skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
you'd rather have your child by a teacher with a high teacher score than a low one

Not necessarily. The very weak correlation means that the difference in this score only accounts for a very small amount of the difference in outcome; and even that claim assumes that the observed correlation is evidence of a causal link, which is not necessarily the case. You can't usefully conclude anything from this data except that more investigation is needed.
Tópicos da Semana - Construção do Maior Centro Comercial da China
But you still have an explicit interface.
If you help doctors, researchers, and others working on life-threatening problems get relevant information they need faster, then you are indirectly helping with these efforts. Not everyone can be the person on the frontline of these critical efforts, but if you can improve their working conditions then surely you've helped out a bit?
1 reason to use MySQL rather than Postgres:

1) Your legacy shared hosting site might provide MySQL and not Postgres.

There are also 9 reasons to choose one of {Postgres, MySQL} over {Oracle, SQL Server}.

Here is 1 reason to use Postgres: data integrity.

"00/00/0000 00:00:00.0000" is not a real date, but MySQL will helpfully insert it into your table if you try to insert NULL into a non-null datetime field. (One example among many.)
These are different sorts of alignments, with different sorts of math behind them.

Genome assembly is the shortest common super sequence problem. It involves finding the best rearrangement and overlap of reads which minimize the overall sequence, given the expected errors in the read technology. It would still be hard even if all of the reads were perfect.

Sequence alignment looks at two or more sequences in their entirety, and does a best fit alignment using a given model of how substitutions and gaps can occur. This model may be based on chemical or evolutionary knowledge.

A "super-efficient solution to sequence alignment" doesn't lead to a way to tell how the reads should be assembled into a single large sequence, even ignoring possible read errors.
If he has been able to change the page source, he should probably be able to remove it.
Homebrew.[1] Its the closest you will get to apt-get.

Iterm2.[2] Its the best choice for a terminal emulator

MooM.[3] Is the closest thing I can find to using a tiled WM on osx.

[1] http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/

[2] http://www.iterm2.com/

[3] http://manytricks.com/moom/
To be fair, we should be comparing like tokens, if the proof is using them as part of its advantage:

evens = filter(lambda n: n % 2 == 0, numbers)

with

evens = [n for n in numbers if n % 2 == 0]

or

evens = [n for n in numbers if not n % 2]

Choosing token names is certainly a different
Yes. To hire is "to employ for wages" according to Apple's Dictionary app. Or if you take the British meaning (mostly the same as the American meaning of the word "rent") to obtain use for payment.
And that, in itself, is absolute gold.
I also find it telling how he closes the ticket asking everyone to go upstream and use PulseAudio's ticket system (http://www.pulseaudio.org/ticket/606), which gives me this error:

-------------------------------
Internal Server Error

TracError: IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/home/lennart/svn/trac/pulseaudio/VERSION'

--------------------------------

That kind of sums up.
Seriously?

If you asked someone to build a three page "We're Hiring" site and got this, you'd "probably tell them no thanks and stop returning their emails". Why?

Their main .biz site looks fine to my eyes too, like thousands of other business websites settled on functional and simple - I'm sure all of this was built closely to spec. What am I missing here?
Please. You can only buy hunting rifles at Wal-Mart. Hey, maybe they could sue you in France for that defamatory statement?
The company won't hire law firms that take on patent troll cases, and its top lawyer, Lee Cheng, is vocal about his view that others should take the same approach.

Is there a site somewhere listing which firms represent patent trolls?
1. Get iterm2 http://www.iterm2.com/#/section/home

2. Installing stuff from homebrew is great until you break homebrew. Then you will be in a deep and unproductive pit for a while. Read the docs, move slowly and don't run homebrew as root. I've found that for some things ( postgres, redis and nginx ) is that I prefer to build them by hand and stick them in /opt your mileage will vary.

3. Lion at least, has workspaces, and iterm2 and terminal do support tabbed terminals. You can remap keys use the Keyboard panel in settings.

