skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author seems to have constructed a strawman. And I think the point she misses most is transparency of data and the feedback loop. If you have these two things it puts a light on the problem points she discusses.

That is, having a model is not sufficient. You need a model and then a way to measure that a model is a success, and a feedback loop. All of these things are open and can be updated. Things like seatbelts being better for men become more obvious, and the model can be improved to include gender weights, etc...

At the end of the day a model is a model. Almost always imperfect. But if the model is open, as is the metric of success, and how the feedback loop works, I think you'll tend toward improvement and better discussions.
4. Only 5-10 upper division undergraduate cs classes. Interested in type theory? Practical encryption? Computer algebra? You're out of luck. Most other universities seem to offer a lot of variety.

I know of almost no university besides maybe MIT where there's no bias in the teaching and research towards certain fields and away from others. It's quite unfortunate, but you have to choose your educational institution based on what specialties you want to enter.
I find it a little disingenuous that students who are subject to "forced withdrawal" are allowed to re-enter after 2-4 semesters. This sends a horrible message to students - that you can cheat, and the worst case scenario is taking a couple semesters off. No mar on their transcript of starting a degree at Harvard, and suddenly transferring to another, probably academically inferior, school. No explaining to employers why they suddenly decided to pack up and leave during a large cheating scandal. Just a forced vacation.

I'm also pretty appalled that students supplied the same answer down to typological errors. When the scandal first broke out, it sounded much more mundane - that there was little guidance, and that students asked their TAs for help. At least then, it's possible to rationalize the situation by saying that students genuinely did not believe they were doing something wrong. I don't think there's any way to justify multiple students submitting the same typos. This indicates blatant cheating, which any Harvard student should readily recognize as being morally wrong, and clearly violating any reasonable academic honesty standard.
This is a bit nostalgic. Back in the day, Opera used to crash if you typed http:/// into the address bar.

(Edit: talking about bugs, HN formatting won't let me put http:/// in double quotes - it eats the closing quote.)
F.T.C. Suggests Guidelines on Privacy for Mobile Apps
A list of best front-end frameworks
Yes, some of these TOS have clear copyright notices. Are these valid?
The only thing you're really missing is capitalism itself, which demands that everything be put on a quantifiable measure in order to justify its existence to the ultimate quantifiable measure, money.
[I work at Docracy, prepare for a plug!] Well note that we have a great negotiation and e-signing service that uses these same diff tools, try it out! http://www.docracy.com/supersigning
20 Must See TED Talks for Computer Scientists
Workers Leaving the Googleplex (2011) [video]
I really don't get the divide-salary-by-1000 thing. Is this a US rule?

In the UK I'm taking home enough from a contractor rate that I would need to nearly double the salary part of calculation to have the same income.
When you use this manipulation to get your way to your kids, the kid watches you, and you find yourself the lab rat of a psychological manipulator far more capable then yourself. And the kid uses tricks you never heard of to shape your behaviour. Which causes a feedback loop of who can trick the other into doing what they want better.

Then you end up with a dysfunctional family. Funny joke, but there are serious child education problems in this joke. It's like laughing at a baby seal getting kicked around by teenagers. It's hilarious to people who are emotionally present-oriented. yolo, if it feels good, then it's good.
Good luck getting $10 in the settlement. I got a settlement check last year on a Google Adwords class action suit that I think I was automatically included in. I don't remember ever doing anything to join it. Anyway my check was for 60 cents, and this was for a suit involving an actual paid service. How much do you really think you'll get back on free?
tl;dr;

Data is objective. But a decision process incorporates both data and a utility function (a goal [1]), and the utility function/goal is based on values.

The successes that Bill Gates ascribes solely to data collection are actually due to a choice of utility function, together with using data to measure it and make decisions based on it.

However, the claim made in the title does not agree with the content of the article. Data is objective. Your choice of goals is the thing that is not.

