skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"None of the power, all of the responsibility."
A dangerous narcissist.
Bird Flu: On the Move and Hard to Track
This is pretty sweet. What optimizations does it do other than offloading stuff to CDN?
thank you. i couldn't recall the exact words, but yeah this is classic industrial espionage
The most accurate measurement of what a person has learned over a period of time is their ability at which they are generally able to discuss a subject. The best exam would be a personal exam in which the teacher orally administers a series of generalized questions and explorers the subject matter with each student to understand their actual level of understanding.

While it would take a long time to administer these tests for every student it would provide a lot of value for many subjects, while a written test would still be important to determine particular skill sets for certain subjects like math.

Any average student can jam a notecard full of likely facts or cram facts into their head the night before an exam, without learning much. Likewise working as a team to generate the best answer can allow people to receive a high grade without knowing much.

There is also the fact that even a well read student with a good understanding of the subject matter can a fail a test because they don't have a the particular points asked on the test.
I used the book I referenced for a course so that's what I am basing my recommendation on. Your suggestion also seems like a good choice but I don't have any direct experience with it.
One of the coolest WordCamps ever!
Thanks for those resources. Didn't know about them and they look really useful.
I'd be more surprised if even 1% of college students had to goal to learn as much as possible as opposed to get the highest grades possible.
Jeremy, image optimization/compression, javascript minification/combination etc are some of the benefits we've tested and had tremendous success with.
Thanks for the link. That was a really useful article for me.
There should be no surprise here.

Strategy #1 (follow rules) only works if you make strategy #2 (cheating) costly. That requires that there are people follow strategy #A of wanting to punish cheaters rather than strategy #B of not punishing cheaters. (From the point of view of someone following #A, someone following #B is cheating, since they are a free rider off of the efforts of people like you.)

The problem is that strategy #A is costly. But following it is more tenable if other people who follow the same strategy actively reward people who demonstrate that they follow strategy #A by outing cheaters. However when people who follow strategy #A become either too common (there are not enough cheaters to catch to reward the vigilance) or too rare (you're overwhelmed by cheaters), then #A becomes not worthwhile, which increases the prevalence of cheating. This proceeds until either there are enough cheaters that vigilance is worthwhile, or until that rule breaks down entirely.

Therefore you can only observe #1 (rule following) being a successful strategy when there are people around following #A (moral outrage at cheating).

In real life people switch between these strategies depending on the rule. For example I get morally outraged at people who cheat in school. I cheat on the speed limit (but within the limits that I think the police will accept).

However when you compare societies, you can clearly see that ones which discourage cheating, have far, far better outcomes than ones that broadly accept it.

In that note, my brother made a recent observation that I like. He's lived both in the USA and in China, and has dealt with people at various levels of society in both countries. His observation is that the broad mass of Americans tend to be relatively moral, but the people at the top in the USA tend to be corrupt. But China is reversed - the average citizen will gladly cheat you if they can, yet the people at the top genuinely want to do what they think is best for the country. (Note, my brother got to personally know many people who are highly placed in the Chinese government while he worked at Lovells and was putting together the Sino-Global Legal Alliance. His opinion of their characters is based on personal interaction, not media accounts.) His personal opinion is that this is going to be a net positive for China going forward.
Cheating means that you get the reward (the good grade in this example) without earning it in the prescribed way (by learning the subject and using your knowledge to get the good grade).

That's not a good life lesson and leads to entitlement issues and a society where you can't take any statement of accomplishment at face value.
Saying "I want to learn Quant Finance" is like saying "I want to learn programming," in that it really all just depends. There's an impossible number of fields and sub-fields, and many people know one field intimately but may not know another at all (high-frequency trading and derivative pricing, for instance, have little overlap). Also, some of these jobs (i.e. high-frequency trading) are about 90% programming, whereas other jobs tend to be significantly more mathematical. If you can't narrow your interests beyond just the exceptionally broad category of quant finance, then learn enough to figure out what subcategory you want to jump into, and then let me know and I'll give you a reading list, if I know anything about it.
And lithium can be recycled, so if the price of mining more lithium increases too far, expect the amount of recycled lithium used to increase as well.
At the risk of stating the obvious - this is all good and the experiment he's running is very interesting, but - no. I really like eating tasty food. Not for the nutrients, but for the experience. Similarly to how I really like sleeping in a comfortable bed and taking a hot shower daily even though, technically, I can rest as well on a bare floor and shower once a week.

To each his own, but some things are just too unorthodox.
If cheating in a multiplayer or scoreboard scenario is of no concern does it matter?
What few people realize about lithium batteries is it's not the lithium that's scarce and expensive, but the alloying elements that go in to make the electrode- most EV batteries use more Cobalt by weight than Lithium, and Cobalt is more expensive per pound.

