skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The quality and compatibility of Open Office has improved a lot since it's inception. So what you're advocating is a sliding scale of value which is reasonable.

What you have not included is the TCO for MS Office which includes a lot of the same things like UI issues, work lost due to crashes, compatibility with other services (including Google docs), etc.

Open source often lags behind, but it gets better over time and also often exceeds closed-source equivalents.
Some links I found helpful while trying to make a sudoku game with angularjs (https://github.com/mouradmourafiq/angular_sudoku):

http://deansofer.com/posts/view/14/AngularJs-Tips-and-Tricks...

http://www.yearofmoo.com/2012/10/more-angularjs-magic-to-sup...

http://blog.petermolgaard.com/tag/angularjs/

http://onehungrymind.com/angularjs-sticky-notes-pt-1-archite...

http://www.raymondcamden.com/index.cfm/2011/11/29/My-first-A...

A google discussions about the difference between factory and service:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!searchin/angul...
>The support for FOSS alternatives just doesn't compare in terms of diversity or ease of use for a lay person.

Actually I've found the exact opposite. FOSS tends to have very active and very engaging communities that actually provide answers. Whereas on most win/ms software forums, there are usually a ton of people who are just parroting each other without understanding how completely far of they are from the crux of the problem. Of course this is all just a bunch of anecdotes.
How can I get $0.003/GB? Can I do it with a single dedicated server or do I need my own data center?
When I first clicked on it, all of the text besides the link was completely invisible, so I had no idea it was NSFW. I guess a lot of other people didn't realize that before they clicked on it at work.
Neck tingles... I gotta say that rarely does a post hit at the right time so well. Thank you.
Expect Labs on Glenn Beck
How has this fallen of the front page so quickly, yet the story from Musk's perspective is treated as irrefutable? Right now this is still mostly in hearsay mode, proving the bias in HN readers (at least those ostensibly flagging and down-voting this story into oblivion).
Bad on Musk using the charge "fake". It's pretty clear the article was written in good faith; he's lucky the author didn't respond in alpha-male kind.
We should not confuse procurement risks with usage risks. In general, the risk with Excel, as indicated in all these articles, does not come from the vendor but from the user. Your systemic risk is always bounded below by the highest risk you are facing, which is user incompetence. Even with power users you still get errors. The main negative differentiator for Excel is that these errors are sometimes hard to identify.
I remember doing the same in middle school. Cant remember the name of the program for the life of me though. Thats ridiculous that you got punished for reading in a school, especially in that situation.
Dazzling Comet of 2013 May Be Among Brightest Ever Seen
Twitter usage reveals fascinating speech patterns
US Post office...? Though maybe I'm showing my ignorance. I just assumed that you had to physically mail these out by the end of January.

With things "tax related", I mostly just go with the flow, get the numbers right, and move onto the next thing.
> Chat comics.

It'll be 1996 all over again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat
The point is to have a free alternative.
The curricula were often quite lousy, and the tests rather poorly constructed. But neither so constrained teachers that we can conclude that they made things WORSE for teachers than before the Act and the associated tests.

I find this statement quite extraordinary. Moreover, despite the length of your post, I don't see where you reconcile the implication that there's nothing to worry about here. The various measures you're talking about might indeed ameliorate some problems. Most of these aren't available to individual teachers but to parents and administrators. Moreover, even these were available to individual teachers, even if the only thing stopping them was their venality (two statements I don't believe are true), even then, the teachers on average simply haven't done and the consequence is that a lot of classroom time has been devoted to mere test preparation. And so given that this program began a decade ago, there have been results.

Ill prepared college freshmen are a well known phenomenon in the United States.

Yes, you'd assume college teachers would consistently remark on this if the quality of graduating seniors were consistently declining. But you're this as if things couldn't get worse and I kind of think we should be worried about them getting worse.
> This would be mitigated if programmers were very careful about declaring methods to be final if it's not perfectly safe to override them

Its always perfectly safe to override a method if you maintain its required features. Its rarely, if ever, perfectly safe to do so if you don't. The issue is correctly documenting the required features.
Maybe this is a side effect of this current day and age being a specialist society? Everyone needs something to differentiate themselves from the crowd, and Javascript being such a recent growth in setting a "standard" with regards to frameworks and tools makes for a good incubator for specialists.
Depends on how much you make use of the social element of DropBox. Friends, Family, Colleagues, coworkers all share their files with me through DropBox shared folders. About six months ago I finally bit the bullet and just bought a subscription.

For whatever reason, I've never had a folder-share request for anything but Dropbox, and, it's performance has been flawless for me across all my systems.