Bill Gates chose as his goal (# of children who can read) - others prefer (# of teachers with lifetime job security) or (3 x # of children who can read + 2 x # of children who can do math). It is absolutely true that no amount of data will change your fundamental goals, and we should recognize this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility
A generalization of the singleton pattern
>One implicated student, who argued that similarities between his paper and others could be traced to shared lecture notes, said the Administrative Board demanded that he produce the notes six months later.

If I were accused of cheating and I argued that my notes would exonerate me, I would have no problem producing them six months later. Heck, I still have notes from a class I took in 1982.
[I work at Docracy] We believe that if everybody who visits and uses the company's site is implicitly held to these terms, then they should be able to have a copy of the terms. We would be very surprised if a company asked us to stop tracking these policies, and nobody has yet.
Yes, you can do that, but to me it's not as nice as having as syntax that makes it easy and natural. This is where the ML-derived languages like OCaml, F# and Haskell beat other functional languages, in my opinion.

You can argue that it's nice to be able to choose the argument to bind, but I think that's actually a bad feature. It gets rid of the design pressure to pick an order of arguments that maximizes easy composition.
It's a good bet many people reading this forum today downloaded and/or linked to leaked Stratfor, HBGary, and/or Britam dox.

Do you think they should be charged for doing so?
It encodes the assumption that you count on plus/minus 1000 billable hours in a year.
Exploration of Kelly's Principles at Lockheed Martin
Or you could go to your .gitconfig dotfile and add

[color]
ui = true

So I have have this wherever I work as part of my standard dotfile import script.
I have no idea why you are being downmodded. Your point is absolutely correct.

You should always create an explicit, transparent model and utility function. Discussion will always be more clear. "Person I disagree with undervalues math relative to reading, just look at his weights" will get us far closer to the truth than vague subjective opinions and mood affiliation.
The Nordic countries are probably the best-governed in the world
You can do the same in Haskell with the flip function. In fact the bindWith2 is the same as the flip function for binary functions, but without the need for "functions objects" with bound methods.

λ: (/) 2 4

0.5

λ: flip (/) 2 4

2.0
Click 2013. In the red municipalities less than 50% are employed.
http://www.dr.dk/Nyheder/Indland/2013/01/26/103754.htm
Defaults and named args don't really work that well with currying. OCaml ended up adding them as a separate feature (so functions are now sorta-curried, sorta-not in OCaml).

Not that currying is a bad thing, of course. For the right functional combinators (map, reduce, etc.) currying can be put to very elegant use.
Check your meatspace privilege, human.
So you need a $700 billion a year military to fight a couple of pirates. Yeah right.
3D files embedded in Kickstarter
Why did I just buy a domain suggested by suggestmydomain.com?

I guess it's like my dad always said, "you can't have too many four-letter domains". Except now it's five-letter. :(
I don't think that people really see the advantage of currying until they work in an ML-derived language like Haskell. The syntax is tuned to make it easy and you get very nice design affordances.

In languages like Scala, C#, etc., currying was an afterthought and it shows. I actually think it's a shame that the Lisps make currying unnatural also. Yes, they have homoiconicity, but it's a sad tradeoff.
Things Most Americans Don't Know About America
The guy never trusted an old version of nginx -> http://d.pr/i/U2UP
I continue to be very psyched about RethinkDB - looks like an awesome product coming together nicely.

As a boring non-cutting-edge, non-expert Rails person, any word on projects a la Mongoid to give a nice ActiveRecord-style ODM to guys like us? Would LOVE to be able to play with Rethink in place of Mongo.

(Also, as an aside, if I were about 3 years more advanced in my ruby skills I'd totally volunteer to start that project. But I'm not. So I can't ;)

Keep up the good work guys.
this is great, glad someone did this. i've often wanted such a diff instead of "dig through 27 pages and see what possibly changed" with iTunes' TOS for example.

that said some of these terms look scary.
First time I see this. Well done Sketchfab!
Apple will cease shipping Mac Pro in Europe on 1 March
Perhaps. Separating out the home factor of homeschooling to get some useful truth seems quite impossible.
OpenBSD removes Rails from the ports tree
Leaving facebook would still be the better option - even if you still show up in sponsored stories.
I have noisy kids. Three of them. They make lots of noise when playing games, when watching TV, and right now are making lots and lots of noise (at 7.33am on a Saturday morning) by playing in a cardboard box that holds a bathtub (we are remodeling a bathroom, it goes in Monday).

