skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is it really true that no one here has genuinely studied this question before?

Findings from cognitive science and UI research:

People attribute personalities to everything, including software.

Personalized emails, with a person's name, have higher conversion rates.

One of the ways the brain deals with reading is to pretend, on some level, that it's having an imaginary conversation. Concrete description of objects, use of the active instead of passive tense, questions, and keywords like "You," all improve understanding, attention, and memorability.

It's that simple, guys. The research is out there. It's not hard to find. It's not hard to read, either! Just pick up a couple books on writing/cog sci and subscribe to the ACM and do a quick search of their library once in a while.

Or continue to have an argument based solely on what you feel, as if the data is not out there… that works, too.
The main angularJS site has a good tutorial to get you started. This blog i found helpful when getting started, specially the integration with yeoman: http://briantford.com/blog/angular-yeoman.html. These are video tutorials about angular.js: http://egghead.io/. The rest is up to you.
Wow, combine this with http://xkcdgraphs.com and you've got the ability to do a pretty good Randall Munroe impression!
Show HN: Beautiful real-time dashboards with FnordMetric
At my job we use a Bayesian approach, or at least we've started using it. I'll ask around to see if they'll let me publish it.

The Bayesian approach is indeed quite simple and understandable.
seriously, they probably know it already but no linux client? not that google (google) drive is any better but thumbs up for dropbox for being so easy to use and send to a friend of yours a pic or a zip file...
This is unbelievable blogspam. The linked article --

http://sinidentidades.tumblr.com/post/42395076857/study-debu...

-- very briefly summarizes a study but without revealing its name, much less offering any links. A search online produces this much better but still flawed summary --

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/02/04/study-debunks-notion-t...

-- with the same title, and that has a link to the paywalled publication --

http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/psp/index.aspx

-- but this article also doesn't name the study or link to it. The above article says about the unnamed study: "Analyzing 122 different characteristics from 13,301 individuals in 13 studies, the researchers concluded that differences between men and women were best seen as dimensional rather than categorical."

So it's a meta-analysis, a technique with many pitfalls (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-analysis) unless precautions are taken not to combine studies and experimental groups that differ in ways that can destroy the meaning of any conclusions drawn.

Also, as is typical in psychological studies, the conclusions are phrased in ways that prevent any meaningful basis for testing or falsification by additional work. What does "dimensional rather than categorical" mean? Most likely it means the differences are a matter of degree, not kind, but that only changes the waffle-words, it doesn't turn the conclusion into testable, empirical science.

My advice? Ignore articles that don't link to their sources -- "psychological science" is unscientific and non-reproducible enough without the added handicap of not being able to read the original article.
This policy is just common sense - it applies to bank tellers, the gal minding the till at a coffee shop, the checkout grocer, the gas station attendant, etc. When someone attempts to physically steal from your business do not escalate. The risk of death or bodily injury is too great. Business assets can be insured against loss; human life can not.
The essay structure is mostly useless in the real world, but it can help inexperienced writers get started. It's a teaching aid, like simplifying hundreds of pointless equations to get better at simplifying equations.
Sorry we missed this one, yep HTTP download from Cloudfront - so we use those servers. Others e.g. SpeedTest.net use the servers of the local ISPs which is better for measuring the max possible speed a user can get, but our focus is on the speeds users are more likely to get while actually browsing/downloading so Cloudfront works pretty well as a lot of global traffic is served through it - would love to see the % if anyone knows.
Thanks! Interestingly, the experts can find a lower price than Amazon. E.g. a user was looking to buy a gaming console and one of the large merchants was having a anniversary promotion and had a great price. It is rare that a single merchant has the lowest price on all products all the time. Also, the experts can search for the lowest price across different product categories that are carried across different types of merchants i.e. it works for items ranging from electronics to Broadway tickets to auto parts.
Great easy to use tool for pitching to investors..
This is a bit of a distortion. The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) doesn't oppose testing wholesale, but rather the use of standardized test results to generate new policy, something that test makers explicitly said their tests are not useful for:
http://www.uft.org/teaching/hot-topics/testing
I love the scribbly cubic beziers you have going on for the speech bubbles. Moving around their control points makes them dance a little. Great stuff.
It'll always be Joe Robbie Stadium to me.
tbh I have no idea as the London DC has been rock solid for me. On the odd occasion I've learned of Linode DCs having problems (usually here on HN) it seems to frequently be Fermont that's mentioned.

