skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "maximum sentence" isn't even the recommended sentence that the accused would be having to plea bargain against, which is determined by the Federal sentencing guidelines.

We went over all of this with Aaron's case, and yet people apparently still refuse to pay attention to how the U.S. legal system works, and instead continue to use MPAA/RIAA tactics when discussing these cases. I have to say it's certainly not very heartening to know that there is seemingly no ideology that won't use propaganda just as soon as it suits their cause. :(
Requiring absolute certainty as a subjective being yields an incomprehensible, absurd universe. The scientific method is based on testing models, i.e. systems of measures, against each other.

I volunteer at two institutions: (1) as a reading tutor at a Harlem charter school and (2) as a mathematics tutor for disadvantaged youth in Lower Manhattan. At 1 the administrators regularly assess students' reading levels. The process is highly subjective but allows for individuals' effectiveness to be tracked, as well as tutors' and methods'. At 2 the administration is more ad hoc, giving each tutor more freedom but having no system for measuring progress. 1 has a good idea about what works and a programme with demonstrable effectiveness. 2 is a more challenging environment as every problem calls for starting from square one. I set my own measurement criteria but due to a small, variable sample they have low statistical power.

In both cases the measurement is subjective. Strictly codifying the measure and then lording over it would be unproductive. But having a measure and optimising processes to the measure creates a feedback loop. Simultaneously remaining vigilant of exceptions, e.g. a child who could read complicated words so long as they don't contain 'q', creates a meta-loop that optimises the measure-process system. Together one has a system that evolves, that learns.

"We see that cars are safer for men than women because the crash-test dummies are men."

Crash dummies have made cars safer for women. Perfect is the enemy of good.
Once you're at the college level, what is the goal?

Good question. The lack of a good answer certainly undermines the justification for colleges continued existence and pervasiveness.

Tangentially, I'd argue that any institution which can't even define it's goals should not receive any taxpayer dollars.
Then why would disabling Spellchecking affect that?
I guess there are no guarantees. Which ones are you thinking of in Haskell? There it seems to matter more.
SAMATS ALGERIE: EQUIPEMENTS INDUSTRIEL EN ALGERIE.
It's not required for Private Pilot which I was training for at the time (early 90's), but my instructor planned to practice it. I lost interest in flying after about 45 hours, so we never got around to it. We did some unusual attitude recovery under the hood as part of my introduction to Instrument flight (the bit they do so if you accidentally fly into a cloud you can stay in control long enough to fly back out), and that was really a lot of fun.
Visite this link , please.
I like how the title introduces a HUGE bias against the author.

I know it's all trendy to say whatever can bait some viewers to blog posts and stuff, but come on, he's one of the richest men in the world, one of the greatest entrepreneurs of recent history and currently solving world-wide health issues, let's have some decency.
I have dealt with it by installing a solid door at the end of the hallway.

Read the comments on SuperUser. He's a single dad. Being unable to hear what your 4 year old kids are up to is a bad idea when there's no one else to monitor them.
"Gates also brings up the campaign to eradicate polio and how measurement has helped so much there as well. Here he sidesteps an enormous amount of politics and debate about how that campaign has been fought and, more importantly, how many scarce resources have been put towards it. But he has framed this fight himself, and has collected the data and defined the success metric, so that’s what he’s focused on."

I was looking for some meat to back up the author's claims in regard to mosquito nets etc. Instead I read the above nonsense about polio and realized that the author was either fabricating claims from whole cloth or grinding an ax with Bill Gates.

The campaign against polio is in its 25th year. Gates involvement was a challenge grant to Rotary International's Polio Plus campaign in 2009 He never set the metrics. They had been in place for twenty years. I was active in Rotary when it was announced. Several local members had been volunteers in far corners of the world on vaccination drives. Some more than once. One more than a few.

The grant was sized to allow the existing effort to finish its work. The Gates foundation didn't set the agenda, let alone Bill Gates. The foundation employs experts is my understanding.

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/speeches-commentary/Pages/bil...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_eradication
Column history for keeping history
want to have a table that holds information about a task. PriorityId, StateId, AssignedToUserId etc. These columns can be updated. I'd like to be able to list the history of a task, showing the changes, and the user who made the changes. The table will have an UpdateUserId table with the user who did the update.
The author makes the point that data are not enough, but then doesn't drop the other shoe. The "other shoe" in this case is that data collection can only describe, but cannot explain.

If I collect data about all those points of light in the night sky, I can then say, "There are many points of light in the night sky". But that is only a description -- it lacks an explanation, for which the data collection effort can only be a preliminary step.

The social sciences are famous for describing things they cannot explain. When we make an effort to explain what has been described, we cross the line into science.

