skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Anything that allows you to get an exam score of 25% by chance alone is a pretty weak pedagogical tool.

That's a pretty weak argument. Not only can multiple choice questions be weighted to punish guessing, remember how the score system works. 50% is a complete failure.
I think you missed the "who were in schools at the 8th grade level" qualifier in your post.
A long post that gives two arguments near the end in favor of Go over their old language of choice (Python):

1. No dependency issues.

2. Compiles with no issues on different platforms.

And one sort of argument in between:

3. Some of the tools that they use were written in Go.

While (1) is true for deployment, dependency handing is not a solved problem in Go. Since import statements do not allow you to specify versions, you have to keep track of which commits of a particular project you trust. I am pretty sure that this problem will be solved, but it currently isn't.

(3) is perhaps an argument in favor of being able to read Go, but not to switch to Go. By those standards, everyone on Unix should be writing C ;).
Jamie Oliver Proves McDonald’s Burgers “Unfit for human consumption”
It does indeed look a little depressed when you google for puffin picture but none the less it's a beautiful creature, makes for a good and recognisable logo.
The entirety of that thread has some very interesting discussion (http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1k3fq7/what_are_som...)
Check http://motyar.blogspot.in/2013/02/hacking-micromax-400r-mi-f...
Gods, could the NSA get any more short-sighted? Once they started tapping into all of this data, how long did they think they could keep it secret, especially when tens of thousands of contractors knew about the program? Once the news leaked, what did they think other countries were going to do?

Whenever people in power setup perfect systems of abuse, the people being abused will change that system by going out-of-band.
Git blame has never been so much fun
John Adams: George Washington as Mohammed Mosaddegh [200 yrs of terrorist FUD]
Back in the days where men were made of iron and ships from wood...

... the only people with ski so thin that the veins could be seen through it were the "noble" ones. Looking at their hands it seeemed like they had blue blood.

At least that was the explanation of "blue blood" that I got when I was a kid ;-)
A pen testing pen.
I don't see your boss saying this to you unless you are valued as a dime-a-dozen pizza maker. If you love your job and/or are making what your worth then stay, otherwise it sounds like you could do better.
Exposiciones a los CEM destruyen la salud y el bienestar,
I understand being confused/annoyed at spiritplumber linking a music video to make a pun.

I don't understand being confused/annoyed at the fact that he linked a video.
If only our Founding Fathers had been smart enough to give one person, say, the President, the power to reduce or negate excessive sentences imposed by a justice system run amok. They could have given this power a snappy name, like "Pardon."
Are you saying our NHS here in the UK operates on threats of violence? I'm not sure I follow.
I have a little different take. So, let's assume that you can combine 5+ encryptions / encryption points and hide the contents of you communication on someone else's network. IT IS STILL SOMEONE ELSE'S NETWORK. What happens when the network owner becomes China (game already over), UK (now blocking porn, next political speech, etc. >> game over), USSR, USSA, etc. and decides that your packets look like something we don't transfer. Or what about the old proposal to require a license to use the Internet? -- see http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100204/1925188060.shtml and http://business.time.com/2010/01/30/drivers-licenses-for-the... and a million other links.

Solutions built on top of some existing (OWNED) platform are inherently fragile until there's a private (P2P-like HAM radio to smoke signal) transfer pipe.
Show HN: Simple website for Board Games and Card Games - What do you think?
2nd time around showing off FunNode. Any feedback/suggestions to improve the site will be appreciated.
Redbull is expensive!
PHP succeeded in part over mod_perl because of the very statelessness you describe. State is delegated to a database or a memory caching service; each request is answered from scratch.

mod_perl allowed programmers to sink their application code deep into the guts of Apache. In retrospect, this turned out to be a dead-end because it is difficult to install, difficult to update and difficult to scale up.

PHP's lack of power and low cost of operation ("here's your FTP account, have fun") made it much more attractive to shared hosts.

