skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is true if you've gone to school under the recent testing regime. If you haven't, your opinion as to whether it's an effective method of evaluating teachers is not valid.
Wolfram has written a lot of egotistical, boring things before. I have to give it to him: this time he's outdone himself.

Why not just outsource the naming to a flunky and then take credit for it if s/he comes up with a good one?
Are You Living in a Constitution Free Zone?
"Elon told him the supercharging stations should actually be closer to 140 miles apart in that area rather than 200 miles."

I'm very surprised that no tesla employee tried the test first. The difficulty of the 200 mile spacing would have been apparent (and niggling about 2 miles seems petty).
So it's either "the good folk vs the evildoers" or complete moral relativism?

No concept of an interplay between transparency/civil rights and security? No room for disagreement between people who value both but disagree about the relative worth of these goals when applied to a specific circumstance?

As I said before: childish.
You're dodging the point. Being skeptical does not give you license to be ignorant. That is to say it's possible to believe that our civil liberties have been eroding for the last decade* and base it on actual evidence instead of knee-jerk reactions to any government action.

*) And I tend to agree with you. The history of the U.S. has been a waxing and waning of civil liberties, and I think we're in a waning point right now. That said, the long term trend has been towards more liberty.
Depends on the carrier; with mine (Sprint), termination after one month would cost $200 for a basic phone, and $350 for any smartphone regardless of subsidy ( http://support.sprint.com/support/article/Learn_about_early_... ).

But most people do not cancel their contract after one month; they just wait out the term because carrier quality rarely changes so quickly that it's worth eating hundreds of dollars in termination fees to switch.
"It should be a natural goal for a school to raise it's test scores as time goes on."

With many of these tests, especially good schools are hitting the ceiling of how well it's possible to do. If you're scoring a 99% every year, how do you improve?
What a terrible post. Those two snippets aren't even slightly related. It's like the author is comparing a basic "Hello World" in C to some entry from the obfuscated C competition.
This piece and it's comment adds interesting commentary on the Canadian VC scene.
This is great, nice work!
Angels: Questions for Entrepreneurs, part III
A loose rant on maximization
Interesting, I don't go to many Mavs games, but was there about a month ago (the day before NYE) and didn't experience that at all. I haven't noticed a worsening trend at Stars games at AAC, either -- I remember about five years ago having an annoying security experience, complete with a line at some metal detectors, but in the past few years it's seemed to get quicker, if anything, for the Stars.

It wasn't exactly "fun" anyway, though, cause they couldn't buy a basket and got blown out by the Spurs... but that's a different issue!
I can't just install a random EXE file on my finance computer without knowing who you are. Even if I felt like this was a great product, there is no way I can risk my client's data to save some time.

I'm honestly not sure how you get over that hump, but you should think about it, hard.
Sounds similar to the Zen Buddhist concept of Shoshin or beginner's mind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin
Facebook messages down
"While Tesla officials and many armchair experts have said I should have accepted the time penalty to top off the battery in Delaware at the Max Range setting, Tesla warns specifically that this shortens the battery’s life."

I wonder by how much?
"You only save money with open office is your needs are very
limited, your time is worth nothing, and everyone you might
ever send a document to is also using OpenOffice."

You do make some good points, but this sentence doesn't fit at all. There are quite a few scenarios where LibreOffice can be a $$$-saver, and it certainly doesn't require your time to be "worth nothing".
I wish people would stop offering services 'for life'. They so rarely turn out to be for life. Having to renege on a 'for life' promise only generates the worst kind of publicity: justifiably vocal former-customers (even worse: formerly-happy former-customers).
But it could be less inefficient as driving 55mph on the highway with this particular car, no?
At some speed, driving fast on the highway will eventually be less efficient than driving in very bad gridlock. It isn't entirely unreasonable to incorrectly estimate the intersection of two causes of inefficiency in driving.

