skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are people using QR codes frequently here in the states or elsewhere?

To me I see them everywhere, but curiously most phones don't have them built into their camera apps (iPhone's camera doesn't have built in scanner) or have some quick an easy way to scan QR codes.

Rather you have to download an app and then later find that app, then fidget a bit too much to get the app to read the code.

Not the greatest user experience and I have found it frustrating!

What advances have been made and or are being made to make QR code scanning quick and painless?
Snapchat Poised to be L.A.'s Start Up Star
I wish my parents had shared this view with me at the beginning of highschool, as opposed to the standard "knowledge is the path to a better life" mantra. I now try to explain to any young student I know that school is a game where you have to win despite the arbitrary information, inconsistant rules, social games, and bad teachers. It feels short-sighted, overly-realistic, and depressing, but it would have served me better than filling me with hopes and dreams.
It’s a matter of taste: a quick note on the flat v. depth debate
First of all... June 2007 article.

Secondly, school is a system, government is a system, large corporations are systems, learning to survive and advance within systems is valuable. Outright revolt as an individual is generally purposeless, use that creativity to find way to minimize effort while maximizing gain.

I learned this trick far too late in my school career!
This screams marketing and engineering not being able to clearly communicate the problem statement. The problem statement was given to engineering as "How do we get a QR code inside of this handle thing?", when I am guessing their actual question was something like "How do we get the shopper to engage with our digital marketing efforts?"

I for sure know there are times when marketing has a clear thing of what they want, and you are not allowed to brainstorm the pro's and con's; but the con's seem to far outweigh the pro's in this specific strategy.

You're telling me that the shopper would have to contort their phone an unnaturally specific angle just to scan a QR code. Now the problem statement is back to the marketing team of "How do I tell the shopper to contort their phone at this angle?". I doubt that the marketing folks will like this being back on their lap.
I've been there, as a kid, and I get his frustration (well, both the parent's and kid's). As much as homework sucks, and following the rules sucks, it's something everyone has to do at some point. Learning how to do it, and acknowledge it for what it is, is important.

I can remember all of about 15 days between 1st and 11th grades where I actually did homework, as in, did school work at home. The rest of the time, I did whatever exercises/sheets/etc that needed to be handed in on the bus or during class before we went home. The 15 days - I remember having to go to the library to read up on some topics to write papers, and I remember having a few essays which took a bit of time to write longhand (and eventually word processed on a computer later).

It wasn't until 12th grade that the assignments got hard enough that I ever struggled. By then it was somewhat too late - I didn't have any really strong innate ability to study something for more than a few minutes. Now today, that might not even matter at some level, with all answers a google away, but I think it still takes time to really study and learn a subject/problem/etc.

The ability to focus yourself on something - anything - and get through the hard stuff you don't care about before getting to the stuff you might enjoy - that's a discipline I didn't have, and it took me many more years to get it back, even for things I wanted to get more involved in. Developing this habit/skill at a younger age will pay dividends, but it's hard for kids to appreciate that. The OP's kid may be mature enough in some ways to at least consider this angle - logically - when homework comes up. Do the stupid exercises on the size paper they want with the stupid number 2 pencil.

Learn to adapt to whatever requirements are put before you quickly and with little fuss - focusing on the intellectual aspects first. As someone else mentioned, those are eventually mandatory in just about all walks of life, so learning to roll with that will help.

It's possibly similar to healthy eating and exercise. Especially for kids - they can 'eat anything' and not get fat, stay thin, etc. Eventually, that goes away, and learning to eat healthy and exercise is something you have to adapt to to remain in good health. If you have a better grounding in healthy eating and physical fitness from a young age, it's not a big deal.
I don't see how this has anything to do with Objective-C. He actually said he used very little Objective-C and did it mostly in Xibs.
I'm curious, do you ever have discussions with him where you make it clear that you know he is "playing the game" so to speak, or do you also try and hold up the charade? (I know it's less black and white than that, I'm speaking in extremes to make a clear question.)
Oculus Rift + Microsoft Kinect = full-on Virtual Reality?
Why VCs should love hardware startups
Social Is Not A Destination
If they keep sharing great content via courses, and make traditional education better (by replacing Blackboard), more power to them. I would have loved to have a tool like this when I was in school. My grades would have been better if I had access to old lectures to prepare for exams (though, I'm not sure how quickly instructors would be willing to post lectures). When I last used it 5+ years ago, Blackboard sucked... I'm assuming that hasn't changed. Anyone have more recent thoughts on that front?
Ask Freestyle’s Dave Samuel On The Secrets To A Great Co-Founder
Calculating The Long-Term Value Of A Bitcoin
I enjoyed it more this time than I did when I last saw it, perhaps because I was more familiar with the showcased peculiarities last time (the theme is garbage in, garbage out).
There's a story from Gene Woolsey that I had to read my senior year in college (I was an Ops Research major, and Gene Woolsey is a pretty big deal in that field). The story went something like this:

