skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with coworking space, at least here in Manchester (UK), is that it's inflexible and expensive. If I could pay something like £20 for a day, without any subscription attached, and get free coffee, I'd use it a lot. As it is, you have to pay for weeks or months in advance (and more like £30 to £50 per day), so I might as well go to the coffee shop whenever I feel like.
Funny that they bring their toothbrush and remember that the white zone is for loading and unloading of passengers only, but they miss all the signs saying "Please don't bring a loaded gun through airport security".
Hard, or just detail-oriented?
Landing page optimization for the Obama 2012 campaign
One of the other issues is lack of adequate high school preparation. One of the factors I saw in college (15 years ago) as a Physics major was that a lot of students that wanted to study physics (or other sciences) just didnt have adequate foundational knowledge coming out of HS. If a year of remedial courses is required just to get to the point where you can take freshman level classes, it becomes very difficult to complete the coursework required for the major, because many of the courses have to be taken sequentially. You can't just load up on a bunch and take classes in parallel to catch up. If you start a year (or more behind) or try to switch into the major late, you can't finish in four years.

Humanities major fields seemed more tolerant of lack of preparation - one could switch into them late or do some remedial work before diving in deep and still get the required coursework done because courses did not depend as much on one another and could be taken in parallel.
> There are real dollar costs to our overall quality of life from society's health self abuse expense.

People are not obligated to be healthy or to have habits you consider healthy.
You're contradicting yourself:

> there is literally no evidence at all for TDD

> And have been falsified

Falsification requires evidence.

You can't say there's no evidence and then turn around to draw a conclusion two seconds later.

> like in the link I provided you

That is but one blog post. Science doesn't work by cherry-picking results. That's a tactic used by climate change deniers and homoeopathic medicine supporters. The evidence must be taken in full.

In addition, I skimmed the paper cited in that article [1]. It appears to be measuring TDD's effects on external quality. That is not a purported benefit of TDD. Most of the research I've seen agrees with that paper: TDD doesn't improve external quality (defined by passing acceptance tests). The contention is over whether it improves internal quality. Also note that the paper cites "process conformance" as a threat to validity, which is what I've been saying is one of the major problems with TDD research all along [2]. The experiment also used students, which is known to be a problem when generalizing results. With TDD in particular, some research indicates that it's more effective with mature developers and ineffective with inexperienced developers. If you've read the rest of the research instead of cherry-picking, you would have known that.

I'm not trying to make a bold claim about TDD. The evidence doesn't support that. I'm trying to help people like you look at the subject objectively. You can't form an objective opinion without evidence (which you claim) or while cherry-picking evidence (which you've done). But frankly, I don't think you want my help, so the last word is yours if you want it.

[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/application/mdl/mdlconfirmation....

[2] That was my first bullet point in my first comment on this thread: "there's little confidence that TDD was applied correctly in many of the studies."
Studying should not be the most important part of childhood, and knowing how to enjoy time off is a life skill that a lot of "high achievers" are sorely missing.
I'm not sure that the point is necessarily that the browser should be competing with native pro apps.

Web apps tend to be really good at very specialized functions. A silly, but I think still valid example would be a meme generator using <canvas> and JS. If you want a picture of a cat with some white Arial text and a black drop shadow, a web app is going to be great. It'll probably be faster than Photoshop (especially if you count startup time), and way more accessible.

Same thing goes for the Web Audio API. Will we see a full-fledged Pro Tools competitor? Probably not. But we will see ringtone generators and voice recorders and (hopefully!) some T-Pain AutoTune apps.

Great web apps are all about playing off the web's strengths, not trying to replicate the desktop.
Similar. I was wired to take hard courses for the challenge, and just didn't care about the grades. But a lot of people are coddled and fear failure.
The system isn't particularly designed with focus on kids learning things.
Python's GC can be turned off.
Humans want to go to Mars. Too bad the journey turns our bodies into mush.
I suspect that pedestrians are less threatening because they rarely walk in traffic (both because it's illegal, and because it's obviously dangerous). But for bicyclists, it's legal, and apparently the danger isn't enough to stop a lot of people.
Quick, somebody start the NoTwister movement.
She was being homophobic. :\
One other issue with math and science courses is that they constantly build on previous material. You get these long chains of courses in calculus and differential equations and who knows what else where if you didn't master the first one, you're going to have trouble with everything after it.

Getting a D in "British Civil Wars and Revolutions, 1639-1651" won't haunt you for the rest of college. A mastery of lower level European history courses might help you do well in that class, but you aren't in a position where forgetting old material means you don't even know how to start a single exam question.
Same situation here.

I get looked-at like I'm crazy when I try to explain my insurance and that I'd like to know more about the cost of a procedure or prescription before I agree to it.