In short, operational advantages outweighed programming advantages.
Celeb Hypocrisy on Twitter
Huh what is your problem? I said that Marie Curie is famous (and definitely nobody knows the Skoldowokski-part of her name - today is the first time I heard that). Are you saying that Cecile should be as famous as Marie? Or only as famous as "lesser" physicists like Einstein or Newton?

And you only confirm my point. I was going to suggest that if "we" (or feminists or whoever) want Cecile to be successful, we should just refer to her as Cecile Payne from now on.
Mio: A High-Performance Multicore IO Manager for GHC
This is timely as I was just fiddling around with some CLI and subprocess communication in Go as I learn the language. Is there anything like envoy for Go? While interacting with processes wasn't too tough (once I found the bufio package -- doh!) there's still a lot of boilerplate involved. That's partially unavoidable given the static nature of the language, but it would be nice to have a library that streamlined some common patterns.
I've been reading a lot about that topic recently and I am pretty sure the science on that is not as conclusive as you claim. Most studies stop as soon as they find anything that could support their claim that it's discrimination, too.

For starters, any article that claims the pay gap is 20% is dishonest. Last I read all but 3% were accounted for by other factors like choice of profession, work hours and so on. So the actual wage gap is only 3%. And that doesn't prove discrimination either, could just as well be some other reason they haven't found yet. But feminism works like religion - discrimination is a handy explanation for everything, no need to ask any further questions.
Not true, Linus Pauling also did, admittedly many years after her. Also he's the only one to win two unshared Nobel Prizes.
Excellent post. Thanks! Hopefully these will become dirt cheap (or, worth hacking because they'll be cheaper than the electric imp).
How do you do that without getting "residue" on your feet or shoes?
It's not hard to imagine why there's more sympathy for taking care of children and the aged rather than working age adults.
To my kwnolage (helped a lot by wikipedia) LaTex was first written in 1980. This paper dates 1926.
>it's also proprietary software.

ok thanks guys. Good luck with that.
My friend started there couple weeks ago in a dev position. They gave him a 30% raise. Tomorrow morning or this week he finds out if he gets to keep the job. Most likely he should given he's a dev.
I've seen Varnish choke on mainline code: the Recent Comments widget, which can invalidate an entire site whenever a comment is posted anywhere. I have one site which caused both WPEngine and Page.ly to lock up on just 30k views/day because of that.

What I do with my VPS:

1. WP Supercache is configured to write .html.gz copies to disk.

2. Nginx is configured to check if such a file exists before referring anything to PHP. If it finds the .html.gz, it will serve it directly from disk. Ordinary file caching gives it the advantages Varnish promises.

3. WP Supercache appears to correctly handle invalidation when a new comment is posted.
>> "Also, it's interesting that several questions basically come down to the student knowing the definition of imperials units like cords or the number feet in a mile. It makes sense that students would need to know those definitions for daily life, but I still find it odd since I grew up using the metric system!"

With the metric system we still had to learn these things (how many metres in a kilometre etc.) it was just much easier.
Not to mention curving, but I think that is something that the Europeans don't like. American universities are dog-eat-dog compared to soft European ones.
I agree with a lot of stuff said here - caring, or intrinsic motivation, is one of the most powerful attributes you can hire for. There are, however, a plethora of other attributes out there, and restricting your potential hires to the tiny subset of people that are as insanely motivated as yourself seems like a recipe for never hiring anyone and paradoxically never actually solving any problems.

Specifically I don't think points 3 and 4 are quite on the money - how much you care is often based on how much you perceive people care about you, and equity can be a pretty big signal of that. Additionally, I think people who care can be quite contentious.

Still, a good enough point to talk about. Apparent enthusiasm is one of the best things you can select for, when you see it, and it can make up for a lot of other things that might be lacking.
>> "Note the biggest change from today: none of these are multiple-choice tests."