4. Try the different flavors of Vim, do what works for you. I'm an emacs user so I can't comment on what the differences are.

5. VirtualBox and Vagrant http://www.vagrantup.com/
Don't bother trying to get things running on osx that belong on the server. Run a VM that matches your server environment. Bonus: you can use Salt/Puppet/Chef to manage your VM's in the same exact way you manage your servers.

6. `pip` and `virtualenv` work on osx, don't do python development without them.
You should be able to do this (you can't however drop a subtree to a node that's in the subtree itself)
Could you clarify what you're asking for?
Sigh. This woman just doesn't get it, does she? You'd think that the public taking to pitchforks for her job would have led to some serious introspection on her part.
He doesn't run a bug tracker any more?
Why stop there? http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=3553

For the record, my theory is that "average global surface temperature" has a nonlinear response to various known and unknown forcings.
CNNIC is notorious for producing malware and many other things. Some is list here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNNIC

Having been in the internet industry in China for more than 10 years before I decided to move to the US I would say CNNIC is just as evil as any government organization in China if not worse. There are some well known rules regarding CNNIC: don't buy a .cn domain, don't install any software from them and don't trust what they say.

BTW non government organizations are technically banned in China. You need to apply for a permit and you seldom get one.
Show HN: Bloomberg API Emulator
I was just going to submit this and found it was already submitted, thanks. Curious to see how others are going to tear my case apart on this one.
True, but it also brought about demographic changes that finally destroyed feudalism in Western Europe.
The point is, you shouldn't worry too much about teacher performance.

If it's only loosely correlated, measuring value-added then punishing / rewarding teachers based it won't be very accurate. It's like lines of code - programmer talent is probably weakly correlated with lots of lines of code, but you don't want to reward or punish them based on LoC because it will lead to pathological behavior.

You should look at other things to alter (which are less easy to game once you start trying to control them), like class size, course materials, assessment style, how the teacher actually teaches, etc.
It's not libel if it's true! But it may be some sort of fraud / infringement.
The work may not be good but if you commission someone to create something for you under the pretence of providing payment for their time and services (any amount of money) and then decide you didn't like the work they produced, they'd still want payment (partial or full). Otherwise it's just similar to spec work
IPod. iPhone. iPad. Why Apple is Done Inventing New Devices.
Yes, for pairwise sequence alignment. The globally optimized multiple sequence alignment problem is NP-complete.
@wanghq and @yataa . The kid only needs $70 to make the website. That is all he needs right now. He told me he was going to focus on making the website first, then getting more help (if he needs it) from there. I think his website is going to be something that changes the internet and ecommerce. He has been working on it for quite a while, and i'd hate to see it go to waste. Here is what it is about:
If she keeps it up, she'll definitely lose any political future, as we usually don't forget things here on the web.
That would be much more relevant if the name of Paris was Paris sur Seine. It's not. Your accusation that I am useless and a troll is uncharitable and unfounded. This is particularly disappointing given that it seems that (judging from your other comments) you are normally an intelligent and thoughtful commentator.
The (in-progress) 4.0 changelog is at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.0

It's nice to see a software project keeping with a sane version number system (major.minor.release; major number change = architectural changes), and it's nice to see them working on fixing a pile of bugs and trying some new approaches in their architecture, instead of just introducing a meaningless UI change.
If anyone here has used Second Life's scripting language LSL, they had to work around this issue. Apparently they now calculate x / -1 as -x instead, which gets a counter-intuitive result when x=INT_MIN but doesn't crash. I believe once upon a time this was documented and everything.
1. iTerm2 is great. I haven't used the Mac terminal since it became available. Thought I will say that I have never experienced any performance problems with either. iTerm 2 just has a richer feature set.

2. Say hello to the homebrew (http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/) package manager. While apt is more robust, I don't think you will be let down by homebrew. I recommend following the "advanced" instructions for installing it into your home directory rather than mangling the /usr/local permissions.

