skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"North Westall, a fifth grader, got 27 3s this marking period"

I'm glad they're giving a more realistic report and showing specifically what needs improving.

"while the top grade of 4 celebrates 'meeting standards with distinction.'"

However, meeting "standards with distinction" to me means you haven't met much. Of the standardized testing I've done (which admittedly was many moons ago), getting a perfect score wasn't saying much. It was truly a lowest-common-denominator type of standard. For our future's sake, I hope this is no longer the case.

However, if this comment is representative of what's happening:

"What happened was the high-performing students said, 'I don’t have to work that hard' and they all stopped trying"

Then I fear there's no hope in such a system. This was happening even among the best of the best in my high school, where we often joked about "points per minute" to see how well you could do on tests or assignments in the shortest amount of time.

And I hate to say it, but what Dr. Guskey points out about the traditional way of grading:

"'The dilemma with that system is you really don’t know whether anybody has learned anything,; Dr. Guskey said of grading on a curve. 'They could all have done miserably, just some less miserably than others.'"

Is even more true of the standards as I've seen them. You only get a chance to show you can excel at mediocrity.
I once went to a magnet system that did something similar, presumably to prevent excessive competition for As when everyone was already exceptional.

I think the theory was "We teach algebra to 4th graders but there is no way they'll figure out a 3 to 3 mapping on their own."
Cloud control
Exactly. It's like reworking the scoring of the SAT from 1600 to 2400. If you have ANY kind of scaling system in place (which is integral in any kind of ranking system), it will always be converted.
Jive.ly - a one-man attempt to better Twitter?
The diagram shown in the article doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. They've got the output of the heat exchanger going directly to the supply of the shower where it mixes with the output of the water heater. This actually reduces the temperature of the shower and, as phugoid already noted, introduces undesirable temperature transients. It seems to me that it makes more sense to use the heat exchanger to preheat the feed to the water heater. This has the added advantage of making the energy exchange mechanism generally applicable to any hot water that exits via the drain which supplies the heat exchanger, not just shower water. Also, when you finish your shower and shut off the water, there is still heat in the drain and still water refilling the water heater, but the design as shown does nothing productive with that energy.

Of course, one would hope that the heat exchanger itself is made of highly corrosion-resistant material. It would be quite nasty to have a leaky drain introducing gray water into your potable water supply.
If your house is older and has copper sewer piping, it does an excellent job of radiating that heat back into your house. What you save heating water might not be too far off the heat you don't have to use your furnace to make.
Ask HN: Any easy way to automate mouse clicks in Linux (Gnome)?
I'm curious to see what happens on that page when I get to 0, but I want to be a smart hacker about it ...
Upvoted for wbr. I kinda wished for something like this. I wonder if it actually works in modern browsers.
I'm curious to see what happens on that page when I get to 0, but I want to be a smart hacker about it ...
How Our Brain Differentiates Between Reality and Fantasy?
C'mon, any upvote for wbr should be more than equaled by downvotes for saying label is rare and/or obscure.
Here's the homepage: http://www.pfspear.net/projects/gcalcron

This seems like an interesting experiment I think it could possible have implementations without google, such as a standard web-gui for those people that don't like ssh-ing in to schedule a task and such.

Edit: I read one of the screenshots on the site, the cool thing in it was lights - on or w.e for an automated house now that is really cool to be able to schedule something like that in a simple interface for non-computer savvy people. Although it is unlikely they would have an automated house running off of a server.
Fourth, the first one was at Radegast Beergarden in Brooklyn.

Incidentally Scriptor, I'm also at NYU. Feel free to contact me (my website is on my profile), I'm always looking to meet like-minded folks.
The only neat idea from the article was using rel="clickable" for doing inline ajax editables, makes a lot more sense than adding a class. Everything else was kind of fluff.
Works in IE and FF. Buggy in Safari. Does not work in Opera. Ref: http://www.quirksmode.org/oddsandends/wbr.html
Scalable Teams, Part 2: Leadership
Ask HN:  Can this be an answer to the auto industry?
I assume you're using Firefox...

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=firefox+macro
Entrepreneurs Find Gold in Gadget Startups
Mid january is the best time to get a shake, - though even some days then you get a line.
http://www.nycresistor.com/
CL junkie so no interest in this project. But doing what it does in reverse would be great for my work. We have numerous business critical b2b batch jobs kicked off by cron. It would be pretty cool if each one posted start/stop/endstatus to a gocal. Interested parties could see nightly and historical activity. Also 1/2 decent visualization for understanding the order/interrelatedness.
You mean like a console?