In the UK, at least where I live, none of our tests are multiple choice. I've always wondered why in the US tests are given in this format. It seems very dumbed down. Is there a valid reason?
It is the iTunes of the open source media world. An abomination, at least it isn't as bad as Calibre.
Yep, not hard considering everyone here probably likes math. My wife has to search matrix multiplication even if she has to use it once a month. Otoh i have to read about grammar anytime a child ask me help with any simplistic question... Damn those meddling kids

Besides, The answer they present to #7 is a little crazy though when they try to equal 1/3b = 2/3g... I'm pretty sure it should be a simple 40g and 80b
Rufskin Presents 2013 Collection Featuring Logan Taylor
Rufskin was built on the foundation of "vintage, sexy, masculine, athletic and futuristic," when its owner and head designer Hubert Pouches along with his partner and company president, Douglas Coats, pooled together their fashion-based resources to create the company in early 2000. Rufskins ground-breaking design approach boasts that their garments are for men who want to look their best, and that they are appealing for all body types, providing body contouring designs to accentuate and lift areas that need it.
No pinchzoom on iPad. Why do sites like this go out of their way to disable useful functionality.
The Aftershock Survival Summit. Whenever you read an article talking about doom and gloom in the economy, you have to scroll to the bottom to make sure this video isn't sitting there. That's if your B.S. alarm hasn't already gone off. I'm sick of seing this all over the internet. Don't waste your time with this spam.
here the screenshot [pic.twitter.com/IneqTYhyc2](http://t.co/IneqTYhyc2)
Sunk-cost fallacy.
Well as I said, if you want her to be famous, just call her Cecile Payne from now on.

My point is that her relative fame probably has little to do with being a woman.

Of course maybe now she'll become famous for the only reason that she is a woman. I think that qualifies as irony...

I don't have an issue with the Wikipedia article, only with this feminist pamphlet that suggests she would be as famous as Einstein if she weren't a woman https://twitter.com/marcuschown/status/366132278381903874/ph...
That's an excellent and useful reply, and you've given me much to think about. Thank you.
"It seems that we now have the choice between taking the time to understand and implement secure encryption or choosing services based on which governments we don't mind spying on us."

I prefer the first of those two options but it'll only have an impact if more people make the same choice.
Running a VoIP platform, we've "discovered" that instead of running one big process (which spawns lots of threads), we run one process per core or socket (still experimenting). We force affinity so the scheduler can't bounce stuff around. We've gotten somewhere between 200% and 500% efficiency from doing so, as well as minimized variation (that is, the one-process-per-server machines see huge CPU spikes, whereas the affinity locked systems don't).

The way I see it: You've gotta figure out your scale-out or load balance method. It might not hurt to just pretend each NUMA node is a separate server and just treat it like that.
Regulator Examines Bitcoin Practices
One thing that annoyed me about both Python and Rubyis that the way things in the standard library worked changed from release to release in subtle, incompatible ways. I remember getting burned by a change in how iterating over characters in a string worked in Ruby in the 1.8.x versions. Sorry-- I don't remember the details, it's been a few years. The point is that if you want to run in on a different PC than you developed the code on, or upgrade, these are buried landmines which are going to blow your leg off sooner or later. If you're working on an open source project, often the first sign you get that your Python code doesn't work on older or newer versions is a user reporting a mysterious RuntimeException.

virtualenv can sort of solve a lot of these issues, if you have complete control of all computers running your software, and if you can find a Python version that works for all the packages you need. But for a lot of open source projects, these assumptions may not be true. And then you have the issue of stagnation. It sucks to be stuck on Python 2.4.x in 2013. But how do you make a business case for a potentially very risky upgrade? This is the real reason why initiatives like Python 3.x and Perl 6.x have been DOA, in my opinion.
Skill Cloud: Erasing the job title
So, the DEA and other agencies create the incentives for the criminal drug milieu by creating artificial scarcity, i.e. high prices... which in turns leads to more criminal activity and violence and subsequently to more funding for these agencies.

