skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
According to the article, 7% of Finnish children don't graduate high school, compared to 25% of US children.

22% of US children live in poverty. 4% of Finnish children live in poverty.[1]

Strange.

Furthermore, it's my personal policy that anyone who creates an infographic with a bar graph that starts at 520 and goes up to 570 should be ignored. Either they are trying to intentionally skew interpretation of the data by presenting it in a misleading fashion, or they don't know enough about mathematics to understand why their graph is misleading. Neither one presents a reliable source.

[1]http://www.nationmaster.com/compare/Finland/United-States/Ec...
School sucks in Finland too, it just might suck a bit less than in some countries.

- A finn
Awesome - and I agree other countries could learn a thing or two from Finland (and other apparent successes.)

What's left out of the analysis is the cost, especially the cost per student. That would include the fully subsidized master's degrees for teachers. In the US the spending per student can be pretty high in some areas, but performance seems low.

Does anyone have a fairly detailed comparison of education practices, spending, and outcomes from various countries?
I also doubt that the average US 5th grader has 50 minutes of homework every day.
California extends HOV lane access for electric cars and plug-in hybrids to 2019
Then you read it again and see that nowhere in that post was the phrase "tard" anywhere to be seen.

Maccard = a word for a mac-user person thingie. There's nothing derogative about that.

If people read it as you did though, that might explain the downvotes.
Not at all. FBpurity is still functioning. I have to download it from a 3rd party site. You can't expect Facebook to allow products which deliberately violate their TOS to be hosted/promoted/advertised on Facebook.
I suspect they removed his page because they can't take action directly against him.
Ask HN: Good book/resources on algorithms?
Recently I realized that my knowledge about algorithms are almost nonexistent, a fact that made me want to change this but I'm having some difficulties finding good resources to guide me in the right direction.

Have any advice/links/books?

(I'm asking here and not elsewhere as I already received some very good directions on one of my past, somewhat related, question)
This problem exists in the "hard sciences" too. There happens to be an intern in our lab, who is very motivated to do science, and actually fairly competent, but there are just some really critical things that are missing she just can't do basic mental arithmetic - it takes her minutes to figure out what volume to add to do a 1:20 dilution. Then she writes it down so that she doesn't have to do that calculation again in the future. She's always asking to make sure her procedure is correct, and has never creatively come up with an experiment on her own. This is compounded by self-doubt, there are procedures that need to be done extremely quickly, because there's an air-sensitive compound, and I've told her she needs to be snappy, and if she needs to, practice it 20 or 50 or 100 times to get the whole thing done under a minute or two, still no, and I think it's affecting the results, which of course, increases her self-doubt, so she tries to be more careful, which makes things slower, etc etc (she's not my intern so I can't be too aggressive in giving her criticism). This student has a master's degree and was applying to PhD programs at Harvard. I think Harvard rejected her, and the best grad school she got into had "people worse than her" (which I don't doubt, like I said, she's competent overall), so she's applying again this fall.

I can't take her aside and tell her, "you are not PhD material". I leave it to the reader to figure out why. She would be fine in industry as a lab tech. I presume something similar happens at a lower level where people who are techs, shouldn't even be at that level.

Contrast this with a high school intern in the other lab, who successfully built a giant 6 meter bioreactor that is actually being used to process waste at an industrial facility, and totally took down a professor that asked a dumb question during her "presentation on what she did".... I am terrified that she will leave STEM - she didn't get into as good a college as she should have.
I can appreciate not liking the brogrammer phenomenon, and not being interested in conferences that are so party-focused, but this guy really has a huge bug up his ass about other people enjoying themselves. "I'm not interested in 'partying hard', I want to talk with like-minded people about subjects I don't necessarily get to talk about at the office." Well, guess what, you can't force people to sit down and talk nodejs with you if they want to drink instead. Sorry the world isn't the way you really really want it to be.

The guy seems to be interpreting a lot of his examples in the worst possible light, too. Example:
Q: Is there space set up for hacking?
A: We have done this for previous conferences, but to be honest people were having too much social fun to really take advantage of the space.
Translation: Y U NO DRINKING!?