> ... behind every model and every data set is a political process that chose that data and built that model and defined success for that model.

Not in science. This is precisely what science is meant to avoid. All we need to do is practice science rather than perform naive data collection followed by shallow conclusions.
Spoken as a childless preacher.
Good luck with that should or do you not understand the class/status system - society defiantly thinks that there is a difference between a minimum wage security guard and say a FBI,CIA,SIS,SS officer who will have an directly equivalent rank to his or her counterpart in the milatery?
The spin I mentioned came from the first time practicing full-power departure stalls when I held the yoke back too long and the airplane rolled over. Did it a couple more times with the same result and when he tried it, it also happened so we concluded there was something wrong with the control surfaces and returned home.
package com.howardlewisship;

import java.util.*;

public class MapUtils {
public static String sortedKeyList(Map<?, ?> map1, Map<?, ?> map2) {
Set<Object> allKeys = new HashSet<Object>(map1.keySet());
allKeys.addAll(map2.keySet());

return allKeys.isEmpty() ? "<none>" : org.apache.commons.lang.StringUtils.join(new TreeSet<String>(allKeys), ",").toString();
}
}
You left out the most important step: make sure kids understand the reason for those rules (other than "because I say so"). Speaking from my experience with my parents, yours is a great recipe for having your kids think you're an asshole when they're older.
This is true. When the professor asks, if you want a take-home or an open book it's usually a trick question, and you always supposed to ask for a closed book test. Grad school, doubly so.
Can you clarify what about that output shows that the crash cannot be exploited? Not doubting, just curious.
[OT] Page is down.

It's incredible how many people (even on HN) don't know it! You can get Google's cached version of a page fairly easily.

Just type

cache:[url]

in Google search bar and press enter. e.g.,

cache:http://blog.nimblegecko.com/never-trust-what-recruiters-say/

redirects to http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&tbo=d...
Heh, I like that.
(Disclaimer: not a tax expert or an accountant, but I have spent too many hours researching this stuff as it applies to my own situation.)

IR35 only applies when there's an intermediary -- usually when you're providing services via a limited company, then taking dividends at the lower tax/NI rate instead of a salary.

If you're self-employed and contracting with a foreign company, then IR35 can't apply (or so I was told when I spoke to HMRC to ask precisely this question).

Now, HMRC could decide that it's not a true self-employment relation. In my case (self-employed, working remotely for a company in the US, limited degree of control by engager, purchasing my own equipment, bearing the risk of invoices not being paid) I think there are enough factors to make it a true self-employment relationship and HMRC's online questionnaire agrees.

Even if you were contracting through a limited company, if you met the self-employment test you'd probably meet the IR35 test when operating through a Ltd. I'd prefer not to risk it -- which is why I went the self-employment route.
> Data is objective.

Almost never true. One of the responsibilities of science is to gather data in a way meant to minimize sources of bias in the data collection process. Any number of studies have come to a very predictable, and wrong, conclusion, based on biases and errors in data collection.

> It is absolutely true that no amount of data will change your fundamental goals, and we should recognize this.

Yes, and one point of science is to separate the process of data collection from any particular goal or outlook.
A philanthropist is someone who gives a lot of money to charitable causes, with a connotation of noble motives. A humanitarian is someone who acts on their strong desire to help their fellow humans, with a connotation of successfully helping many people. These have a broad area of overlap, but a person can be one without being the other.

One can be a philanthropist without being a humanitarian by, for example, donating large amounts of money to creating wildlife refuges. Charitable giving, but not to humans.

From the other direction, people like Norman Borlaug who devote their careers to helping other people are excellent examples of people who are humanitarians without necessarily being philanthropists.
You are right, and we believe that what we are doing represents "fair use", as per _delirium above.
There are roughly 2000 working hours in a year, so annual_salary / 2000 = hourly rate of a salaried employee. And as a rule of thumb, contractors need to make about twice the hourly rate of a salaried employee in order to come out even. So annual_salary / 1000 is roughly the equivalent contractor rate.
3D-TV, Automated Cooking, Robot Housemaids: Walter Cronkite Tours Home of 2001
Why only millionaires should play Powerball
Last.fm no longer offers radio internationally
The author uses a bad graph to convince the reader that there is no correlation, even when (by his own admission, see the comments) one is present.

The year to year correlation is 0.3. The correlation across percentile groups is much higher because that increases the sample size and thereby reduces statistical noise.

