of their LEAST ("not in the top 10") important questions.
Mint used to use a company called Yodlee to do data aggregation. You can find more information here: http://www.yodlee.com/developers-and-alliances/yodlee-apis/

Since Mint's acquisition by Intuit, they have switched over to Intuit's in-house data aggregation system. Intuit is planning to release these APIs to developers some time in the next few months. You can find more information here: http://developer.intuit.com/agg-cat/

There are some other companies out there like CashEdge and ByAllAccounts, but they tend not to do deals with startup companies and instead focus on selling to big financial institutions like banks, etc.

You also might want to check out Wesabe's (former Mint competitor) data aggregation system which they have open-sourced: https://github.com/wesabe/ssu
Hopefully the goal isn't to indoctrinate people but to prepare them to go to college, get a job, make money, spend money, etc.
Steve Jobs' yacht revealed, designed by Jobs and Philippe Starck
And do you know the breakdown of that 2.75%? Most of it does not go to Square, it goes to card processing networks and issuing banks. Do you know what those are?
SEO Growth Hack: Piggy-Back For Fast Rankings
I sincerely hope every practical developer knows the complexity and costs of their algorithms, can write a simple parser, and reason about finite state machines (ie, the non-trivial systems people build). I do get what you mean: CS is different than practical skills. Pure theory is interesting and less practical but all the things you mentioned have lots of uses in practice. You don't write a formal proof for every little thing but you use the conceptual tools.
I used to hoard links, pages, resources at a higher pace than I could consume. All it did was increase the size of a self dictated TODO list and the feeling of being "left behind" more and more.

I don't use bookmarks anymore, or for that matter any other "save for later" tool or process. If I can't read it right now, chances are I won't do it at all. And that's ok. Ultimately, none of this matters much, if at all.
One mistake (of his):

The point of these programming tasks is not to show off your prowess; most of the time the interviewer is trying understand your thought process and maybe some basic programming abilities. Think of it like a sanity-check.

Showing off turns people off because it can lead to negative team behaviors. Being creative to make life better is good, but there's a line between that and being too clever to work with other people.
That's a detail that's sort of glossed over in the article. I'd like to see some evidence for that. While I wouldn't be surprised if teachers work significantly less during the summer, I'd be very surprised to find out that they don't work at all. It rings of the assumption that classroom time is the only work time.

Even if they don't work all 12 months of the year, is it feasible for a teacher to take another similar-paying job during the off months? If not, then hourly pay is not a good indicator of income. I can't imagine a person who is only going to be available for 2-3 months, and who has split responsibilities with classroom preparation, would be able to get a non-menial job to fill in the gaps, somewhere along the lines of $15/hour.

So taking $15/hr * 40 hours (optimistic) gives $600 per week, multiplied by 13 weeks gives $7800 for the summer. Add that to the $52000 estimate from BLS, and you get $59,800 per year, which averages about $28 per hour on average.
Tim Cook emails employees; thanks Forstall, says Mansfield to stay two years
I'm principally talking about look and feel. iOS looks and operates great, let's get that out of the way. But it's essentially the same core design that was laid out in 2007 + Androidish notifications + multitasking-lite. At a glance can the average user tell the difference between iOS 2 or 3 and 6?

I acknowledge that that's not necessarily an entirely worthy goal in and of itself, but keeping a design focused product fresh does have its merits.

Here's iOS 1 and 5 side by side

http://pocketnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/ios1ios5.png

Other than the obvious lack of a wallpaper I'm not really sure that there's been any fundamental work on improving the user interaction and look & feel of the thing in 5 years.

I find it unbelievable that there's nothing that could be done better and that iOS was launched with perfect interaction design, fully formed from the heads of the designers, or perfect visual design, reverently propagated to the modern day and on into the future.

Is this really the penultimate in volume slider design? There's no more work to be done here?

http://www.uiparade.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/clean-ios...

I think this recent shakeup is Apple signaling that it's time to evolve again and that excites me much more than the last 2 or 3 product launches have.

If anybody can put out a new way of pushing electrons around and making it "just work" it's going to be Apple and I want to see what they come up with.
Are content marketplaces any good?
FYI, the Nexus 4 is quad core. However, the Nexus 10 is only dual! I've tried switching to a tablet at the beginning of the year but web browsing performance wasn't good enough for me. Hope the dual core downgrade won't make that much of a difference.

edit: I was under the impression they both were Samsung Exynos arm processors. Turns out the Nexus 4 is using the Snapdragon S4 Pro and the Nexus 10 is using a A15 Samsung Exynos.
The idea of 'hacking language learning' puts me in mind of Kato Lomb [1] a hungarian linguist who worked for the UN as one of the world's first simultaneous translators and knew around a dozen languages fluently. One of the most interesting things about her is that she didn't take any interest in languages before her adult life had begun; before that she was a physicist.