Lithium's one of the lightest metals, so a little bit goes a long way.
Hacking textbooks: Tips to sell back your textbooks
Awful, I feel really bad for his family. First he goes missing, then he's suspected (by mob decision) of being a bomber/terrorist, and then they find his body. What a nightmare.
All these: https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/mod_pagespeed/filte... So image optimization, css and js minification, cache extension, css combining, image spriting, ...

But offloading things to CDN is actually one of the things it doesn't do. You might be thinking of the PageSpeed Service [1] which is a Google-hosted version.

[1] https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/service
Imagine a world where professional sports teams recruit the least talented players, and companies seek out the bottom of the class engineers, while everyone cheers how outstandingly ugly the models are because advertisers only want the most ugly to represent them, above the noise of the least gifted warbler singing on the radio.

There are many ways to be outstanding, why should the pursuit of the outstanding in some areas be any less socially acceptable than in other areas?
No need to "give [your] right arm for a rational discussion" on copyright.

Just get involved in one of the many CopyrightX discussion groups that are all based on Harvard Law School's CopyrightX course at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/tfisher/CopyrightX_Homep...

Last night there was a live webcast of a superb rational discussion on copyright involving several experts. Recording will be up soon, and I'll post it when available.

Perhaps also consider following the StackExchange.com community proposal for same at http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/51342/copyrightx?r...

Also, in case anyone here is not yet aware of this, the US Register of Copyrights testified before congress last month about how desperately US copyright legislation needs radical reform: "...if one needs an army of lawyers to understand the basic precepts of the law, then it is time for a new law. " and other very strong statements.

http://www.copyright.gov/regstat/2013/regstat03202013.html

For more details, see http://copyrightx.org/ and https://copyrightactof1790.wordpress.com/about/
You can see the complete list of filters (40+) here:
https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/mod_pagespeed/confi...

Note that docs above are for mod_pagespeed (Apache), but all of the same filters are available in nginx port as well - it's the same C++ code under the hood. In a nutshell: HTML, CSS, JS, and image optimization (resizing, recompression, WebP, auto-spriting, etc...)

Configuring ngx_pagespeed: https://github.com/pagespeed/ngx_pagespeed#how-to-use
For the most part, the cost of production is what matters. If Chilean lithium costs $x and US lithium costs $3x then it doesn't matter how is in the ground in the US, the lithium will come from Chile.
A nice platitude, but when folks from UX, marketing, sales, engineering, bizdev, and executives all want to know different things - that's how you end up with the 60-question surveys.
> No one in the United States plows fields or hammers steel.

Wow. Talk about being disconnected from reality.
Keep trying... the Heroku app seems to be getting hammered
I think we're really agreeing on your first point, and really just have a difference in choice of language. I was kind of sloppy, and used society as kind of a shorthand for the type of emergence you describe. In fact, I would go as far to say that a given society is the very type of emergent phenomena that you describe, and exists as a kind of a high (perhaps highest?) level system that we tend to exist and work within.

Regarding the second point, I really tried to cover this angle with my little bit about 'goodness' of a system, and also vastly over simplified things. Obviously different people in a system are effected by it to different extents, and can play vastly different roles. Many of the statements I was making were with regard to systems with all members are on roughly the same footing. Imagine an honour system for paying for soda, an agreement that everyone on a street clears their own segment of sidewalk of snow, that type of thing. My assumption was that systems and agreements where everyone is more or less on the same footing are generally beneficial to everyone.

Obviously, the situation with regards to taxis and Uber is different. The majority of people are just consumers. They don't really care as long as they are provided the same benefit (reasonably priced, safe, quick, point to point transport). The taxi companies on the other hand are in a completely different position, and in fact, from their position, Uber is definitely a cheating parasite, and a net negative for the taxi companies. I think this falls under my lazy little blurb regarding 'breaking bad systems'.
It's been running for about a week I think, and I'm just taking the top 80 or so tags by article count. Glad you like it :)
And yet again, here's 25 comments from the Hacker News Pedant Squad to remind you that it's not REALLY cheating if the teacher lets you, in case you only recently disembarked from an 18-wheeler full of turnips.
Facebook as CMS: Pagevamp
You mean like making Minecraft insanely popular? Or Kerbal Space Program the game of the year in many magazines? Or DayZ being the game of the year in most other magazines? Theres only so much we can blame the consumer for companies producing shit.
There are multiple goals for the students. One might be "have fun", or whatever, or maybe it's not a goal. One is "gain the best preparation for subsequent life", which might well be reducible to "learn the most possible", or perhaps not. Fine.

