skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Happy to chat. We actually moved from the Bay Area to the Boston area recently.

I didn't see your email in your profile, but feel free to shoot me an email through my profile (anand at percept dot us)
We'll definitely make that clearer.

It's not just for the speakers - we show team members who are attending the event as well. The primary intention of the company pages is "come and meet us at these events", so attendees are very important too.
I have to admit I was a bit scared when I read this too. My introvertness makes me want to run from stuff like this. However I do have to say that there should be some effort to greet the new person. I had one job where I was sat in a cube and no one around me me said hello. I had to reach out and they were so dispirited I got a lukewarm response. It was a chilling effect for a first day.

Oh and I could not do anything with my machine since it was not set up.
She is citing other studies that attack Hanushek's analysis, but she isn't citing any mathematical arguments that she created herself. There are a number of problems with Hanushek's argument, among them:

- The ratings are completely unstable, so a teacher who is in the bottom 20% one year has a pretty good chance of being in the top 20% the next year.

- Hanushek doesn't account for forgetfulness when evaluating the differences between teachers. So if you retest the students on the same material two years later, it turns out that the difference between a great teacher and a mediacre teacher is only about 1 / 8th as much as Hanushek had supposed. And the teachers that do the best in the short term (at the end of the school year) have little correlation with the teachers that are actually the most effective in terms of getting kids to know the most after two years, which is what is actually important.

- Even if the teacher ratings were stable, which they aren't, they're not on an interval scale, meaning that the comparisons between different teachers are largely meaningless.

- Students aren't assigned randomly to classrooms, and the differences between their abilities and backgrounds can't fully be corrected for for various reasons. (One of which being that again the tests are not on an interval scale.)

- In order for the VAM to become at least fairly stable it takes about 7 years, by which point about 60% of teachers have already been fired or quit anyway.

- VAM only works for math and literacy and not the other subjects that aren't tested.

- The VAM ratings are extremely test specific, and if you give a different test of the exact same material to the same kids then the teachers that are 'effective' or 'ineffective' are often wildly different.

- VAM only works if you have data for kids from the previous year. However the data tends to be missing for about a third of kids, especially in low-SES communities where people move around much more, which means that VAM is much less accurate in minority communities due to having less data to draw from and therefor less statistical power. Which means that it's effectively firing/disciplining/rewarding teachers at random in these communities, and therefor discouraging good teachers from teaching there.

There are other issues too, I'm happy to email you my notes if you'd like, which are mostly from the sources that Ravitch cites and not from Ravitch herself. (The sources are mostly things like Department of Education studies.)
What’s New in Node.js and libuv this week – April 11, 2013
What Bitcoin Is, and Why It Matters
Maybe these people bought the laptop as a used laptop from eBay without knowing it was stolen. It's no good to break their privacy and show their pictures like that. But this article must be a troll otherwise why someone would create a new tumblr page for stolen laptop?!

BTW despite being a muslim, they drink Hennessy. LMAO!
If you're interested in meteor, telescope (http://telesc.pe/) is an open source social news project.
while (1) { Steal a macbook, pocket $200. }
Awesome. Apply for a key here: https://creativemarket.com/platform/api
Maybe you're right. But as folks sitting in front of a computer all day maybe it's nice to see these kind of post now and then.

Granted, I could see it on Reddit instead but the homepage is crowded with funny images.
I found this interesting for a different reason, the Iranian connection.

So there are like a bazillion sanctions on Iran and importing products into Iran is a big transgression, so somethings are hard to come by. One such thing is apparently laptops. The creates a huge black market for them. There isn't a good Chinese counterfeit item (although there are for the accessories)

So stealing these things is currently profitable. But the interesting point was an Iranian guy who out of the blue called me up and offered to buy any "not too old laptops we weren't using" for nearly list price. I was pretty amazed until I figured he was making the profit on the other side.

Sad.
If it's that wildly off then they're probably just using the IP address to do a WHOIS and basing the location on the details reported by the ISP, which tends to be wherever the largest office of the ISP is located.
The Facebook "phone" approach is interesting: take over the phone to such a degree that it delivers a FB "experience". No dependencies of the Evil Triangle of the cell world: Handset mfgr, OS provider, Carrier.

Yet Moz apparently is looking to become another OS provider? I'm wondering if they might take the FB approach instead.

FB will succeed now with Android, there appears to be no App Store issues. But my bet they'll also force Apple to cry Uncle! relatively soon. Now THAT would be progress
Going viral is not random, magic or luck. It's a science.
Maybe because it doesn't matter
Not US, UK.

"My name is Dom. This is where my flat is, in London, UK."
While this might look nicer, it's solving one problem by creating another, and in my opinion larger, problem.