The conclusion we can draw here is that measuring the performance of a single teacher based on a single class will yield a very large confidence interval. That's not the same as "bullshit".
Keep in mind guys that this is the same person who wrote about Nate Silver confusing cause and effect. Which was also thoroughly wrong (you can find the reasons why it is wrong in the first post of the hn link).
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4949103
http://mathbabe.org/?s=nate+silver
> Which is not the same at all with having thousands of proprietary third-party apps to distribute in closed source form

What are you talking about? Nothing about app signing and sandboxing requires open-source repositories.
Technically correct, but also very misleading in a discussion concerning sustainability of the welfare system. Obviously a working couple with three kids is not a problem in the same way that e.g. three unemployed people per two working.
Hacker discloses vulnerabilities in dozens of Military and Pentagon websites
Never bothered with it. I listen to dubstep on
http://listen.di.fm/public5/clubdubstep.asx
Add a document, presentation, spreadsheet, form or drawing to Google + post
Bias and error are not the same as a lack of objectivity.

A loaded coin may come up heads 75% of the time. Using that coin to make a decision yields a biased procedure. It's also objective, since the bias is unrelated to the experimenter.
I remember getting a payout from Apple because of the way they advertised the size of their monitor screens. I received a coupon for a few bucks off on the purchase of my next Apple monitor.
Not just now -- this library has been up for a number of years.
This is an ad-hominem attack, and pointless. A person can be wrong on some topics without being wrong on every topic.
> You will learn ruby quicker because you won't have to get bogged down in details about how rails decides to do things.

Exactly! ... one of the most confusing things about Rails is how much you're told not to understand some of the heavy lifting done by the framework, the monkey patching and all kinds of magic tricks all over the place.

I've done webapps programming for long now and I recently followed the Rails tutorial from beginning to end just to make sure I could remember some now obvious stuff about testing, etc. and I understand it can be completely overwhelming if you try to learn all the Ruby + Rails + RSpec + SCSS + jQuery combo at once.

Try something simpler, build something with Shoes (http://shoesrb.com/) or if you're into web apps, something like Sinatra would be a better fit.
Now when I try to acces F ...acebook it crashes... calling File://[.]
If so many kids, proportionally, are cheating, the reasonable conclusion is not that there's an abundance of 'bad seeds' but perhaps that Harvard isn't very good at getting students to take ethics seriously.

At your typical university, cheating on take-home exams is common, pressure is high, and ethics are underemphasized--is it your place to say a student reacting in the obvious and ordinary way deserves expulsion? Are kids trying to sink or swim in such an environment really deserving expulsion? Besides, more effective cheaters are less likely to be caught. The moral Harvard sends its students is not "don't cheat on a take-home exam" but "don't be caught by copy-pasting answers". The people who work together and tweak their answers to look different get A's.

Honestly, I think it's an overreaction; an institution that has been so poor at imparting academic ethics to its students is now harming the same in order to save face.

More generally, it is an anti-pattern to paint large groups of people as wrong and deserving of punishment, even if you feel the underlying ethics are correct.
I'm referring to CBS advertising sales as a 'free market' microcosm. (The 'market' being adverts on CBS)
Can You Build A StartUp Ecosystem? 5 Things You Have to Have
>So basically you want Congress and the Judiciary to only ever make sentences shorter, yes?

I didn't say "ever" -- if sentences were too low then the maximums should go up, but we are clearly in no danger of that happening because as you point out, "Americans like throwing the book at criminals, or people they perceive to be criminals." There is a reason that we don't elect Supreme Court justices.
I'm using Treehouse currently to learn how to make apps for Android and it's coming a long great. I work full time (not a coder), married with a kid on the way, so I don't get the chance to work on it as much as I like. For me I feel it works as I can see the instructor code an example on the video, and many things he repeats throughout the video. They also link notes into their lessons and links to other sites, have blog entries about Android and they have a forum for asking questions, that they respond to.

My only previous experience is HTML5/CSS.

I've tried Codeacademy when it first came out, but found it dull. Maybe cause it's about Javascript and not what I wanted to learn exactly (Android development).
Linux Foundation's UEFI Pre-Bootloader now boots  all Linux Versions
Another trick that recruiters use:

Ask you where else you have interviewed, and even get names/contact info from you if they can. Then they call that place and tell them that they have a stack of resumes of way more qualified people than you.

You may never hear back from that place for two reasons: 1) they think you sold them out to a recruiter, 2) they believe the recruiter and start interviewing new people.

Bottom line is that recruiters will sell you out any chance that they can get. As much as they may seem like your friend, you are not their client, you are the product they are selling.
User 5,260 and an active, daily users. Got an email that my account was impacted.
My understanding is that forced withdrawals at Harvard work like this:

1. If you want to come back you have to leave Cambridge and get a job for something like 6 months, and it has to be a real job, not a job at your Dad's company or something.