Kids are noisy. I have dealt with it by installing a solid door at the end of the hallway. No scripting required. Occasionally I tell them to quiet down if they get out of hand. Kids are noisy, that is just part of the experience.
The Motivation Story of Apple and Toshiba
When I discover anyone has deceived me successfully, my shields are up around them, forever, because a deceiver is always a deceiver, I always have to spend more cpu cycles to wonder: "Are they deceiving me now"? This could be an elaborate lesson for the kid to teach them about deception. But it looks to me like this is a dysfunctional family in the making. When you break the bond of trust, it takes YEARS to get it back, and for me, it's like 5 years. Father is playing with fire here, and I'd kick that guy in the shins and post an image to reddit for all to laugh, why? Because it's FUNNY!
The copyright notices are valid, but fair-use exceptions still apply, and fair-use tends to be read fairly broadly with this kind of document, compared to, say, lengthy excerpts from a novel. I'm not aware if there's any solid caselaw specifically on quoting excerpts from contracts or licenses, though.
And check out how CPAN is an active modules repository :D

http://stats.cpantesters.org/statscpan.html
I should've updated that long ago, but everything was working - I never had anything like that happening, so there was no pressing reason to upgrade, I guess.

It should be better now, well, I hope.
maybe Vice can go interview him , forget to sanitize the EXIF data, and somehow make things worse.
IPhone Plus Could Steal A Winning Play From The iPad Mini's Playbook, In Reverse
Now it dies at ~80 users instead of ~50 before upgrade. Oh well.
I was also averse to Bill Gates and his slide rule.

There's a whole warm and fuzzy area missing from his vision, just like his book The Road Ahead had him standing on an asphalt road.

When children aren't terrorised at home by their own stressed out parents, then we have a chance at raising an enlightened generation.

How to measure that?
I have a solution for that. The more a person says "faggot" the more images of men kissing they see in the game. A homophobic 13-year-old would be totally horrified by this whereas a reasonable adult that (somehow) didn't use the word as an insult wouldn't care.
Your observations are pretty accurate. I'm fortunate enough to work with the maintainer of llvmpy and he's done some great work in making llvmpy pretty Pythonic. Should also check llvm-cbuilder the EDSL for building up higher level LLVM constructs:

https://github.com/llvmpy/llvmpy/blob/master/README_LLVM_CBU...
I don't think that Bill Gates claims decent measurement is sufficient for the kind of progress he seeks but rather claims that (in most cases) it is necessary.

I suspect one answer to Mathbabe's question "what can a non-academic mathematician do that makes the world a better place?" might be to highlight and explain the kinds of logical dependencies that are so often obscured by polemics.

I cringe at the suggestion Bill Gates is naive. Anyone who has spent the time he has in corporate America will be well aware of the challenges and politicization of measurement.
He was not charged for entering the wiring closet. He was charged with various forms computer fraud and with damaging a computer.
Easily. We were buying absurd amounts of Pellegrino before we got our SodaStream. Way easier on the wallet and the conscience.
Beat them when they yell?
Greg speaks the truth. Let kids be kids. Stop acting like an old lady.
Reddit review puts some teeth into “Aaron's Law”
In the best of all possible worlds, this could affect Carmen Ortiz's career going forward, which could affect her finances. Of course, it's been a long time since I've thought that we live in the best of all possible worlds.
The Amazon TOS notes it was `Last updated: January 28th, 2013` and includes the recent Elastic Transcoder terms. This precedes its announcement, and journalists may try to use this for scoops.