In comparison, photostream, which only needs to sync across a limited number of platforms, all controlled by Apple, has been consistently unreliable, and i frequently have to hop into my iPhone Photo application to get it to sync pictures over to my Laptop.

Syncing is hard. Dropbox has it nailed. I have zero desire to mess around with anyone else in the near future, so, they've won as far as I'm concerned.
Ah, so more or less the non tech founders. Different axis, same point. ;)
Often, I am willing to pay a few bucks more to purchase from a retailer I like...or who I am comfortable doing business with.

I think you may be assuming that people only check one place for a price...consumers tend to look at a few merchants. They compare the price of the product and the shipping cost from the merchants. Another item to consider, is that many shoppers also look for free coupon codes to get free shipping or 10$ off from a merchant.

What I do like about your idea is that the prices are checked via crowdsourcing.

I think your site UI could be a little fresher.
Nice work. I did not see a knife plugin on the community site a few weeks ago when I looked. Thanks for putting this together!
"You were punished for not doing your homework, not because you spent your time learning. Just because you made these two things coincide for you does not mean that they have to."

Assuming, of course, that the volume of homework is sufficiently low to actually leave time or mental energy for anything else. I am not sure that is something that we can just assume, although I will admit that I did not really bother to find out how long my homework would have taken in middle school. Really though, the punishment for not turning in homework is handed down regardless of whether or not students spent their time on something with more educational value, and that is what I think is wrong here. Doing your homework is more important than learning; if doing homework coincides with learning, that's good, but there is no requirement of that or even any consideration of the possibility that the homework might have no educational value.

"If you don't need to go to class to learn then go take all the ACT's and SAT's you want and get yourself into college without them and stop whining. Otherwise go to school."

Of course, colleges also demand to see your high school transcript, and top schools will reject students whose high school GPA does not meet a certain threshold, so what you seem to be portraying as a student's choice is not much of a choice at all. High school grades can have consequences years later; when I was an undergrad, I went to MIT to ask about their graduate program, and they stopped answering my questions as soon as I mentioned what college I was attending. I had top marks on the SAT and SAT II exams, but without a report card to back that up I was not accepted to a top tier university. I am by no means alone in this; I met plenty of other people like myself in college, and this sort of story can be heard elsewhere.

It is not a matter of whining, it is a problem with the approach we take to education. Students who "play the game" get ahead; learning the material is secondary and on its own it gets students nowhere (on the other handing, forgetting the material at the end of the academic year or gaining the minimal understanding needed to receive a high grade is not punished or discouraged). Disobedience means closed doors, regardless of whether or not a student has mastered the curriculum they were supposed to be taught. If this sounds like the rest of life, well, that is exactly the point of school right? To prepare students for life -- both by teaching the skills needed to survive, and by teaching students to abide by the rules of the system they will be expected to live in.
We are the products because we are being sold by Google to advertisers.
There's only 10GB of bandwidth for the month. You'd need 5 months just to upload to your max, not including any downloading that would inevitably occur.

Also, it requires your phone number. Not as big a deal, but fuck that.
Exactly. I get the same thing to an email address that is secondary on my account but someone else was able to create an account with at one point or another (the email being addressed to a name other than your own is the giveaway).

It's not anything evil, just some poor guy (in my case) who can no longer access his account and is trying to reset the password.
I wish that someone would find Stuart Smith and get him to do the same with Adventure Construction Set.
IE isn't bad. It's bad because it is like 10 years old. IE actually innovated a ton of what we consider javascript and CSS/HTML now and days.
Whoa... How about just chop off the end and put a new one on? I was intimidated by this until a friend laughed it off as easy. $30 in tools/parts investment and now I just make cables as needed.
Same, but on the Apple II version. I remember making Rube Goldberg like pinball layouts where the ball would be guided through all sorts of paths and down to where you'd only have to hit it with the flipper every once in awhile.

Pinball Construction Set, Spy's Adventure in North America, Robot Odyssey. So many classics on the Apple II that were fun and educational.

I basically learned college level circuit design by playing Robot Odyssey as a child. For those curious, here's a part of a Let's Play trying to solve one of the earliest puzzles in the game:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNa4wivnjgs
Thanks for doing this series! I read 'How Not To Run An A/B Test' recently and was struggling with the implications.

My only advice:

body {
font-family: Georgia, serif;
line-height: 1.5;
margin: 0 auto;
max-width: 640px;
}
Sorry to not be specific. This article is about the US, as is my comment.

I also was talking about 200 students per teacher, not per class, which comes about because middle and high school teachers generally teach 5-7 classes, of 20-35 (although sometime) students.
ELB is a local load balancer, distributing requests to local servers based on load and availability.