The problem when it comes to listings is that information needs to be easily scannable. The information to be scanned usually has a certain hierarchy, so there has to be a separation that reflects this hierarchy.
If you use your solution, you favour optimal separation while sacrificing scanability.

This is not exactly a straight-forward problem to solve because the hierarchy is different for everyone. But one thing we can all agree on is that the title is at the very top of it. So, having the title in a bigger font-size, maybe bold, but definitely more contrasted as the stuff around it goes without saying. So the current HN style is not that far off the mark, though I think it could do with less data and/or more whitespace, to counter the "gray haze syndrome".

A straightforward fix for this meta-data clutter would be to make it collapsable, you could then show it in a tooltip on hover for example. Or make it collapsable on a per story basis to cater for tablet/phone users.
What Krugman said here applies to the EU too (infact he's basing it on IMF research using global data):

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/the-price-
stability-trap/

"in the modern world, rapid deflation doesn’t happen, and in fact slight positive inflation often persists in the face of an obviously depressed economy"
Where can I find what 'speed_to_nearest_moon' does?
> I had a chip on my shoulder when I was your age too.

Do you know how old I am? :-)

> The problem with 2 is that there is too much luck involved hitting home-runs. If you base your sense of accomplishment on that chip in your shoulder you will only be greatly disappointed later in life.

That's a fair point, but it's more than just the "chip on the shoulder" effect. It's also, as I said, about demonstrating - to the people who have supported me, and shown belief in me - that their belief was justified. And that's something that matters to me. Sadly, some of those people are getting older (my parents, for example) which contributes to my desire to work harder, since I want to accomplish something in their lifetimes.

> You only have yourself to compete with.

I agree with that to a point. But combined with

> There's nothing to prove.

I would argue that I do have something to prove... to myself. I need to know what I'm capable of achieving, and if I give less than 100% effort, I'll always have to look back and ask "what could I have done if I'd really given my all"?
I think Apple's stance has always been that they don't want to get involved in device retrieval unfortunately.
I like where this discussion has gone. I feel like the vast majority of us are stating that we didn't understand our market well enough and didn't get validation early enough.

Our product relied heavily on the technology behind (it needed to be fully coded before being functional). So how do you all think we should go about validating a market using an MVP without having the product coded out?
Cure Poor Posture at your Desk with the mStand Laptop Stand
> I always wonder why those _smart_ people:

> - don't protect their laptop using a password

> - therefor probably do not turn on FileVault?

This is obviously a publicity stunt. Or perhaps the thieves erased all of the data and set up a new user account... But then HiddenApp wouldn't be on the computer anymore.

Or maybe the original user was too dumb.

Or, most likely:

This is staged, and a publicity stunt. No other explanation.
Technically, you own it, and they took it from you or bought it on the black market. So actually, I'd postulate you do have that right. Legally speaking, that is.
Ah, the irony. :)
A comment on the presentation:

I have three monitors right now, my build-in MBP one and two others hooked up to it. I would like to watch this video in full screen on the MBP display, while doing other stuff in the other two.

Clicking on "Full Screen" activates OSX's shitty built-in "full screen" mode, which moves the video full screen to the center monitor, and hides away every other window on my desktop.

This is awful.
Announcing the Objective-C Mailgun SDK
It's kind of a dull problem, unfortunately. I think this is also why so many of the XML standards are poorly implemented.
In this case, Google would operate the endpoint a http://search. They may redirect or proxy to your registered preference for a search engine, but they have still answered the original request. So if you used an automatic search tool (like the search box built into your browser) that used that address, Google would see http://search?q=question as the request and THEN have to decide what actions to take (redirect, proxy, etc). Users that just went to http://search and THEN entered their question would not show Google their queries, if redirected to their engine of choice, but if Google just proxied their search engine choice, they would still see everything.
Evasi0n Jailbreak HITBSecConf2013 Presentation [Slides]
Show HN: We are building a site to validate ideas and projects; check it out
Unfortunately for the user the 'pocket $200' API has undocumented behaviour that lands him in jail.
My instinct exactly! I have seen something similar before.
The one thing that I want to counter people who complain about the whole nothing new in heaven and earth issue is that the reimplementations are typically removing historical cruft that made the old versions untennable for contemporary development or have solved a hard problem that made things work poorly.

Now, that doesn't mean the new version is tennable, but it means that it's probably time to re-evaluate the old idea.
Facebook's Zuckerberg Launches Political Group
See the discussion of this point at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5530988 (and child comments)
You'd think these companies all had a vested interest in underpaying a bunch of H-1B visa holders or something...
I'm curious to know what his ulterior motive is behind this, as I've never been able to take anything he says at face value.
It is an extraordinary claim to say that they "certainly" did nothing wrong. You don't know that, and just as viable of an explanation (even more seemingly logical) is that this is the family of the thief.

