skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel for the daughter who (like many women before her) had a crappy experience in the male-dominated programming world. I feel for the parent who sees her daughter possibly reject a very fulfilling career path after a bad initial experience, when the future could be so much better. But as a former high school teacher, I also feel for the teacher. Giving them some benefit of the doubt, I just want to point out a couple things:

1. As many others have mentioned, if this is a public school, it's quite unlikely that this teacher is college educated as a programmer, let alone has ever been a professional developer. I'm sure they're teaching VB simply because that's what they have experience with, probably making them the most experienced programmer on staff at the school.

2. High school bullies are typically quite good at restricting their bullying to times when they're unlikely to be spotted by an authority figure. As a teacher, you try hard to maintain awareness of the entire room as much as possible, but there are always tons of gaps. You might be writing something on the board, helping a student 1-on-1, addressing some other kid's behavior, or doing any of dozens of other tasks.

3. Most teachers try to keep tabs on their students on a personal level, especially when they behavior or attitude noticeably changes, but not all students open up. It takes a lot of effort to maintain an authentic connection. Parents have trouble connecting authentically with their children--imagine doing it with scores of students per semester. And when it comes to bullying, most teenagers downplay to avoid being though of as a snitch. Some are self-conscious to be bailed out even when they haven't "snitched".

4. For many of the author's suggestions, the teacher may be doing these things (recruiting, cross-promoting, etc.), to the extent that they have time. But these are outside the job of teaching. These are things the author could be doing at the school too, but presumably she's too busy. I'm sure the teacher can relate.

Teaching high school was by far the most grueling and emotionally taxing job I've ever had. My work career also includes being a custodian at a health club, a baseball umpire, a senior software engineer, and and a startup founder. None of those jobs is anywhere near as demanding.
As a teacher, I know that it is the job of a teacher to do better. Allowing an environment that takes engaged, bright students and grinds them down is in fact a failure to do a teacher's job: classroom management is tied with content delivery in a high school teacher's job description. Yes, there are many bad teachers, but why do you excuse doing bad work, essentially arguing that wasting kids' time and potentially doing them damage is just good preparation for the real world?
It's every bit as irritating, not that I would bother to confront anyone over it, it's not worth the effort. Still rude though.

Take a table when you need one in a fast food place, not as you're joining the queue. Reserving tables before you have food makes it less likely that people with food can get a table.
The UI of the US version is a bit tighter - they probably just copied all the static assets anyways though ...
A little off tangent but this year I started volunteering for an organization called TEALS (http://tealsk12.org/) that's trying to address this by having developers teach into and AP computer science in high school. I'm currently teaching AP CS remotely to a school in Kentucky - it's extremely challenging and a huge time commitment but being able to get students excited about computer science and seeing them succeed in their programs is worth it.

I suggest everyone to check it out - if you're near a local school you can actually teach a class in person.

Also - if you have any questions feel free to email me - username @ gmail
I'm confused by the general scenario here - the daughter graduated high school last year, probably at age 16 - and is now repeating high school in India? The letter is to an Indian teacher in India? Is she going to a public school for Indian students there? It's the students in India asking her to make sandwiches? Is this some sort of student exchange program?
How to make an HTML5 developer smile: A Google Web Designer wish list
Yes, it is common for them to ask. (It doesn't mean they get it, though).

A large part of the US is not practically walkable and has insufficient public transportation. In order to "go out with friends", sometimes to even see said friends, to hold down a job, to go to the store, transportation in a car may be necessary. Teenagers prefer to not rely on their parents to take them places. Thus, car ownership represents freedom and autonomy to US teenagers.
Linux is clearly the superior operating system
Here's a good comparison (and vote) of programming fonts:

http://www.slant.co/topics/67/~what-are-the-best-programming...

Most popular: Source Code Pro

http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2012/09/source-code-pro....

Monaco, my favorite, comes at #3.
Technical Debt - Long hours and the myth of productivity
Let's see...

TJ Max,
UBS,
Knight Capital,
Heartland Payment Systems,
Visa,
Sony (already mentioned, but it's my fave),
Stanford,
Countless other hospitals, e-commerce vendors, banks, and other organizations that handle payment or personal information.

