skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't feel his comment was as general as 'blindly accept the crappiness'. What I read (which mirrors my own sentiment) is that it is seen as the normal and proper thing to supplement some local public services with fund raisers because they are underfunded. Firefighters breakfasts and school bake sales.

Seriously we don't pay enough taxes to cover these basic services?
Working From Home is a Dead End Job (video)
Perhaps not, but the quality of research at IAS is surely better than that at all but a handful of universities.

Also, the IAS does things like have "special years" devoted to a particular topic, and then a ton of professors in that area take their sabbatical that year to go to IAS for a year. It would be difficult for a university to do that.
Chrome is pretty nice, too.
Here's a thought experiment: Imagine that I breed gorillas. Soon after reaching adulthood each gorilla is killed and made into dog food. One day I discover a gorilla whose mental abilities are similar to a 6-year old human child. That is, the gorilla can reason, communicate, be creative and show empathy just like a child. Is it OK to kill that gorilla? If so, how about an '8-year-old child' gorilla? Or 10-year-old?
> 6. The most successful tech guys I have know dropped out of school, and learned to program on their own

To a large extent, given the values of US universities, that's mostly inevitable.

What are such values? In a university, the profs are expected to be doing 'research', not just teaching what's already on the shelves of the libraries or in commercial products. In computer science, the 'research' is supposed to be finding the 'fundamentals' of computing, e.g., the question P versus NP.

So, there can be some first courses in computer science that concentrate on teaching a programming language, maybe Java, and then some later courses in algorithms, data structures, compilers, database, etc., but, still, turning out people ready to 'hit the ground running' in a serious programming team is not really the goal.

Now, there are community colleges, but there is a 'quality' problem: First, the better students tend to go to universities. Second, where is a community college going to get someone who is a right up to date software team leader to teach and, also, do a really good job teaching with preparing the course materials and giving individual attention to the students?

Net, at least in the US, it's long been the case in computing that mostly or even entirely have to be self-taught. Heck, I've taught computing to undergraduates at Georgetown and to graduate students at Ohio State but I essentially never took a course in computing and, instead, was self-taught and before such teaching had a good career going in industry.

Self-taught's largely where it's at. Sorry 'bout that!

Solution? If you can think of a topic that needs some good teaching, then get smart on the topic, write a book, sell it in some form, maybe Kindle, develop some lectures and put them on YouTube, have a blog, etc.
The next stage is hidden design. I'm not saying this as a joke. It can be very difficult to understand because almost everything is hidden. It could be called minimalism, but it takes it to such a degree people don't see it. Think of the nest thermostat, jawbone bracelet, or even telling a television to start a movie (and having it just do it, without any visual UI).
None of that stuff is exclusive to github.
I have to laugh any time someone says "Humanely slaughtered" or in this case "slaughtered respectfully".

I guess the oxymoron is non-obvious.

Here's a couple extreme examples:
I humanely slaughtered your family.
I slaughtered your mother respectfully.

Followed by: "Why are you so upset?? I could have just opted out of slaughtering your family but I decided to opt into doing it respectfully."

I put that into familial terms to bring the context closer to home. We wouldn't stand for such language with humans. At the root is hubris and apathy.
> people aren't rational!

As an aside, I'll point out that this is essentially meaningless as a critique of free-market economics, since people's actual behaviors are the only viable external indicators of their underlying preferences that we have, so the only reasonable conclusion to draw from the observation of allegedly "irrational" behavior is that the hierarchy of values motivating that behavior isn't what we expected it to be.

In other words, since all human behavior is a product of underlying motivations, the behavior itself can't contradict the actual existing motivations, but can only contradict others' erroneous assumptions about what those motivations were; all economic activity is therefore rational by definition.

With this in mind, the whole debate regarding the rationality of economic actors becomes nonsensical; the critique is an attempt to falsify a tautology.
You could easily fix this by weighting the value of each new vote based on the position the comment was in when it got the vote. These weightings would need to be calibrated but would produce a better outcome.
I don't understand this comment. Quora doesn't show up in results bc they're not in the index, it's a private site. Unless that's changed?
what lurker14 said. Your first paragraph is correct, your second one is not.
I absolutely love his joy and wonder as he demonstrates. What a great video. This put a huge smile on my face. Thanks Felix :>
Windows 7 and below doesn't have notifications.
Quora did a good job of fixing this. You frequently see highly upvoted answers that aren't among the top answers and similarly answers with relatively few upvotes at or near the top.

How quickly late answers gather upvotes seems to be a big factor. I'm also fairly certain the relationship between the upvoter and upvotee plays a big role. For example if you frequently upvote a persons answers, that upvote carries much less weight than if you upvote some random noob. And if you downvote somebody whom you frequently uvpote, that seems to count as a super downvote.