That's a stupid translation. They set up hacking space before and very few people used it, so they didn't bother this time. You have your cause and effect backwards if you think this means they're trying to force you to drink.

Or: "Perks for working for them include dental coverage, and 'weekly happy hour'. Those who don't want to participate in getting sloshed regularly... need not apply?"

Jesus, dude, settle down. You've taken a perk of employment and turned it into a statement that if you don't drink you're not welcome? Please let go of your persecution complex. I know it's really fun to be indignant that others encouraging you to have a good time is so totally unfair, but it's really no different than people saying "No seriously, The Wire is fucking fantastic! You have to watch it!"

Interacting with humans isn't that hard if you allow yourself and others to actually act like humans.
What's wrong with model change listeners?
Hmm, the link to the demo redirects to an unrelated techcrunch article. Heres the demo: http://www.appcubator.com/resources/editor/
So my grep patterns list should now look like this?

@$_[]=@!+_
apache_child_terminate
assert
base64_decode
bzopen
chgrp
chmod
chown
copy
create_function
curl_exec
curl_multi_exec
edoced_46esab
eval
exec
exif_imagetype
exif_read_data
exif_thumbnail
extract
fclose
file
file_exists
file_get_contents
file_put_contents
fileatime
filectime
filegroup
fileinode
filemtime
fileowner
fileperms
filesize
filetype
fopen
fsockopen
ftp_get
ftp_nb_get
ftp_nb_put
ftp_put
get_meta_tags
getimagesize
glob
gzfile
gzopen
hash_file
hash_hmac_file
hash_update_file
highlight_file
image2wbmp
imagecreatefromgif
imagecreatefromjpeg
imagecreatefrompng
imagecreatefromwbmp
imagecreatefromxbm
imagecreatefromxpm
imagegd
imagegd2
imagegif
imagejpeg
imagepng
imagewbmp
imagexbm
ini_set
iptcembed
is_dir
is_executable
is_file
is_link
is_readable
is_uploaded_file
is_writable
is_writeable
lchgrp
lchown
link
linkinfo
lstat
mail
md5_file
mkdir
move_uploaded_file
parse_ini_file
parse_str
passthru
pathinfo
pcntl_exec
pfsockopen
php_strip_whitespace
phpinfo
popen
posix_kill
posix_mkfifo
posix_setpgid
posix_setsid
posix_setuid
preg_replace
proc_close
proc_nice
proc_open
proc_terminate
putenv
python_eval
read_exif_data
readfile
readgzfile
readlink
realpath
rename
rmdir
sha1_file
shell_exec
show_source
stat
str_replace
symlink
system
tcpflood
tempnam
tmpfile
touch
udpflood
unlink
As a hiring manager, it happens very, very rarely that I encounter someone worth training.

When we're talking "crap" candidates, we're talking a complete lack of both talent and passion. It would be a waste of time and effort to try to train these people.

Education is part of the problem. I don't expect higher education to result in immediately applicable job skills, but I do expect it to weed out the fundamentally incompetent.
I'm of the opinion that people can adapt to less sleep. I spent quite a while sleeping exactly 6 hours per night, and then spent about 11 weeks alternating between 3 and 4.5 hours of sleep on weeknights and about 7.5 hours of sleep on weekends. This almost certainly wouldn't be a healthy thing to do for years on end, but for the 11 week period that I did this I felt pretty good (maybe 90-95% mental capacity) and was able to get a ton of stuff done with my ~20 hour days.

Again related to your post, this sparse sleep schedule was caused by college. I go to Caltech (for those who haven't heard of it, its probably pretty similar to MIT in terms of workload/intensity) and have a fairly typical sleep schedule among my peers. I'm pretty sure that every term (10 weeks) that I've been here I've had at least one 40+ hour period with 0 sleep, and had a term where I would sleep from about 7AM to 10AM every weekday (and then at least 10 hours/day on weekends). These longs hours are mostly caused by problem sets + studying, and things get a bit worse when you're actually too busy working to have time to go to class (which is a common occurrence).