I've always tried to just pay cash for services. Increasingly, though, I'm finding that providers are being put under exclusive contracts which prevent them from allowing me to pay cash. As soon as they find out who my insurer is they clam up, explain that they're under contract w/ that insurer, and say they can't give me cash pricing. It's doubly frustrating because they usually won't talk to me at all if I don't tell them who my insurer is. Catch-22.

The provider ends up billing my insurer who doesn't pay because I haven't reached my deductible. Then I get a bill from the provider, 4 - 6 weeks later. Sometimes the provider allows me to pay the "negotiated price" my insurer would have paid, but other times I've had to pay the full non-discounted amount.

What a screwed-up mess.
To this day I cherish the C's and B's I got at RPI and high school a whole heck of a lot more than any A. Struggling/pressure is a good thing.
If we're going anecdotes, I can't remember the last time I saw a car stop at a stop sign either.

http://www.cyclelicio.us/2013/stop-sign-compliance-temecula-...
Driving depends on a huge amount of infrastructure which is provided or controlled by the government, everything from roads to refined fuel. As far as I know you actually can drive a car without a license, if you do that in your private property (e.g. suppose you own a farm or other big property with internal driveways), but not in any public roads. Yeah we pay for the roads, and oil infrastructure and other things with our taxes... it doesn't matter. Google [is driving a privilege], you'll find citations of court decisions, some people have tried to assert their "right to drive" without success.
If I could hazard a guess, I think the popularity of abolishing the summer break started around the time when the sunbelt started to see a huge migration influx. Energy costs skyrocket for large buildings (like public schools) during the summer months, plus outdoor sports are untenable because of the extreme heat, so it would be a huge obstacle for many organized sports.

Just a guess. I agree otherwise. Public schools could have a more rigorous curriculum while being much more relaxed if the semesters weren't condensed into 4-5 months.
The headline of this article reminds me of this one article I saw a good while back that basically said "SOME DUDE WHO WORKED ON FUKUSHIMA HAS BEEN DIAGNOSED WITH CANCER!"

Then at the end of the (short) article it was mentioned that "oh, by the way, doctors are saying that it has nothing to do with Fukushima and he has been a chain smoker for decades. Never mind the blatant link baiting and scaremongering that was the entire rest of the article, it's just what sells!"

I'm having a hard time locating that article now, but maybe that's for the better. It's pretty sad how common stuff like this is when it comes to reporting on nuclear energy.
Live does not revolve around "school", and there should be time (and lots of it!) to learn outside of it. Therefore, summer vacation.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are frequently science and engineering tests where the expected average is around 30-50%! I'd argue those tests are more poorly designed, as they're either the wrong format or the professor isn't communicating information effectively at all.

Just because something is hard doesn't make it any easier on you, as a student, to have to remember and reconcile that a failing grade on an exam is expected and is more likely to cause serious panic about a curve.

EDIT: To be clear, the fact that below a 70% generally means "forced to retake" due to how GPA is handled in the US really isn't helping matters.
What was being discussed was cyclists behaving recklessly. Imagine a cyclist blowing through a red light at the bottom of a hill, where they're going ~20ish. Cross traffic with a green light isn't necessarily going to see them until the last minute even if the cross traffic is moving at an otherwise safe speed. Pay attention in a city for a while, and you'll see things like this, and it rightly pisses off both drivers and us other cyclists.
Well, in most science and engineering classes the final grades are curved, so it's still possible to get an A in the class even if you do worse than 80% on the exams.
Hard? Hell in the public university system in many countries lots of courses are downright impossible to nail; even a passing grade is worthy of honor (and we're not talking about first-year filter courses, just solid, important subjects).

Degrees would be much more valuable if they required more than mere competence to pass. I'm not claiming this should be the modus operandum, but it's certainly something to ponder about, instead of believing that a difference of a few hundredths of points in a test have any real-life meaning.
> The idea of getting 80%+ in college would be absurd in the UK.

Indeed; that's the bias I was referring to in my comment above (I'm from the UK and I think, in this particular aspect at least, our system works better).
Lol, ditto, except with Computer Engineering.

I managed to get an "F" in High School History, which was a low point for me frankly, but the C's that came later in Engineering were no big sweat :-).

Focusing on learning, instead of getting decent grades, seems to have been a good thing... definitely contributed to my sanity through college IMO.
Ukraine - Most interested country in AngularJS
A buddy of mine biked to work from Somerville to Boston and he got a ticket from an officer in Cambridge. He had stopped at a red light, but his tire was over the stop line.