However, the timestamp on it is January 29. How often do you check for updates?
Using a task manager on your phone is like analyzing the water coming out from your tap before you drink it, only a little less important for your general well-being.

Most people are simply ignorant about the details because they trust an authority to keep things in order (e.g. the FTC). Perhaps trust is more misplaced with Apple and Google than with your water supplier, or perhaps those working in the food or water industry will be as wary about water quality as we are interested in whatever spyware is running on our phones - and we will find it a bit ridiculous.
7500 might as well mean 'please shoot me down' if you are anywhere near a big airport.
Fits my experience. I got a callback from a recruiter and he wanted me to drive about 30 min to talk to him. Needing work, I agreed. During the "interview" it was obvious that he just wanted me there to mine me for my contracts at some of the larger companies I worked at. I left extremely annoyed since I traveled there at my own expense and they had nothing for me. To this day I won't return phone calls or emails from that place.
I don't really contribute a whole lot to Hacker News, but generally on here (unlike reddit) people are expected to back up their opinion. Not make sweeping statements and expect the other person to research if the person was right or wrong.
>When you use this manipulation to get your way to your kids, the kid watches you, and you find yourself the lab rat of a psychological manipulator far more capable then yourself. And the kid uses tricks you never heard of to shape your behaviour. Which causes a feedback loop of who can trick the other into doing what they want better.

It's not a manipulation or a trick.

It's a "reward system". You get X only if you do Y. Period.

It has worked wonders for ages. Still does in most parts of the world. The US has a messed up system that ends with annoying, over-self-indulged, entitled children and adults.
great , i use http://plnkr.co/ too which allows to create one's own files.
You're right that the central challenge here is helping academics evaluate each other's work without relying so heavily on journal titles, closed access journals or otherwise. There is some movement here. Increasingly hiring committees are taking other reputation metrics into account when evaluating work (inbound citation counts, readership metrics, follower counts - anything that may make the job of an evaluation committee a little bit easier).

The fact that papers you are looking for tend to be available on author's webpages is atypical. A very small percentage of the 2 million papers published each year is available online for free. Institutions pay $8 billion a year to subscribe to journals, and they would be only too glad to cancel those subscriptions if they could.
Is there a way to subscribe to change notifications on ToS docs from a specific company?
Good list. Would have been good to specify 'CSS frameworks' in the title though
If leaving out wheat helped your sinuses, it might be worth investigating if you have a Histamine intolerance (my wife has that, and the symptoms you described).

If you have indeed a Histamine intolerance, you'd know what other food to avoid (for example easily spoiled fruit like strawberries), and there are enzymes you can take if once you couldn't avoid such food.
The author doesn't get what Bill Gates is saying. I doubt if Bill is naive enough not to understand what the model of measurement is important and never 100% objective. Bill is saying (1) teachers' performance needs to be measured; and (2) college ranking is based on a wrong criterion.

And we must do something to fix this. Bill isn't saying he has the perfect model for measuring these two things. But he is right in saying both of these things.

Teacher performance in K12 needs to be measured. It's hard, maybe expensive, and certainly subjective and biased in certain ways. But it needs to be measured. In college, teachers' performance is constantly measured. No professor will tell you that the student evaluation is a perfect indication of his/her ability to teach. But most professor would agree that such a thing is necessary.
> People are upset that Aaron Swartz faced losing the right to vote, hold public office, serve on a jury, or own a firearm, penalties entirely unrelated and disproportionate to the crime.

The "Felony" idea comes from the maximum possible sentence for a crime. CFAA has been on the books since like 1986 so as soon as Aaron decided to run afoul of its provisions that was a done deal.

As it turns out many states have provisions to restore voting rights to felons, firearm rights, etc. But this type of case is one of the few things prosecutors don't have discretion on, except by dropping charges completely (which I understand is what you think should happen, but that's not going to match what most of the rest of the country thinks, where fairness of justice and due process are at least theoretically the ideal).

> This debate has gone on long enough; most of HN disagrees with your position.