In one of her books she advocates reading foreign language texts without using a dictionary at all, just trying to figure out the meaning from what little you already know (of course you have to be at a certain level to even try this, although you'd be surprised how little you need to know to start.)

This process forces you to think logically about who words are constructed, and to use your own current knowledge to e figure out meanings of words. For example, you might already know a small part of a compound word in german, and use this along with the context of the sentence to figure out the meaning of the whole word.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kat%C3%B3_Lomb
> And a heartfelt thanks to FF developers for taking care of the memory footprint and the leaks.

Woohoo! You're welcome :)
Polling is another form of standardized testing (unless you propose asking different questions of each participant).

It seems you don't object to standardized testing at all, but merely to the goals of the current school system (conveying knowledge/skills rather than indoctrination).
I'm the same as you. I've accumulated years worth of bookmarks which I dread organizing, but at least I can search for their titles. My current solution consists of:

* Readability - things I intend to read soon. Works across browsers and devices, and the simplified text-only view is a boon.
* Bookmarks - I try to roughly categorize by folders, but mostly use tags. I'm not sure why no other browser other than FF lets me add tags to bookmarks considering that page titles almost never represent contents of the page. That and built-in readability-like functionality on Android are some of the things that are making me switch to FF as a full-time browser again.
* Evernote - pages move and die often, which is a problem with Internet as a whole I find. Clipping to Evernote at least ensures access to the page later, and feels a little less archaic than saving the page to disk.
I have tried almost all the podcast apps at this stage (sinking about $15-20) and although Downcasts is great (my number 2 choice) I recently found myself prefering the lesser known Pocket Casts. The best feature by far is they poll the feeds on their own servers and push notifications to you (I know Instacast is supposed to do this but I didn't find it very reliable and Instacast had many other problems for me). Pocket Casts very rarely crashes (with over 60 podcasts subscribed), resumes/pauses system-wide reliably and instantly, has a nice responsive UI (even on my iPhone 4) and has full import/export OPML so you aren't stuck with them. No affiliation.
You know what sounds like a great way to delight users? Don't send me email. Leave me alone. I signed up for your service, not for a newsletter.
NIH funds behavioral intervention to slow cancer by improving the immune system
I really enjoyed reading this (fairly long) essay.

Valve has a company culture I admire and having a name for a similar structure (open allocation) helps when speaking about intentions.

I particularly enjoyed the portion of the essay that dealt with dividers vs subtractors. It's fairly evident that everyone starts as a subtractor, and should not be fired just because they take longer to get acclimated. Dividers, on the other hand, are a kind of person that not only take down companies, but also take down relationships and friends in their personal lives.

I've personally spent much of my life identifying "divider" behavior in myself and eliminating it so I can commonly identify these types of people. I wonder, however, if there is a third category which would be a subtractor that doesn't wish to improve. This could potentially be classified as a low-level of divider, but takes longer to identify for me personally. I also wonder if these types could have their course altered with the right persuasion early enough.

Ex: Someone who makes concrete plans and bails increasingly over time with originally convincing reasons. These originally convincing reasons are visibly full of (not necessarily malicious) ulterior motives once you are familiar with them.
The "early intervention" in this situation would have the goal of making the person more reliable by somehow solving their ulterior concerns.

My belief is this organizational structure is a driving force for my startup.
Do you have any idea how to read a chart? Do you see that "operating loss" light red colored area there? If the slide is to be believed, the aggregate cost of Square's transactional fees (the orange part) and their operating costs (the dark red part) is higher than their revenue (the blue part). That means they are operating at a loss of about $150k per day as of April of 2012. And it's accelerating. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

As for the source, the slide was on TC and the report is available with a subscription at https://intelligence.businessinsider.com/welcome. I can't verify it, but everything I have seen/know about their revenue model makes it look genuine.
That comment didn't add anything to the discussion. The comparison you made is not helpful to anyone's understanding of the situation. Please don't do that. Hold yourself to a higher standard in the future.
Indicating depth in a digital button is a clear affordance.
> Hopefully his replacement is closer to Ron Johnson's set of retail and service values.

I wonder if the scope of Human Interfaces extends to the Apple Store. If Apple is taking a holistic approach to coordinating its products, it's worth considering that the store is one of the most important aspects for human interaction and industrial design. Maybe Jony will take some level of control in terms of design and leave the management and promotional aspects to the retail SVP?
I appreciate the help, but that's not actually my point. My point is that Square does not keep the 2.75%. It is doled out as cost of goods sold in the form of interchange fees back to card networks and issuing banks. No one has any idea how little of that fee that Square keeps but I would guess around 0.2 - 0.5% at most.
There is a world of difference between being influenced by something and doing an exact copy. One is legal, accepted as beneficial to society and common place within the design community. The other isn't.

