skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
AP Computer Science is supposed to be a college-level Intro to Computer Science for high school students. In 2012, 26,103 AP CS students took the exam. 63.6% received a "3" or above, meaning colleges accepting AP scores probably awarded credit.

It also means 36.4% probably didn't receive credit.

A "3" sits on the bubble. Since AP scores are "recommendations of proficiency", not final exam grades in the traditional sense, students with "3's" are often advised to reconsider taking the course again. It depends on the school of course, but nobody complains. That's how it works.

Adding the 15.6% of students with a "3" to the 36.4% means 52% of students might not be "proficient" by definition.

The San Jose State numbers aren't shocking, they're about right given the total population. Plus, looking at the courses and the material, I'm willing to bet 40% drop the traditional class before the final anyway. Are they included in SJSU's comparative statistic?
This is why Linus may want to consider toning it down or fin another way to make his point:

"But 80 percent of the kernel contributors are paid by companies. So that means that the Linux kernel really has a lot of people from corporations on there. Some of them, like Linus, are paid by nonprofits. But it’s still becoming more of a corporate environment, and a lot of corporations have codes of conduct. And those codes of conduct often say things about how you conduct yourself on public forums or social media. The code of conduct for those companies also applies to the [Linux Kernel] mailing list.

So we need to figure out how to be respectful and civil to each other in the mailing list because this is no longer a volunteer project. People are paid to work on this. This is about making a workplace more civil and more respectful."

It's not just a good ole boy OSS project anymore.
I claim that they have plenty to lose. There are people in our society without access to modern medicine, no concept of physics, no chance of what you consider to be modern housing, terrible sanitation, no plumbing, etc, etc.

You can romanticize how much better their situation will be all you want, but there's plenty of evidence it won't be.

I read an article years ago on feral surfers who were basically turning indigenous peoples into diseased addicts, sex workers, and slaves. Not because they intended to, but it just happened to be convenient. I'll try and dig it up.
They are better, objectively.
Your emotions are a physical process occurring in your brain, and you are not in control of them any more than you are in control of whether or not a bruise forms after you are struck.
I don't like abusive comments at all, and I'm sure that an abrasive environment will keep some good hackers away.

On the other hand, I'm also sure that an environment where you always need to bite your tongue and force yourself to be very polite, even when you're pissed off, would keep other good hackers away. Especially among those that do this for passion, and not because they're paid to.
Looking on Google for interesting content + shar with Hootsuite
Russell's Teapot

I'd never heard of that before. Turns out it's a metaphor for atheism / agnosticism. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot:

[Bertrand] Russell wrote that if he claims that a teapot orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, it is nonsensical for him to expect others to believe him on the grounds that they cannot prove him wrong.
At which point using Tor will become a crime.
The problematic thing about Linus's behavior is not its direct effects but the example it sets. Even if one can justify his behavior in terms of his responsibilities at the top of the technical hierarchy, that doesn't justify worse behavior by those lower down. Others see what he does and take it one step further. Then, in the absence of a correction from him, they take it another step further, until they're just as nasty as their own pathologies allow them to be, and newcomers start to imitate that right off the bat. Just one "Al, that was over the line" comment from Linus would damp that feedback loop. The continued absence of leadership on that front ends up affecting the overall tone far more than the occasional one-on-one outburst.

P.S. To cheery, since you've been hellbanned: that's a false dichotomy. I'm not suggesting that people should be artificially nice. I'm not a nice guy myself. I'm just suggesting that discussions should be kept focused and fact-based, not made personal or nasty for the sake of entertainment or sheer bloody-mindedness. That's what I see both on LKML and here, and it serves no purpose. It's not honest, it's not efficient, it's just being a dick.
> What would be the likely result if Larry Page made a blog post detailing all the information they are petitioning the government to allow revealing, and then went directly to the media with the same information?

