skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many/most of the comments here reflect a general mistrust towards the administration, questioning motives or competence.

I've been the parent of a troubled kid. In that time, I worked closely with our school administration, who could not have been more helpful and smart.

If I lived in that school district, I would welcome efforts to address drug/alcohol/emotional issues. Maybe the survey wasn't perfectly done. But I don't see evidence that anyone was actually harmed by it.

In my experience working with sensitive information, educators have generally done the right thing, for the right reasons.
I really respect Temple Grandin so I hope that this article's almost nonsensical content is due to it being an excerpt from a book.

First, it conflates being successful with being an expert. I can be successful at something without being an expert. I can also be an expert and die penniless and unknown.

"My brain simply doesn’t work in a way that allows me to write code." There may be some disability that causes this but to counter an anecdote with another one, I think we all know people on the autism spectrum who are excellent programmers. And the fact that a particular person's disability prevents them from doing something says nothing about the rest of the population.

These types of articles really bother me because it's a well-known name, in a big "forward thinking" magazine, basically saying if you believe yourself to be "naturally ungifted" it's okay not to try. You have reasons. As someone constantly on the lookout for new things to learn and a brain on the autism spectrum, I can't abide that.
I'm not an active user or part of the SEOmoz/moz community, so perhaps my perspective is off (or perhaps it's better) but...

I think this is a bad move. Like it or not, I know what SEOmoz is immediately. I've known what it was for years. It's a brand.

Moz makes me think of Mozilla, immediately. That's just how the brain works. It doesn't make say "Oh that must be SEOmoz just expanding their reach!"

Love it or not, we all know what MtGox is. It's a Bitcoin exchange. Even though the name is based on Magic the Gathering, that doesn't matter. If they became Gox, that would be meaningless despite their best intentions.

As always, I'm happy to be corrected by someone who knows more about this stuff than I do, but me thinks this is a bad idea.
Thanks for the feedback.
I'm using Arual Light generated by FontSquirrel and I think FF does not support font-smoothing.
Will find a fix though.
Website visitors for your business
How do I down vote the above comment!?
Neither can I. But I hear about her all the time. I just don't know why.
I have a really hard time keeping myself from typing the {, } and ; when I'm in "css mode". Instead of fighting it I just embrace it.
Identification? As in how long we've been around?

We've got Ruby already installed and we offer Ruby on Rails so Sinatra should be okay to install. Obviously on the shared platform anything considered highly intensive or anything which will require ports opening won't be allowed. You'll need a VPS for that.

We do a full 30-day money back guarantee on all shared web hosting packages if something doesn't suit your needs.
It's an interesting concept, and I'm curious what results you find.

Here's my issue:

You say you value a $0.99 app as throw-away, and that the more you spend, the less throw-away it feels. Sure, if you priced your app at $20.00, I agree that it would feel less throw-away (if a customer decided to buy it, they value it at >= $20).

But you're not pricing it at $20.00. You're pricing it at $2.50-$20.00. Really, anything I pay above $2.50 is a donation to you, for your work. But in my head, it's still a $2.50 app, isn't it? Because other people are paying that amount even if I'm not.

I think what you're talking about is setting my expectation of the value it will add for me. For a $0.99 app, the creator thought it would typically only add $0.99 of value. For a $5.00 app, they thought it would add >= $5.00 of value.

It just sounds like you're not sure how much it's worth (or you have customers who it's worth $2.50 to and customers who it's worth $20.00 to, and you can't choose who to target).

One more point/question... wouldn't it be better for them to "pay-what-they-want" after they try it? Before they use it, they can only guess how much value it adds for them. Are you expecting that they've already downloaded and used your trial, and then return to the website to buy?
In the case of a general purpose computer, I'm willing to bet you'd be wrong. We're not talking about a Surface tablet here.
Total USA household wealth is somewhere around $50T, GDP $15T. Per parent post, the bottom 60% has 4.2% of wealth: that's $2.1T, or average $11,150 per person - most of which is not "disposable" (tied up in home, car, and other nonliquid essentials). Assuming same distribution for income, that's averaging $3,343 - again, most of it not "disposable" (rent, gas, food).