If you want to say "name a startup that's gone out of business because of a security problem" I'll let you away with that. There's still instances, and I'd love startups to pay more attention to security, but I know reality as well...
Thanks for the LMAO IRL, guys. This was the funniest exchange I've read in a couple of days (including on reddit. :P )
NPR did a piece examining this phenomenon: http://www.npr.org/2013/08/21/209579037/why-millennials-are-...
Why I use Linux and why you should consider it too
Those things are largely ignored in rural areas, unless there is a complaint. Believe me I've seen people living in structures that violate every building, electrical, and plumbing code in the book, but out in the backwoods nobody cares.
Thanks for mentioning Al Bartlett here. This video is very relevant to this post and worth watching. Al Bartlett is a brilliant man and does a wonderful job explaining the profound implications of misunderstanding exponential growth. Here is another link to his videos:
http://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populatio...
Show HN: List of Professors ranked by total number of PhDs & postdocs trained
I actually think this should be the funding source. This is basically what Facebook is for as my very pregnant wife said as soon as she saw the site. But she was still pretty enthusiastic till she saw the 10$ cost. "Facebook it is!"
Believe it or not, most teachers can't do this in the real world anymore. Grades are supposed to be objective and based on a student's demonstrated work. In the schools where I've worked, a teacher would find him/herself in a world of pain for knocking down a kid's score by an entire letter grade for being a jerk.

These days, school policies generally insist on separating disciplinary and academic issues.
From what I understand (gf just finished her education degree, michigan secondary ed), there isn't really a teachers certification for computer programming/CS classes in secondary. It is generally taught by someone who shows interest in teaching it AND if there is an opening for the class in the schedule AND if there is a budget to allow that elective AND it doesn't get in the way of whatever the school's administration deems to be important. The state of it is quite sad really...I know at the high school I graduated from, there was a programming course that was taught by the typing teacher, at one point (was no longer available by the time I would have been able to take it).
I have zero tolerance for zero tolerance policies. How many poor kids lifes' have been ruined by pointing their finger and saying, "Pew, pew" by idiot school administrators that are too stupid to think objectively?

That said, this teaches does need to be reprimanded at very least for laziness and not paying attention to what was going on in his class and possibly for creating the environment where it was allowed as well.
Hey, maybe tuition will go down if loans aren't as readily available...?
Scientists may have found a new state of matter
Perhaps you've heard about the compressed release cycle the Windows and Windows Server teams are planning to maintain going forward. This is my first cycle here, but my impression this is not the old slow-roasted dogfood system that we had in the past. It's a new thing for everyone. I assure you that you aren't the only one finding it a challenge.

I hope things will go smoother for you next time.
I didn't say it was funny or that being offended wasn't an OK response. I simply believe that we should handle potentially "offensive" situations wisely, instead of curling up and quitting. It is more than fine to voice your complaint and indicate that a so-called joke makes you uncomfortable and expect your peers to respect those feelings. It is also an effective requirement to recognize that you aren't always going to be able to get people to stop saying things you don't like, and that you can't let it cripple you.

And I only see hits in two squares on the "sexist joke bingo", not that it matters.
In that case, this kind of dome is easily demountable, and offers a lot more protection from the elements than a shack. On the downside, that would also make it easy for people to steal your walls.
I think the point you make is an excellent one. However, we've seen court decisions that essentially equate ToS violations with wire fraud, no? I wonder where the line gets drawn...
> That's hard to notice for a specific student when that's happening to 30% of the class, don't you think?

Not to mention 70% of the teachers.

I took a mandatory class (keyboarding) from a friend of my grandparents', the first year he taught. I saw first hand how much the apathy of the class wore him down. He started the year hoping he could get people at least vaguely interested, but no one cared, and there was no way he could force them to.

He quit after a year.
We need computers that fix our brains, not break them
They don't even have to go back to the Apple II: the first Macintosh was released in 1984.
Spring.io revealed at SpringOne
Heh, Louden's book? Still got it here somewhere. For an hour of nostalgic fun and an excuse to burn a Bass Ale while your wife watches DWTS, take a look at the 1130 emulator at http://ibm1130.org/sim
>Lisp is a language that was ahead of its time, but there are language features now that seem beyond Lisp's grasp.

