skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Note the biggest change from today: none of these are multiple-choice tests. Students are expected to write out the answers, and teachers are expected to mark them. I very much doubt whether the textbooks on 1912 had special teacher's editions with answer keys.

Of course, back then you could also support a family on a schoolteacher's income.
Ok so a guy named "lenz" got fired for taking a "photo" from a product team at AOL that nobody had herd of and now theres free bad/good? publicity all over the media.

If this does turn out to be a joke its one of the best publicity stunts in history.

Of-course if it is not a joke/stunt. All the best to Lenz
Much of this seems like rote memorization, to which I see very little use for in today's society. Need to get a list of state capitals? Google it. Need to plot a naval route from England to Malaysia? Look at a map. Students do not need a teacher nor a classroom to memorize facts. The time is better spent on developing problem solving and teamwork skills. Note the lack of any room for original expression or thought - no essays, no argumentation. Just rote memorization which will likely have no real use 99% of the time.
I can't wrap my head around how you can still have an aol dial-up subscription in 2013.
Thank you. I'll do that today evening, although I do have a rough idea now which direction I'm heading.
Is a "year 8" student the same as an American eighth grader? That would surprise me.
Is this why they killed Pacific Fibre?
The speed graphic at the bottom should run left to right.

It already does. the puffins are going towards the left because the goal is zero, whereas if they were pointing to the right it would look like they were chasing slower browsers.
A fantastic tool! I couldn't help but notice when I did the first exercise that the way of live editing did distract me from observing the code deeper than fiddling with the actual values needed.

So if one would now ask me how do I do a full-yellow box I would not know how to do it from scratch. However, I would know that the RGBA values were 1, 1, 0 and 1, which is the most important part to learn.

That's why I think there is a lot of work to be done when making proper abstractions around this for human programmers in the future.

This is however just an observation on my part, I think this is definitely the way to go forward. Making learning more interactive just makes so much sense.
I find it interesting that the test actually has a couple questions based on the war of 1812. Perhaps that war had a higher profile in 1912, it being the centenary?

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!

I know the test isn't meant to serve as a comparison of students from 1912 with those from today, but I must say, it certainly makes the teachers in some states of the U.S. today look like dunces!
As he alludes to there used to be a website called fuckedcompany.com that chronicled the first dotcom collapse. Very entertaining, and a good way to find out where lightly used aeron chairs could be found to boot.

I'm sure nothing like that will happen again, this time is totally different.
Or the "cobra problem". The British put a bounty on cobras in India (to reduce snake-bites). So the snake-catchers bred cobras (some of which escaped, making the problem worse).

Incentives are powerful things.
What is the prevailing opinion on dedicated wordpress hosting providers such as zippykid?
But in this case the you that's worried about security is the social security administration for the state.

The real problem with the argument is that it's hard for people to set up their own secure mail servers, but organizations, like in this example, can do it decently well.
We have enough stupid around without adding more to it. This kind of trollery is cancerous.
If you read his post, basically width is the constant and height is the variable. That's why horizontal centering is easy, because the width is deterministic.
This is so awesome. I have been waiting for this to finish translating for some time now. When I read the first two chapters almost a year ago, I was pleased by how much detail the author goes into to explain the inner workings of Ruby. I recommend it to everyone.
No, they're unique. Each manufacturer is given a block of MAC addresses, and they assign them like serial numbers to each NIC they build. Each cell phone, WiFi access point, and normal NIC, has a unique MAC. If this were not the case, if two devices had the same MAC, the risk of a network collision would exist, and manufacturers, aware of this risk and the damage it would do to their reputation, act to prevent it in their own interest.
What is most interesting to me is how the test shows the value we enjoy of living in the information age.

Without instant access to rote information, knowing some of these facts was probably rather important a hundred years ago. Schools today can avoid burdening the student with memorizing so many facts and focus more on developing conceptual understanding, which – coupled with free, rapid access to factual information – is much more valuable.
OK, so NaCL will not be guilty and they will be in good company.

I'm sure these principles of minimal redundancy will be of great comfort to those users who get their private keys exposed.

Do you see the paradox here? Find me these developers who are undoubtedly competent to implement their own CSPRNG, but prefer not to. These are the folks I want implementing the CSPRNG that will be generating my keys, rather than kernel developers who find entropy pools exciting.
You'll have to explain what you mean.
إرفين شرودنغر
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إرفين شرودنغر - http://www.alhqeqa.com/?p=20336
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This is completely opposite of my experience in the industry.

Stephen Sinofsky is famous for sending people bug reports with the line of code that was causing the windows bug. My presentations to Harry Shum were the highlights of my time in Bing, as he was both interested and insightful. My conversation with Satya Nadella about incentives and alignment of the OSD organization taught me a lot about how the businesses operated.