They are also offering a browser plugin for your PC or Mac so you don't need their box. The box is only required if you want to use your TV and not your computer.
In depth coverage of The Future of Capitalism from the Financial Times
The government. Oh yeah great idea. So when you post something critical of the wrong official or say the wrong words on your website your certificate is summarily revoked.
I like the advice to "start your day as early as possible, even if you're not a morning person." I'm definitely not a morning person, but he's right that it feels so good to have accomplishments done early in the day. Need to do that more often.

Another one of his points is similar to Randy Pausch's advice to "eat the biggest frog first."
I like the simplicity. If you have a life changing event, you turn the car back in. If the event is that bad, they'll probably get it back anyway. Sounds like a pretty cheap incentive to me.
Unless I am mistaken, acidification of the oceans has been demonstrated. So has the loss of large volumes of fresh water stored in glaciers, as well as the loss of coastal land as sea level rises. Natural systems are fragile, and we continue to poke and push them, with damages (for example, loss of biodiversity) that are not clearly obvious and that are in many cases simply irreparable. I won't belabor this point, although obviously much more could be said.

Burning carbon based materials to generate energy is, in the long term, unsustainable--there is a finite supply, and getting at the remaining sources will continue to become more expensive and more environmentally invasive (see: mountaintop removal). But enough about the environment, there are more important considerations (After all, we will eventually leave this planet, right?).

Our eventual shift to renewable sources of energy is inevitable. Worries about the consequences of climate change are finally gaining momentum in the public conscious. That means that now is the time to go full speed on development and roll-out of renewable energy. Mr. Dyson mentions that "By restricting CO2 you make life more expensive and hurt the poor."

Interesting comment from the man described as looking "like a person taking the longer view," because (given time) cheap abundant energy would do an incredible amount for the poor and starving. Deserts could be irrigated and farmed with desalinized water, pumps could preserve our coastal cities, really, the applications of cheap and abundant renewable energy are limited by our imaginations. Why leave that for our childrens' or grandchildrens' generation? What are we waiting for?

There is always a place for some healthy skepticism, but I fear that with respect to this particular issue skepticism has given the world plenty of motivation to procrastinate.
My cheaper version: Stand in my own filthy gray water and then leave it overnight. Problem solved. Of course now I have to solve this jock itch on my feet...
YC ignores a lot of good ideas because it's really focused on BIG ideas. YC wants to build Paypal, not 37signals. They lean toward ambitious infrastructure ideas which also have a higher failure rate. But there is a huge number of great ideas with lower risk/reward ratios that will still make stellar companies. I say bring it on... it's a great time to be in the HTML writing business. :)
"I have found everything could be picked up in a few weeks."

yes, business courses are really that easy

i took accounting course back then, the first couple weeks it didn't make sense (too simple). i thought a better way (aka ABC (activity based accounting)) which was covered weeks later

i sat on mba course later and most 'analysis' are too simplistic, mostly straight lines (remember 'beta' ?). complete waste of time.

i feel that business in general is easy and not much to learn so schools just teach everything for the sake of teaching.

out of the 1000 pages in many business textbooks, maybe only 100 pages are useful.
If you just need certs for in-house use, make your own. You can do that for free.
I'd also be interested in seeing some of the competition. Does anybody know of any relatively decent and comparable services?
FTC: We'll "come calling" about deceptive DRM
The beauty of it is you don't need a console, but makes up for it in the bandwidth needed. If my internet goes out I can still use my computer I can play the wii, and chances are if my internet is out weathers not too good outside so I don't really see me wanting something like this.

Idk about other people but I really do like tangible objects like discs or even things stored on a harddrive not a thinclient experience. Another thing is if this actually becomes big one wonders how much the quality would degrade as servers would be gaining load and losing performance, so would play quality go out the window at peak periods of the day, something you don't see with the current system in place with consoles even in multiplayer games.
> PC gaming is dead.

Yeah billions of dollars dead.

from 2007:
"The biggest gaming platform last year was the PC. Why? Online revenue alone exceeded 7 billion USD in 2007. As well, DFC predicts total PC gaming revenue to top 19 billion by 2013"

from 2008 14% plummet in PC game sales, cause why, cause of MMO's and Steam we buy online and not retail.
http://www.examiner.com/x-892-PC-Game-Examiner~y2009m1d19-PC...
So we grade tests with two significant digits (0-100%).
Then we partition these to a letter grade (<1 significant digit)
Then we average the letter grades to a GPA with three significant digits.
So what's a bit more confusion?
Small wonder colleges place more emphasis on the SAT (3 digits).
What makes "business" so different from "sciences" is that most business skills are not hard skills. There are certainly a few -- such as accounting and finance (btw, corporate finance is not as easy as you think).

"Soft skills" -- such as your presentation skills, your communication skills, client management skills, etc, are actually arguably more important. As a former consultant, I think soft skills is much more critical for your business success.