Yes, there are a lot of them ("poor" still being a debatable moniker when you're making more than 15x income of half the people on the planet). A lot of money can be made there, and many manage to. To the point of the lead article, a little bit from a lot of people can add up nicely for a business. To your point, there are indeed a lot of people sitting on a cumulative lot of money. To the point of the post in between, eliciting a lot of tiny slices from a lot of small piles of money is a lot harder than eliciting the same sum from a few piles orders of magnitude bigger.

Just trying to get a sense of scale here.
There was an opt-out notice sent via email to parents, at least several of whom claimed not to have received any such notice. The students were not given any opt-out opportunity.

> The teacher then undertook to tell students that they had a right not to fill out the survey, not withstanding their exercise of the opt-out opportunity, as if it were a fact.

It might come as a shock, but the students also have their own rights. Being a minor does not mean all of one's rights are subjugated to authority figures. Students do have 5th amendment rights.
Fair enough. I don't mean to belabor the point.
Tim Cook discusses the iWatch, iOS 7, iTV, and the future of the iPhone
This is about the four horsemen -- Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google -- and how Amazon is moving forward with Facebook and Google, and perhaps into the lead.

The true purpose of Google+ is to accumulate more information about you, not to be a "social network" per se. The latter is the means to the former.

Amazon has a huge amount of exceptionally high quality ecommerce information. They have "only" 200 million users, but info about what they actually like -- because they buy it -- not what they say they like. Plus, for search -- if you're searching for products/pricing, you might already use Amazon not Google.

Login helps Amazon extend information beyond ecommerce -- and potentially pull clearly in the lead in that regard compared to Facebook and Google.

Apple...has a problem in this regard. Excellent company in many respects, but falling out of the pack in this regard.

p.s. In all of the above I'm only talking about it from the company perspective. If you think it's not necessarily a good thing for a company to have even more complete data about you, I wouldn't argue with you.
| Defrauding someone will cause you to be
| guilty of fraud, because that's what
| "defraud" means.

The legal definition and the 'common' definition of something don't always match up.
Show HN: My app for envy free rent division
A lot of this was really good but I disagree with three points. You shouldn't stop using ID's unless you have a reason to. Mixing dashes and underscores is just ugly. And finally he calls @import after he declares his own styles which will override anything that he just declared. That is the opposite behavior of what you want it to do most of the time. Beyond that most of it is a good write up and has some really good rules that really help keep your SCSS clean and organized.
Maybe, but the heavy reserved instances come with a required hourly commitment. If you buy one, you have to pay the 24/7 hourly usage fee regardless of whether you're actually running a server. That strikes me as the bigger "gotcha."
A dead-simple GoogleReader replacement
GoogleReader will die, R.I.P. I'm done with tier-hosted services which choose to reduce features or close at will. No Feedly for me, thanks.

Here's an opensource self-hosted online RSS reader which is dead simple: https://github.com/tontof/kriss_feed
(Homepage: http://tontof.net/kriss/feed/)

And when I say "dead-simple", I mean it: Just drop the single php file and you're done. Yes, it's that simple.

It has all the features you expect: mobile version, keyboard shortcuts, read/unread status, starred items, OPML import/export, customized styles, collapsed/expanded view, public/private reader, you name it. And it's fast.

This is just great and hassle-free. Here are some screenshots:

http://sebsauvage.net/rhaa/images/201303/rha_20130317_kriss_5.png
http://sebsauvage.net/rhaa/images/201303/rha_20130317_kriss_6.jpg

This is KISS as I like it.
The one thing I don't agree too much with is splitting in many small files. This slows down refactoring and long files are handled properly in good editors.
This is very alpha at the moment and I would appreciate any comments on how to improve the app.
Can anyone provide more background to this point?

>And physicists rely on clocks to test the fundamental laws of the universe to ever deeper levels.