Also, not all answerers are treated equally. Answers from a person with an algorithmically good (or bad) track record start out higher (or lower) than for others. This happens to me on a couple of topics where I've had popular answers. I can make a stupid one line answer and it'll instantly leapfrog answers from randoms with up to ~10 upvotes each, sometimes more.
Unlike Sheryl Sandberg, I chose to lean back
You can sort by upvotes : views ratio, combining both approaches.
Yes, I believe HN comment sorting uses the same algorithm as news items, where the score of an item is based on both votes and time, decaying over time.

Description: http://amix.dk/blog/post/19574

Comment sorting: https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/b78c7f/lib/news.arc#L2028-L...
I'm sorry. You can combine all of them and they are still not as useful Google Reader & Blocked Sites. #sarcasm.
This is simply spinning the story into the bitcoin manifesto if I ever saw such a thing.

Banks keep money secure. Wallets don't.

You seem to operate entirely in a world where inflation is the only thing that occurs. You ignore the fact deflation can and has occurred. Japan, for example, has experienced prolonged deflation and continues to face it today. So under your hypothesis, banks shouldn't exist in Japan because they are a place we put money to prevent it from losing value.

You also seem to be confused by monetary supply and its relationship to inflation and deflation. Just because a supply is fixed doesn't mean inflation and deflation don't happen. Look at price stability when we were under the gold standard[1]. Under your assumption we shouldn't worry about price volatility, except we experienced worse shocks while under the gold standard than without it. Inflation and deflation aren't inextricably linked to monetary supply. People play a large role, you can print infinite money but if people are afraid to spend it, you still won't experience inflation.

On a side note, it continues to amuse me to watch Bitcoin and the people who are passionate about them rediscover all the things banking discovered over the past few thousand of years. The ideas are hardly new and have been tried, yet the results are ignored.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/why-the-...
Because so many people want to live there.
Did anyone else notice that you can slide on the page, like on touchscreen devices, with a mouse?
Services that sell DRM'd content whose value isn't intrinsically linked to a particular device deserve extreme caution. Other than that, I can't really see a problem if you can take your content elsewhere.
To be entirely honest, I've never heard server used in the US, and a few of my friends are waiters and waitresses.
Does the extension remove results before they are sent to the client? In other words, if a result page has ten results and three of them are blocked, will I see seven or ten result boxes on my screen?

Client-side spam blocking has been available for years. The primary advantage of having spam-blocking integrated into the search engine is that the user sees a full page of results for their query, even if some results were filtered out.

If the Chrome extension supports server-side filtering, then it must be sending some sort of "exclude results from these sites" message to google.com. It would be very nice if the message format was documented and official, even if it's something as simple as a JSON list. That would allow extension developers to add support to other major browsers, especially Firefox.
I graduated from one of those Minnesotan miracle school districts in 2007. I think I got a reasonable education -- it wasn't great compared to what people in private schools got, but it set me up to succeed in college.

I now live in Chicago, which is the third largest school district in the United States. It's completely broken.

* The schools are massively segregated -- both by income and by race. The wealthy leadership of the city clearly decided a long time ago to give up on the public school system and send their children to private school. Even in middle class neighborhoods like Hyde Park, the divide is clear: if you're poor or black, you go to the local public school. If you can afford it, you don't.

* The school district is trying to close down 50 odd elementary schools, almost all of them in the ghettos. Why? Because population loss has eroded the tax income from those areas to the point where they can barely operate anymore.

* The entire teachers union went on strike for a few days earlier this year to protest salary and benefit cuts, increased testing, and the city's neglect for the school system. They didn't really win -- the salary cuts were mostly averted, but the tests keep rolling in.

* For every 100 students who enters CPS as a freshman in high school, only 6 ever get a bachelors degree.

The schools back home in Minnesota aren't perfect or even particularly good. They're mediocre. They're ok. But they're so much better than in Chicago (and many other parts of the country) that I will seriously consider moving back to Minneapolis when I start having kids.
(This will be hopeless to find in this massive thread, but...)

The OPs service-have laymen fund science-solves exactly the wrong problem (though he's on the right track.) The problem is not too little money, it's too much research because of the massive incentives to crank out crap, and the inability of the expert funding committees to sort through it all. Kickstarting this will just lead to funding the flashiest pseudoscience. We need to allow researchers more freedom to produce rarely, not encourage hype even more.
It assumes average posts would have the same amount of upvotes and downvotes. This is rarely true - people don't care to downvote boring comments, they downvote ones they don't agree with more often. This is why considering views might be better idea.
Yes, because such an application is effectively also a library.
Except Twitter used to offer "extremely deep API support...allow[ing] folks to build applications that leverage [their] platform in unique ways." And then they couldn't make any money that way.

