skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's orthogonal to my point. Teacher quality or competence in assessing quality, doesn't have anything to do with whether they assign grades in the ways I've enumerated. I've had absolutely amazing teachers that have graded in those three ways.

Even if they're good judges of quality, it's still a matter of how they determine your grade. Is it good quality relative to what they think your skills are? Is it good quality relative to the rest of the class? Is it good quality relative to what they believe constitutes mastery of the subject? And some teachers curve and some don't.

And I haven't said whether I think teachers should be required to meet standards. I don't even know if it's possible to create good standards.
Well, in your parent comment you say "The problem is that we assume we need to test students, and not teachers." So, that does seem to be what you were saying.

Of course a teacher's supervisor should be in charge of evaluating them. But they must be competent to do so and they should do so through evaluation of individual lesson plans and classroom observation, not the performance of the teacher's students on a standardized test. That's not a straw man by the way, there are a lot of people in this debate who think that's an acceptable metric for making decisions on compensation and hiring and firing [1]. Whether you are one of them, I have no idea. But the argument you make above is one I have encountered many times, and typically its adherents are quite myopic about the culpability of everyone else in the system.

Of course there should be a way to evaluate teachers and hold them accountable. And there should be a way fire them if it's called for. But it has to be equitable. And it shouldn't hold teachers hostage to factors they don't control. But even granting you that, I haven't seen any evidence that this is going to lead to much an improvement in the educational system. There are much bigger problems here than "bad teachers".

[1] http://www.epi.org/publication/bp278/
The conclusion that a consciousness is nothing but a series of mechanical interconnections, a machine that can be built or destroyed, fundamentally a kind of computer, and not something metaphysical, magical, or unexplainable, can be unsettling. Maybe that's what they meant?
The same company also did a cloud-based version, called Project Dirigible. You can still sign up for beta access, but that also now has an End of Life notice up. Maybe this time the source will appear.
I believe go-memcached is faster than fatcache - https://github.com/valyala/ybc/tree/master/apps/go/memcached . Will return with performance numbers soon :)
It's like http://yUML.me, but better :)

http://yuml.me/e5d8e14e

http://yuml.me/diagram/scruffy;/usecase/edit/[Bob]-(This%20i...

T
He called Tesla and acted on the advice they gave him. In this respect, he was acting like a normal consumer, not an automobile expert, which is precisely why I like his review. One shouldn't have to drive a Tesla like a auto expert to avoid getting into trouble.
Agreed, I had a Z80 card in my Apple II and they are very different. I found assembly on the 6502 a little easier but the Z80 allowed me to run CP/M and that opened the door to a tone of SW.
> According to a back of the envelope calculation, the opportunity cost on each article has been about $4k for me. I think I know what I want to write, then I begin adding things, removing things, play around with extra simulations, decide to change subtle details, etc.

Out of curiosity, is that rough guess with or without the value of everything you're learning in the second sentence?
I think they're falsely assuming that electric cars work like hybrids, in that regenerative breaking will help boost economy vs. driving on a highway where you don't get this benefit.

This isn't out of the question, you would assume that the Tesla's regenerative breaking would help it in the city.
The lost art of offline dating
You would wager wrong, depending on how you define "large." The total exchange volume of all exchanges is only about 93k BTC per day. http://bitcoinwatch.com/

The daily transaction volume, with change transactions removed, averages around 400k BTC per day.

So speculator trade is less than 1/4 of all Bitcoin transactions.

Fun fact: SilkRoad is less than 3% of daily Bitcoin transaction volume

75% of trades are commercial in nature. There are thousands of vendors dealing in BTC- hundreds of which deal in it exclusively. Some are even among the most popular web sites in the world.
As has been brought up in previous discussions, his primary role is as a "Green" correspondent, not an auto columnist. However, his inference wasn't all that crazy- consider, for example, that published mpg for the Prius is higher for city driving than on highways.

Edit: Further, Tesla's own blog states the following, which could probably influence many to infer what Broder did:

In contrast slower city driving speeds are more efficient and electric vehicles have a unique benefit in stop and go, low-speed driving due to regenerative braking

http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/model-s-efficiency-and-range
I would go even farther than you. It's not science reportin because it's a report by two law professors, working for the Wharton School of Economics. One of them, Klick, regularly writes for the Cato Institute on privatization, Austrian school economics, and so forth. It initially sounds like a scientific report, but one just has to consider the source.
Just keeping an eye on your bike from the other side of a window is pointless. Anybody can just hop on and ride away without you being able to do anything.
God says...

shall be according unto the number of years, according to the time of
an hired servant shall it be with him.

25:51 If there be yet many years behind, according unto them he shall
give again the price of his redemption out of the money that he was
bought for.