It's probably possible to design a car so aerodynamically inefficient at 35+ mph that stop and go is preferable to cruising at even moderate speeds.
I thought the Randall Munro personality came from the writing. Stick figures are not the hard part.
Using jQuery to Enhance HTML5 Tabular Data
Not only that, regular algebraic operations also work with vectors/matrices as inputs, as long as you press CTRL-SHIFT-ENTER after editing. This means that most functions with complex MATCH and OFFSET can be replaced as well (i.e. SUM( (column_vector = cvalue) * (row vector = vvalue) * (matrix))
> unless there is going to be a huge breakthrough in battery technology really soon, EV's that run on batteries alone are not going to be a success for anything but short-distance commutes

I don't think that's the only option, battery swapping springs to mind as an alternative to beat the problem.
The fact that something monolithic, at the bottom of the car, which causes bad experience thingy isn't easily removed is the designer engineer's problem. It also shows that nobody really thought about the whole everyday experience of this kind of a vehicle.
> If it's using -webkit prefixed CSS, that's pretty unlikely.

Unsupported CSS features should not affect the functionality of a web app, only its appearance. Emphasis on "should"; far too many web apps end up fundamentally broken when this happens.
I like that article, but have one major qualm about it. Everything that you do in a Bayesian model depends on the prior. Yet you often see - as there - someone tell you, "Here is the rule to use" but without telling you the prior.

However the prior actually matters. For instance when you look at what Nate Silver did, most of the mathematical horsepower went to determining a really good prior to use based on historical data. And armed with that he both can and does make inferences. (Which he's willing to publish.)

That said, the Bayesian approach is conceptually so much better that Bayesian with a questionable prior can be better than a frequentist approach.

Finally the fact that a Bayesian approach needs a somewhat arbitrary planning horizon does not particularly bother me. Financial theory tells us that businesses really should apply a discounting factor to future projected income, and when you apply an exponentially decaying discounting factor, the weighted number of future visitors generally comes out to a finite number. And yes, there are a lot of arbitrary factors in how you get to that number. But you can generally do it in a reasonable enough way to be way less sloppy in your A/B test than every other part of the business is. Heck - you can just say that your planning horizon is 1 year, and use the expected number of visitors in that time as a cutoff.

Anyways I'd like to eventually get into this kind of issue with this series. But whether I can, I don't know. It certainly will be hard if I keep on trying to pitch it to the level of mathematical background that I've been aiming for so far.
PGA adopts data capture technology and expect to save $3 million in 3yrs
Does anyone have a recommendation for a good book that covers this sort of thing (A/B testing) in detail?
That's true. The fastest 3G speeds can exceed average LTE, so it's semi-defensible for carriers to brand some HSPA+ as 4G. In our tests though, the fastest speeds are always LTE. In the last week of the 50 fastest speeds tests all but 2 (#39 and #40) have been LTE. (Fastest was 69812 Mb/s - Oman Mobile!)
I live in ND and have stayed in several hotels here (lived out of one for 6 months). I can truthfully say ND gets a lot colder than where the reporter was driving. I am wondering which hotels have overnight plug-ins because I sure don't see it here?
It's probably not so much about the 2 miles but rather having a stretch of start-stop driving instead of much more energy efficient highway driving.

The author tries to put a nice spin on it here by saying he understood that start-stop driving would be more efficient but I don't really buy that.

edit: A downvote for this? Really? Could somebody explain what's wrong with it?
Ex-Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein used to dismiss AT&T's "4G" network as "faux G."
It's more the power engineers problem. There's no way to power a car like that with a smaller battery at the moment.
Mathematicall
Upvote because Google CS sucks, plain and simple. I've experienced similar troubles with AdSense.
So I have read all the comments and POV in this discussion and have resisted posting this link. But there is only one way to solve this problem. Accept that Excel and Spreadsheets are here to stay, you are never going to impose the controls the IT guys would like the world to live by and put in place a technology that transforms Excel into a true, secure, Enterprise application. Here is the link: http://vimeo.com/user13359040/review/48949438/7d482fb814
All know at least 3, because two are compulsory and that does not include English.