As for why students do it, its to get everything done. Typical courseload is 5 courses/term, and starting in the middle of sophomore year most people are taking courses that would be intro graduate level courses at most institutions. 4 advanced math + 1 social studies/humanities course definitely keep you busy.

Also, among my group of peers, we typically define an "all-nighter" to be where you just complete the planned activities for the following day without any sleep at all. This generally involves staying awake from one morning (10AM) to dinner time on the next day (~5PM), making an all-nighter be ~30 hours. If an all-nighter were defined more leniently, we'd have a depressingly large number of all-nighters.

Note: Most of the above applies to my more difficult terms. I've also had terms where I slept 7+ hrs/night and maybe only worked until the sun rose about 2 or 3 times.
I'm Finnish, and saying that there's no homework is utter misinformation. You do have time to do exercises during the class, and if you're fast, you could end up having no school work but not always. And this is mostly before high school. After that you definitely get homework.
techinsurgent.com
I was speaking in terms of quality. I think both can fuel subscriptions/customer acquistion. Quality leads to "omg you have to watch this show it is soooo good" and ratings lead to "everyone I know is watching this, I should give it a try"
> We complain about a shortage of competent people.

As an aside, software development is one of the most internally brutal and self-critical industries out there. We tend to consider anyone outside the top 20% to be entirely, unredeemably incompetent. It creates a huge drive in our industry to keep getting better, but I do wonder if the d* measuring contest might be holding us back at the same time. The ridiculously competitive nature of our field has already been attributed to unintended consequences like blocking out women and older people. I personally was drawn to the field due to its competitiveness, but I do wonder if sometimes we let "perfect" be the enemy of "good".
Good quality 720p should definitely be more than a gig for movies. Even high quality 480p rips came in at over a gig for most movies. I'm sure the torrents are watchable, but there are sacrifices being made somewhere.
I enjoy the subtleties. Leveling deployment adds dexterity and fortitude :)
The reports of the death of MVC are greatly exaggerated.
Assuming I want, say somebody to build a new kind of genetically altered flower, I can ask all my friends and people around the world who would also like to have this kind of flower to pledge a certain amount of money.

A group of genetic engineers someplace in the world notice that me and my troop have collectively pledged, say $500k, and the genetic engineers actually spend some time and make such a flower. They send us a video, and we trust they've built it. We get flowers, and they get the money.

Am I right?
I understand your point, however that isn't quite a valid analogy in this case.

The correct analogy would be:

Q) Am I forbidden from writing an application using the facebook API that tints/alters the color of the website?

A) Yes, you are forbidden from doing that.
LinkedIn is Terrible at Job Recommendations
So according to logic, assembler is pure alcohol?
It'd be cheaper for Netflix to poach AMC's top talent and invest in new original shows without buying an entire network.
:) I just wanted to say that it looks like a really cool project, so I would not want some troll to come and stomp it out.
The NSA probably got the private key so they can reprogram your CPU.
The article talks about startup founders having low risk because of money and stability, and that's absolutely true in my experience (especially of people who jump into startups immediately out of college).

What the article fails to mention, and I think is just as important, is that the RELATIVE risk of the startup lifestyle continues to decline as traditional, "stable" jobs slowly become a thing of the past. I'm part of a small (but growing) freelancer agency, and when I try to convince others to join my firm, relative risk is a large part of my pitch.

When the "safe" option is to work at a bank or consulting firm, is it really all that safe? Many students think so, but have to be reminded that some of these firms average less than two years of tenure per new employee. Large tech companies have been somewhat safe over the past 5-10 years, but still put you at the mercy of corporate-scale layoffs that may have more to do with your product and the company's finances than your skills.