What will this instrument allow us to further discover, confirm, or understand?

This project also reminds me of the 10,000 Year Clock--
http://longnow.org/clock/
This is a nice read. Is there any place where we can learn more about these problems? as in, a place (blog/site etc) that lists problems that are real world problems to solve, than twitter/facebook type?
I can't believe Gabe Newell let the fired employees use the AR technology they where working on at Valve.
PayPal refuses to pay bug-finding teen
Microsoft's GeoFlow helps spreadsheet jockeys tell stories with maps
It makes it practical though since so many people seem to think linking off to HN instead of having comments is a decent way of handling discussion.
Interactors are not always triggered by a user event. Many of our interactors are triggered by a scheduled job or some other system process that doesn't touch a controller.

Also, as the article describes, interactors are plain old ruby objects, so are straightforward to test. An Abstract Controller, being a Rails construct, would require you to jump through some Rails hoops to test.
The wait-and-collect-info strategy can fail too.

If they watch transactions happen, trying to trace the money of particularly promising ones, and something goes south, they end up like the Fast and Furious ATF scandal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal

Basically, by letting it go on, they become implicated in whatever happens.
How I Hacked PayPal Users Reports System | Break Security
Notify Users When They Haven’t Completed a Form
Keep hearing stories like this.

Makes me think there's quite the hacker culture in China and other developing countries, driven out of necessity and lack of (or looser) regulation.

This farmer couldn't afford to buy prosthetics so he built his own for 1/10 of the cost and is now selling them to other people in the same situation.

I imagine in the US and EU he would have been shut down over patents, health & safety, etc.
http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2004/04/google-acquires-appl...:

"A key application of the CIRCA technology is Applied Semantics’ AdSense product"

Is this wrong?
I think I've noticed a pattern with these kinds of systems: its not a software problem; it's a policy problem.

When designing (evolving, inventing) rules, regulations, policy, exceptions, limitations, audits, checks, balances, the bureaucracy's princes seem to ignore the bigger picture of what it's all become: a mess.

It's not just government systems either. There's a reason why people joke about their phone bills being difficult to understand. Same goes for most utilities.

Now, once you have an incoherent, contradictory, thousand page mishmash set of rules, every engineer worthy of the title is going to stay as far away as possible. So, the whole mess gets dumped on an army of coders from a big consultancy.

Perhaps instead of focusing on the useless software written to fit a pile of inane rules, people could focus on the economic and operational benefits of redoing the entire policy regime with a zen-shaped comb.

Software is an enabler. It's actually covered-up a lot of really awful decision-making. The US tax code could never have become what it is if developers hadn't been able to consistently keep up with crazy new patches to implement it: nobody could possibly manage it by hand.
Shameless plug: the scss-lint tool we built at Causes provides you with an automated way of enforcing a consistent style, including a number of details not mentioned in the original article:

https://github.com/causes/scss-lint/
Intel Perceptual Computing Challenge
Amazon does have a social network though https://kindle.amazon.com/, actually two now with the aquisition of goodreads
Clever, clever article. Anything you say in criticism of it will get you labelled an Old White Dude.
Unfortunately, it's not an assumption. It's not immediately clear when looking at the pricing, but if you buy a heavy reserved instance you have to pay the 24/7/365 hourly rate. It's something for startups to consider as they look at their burn rate.
The New Tetris hidden rants
Wanted for the Internet of Things: Ant-Sized Computers
1) and 2) are justifying the hype about Mayer by citing the hype about Mayer as evidence.
People can talking without having a daily, scheduled, standup meeting! If the only time people are talking is during the standup, I would consider that an anti-pattern. :-)

I'm certainly not advocating not communicating or collaborating, and frequently. Just saying that the daily standup isn't always required.

Given that very exploratory context, I also really like people generally being present. If that's the default, you can iterate much more quickly.