2. Any letter of recommendation that Harvard issues will note that you've been required to withdraw.

I don't see this as a forced vacation. The intent is that you have to have some understanding and appreciation of the real world before you are allowed to come back. Compared to many other schools, Harvard's penalties for cheating are actually very harsh.
[I work at Docracy] The first part here isn't necessarily true. Many sites don't keep previous versions of their terms online, so the version of the terms you agreed to might no longer be available.
LCA2013 and Rearchitecting Secure Boot
Air Jordan 13 Womens Pink White Black Shoe Cheap Sale
I don't think my parents are assholes. Sure, I did when I was a teenager, but that's because I was egocentric and had poor impulse control - in short, a teenager. Thank god my parents were doing their job instead of trying to be my buddy.
I wrote a LaTeX Markdown plugin as well, but it served a different purpose. It was geared for offline documents.

https://github.com/justinvh/Markdown-LaTeX

It generates inline/base64-encoded images with a small file-cache for the generated images. Try it out!
Google: Moonshot Thinking [video]
The title is wrong, data is objective but the models are not and which data is used is not (and she argues both those points).

She links to Gary Rubinstein's blog[1] that is mind boggling in its analysis of the results of an actual model of teacher's effectiveness and the resulting data.

1) The model that NYC used to evaluate a teacher's effectiveness is not available. It appears that the input data is not available either, only the output data of the model. That isn't transparency.

2) The output of the model is random. Having a feedback loop on random output data isn't going to improve the model.

Maybe Bill Gates' model and data will be better and will be transparent. I'm skeptical.

[1] http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2012/02/26/analyzing-re...
Once a recruiter decides that you're of no use to them, they'll stop answering your emails and phone calls. I've seen this happen to others with astonishing regularity, and had it happen to me some years ago.

The initial contact is cordial, there is even some hopeful talk about a position that allegedly exists. And then suddenly, contact is cut off.

Just as bad is the common practice of advertising a phoney job position just to get a pile of resumes and contacts. I suspect that this might even be some kind of fraud, legally-speaking, but I don't know if these people are ever pursued for it.
I can't believe the author's analysis missed the point that, when the "expected value is positive", that is, when the jackpot is larger than the face value of all the lottery tickets, it becomes very likely that a group of well-heeled investors will fan out across the countryside and buy as many of the tickets as possible, thus exploiting one of the few occasions when buying a lottery ticket actually makes sense:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbarro/2012/03/30/can-you-eve...

Under new rules that resulted from the above story, when a syndicate tries to buy all the tickets, all they need to do is avoid being too obvious about what they're doing.

An economic analysis of lotteries that fails to take syndicates into account, misses the forest for the trees.
OS X Desktop web authoring for Bootstrap
Then y many are giving lot of hype?
7) Make the users redirect the domain to you and put a nice notice on it stating that the name is available for trade / swap / a worthy purpose and place some AdWords on it.

You can actually sell it as a value-add and, from what I understand from professional domain squatters / traders, there's a surprisingly decent amount of money in it. The amount of link juice you could give the main domain probably also isn't insignificant...
Ask HN: Does a college degree matter?
I'm an engineering drop out. i have 4yr+ working experience with 1yr+ in each of these sectors: technical support, marketing, freelancing and application development.
Currently, i'm working as a software engineer at a Startup. Now, i'm a bit confused whether or not should i consider getting a college degree.
i have heard Friends and colleagues say that a college degree is a must and i might face some problem in future without it.
So, i ask HN users to offer their views so that it would help me change course if i have lost my way in my life.
There are some things in the world of programming or software engineering that are difficult to explain the cost/benefits of in a nice little blog post, because the costs or benefits don't become apparent in anything that fits in a blog post.

As you'd suspect from that lead-in, currying is one of those things. Explaining how it works is easy in a blog post, explaining why it is interesting is hard to do without being A: trivial or B: gibberish if you don't already know Haskell fairly well. Both approaches are taken in the StackOverflow there.

While it does mean you lose default and named args, it turns out to hurt less than you'd think, because the whole runtime and library is set up around functions without named args. I'm not sure exactly why, but when you can break things down into such smaller grained functions it seems to matter less. Positional is handled by a variety of functions that can reorder arguments, most commonly "flip" which switches the order of the first and second arguments, and while that is used and idiomatic it's probably used less than you'd think.

I can assure you it gets used a lot in idiomatic Haskell.
The Chicken Gun
Also known as a birdstrike simulator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birdstrike_simulator
The Origins of ‘Big Data’: An Etymological Detective Story
Have fun automating something that will prevent them from smoking or something, since you haven't taught them to listen to you, but to the computer by then.