A group of students had just finished a big research project and were told to present a one page executive summary that outlined their work, results, and conclusions. They couldn't quite get it to fit on one page, so their executive summary was two pages, but the second page was only 1/8th full. No big deal, right? They showed up to meet with the head of the company that was sponsoring their research, and handed him the paper. He rips off the second page and throws it in the trash (losing a good portion of their conclusions). The head of the company reads the first page, then stops and says, "This summary is incomplete. Where are your conclusions?" The team was dumbfounded, and lost a few points on their grade because they didn't follow the rules.

The moral of the story is: FOLLOW THE GD* RULES. If you want to use a different kind of paper, ask your teacher first. If you need an extension on the due date, ask your teacher first. If the guidance says to write a one page summary, do not write a two page summary. It's fine to be creative, but don't change the rules on your own because you don't have the authority to change the rules. In most things it is easier to ask permission than it is to ask forgiveness.

It's not unusual to not want to do homework, but a lot of people in this modern generation think that it's okay to get bad grades and just blame it on the fact that they are not "book smart." Just about every movie marketed towards young people is a variation of the theme where a kid is secretly a prodigy but the "system" didn't realize it somehow. That is not how it works in real life. For every kid who skips all his homework and gets bad grades but is secretly Will Hunting there are a thousand kids or more who are getting bad grades and are going to end up flipping burgers as a career. It's time to start spanking your kids so they'll get better grades and won't suck at life.

Btw, here's a link to the book if you want to read some stories from an actual genius: http://www.lionhrtpub.com/books/wp1.html
Hah. Yes. Hah. Hahahaha.

Like all teenagers, he is capable of of reason, judgement, introspective listening, and a sense of how he actually fits into the cosmos. In 5-10 minute bursts.

In other words: I might as well be the teacher addressing the question of whether the dog has the Buddha-nature. I try, but realistically. And then I make him write the papers.
I completely agree on most things in school being useless, especially homework. However, I don't know of a single career path one can take where they never have to do boring, monotonous, or simply annoying things to succeed. CEOs have to handle investors and bullshit politics, professional athletes have to practice and work out, and even rich retired people had to do plenty of stupid pointless things to get to that point. Shit, even the Queen of England has to make appearances I'm sure she'd rather skip.

Don't frame the homework as something he has to do to learn what he already knows, frame it as a stepping stone. If he doesn't do his homework, he will fail out of school. If he fails out of school, his chances of doing what he loves severely diminish (and having to work at Taco Bell is a lot worse than homework). Doing to homework now is the gateway to never having to do homework again.
We've been using libpam-google-authenticator for a while on all our servers, it's part of our base Chef configuration.

Our setup is that key based authentication works as normal, but if you want to use a password based authentication, you need to 2-factor auth.

This approach allows us to maintain security without losing the ability to go "Oh no I'm somewhere without any of my private keys and I really need to log into that server to fix this production error!"
Here's another comment on this thread that I disagreed with but found sensible, until the very end, where it recommends that adults hit children to make them do things.
http://picturesofpeoplescanningqrcodes.tumblr.com/ SCNR

But on a more serious note google now/the camera search in android has QR code support integrated and you don't necessarily have to install additional applications.
Wyoming teen builds nuclear reactor in dad's garage
There're more benchmark available on the README now: https://github.com/jingweno/gh/blob/master/README.md
Yes, I understand all that. I don't share your intuition that it's gravity over a man-sized drop is obviously too weak to cause a large explosion. You haven't made an order of magnitude estimate to back it up.

My point is that there are many orders of magnitude difference between the relevant parameters of plutonium vs. uranium, so the fact that dropping plutonium cores against each other is insufficient to produce a large explosions tells us essentially nothing about that possibility for uranium.
Thanks! I'll see what I can do :).
Let me try again. Maybe it will enlighten some other readers.

You're cherry picking some of the outermost outliers of both of their ranges, ignoring the cost of storage and transmission and distribution infrastructure, and ignoring the fact that the price of fossil fuel could just decline to the cost of extraction processing and transport as we produce replacements. The cost of coal + extraction nears 2 cents per kwh.
> pollution regulations

> government gets corporations under control

China has got its growths because government did (partially) lift their control over private interest. Narrow sighted people (including NYT) tend to forget it and spend a lot of energy lecturing China about government control and things like that.