25:52 And if there remain but few years unto the year of jubile, then
he shall count with him, and according unto his years shall he give
him again the price of his redemption.

25:53 And as a yearly hired servant shall he be with him: and the
other shall not rule with rigour over him in thy sight.

25:54 And if he be not redeemed in these years, then he shall go out
in the year of jubile, both he, and his children with him.
Brilliant. But... now wait for a deluge of tenth-rate internet comics!
In fairness, that's what he was told by Tesla Motors when he expressed his concern with his remaining range.

It's also not completely insane: Energy requirements for driving go up approximately as the square of the velocity. This would normally make city driving exceptionally efficient.

The reason it's not efficient is because of all the energy lost due to idling and from being dissipated in the brakes. If the Tesla is able to idle at a much lower energy than a gas-powered car (which should be true) and if it can reclaim energy from braking by using regeneration then it could very well use less energy to "take a shortcut" through Manhattan.

Whatever gains he might have obtained were eliminated by the extra distance though (and it's not even clear there were gains to be had). The right answer is even simpler (albeit frustrating): Drive slower.
this might be the dumbest blog post I've seen posted on HN. why is anyone reading crappy marketing blogs that have no basic understanding of accounting or microeconomics?
I think the $1 billion is in regards to how much advertising money that Apple's cut earns from google's ads on iOS devices. I doubt this is just about default inclusion of the google search engine.
Much more stable, yes. But it still fluctuates as much as 4% on a daily basis.
Selling gold and silver in this way would probably be a lucrative business, actually I would be surprised if somebody wasn't doing that in large volume already.
I haven't worked there since 2008, so I don't have any idea what's currently in place.
Unfortunately I cannot track down the exact PR Agency, or any details really, so take this with a grain of salt... One of my former classmates worked a while for a PR Agency hired by "Big Plastic" to prevent plastic bag bans like the one in SF from spreading...

The conspiracy theorist in me would love to find a connection between these Wharton profs and that PR Agency.
Am I right in thinking that the more you charge for a service, the higher the cost of support for that customer will be

This is one of those "That certainly feels like it could be true" intuitions which data will disabuse you of in a hurry if you run a SaaS business. Within roughly the same tier of customer -- say, all the publicly available plans on any SaaS whose pricing page you have in your swipe file -- I can virtually guarantee you that customer support costs go down as price goes up. (There's a discontinuity between $500 a month and Enterprise, where support costs may or may not actually go up. Prices go up in a hurry at that discontinuity, though.)

Also: do not price SaaS based on costs. The margins are typically very, very high. Customer support is generally a very low portion of both the costs of the company and the marginal costs for bringing on another customer -- at most SaaS companies I'm familiar with, the #1 cost is engineering salaries and the #1 marginal cost (by a long shot) is costs associated with customer acquisition. (Either advertising spend or marketing/sales salaries.)

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?

You're trying to fit a rationalization onto observed behavior, which is dangerous, because customers are frequently irrational. Anecdotally -- and again, social lubricant is a great way to get fun stories from your SaaS peers because darn if we're going to repeat many of these stories while sober [1] -- there's a particular segment of customers who you don't want to be in a relationship with at all, and these customers are disproportionately drawn to your/the market's cheapest offerings. That's not necessarily an indictment of the offering.

[1] I am reusing this joke for comedic effect, as I don't drink, but these are very common topics of discussion at dinners among SaaS entrepreneurs. My favorite anecdote ever:

X: "I get 'My business doesn't make any money, so I can't afford to pay you $20' all the time. What do you say to that?"

Y: "'#$#& you, mine does.'"
The author missed a golden opportunity to point out that most facts aren't facts either.

Example fact: the word "literally" means consistent with reality, not exaggerated or fanciful. Is that what "literally" means -- yes or no? Let's resolve this by looking up a dictionary definition:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally

Definition 1 : in a literal sense or manner : actually <took the remark literally> <was literally insane>

Definition 2: in effect : virtually <will literally turn the world upside down to combat cruelty or injustice — Norman Cousins>

Take you pick -- "literally" either means according to reality, or according to the speaker's fancy.

Another example fact (something many people believe): "After a long losing streak while gambling, statistics says my luck should improve." True or false? It's false -- the above is called the "Gamber's Fallacy".

More here: http://arachnoid.com/wrong/ ("Everything you know is Wrong")
Where did you get that, out of that PDF? The number 25% sounds extremely high.

I have read this PDF before, a while ago, and I don't remember that stat. A quick glance tells me that they say that 2 addresses have over 500,000 Bitcoins, but that's just 4.6% (or more, obviously) of the total 10.7M issued so far. And there's no proof that this is the creator of Bitcoin. In fact, it's more likely one of the large exchanges!