He would go to jail. And then, instead of being a powerful executive in a strong position to push the government to do the right thing, he would be powerless.
The GGP started off by saying:

> American company…

Then, noticing the critical error, the GP said:

> Fastmail is owned by Opera a Norwegian company.

Replying to the American company part.

> You said: Their servers are located in the US according to the article.

So, the servers location have nothing to do with whether the company is American or not. And while that might have a bearing on certain facets of the topic as a whole, it's meaningless in this context. Basically, what you said does not change anything.
Yes, the worst part about the security state/NSA story is listening to and reading those who are most upset about it. They get on an emotional tear and play loose with facts and sources. This hurts much more than it helps, because it begins to paint anybody concerned about what we've created as a crank. I'm much more concerned about the ranters than I am about those that are apathetic.

This is an issue to be intellectually passionate about, not emotionally passionate. It's something I have to keep reminding myself of daily.

News outlets and bloggers are all too willing to play telephone and translate emotional energy into pageviews. That's not a good thing for the discussion.
If you use a custom Sieve script, you can definitely whitelist certain addresses, domains, subjects, body text, etc. Google "fastmail sieve" for more info on this.

Also, if you haven't talked to support about this, I'd definitely recommend it. They've always been super helpful with me.
Look for content on Prismatic/Scoop.it/Reddit/Topsy + share with Buffer
Ex-CIA chief: What Edward Snowden did
Look for content on Prismatic/Scoop.it/Reddit/Topsy + share with Hootsuite
Code Search API
That doesn't refute what the GP said though. Fastmail is not an American company.
As concerned citizens who would sign a white house petition to block the renewal of the NSA data collection order?
It doesn't matter if clients are naive or not, it matters if they have a checkbook.
My one feature request would be to have the word proceeding 'fuck' as an argument:

/:thing/:from
Will return content of the form 'Fuck :thing. -:from' e.g. /SaaS/Foaas will return 'Fuck SaaS. -Foaas'
I'm pointing to that they're not a new encounter, and that they are clearly delineated as ads.
Sure. I'll just take a third option though where people are direct but not abusive. Doesn't seem like too much to wish for.
They are.

$ git add .
$ git commit -m 'fixing #23'
Intuit's Mint. Provides some really nice advice sometimes, such as how to avoid X or Y fee. (Some accounts that require $100+ in your checking account to avoid a $5 monthly fee)

https://www.mint.com/

You connect it to your bank account.
Don't be facile; surely a picture implying that the government is going to blow you up with a Reaper for going 10 over the limit is more distracting than a picture of a Big Mac. Especially in a state that (I hear) is on the verge of bankruptcy.
"OSX lets me get more stuff done than Linux while maintaining the ability to freely develop programs..."

And Windows might be getting you more stuff than OSX, but that was not the point for GNU world, wasn't it? It was about the free and especially the open part.

"Apple has yet to sue anyone other than blatant and uninspired copyists"

Let's keep a little less brazen attitude about tech and engineering, shall we? Just because lines were crossed in the dark age doesn't mean that those lines aren't in place any more.

"Meanwhile, Apple has been advancing in really important ways"

I do not deny true innovation, but we all know that the reason for some matters being "really important" is sole for just being Apple-related.

"that are not being sufficiently imitated by Windows and Linux"

Might it be that not all Apple "advancements" are worth to be "imitated"?

"sweet app store"

...and incurable Apple fan-boy.
That's the thing -- I do feel strongly about privacy. That's why I don't see the point in switching to another US based service. Better to use a European or Asian provider or roll your own.
Well, there's actual research on it. Most of our intuitions about teaching and learning are wrong.

Google computer science education or check out SIGCSE
Collecting thematic blogs in Feedly + share with Buffer
Someone didn't do their homework. -- Man, I'm not going to get this project done by morning. Hey I know, I'll take down github and say its checked in.
Looking around on the EMC website, they have a product that can put 1.9 PB in a 40U rack. So that's 5.26 x 10^8 racks. Each rack consumes about 18 sq ft. of floor space (includes room for aisles, servicing, etc.), so doing the math, it comes out to 339 square miles. Assuming just one floor.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%285.26+x+10%5E8%29+*+1...