I've met and worked with vice presidents in Microsoft, Google, and Facebook and every time I been impressed with their levels of interest, insight, and passion for the product.

There may have been a time with being a vice-president was a parking title and reward for a lifetime of work, but that time has passed.
At work, before iPhone, I'd typically take to the bathroom a book that covered something I actually needed to know for work, so my time in the bathroom was actually productive time.

After iPhone, I read HN, Reddit, or Slashdot. So, at least in my case, there has definitely been a hit to productivity.
You see my point, right? A lot of your security already depends on urandom working. Everyone knows this, and a lot of effort has gone into validating the kernel random driver (there have been some pretty good systems security papers on it). Given that you already depend on urandom, all a new CSPRNG gets most developers is a second single point of failure.
That page was a tough read so I laughed out loud when I got to this point.

"While Emily was visiting family I had started to develop some pain in my groin. I attributed it to over-use while she was away, but we were pretty concerned nonetheless."

Strength to you, your family, and your soon-to-be in-laws.
> elephant have been seeing their reflection when drinking water in lakes/ponds for millenia. Their brains evolved to identify with those patterns. Mirror test just proves if any species evolved enough to identify with that "pattern".

Yes, but many animals see their reflections in watering holes -- only a few of them understand that they're seeing their own reflection.

> humans are just animals. nothing special.

That's certainly true.

> Take two humans...put one human in jail from birth (dont even teach language), and put other human in silicon-valley from birth, send him to stanford. Now, compare the "consciousness" of these two.

This diminishes the role of inheritance, but over time research, especially twin studies, has produced increasing support for the idea that we're much more shaped by inheritance than environment.
On the other hand we have tons of data on how women in science are currently treated, and I don't think it's a huge leap to assume things used to be worse. So yes I'm pretty sure it's because she was a woman.

"according to the National Science Foundation research, after examining other factors such as age, experience, and education as the causes of why there is a gap in success between men and women, they concluded that discrimination is the only explanation for the poor positions and salaries of women and minorities."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_science#Statistics_abo...
Highlighting this for importance:

“When I returned to France to treat genital mutilation, I
was amazed that they were never tried. The medical
literature tells us the truth about our contempt for
women. For three centuries, there are thousands of
references to penile surgery, nothing on the clitoris,
except for some cancers or dermatology -and nothing to
restore its sensitivity. The very existence of an organ
of pleasure is denied, medically. Today, if you look at
the anatomy books that all surgeons have, you will find
two pages above. There is a real intellectual excision.“

No doubt someone will try to nitpick it, saying something like, "Well <inconsequential part of a man's body> wasn't documented until <year slightly earlier than 2009> so I don't see why it's such a big deal!"

The fact of the matter is, though, that a body part crucial to a woman's sexual pleasure wasn't even properly documented until 2009, while a pill released solely to make men have more sex was put on the market 10 years earlier.[0] In a world where 140 million women have experienced genital mutilation,[1] and women are still shamed for having any sort of sexual experience[2] to the point where politicians[3] and even pharmacists[4] want to ban birth control, there's no way that's not indicative of a problem our culture still has regarding female sexuality.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sildenafil

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_genital_mutilation

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slut-shaming

[3]: http://www.care2.com/causes/after-banning-almost-all-abortio...

[4]: http://www.prevention.com/health/healthy-living/new-birth-co...

Edit: Of course this story disappears off the front page. Oh sure, an article about a 1912 school test and yet another log on the NSA hate fire sit up at #1 and #3 respectively, but God forbid someone posts about female genitalia. Really just proving the point.
An artificial vasculature for adaptive thermal control of windows
Wordpress kind of makes me realize how incredible PHP is. It's a 'program of pages.' Which can basically hot swap update itself as it runs. You can download plug-ins in the control panel and extend the functionality of your site instantly. I still get mixed up trying to wrap my head around it even after 15 years of using it. It's a program that exists in different files that can be updated individually while the program itself is used. Most of the 'state' is temporary or stored in dedicated memcaches or databases. It makes you wonder what if other applications were written in a PHP style structure - what would that be like?
Sir Walter Raleigh - all I can think of is the actor who played him in Blackadder...
Well it could help with getting a sense of spending budgets and allocating resources to states/cities more appropriately, but I guess we have the Federal Reserve for that.