I'm really not sure you have a good example of a loss of an open ecosystem here. NewsGator's plans were to pretty much create the equivalent of the (unofficial) Google Reader API, which, while not replacing RSS (the actual open format), does notably reduce its role. Moreover, for those who apparently don't remember, NewsGator actually did release their API. The API and their free reader software is what they shut down in 2009.

You can blame that on Google, who did indeed retain the lion's share of users, or you could blame the self defeating business plan of providing a completely open API for free even while it costs money to run. A NewsGator API is not a loss in terms of a loss of an open ecosystem (and Bloglines was definitely not a loss).

If you want open, you need a real federated protocol. Like RSS.

Meanwhile, this article says "RSS industry" in the headline, but it's about nothing like that. The author says it himself: "No, Google Reader’s real competition back in its early days was not client software but services that aggregated RSS feeds and synchronized them across multiple devices."

You can't embrace, extend, and extinguish services that have no standard format. RSS is doing just fine. What was lost here was a UI and a service, which leaves us with user migration pain and a loss of continuity of history (due to indefinite feed history).

We'll likely always need some services. Yes, I can run a feed aggregator on my home machine, but it's kind of a waste, and not everyone has stable IP addresses they can use to sync across devices. Instead of giving up on services, what we need to learn from this is to make sure the next services we allow ourselves to depend on don't have control of our history, both individually and collectively. Notably Facebook, Twitter, and G+ don't fit this bill, or fit it only partially.

(Unfortunately, our collective history on those services is complicated by visibility/access by person controls, so maybe there isn't a perfect solution. I know I can use takeout to download my posts on G+, for instance, but what about my comments on others' posts, and what about those posts themselves as context for my comments? And what about the major news of the day, even if I didn't comment?

Sigh...we need a modern usenet...)
Is the only way to beat Android to use Android?
I think academia is eating the young if it lets people do that in exchange for producing papers that the PI gets the credit for. Precisely because it isn't the case in all of academia, in the parts where it is, I think it really is eating the young.
There's a fundamental problems with your approach.

To reliably determine if someone has actually read a comment, this means the comment has to be hidden. You cannot assume that simply because something is viewable that the user is viewing it. Since you have to hide a comment, this requires a user interaction event to change its state. This is a broken model since comments are primarily a passive, not interactive, experience.
"centralized administration of user access"

This is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. Let the team working on the code decide who has access to the code. Not some person in a different part of the country who has no idea what the code does.
It is objectively the case that our schools aren't bad in general. Not as good as Finland, but adjusted for demographics about average compared to the rest of Europe: http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou....

You can't really compare the school systems of a homogenous country with low income inequality to one where 30% of the population is from either a historically oppressed racial minority group or relatively recent immigrants. It's especially misleading to look at school systems in urban areas, because that's where the U.S. puts most of the poor people.

That is not to say we don't have a problem here in the U.S. But the problem isn't with the education system, it's with how we've dealt with the disadvantaged in our society.

A great example of this is Chicago. Finland spends about $10,000 per year per student. Chicago spends about $20,000 per student. Chicago teachers are paid over $70k/year on average, almost double the $37k/year Finnish teachers are paid. Why does Chicago do so poorly? It doesn't take a genius to figure out that it has nothing to do with money or school quality, but the fact that 86% of Chicago's students come from low-income families, and 87% are disadvantaged ethnic minorities.
Still, lets not confuse matters here. People from lower tier schools make it, and make it big, all the time.

Yes, you can find plenty of counter-examples, but the average income of the college graduate and the highschool dropout are miles apart.
If you're considering getting into Rails and wanting to accelerate the learning process try something like Dev Bootcamp.
A "monopoly" consists of 100% market share, not 67%.
systems biology, so half wet lab and half modeling
Yeah, it's actually pretty well implemented because you can select text aswell, it doesn't get in the way. I didn't think something like this could work, but it's in fact not that bad.

Edit: https://github.com/debiki/utterscroll
"Masculinity" is defined as "number of men who have this name per number of people who have this name." Seems to me like A)it's difficult to do this test accuracy given the small number of people who have a given name and B)it doesn't necessarily accurately reflect how we perceive the masculinity of a name.

Also, "Because the number of female judges in the data is small, the asymptotic justification for conducting standard hypothesis tests is suspect."

This is an interesting paper, but it seems like it would benefit from a larger dataset.
Not sure which way you mean it, but it's important to note that this is only true if you have C-like undefined behavior in your language, and is not true of computer languages in general. It's not all that hard to define the results of all operations. I believe a lot of languages (e.g. Java) do this. For example:

- C makes it undefined to access beyond the end of an array. It's possible to define this as always throwing an exception or terminating the program.