Fair enough.
Which had nothing to do with it being a real threat to the USD - firstly because it was never a real threat to the dollar, and secondly because it was demonstrably used for criminal transactions.
That's probably because you're a paying customer rather than a pair of eyeballs to them.
I'd suspect that in more "mature" working environments the probation period is used more as a fail-safe mechanism, as opposed to being integral to the actual hiring process (which is what it sounds like at FB).
The original title makes me think this is not really a Show HN. Have you made this?

It's a cool product anyway.
Less than a month ago? It was submitted just yesterday!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5778469
Apple isn't going to solve this problem more than anyone else looking to change the balance of power, unless the big distribution companies get their tithe, nothing changes.
Never has it been deemed necessary to educate a child by making him put into writing his misdemeanors. Ever.

If you want to educate a child or a minor, please please please talk to him personally. If you cannot do this, you are not going to educate him.

And never in your life ask him to write anything wrong about himself. Even less with his name on it. It is a useless exercise which can only have ill side-effects and help nobody.
Robot pours you a beer later, based on you now
Pedantic question here: Which of the classic Gang of Four patterns does interactors fall into? Mediator?

http://geekswithblogs.net/subodhnpushpak/archive/2009/09/18/...
> At this point I don't think they are trying to compete with google or anyone in particular. I think right now they are just trying to be relevant and not be just a lost cause.

I wanted to say exactly this. +1.
Sorry if I've misread your example, but I think this isn't quite correct. While the "batch" method of dish-washing (washing all at once, then drying all at once) is probably more convenient and efficient for humans, if you were to formalize your "dish-washing" algorithms, I believe both of them would have running times in the same class of functions -- ie the same big Oh.

In pseudo-java-code:

void washDishes(Dish[] dishes) {
for(Dish d : dishes) {
Sponge s = getSponge();
s.wash(d);
Towel t = getTowel();
t.dry(d);
}
}

void washDishes(Dish[] dishes) {
Sponge s = getSponge();
for(Dish d : dishes) {
s.wash(d);
}
Towel t = getTowel();
for(Dish d in dishes) {
t.dry(d);
}

}

Maybe, in practical terms, there would be differences in efficiency, but those are exactly the kinds of constant factors big Oh is meant to abstract, and for the purpose of example, both of these are O(n) given input size (number of dishes) of n.

I hesitated to post this comment, since it's kind of a "well, actually"[0], but unless I'm mistaken this example is fundamentally flawed.

[0] http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-17.html
Except in this case, shutting down the exchanges is all that needs to be done to discourage the vast, vast majority of digital currency use. That would pretty much quash them entirely.
Ten thousand hours of practice will make you a hell of a lot better at something, no matter what your natural gifts are. I suspect that in most cases, ten thousand hours of practice will make you far better than the group of naturally talented people who haven't put in the work.

Given that, I have a real hard time caring about the nature vs. nurture argument - it's only relevant if you're in one of those narrow fields where only the top 0.01% of people can be successful and happy, and that certainly doesn't include programming or entrepreneurship or any of the other stuff we usually talk about around here.
Facebook should review the way youtube handles comments.
The Cutting Room Floor - unused and cut game content
Dude this is really cool. Thanks for sharing. I am also a bit disappointed in Google, but I am happy with Feedly.

I'll try it tonight and give you some feedback. It is pretty cool that you could fit so much in such a little package. (one file!)
I sure hope next generation's NORMs won't speak in creaky voices. This looks a lot more like another cycle of fashion than true "ingenious" "innovation". What society-wide improvements in communication does it effect?
This article should be stapled to the top of Hacker News, next to

new | threads | comments | ask | jobs | submit | to-do
I understand that this is a good idea for Amazon because it is good for them to keep people within their ecosystem, but this is what I think of whenever someone announces a product that has already been made several times: http://xkcd.com/927/
The 10,000 hours rule isn't someone's fantasy, it's based on an increasingly large body of evidence, but this article just dismisses the evidence with a wave of the hand and some assertions. A good selection of research is in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. Other people here have mentioned also that it's a specific kind of practice that's called for, not just mindlessly amassing hours, but rather relentlessly working on your weak spots and on skills that are just a bit outside what you can currently do.