Not to say that there are no problems in China. But i think it is nauseating to grab a hooror video on Youtube and draw conclusions, or to voice concerns about Chinese pollution with the underlining preconception that Chinese people are dirty subhumans who don't care a shit.
Maybe it'd be helpful for founders to spend some time in other areas of the country, especially the interior.
The core problem in the blog post is the (perceived) arbitrary judgement of the value of the work.

Let's suppose the parent evaluation is right, which is not self evident given how the emotional attachments impairs judgement.

The article says the work was poorly graded because the paper was not of the "right size".

We can suppose that the grader either a) didn't have the time to properly grade b) had to follow strict and pointless rules even if they were evidently stupid c) had a poor judgement.

The c case is the biggest problem - when an evaluation fonction returns wrong results. b and a could be special cases of c (not having a schedule or following stupid rules could be having a poor judgement)

Now let's think for a minute than N% of the graders are giving results that are no better than random assessment of the pupils.

Given how, in a schoolchildren life, a number of educators will be met, N% of the results will be meaningless (apply statistics, SD, etc.)

Now think of those randomly declared having "good grades" become graders (teachers) themselves.

I wonder how the equilibrium works out in a society - at which value of N will society turn education from acquiring knowledge to jumping through hoods and having a certificate in witchcraft (replace witchcraft by anything you think is wrong and pointless)

[Even worse- think, if for example the school district is poor and recruts graders of a lesser quality, that this raises to (N+X)%]
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U.S. Companies Can Now Sell Phones and Software to Iranians
This is a great post.

Michael is speaking from a broad base of experience, one that is not just a hero's epic of one success after another with a token failure before the ultimate victory. From the heroic perspective (PG, Zuck, Gates, etc.), every setback is but a small dip before eventual triumph. These people sincerely believe that anyone can do what they have, and as a result their worldviews are extremely limited and naive. In a way, they cannot know the other side of the story, because they have never experienced any other outcome.

My story's not over yet. I plan on being successful. I'm too old (30 this month) to be a VC darling, but I know I'll do something cool, and probably in the next 10 years. But the world needs to see that the misery is real and that, no, not everyone gets out of it. Most people don't start talking about their lives until the bad stuff is all years ago and they end up putting forth an "all's well that ends well" rosy view. I want the whole story to get out. If I have a break-out success in five years, then after 5 more on that, I will already have lost some touch with how the world really is.

VC startups will not save the common man. If anything, they will put him out of work and ask him to "retrain", putting him in massive debt for an entry level position making far less than his previous job.

Right. I don't think that's the intention. I think many VCs are good people trying to help the world. However, most of the established players in Corporate America would rather cut costs than improve yield. The first increases centralization of power (fear) while the second is destabilizing to those in power, even if economically beneficial to all (including them).

VC-funded startups can't change the world because they are an even more short-sighted (by necessity) strain of the Corporate America they're theoretically supposed to be attacking.

All this being said, I am extremely optimistic for the future, but I understand that the US requires significant structural reform if everyone is to benefit from technology.

Very well said.
ECU Reader For VW AUDI SKODA And Jetta
VW group(including VW, AUDI, SKODA and Jetta):
all diesel engines with EDC15-original car odometer/mileage reading and programming from motor ECU, immobiliser PIN code reading and programming from motor ECU, immobiliser disable function, EEPROM read/write - everything by OBDII connector.
Or you could have rented a car?
That's funny: for a dead project, there's an awful lot of traffic on emacs-devel, a big user community, lots of interesting new projects (like org-mode), and an amazing amount of utility.

If this is what a dead project looks like, the living really ought to envy the dead.
Kim Dotcom Wins Access to all Data Seized in Police Raid
Android porting suite targets x86 devices
Is he wrong though? Misinformation spreads easier than ever through social media, and we instinctually trust a lot of it because it's coming from our friends/acquaintances.
Why The Data Problem Is A Good Thing For The Open Cloud Movement
For similar reasons, https://github.com/socketubs/leselys - but using mongo and python rather than ruby and PostgreSQL.
> the right to buy chewing gum.

In San Francisco it is unlawful to use used underwear to wipe off cars in a car wash.

So what?
this might be actually useful if glued on a bikeframe:
http://joe.framba.ch/qr-code-on-a-cylinder
So, if we take the author at his word, then either the teacher had an unwritten rule for the size of the paper, or the student and the author both somehow managed to not read or to forget this rule. If it's a, then rules lawyer the hell out of the idiot teacher. If it's b, then looks like both of them are bad at details and instructions, which is a skill that certainly deserves some attention. So why was that the end of the story?
"Make an argument here and cite your sources here, I'm not going to read a book just so I can respond to your post in half a month..."