Perfect.
I love the way he only dropped maybe two beats in executing that one.
mencoder is an abomination. Unless you have an actual real-life use case where mencoder works and ffmpeg doesn't, use ffmpeg; practically everything else does, regardless of licensing (ffmpeg has a wall of shame, which I'm sure comprises only a small sample of infringers, on their site).
I played with reflection in Ruby for a short time and found it really fascinating, until I realized everything got pathologically slow quite quickly - especially if you add one reflection effect on another.

All this stuff sounds cool. Is it fast and scalable?
Indeed, I could not remember the gearing you were talking about. This looks super cool :)
I can write libraries in COBOL and then proceed to claim "these libraries only exist in COBOL, therefore COBOL is better than other languages", which is to me exactly what this post reads like.
Please spare us the "Obamacare" paranoia.

I agree that once data is available it will be abused.
But Obamacare one of the main problem? Dude, take off the tinfoil hat.
And that would be better, the world could do without a trillion photo apps and dazed kids trying to be businessmen.
Ok, I understand. I was using the term "user acquisition" loosely to refer to the initial perception and evaluation of something vs. the experience of using it long-term, but that was not at all clear. Of course I don't think you are concerned with 'acquiring' as many users as possible. I just mean to emphasize that design impacts whether people will even consider using what you make, even people who may benefit greatly from it.
I've been using Elementary OS since beta 1 and I have found it to be the most usable Linux distribution. Don't get hanged up about them copying mac os. Even a novice user would find it easy to use. Let's not forget the soothing feel of the UI. It feels light.

Even android has some parts copied from ios, and yet you don't want to complain about it because it lets you get similar experience within your budget. It gives you a likeable option, copy or not.

Just give it a try. Don't judge from the video alone.
Ethercalc.org down
Been using mpv the last few days, replacing mplayer2. It doesn't seem to be activating VDPAU correctly despite using the sample config file as a template. The console output clearly indicates VDPAU vo, but I still get 40% CPU usage with HD footage and occasional slowdowns (including the slightly-modified classic MPlayer "your computer is too slow to play this!" message) while playing videos.

While mpv sounds like a good thing in theory, I might just remain content with mplayer2. Now at least a single point has been given.
i don't think Julia is viewed by the relevant communities as a replacement for Matlab, Octave, et al; likewise, i don't think that was the purpose underlying the Julia project.

"Scientific Python"--ie, python + NumPy + SciPy + Matplotlib (and perhaps including iPython) have been a de facto open source replacement for Matlab for some time now. This is apparent if you look at the similarity in syntax--eg, most significantly) NumPy copied Matlab's beautifully dense array-indexing syntax. Performance-wise, across a reasonably complete set of benchmarks reflecting the workflow of a typical user, Scientific Python and Matlab are interchangeable (https://modelingguru.nasa.gov/docs/DOC-1762).

Instead, what the Julia creators wanted to do, as i understand it, is provide an array-oriented language having true compiled -code performance; this level of performance, Scientific Python user can only achieve through additional steps in their workflow that usually involve re-writing performance-critical portions of the code in another language and compiling them in-line, e.g., cython, weave (C++ inline), numexpr (JIT for a limited set of NumPy functions), direct access to the BLAS (provided via a SciPy module), swig, f2py,....
Tumbler (Project Xanadu)
So, where should I Go to get started learning Go as a sysadmin?
1. People are stupid.
2. There's a lot of the US, land-wise if not population, that still has no broadband alternatives. Dialup is all there is.
3. See #1. That bundled set of applications which sorts out the wild, scary Internets for you is comforting to some.
The source that the quote is pulled from (Schiebinger, Londa (2001). Has Feminism Changed Science?. United States of America: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674005449) includes (in the very next paragraph):

"In 1996 salaries for women in professional fields increased to 85–95 percent of men with similar jobs. Younger women in the United States (childless women between the ages of 27 and 33) earned nearly the same (98 percent) as men in their age group."

The quote from the National Science Foundation in the book is unsourced, however, the only related information from the National Science foundation I could find was http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/issuebrf/sib99352.htm which is not necessarily contradictor, but paints an entirely different picture.