The Grandin book looks interesting, but this excerpt just seems lazy.

There is also the recent research on grit by Angela Duckworth who is demonstrating that success depends on perseverance.
That observation probably seems pretty intuitive, but she's demonstrating it with research. The "I was hopeless" reaction to something hard is just a failure of grit. The author has no idea how they would do if the ground it out through the really tough parts.

I also find that when I talk to people about this they are often very resistant to this model of essentially talent-free skill development. It makes a lot people uncomfortable, and just seems wrong to them. I think maybe the notion that it's all innate talent absolves them of the need to work hard to develop advanced skill. Instead nature capriciously doles out talent and that's the story of why I'm not ...
It makes sense if you're absolutely, positively sure that the project is doomed and there's not a slightest hope for it.

But even assuming this, choice (b) is only local optimization. One could consider instead doing (c) - to try as hard as possible to convince the management to shut down that project ASAP, and thus saving the company many man-hours of wasted work. The global gain will be much greater then. Of course if management is stubborn and you're still sure the project will fail, then you're back to option (b).
You're being intellectually dishonest.
I became a 1Password user about a year and a half ago or so. It's awesome. My password file is encrypted to Dropbox and in sync with my phone and laptop. The Chrome plugin rocks for generating new passwords and filling out login forms. Easiest way I've found to achieve independent, large, random passwords on every site.
To where goes the rent money? Is this all just making landlords richer?
I'm glad they've finally moved to Moz.com (I predicted they would do this when Rand started blogging on Moz.com) because apart from when it was an SEO blog, SEOMoz has never really been just about SEO - they're more of a marketing suite (and I'm assuming the new Moz.com is step 1 in becoming this)

The post itself mentions some of their services (and acquisitions such as FollowerWonk) which shows the company are not really just an SEO software company although, the bigger point around it goes back to them being beyond SEO as the content they have always focused on themselves alongside the tools they have provided were/are more than just your standard SEO tools.

Personally, I think it’s a smart move for them and the new branding allows them to tackle a much bigger market too!
PR can be bought for $$ in case you didn't know. Give me a billion dollars and I can generate equal amount of noise about anything.

I don't see what she has done special so far. Let's see what yahoo does with these acquisitions, that's where her qualities will show up.
True, but that would overlook the other purpose of linguistic tags like that, which is to improve the rhythm of speech. The french know all about this.

Plus I just like saying it.
Why Medical Research Does Big Data Wrong
Always good to see a new physical product on the market.

All is well but I decided not to part with $35 for this product - simply because 9 photos are there forever and you can't change that.

If you had a web interface where 10 of your photos could be selected and then projected, now that's what I'd be willing to pay for.

I'm sure it'll be a success though.
He and she. Temple Grandin and Richard Panek.
They are not going to have much of a problem. People who knew SEOmoz will recognize Moz. Besides they are a strong SEO company. They will own many of the Moz related keywords soon enough.
If you're taking feature requests, it'd be really handy to see pricing breakdowns for Windows instances as well. They have a different breakeven point than the Linux ones.
This is awesome, the companies other projects look cool too [1]. I remember seeing their other project foldable.me on kickstarter, I wonder why they didn't take that route this time?

[1] http://mintdigital.com/portfolio
Once an iPhone is jailbreaked, most of these features are available...
The Definitive Guide to Getting Venture Capital
This. I avoid accidentally posting some garbage to my facebook wall.

I'll finally start using "Log on with" if I can use Amazon.
Portuguese and Spanish are quite different languages.
How to add a working countdown timer to an email
I'm speaking at this one, doing an extended remix of the "does it make any sense to run Free Software on hardware produced by Chinese prison labour?" (paraphrase) talk I did at the Athens Hackerspace in Greece.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsaSfUwOVkw

I suspect we'll build some hexayurts too.
You read the xkcd post as serious? To me it's clearly sarcastic.
I wish I could OAuth with my hn login!
The Cord-Cutting Fantasy
Show HN: Navigate Github projects more easily