As for alerts, maybe they only automatically create tickets and alert users when there's a problem with a vm or the host it's on. Agree with you that doing the same for DC issues would be a good idea.
The Wild West refers to the west when Americans first started settling in the West and were largely out of the reaches of the army and federal government.
Is this article about WHAT TYPE OF BUSINESS to run, or HOW TO PRICE IT? I think it's mixing some logic of the two.
Marissa Mayer keynote  Goldman Conference
Can you imagine how much we would accept google into our lives if they had an equal amount of engineering, but awesome customer service?
LibreOffice has Python 3+ now baked-in (i.e. part of the default install).
That DEC-20 offer was hot though.
Just don't drop it in the toilet.
Although you don't mention it, I feel that this post strongly implies that the teachers can't be trusted to exercise professional judgement. What's the point of even requiring teachers to meet standards if you believe that they can't properly evaluate their students?
Demonoid ‘Operator’ Released From Jail, Case Stalled
Aw, snap! Crashes chrome 24.0.1312.57 on Ubuntu 12.10. I tried opening the console to get additional info, but it doesn't show anything.
For me, the difficulty of writing goes up nonlinearly with the length of the thing that I am trying to write. If I told my wife that I was writing a book, she'd want to kill me. And I wouldn't blame her for that.

This subject is particularly hard, because I'm trying to require as little background as possible, on a topic that normally requires much more.
It's a Fact: Opinions Are Not Facts
I think the point with Amazon is: if something goes wrong, they give you your money back. Once the post man wasn't able to deliver, before I even realized, I had the money I paid back on my bank account.

Negative example eBay: when something goes wrong, they take no responsibilty and ask you to take a lawyer if you are not satisfied with that. Even with pure humans this is fast enough.
I find this very interesting. What is the best way to find the sweet spot? Am I right in thinking that the more you charge for a service, the higher the cost of support for that customer will be and this can be difficult when scaling. i.e. A million customers at $5/month with 1 support employee/50,000 customers results in a much simpler business than 50,000 customers at $100/month with 1 support employee/500 customers?

With regards to the high churn rate on cheap plans, is it that this is due to the quality of the plans and that it is likely that these customers can find a similar service for free or is it the perceived value to customer is lower because they are only paying a small amount each month?
A bit of a misleading title -- I got really nervous because I have friends who work for OpenX; yet it was the OnRamp service that was shut down and not really the entire company.
The federal government has no business in education. There is no feasible, informative way for a single organization to comprehensively evaluate the education of every K-12 student in America.

Education should between a student, his parents, teachers, and local administrators. Involving an army of faceless bureaucrats cannot possibly make anything better.
Storenvy has an interesting model, but I'm a bit skeptical about their scalability. I started a fashion brand in HS (backpacks, apparel) and we launched a Storenvy store pretty much off the bat since there was no cost. The issue is that they don't seem to have accountability for their customers. They didn't run any checks to make sure my business is legitimate (obviously it is), that we actually sold product before, that we even had a website. This is polar opposite to Amazon, which runs several screens to make sure sellers are legitimate (getting our products on Amazon took nearly two months).

Perhaps even more importantly, the marketplace model for e-commerce does not align with individual sellers. Marketplaces are focused on expanding, adding more sellers, and expanding product portfolios. Sellers, meanwhile, prefer to be one of few on marketplaces so that they have greater visibility. With Storenvy's model (basically no barriers), I don't see much value being provided to sellers. Even if there is 0 cost to the seller, there is little incentive for them to invest time into building out a profile and attracting customers on the platform.
There's a name for this product space! "Spreadsheet controls" describes the product space inhabited by various products that aim to help businesses manage the terrifying, complex Excel workbooks whose contents influence business decisions in subtle, interrelated ways.

Microsoft recognized that this was an important hole in the way enterprises used Excel, which is why they acquired a company in this space, Prodiance, in 2011. Office 2013 integrates some but not all of the company's products in its "enterprise risk management" / "spreadsheet controls" functionality; see some discussion at http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-excel/archive/2012/09/13... .

It was really interesting to read the prior blog post on this topic ( http://baselinescenario.com/2013/02/09/the-importance-of-exc... ) because it sounded so familiar! That blog post is spiritually identical to about the first third of the Prodiance sales pitch.

The "controls" space has a surprising amount of depth. Just a few problems that these folks think about:

(1) Excel spreadsheets are not a very good computation engine: business logic can be subtly altered by a typo that includes one too few lines in a range or a copy-paste error that accidentally includes a constant instead of a calculated cell. It turns out to be possible to programmatically inspect a workbook for "risky" or "possibly wrong" calculations and warn on their presence.

(2) Chained dependencies can be really hard to track: some businesses use one spreadsheet that refers to data in another spreadsheet that refers to data in another spreadsheet… and you have to hit "refresh" in all of them if you want your changes to propagate correctly.

(3) Data can be changed maliciously: by leaving some text white-on-white, by using Very Hidden sheets, or by deliberately changing a formula, you can put misleading information in a quarterly report to hide bad news!