While I disagree with who you are responding to, there has been a massive improvement in 1 1/2 generations and it removes a significant amount of credibility to present information in a way to try and say that widespread systemic discrimination still occurs in areas where it does not.
http://tour.golang.org/
Show HN: Lazy Analytic - transform raw events of your app into a meaningful feed
Hi HN,

LazyAnalytic (http://www.lazyanalytic.com) has been my side project for a couple months. LazyAnalytic is a tool that takes raw events from apps and turn them into a beautiful and meaningful feed.

The goal is to make it easy to explore what is happening on your app. I.e. Spot trends, find out which features users really like (or never use). A huge emphasis was to make the app intuitive for non-technical users so that they can explore the data without being overwhelmed by hundreds of graphs or being forced to disturb developers to do DB queries.

How is it different then Google Analytic or Mixpanel? Both of these tools are very good to answer specific questions. But it's hard to explore the events without easily getting overwhelmed by all the data. Don't get me wrong, I love GA and Mixpanel and I still use them on all my projects. But I still prefer lazyanalytic for exploring and discovering users' behavior. I like how I can see the big picture but dig into what seems intriguing in one click.

So far, I've got a MVP built for my projects and my friends projects. I'm working on the general framework to make it easy to integrate for any apps or websites. Still, if you'd like to try it out on your startup/project, make sure your register and I'll contact you. (Maybe add +HN in your email address or name).

Thanks!
So McCain says today US needs to start poking digits(pun?) into Putin's eye, and this NZ fragment leads me to wonder what fist or carrot incentive makes every(?) country in the world pipe their domestic surveillance back to US? Now, how then, do you apply all the world's intel to acquire whatever you want? What new US intel agency with an eagle logo orchestrates the `parallel construction' to `git 'er done'?
China investment meant a preference for Chinese equipment/vendors, which in turn would mean getting a landing in the USA would be very hard, essentially impossible.

The primary contract was signed with a US vendor, TE Subcom (actually HQ is in Switzerland for tax reasons), and whether the Chinese vendor could even do the job aside even from landing rights was a big question.

Funding from any source never amounted to enough to get it away. Which is a shame as the business case was - and still is - compelling.

Source: me - a Pacific Fibre founder
You don't need to imagine.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iRLtCGzuK...

The lives I'm thinking of weren't just Americans.
It is of interest to lots of people. The question that we need to ask is not whether there are interested people, or whether the topic is of interest to people who specifically want to talk about the things that make HN special.

I would also be incredibly supportive if this change actually happened. However this is not the forum that I want to see filled with discussion on this topic.
I would suggest looking into Photonstorm's phaser. It's all in TypeScript, so you get Intellisense, and it's based on Flixel. They're getting close to 1.0. https://github.com/photonstorm/phaser
argh, good catch, thanks!
>There were children in iron lungs for weeks.

There were people in iron lungs for lifetimes
I guess that's the point of the stats-battery - pure python stats with no / minimal cost to migrate to numpy e.g.

From stats import mean

...

from numpy import mean
I remember him being quoted saying it was to save lives and I give him a lot of credit for that.
Personally I've always preferred mplayer's no-nonsense interface. That's been the biggest thing that has kept me an mplayer user for several years now.

VLC also seems to mandate a larger performance hit while playing a video, no matter what.

For the most part, VLC and mplayer provide a similar experience, and both tools have major dependencies on ffmpeg. It's just a matter of preference on the interface, and if you utilize any of VLC's niceties that justify its performance decrease (I've heard this happens because VLC forces software processing of the image at some stage to facilitate easy application of filters, and mplayer (and its descendants) doesn't. I don't know if this is true or not).
You don't need to forcefully prevent competition to have a single payer system; here we have such a system, and we also have private hospitals and clinics.

And there's really no need to prevent competition, since people pay the taxes that fund our NHS anyway. If they want to spend again to go to the private system, it's their choice.
Actually, the full title is "Things I love in Haskell that don't exist elsewhere at all"
That would be a Lisp Machine or a Smalltalk environment.