Just because you don't see it happen, doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

Same guy was almost destroyed by a truck as we were riding through an intersection with the green light because the truck decided to speed up for the yellow light and run the red light.
You're completely ignoring the fact that the web began as (and still is, in part) a collaborative tool and publishing platform. Text-based formats played an immense part in that, geocities, the rise of personal publishing, blogs, these would not have happened without them.

Yes, binary is more efficient, but then tell me why is JSON the most popular data interchange format on the web today?
How about we ask a former communist?

http://lunardefensecorps.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-ussr-women...
A good non-technical solution to this problem is an intentionally slow/standard Internet connection, such as at my cafe of choice.

For me, it is frustrating to be at this cafe at peak laptop hours and I think it causes people to churn in and out. So, I try to only use my laptop there when there are fewer laptop users at the cafe. I think this is a good psychological effect for the cafe to impart on its customers!
All large groups have power struggles, but that doesn't mean they are hierarchies, they could be strongly connected graphs or other topologies (for instance voting on a referendum is both non-hierarchical and a power struggle).
It's important to take this article with a grain of salt. It appears that it was written based solely on her (obviously one-sided) testimony.
Wait, why on earth should people be prevented from leaving a negative review when they have a negative experience? A review site that doesn't let people leave negative reviews is an untrustworthy review site.

Sure, people are unreasonable - but that has nothing to do with Yelp! Think of it this way: you can make it look like the world experienced vastly more earthquakes in the 20th century than in the 17th, but what actually happened was that detection got much better. Similarly, Yelp doesn't at all change people's propensity to think unreasonable things about restaurants they go to: it just improves detection. Improved detection, I argue, is an inherent good. Knowing what people really want makes it easier to deliver that, even if the process of finding out what people actually want is painful (and it usually is, since most of us are not very good at knowing what we actually want).
3D printers, DIY Bio, and one possible future path for drug development
The first time I came to India, I sucked at their grading system and it broke my bubble of being a precious snowflake who always did well. I think that was a good thing really; it got me used to the idea that grades could go fuck themselves. Much later, when I changed careers and started doing more math here in the U.S., it helped a lot because the whole idea of getting a B+ didn't matter so much. I knew a lot who were in my math classes who were probably smarter than me but dropped out because they couldn't handle the idea of struggling.
" One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything. "

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...
The guy turned himself in. http://www.wral.com/man-charged-in-durham-hit-and-run-that-k...
How the Android "master keys" exploit is used.
This is not a complete explanation. The most important factor is that Americans just have more resources than most humans in history. Transfer any but the absolute poorest Americans to anywhere on earth, at anytime in history, with their current income, and they'll be just as well-fed as they are here and now, even if the local farmers are driving oxen.

Another way of stating this, is that edible commodities are just as fungible as all other commodities. If Egyptians could afford to purchase enough wheat to feed themselves, they would.
It is important to note the sample set of the survey: "The researchers surveyed 655 students entering Berea College, a private liberal arts college located in Kentucky, in the falls of 2000 and 2001."

I have a feeling that the results of the survey would be different at a public university with strong science and engineering programs.

My personal experience has been that many people will change their intended degrees, but rarely have I seen someone completely withdraw from science or engineering programs
It seems like a strange methodology to get at what's an obvious truism. Berea college (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berea_College) is very atypical. It's a small school, with a mission of helping poor Appalachian students get an education. 100% of the students are on scholarship. 100% have paid jobs while in school.

It's hard to extrapolate from this to a national poll. It would be better to include Penn State, Michigan and University of Texas to understand national trends.

That said, this is a truism. The fields pay well because they are hard enough to scare away many students, and they have good jobs. Other fields are difficult too (say Philosophy?) but they don't have good jobs on the other side so people are less tempted.
No one is disputing that a reckless bicyclist is a danger to themselves. The question is how much of a danger they are to others, because more people feel more okay intervening when someone is presenting a danger to others.
The average student does not give a flying fuck about what they study. That 4 month break is the only thing that keeps them going. It sucks, but I see it as beneficiary to people who are interested in their subjects. It's a good balance.
I've noticed that there are two types of laptoppers that frequent coffee shops, the "well-heeled" and the "hobos". The former are social, interesting, always buy drinks/food. They may stay for a long time, but they typically add to the atmosphere rather than detract from it. The only thing that really bugs them is when the Internet is spotty or really slow.

Then there's the other sort, the "hobos." They bring a ton of crap, (I saw one guy haul a fricken printer into a Starbucks) it's even chances on whether they'll order something or not, get angry at the drop of a hat, and you get the distinct feeling like they don't have / can't afford Internet at home.