So, please help me understand your statement. If it's buried in the text of that PDF, my apologies.
When you're writing for an unsophisticated audience, it's generally more profitable to be a good writer than particularly knowledgeable about the subject.
Anecdotally I've heard people from New Mexico complain that people look at their license plate and assume they are not American.

We are talking about a country where large minorities to majorities do not know whether the Sun goes around the Earth or vice versa, that there has been no significant scientific debate about evolution in a century, or that the evidence for human-caused global warming is overwhelming. A country where many colleges find that the performance of their football team has a bigger impact on their financial bottom line than the quality of their academics.

Outside of various bubbles, this is not a country that actually values knowledge very much. Every attempt to change that is swimming upstream against a strong current.
WRT masks and race there was a really interesting bank robbery where the robber obscured his race with a latex special effects mask and sunglasses.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/white-bank-robber-chang...

Interesting that even with those precautions he was still caught.
> in java, c++, or c#, to add a variable to a class, you have to repeat its name 4 times. once to declare, once in the constructor parameters, and once on each side of the assignment. why am i writing the same thing 4 times for what should be a core part of the language?

Because Java, C++, and C# suck at this. I'm trying to see the relevance to the OP, which is about Python, which rather decidedly lacks this problem. To add a new instance variable in a class, you need to mention it once, or twice if your using a __slots__-based class for compact memory footprint (because then you have to add it to __slots__ and then actually assign it a value somewhere.)
except most people don't have his wit or intelligence, so prepare your filters!
Cryptocat Passes Security Audit With Flying Colors
also see this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/02/...
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tax_compliance
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good thing expensive enterprise windows hosting is never hacked.
Yeah, that and the whole Newton's First Law thing. :-|
I wrote my reply to waterlesscloud above before I read your comment here. I honestly don't mean to be condescending or dismissive. Truly. If I had had different parents and just the wrong combination of teachers in my own high school twenty-something years ago, I probably would have ended up with a very similar outlook on things.
> It is neigh impossible to program a computer without some semblance of empathy, albeit for a machine and not for another human with all those complicated feelings. You have to think like a computer: to envision how it will respond to an input and what its options are for subsequent action.

Solid. I've never thought of development in terms of empathy for the machine, but it's a valid and interesting perspective.

Of course, one form of empathy that also gets cultivated is empathy for the programmer. It's quite easy from a non-technical perspective to gloss over the challenges that developers face when framing instructions for the inherently pedantic and narrowly logical beast that is a computer.

>An analogy for this argument is that learning to program today is a bit like learning to speak Phoenician if you happened to live on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea in late antiquity. You could probably get by just fine without speaking it, since most of the Phoenician traders you would encounter most likely have a rudimentary grasp of the local language.

I agree. One nitpick, on which I'm happy to be proven wrong, is that IIRC the heyday of the Phoenician traders was well before what is normally termed 'late' antiquity (2nd century AD onward).

>The correlation between literacy and political agency is undeniable. We would be foolish to ignore this correlation in an age of digital literacy.

Salient point.

What I find these discussions typically end up revolving around is to what extent programming literacy should be encouraged.

From a macro perspective, we live in a world of finite resources, and computer programming is far from the only important skill in a well functioning society. Thus, how much is enough? To piggyback on the adage that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing", how little is perilous?
If by not maintaining the price for 24 hours means that you're spending less and less bitcoins for it, then yes, you're right.
Honestly, the simple fact that there is a discussion regarding the range of the Model S shows that its still an issue. Will it work for some? Sure. Will it work for most? Probably not.
Hi, Jon here! Actually, I'm the technical founder. I'm a Ruby on Rails developer originally (have commits in Rails itself). The other founders were graphic design and sales. For about 6 months (post YC incident), I was doing design, engineering, customer support, and fundraising for our seed round with just the help of my wife helping out with Community and writing.

Sometimes I miss those days. :)
Stop Selling Ads and Do Something Useful
Should an armed drone be dispatched to kill Christopher Dorner?
So why are you a shareholder? Or why haven't you attempted to change the policies from long term thinking to quarterly thinking like most companies these days?
The 10 gig is the montlhy bandwidth for shared links only, not for personal downloads:

The bandwidth limitation refers specifically to your usage of shared links in a given month. Once you reach 10GB you can no longer download via shared links until the next month
As best as I can tell (unless Tesla releases data showing otherwise), the reporter probably did not intentionally sabotage the results, but made a number of errors possibly because he was trying to simulate a "mass consumer" driver. On the one hand, he should have known better. On the other hand, I can imagine similar things happening to some subset of new Tesla owners who fail to read up on what to do with the new technology, and it is fair to point those faults out.