(4) It's hard to find "one version of the truth": people constantly e-mail around things like "quarterly report - new calculations.xlsx" or "quarterly report - new calculations - REVISED USE THIS.xlsx" and we just have to hope that business processes use the right one. In some kinds of businesses, people really want to see a complete audited list of "important spreadsheets" and "all the versions of them" and "how they have changed and what specifically has changed".

These are all problems that can be solved at other layers — for example, this blog post advertises "move your business logic to Python with DataNitro/IronSpread" as a solution to problem (1).

If DataNitro's plugin is going to help provide "enterprise risk management", one really interesting thing to hear would be what their plan is for auditing. How can people see what ancillary Python code is attached to a workbook and how it's changed over time? That is, what assurances can someone get that the generateQuarterlyReport() method is working as designed, and can someone get an e-mail when it changes?
"If you're not paying money, you're the product being sold" is one of those cached phrases that looks insightful on first glance, but contains no actual substance.

Every human using Google is a customer. For most customers, the product is search results, and their payment is to let part of their screen be occupied by ads. For advertisers, the product is X pixels of advertising text, and the payment is dollars (or euros, or yen, etc).

Currently, the exchange rate between pixels and dollars is so extreme that it's not cost-effective to provide support to those customers who are only paying in pixels. Customers who pay in dollars (advertisers are one, but also people who have a paid Gmail account, or have bought more Drive storage, etc) do receive support.

---

But that's all beside the point. The original story is about someone who paid hundreds of dollars for a phone, and received terrible support. Even if you hold the position that all free services are inherently exploitive, don't you think that someone who spent that much money should be receiving top-quality support?
That approach was discussed by Anscombe, and I wrote up a summary in the Custora Blog. However just because an approach is frequentist or 'ad-hoc' does not necessarily mean that there is anything wrong with it. The bayesian approach requires making assumptions about the number of visitors to your site after you stop the test, which isn't really any less adhoc than picking an error cut off.

http://blog.custora.com/2012/05/a-bayesian-approach-to-ab-te...
"Award winning teacher" waits till after he retires to say the systems fucked. Thanks bro. Good help.

(yes I know I don't know the full story but it reads bad)
"Are any of those companies self-supporting on revenue from those products?"

http://hostingmatters.com/web_hosting.html

They've been in business for 13 years.
Yes. Expect an entire cohort of people who previously scoffed at the value of such things to start embracing it with both hands! (And rightly so, because this stuff is just super useful, and it can be done so much better then ctags, or, god help us more, grep.)

May clang cause people to expect more from their tools.
You say test but I think you mean measure. You can't improve unless you have a way to track improvement.

There are many ways to measure though and tests are just one of them. They also happen to be the easiest and most understood, which is why they get used in schools and by use officials to track and rate how well a school is doing.
"Students learning on there own and striving to do better is never punished"

Well I am a counterexample to that statement. I was punished year after year because I spent my time learning instead of doing my homework.

"Saying they are punished would mean the answers they are provide are technically right but graded as wrong."

Yes, that is exactly what happens, especially in math courses. Answers that are not only technically right, but which show a serious of logically consistent steps leading from the question to the answer, but where the steps diverge from what the teacher taught the student to do, are often marked as "wrong" or worse still, marked as "right" but with a point taken off for using a different technique. It happened to me on more than one occasion, and it happened to friends of mine.

"Also i am in no way saying a student should ever skip school to learn on there own."

Why not? If the goal of school is to educate students, does it really matter if a student attends class to learn or skips class to learn the material on their own? Does it make a different if a student skips class to learn, and then comes to the teacher outside of class to ask questions? Why is sitting in a classroom so important that we must punish students who fail to do so?
CJDNS based cloud hosting launches
Exactly. Which is why transparency and honesty is key.

Look at Cloudflare's handling of their incident. Then look at Linode's.
>If somebody can match your key to your person they can see your entire purchase/sell history.

Which is why keys aren't attached to individuals and can be changed with every transaction.

Yes, some traceability is inherent to blockchain crypto-currencies. But using them anonymously is still easier than with any other electronic payment method.
When the west was being "settled" who living there at the time?

Put another way: Are you arguing that the wild west period was a peaceful and prosperous time for the Native Americans? A period marked by little physical or economic violence?
The answer about teacher motivation/performance is interesting, not least because it isn't answering the question that was asked. (Unless you do private work like tokenadult I suppose you don't have a basis from which to answer that question.) Do you find that public school teachers are paid enough? If they are paid enough in general, are there particular groups that aren't? Are there other particular groups that are paid significantly more than enough?