Finland has a small problem of degree inflation. Masters degree is highly preferred. Vast majority in traditional research university students are likely to skip over the bachelors. Because of this average graduation age is dangerously close to 30.

Finnish perspective: The only quality you truly need to worry about is the quality of your teacher education.
"If these cars got 5k miles to the charge I could still start "discussion" about the range, but that wouldn't show that range is still an issue."

Sure there would be, but it would be a positive discussion.

Allow me to be more specific since you want to nitpick my choice of words. The simple fact that there are questions regarding the range of this vehicle shows there is an issue.

If this vehicle had a similar range to that of the majority of vehicles no one would be arguing about the range, because no one would care. If anything everyone would be raving about this car because it would literally be the future of the car industry.
I went to school in a day when the Iowa tests came around every few years (twice or three times between 1st and 10th grade), and that was it except for P?SAT and ACT. There was no test to teach to. It was not a golden age. It was an age of fads, just as our age is. That they came out of the teachers' colleges rather than federal mandates made them no more helpful. My brother suffered through more of the junk as being just enough younger. My stepmother eventually quit working as a substitute teacher because of her impatience with the continuing professional education courses she had to take.
> And yet that second definition came about due to incorrect usage of the term.

But there are no "incorrect" usages of words. Dictionaries are supposed to record how people use words, without judgment or rancor. Encyclopedias strive for correctness, but dictionaries are only meant to find out, and report, how people choose to use words.

In the old days of lexicography, scholars would find ten new uses of an existing word, or of a new word, and that was the criterion, the threshold for acceptance -- that new word, or that redefinition, was duly recorded. I think that's still the standard by which words are discovered or redefined.

The tl;dr: Encylopedias prescribe, dictionaries describe.

> So is "literally" as a virtual thing incorrect?

Wrong question. I think the only fair question is -- does this usage cause confusion? Well, yes, but since people use the word that way, what are you going to do? People are in charge of language, not scholars in an ivory tower.
Well, without the comments, it's almost not worth it. They're like directors commentary.
Crichton's Travels is a fascinating and infuriating book. You know he's a human being just like yourself, but yet his thought processes are as alien as anything you'd expect to find in a Star Trek script.

The idea that the author of The Andromeda Strain could be taken in by spoon-bending was also more than a bit frightening.
Egotistica. (ld;o)
Masterclass: Hack Learning
I can vouch for this; I think this is a BMW thing. Our 2012 X3 does the same thing. If you let off the gas while going down hill, you can see the RPMs on the tach rise as the transmission downshifts. I was really pleased with the feature on a trip to Asheville last fall.
Updated, refresh your caches:
https://github.com/darwin/cmx.io/commit/02ae7bc5b37cfc3117f8...
I graduated high school in a rural, fundamentalist town. No doubt if this were to happen, I would have had to listen to why I should accept Jesus Christ into my heart. No thanks. Sex Ed is already left to the States and look how that's working. The State's with the highest teen pregnancy rate all teach abstinence only education.
Big Data Could Mean Big Jobs for Cleveland Area
Seems a very obvious manufactured PR story
I would say that the "opening your mind to grammar" is true of learning any new language. Obviously one like Latin where the grammar is very different than English might be more effective on that front, but with any new language you are forced to think about every word as a specific part of speech. It's like when someone tells you that your tongue doesn't fit in your mouth and you spend the rest of the day consciously thinking about something that is usually completely involuntary.
>I firmly believe that any student who wants to learn will learn.

Well sure; people overcome all types of adversity to learn, produce, and excel in the world. A child from the ghetto may strive to succeed and go on to be a chess grand master, this does not mean that we should go building more ghettos to produce chess grandmasters.