R53 is a global traffic manager, distributing requests to datacenters to provide failover and latency optimization.
I had the same idea only to read the comments to find that it had already been suggested.
"world's great bastion of representative democracy"
and kill lists
and 100 mile Constitution-free search & seizures
and signing bills without Congress having read them
and ignoring immigration laws
and on and on
Classifying such languages is actually part of my PhD thesis, so I can authoritatively :) say that while merely adding the concept of time gets you to functional reactive programming from excel, they aren't really related because FRP is so much more powerful.
Is there anything to this debate that doesn't boil down to style? Python has a pretty decent object system. It also has first-class, nested functions with closures. You could write good OO code or good functional code according to your taste, and python libraries don't seem to strongly prefer one style over the other. I'm not terribly interested debating OO vs. functional in the general case, but I am interested in the pros and cons of each style in specific contexts.

For example, Python's lack of variable declarations sometimes leads to bugs involving scoping. (I've run into this a couple of times myself). Does this quirk become more of an issue in heavily functional code? Are there other language quirks that become troublesome in heavily OO code? In what circumstances might one style be preferred over another?
> The logic applied in this article is equal to saying that it is racist to display a white man on your presentation

I think you've generalized the lesson incorrectly. There is a certain amount of context behind showing women as sex objects in your technical presentation that is lacking by showing a white man on your presentation.

Put it this way, is there anywhere you'd find the sexy women inappropriate? If there is, that's how some women feel about it in a business setting.
Lessons from Amazon’s email marketing
You don't need node.js for this little service. If you're already using nginx you can just use the return directive. Voilà http://git.io/ip
Downtime is Good
I'm thankful the author did this, but there's no copyright notice or license.

Obviously I can assume it's copyrighted, but it would be nice to have the explicit declarations.
How PeerJ is changing everything in academic publishing
LinkedIn EgoBait: Don’t be Fooled
I think it's funny how Nat capitalizes "xBox". The official capitalization that was finally settled on was "Xbox". It annoys the marketing people to no end when people capitalize it wrong.

I always thought xBox looked cooler.
I've never heard anyone refer to Stephen Wolfram as "friendly and approachable," and naming the language based on that reason would be both amusing and disturbing.
If they can't release everything related to that trip, then it leaves Tesla wide open to the question that they just doctored up the analysis of the trip.

In the same way we shouldn't take NYT's story at its word, we should not take Tesla at their word.
I wonder how this fits into Australian Consumer Law (ACL) [0]. We have a relatively robust set of rules that govern how a business selling a product/service interacts with their customers.

For example, if you purchase something and it is not as described, or it is faulty, or certain other conditions then the business must be able to remedy the situation. I fail to see how you could satisfactorily comply with the ACL if you're only form of customer service is AI bots.

[0] http://www.consumerlaw.gov.au/ (overview at http://www.accc.gov.au/content/index.phtml/itemId/963190)
"However, it’s unlikely that the customer would be able to actually track the order through Domino’s online order tool."

Actually, so long as they have your phone number for delivery issues/to give the driver directions you can track any Domino's order by phone number on their web site (https://order.dominos.com/en/pages/tracker/#/track/order/). Last time I looked they were passing json around or something and it was easy to scrape.
I have read a couple of books, but have not been particularly impressed on the technical side.

But if you want a longer presentation about how to do A/B testing, with various gotchas, development considerations, and so on, http://elem.com/~btilly/effective-ab-testing/ is a tutorial that I did at OSCON a few years ago. (Be warned, it is long and divided into sections. Different sections are aimed at different people in a business.)
Well, what I actually said was not that "they reveal them not doing their job properly," but rather, "they have incentives."

All of those things are a nuisance and a threat for those groups of people. Even if you're a good policeman whose conduct is objectively awesome, when you see someone recording you, you have to wonder, "Will this guy catch me on camera screwing up, even though the last hundred times I've done everything right? Will the people who view this recording understand that I'm doing everything right if I do? Why doesn't this guy trust me?" And even if you're a good policeman, you know your buddy Bob, well... he doesn't have as exemplary a record as you do, but you think that on balance he's a good guy.

And, I don't know if this is true of the police, but for the teachers at least, they have the unions, their representatives and advocates, spending a LOT of time saying, "Testing is of the devil." They hear it day in and day out, from other teachers, from the unions, from a lot of politicians.

Those things matter. They matter a lot. If they didn't matter, teachers wouldn't be human.

And the fact is, there are downsides to all of those safeguards. They aren't perfect. Some of them may need to be reformed. Some may need to be reformed a lot.