However if we accept your notion that they have "nothing" to do with it, the secondary market is what props up the theft market. Many people buy goods from shady actors and with shady pasts ("Oh I've totally lost every supporting component..."), knowing how the sausage is made. Those people should worry about the goods, and hold some culpability in it.
Will This Fly? is a place to gain feedback and validation on projects from other innovators, developers or entrepreneurs.

Post details of your project; let others vote on its viability to provide feedback; iterate and develop until it’s a winner.

A single project is on there now, Will This Fly? itself. Try it out, vote it good or bad and let us know what you think. We would appreciate any feedback.

We will read all comments posted here on HN.

Thanks :-)
Presumably they have the 10btc set aside. It would be a bit stingy to hold it back if btc goes up, but I guess they might.
Yep. YC'ers have probably read some Paul Graham essays. If so, one of best perspectives I saw from him was:

"...What it amounts to, economically, is compressing your working life into the smallest possible space. Instead of working at an ordinary rate for 40 years, you work like hell for four. And maybe end up with nothing-- though in that case it probably won't take four years."

I think it's also key to hit that if you enjoy it, then hell, why wouldn't you want to reminisce about it?
It depends very much on local laws in your country, from what I've seen.
Yeah, austerity may be the most proximate thing, but that misses the chronic condition of depressed economic growth. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer.

But they try. Lots of European nations punish capitalists sufficiently that they just do their capitalism elsewhere, so any economic growth due to capital investments is happening elsewhere. Half of Europe's problems come from things like...

Okay, take this guy in Greece, who tried to set up an Internet-based olive-oil business (which you'd think would be a natural fit) and had to submit... stool samples... and faced other inane red tape... http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/world/europe/in-greece-bus...

to say nothing of insanely rigid diversity and disability hiring quotas which serve more as hoops to jump through than anything equitable and which depress average Greek wages to the tune of... what was it, 25% or so? need to find that article...

and the labor unions... let me quote the tire guy... "How stupid do you think we are?" http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/20/us-france-workers-...
The pastry example is really important. You can't just serve ads to people, they have to be targeted toward the users' interests. Perhaps they're based on your check-in history, but this won't convert well to sporadic users.

I don't know how the majority of Foursquare users use the service, but my friends and I pretty much only use it to check-in - at a place that we had pre-determined. There is no discovery or opportunity for an ad to capture my attention or push me toward a promoted business. If I'm going to get a burger I don't care about your pastry ad. But there's no way for Foursquare to get this information. Not without disrupting the check-in experience.

As has been suggested, I don't see how Foursquare can grow their ad network with this kind of usage. How can they convince businesses to sign on?
This type of thing was also commonly done in hardware back in the day. For example, DEC VAX microprocessors sometimes had etchings that taunted Soviets reverse-engineering their technology (src: http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html ).
There is little that is more backward and corrupt than the path to citizenship in the US.
Ultimately the axe to grind is not with these people. They seem to be folks who bought the product at the end of the day. It may have changed hands multiple times, and shaming these people isn't justified,

Though I should admit that I'm surprised that it wasn't wiped before resale
Right. I understand this. I wouldn't want to be singled out or considered "special" or "different" simply for being a woman who happens to also program. At the same time I do have a very strong gender identity so I wouldn't be comfortable at all if I felt like I had to downplay or hide my gender to fit in. So while I do consider being a woman extremely important to my identity, it has nothing to do with me also being interested in tech and computer science.
because if they don't know that they're goods are stolen, they haven't done anything wrong and there is no reason why their privacy should be allowed to be violated

dude
They most likely do, both password and FileVault. The idea is to intentionally leave a barely-functional Guest account available to anyone who opens the laptop. Those in possession of the laptop start using it and the tracking software phones home with location, photos, etc. This is even a best-practice suggested by Apple; its quite effective.
She's hot! At least be grateful it's not in property of some fat, hairy dude. :D
So in reality this is just link bait? He can't crash a plane with his phone?
Is it possible to send positions/result to an outside server to use some kind of genetic algorithm ?
I guess that it depends on the ISP (for general area location) or the Wi-Fi SSID and MAC (for exact location). I just ran an HTML5 geolocation demo http://html5demos.com/geo from my wi-fi connected laptop, and the location is less than a couple of meters off. It even shows the correct corner of the building, where my apartment is.
I'm young (upper 30s), but I've been programming since I was 10 and I still love it.

What I don't love is being forced to work on project after project by employers that don't have the slightest idea what they are doing.

At my current job, I've been stuck in the cycle of:

-boss will give me the specs
-right before I finish, boss decides to change his mind (redesigns, functionality, etc)
-There will then be pressure on me to get all of the new changes done in a specific time frame (often not even close to reality).