What does this tell me? Either the NSA has storage that is 2 or more orders of magnitude denser than current industry parts, or that a lot of their data is not in online storage - it's been moved to tape for warehouse storage (but LTO v6 is not as dense as hard drive - only 2.5TB in a larger device, so the warehouse would still be huge...)

Or most likely, the NSA just doesn't have 1 YB in their data center. Think about the disruption there would be in the hard drive market by someone buying 3.1 billion hard drives, even if they spaced out their purchases. And coming after the factories in Thailand were flooded a few years ago, with the shortage that happened.

So what if they used data compression on disk? Assume they got 90% compression (english text, voice, etc are pretty compressible), that means they only need 1/10th the number of drives. Wolfram Alpha says their data center space requirements go down to 34 square miles. Ok, a big savings. But it's still an area the size of Manhattan.
> rules and guides

Repeatability would be one reason. Asking the same questions to different candidates will help you make better and comparable decisions. The usual "casual chat" interview is heavily biased towards people who are good looking and interview well.
Yeah, this is the problem. I pay for Hulu but there is no way to get out the ads. Google is going for an interrupt-based ad model here so you should expect it in the paid version too.
I went to Jesuit high school in Chicago and was in detention on >70% of school days (usually, dress code). Detentions were meant to last an hour and were typically managed by handing out poems that the detainees had to memorize and recite. My detentions lasted ~4 minutes. At one point they started giving me extra poems to memorize, which didn't work for them; no poem could hold me.

I have no idea if I've grown out of it. For specific, focused things, I still have a freaky weird memory. It's handy for API documentation and suchlike.
USA PRISM Plus
>I _do_ care about running random plugins in my browser that update in the background.

Then turn that function off [1]. There's no more security threat from well-known browser plugins from Mozilla's site than well-known packages from your OS's apt repo. And both are open source.

[1] http://imgur.com/tivq9o8
There is an awful lot of righteous indignation here over Google placing ads where you'll only see them if you're looking for ads.
Exactly. In addition, I think there's an unfortunate tendency among programmers to wear the "crusty curmudgeon with borderline autism" as a kind of pride, even emulating it to be more credible.
And he started it with this.

I hesitate to ask this question because I really don't want to start a
flame war.
"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can make me think I deserved it."

http://xkcd.com/1216/
I maybe get around one spam message a month. And it is always someone trying to sell me web design services.
Well that's how it would seem, in the wake of the Snowden revelations.
Right, I think reusable components (at least in web dev) are the libraries/frameworks that come out of creating a project.

Example: DHH built Basecamp and pulled Rails out of it. He (and now many others) used Rails to create web apps.
Yeah, that's interesting; I have a weird memory, and even when I was in high school, I'd often enjoy rereading a book more than reading a new one.

Brains are weird.
They were responding to Gmail, by working on a more modern AJAXy web interface, even before Opera bought them.

I remember being concerned about the buyout, but it seems it's been nothing but good for them. Opera are a great company.
Presumably you've heard the phrase that "we can disagree without being disagreeable".

I agree that I would much rather work with Linus than Wikipedians, but I'd also prefer working with people who I trust to give me their honest opinion without a needless verbal shelacking.

You could also ask me if i'd prefer to have my hand or my foot cut off (foot for the record), but personally my preference is to find a way to keep all of my limbs intact.

The point over which I absolutely support Sarah Sharp is that what Linus is doing is essentially hazing. He's trying to enforce societal norms by handing out verbal beatings, and trying to encourage others to enforce his norms via his methods.

That is a problem. Tart replies regarding criticism of code, or how code is managed is one thing. Trying to encourage a culture of verbal abuse is entirely another.