I'm not especially interested in discussing this at length, I listed the books I did for the benefit of you and anyone else who is interested. You could instead read Wikipedia and random papers you find on Google scholar, but I don't think you'll really learn much that way. And in Overdosed America it's really only one or two chapters that are relevant.

"How's a paper in a top tier medical journal[1]?"

Not really worth much unless it's a large NIH trial, a well-cited meta study, or an IOM report. Individual research papers are generally pretty worthless, at least for medical related stuff.
This rather feels to be the right step to me as explained below.

Before MOOCs, knowledge went from the creators (original researchers) to the students via a chain of steps -- academic papers, advanced topic-specific books, curriculum books, local university professors, finally to the students. MOOCs have shown a way where most of these steps can be bypassed, with top-notch creators directly delivering education to the students. It's like Feynman delivering the lectures to a much wider audience than he actually did.

One problem remains partly unsolved - how to ensure students actually grasp all the concepts, stay motivated to complete the courses, get personalized career guidance, and also are unable to cheat in the exams. This requires a local system of teachers and teaching assistants, which already exists.

Why not combine both systems, even though now it is just blended learning per the OP. Cannot say about others, I have certainly encountered teachers who were not up to the mark. Future will being students lectures directly from the Feynmans of today with the local system just aiding the delivery. This is no different than cutting the middle men out [1] that can both improve education and make it cheaper in the long term.

Coursera and others has started by making the courses free which, while not sustainable by itself [2], has enabled countless poor students to take the courses. The future just holds the prices of this education tailored to the local markets (differential pricing) which can still be better than education today on the quality/price figure-of-merit.

[1] This allows the professors to spend more time on their research work.

[2] OK, I am not in the favor of advertising within the course content.
If I didn't have the value, I would not use that approach. I'd use the sum of the historical returns multiplied by their respective proportions and take the standard deviation of those daily returns. That would be my volatility for the portfolio.
Key phrase: in the flow.

If the people I work with would shut their traps when in the office I'd get everything I get done in an 8-hour day today done in 2-3 hours, tops. I find that the people who appear to love to work 100 hours a week are the ones doing most of the yapping.
What I read from your example : this head of the company wilfully destroys parts of the information paid for by the company, then complains about it.

If it is to be a learning experience, this will produce obedient slaves and avoid any creativity. Not a good thing in this day and age.

If it is to be a real world experience, the head is engaging in sabotage, and should be removed by the board.

"In most things it is easier to ask permission than it is to ask forgiveness."

I'm really not sure about that. Besides that, I agree with your conclusion.

Regarding corporeal punishment, I find it odd how the western world believes the practice should be stopped while it did produce result (like kids doing their homework).

Whatever, european and american kids won't get spanked, won't get better grades, will suck at life - bad thing for them, good thing for the other kids :-)

Wait, it's unfair for the european and american kids. We should give them away a liberal art degree (but only if they spend enough time and $ at a place where they are supposed to acquire an education)
I have no understanding of why schools are allowed to assign homework in the first place. The kid is at school 7 hours and then most schools try to assign a couple of hours of homework on top of that. I seem to remember a work / life balance thread about working over 40 hours a week is bad. So, why is it ok for our children?
Who Even Needs the Nation-State in the 21st Century?
If Foxconn sneezes, does that mean Apple caught a cold?
What do you think they were doing when he was 'driving her to the rental car place,'?
Ask HN: Girl graduate student in CS needs career advice. What should I do?
Hi, I am an International grad student in US and currently working in NLP. I have several publications to my name and got a fully-funded MS offer. I have completed 1 semester and have been lurking in HN for a year now.

1. Is there any free mentorship program that I can take help from? Someone who can help me with information about things I should do and learn.

2. Any free bootcamps in ROR/Django/web and app development etc? Virtual bootcamps as well.

3. What things should I learn to become eligible for web development jobs in top companies 1.5 years later?

4. Is there any special facility in Texas (Dallas area) I can take advantage of.

Please help.

I am currently working through the book of Google Resume, algorithms, pro-git etc.
We learn math & science because it gives us electricity, airliners, and computers. Enough said.
Music discovery app Shazam launches for Windows Phone 8
What practice testing would you suggest for the War and Peace?
Why You Should Blog to Get Your Next Job
Provably Fair Shuffling Through Cryptography (2012)
Under that definition ... there's hardly anyone working on "real" problems.
Even Nasa.
You make it out like this is a zero-sum game. As if lifting people out of poverty means other people (Americans and Europeans) will necessarily be worse off. I don't believe this is the case. More people with money also means a bigger market for western products.

I'm frankly a little bit put off by the scare quotes you put around "progress". As if giving a billion people a better life is somehow not something to aspire to.