3. The keyboard iTerm 2 shortcuts are highly customizable. Mac Terminal does not appear to be as configurable.

4. vim in the Mac terminal works wonderfully. MacVim adds clipboard integration, native keyboard shortcuts, and other Finder integration niceties. I use both interchangeable. Per my response to question 2, the latest versions of vim and MacVim are available through homebrew.

After a adjusting to Finder, I don't think you will find a productivity loss. The biggest issue I have found for folks coming over from Linux are the lack of real virtual desktops. Spaces is a joke by comparison.
A friend of mine does this. My email is in my profile if you would like an introduction. He actually moved to Hawaii so it would probably have to be via Skype. Not 100pct sure he is still taking on students but it's worth an email.
One alternative is to not use these flawed/complicated/expensive metrics. Imagine if I came up with a metric that had an 0.1 correlation coefficient with your performance at your job. If you're a programmer, maybe that'd be something like measuring the lines of code written per day. Would you put much faith in that? Of course not, there would be myriad problems with such a system. Same thing here.

The status quo in teaching is to evaluate teachers based on qualitative observations from management, same as it is in most other industries. As the same blogger points out in another post http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2013/01/13/50-million-3... "Conspicuously missing from the various weighting schemes they compare is one with 100% classroom observations. As this is what many districts currently do and since this report is supposed to guide those who are designing new systems, wouldn’t it be scientifically necessary to include the existing system as the ‘control’ group? As implementing a change is a costly and difficult process, shouldn’t we know what we could expect to gain over the already existing system?"

The status quo also has the advantage of not being ridiculously expensive and complicated. Ask Bill Gates to release the data if you're curious about its performance, but given what I've seen, I'd be shocked if it was terribly different than these complicated new metrics.
I always assumed the term referred to non-technical or semi-technical people who do things like content authoring/proofreeding for company websites and blogs using a CMS and perhaps do basic SEO.
Since you brought it up, the Laughing Man does the exact opposite, using image recognition to hide himself.
Statistics, like engineering, is done with numbers. When you attempt to do it without numbers, that's called "opinion".

I have not tried to look at the numbers. Here is my opinion.

My experience of school was that a small minority of teachers are truly excellent, and a small minority were horrible. The truly excellent ones are not distinguished so much by what happened in their class as by what happened in the following classes, and what classes they left people excited about taking. The terrible ones, by contrast, showed up as poor performance all around.

The described data set has a clear correlation. Whether or not the correlation is meaningful in individual cases is much less clear. My initial approach would be to try to fit a hierarchical Bayesian model to a data set, then use the resulting model to come back with predictions about individual teachers. Teachers whom, after several measurements, are overwhelmingly identified as terrible should be removed. If you find a population of teachers who show up as superstars, they should be subjected to further study to see if we can predict the quality of incoming teachers, and to see if we can learn lessons from them that improve other teachers.

However this is a well-studied problem. I'm sure someone has tried something like this. I am sure that there are a lot of vested interests. I have not attempted to evaluate work in this area, and I have no opinion on how good it is.
It is basically a centralized place of making money. Have you ever gone on the internet, and found these ways to make money (only by being on the internet)? Then finding out they are just scams, or not really worth it? This kid wants to make a place where anyone can go on and sell/buy things, an online stock market with a different focus than companies, and many ways people can make money. That is all i know about it so far, and i cant wait to see it in action
Regarding the latest Twitter hot drama:

There's a lot of ugly code out there. Doesn't mean that the program it runs isn't successful or popular. That's what iteration is for.

I don't believe this is a misogyny issue; it's a general issue of being polite, and telling the person what you have an issue with instead of broadcasting it to the world, just because you can.

The programming community often envisions itself as more altruistic than other sectors of business. If we want to make that closer to reality, we should offer suggestions of how to improve existing code. This benefits everyone, while Twitter blasts benefit no one.