You are either woefully naive or being disingenuous to assume that the two are the same.
The problem of standardized testing has a direct analogue in software engineering that makes the situation crystal clear to any programmer - remember when our industry thought it was a good idea to measure programmer productivity primarily (or even solely) by the number of lines of code written? How did that work out for us? Terribly, of course. LOC metrics have a passing resemblance to the thing you want to measure in software engineering but it turned out to be horribly bad at predicting the thing we actually cared about - working software.

Standardized testing bears exactly the same relationship to the outcome we actually care about in education.

In both realms, there is no easy single metric you can turn to. In the end, you hire great people and get out of their way. The best measurements come from multi-dimensional feedback from managers, peers, and customers. No it doesn't scale very well but it's the only thing that works.
That's curious. I'm quite used to hearing conversations where people have wildly different performance experiences with Chrome and Firefox. But people with 100s of tabs almost universally say that Firefox handles them ok and Chrome fails miserably.

As for Firefox improvements -- FF7 (September 2011) fixed some big memory problems in the browser, and FF15 (August 2012) prevented a very common kind of leak caused by add-ons. But most of the other releases since FF7 have had minor memory consumption improvements. See https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/category/memshrink/ for more (possibly too much) detail.

If you haven't tried Firefox for over a year and you regularly have 100s of tabs open, you should really try it again. If you have an existing profile, it might be worth using the "reset firefox" feature to make sure it doesn't have a bunch of unnecessary cruft in it -- see http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix....
I'm seeing degraded performance in AWS US East - anyone else?
Hope I'm not the canary in the coal mine here.
We are building a search engine with it (nuuton.com).
Shoot me an email. I'm looking for feedback from experienced lispers. :)
The guide itself was definitely being read. I built it directly into the app, so users could only advance the guide by completing the step described (like, they'd have to actually create a new contact before the guide would advance). A surprisingly high number of people completed the entire thing (~45% if I remember correctly) but very few of those people seemed to actually retain anything. We received way more support requests, and the conversion from trial to paying customers decreased (relative to just showing a video).

I don't mean to suggest that interactive tutorials can't ever work, but they were a huge failure for me. The only upside was that several people contacted us specifically to mention how awesome they thought the tutorial was. However, most of those people seemed to be other software developers that were interested in doing something similar. They didn't seem to actually be any more likely to subscribe.
Show HN: My Arduino LED suit
It's barely even a joke. There's a reason Apple watchers refer to what they do as "Kremlinology".
Is US-east the least reliable of all AWS data centres? Arguably, Virginia is more susceptible to natural disasters than Oregon or Northern California (while we wait for that 1 in a 100 year earthquake).
him: why did people elect Hitler?

you: Explaining how votes are tallied.

Technically correct but totally useless.
Why? Both seem to be used, with Lake Geneva being used more commonly. Are there good reasons for preferring one over the other?
I think it's pretty clear where the direction of Apple is going:

http://www.apple.com/itunes/new-itunes/

So it could be coming sooner than you think.
I was initially afraid this app could take a turn for the worse and become used mostly for "less respectable" activities, but what I have actually seen are (in maybe 30% of total users) small businesses (like hair stylists, landscapers, and other one-person companies without a main office) looking for a cheap/easy way to not give out their personal phone number.

The other main use case I see (about 10% of total users) are international (non-US) users, presumably to make/receive calls with US-based people without incurring international or long-distance charges.
I'm no scripting historian, but I believe the relevant date from which to judge this patent's validity is 4/12/2000, the date of the provisional application from which this patent was born. As of that date, were these types of embedded components possible?
Woohoo, I made that. Have a free premium month as a thanks for the recommendation (what's your username)?
Yeah good point. We actually run kage proxy behind another load balancer, and only send traffic with a sampling cookie set, which can be controlled from our main app.
I saw a comment a few weeks ago where one fellow HNer ran his entire startup on AWS spot instance pricing - so that he was forced to program in a state of continuous chaos as his demand/spot instances popped randomly and continuously into and out of existence while his service was running. It's like programming on quicksand.

This is probably a step too far - but maybe it is a natural extension of NFLX's Chaos monkey.

If you want ~100% up time with no QOS degradation - your system must be constantly under catastrophic attack.

This is probably a major reason why vol based risk models in finance are completely pointless.

Value at risk of any investable securities (including cash) is 100% all the time - any other number is bullshit. All volatility based risk models are useful if you like watching squiggly lines or pricing options, but they are essentially a random anchor that helps us sleep at night (anchoring bias).
Yep, we run kage behind another load balancer that does SSL decryption etc.