Another goal is "get the best possible grade", which some students might not have, but most do, and different students value it differently. But depending on the class, this MIGHT reduce to "get a higher grade than my classmates". Or it might not. If you have a chance (and willingness) to affect your classmates' grades, then knowing whether or not the class is graded on a curve is pretty important.
She explicitly stated so: Although the Wolves listened and contributed to discussions, they preferred their individual variants over the Mob’s joint answer.
"If people had more self-control obesity would take care of itself."

Obesity might be partly genetic.

http://www.cdc.gov/genomics/resources/diseases/obesity/
What I find interesting as well is that being attractive is not all roses, and sometimes it can work against you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr

Hedy Lamarr, credited with the US Patent for frequency hopping, was met with disbelief simply because people thought she was too beautiful to create such a profound intellectual contribution.

Many actors/actresses find themselves unable to break out of certain roles that match their look and caricature. In day to day life, we make assumptions about a person's personality based on how they look. There's a lot of "work" we all need to do to break out of the societal mold that's shaping other people's perception of our personalities if left to first impressions.
If you take a class in compilers you should see these sorts of inference rules when talking about operational semantics. Though maybe it isn't as popular to use operational semantics anymore. It's very useful to define rules in this syntax when working on semantic analysis and code generation.

I didn't get the background really necessary to really understand the type-theory parts of this notation until I took a graduate course in programming language theory.
This is a good guide for anyone hiring contract developers, not just those who are bootstrapping their project.

I've run into problems before mostly with communication, availability, and reliability as you mentioned. I'm excited to implement some of these recommendations.
If EA tries to avoid creating new IPs then there is little opportunity to show them with our money. Plus they seem keen on ignoring the successes of other companies that do create new IPs.
Temboo Martha
Next sentence is "it has all been automated", so clearly he means "not directly".
1: From TFA:

> Although by conventional test-taking rules, the students were cheating, they actually weren’t in this case.

2: The mob still contributed to the work of the lone wolves, it was absolutely still 'collaboration':

> Although the Wolves listened and contributed to discussions, they preferred their individual variants over the Mob’s joint answer.
Readability note: Theres a really annoying iFrame in top right (join Tumblr), fixed position that makes it impossible to read the blog and follows you.

Screenshot: https://twitter.com/danielpalacio/status/327525758065070080/...

There's no way to close it. Is this something that Tumblr adds?
The ultimate "learn faster than your foe or die" is in my opinion counter-insurgency. There is the army manual on counter insurgency by Gen. Petraeus(free download http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24.pdf), heavy on army procedures, but the general guidelines are very interesting. There are also David Kilcullen´s books, very well written with great insights on the mistakes made on Afghanistan and Irak.
2012 Google Founders’ Letter
My son and I watched Star Wars a New Hope this weekend and when that exact scene hit I thought of Soylent. Spooky!
I don't think that's a fair comparison. What if sleeping on the floor and not showering made you think better and your body healthier? It's not simply a privation technique, he seems to be doing it to hack his body for better performance. Although kind of anecdotal evidence, the article mentions several mood and energy changes when not on the soylent diet (I think those things could just as likely be a change in environment/routine though).
Schools emphasize the numerical values that represent the 'amount learned', not the actual acquisition of knowledge.

Any college student with the sole goal of learning how to learn & think unfortunately doesn't survive the education system.
Until this perception of attractive people being more trustworthy, smarter, etc. changes (it's probably not going to change), how do we incorporate this information into our lives and careers? My opinion: lose weight. Or rather, reduce your body fat percentage. It's not as hard as people make it out to be. Look at the hot or not composite index. Notice the correlation? The numbers are inversely correlated with their body fat percentage. If you are wearing great new clothes, are clean, are groomed, and are 30+ pounds overweight, you're going to look less attractive (and therefore less successful and trustworthy) to most people than someone who is wearing average clothes and is in decent shape. And I'm not talking about see-your-abs shape, though of course that's even better. I mean just getting to a healthy weight. It seems to me it's one thing that a lot of people with desk jobs overlook or fail to take seriously, that can mean a huge increase in quality of life in a lot of different ways.
I get lost in my work/play quite a bit and often forget about meals. I'd definitely be interested in trying soylent simply as a meal replacement, especially if ingestion/preparation of it is quick enough not to break my workflow.
How MicroVentures Handles Crowdfunding For Startups
The implicit "by hand" was pretty obvious to me, fwiw. I don't think that assertion is disconnected from reality at all.
Yes. This is the future.
As I understand it, that's because the franchise is already being developed elsewhere: http://mulereturns.com/
I learned from Foundations of Programming Languages by John C. Mitchell. However, it is a very dense book and I wouldn't want to work through it without a partner or a class.

