skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a very interesting study, thanks for sharing it. With risk to go against what I said earlier, I have to admit that I've seen the same thing in my own learning and that of some of my peers in my math program. The first two years of math courses were great and we did well and the more advanced ones were, of course, harder but we just couldn't do as well on them as we wanted. However, I'll argue strongly that it's not because our first few teachers were so good, from perspective of evaluation but because the later professors were not up to par.

You see, Calculus courses are taught so much that the material has been developed and optimized to an extent that when I took my Calculus courses, I fell in love with math. Even somewhat more advanced courses like Linear Algebra and Complex Analysis are quite optimized for learning. Go in a little deeper into things like Real Analysis, Group Theory, Abstract Algebra and Galois Theory, and all of a sudden, everybody teaches these courses differently. Of course, these courses are taught less and they are not as optimized. THIS, I will argue is the reason for the decreased performance in the "deeper subjects".

Let me use an analogy. Let's say your first big relationship is with a really easy-going happy person and you have great times but eventually you have to part ways for some arbitrary reasons. Some time later you get into a second big relationship and this time the other person is difficult. They are battling through a lot of childhood issues and have problems with self-esteem. All of a sudden, you find yourself unable to deal well with this person, eventually you break it off.

Now, was your lack of "performance" in the second relationship due to the first one being so good or due to the second one being so crap?

Now, from the paper's conclusion:

> A final, more cynical, explanation could
also relate to student effort. Students of low-value-added professors in the introductory course may increase effort in follow-on courses to help “erase” their lower than expected grade in the introductory course.

I have seen and experienced this all too often. Case in point - one of my friends got a C in Calc 1 but went on to get A's in the next few Calc courses.
The feature "No Build Step" translates to "require your webserver to run PHP to render your documentation every time it's accessed".
Longtime Android developer here. Windows Phone is actually legitimately good.
And then stay on IRC - and try and help other people with their problems as a displacement activity while you're letting your subconscious work on something else.

Not only will you learn things by trying to help, but you'll demonstrate value as a community member which will improve the quality of the help you receive as well.
>This isn't really a problem you can solve using the university system, as far as I can see.

I think you're probably right.

>Think of it as Home Economics with basic law (family law, what abuse is, what mortgages and contracts are, rental property law), real practical economics (budgeting, not balancing checkbooks), basic home maintenance (stuff that's also useful for apartment-dwellers) and, generally, a lot of diverse stuff that you have to know to avoid getting ripped off and/or laughed at and/or killed when you're living by yourself.

To be fair, my own high school did a fair job, they tried to address most of the things you mentioned, but there just wasn't enough of it, and a lot of the training I got (in maintenance, and not killing myself with tools) was extracurricular (FFA).

So, what parts of high school do you want to throw out?
/usr should be mounted at the start since there's various things that are necessary during bootup, like udev rules.

See http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/separate-usr-is... for a more complete explanation.

There's no equivalent for /usr/share, which some programs depend on. You could make /share, or you could just use /usr for everything and have it available at early boot. Putting everything "system" in /usr/ also lets you make backups more efficiently instead of having to blacklist /home/, /sys/, /proc/, etc.

The initd needs to depend on the kernel. POSIX semantics aren't enough. Even Upstart and SysV init change their behavior based on the kernel.

Furthermore, it makes sense for the responsibility of services to be delegated to one place, otherwise you end up in this situation where programs are started differently from cron than they are from /usr/bin/service than they are from init. It makes sense to delegate all the complex service management and watchdog stuff to one location, and that requires kernel-level semantics. For instance, systemd's use of cgroups allows CGI that it forks off to be killed when it tries to stop Apache.
Granted, i dont use it often, but i find it very handy for specific things that require a lot of work on positioning or when trying to dissect someone elses code.
Ned always has fantastic articles, and the way this is lays out the mutable values name relationship, is it just lazy programming that has multiple names pointing to the same mutable value(s) or are their specific cases when that would make since to have list(a) list(b) point to the same value(s)?
What is great? Debian hasn't decided to switch to systemd.
That's like saying I am against people with one hand because I believe that having two hands is better than having one hand.

I actually have no clue as to what you mean by "being against".
It's odd to think of one's fellow students as competitors instead of colleagues. I would call this mindset pernicious, even perverted.
Upon seeing those words, I realized that's what a lot of media startups are. For example, my companies runs a variety of e-mail newsletters and most of our advertisers are other companies looking to acquire users/customers. We've had advertisers run a single ad with us and pick up 1000 e-mail addresses on their landing pages, etc. That seems quite close to a practical user-acquisition startup even if the intent isn't there.. It does give me some ideas on extra ways to sell the value to potential advertisers though(!) :)
http://paulgraham.com/ds.html is actually sort of what I was looking for.
This reminded me about Joel Spolsky's Strategy Letter III (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html), where he talks about a company called PayMyBills. PayMyBills would handle the user's bills and send them electronic reports of the bills each month.