In a startup or small company, the risks are much more upfront and come with corresponding compensation, usually in the form of equity with growth potential. Large companies typically do not reward their employees for the risk they assume, because there is a perpetuated assumption that they provide a high level of security. So if we're all forced to bear a high level of risk, at least we should be compensated for it.
I could not find the project page. anybody knows?
sometimes it's not trivial to fire people, because lawyers could get involved.
Title: "WSJ Misleading on Arctic Sea Ice Story"

Quote from the article: "WSJ is right about the technical details (30% greater summer sea ice than year before), but that sort of change happens."

SO WSJ's assertion was correct, but because "that sort of change happens", therefore it was misleading? Imagine a pickpocket caught red-handed, saying, "Your honor, these things happen, therefore to punish me would be misleading."

I would have called the WSJ's editorial out on its ostrich-like disregard for long-term trends, not because their claim is misleading -- statistical analysts are free to use any parameters they want for a moving average, for example using months or years instead of decades. The claim isn't "misleading", it's perfectly accurate and perfectly stupid.
HackFwd was the best thing that happened to us on our entrepreneurial road so far. The ability to meet and network with Europe's top entrepreneurs, investors and jounalists, the ongoing support from the staff and the general coolness of the programme and the people is what shaped me as a doer.

The programme was not without its flaws. Yes, the amount of stock HackFwd took was significant, and the communication between everyone involved could have been better between the Build events, but overall I cannot imagine a better place to start my first business than here and I'm very sad other young entrepreneurs won't be able to experience this anymore.

Europe is losing one of their best startup schools and I can't see on the horizon anything that will replace it anytime soon. Let's just hope TechStars grows outside of London and Seedcamp gets even bigger, or maybe someone some time will try to create a new geek-friendly accellerator machine without making the same mistakes. Fingers crossed!

@michuk
PG McLaughlin picks USC over UCLA and Kansas
What kind of algorithms?

Whatever the answer, check out Numerical Recipes (http://www.nr.com/).
a lot of php functions are like this due to the fact that 0 evaluates to false. They need to return boolean false so you can do a strict comparison to determine between failure and a result of 0
1. Whizbang - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMGZMoENjcU
My guess is that you cannot replicate that model in US because salary differences between private companies and universities are abysmal. In finland being selected to have the opportunity to become a teacher is an honor and you quality of life will not be much different than the one you'll get if you choose the private sector. In the US being on the top 10% of your college puts you in a really advantageous position for a much better paid job in the private sector.
Hrmmm.....ok....now you piqued my interest and I decided to check out some of their portfolio companies: http://www.khoslaventures.com/information-technology.html

Xobni, ZocDoc, RockMelt, Bitly, Square, Instacart, FuzeBox, and a few others.

Those seem like either big wins already or a high possibility of success.
robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2013/06/04/america-rip/
"probably big companies will not want it"

..then screw them, let's go open-hardware with it!
Art of Computer Programming by Knuth

Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen
There's so much wrong with that infographic I don't even know where to start.

There is homework in Finland. I have no clue where that idea came from. The Finnish education system doesn't really match up well enough with the USA that "high school" can be compared. A Finnish student typically starts elementary school at 7, and spends 6 years in lower elementary. Then they move to upper elementary and spend 3 years there. This is where the "responsibility to learn" ends, and every school past that is voluntary. Past those 9 years, students generally choose between vocational school or a lukio, which is sort of like high school that provides general teaching. I have no clue what that 93% number means, but it is certainly not "proportion of age class that completes lukio", as less than that sign up for one.

Finnish PISA scores, and all other lower educational metrics are anomalously high when compared to similar peers worldwide. A lot of things are pointed out as reasons for this, but most of those features are also valid, for example, for other Nordic countries whose students don't perform nearly as well.

Personally, I think the difference is mostly the language. Finnish language is notoriously hard to learn, but Finnish written language is very regular and phonetic. This means that elementary school students spend a lot less time learning to read and write than students in almost any other countries. This saves much time at an early age, which can then be used to learn other useful subjects, giving Finnish students a head start on their foreign peers. A lot of us, including me, actually taught ourselves to read before school with little more than repeatedly annoying our parents by asking "What does this letter sound like?".