http://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Programming-Languages-Comp...
Was it really the case that someone could steal information from a computer and not be charged with a crime, or indicted by a grand jury and then successfully prosecuted under existing law, and that until recently, when information was stolen from a computer, that was not a crime?
This seems to be a common complaint, and the response seems to frequently be: you don't need to replace all your food intake. 50% of the time you eat you might find it tedious and boring, so you can leave the other 50% for pleasurable eating and cooking or whatever else you enjoy about non-clinical cuisine!
This dataset you're compiling gets less interesting with every new lens we look at it through. You're YC and you're 500S and there must be a way to get data nobody else has access to that really indicates growth and success - like headcount, who's hiring, the 'true' positions they're filling (vp of nobody?).
Agreed, it's a shame. Similar thing happened to us, someone spammed our Zendesk support desk (and we pay them quite a lot money) and created lots of tickets.

Their support didn't care (not to mention they didn't have built-in flood protection, even a basic one), we have to deal with the mess in our side.
I wish I didn't have to compile from source to install modules, I'd love to continue to use the official nginx YUM repo.
I had a professor who used a similar concept of fostering active discussion and debate within the classroom, except he did it for every lecture. He would present a concept, then ask us a series of questions about it. Students would first think on the question and vote on their own, then the question was opened to discussion and debate. After the topic had been hashed out we would re-vote. Often times the difference between the first and second votes were significant, sometimes resolving a split opinion and other times the majority would change their minds.

It was a lot of fun, and easily the best and most informative experience of my educational career.
I can't figure out if this is just an elaborate troll.
So would you agree that "innocent until proven guilty" is basically a lie, since "human psychology" drives society to consider suspects to be always-guilty regardless of the outcome of the accusation? At any rate, the stigma being discussed in this thread derives from this tendency of society, innate to its members or not.
The colours of the internet aggregated: http://webcolourdata.com/profile/129
Is it cheating if you specifically take this class taught by this professor (as opposed to the same class taught by a different professor) because you know her final exam will be open notes and collaborative?
Why post something like this? I don't get it. He stated what he did to fix the problem and it apparently worked.

So his recommendation is proven to work and yours is....?
I created my own version of soylent (primarily made of a combo of hemp and whey protein powder, canola oil and vitamins, chocolate flavored and sweetned with sucralose and stevia) because I liked the idea so much. Its a great tasting chocolate shake and I look forward to each one. A liquid shake lunch doesn't have to taste bad.
Why would you expect people to be okay with the fact that the support center they called can't help them? You literally have one job to do and that is managing their emotions and feeding them [falsely] empathetic lines in a tone that doesn't lose their loyalty. That's why people don't last in call centers; it's often just an intentional waste of resources to buffer you from the people who can do something about your issue because they don't care.
"We no longer need big biceps". Well true, unless you want to attract women.
Well, he's making something people want; I'm an existence proof, as are a few other commenters on this thread.
It seem to pick up gradients too: http://webcolourdata.com/profile/816
"or maybe it's not ... which might well ... or perhaps not ... might not have ... MIGHT reduce to ... Or it might not"

I love it, I think this pretty well sums up how much certainty there is about what people want out of education :)
> that type of thing would never be allowed in the US for multitude of reasons

I'm American and we had that in my high school.
I am shocked by your comment, and I disagree with your implicit definition of cheating on multiple levels.

Your miss-application of 'morality' in the US/China example is blatant racism, and should not be tolerated. It's also completely false, and the worst kind of personal conjecture. Just because you have been socialized from a Judeo-Christian/Greek Moral traditione and Western does not give you the right or the authority to make such a judgment on another culture.

I can't even respond cogently to your arguments on cheating my computer is smoking so hard.
To get it started, subcategories include:

1) High-frequency trading. Very programming oriented as trade latency is everything. You'll need to be really good at making C/C++ code really fast. Math is somewhat less important than other fields.

2) Derivatives pricing. Usually working for banks/hedge funds, and use various methods (Monte Carlo, PDE, transform) to price options. Will need to know C/C++ and/or probably Matlab, C# (Excel is king here, so MSFT languages is a big deal), and Python is on the up and up. Will need to have a serious math background. This is more or less what I do.

3) Algo trading. Uses mathematical techniques to find patterns and execute trades. Probably works for a hedge fund. Programming languages vary by fund and include Matlab, Python, C/C++, Java (one uses Ocaml). Less theoretical, lots of playing around with data.

4) Quant risk. Usually works for a bank or hedge fund in the risk department. Responsible for things like building VaR models. Usually requires light programming (VBA, although serious languages help), and some lightweight math.
Quazi-Modal Pricing