Business classes are easier than engineering classes because the "hard skills" aren't nearly as complex, but keep in mind you pick up a lot of other skills that are even more important in business settings.
Apple’s iPhone App Refund Policies Could Bankrupt Developers
<keygen>

http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/attachme...

http://web.archive.org/web/20070826111420/http://wp.netscape...
GZIP vs. BZIP2 vs. LZMA
At the very least it would provide interesting FPGA technology.

I think most engineers recognize that the brain has a lot of unknowns.

When you say "educate" what exactly do you mean? We can train neural networks now to, say, recognize handwriting or other behavior. I think we are just after a system that can learn anything in general, say take a chess program and then give it checkers. Or Magic: The Gathering.

Also, the field seriously needs people like you. It seems like there are at lot of engineers who are into the brain and want to build stronger AI but not many biologists who want to do the same.
Actual quotation from a U.S. News top-25 university admission officer who visited my town last year: "The G.P.A. has become the most meaningless number in college admissions." Yes, the test scores continue to play a significant role in college admission, as one factor among several, because grade averages are hardly comparable at all from one high school to the next.
Poll: Moving to SFO this summer regardless of Y Combinator's result?
Just wondering how many applicants are planning to move to San Francisco to start up your dream regardless the result of YC?

We are in the process of selling our house and planning to move out there end of April, we'll be driving cross country from Indiana to SF! Maybe we'll blog along our way using our IPhones!

Would be nice to know who's moving and arrange a meetup sometime early May and maybe share coworking space/partnership/etc.
On the topic of protein rich lunches; what do people usually do?

I like to take a lunch to the office since the need to eat seems to come up at varying times of the day.
Responsible Advertising: Feed a Programmer
Poll: Do you work on your startup full time or part time?
Full time: Nothing else, or more than 8 hours per day.

Part time: Something you do on the side after your other primary job, or less than 8 hours a day.
Part time
Got accepted into Georgia Tech just the other day. And this news made my day today. Is that sad?
This was an exceptionally thoughtful discussion of the regulatory trade-offs involved in acknowledging drugs as enhancements to normal cognitive functioning in healthy people.
That works well for stuff you want frozen rock solid (around here it drops to -25F in winter) and it makes it easy to run out to the grocery at lunch time and safely leave meat in the car. But for things like milk, eggs, etc. that you don't want to freeze, not so much.
most people don't seem particularly bright when delivering (or worse still, reading) a prepared speech

Hear. Hear. Delivering a scripted speech well is HARD, and the people who are famous for doing that well practice a lot. Most members of the hacker community are much more practiced in engaging in conversation about the passion for technology, and thus make themselves look better in speech and in print by treating each communication opportunity as a conversation with an unseen interlocutor.
I already live here :) but i'm always interested in a meetup. Drop me a line or post something here.
I wouldn't call it a serious attempt to better Twitter. It seems too focused on mobile media, not desktop media; the only filetypes you can upload (jpeg, mp4, 3gp and xvid) are typically found on cell phones.

But it hasn't come close to success (or even beta status, really) yet. There's no public API. It doesn't let you upload audio files. Its website needs a lot of work still for desktop usage and a mobile version doesn't even exist yet.

Competition is great, but this doesn't look to be it for Twitter. Not yet at least.
All this winter my wife and I have been keeping water bottles on the window sill, (I live south-west of toronto so it can get really cold at night). It often supercooled, it's really cool to see crystallization happen right in front of your eyes. (Ed: I've only ever seen supercooling once in the freezer, but I saw it almost every single night during winter, you can even drink from the bottle before it begins to crystallize. If only the same could be done with beer.)

I've avoided putting sodas on my window sill because I've had a few explode when I've stuck them in the freezer in the summer to get them ice cold. When my head is less than 2 feet away I don't want one of them exploding, if only because I don't want to strip my bed sheets at 3am. I doubt one would ever be capable of hurting someone as they always seem to split in the side.
The Apache Software Foundation is 10 years old today
Speaking from personal experience, the challenge for doing this in developing nations is that the hard part is being connected enough to a market to know if something can be built in three months that people will pay for. If you're in a developing nation intending to sell to America, you're probably not as close to your users as you need to be because products tend to change rapidly in the early stages of a startup and you need to be interacting directly with potential users and learning from them.

But the money does go 10 times as far, so the idea could have potential. $25K can roll a startup for a year or more on the cheap in Bangalore.
Ignoring the fact that the worst case is halfway around the equator (though real world routes could be less direct), when you want to reduce latency you want to have data centers as near to your customers as possible. In that case, 10 to 15 ms round-trip time to many customers is feasible with current tech and infrastructure. That's about one frame at 60fps.

So it's certainly physically possible.
I'm not saying models aren't tools of science. They are very important. However, the most important part of science is the part about independently recreating and verifying results. You simply cannot do that with long range climate models without waiting for that time to elapse and seeing if the model predicted what it was supposed to predict.