Their strategy required the user to manually call each service provider to change the physical address to PayMyBills' so they would receive all the paper and process it. This created huge barrier of entry (who wants to call every single provider to change their address?). At the same time, if you end up signing up you're likely to stay in because of the time it took you to go service by service to change your address again.

FWIW I don't know what happened to PayMyBills but today their site redirect's to one of Intuit's service.
I find that Chrome generally switches tabs instantly, then takes an age to actually display the contents if I have a significant number of tabs open.
There's a really long way from getting bundle to run until you need to deploy. I'd recommend not worrying about deployment until you've got your app up and running locally.

If you want to develop on Linux without buying another machine, you could (at least for now) download VirtualBox and install Linux on it. That will let you run Linux from within Windows.
My favorite explanation comes from the Economist[1]:

"The increase in female employment has also accounted for a big chunk of global growth in recent decades. GDP growth can come from three sources: employing more people; using more capital per worker; or an increase in the productivity of labour and capital due to new technology, say. Since 1970 women have filled two new jobs for every one taken by a man. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the employment of extra women has not only added more to GDP than new jobs for men but has also chipped in more than either capital investment or increased productivity. Carve up the world's economic growth a different way and another surprising conclusion emerges: over the past decade or so, the increased employment of women in developed economies has contributed much more to global growth than China has."

[1] http://www.economist.com/node/6802551
As the article mentions, systemd has a full sysv init script compatibility mode, with some (trivial) incompatibilities:

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/Incompatibi...
I agree that student evaluations are mostly garbage but they have saved me from bad professors at times. You just have to know what you are looking for. The reason evaluations are bad is that you can't just put a point scale on a professor and hope things will go alright. If you look at ratemyproffessor you'll see a lot of people giving bad rating because tests and homeworks were hard. This is BAD. You'll also see a lot of good ratings because the professor was easy. This is also bad.

You want to look at the ratings that talk about the teacher's engagement in the teaching process, not in how difficult their material is. Case in point - I had an amazing Group Theory teacher and the assignments and final were really difficult. You'd expect that some people will not distinguish the two aspects of teaching and slap on a bad rating because it's so difficult. Others will see the difference and give a good rating for teaching and describe the course as difficult.
The creepy mindset of online credit scoring
I highly recommend Action.io - a cloud-based linux development environment and IDE that I wish were around when I got started. I literally created a new box, cloned a rails app from github, raked the db and fired up rails server in less than three minutes.

Really, check it out if you're having difficulty getting your environment set up. Here's a link to get started https://www.nitrous.io/join/BiSdgSxLjIk (full disclosure: it's a referral link that will get me No2 credits).

And when you're ready to deploy, just use Heroku. Good luck and keep at it!
Is a cgroups emulator in the future for kFreeBSD and the HURD?

I'm curious if faking cgroups (or heck, porting it) would be an easy solution.

Not talking about a fake cgroups providing all the real world advantages of systemd; merely a a fake not being too much worse than existing sysvinit.

Maybe rephrased actually porting THE cgroups to HURD might be impossible due to design issues or license issues. OK well how about writing a stub cgroups using the API that always gives a pleasant and completely meaningless response to all calls. What, if anything, would be the overall system wide net negative effect of systemd on HURD with a fake cgroups? I have not had much success googling for that.

This would not fix the "my /usr is not on my / partition" problem which is a serious concern to a extremely small number of people.
New Angry Birds Star Wars tomorrow.
We gotta say this. We have never been a fan of pg's essays.

BUT THIS ONE IS GEM. Probably the Best. Also remember, even after doing all this there is no guarantee that your startup will succeed. But this one has all the optimal paths.
Looking at cheery's comments, it seems that he's that negative about pretty much everything.
The best example is the fact that the first (and the only AFAIK) conference was held in Ukraine and most of the coverage was available in either Russian or Ukrainian. There were slides in English, but noone was writing additionally about it in other languages.

Also, while the site and official docs are in English, adoption of a framework is greatly influenced by the people who are blogging about it. I found many devs actively writing about Yii in Russian/Chinese, while the English sources were either outdated or ended up on "Let's build a helloworld app with Yii" or comparing Yii's performance with Cake/CI/Symfony/potato.