Corey's apology seemed very sincere.

140 characters does make it hard not to be an asshole. So if your tweets sound that way, leave a comment on GitHub instead.

Being a programmer or a creative in general does require a thick skin at times. Lots of people are going to see your work. That doesn't make a half-assed apology sincere. It doesn't matter what company you work for, or how smart you are. There will always be someone smarter, so don't throw stones. Try to be constructive instead.

That is all.
I was expecting a more compelling case.
The irony:

> You will choose your words more carefully, and make less mistakes.

Should be "make fewer mistakes"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_vs._less
Assuming the guy hasn't been paid then whatever contract they had is probably void anyway.
It seems that it was true not so long ago: http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2012/12/17/wal-m...

And yeah they could sue me if they prove the diffamation i.e. that my statement was false and only stated in the attend to cause damages to WalMart.
The interface is the message
You use the time that you used to use for teaching reading and devote it to teaching methods for multiplying and dividing numbers up to 4 digits in a standardized test setting.

Clever - you caught me. I got lazy and didn't feel like typing up all the goals of a 3'rd grade education system into an HN comment, preferring only to provide a simple example and hoping that a reasonable reader would extrapolate.

Mea culpa - I'll stop assuming reasonable readers in the future.

Or are you actually suggesting that the school system might forget to include reading when defining their goals?
That is common for pre-moderated comments on blogs rather than evidence of hell banning, fwiw.
Here is a pretty well-known essay against syntax highlighting: http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/syntaxhighlighting/i...

Honestly, I've never bought it.
I actually worked for Open Market briefly back in 1998. Don't blame me, though. Open Market acquired my company, ShopSite, but they were already on a downward trajectory by that time, and I left to start another company before the year was out.

But I can report that the company was quite proud of its shopping cart patent, and its patent portfolio in general, largely because they felt that it protected them and established them as a major player in the nascent but growing e-commerce market. There was a sense, though, even then, that the patent was pure bullshit. I never heard any contemplation of using the patent offensively, and from what I can recall there was a feeling that if that were to happen, the same thing would happen to Open Market that happened to this patent troll. That is to say, that it wouldn't stand up.

Indeed, this is a good cautionary tale as to the havoc that "defensive" patents can wreak once they get into the hands of trolls.
A lot of people use it. It is the Java of databases.

Ironically, Oracle also is connected to Java.
"often" is stretching things a bit. The reason this terminology popped up is that it was in the official documentation, but it was (or is scheduled to be) taken out.

anyway, you're right, it's not duck typing. Duck typing happens at runtime. With Go, every variable has exactly one type at compile time. Sometimes that type is an interface type. With duck typing, the checking happens at runtime. There's no runtime type checking with Go's interface system.
RDS as a scaling strategy is also a good reason.
It is one thing suggesting it is unwise to develop a new language without a CS background or broad and deep experience with other languages of some form as you might end up with something like PHP but there are plenty of ideas to develop that a CS background helps fairly little.

Generally curiosity and willingness to learn is worth more.
As an sort of old china hand, china is corrupt but not beyond belief, there are plenty of countries that are much more corrupt, even India is worse than china and they even have democracy.

The level of sophistication that the GFW seems to be achieving is disturbing. We've had certificate attacks before, perhaps they are testing something out that will be deployed more broadly to solve there "gmail" problem?
Great piece. Thanks for sharing Mike! Check out what we're up to at CoFoundersLab, http://www.cofounderslab.com/, a free online matching platform to help entrepreneurs find the right co-founders and build lasting business relationships.

Also, for those in LA, check out this cool workshop on Feb. 12th at Cross Campus in Santa Monica: Building Strong Founding Teams: http://buildingstrongteams.eventbrite.com/
RE: the first link, it looks like you need a custom profile, therefore a custom build of Gaia, for it to "Probably" work.