I imagine the reporter's article would have rubbed Musk the wrong way a lot less if the reporter had made it more clear what was going on and that some of the things that happened were the results of mistakes made (whether or not you might expect consumers to make the same mistakes).

For example: if the reporter had explained that he was intentionally trying to simulate "normal use" by not plugging in the car at night. If the article had said, "The owner's manual said to plug in overnight, repeatedly, but I chose not to in order to see what might happen if a less educated consumer were driving the car," I imagine the article would have gotten more sympathy. The article, as I read it, didn't really get into that, and seemed to simply imply a failure on Tesla's part.
Google sucks on this support. This makes me shy away from their phones and buy Samsung's. Which is practically the same hardware anyway, but with a vaguely human company behind it.
Currently it seems to have become an IBM sponsored project after being spun out of Oracle to Apache. Not sure if this history has made it impossible for OpenOffice to succeed.

I'm not sure why you would think that. OpenOffice is progressing nicely in it's new home at the ASF. And calling it "IBM sponsored" might be a bit of a misnomer: IBM has contributed a lot of code and has paid developers serving as committers, yes. But one of the very points of the ASF incubation process is to ensure a sufficiently diverse community around a project, to where no one company has control of the project.

There's a lot of great work going on in the AOO project, and I heartily recommend that anyone looking for an office suite give it a look. It is definitely not the case that "LibreOffice won and OpenOffice is dead". We have two projects now, with a lot in common, but evolving in slightly different directions and - to some extent - competing with each other. Personally, I think this is good for the ecosystem as a whole and that both projects are becoming better as a result.
Haskell vs Clojure syntax
In case anyone was wondering, I used the app to check pricing for my 1br/1ba with pets near downtown Seattle:

$107 for a one-time cleaning, $214 for a thorough "move out" cleaning.

The earliest appointment available for either was two days out, on the 14th.
There seems to be a gaggle of people who have popped up somewhere within the intersection of entrepreneurship, online startups and lately education that seem to effectively be self-help "experts" in disguise. In some ways it feels like the social networking experts have found a new outfit.

The thing that feels a bit smarmy about it is how a lot of these folks pitch tech entrepreneurship to inexperienced people as some form of paradise where you just listen Seth Godin, finish codecademy, setup an iphone app and a life of abundance falls from the sky. Perhaps I have this guy wrong but I think its a trend that is pretty disingenuous. Colleges need to figure out how to compete and realign their pricing thats for sure but the learn to code, slap together an app, learn some web buzzwords and go pitch people is not exactly much of a real alternative education. Perhaps its Silicon Valley's vision but it seems to be more self serving than the traditional education industry of today.
Daavid, I really enjoyed your writing! Near the end I laughed out loud. Although, thinking about your experience... I could see how frustrating that could be :)

I agree, with such an experience, Google cars don't seem like a good idea at all.
Yes, this a prototype and definitely not for everyone. It has many downsides. I agree Photoshop gives you full pixel control.

I think it has some upsides too. You may treat comix source as html code and apply tools we have for coding today, eg. diffs, version control, collaboration via github. People may also collaborate on library of items, actors and their poses, so you don't have to re-create them or copy&pase all the time. Also localisation will be a snap. And it will possibly allow animations in the future.

Actually I built this for a bigger project. I want to explain Bitcoin technically in the form of XKCD comix. This won't be one-off comix strip. This will be something like wiki/book which will evolve and I hope it will attract other contributors (not necessarily graphic designers).
They're probably not paying that tuition now. They will eventually though, and at that time they may not think they got a very good deal for all their loans.

If school loans disappeared tomorrow then the situation GP describes would as well. Of course, that might coincide with the disappearance of that entire community college.
Shooting stars ebook
To go along with it, making XKCD diagrams in Mathematica: http://blog.wolfram.com/2012/10/05/automating-xkcd-diagrams-...
I address this further down thread, but in a nutshell: there are effective, fair ways of evaluating teacher performance [1]. And I'm all for them. Standardized test performance is not on of those ways. Furthermore, in a lot of the schemes currently being put into place, teachers are not evaluated by test scores at the school level, but at the district or state level. Teacher evaluation is necessary, but it's not easy. Trying to shortcut things by asking standardized test score to do more than they are capable of (which is not much) is exactly the kind of thing that drives good people out of teaching.

[1] See: http://www.epi.org/publication/bp278/ and http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/meet-a...
Seems like a fair impression if you include the sentence in the article immediately preceding the one you quoted:

She said to shut off the cruise control to take advantage of battery regeneration from occasional braking and slowing down.