- C makes it undefined to overflow a signed integer type. We can define this as following two's complement rules, or terminating the program.

- Writing to a constant string is undefined. We can define this to always work, to always terminate the program, or we can even define a type system that makes it impossible to even try.

Once you define all behavior like this, then there is no undefined behavior. A valid program is one that your compiler accepts, no more and no less. The program can still have bugs, of course, but if the program compiles, its output is always well-defined.
You can need this for client-side, especially if you're using coffeescript, google closure compiler, grunt, etc.

I need to write a filename randomizer that dumps the new filenames into a .json file that the webapp can load and cache to inject into the templates. (To defeat browser-side caching of unlike-assets)
Help with portable VBox
I might be interested in helping...
mikel@lawf.com
I've ruled this out as a possibility. For instance here I was the 4th comment (there are now 16), I posted 28 minutes ago and I'm still at the top comment slot at only 1 point.

It must be more than just a function of time and score, otherwise any of the new 1-point comments would have superseded mine, but they didn't.
A fine institution; it served as kind of a national library, museum, even a pseudo-patent office until there were actual federal institutions funded for those purposes. Pretty significant no doubt, but it never conducted original research apart from "paying" for the publication of the Proceedings.

Wasn't until around 1940s that they even started having grants and postdocs, but they aren't significant enough stipends to conduct original research.
Which, it should be noted, is unrelated to the Julian Calendar. That one confused me for a while.
"Run". Yes, just ~600 times slower. At that speed it probably won't be very useful. You have ~50 msec for an operation which is perceived as instantaneous. If it takes 30 seconds (600 times as long), people will not use it. It simply isn't feasible.

This stuff is only ES3 compatible because it didn't need anything from ES5. A low-level compiler target doesn't need any of these things: http://kangax.github.com/es5-compat-table/
Since I still buy into the benefits of the spatial metaphor, I like this kind of stuff.

But, lately, I've been moving to a more search-driven experience where I can add content/bookmarks/files/whatever to the system and forget about them until I need them later, so I'm not sure if this would scale to the number of bookmarks I've been adding lately.

But, still, neat. At the very least, I see some potential in this approach for curated "launchers", sharing sets of bookmarks with others.
Top US Best Cities For Jobs by Daniel Fisher
no kids; no health issues; financially just meeting ends;

I guess I am more concerned about changing career directions to become a developer and less concerned about starting a start-up right now
What's the average income difference of a Finnish college graduate (well, the ones that didn't move to the US because the opportunity was apparently better) and secondary school dropout?
>>posted synthetic benchmarks<<

The benchmarks game shows toy programs not synthetic benchmarks ;-)
- no for the first
- no tech background, hence wanting to do a bootcamp program to become a developer
- not sure about the last piece; what does this mean?
> He's commenting as an expert in Economics, not internet protocols.

Unfortunately, he isn't either. He isn't an expert in internet protocols because he doesn't have a sufficient understanding of how the internet works. He isn't an expert in economics because there's no such thing as an expert in economics.

I mean this seriously: [macro]economics isn't an empirical science; no experimentation, no experience, therefore no expertise. Mastering untestable theoretical doctrine doesn't count as substantive expertise.
that is very encouraging. Good luck!
> It is universal in theme, sure. Not magnitude.

Sure, we're bad. They're worse!
...you really should not be going days between commits...
Spoken like someone who hasn't had to receive health care in Africa. Or maybe you have. Can you tell me why you'd rate your experience in rural Angola as so good that you'd rather go there to treat a broken arm than Johns Hopkins?
I really like your posts on HN tokenadult, but would you consider revising this one? I especially had trouble parsing the 'So Linus notes...' paragraph.
Were your history and poetry courses pretty solid in high school? Mine weren't. I've learned more history on my own, from documentaries, biographies, books and the internet than I ever did in high school at least. I'd say middle school was a little more informative from better teachers. But my public school experience was nothing if not inconsistent.
How does Ember's Property Binding differ from Backbone.Stickit or Angular?
There is also evidence that your graduate students do better research if they teach. See http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6045/1037.abstract
yep that's it...
My ideal world: Basic courses should be taught by professional teachers. Intermediate courses should be taught by practitioners who also have good teaching skills. So an junior year software engineering course might be taught by a Google programmer who was good at teaching and was taking a one year sabbatical from Google to teach. Or the course might be taught by a programming researcher who was good at teaching. Master level courses should basically be the student doing an apprenticeship under an existing master practitioner. So someone wanting to be a computer science researcher would apprentice with an existing researcher. Someone wanting to be an engineer at Google would do an apprenticeship at Google.