FFDoku just copies the assets, as I had originally recommended. That repo contains a 'shared' folder in the root dir, so it's not using the assets shared by Gaia, it's using a literal copy of them. So the same asset winds up on the device twice.
I guess it depends if the developer was also responsible for hosting the site as opposed to just sending a .zip with .html files in it.
Why is Apple so afraid of pornography, anyway? I could understand wanting to avoid bad publicity in the early days of the app store; but now there's a competing platform overflowing with porn apps (at least I'm assuming that's the case with Android) and nobody in the media seems to complain about it, so maybe their fears were overblown.

Or should we assume that the same media that are completely uninterested in porn apps on Android would drum up a moral panic as soon as they could put "Apple" in the headlines instead? (Well, yes, obviously. But still.)
I don't think he has access to the actual website. There's no link to channelsource.org from channelsource.biz.
I never said they don't report "quite a few statistics". I said they don't report this one specific particularly important statistic, and instead obscure it behind a ridiculous averaging procedure. This was either done because they are incompetent or because they are purposely trying to mislead. That's the whole point of TFA.
You don't need to be an expert in the culinary arts to determine the tastiness of a dish.
http://www.quora.com/Technology-Trends/What-will-be-the-next...

Is it this? One of the answers matches your phrasing.
What results did you get from it? I am currently reading the "Mechanical Problems" section.
His work is a straight rip-off of Blek Le Rat.
These were Open Market's patents? OM tried to get us to license one of them in about 1997. They didn't try very hard though. I told the OM guy who called me that I thought the patent was invalid, and he said "ok" and then asked if we were hiring.
So... N64 had voice control?
FF OS should have full access to the capabilities of the device's hardware and anything that it can discover via bluetooth, whatever it is attached to via USB, etc. as long as someone can take an existing Linux driver, recompile it as needed, and then put it in some FF OS repo (official or unofficial) so that it is easily installable from the device itself. Basically, I want mobile Linux as it exists now, but be able to write and run HTML5 apps to access all of the same functionality.

I think if the goal were to make mobile devices as capable as we should all expect but have been conditioned NOT to expect, then that would be an OS that could compete. Otherwise, it is just a slower UI with fewer applications.
Even the Chinese gov does A/B testing.
not tearing you apart, just a small correction - it's spelt PostgreSQL (small "g") - http://www.postgresql.org/
I sometimes use the title ironically. I tried using "Senior Webmaster" as my title on Linkedin for a while and still had recruiters messaging me.
I worked at a bank, I did code for generating PINs. I can tell you the urban myth is incorrect. Perhaps a single bank did it, but it sure isn't industry standard.
Or maybe, just maybe, she thinks she's doing the right thing?
Personally I prefer PostGreSQL over MySQL for a drop in replacement on Linux based systems. It’s far superior in many ways, and something you should consider if you’re able to. Personally if I were to start a new business or had a Linux based environment and was in the planning phase I would choose PostGreSQL from the start. But it’s not always the best option for most people.

What a crappy defense.

There is little I like about MySQL but here's a few reasons I still recommend people use it:

1. It's already part of something delivering value to your business. E.g. Nagios, MediaWiki or some other LAMP stack solution you've deployed. It's there. You're using it. Learn to live with it, and be sure to BACK IT UP!

2. You need to work with data someone gave you that came from a MySQL system. E.g. a Wikipedia dump. Someone else already lived the pain of collecting data into MySQL, now all you need to do is refine it.

3. You're publishing data for someone else to load into their MySQL system (e.g. a Pentaho warehouse).
Fair comment. I suppose that’s why a more declarative style tends to work much better in a language designed for it. For example, functional programming languages tend to have neat syntactic sugar for things like simple lambda expressions or applying a series of transformations like the filter here, without introducing accidental complexity like extra identifiers that the reader than has to keep track of. The moment you’ve added that kind of baggage, which is almost inevitable to some degree in a language like Python, the clarity tends to suffer.