Learning despite misguided education policies will occur, but it's not a legitimate defense against criticism of the policies.

So some kids don't have adequate "drive" or motivation. Should they be dismissed because of it? They are kids! Some kids need more encouragement and support, and we should be helping them succeed (truly succeed, not be socially promoted), not saying "well you aren't trying hard enough, you deserve to fail." Do not worry- they will get that plenty as an adult. The purpose of school is to prepare kids for adulthood, we shouldn't be dismissing them because they aren't prepared already.

Another bone I must pick with your 'they they don't want to learn' argument comes in the form of an experience I had repeatedly while in school:

Sequoia: I understand and have memorized the formula, but WHY does theorem XYZ behave thus?
Teacher: Sequoia, that's a great question, but I've got 30 other students I'm trying to just get to the baseline- I really can't devote time to advanced discussion of this topic when some kids are struggling to just pass the test.

Nowadays there are lots of highly accessible/usable online resources to address such students and I hope teachers are employing them, but the fact is that was not an environment that was conducive to learning regardless of the fact that I wished to learn more.

Yes, I could have looked it up on my own but that's not an argument for school- I could look it up on my own without school. Saying "go learn it yourself" is tantamount to saying we don't need schools.

EDIT: Changed double quotes to single to make clear that I'm paraphrasing "...any student who wants to learn will learn. Students have to WANT to do well ...over the last few decades this drive to do well has pretty much evaporated." with 'they they don't want to learn', not quoting directly. Sorry jug! The other uses of double quotes are legitimate: I'm not ascribing the statements to anyone in particular.
Thanks for the links. The speaker in that video makes an excellent point about science communication which I think applies to all education and not just primary/seconday school. For example, even scientific journals having "commentary" or "news and views" sections alongside the papers is incredibly important to tell the readers why the research may be important (if they don't follow it intimately already).
Ah, another open-office thread. I'm always amazed at the quantity of people that show up on these to piss all over what is a pretty amazing project.

Granted, OpenOffice may well never surpass MS Office, but to even be playing in the same league is a victory of sorts, given the incredible disparity of resources behind both projects.

And for your average person writing a letter, trying to calculate something with a spreadsheet, or put together a simple presentation, they absolutely are in the same league.

For me, OpenOffice wins hands down, because it runs on Linux, which is the OS I choose to use, and is much more versatile and repurposable, being open source. I use bits of it for LiberWriter.
For those with existing free accounts, there was no upgrade in storage limits (for me, it's 5GB). Of course, it's their choice since it's free, but it doesn't leave me wanting to upgrade to their paid plan (like I did for dropbox and sugar sync).
Unless the NYT has two John M. Broder's on staff, he's not exactly only a "green" correspondent, either. He was, at one point, the White House correspondent for the paper:

http://news.fiu.edu/2010/04/new-york-times-political-corresp...
On this view, you could argue that a dairy cow is a farmer's customer. The cow gets food and pays for it with milk. Or a fish is a fisherman's customer: the fish gets food, and pays for it with some pain and inconvenience (in the case of catch-and-release) or with its life.

It is useful to distinguish transactions that involve money from transactions that don't, and to restrict the word "customer" to apply only to those situations where money is exchanged, if for no other reason than that only in situations where money is exchanged is it clear who is the customer: it's the person who pays.

Google's advertisers are its customers. The (attention of the) people doing the searches are the product. Search results are the means by which the product is procured, not unlike the bait on the fisherman's hook.
I'm not sure what "scale" is supposed to indicate in this context; if you rank nations by population density then Singapore is at one end and Finland is at the other, and they both have better results than the USA. In 2011 Finnish per capita GDP was less than 80% of ours. I don't doubt they'll pass us eventually (Singapore already has), and our woeful system of elementary and secondary education is a principal reason why.
At the risk of getting downvoted even more I will share with you that this is done automatically. The guy that made that site wrote a script that detects the last panel of an xkcd strip. I will see if I can get him to share more because it really is cool.
Interesting, I came to an opposite conclusion using relatively logical and rational reasoning. There are really strong arguments suggesting that consciousness can't be explained as a complex interaction of physical particles.