Well I had an idea to convert the PDF's to text, so now i'm working on structuring it and filtering so maybe i can extract some values using some kind of financial dictionary/ statistics techniques.
Getting to this discussion late, but I'd like to add this visualization on different theories of consciousness:

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/what-is-conscious...
Antonio Damasio is a neuroscientist. He has a theory of consciousness explained in a book called the feeling of what happens. The somatic marker hypothesis is a bit more than 'it emerges from neural activity' At the very minimum the book debunks a good number of otherwise plausible sounding theories. Damasio in that book also does a fantastic job of removing any mysticism from the exercise ... He's trying to explain what each of us recognize as conciousness in other animals. E.g. Many people think their dogs are concious without also holding mystical beliefs.
At the time she was at Cambridge, her last name was Payne. It's clear you didn't read the article and have an axe to grind.
They needed to know what would happen. I don't see a better way to test it. The cold war was a different time and the threat was real; our view on events is shaded by hindsight.
This looks pretty neat. Is anyone using it? The Golang implementation of Raft these documents link to also looks pretty nice.
Thanks noir_lord, I couldn't of said it better myself.
>In the great tradition of Revenge of the Nerds (1984)

In which the protagonist commits rape by fraud, dressing up in a costume of Betty's boyfriend, then having sex with her under false pretenses? Probably not the best movie to shine as a star of anything good sexually. (The peeping tom crap too)
The Windows version of the full game works flawlessly (sound and all) for me under wine 1.6-0ubuntu1~ppa1 on Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS, although if you use Steam like I do then you'll need to launch Steam itself with the -no-dwrite option to get around a bug in wine 1.6's implementation of dwrite.
Agreed, but it does run well enough under wine.

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application...

I'm under the impression that the author used some sort of library/framework to build the game; porting that would probably be more meaningful than porting the game itself.
Facts are the building blocks of argument. One shouldn't expect an 8th grader in 1912 or 2013 to have particularly well-developed arguments until they understand basic facts. You might think "rote memorization" has little value, but I have to disagree with that here. We're not talking memorization of mathematical theorem without proving them. We're talking about having a rather basic understanding of the world in a handful of subjects.

Yes it's easy to look at a map if you're unsure which countries border Turkey. It's much easier to remember which countries border Turkey if you've studied geography, which allows you to move on from looking up the basics every time so that you can have a deeper understanding of the subject.
> Saying it emerges from neural activity doesn't explain the mechanism; it's merely the result of something we don't understand.

You make an interesting point, however I think the case could be made that consciousness emerging from neural activity could be the result of emergence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
Most public School teachers make close to the meadean household income in the US (50,000$) with some earning double that. If it seems like there underpaid it's simply in comparison to other upper income professions requiring a collage degree or high cost of living areas. Also a teachers income is often looked at as a family friendly steady/supplemental income with good benefits as the time off matches up well with a dual income family raising children thus lowering aggregate pay.

EX: Arlington VA, has an average classroom teacher pay of 52,003$. However, According to a 2007 estimate, the median income for a household in the county was $94,876, and the median income for a family was $127,179.[37] Males had a median income of $51,011 versus $41,552 for females. The per capita income for the county was $37,706. About 5.00% of families and 7.80% of the population were below the poverty line, including 9.10% of those under age 18 and 7.00% of those age 65 or over.
Most of us are not surgeons, but I think hacking the body will become more approachable as we progress from wearable to implantable technology.
The problem with these types of posts is that they never come with the context or the gravitas needed to substantiate the underlying claims that are implied by the presentation.

Were all eighth grade exams of similar difficulty? Did most children pass? Did the children that passed truly understand the underlying concepts?

Don't get me wrong; I don't think that things are honky dory right now. I have serious problems with our education system, but I don't buy for a second that kids 100 years ago were so advanced.
I discovered this game on Saturday after a recommendation from a friend, and I'm loving it.

I ended up buying a copy and running it under wine, even though there's no Linux version. (The purist in me is raging, but the game is, IMO, good enough to set aside my values in the short term.)

Previous Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5589041 (steamcommunity.com) (158 points, 111 days ago, 51 comments)
I love that the Truant Officer is listed in the credits.
According to author's post in the Reddit thread, it has a 400MHz arm9 with 30MB of RAM.
The perils at Great Falls
Ikea’s New Catalog Transforms Into Furniture With AR
I'm happy to contribute, too -- let me know if you're interested in any help with editing or creating/maintaining a PDF.
> I've also had the "get on board or leave" speech thrown at me.

I'm going to get this speech in about 48 hours (flying to HQ at the moment). What's your advice?
The multiple choice test wasn't invented until 1914 [1]! Of course students were expected to write out the answers.

[1] http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=2007020403001...
I get your point and I agree it's at least not a wrong way to look at it. But you say "the kernel random driver" as if there were only one for a crypto app developer to worry about.

We have already seen a huge number of bad keys generated. Is it that obvious at this point that kernel (and embedded system) developers are so much better at this than OpenSSL?