The answer concerning students makes perfect sense, and is what I would have expected. I want to blame the parents, but then I remember where they went to school.
I thought the points after the nanny-state argument were more convincing, but you didn't mention them:

"-- Single-use bags are not the problem. In 2011, they represented 0.13 percent of California's total waste stream.

"-- According to the British Environment Agency, consumers have to reuse a cloth bag 131 times to present lesser global warming impact than conventional bags."

So at my rate of shopping a bag would need to last 2-3 years to have any net benefit for the environment. And all of that effort to put a maximum dent in .13% of the waste total. If people would just buy what they eat instead of throwing out 20% of their food, we'd have a much greener grocery system.
Feature request: if a link has NSFW and is being downvoted, please gray everything except the NSFW part (and translate it to those pure souls who don't even know what is NSFW)

Or, disable the link automatically for highly downvoted comments

Or at least make the link use the same color

(Or a bit easier, if it has NSFW, just remove it automatically)

Edit: yes, I agree, ignore the last one
There's always the installer at: http://www.golang-book.com/. Sets up the path for you and installs a text editor.
Did he ever release the commands he used to generate the plot?
If that's how you take John Scalzi's essay…you have poorly read that essay.

Seriously.

The point of Scalzi's "Straight White Male…" essay is that all else being equal, being born a straight white male in western culture will result in large amounts of unseen privilege that can be leaned upon without even thinking about it.

It says nothing about relative ease of accomplishment after that. It says nothing about the small, petty, and (generally) inconsequential ways in which men are discriminated against (think auto insurance, as a first order item) in general life.

It also doesn't say a damned thing about whether you have the right to complain or not. It says far more about you thinking whether you've got standing to complain in a particular case, as the reality is that most men do not face gender discrimination on a regular basis—and when said discrimination is systemic (as it is in custody and alimony arrangements), then it must also be addressed—and it generally is being addressed (slowly, but surely).
The n-queens solution? Errr....no. Here is an even faster way of solving n-queens, in the spirit of the posting:

n_queens_answer = [ ... array of answers...];
for (int i = 0; i < n_queens_answer.length; i++) {
place_queen(n_queens_answer[i]);

See what I did there? Wow! Totally linear time in the number of queens!

Remarkably, when you already know the answer to a problem, it is generally not difficult to solve it quickly.

Replicating an observed pattern is not the same as solving a problem.
I've had my own horror stories with Adwords. Google has by far the worst support of any company I've ever had to deal with in my entire life.
The problem isn't Excel.

The problem is that those who are developing complex Excel models are not necessarily taking into account the need for solid design, rigorous testing and model validation. The quant generally building an Excel model is generally thinking "how can I get this model built and running as quickly as possible?" Whereas, a software developer who is used to bugs, and the negative impact they cause, might take a more guarded and gradual pace - with the realization of the importance of testing.

Neither Excel nor the quants that use it in a fast, ad-hoc basis are going away. And so I believe the solution involves application of good design, QA and validation to the Excel modeling process.
From what I understand, you need a 'cash remixer' that doesn't keep logs. The log deletion is what breaks the state chain.
I have to say that I think defining set curriculum and test goals for students DOES constrain good teachers. They are attempting to prepare their students to pass a test. So what do they do, they focus on that test and attempt to prepare them to pass with a certain disregard for what actually should be taught.

I think that this limits the scope and types of tests that teachers can give their students to really prepare them for these tests.

I think that we need to create a better metric for testing teachers and students, because our metrics are broken. I (as a student) see the education that is given post NCLB as detrimental to the future of our nation. It has taken a few steps back in the fact that we no longer allow extraordinary teachers to set the pace, but we allow the state to regulate what pace we need.

EDIT: It doesn't constrain teachers, but it does pressure teachers to teach to the test rather than teaching for college and education in general.
Computing and Buddhism
Indeed -- the point that struck me most was this quote:

"...OpenX lays the blame squarely on the vulnerabilities of open source in a hackers’ world..."
> "then she calls the bag ban a movement of the nanny state"

There are a few (helpful) signals that people send, when they've made an emotional decision and are merely trying to justify it after-the-fact. Using emotionally-charged cliches and strawmen ("nanny state") is a large flashing sign of that type.

You really shouldn't expect such a position to have any logical or philosophical consistency. Nor should you expect it to be receptive to data. If one of their pet justifications is refuted, the conclusion will remain iron-clad; they'll simply fish around for a new justification.
"for most people"

I've seen a lot of incorrect ranges, often the result of subsequent grid manipulations.

With hopefully honest and sufficient humility, I submit that we are not "most people" -- in this respect.
Ahh, the Linode troll's right on time.

We've heard you
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4840352
again
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4121734
and again
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4911934
and again
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4652662
and again
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4427802
and again
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4545458

In every Linode thread that pops up, no matter what the thread is actually about.

We get it. Move on.