------------------------------------

Sidebar: There are organizations that do work these sorts of verbal dressing downs as a systematic tactic. The Marines are famous for it. The objective is to provide shared hardship to encourage bonding amongst a group of trainees. They're also famous for fucking it up (so much so that we've got films like Full Metal Jacket to memorialize the experience).

But FOSS and Kernel contribution is not like the Marines. There is no inherent unit of social support to fall into. If you're lucky enough to be part of a group, or to have someone say "oh yeah, that's how Linus is" then maybe you get over it and inure yourself to the abuse. Or maybe you just stop contributing to the Kernel.
Strikes me (no pun intended) as being a very good way to get the general public to think about the consequences of the creeping use of drones.

"Think its just terrorists targeted? Well, it could now be you".

OK, terrorists get a missile, and drivers get a ticket, but do people want an army of drones monitoring them for motoring offences, and more?
I think your comment is what's "wrong" with the world. You are applying your western values onto a completely foreign culture. Modern medicine? I'm sure after having survived for that long, they are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. You want to give them jeans and t-shirts too? Maybe the gift of starbucks?

It's the opposite of a zoo that the op is talking about.
I have zero dogs in this fight, so it really doesn't make a difference to me either way.

But communication isn't some binary thing. You don't need to either be an abrasive honest asshole OR a slimy political wheedler. It's perfectly possible to be honest AND polite.
If you think that's intense bullying, you should be glad.
It is a BSD and has the nicest UI. Your fight wasn't mine.
Hackernews, Thou clay-brained guts, thou knotty-pated fool...
Huh?

I've had my email address since 1995. I have 5Mb / 6 emails in my Maildir and that's only because I've got lazy recently. I've recieved probably 500,000 emails over the years.

Hoarding email is like recording all your phone conversations and keeping the tapes in your living space. If it's worth keeping, save it elsewhere. If it's not, delete it.
In addition to this, consider if your rasberry pi breaks, or you decide to add a second one, rather than have to set it up from scratch again, you just apply a manifest/cookbook/etc. I guess that falls into the repeatable part of the statement, now that I read it aloud.
Given American levels of obesity, Im not sure you are correct.
I just did recently, and I'm very happy with the decision.

Two feature requests though:

1) Push support for iPhone

2) Have my email encrypted on disk (in the unlikely event there's a security hole or a rogue sysadmin or something, I don't want my email copied wholesale by one attacker) -- I'd pay extra for this
I hate corporate style.

Linus has organized thousands to work together to build something amazing. We all benefit. That's social genius.
Does anyone seriously believe that this is anything other than PR? While these companies were prevented from disclosing details, they easily could have announced that they're fighting for rights. And that's the problem.

Although I won't agree with it, I can understand that Google (and crew) were prevented from DISCLOSING that they're being tapped. Fine, gun to the head and all that. But what prevented them from saying "we receive requests, we fight them", and even providing information on the process of fighting a request.
You know what's funny? You do that and when you look there are still unread things in there that it pulls from the inbox. Once you dispose of them in the inbox, they do disappear, though.
I'm always baffled by this response.

There are many ways to tell someone that they are wrong without calling them a fucking idiot or without having to bite your tongue and forcing yourself to be very polite.
After reading some of the comments posted on the blog, just wanted to give you a shout-out for your having to put up with douchey comments and responding in a humble fashion to them.

Can't be easy. :)
>last 65,000 years...62,000 years before the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids at Giza.

A very minor nitpick, but the Giza pyramids were built around 2500BC, not 1000BC.
Just look at China's internet censorship regime for an excellent example of how this works.

The Great Firewall does not prevent a determined person from accessing banned content. You don't even have to be all that determined, really. They make no effort to block things like ssh tunnels or VPNs. You're just a quick "ssh -D" command or Tor install away from access to everything they block.

One wonders, then, why they bother. Many technically-minded people ask this question. Or they assume the Great Firewall does much more than it really does, and think that stuff like ssh must be blocked. (Of course, it's not. China likes international business, and if foreigners can't get secure access to their corporate networks, foreigners won't come to China to do business.)