I'm not saying the models are wrong, or that climate change doesn't exist. What I'm saying is that calling the predictions of these models "science" is a bit misleading. The underlying factors maybe be based on scientific knowledge, but the models themselves are based on statistics, not science, because they can't be empirically verified.
This doesn't make sense. I can see a refund policy within 48 hours of the purchase to ensure no one is hoodwinked for an app that does nothing. So hold the payment for 72 hrs and if no refund is requested, release the payment to the developer.

90 days is just unreasonable considering the majority of apps in the appstor have really short game play time.

Whoever making these policies changes at Apple needs stop coming up with such policies and think twice about it. I came up with a better resolution in less than 30 secs.
From the FACETS 'Motivation' page:

To understand the basic concepts behind these properties is essential for two reasons: The life-science point of view and the information-technology point of view.

- The first point of view has potential medical applications to cure brain and mind related diseases or even the longer-term goals to work towards neural prosthetic devices and artificial sensory organs.
- The second point of view could lead to new computing devices radically different from contemporary IT technology. Such devices could provide support for complex decision making processes like the one we are currently used to obtain only from human beings.

Some things that Spiking Neural Networks are useful for (besides attempting to simulate a brain) (from http://ralyx.inria.fr/2007/Raweb/cortex/uid7.html):

To improve the performance of such information processing systems, several approaches can be followed depending of the prior knowledge available. Indeed, depending on additional labels (class or continuous value) which can be used (or available) on none of the patterns, on a subset of the patterns or on all of them, unsupervised or supervised learning can be sequentially performed. When there is no prior knowledge on the problem to be solved, knowledge extraction may use an unsupervised neural network as a front-end for forecasting applications or extracting rules. Because of its synthesis capabilities, an unsupervised neural network can be used both for limiting the computation complexity and for extracting the most significant knowledge. Moreover, knowledge extraction is facilitated as soon as multi-viewpoint unsupervised neural network model is used. This kind of methods also allows using in a second step additional information when it is available for optimizing a forecasting problem. However, for a forecasting problem where all patterns are labelled, classical networks using supervised learning can be successfully improved by finding the minimal architecture using pruning algorithms. The pruning methods consist in removing, during learning, the connections or neurons, or both, that have the least influence on the system's performance. Reducing the complexity of the networks prevents overtraining and allows easier implementation and knowledge extraction (variable selection, rule extraction). In any case, combining several models into a committee helps to improve the quality of the knowledge extracted or the forecasting and the proposed methods must be efficient for typical real-world in our domain, dealing with large amount of noisy and temporal data. Both topics are recently developed in the project.

I actually think that, in OpenCog, for example, reasoning or other systems could take advantage of a SNN to provide rule selection or knowledge extraction, etc.

So the point is that even though they might be completely ignoring most higher-level necessary aspects of human cognition, a more comprehensive system can still benefit from incorporating SNNs.
Egads, the capacity for hyperbole never ceases to amaze me.

I have offered refunds for any reason, no questions asked, for the last 3 years. Just between you and me, the 30 day limit on the website is a little white lie -- I think the most ever was 2 years, 1 month after the initial sale. I also proactively remind my customers about it if they report bugs that I can't fix immediately.

You know how many refunds I've given out, with that absurdly generous policy? About 3% of sales.

Now since I use a payment processor which is well-known for being developer friendly, chuckle Paypal, those refunds never cost me a penny. (+) But even if they did cost 30%, that would be under 1% of gross sales.

You think "bankrupt" might be a little strong?

P.S. There are numerous reasons why the App Store model is a terrible, terrible deal for developers. This isn't one of them.

+ Actually, that isn't true, come to think of it. For the 3 refunds I've given after 90 days passed, I had to refund via check, so Paypal would have kept their $1 in fees then. OK, so this policy has cost me $3 and change. My bad.
Sorry for not making it explicit. The point is: people who are not trained in Science (Climate Modeling in particular, Physics in general) are not qualified to speak on the topic.

The trouble is the money comes out of the pocket books of non-scientists. And they must be able to make the judgment, of whether or not climate modeling is the equivalent of chemistry or of alchemy. The alchemist is not just going to come out and tell you that his whole field is full of mistakes, and that you should cut off funding. Thus when the money of the laity is at stake, there is no avoiding having the laity make opinions about the details of climate science.
The challenges of designing a game about your 'first time'
The solution here is obvious: Give your apps away for free, but make up for it in volume...
how do you make up for it when your app is free? unless you're doing in app purchase or ads in your app.
Many of us Atlantans have a lot of respect for the people involved in Shotput. As some others here have said, I'll wait to judge until the first class of Shotput companies graduates.
Like discovering a new Floyd song
Do users need to give a good reason to receive a refund (e.g., the app crashes frequently, misleading description, etc.)? If so, then this may not be such a big deal.