This cycle has repeated 5 or 6 times. I still haven't had one release of the project I was hired to complete. It has pushed me to leave and start my own company.
On Pet Peeves - A Rant
For those that are unaware: http://www.gnustep.org/

I think libraries like Qt and GTK get a lot more development bandwidth because there are popular desktops built on top of them (KDE and GNOME, respectively). With the growing popularity of QT dev on desktop and mobile, GNUstep may just dying out because the other toolkits are much more popular at this point.

If you take a look at the software index (http://www.gnustep.org/softwareindex/) there don't seem to be a lot of existing applications. It's somewhat difficult to want to develop with a widget toolkit that you have not used first-hand.
I don't know if it is dead or not but I am sure it does not include the cocoa framework. IIRC GNUStep has application kit and foundation kit and other framework for UI but I am positive it is not cocoa.

It always had great potential but unless the client has the gnustep stuff installed, your app won't run. Like Mac OS X, GNUStep depends on some bits on the destination machine.
(I may be wrong on this, it has been so many years...)
Has anyone been able to find the actual journal article? I would like to read it and come to my own conclusions. I find it suspicious that I cant find it, but maybe I am just not looking hard enough.
"underpaying a bunch of H-1B visa holders or something"

That's true when they don't have the money. Now that they do, increasing the wage makes it harder for startups to hire qualified people.
Open Web Platform Daily Digest
I'm curious on the status of the iPad. Surely you can do a "find my phone" with an iPad like you can with an iPhone? So either the iPad has never been turned on and connected to wifi, or the author has that feature disabled?

Or, to mesh with the conspiracy theory theme in this thread, perhaps it's not mentioned because Hidden doesn't have an iPad app?
An ambitious goal, but unless they have a clear path to get there, it shouldn't drive their valuation.
That's an interesting question. I dunno. It still is your laptop, and they are an unauthorized user. You should be able to log anything you want on your own system.
For comment systems with both anonymous and non-anonymous commenting (Disqus, LiveFyre), it's very rare (from my experience) that the valuable comments are made by anonymous people.
Legally? Who knows.

Not being a dbag in life? Probably leans towards not posting.
Do You Commit These Silly Grammar Mistakes?
Please post a summary here.
I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream
NumbaPro generates CUDA code that runs on the GPU. I don't see how using C++ to do it would necessarily make it faster as the code executing on the CPU end of things is not the bottleneck.
You also can't "instantly" transact with Bitcoin, unless you're willing to risk a double-spend. You have to wait for confirmations through the blockchain which involve fees AND waiting (or really really long waiting) -- if you're going to pay a fee, why not just use the CC network and get it done instantly? At least when you get an auth from the CC network, you know you're guaranteed the money. When a transaction completes on the blockchain, it's still up in the air until the next block is produced by enough people.
No it is not possible. All the possible alternative metals are already known and traded commodities. Gold also has many properties that people find desirable in a store of value: it is stable (resistant to oxidation), relatively rare, workable (fairly soft), etc. A new hash is for the most part equivalent to the last in the ways that count.
> Edit: I'm in the early stages of planning the next one, which will be bigger :)

Better get a G-Wagen then ;)

http://www.topgear.com/uk/car-news/gunther-holtorf-g-wagen-r...
Ask HN: How much is your idea worth?
We hear a lot that having just idea doesn't matter; execution is the key. However not all your ideas are worth executing either.

How do you decide which is worth investing time in?
I don't see why a GNUstep application couldn't statically link the GNUstep libraries and include them in the application distribution.
I also think that clicking on the link to an error should go to the debugger panel, rather than opening the source in another popup.
Thanks, that's much clearer now!
Fair point, most of the mistakes were on the author's part. MtGox isn't completely blameless, they had a cross-site scripting vulnerability, and they should probably enforce some stronger security around logins from new computers. Something like Steam's approach where every login from a new computer needs to be verified with a confirmation code.
Foursquare & App Wisdom From Whole Foods Check Out Lady
That is only effective if you have all exchanges working in a coordinated fashion. Halting trading on a single exchange (even if it is the largest) does nothing to arrest the fall since trading can (and will) continue at other marketplaces.
The New Yorker Is Wrong About Stanford And Silicon Valley
To those wondering if this is really a marketing site for HiddenApp:

Is this really the best marketing?

Hidden - When your Mac or iPhone is lost or stolen, Hidden will show you where it is and who has it.

Not that you'll be able to do anything about it.

(Just playing Devil's Advocate, not actually sure about this one either way)
But it's his laptop. Shouldn't he be able to use it as he sees fit? It's not his fault that these people are standing in front of it.
A must read !! Impressive !!