Oh! Is HN the decider now? I browse this site and I wasn't aware my opinion had been pre-determined for me. Are there any other HN-mandated opinions I should adopt now that this question has been raised? Am I still allowed to like Microsoft products? Are iPhones mandatory or can I keep my Android?
They should've been salted and hashed !
Attitude. An "unusual attitude" refers to the aircraft being in a configuration that is not normal in controlled flight (e.g., flying inverted). I think that's close to the FAA definition.
Although I this shouldn't be encouraged, banning their accounts would be limiting sharing. Also, moderation would be a nightmare for GitHub.

Additionally, it's somewhat hypocritical for Gizmodo to be posting this article.
Even a Non-Profit Startup Needs a Revenue Model
(Announcer voice:) "Previously, on Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4130494 .
This is encouraging to see. If a given port isn't being maintained, and its security is haphazard to begin with, removing it is a very prudent course of action.

While I know I can't trust Ruby and the Rails communities to do the right thing, I know with much more certainty that I can rely on the OpenBSD developers to.
A Ruby version that attempts to be as close to the elegant and readable Clojure solution as possible via similar 'crafting':

def sorted_key_list(maps)
maps.map(&:keys)
.reduce(:&)
.sort
.tap { |a| a.push "<none>" if a.empty? }
.join ","
end

Works out at 24 syntax-related punctuation symbols for Ruby, 20 for Clojure (ignoring the replace-empty function, admittedly).
Good lord, just discipline your children.

Set clear rules, make sure they understand those rules, and follow through with enforcing those rules.
Ruby gems are still not safe to use
How would you teach a middle / high schooler how to code?
Obviously there are many sites out there on "teach yourself how to code" and books on "learn to code in 30 days." I have a little bit of a different take on the subject, and would love to get your opinion.

If you were teaching a 14 year old the most important thing to expose them to the world of programming, what would it be? Let's say you have 1-2 hours a week and a year to do it.
Are you feeling the pain of mobile fragmentation? Is it getting worse?
[I work at Docracy] We check once a day. We've seen some strange stuff going on with "Last updated:" though. For example, if you check out the history of Skype's ToS, they changed it in mid-January, but with a last-updated date of "February 2013"! Then, just a couple of days ago, they reverted it. Here's the first change: http://www.docracy.com/doc/diff?revisedId=0xgv5wfb72v&or..., then they changed it back: http://www.docracy.com/doc/diff?revisedId=0jxg6uxmx4d&or...
My experience with clojure/haskell tells me that order of arguments of common functions feels horribly wrong sometimes.
[I work at Docracy] There isn't, although you may be able to filter the main RSS feed. That's a good idea, though, we should add a feed to every document... something I will probably do... right now.
//1. As you say, the introductory classes are enormous. For the math classes this means less feedback on your assignments. What this also means is that you have other undergrads grading your work. If that doesn't terrify you, then it should.//

As someone who is an undergraduate TA (for computer science), this doesn't terrify me any more than overworked and underpaid graduate students grading assignments, or overworked research faculty who don't have any incentive to grade well. My anecdotal experience has been that it's generally the top 1-3% of undergrads who end up TAing or grading (in CS, at UVa; mileage elsewhere may vary), and those who do take it pretty seriously (here, at least, we're paid and it's a job). Most of the people I've TA'd with (and myself) take at least one graduate course and actually know the material better than most graduate students (since we've taken the course and universally done very well in it). UVa also rotates graduate TAs out after a year (to research or other things), whereas undergraduate TAs can stay on the same course for two or three years, which offers much more continuity for the professor and fewer TAs who are completely lost. I might be biased (see also: I get paid to do exactly what terrifies you), but I think that if the undergraduates aren't just unpaid volunteers, you get better results than using graduate students for the same things. Unpaid volunteers are much worse: you don't have to pay much, but paying someone for something makes it a job, which switches people's headspace from 'I can drop this' to 'This is my job, and I will do it well'.
Seems to me that you think that all server-side stuff is all the same.

Learn Haskell.