The Great Firewall's purpose is not to prevent information from being accessed at all, its purpose is social control. If 100 Chinese internet users attempt to access blocked content, perhaps 10 will persist and succeed, while 90 will just move on to looking at cat pictures or whatever. From the point of view of the Chinese authorities, that is a success.

The Great Firewall will block attempts to read about the Tiananmen Square massacre. This seems silly, because Chinese people know about this event anyway. But it changes the discourse. It gently pushes the online conversation toward "safer" topics.

With modern technology, a determined person will always be able to find the content they want, no matter how banned it is. This is not a concern. What is a concern is the ability to push the less-determined people, who vastly outnumber the determined people, toward topics and material that the authorities prefer.
Ask HN: Are There Any Startups Trying to Bring Us Cheaper Cell Phone Service?
Many of us pay $100 or more / month for our cell phone bills (or close to it). Your cell phone bill could be just as high as your monthly car payment. Does that make sense? How much value are we really getting for that price? Are there any alternatives to this ridiculous system? Are there any startups trying to take on this oligopoly?

A proposed solution: (1) get a Clear Voyager (comes with unlimited internet access for $50/month) (2) connect to it using a mobile device (3) surf the web and make calls w/ Google Voice

Do you have any other solutions in mind?
Prepare Your Site for the Rolling Panda Updates - Panda Rolling Update
People will laugh it off until the next Snowden will release the slides and it suddenly becomes a reality.
I just bloody switched to fastmail because I thought it was Australian - and unfortunately I really like it. Gutted to hear it's hosted in USA, kinda negates the point of my effort switching away.
Every negative word is not abuse. What kind of idiot are you?
I think making toys for children is a good idea. There are lots of examples in the physical world that don't progress towards the adult version that are fun and educational.

My problem with this is I'm not sure kids would find it fun. Something like HacketyHack that has integrated music and graphics feels like the kind of thing that would make the programs kids want to make. I'd also try Processing.
You just want them to be part of (y)our own zoo.
And I think showing that they fail people actually increases the value of the course. I'm always wary of non-free online courses provided by universities that have an extremely high pass rate.
There are signs along I-4 here in Florida (between Orlando and Tampa) that say that there is aerial surveillance looking for speeders for several years now. Though, there's a picture of a cessna-type plane on the sign, heavily suggesting it's a human pilot :P
Tragically, Tim Hortons writes "donut", I believe. If we petition them, maybe they'll apologize and change it.
> which is inappropriate even for fairly simple claims where belief can be less than absolute

Why?

> These are obviously very different beliefs.

Then make them both "the most effective means", if that makes it easier to understand.

> Saying that I think the logic of your argument is invalid is not saying I believe the statement it was offered to support is negative.

That's not what you're saying, however.
Update the db to store "$" and cents values
Sometimes you just can't make this up.

A bug report this morning from the UI and BA group:
"Update the db to store "$" and cents values (in payment [amount] fields) so they can subsequently be used for display elsewhere"

Anyone else see an issue with this?
But fastmail don't give you calendar and contacts that you can sync to devices...
A Point of View: Magazines vs. Blogs
Why I left Ubuntu ~ Everyday Linux User
If your team is small enough, why not use bitbucket as a remote as a backup option?
http://foaas.com/chainsaw/Hughdbrown/Heather

haha
the ability to write a commit with a number in it doesn't magically create a distributed issue system which is still hosted in ONE place, which is still down when ONE place is down, and which still demands you have an account registered in ONE provider where those issues are posted and discussed.

btw the auto-linking auto-fixing commit syntax is just a local convention, which isn't even compatible between the 2 biggest players, see https://github.com/zzzeek/alembic/ and https://bitbucket.org/zzzeek/alembic/commits/all for example reference.
UIkit - A lightweight and modular front-end framework for the web
Look at commodities trading books too. Bitcoin et al are not quite as liquid as most forex markets, so they tend to behave more like a commodity.