Then again, I might just be another idiot assigning my pet cause for a measured effect of uncertain origin.

I wonder how students fare in other countries with phonetic written languages? As I understand, Turkey is one, and their scores are not very high. Could someone describe the Turkish education system a little?
My company uses Aha! and we're getting a ton out of it. Finally, we have a structured means of clearly communicating product strategy/objectives and demonstrating how it translates into truly necessary engineering effort.

It helps demonstrate that product management is not wizardry, it's a deductive process that can be open to everyone. In the case of a small startup, it seems like it could be an almost automated means of reassuring investors that the team is executing on-plan.
Wow, I didn't realize it was quite so bad everywhere. This really shows how desperately reform in the education sector is needed. Especially the last part, a student brimming with talent turned away and potentially changing fields because of it. That's scary.
Dondur — freeze your Go dependencies with ease
If they put that clause in their ToS, and then decided to kick you off Facebook for wearing tinted glasses, they'd be well within their rights.
Would you rather return it -1 or something else? You are gonna need a comparison in any case because you can get 0 offset. Return type doesn't matter as much because php has dynamic typing. Pretend it is Option[Int] if you will.

I would also like to use this moment to go on a tangent with my unwilling audience that, not wasting any remote opportunity to badmouth php, or any other language for that matter, just for its standard library or trying to not break as much legacy code as possible, is bad form. Sure language syntax itself may suck, semantics may suck, I am always up for a good PL flamewar. If you want to bash the library, don't blame the language itself for the poor choices of the library.

cryptbe, I would like to apologise in advance and humbly request you to not take this personally.
C is pure vodka, hard, powerful and without any flavor.

Assembly is pure ethanol.

Still thinking how would VHDL be... thinking about raw sugar cane to make your own alcohol from there.
Well, they are in alignment with the industry then, where the big players seem intent on hiring effective exam writers based on their technical screening process. How do you pass your undergrad courses? Memorize data structures, algorithms, and definitions, and write code on paper. How do you pass a Google interview? Memorize data structures, algorithms, and definitions, and write code on a whiteboard.

I cringe every time someone asks a question about interviews on /r/cscareerquestions and the inevitable reference to Cracking the Code Interview or something similar comes up. I cannot fathom that you can, and should be expected to, study or cram for an interview. It makes the interview the equivalent of an undergrad test, with the same value as a signalling device. I'm not sure which feeds which, and I'm sure there is two-way feedback in this system, but I don't think fixing undergrad education alone will fix the core of the problem, nor will encouraging more students to pursue engineering degrees as programs like MathMovesU attempt to do.
SSRIs are also like placebos in that they have no more of an effect than placebo.
This is probably not a big concern anymore. Almost all the major studios are in bed with a distributor of some kind. HBO & Time Warner, NBC/Universal and Comcast, and so on. Disney is the only one I can think of without some cable arm attached, maybe Viacom? Fox has/had Sky internationally and used to own a piece of DirecTV, IIRC.

Thus, Netflix wouldn't be an outlier, but part of a broad change/consolidation happening to the industry.
In principle, but does Adobe ship the Flash PPAPI binary separately?
I'm more concerned about the concept of a document that can issue a GET request just by being opened. It sounds exactly like a phishing payload.
I don't know what the actual average is but as a parent of middle-schoolers that sounds right. I've always fought my kids' teachers to keep them from wasting too much time doing homework but if I didn't they'd probably have at least this much. A friend of my wife had to email her son's 6th grade teacher the other day explaining that the son was sent to bed early and could "only" spend 4 hours on the homework that _day_.
Nice article with a concise overview of PubSubHubbub and HTTP Subscription Specification. It would be really nice if you could complement it with pointers to some real example of interfaces using one or the other approach. This could help practitioners identify is the better fit for their use case.
For everyone telling kken how often they upgrade your desktops, do note that we are not a representative sample of the desktop-buying public.

When was the last time your parents/grandparents upgraded something in their desktop computer?