Is it possible that you just tend to look at more broken library and app crypto code during the course of your work? If you worked primarily with broken kernel crypto code, would you perhaps prefer (for your own use) a CSPRNG in a library written by your favorite experts?
> It's really a simple test to see whether taxes are theft or not: if there was no way for IRS to find out how much money anyone made, would people still be paying taxes?

This "test" is hilarious!

If stores could not determine how much merchandise you had in your cart, more people would shoplift. So prices in stores are theft! If you could not determine if someone else drove your car, then your neighbor might sneak a joyride. Your owning a car is theft!

> My guess is that 90% of people who preach about the social contract and helping the poor would keep the money.

And if we replaced the social contract with private contracts, nobody would ever cheat on those, right?

An unenforceable law is a bad law. Good laws are designed to solve problems like free riders or production of public goods in a way compatible with rational self-interest. It is not hypocritical to act in your self-interest while simultaneously supporting the rule of law.
The project is pretty young, but we are already seeing a pretty strong community coming together:

http://coreos.com/docs/etcd/#libraries-and-tools

We intend to make it a primitive in CoreOS, so plan on it to just get faster (although we recently hit 20k atomic writes/s, so it is pretty fast) and more reliable.
What _does_ the liver secrate?
are you fucking retarded?

Marie Skłodowska-Curie won two nobel prices - in two different areas of research. The only human being so far of any gender to accomplish this feat.

and yeah, her full name just rolls of the tongue for non-Polish speakers.
I think you missed the point I was making. By a mile.
>multiple-choice tests

this must be an american thing. I have never had a multiple choice test in school.
(okay, maybe some small test in geography or something, but very very rare)
As prisons overflow, Attorney General Holder calls for new approaches
There's gotta be a numa numa joke in there somewhere.
'data processing' is still unclear for many. I'm in Austin and last month I had a graphic designer/front-end programmer add sales tax to an invoice because he thought he had to.
You can pretty much deduce what their history class must have looked like: war and discovery.

It's interesting to note that they spell Sir Walter Raleigh differently than we do now. I wonder if that's a typo.

Did anybody else have to Google kalsomining?
For a theory to be good science, it must fit a very large number of observations and not contradict any a single one. Here's my attempt.

We must get a tight definition of consciousness to begin with. Are animals conscious as well (and to what degree)? What about amoeba and plants? If you classify "living" things as conscious, and "dead" things as unconscious, what is your definition of "life"? In their work, various people (notably, Metzinger) have isolated certain characteristics that make up various degrees of consciousness.

The "conscious experience" is a product of evolution: clearly, "self-aware decision makers" have better chances of survival than "hard-coded automatons". In recent evolution, the part that has changed most significantly is the neocortex. Scientifically speaking, it's very easy to figure out what is responsible for a high degree of consciousness: removing neocortex consistently leads to a lower degree of consciousness => the neocortex is responsible for a large part. Dissect, stick electrodes, and get unbiased data: then do a best fit.

Quantum mechanics is quite misunderstood: if you separate out the observer from what is being observed, it looks like humans are operating the universe (because their "observation" causes "collapse", right?). Highly egotistical and inelegant. If you exclude M-theory (because it's not able to make verifiable real-world predictions), a lot of people subscribe to quantum decoherence as an alternative to the classical Copenhagen interpretation.

On conscious computer programs. Essentially, I think of consciousness as a higher degree of interaction with its surroundings (it "learns" from its surroundings and adapts more quickly than it would normally take for natural selection to pick a genetic mutation). Aren't we just describing computer programs that interact with humans via a high-level language?
1) Support minitest/spec with ActiveSupport::TestCase
2) Make rails indenpendent of testing framework, why should I case about minitst if I prefer rspec?
So smart at physics, yet he never figured out LaTeX.
Love the Backbone APP
Amazingly enlightened view.
Sorry. I was being pedantic.
Well done! And especially true in this age of reality TV. Let me add my own bastardized quote: "We're a race so primitive that we still think reality TV is a pretty neat idea."
Linux random/urandom is supposed to prevent short-reads for exactly this reason.

Oh great, yet another way that Linux developers are going to write broken code because they think the whole unix world behaves like Linux...
Anyone interested in this kind of content should see Pat Shaughnessy's Ruby Under a Microscope book: http://patshaughnessy.net/ruby-under-a-microscope

It's the closest thing we have to a new Ruby Hacking Guide. It's a somewhat gentler, more approachable treatment of the subject matter, but no less awesome.

Shaughnessy also has a number of blog posts on his site that dive into the same kind of details covered in his book (and RHG).
Except AOL provide high-speed broadband subscriptions now, just like all other ISPs...
This is extremely cool, I am becoming more interesting in the idea of trying to write a small toy language and articles like this excite and inform, great work.