Hint: the core of the problem (and core of many, if not most, philosopical problems) is "What is the definition of consciousness?"
Why do teachers need to be evaluated by metrics at all? Every professional (software dev) job I've had has managed to do a reasonably good job selecting and promoting the right people. Not perfect, but well enough. Why is teaching the only domain where adults are unable to make professional judgments about coworkers?
> cached phrases

I think you mean "catchphrases."
but I have to sign in everytime to use the SDK.

Every time? I've been prompted twice, I think. Once the very first time I set up the SDK, and then once again after, I think, an update.

And, yeah, I'm waiting for the Linux support too. :)
Ask HN: Will YC accept applications without idea for summer 2013?
The link to apply without idea is disabled.

Sorry, we're no longer considering applications for winter 2013.
Check back later to apply for summer.
The main problem with IE wasn't that it was an exclusive product incompatible with other browsers. The problem was that it was bad. I'm not a fan of people only supporting WebKit, but at least WebKit browsers are good.
I think JulianWasTaken is hinting that your solution is exactly a recursive solution to generate all permutations (google "recursively generate permutations"). This is because any N-rook solution is just a reordering of the columns of the trivial solution.

It may be interesting for you to try to come up with a different solution, where the basic operation is to swap adjacent columns - and try to minimize the number of swaps.
Draft, easy version control and collaboration for writers
Wow, they actually try to make it illegal to read up on the law and plan your actions so that they don't violate it? Freaky.
The institution does not appear to be in the wrong, here. I'm a little confused as to why this gentleman feels he should be entitled to take his self help book tour to his (kinda sorta) alma mater.

In any event, what are his accomplishments? I would tend to think that if he had something substantial to offer, he might stand a better chance of being invited to speak. As Steve Martin once quipped, "be so good they can't ignore you". Clearly, this guy is quite ignore-able.
Heh, not surprising that comment isn't popular among the group of people who are currently exporting their worldview.

Harder to see the harm in it when it's your culture that's becoming the monoculture. That's the "good one"!
>I really have to ask why you can't just fail those students

Who says they didn't fail? I didn't get into detail. For one thing, I don't want students to fail. Another thing, it is stressful to have more than half your class fail, even for a self-righteous ass like myself. Here are the grades from my freshman (Fall 2012) course, (IIRC):

A, 1 < Non-traditional student, ex-convict, age 30-ish.

B, 1 < Probably this student's first non "A"

C, 2

D, F, W, x 10
They don't care enough to riot, no, but I'm certain that given the choice they would rather not have advertising blasted at them. And they don't have a choice, since most major professional sports are not subject to ordinary anti-trust restrictions.
Hmm, someone make a plugin for Box now for splitting files into 250MB pieces and also recombining them.
Yea, I was half-way also responding to the top-level comment about "smoke a huge joint!" That could go well or very poorly depending on who's with you and the sort of stuff it is.
It depends.

For statistical graphics, it is hard to beat R simply because it has all of the statistical functionality built right in. Want an ACF plot for your ARMA model? No problem. To do this in D3 requires a lot more code. R also has the great package ggplot2, which is simply brilliant for constructing plots.

Where D3 shines is the ability to add interactivity and animation to its plots. R simply has no concept of this as it is only really capable of static graphics.

If you know neither system, I would probably suggest D3 because you're going to have to learn a graphics system anyway. With D3 at least you have the ability to construct more than just static graphics. Also, it's all JS so most people are going to find it easier to learn than R.
Well how do you expect it to work when the functionality is to change the appearance?
Right. It seems that Hendrix is a private institution. The company and book he was promoting was the antithesis of how that private college makes money. Why would anyone there allow him to promote something that completely removes their funding source?