But that's all beside the point, which is that teachers have a huge incentive to hate NCLB outside of its merits or faults as a program.
Get a Skype mate. Its just 89 cents per month to call to USA. http://www.skype.com/en/rates/
I think it's a bit rich to accuse me of not being qualified to disagree when you've decided to ignore the other half of the equation: that the transfers ultimately end up elsewhere, ie the merchant's wallet.

I fear that as long as you and I fling accusations like this at one another, no good will come of this thread, so propose we end it thus: I consider the problem solveable; and you do not.
It was the most forgiving browser, with a quirks mode that handled broken code like a champ. But Opera was the best browser, and if your code rendered correctly in it, it would probably render correctly everywhere else (except maybe Netscape 4, an abomination that took too long to die).
Silbo gomero: A whistling language revived
With inflation I hope otherwise its an empty gesture.
AppStore Optimisation
Thanks. Managed to miss that!
Of all the debates we could possibly be having, playing the "We're professionals" card is least suitable here.

On another place on the Internet, I participate in discussions about military budgets, and there are a certain group of people who insist that since they are soldiers they have the ultimate call on how much funding it should receive. (Spoiler: the answer is "more.")
House prices went down, and a recession happened. So making the prices of some other investment (which probably has to be government debt in order for them to not get sued for favoritism) go up by a similar amount, should make the recession stop happening.
This was on HN a few weeks back. I must say that I haven't gone through all of the lessons yet, but from what I have seen, it will help you grasp what makes good design.

http://hackdesign.org/
> No they do not. I personally use T-Mobile $30 monthly
> prepaid plan with 100 minutes/5 GB/unlimited text. The
> service is no way inferior to any regular service that
> T-mobile provides.

By using this plan, you're choosing to save money by having very little talk time. That is most certainly an inferior service compared to the post-paid plans, which typically offer unlimited talk time.
I would be more worried about things like personnel complaints, or matters that I ignorant of, but was "informed" via email.

Although explicitly making everything public is a novel way to keep bad behavior at bay.
Congratulations for continuing to kicking ass with your business even after the unpleasantness with YC.
ICEs are significantly less efficient at startup and until they get up to their normal operating temperatures. That's not so much a problem for long range trips, but taking multiple single-digit mile trips spaced apart in the time dimension.

Overblown, at least for modern cars. Girlfriend sometimes drives an ICE 1.5 miles to work, Gas mileage suffers ~30% versus freeway driving. When I did ~7 mile trips to work and back efficiency was <20% worse than freeway driving. Combustion chamber temps warm relatively quickly.

EVs have no problem "starting" in low temperatures. You might not be able to draw as much power for the drive train as the pack is heating up, but it's not a primordial "fuel-air-mix won't explode" problem.

In theory you're correct. In practice, ICEs will start and operate at temperature of -40F (perhaps with a bit of help heating the oil). The Tesla in the article was brought to its knees in temperatures within the positive teens.

And then this is mostly an issue of infrastructure; if there were at least 120V plugs at every parking lot, you wouldn't ever have to worry about these vampire loads.

Except now you have to convince everyone to install 120V plugs in parking lots, wire them up, figure out a way to bill for this or provided it for free, AND you have to remind the consumer to plug in every time they park their car.
I've worked for two tech companies doing fairly cutting-edge R&D that were definitely "start-ups" in every sense of the word, called themselves such, but were never developed with the intention of getting a bunch of VC money then making a big exit. These are much more common than you probably realize, even within the tech sector.

Getting really big then exiting basically necessitates that you have to be in a mass-market business. But do only mass-market businesses get to call themselves start-ups? Is there no place for start-ups in specialized fields with significant revenue potential but without the kind of universal applicability that makes VC's wet their pants?
Awesome vertical middle alignment on IOS... makes it a bit tricky to use.
You're grossly overestimating the capacity of any public school system in this country. You're talking about people who are underpaid, who face being laid off on a yearly basis, and who have too many pupils in their classrooms. What you're asking for -- a system that recognize's each individual's capacity and inclination and tailors the learning experience accordingly -- is a joke. Given the constraints, the only thing you can hope for is to try to present a curriculum which will be as effective as possible across as many students as possible.

Students of the type you're talking about would best be served by being home schooled or attending private school. I realize that doesn't work for many families. What's your suggestion? You get what you pay for.
Penguins welcome their robot overlords
I think Aleph is nice name. There is already Wolfram Alpha, and Aleph, while it is related to it, is IMO more appropriate for general purpose language.

It sounds to me mystical and abstract/mathematical at the same time as it reminds me of Blaise Pascal's definition of Nature (or God) as "an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere" (because Jorge Luis Borghes has a story with the same name in which he cites the Pascal's quote :)).