Regarding coding standards - this is personal and of course you can change it, but to me it was a sign of ignorance and reminded me of sloppy coding. Whenever I do something through gii (code generator) I had to do a few rounds of replaces to format everything the way I want.
Doesn't influence anything directly, but is damn annoying.

Hope this makes sense.
The Secret to Finland's Success
Process and service management is not a simple problem space, especially with POSIX semantics.

Try doing something like "stop apache". It turns out that trying to simply kill the Apache processes isn't going to work right, as Apache forks out lots of worker processes that won't be guaranteed to be killed when the Apache process stops. And now since the parent has gone away, they're reparented to PID1, so there's all these worker processes littering your system.

systemd uses cgroups to tag every single forked out process with a service file, so that all of the processes associated with a service can be stopped at once.
This bums me out. Majorly. I work at a YC startup (which will remain nameless), and we function exactly the opposite of how this essay suggests. We aren't huge by any means, but we focus heavily on scale, and suppress ideas that do not scale. Automate everything. Nothing should be manual.

I'm an engineer, but I recognize the importance of fantastic customer service. While building an iPhone app, I suggested that users should have easy access to our hotline at every step of the purchase and post-purchase flow in case they ran into issues. The founder rejected this. Why? "People would be calling us constantly". We also spent enormous amounts of time and resources tweaking the app design to perfection (pre-launch), and attempted a massive press launch with exclusive blog posts/coverage while turning our noses at any sort of manual user acquisition.

Fast forward 6 months. That product failed.
Pix: Every subway station in NYC in a single day
Hah, Freudian slip, perhaps?
I don't know why you think cgroups has anything to do with the /usr split.

systemd uses cgroups to tag processes with metadata about services, and to provide resource limits. If you added a stub cgroups, then resource limits wouldn't apply, and you might run into issues with services not fully shutting down as you do right now with the POSIX service management.

It's entirely possible, but you wouldn't get any of the upsides of systemd.
It's not rational to generalize a whole population or even a part of world, just by one person. I have seen many Iranian people who are very comfortable with dogs, and many of them have dogs since they are kids. On the other hand, I have seen people who were born in Canada, are not comfortable with dogs, as some of them had bad experiences when they were kids.
The electrical emanations from the typewriter can be used to detect the characters typed regardless of whether or not an electronic display is used, and TEMPEST, which is a method of securing electronic devices, will protect the typewriter's emanations from outside detection, and, as mentioned by Daniel_Newby, electric typewriters are vulnerable to power line reading, but if the system is entirely disconnected from any external power source, as TEMPEST dictates, and the entire facility is held to TEMPEST standards, then the typewriter will be secured against external eavesdropping.

Any attempts at picking up audio|electronic emanations will be foiled by traditional TEMPEST type protection.

Typewriter ribbons can be dealt with by old fashioned incineration.

The only way to acquire a signal would be by infiltration of the facility housing the targeted systems.
I would suggest running Linux in a virtual machine. A decent choice would be the combination of Ubuntu running under VirtualBox (a free VM). Here's a random guide I found online (I'm not vouching for its veracity): http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/virtualbox

I bet it's possible to do all this stuff under Windows natively too, but it's probably going to be harder to find help. So if you have some familiarity with UNIX-like OSes already, I'd suggest just using something like Ubuntu in a VM.
The police might think that the white noise file is an encrypted document, demand that you provide the (non-existent) decryption key, and imprison you for "refusing" to provide it.
I've written a lot on Yii/Heroku if you care to look: http://aaronfrancis.com/?tag=Yii. I love Yii, it's certainly my go-to for PHP frameworks at this point. It's super powerful.
I am so glad to read something about hardware startups here. As a engaged hardware engineer who aims to build my own company soon, I miss reading more about hardware startups.

Funny thing, I read the whole OP thinking about how all these ideas would work in a hardware startup, and came to conclusions similar to his before reaching the point about it in the article.

Crowdfunding brought some fresh air to this world, but I still miss an active community as the software startup one is. Maybe I am missing something?
How do you measure "good at teaching"?
DeepDB: a new transactional/analytical combination database platform
Well, for one you're trying to compare a case that took place in New York with one that took place in Florida. If Zimmerman was tried in New York the case would've most likely had a different outcome. Florida has stand your ground laws which allowed Zimmerman to protect himself using deadly force, whereas New York doesn't.

The cases aren't even that similar. The reason Zimmerman was found not guilty was because there was evidence that he was physically assaulted and that his life was in danger when he shot Martin. In the New York case, there was no evidence to suggest the shooter was physically assaulted.