The thing about the latter is, they tend to have older laptops whose batteries can't hold a charge. Guaranteed they won't have 4G devices. So removing the power outlets is probably the easiest and best solution to the problem. You'll keep the good sort from being able to stay all day, but if the problem is really that bad, the well-heeled wouldn't want to stay anyway due to the atmosphere being created by the hobos.
From Code to Cure - Engineering Genomics
I question the value of memory-based education. Application of historical theory is a lot like coding, and requires some memory retention, but classes that test on historical detail seem to me to have missed the point.
A Terry Pratchett quote seems appropriate:

"Witches are not by nature gregarious, at least with other witches, and they certainly don't have leaders. Granny Weatherwax was the most highly-regarded of the leaders they didn't have."
70% in Engineering. People did get more than 80% though so it's clearly not absurd. I got 100% in a couple of exams.
Do you know what GC does?
The Economies of Scaling Software: Parallelism, caching, big data, & more
Tmoertel, your comment is dead for some reason and you might want to talk to the admins.
ahhh. Idioms at work.
I've had a few experiences with flat organizations.

Notably, the one which was proud to loudly proclaim it's flatness and openness was far and away the worst. It didn't quite fit the high school analogy, but it wasn't far off.

In reality, the "flat", "open" structure was actually a concentric hierarchy radiating from The Boss. The Boss > The Inner Circle > Untouchables > Loyals > The Rest.

As bad as that was, I'm still inclined to something generally flat given an exceptional leader to set the tone.
> I think that tests and teaching in general could use a lot more discussion and analysis

You're right, but so many times when this is brought up, the result is one of those "express your feelings on this topic" type assignments. A few of those bad apples ruin it for everyone.
Check out the Capital One 360 cafe in SF (Kearny and Post). It is basically this.
How would you feel about a credit-based hourly system? I.e., you put in £40 to your account, and you pay £2-£3 an hour for a desk which you can book a day or two in advance. Then you can order coffee from your desk which comes out of your account (but is, of course, cheaper than if you bought it using a card)?
I think the problem is skill related. Most U.S students just don't have the proper foundation in math to do well in physics, engineering, or even bio and chemistry.

I don't think majors like philosophy or english are implicitly any easier (I went to a school where they were seemingly pretty difficult majors), but they're much easier in comparison to subjects where you many students lack years of fundamental work.
First of all, I don't think math/science is harder than history or art. I consider both Newton and Shakespeare to be geniuses; same with Bach and Leibniz. I think it's an established empirical fact (maybe not -- see NYT article) that to become an expert at anything, it will take you upwards of 10,000 hours -- be it playing violin, studying history, or doing number theory. So I don't think the effort is any differentiating factor.

But I do think that in math/engineering classes there is a disproportional amount of trickery. There are numerous memes that exemplify this: http://www.thefunnyblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/funny...

You'd be surprised how often this happens. In my calculus classes it was virtually rampant. We'd get some material that was non-trivial to figure out on an exam. That's just bad teaching. Sure, some people will argue that it separates those a better grasp of the material from those with a worse one (maybe it does), but to me it seems unfair. Say I'm not a bright student but I understand the homework very well; the exam, however, uses a non-trivial combination of the elements found in the homework. I personally think that's bullshit. Why not go over the most mind-numbingly difficult problems in class? Often times, there are only a limited number of tricks that can trip you up; if professors would go over these, everyone would pass. But I guess we don't want that (why not?).

Consider an analogy: I decide to prepare for a running competition. My trainer shows me how to keep my heart-rate up, how to jog briskly, etc. All this is done on a treadmill on the low setting. Come competition day, it turns out that it's a 25k through the Australian outback. I'm not sure how anyone in their right mind would think the trainer did a good job if he knew exactly what I was getting into.
http://www.stuffaboutcode.com/2013/07/raspberry-pi-reading-c...
Firebase dev here. :-) Firebase does handle offline syncing / conflict resolution.

If you have a Firebase app open and you lose network connectivity, the app still continues to work fine and any modifications you make will be synced back to Firebase when you regain connectivity.

What we don't (quite yet) do is handle the case where you make changes, kill the app (without regaining network connectivity), restart the app, and then get network connectivity, but that's coming soon.

As for other differences, Dropbox Datastore seems to be tightly tied to Dropbox, so the end user for your app must have a Dropbox account (and if they want to collaborate with other users, those users must also have Dropbox accounts, etc.). So it's really for building apps on top of Dropbox.

Firebase and Parse are just generic backends, with no ties to other services, so your end users don't need anything to use your app.

As for differentiating Parse and Firebase, Firebase deals with data in real-time, pushing updates to apps as soon as data changes. Parse is a traditional request/response model, where your app has to explicitly "refresh" to get new data.
it's easy: life is not about reading books and attending school. or working, for that matter.