All this is is a poor attempt at playing the race card. You can't compare two different cases tried in two places with different sets of laws. It just doesn't work like that.
> I'm always irritated when people blame capitalism and free markets for the high cost of healthcare in the USA. The reality is that healthcare is anything but a free market, and costs aren't going to come down until it becomes one.

Every other OECD country except Mexico has similar or better outcomes than the US, at lower cost (per capita and per GDP) than the US, so its pretty ridiculous to claim that the only possible way for the US to reduce prices is to convert the healthcare market into an unregulated free market, which is far from what any of the countries that achieve equal or better results at lower than the US have.

The US pays more in healthcare in its public healthcare systems -- as a share of GDP or in $/capita -- than many countries do in their public systems that provide virtually everything through those public systems, and then pays about the same amount again in nonpublic healthcare expenditures. From all evidence, the biggest problem with healthcare costs in the US is the high degree of privatization, not the lack of a free market.
Well if we're trading anecdotes, my sister-in-law (a serious geek type herself) wanted a MacBook and I convinced her to get a Windows PC instead. And of the several computing devices in my house, Apple products outnumber those running Windows 2:1.

The difference is, I bought my Apple devices for dirt cheap from my previous employer, whereas she'd be buying one retail. Spending 2x the money for the same hardware capability and an OS that's equivalent does not make economic sense to me.
Yii is an amazing Framework all-round, well documented and has a fairly active community.

I just finished my first Yii extension which can come in handy when mixing Yii URL creation and Javascript: https://github.com/Ainsleh/Yii-JSUrlManager
Perception is reality.

1) In mainstream use, Microsoft and Windows are 'Big Business'. Nobody wants that anywhere near the photos of their kids.

2) For geeks, Microsoft is the devil because they've managed to annoy most long time geeks in some form or another.

Indeed, it really is the problem. But it's the problem Microsoft is going to have to fix - and believe me, their 'spam the forums' and 'give free things' approach is not going to cut it. They need to drop the Windows and Microsoft branding for consumer devices in the same way Lexus is not Toyota. They need to make sure that the business and consumer products look as different as possible also.

I realize Microsoft is doing the exact opposite of what I've said above - and that's the real problem. What you're complaining about is just the mis-branding and mis-management of Microsoft bleeding through into the general populace.
I saw this on a miniature scale when I created a new subreddit (http://reddit.com/r/LSAT)

I spent about two weeks creating quality articles for the sidebar, personally replying to every submission/comment, manually recruiting anyone who mentioned the LSAT, and reaching out to moderators of related subreddits for links.

Mercifully, a subreddit is a small thing to launch, and after two weeks the place became self-sustaining and grew to 1500 subscribers.

I'm seeing the same thing again with a website I just launched (http://lsathacks.com), which has free LSAT explanations.

Very positive initial comments, but just letting people know about it hasn't resulted in a surge of traffic. Instead, I'm going to have to manually recruit people. Only then will I know if it's worthwhile.

My point is that this doesn't apply just to high growth startups. Almost anything new requires initial unscaleable effort.

Edit: The LSAT is the Law School Admission Test, a logic test required for admission to North American law schools.
In Haskell you can also use the Integral typeclass to make functions polymorphic to Int and Integer.
Trucos para verse mas joven
Don't worry, it's like this for everybody. Just hang in there. Suddenly it'll all come together and you'll forget what was so hard about it.
JK Rowling revealed as author of The Cuckoo's Calling
They could try sneaking in a timing-based covert channel but surely that would be externally observable? The expected latency of those instructions is specified down to the last cycle, and since encryption is often performance-critical code people will be looking at their behaviour in detail.
Blow Out the Candles – OpenStack Turns 3
They could, but there's also a high chance of discovery. Also, blanket recording hotwords from millions and millions of phones is likely to result in so many false positives as to make the system useless.

For any kind of system to be workable, it's likely they'd have to narrow it down considerably to suspect users. Someone calling the phone number of a person or organization known to be N-degrees separated from real known targets is more likely to yield fruit than scooping up voice conversations from every phone that heard the phrase "bomb making"
> Socialism is hardly a solution here,

Even though every other OECD country save Mexico provides more socialized medicine with essentially universal coverage, produces equal or better overall health outcomes than the US, and spends far less per capita and per GDP on health care than the US. But, yeah, sure, "socialism is no help here", because if it was, that would require people to reconsider their laissez-faire religion.
Is this true even with perfect forward secrecy, as is used on DDG?
Nope. I just did it. Worked fine for me. If you are talking about that very first exercise, you did put it in a file and run it? Right?

I got the expected output no issues.
Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling's book collector here. Ask me anything :-P