Interested to hear your views, can you provide some examples?
I agree with you, as someone that heard from a colleague "to go to the kitchen and do the dishes", instead of helping him with the problem he was facing. I was his superior at the time.
Wireless Power
Ossia has created a system to wirelessly charge devices. Founder Hatem Zeine said that the company has been developing and patenting this technology for six-and-a-half years.
Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/09/todays-5-standout-fighters-on-the-disrupt-startup-battlefield/#OjjFvrjUZK3sYkhK.99
Microsoft-Nokia: A good deal that came too late
Not entirely. From the article - 31,440 for Seton, 10,104 for Rutgers. They are saying max merit aid is 21,000 at Seton, so tuition w/max merit aid is 10,440. I don't know about Rutgers specifically, but it's not uncommon for public state schools to offer up to 8,000-10,000 merit aid, covering the bulk of the tuition. So you'd be looking at paying 10k/yr vs 0-2k/yr, still a huge difference.

This assumes no need-based financial aid, and doesn't touch on housing, which is assumed to be 10-13k these days regardless of public or private.
Given that most of chinese websites have horrible typography, this one is actually not bad in this aspect.
C++ was a short run, something like '99-'03. It was Pascal beforehand and Java afterwards.

There's no AB course any more either. It's just one course, the equivalent of the old A.
As a practical matter, anywhere that you can get away with living in one of these is not going to be someplace where "first responders" are going to be close enough to make a difference.
Medium clone launched in China
>Accelerators are worthless to measure distances even if they were super precise. This is because you have to do double integration to get distance and the errors only accumulates.

I never said that a distance scale was obtained by applying double integration to the accelerometer output. I only said that in order to measure absolute distances, as opposed to relative distances, it is necessary to have an accelerometer, since no other data provides an absolute scale. See the other reply by one of the founders for the details.
The old flat had border lines (usually black lines between light-colored backgrounds). The new flat uses differences between background colors to mark the same sorts of boundaries. I think this makes enough difference that it's worth considering them distinct.
The first thing on that page is a GIF. There is no explanation. It is not clear what the GIF is meant to be portraying. I even went on to read the first two paragraphs, which also didn't explain what the GIF was supposed to be illustrating.

After that I closed the page.
Instabug
Instant bug reporting tool for mobile apps
(Sorry, replying here because comments are closed to new accounts in the other thread.)

>Was it always like this and I just need to "check my privilege" as a dude or has the 4chanification of geek culture invaded real life?

Here's a crazy idea. Maybe it's because many geeks are simply growing tired of being shamed by females and their "allies" for being "awkward creeps" and they're starting to fight back?

Honestly, what did you expect? That you could tell socially inept male geeks, which make up most of the group, that they're bad persons for making you uncomfortable with their mere presence, and that they'd turn into well-adjusted gentlemen overnight? Bah.
For 10 key entry in accounting you want the most often used numbers closest to you. Benford's Law explains why 1 is the most common digit, followed by 2, 3, etc. Thus for hand entry, small digits should be closest to the hand, at the bottom, and larger digits at top.

For dialing a phone you are not constantly dialing numbers as a accountant or data entry person will be doing. For phoning, the number 1 is not the most common one, it's was actually more rare in old numbers which reserved 1 and 0 in some positions for area codes, needed only for long distance. The user testing showed that top to bottom order worked better for users than bottom to top. Undoubtedly since it matched reading order of the english language, going top to bottom as well.

The most efficient and least error prone layout depends on the task. The task of accounting, and the digit frequency, is very different from the task of telephoning.
hb gary federal

sony

google

rsa

epsilon

saic

tricare

tjmaxx/marshalls

lifelock

hannaford

U.S. department of Vet affairs
You could support a stack with scaffolding.
> The end of the Oil Interval is the most interesting, possibly the ONLY interesting historical event that will take place in our lifetimes.

That seems like a bizarre thing to believe. When humanity switched from wood to coal for heating, or from coal to oil, were either of those an identifiable "historical event"? If we switch from oil to other fuels in our lifetimes, this will happen so gradually that nobody will notice when it happens. Any more than we noticed as "an interesting historical event" the moment that everybody got an email address, or started using google, or bought a smartphone.
Right, but just imagine the fees you'd need to establish on student loans to wildcat them!

Late billing fee: $10,000
Processing fee: $1,500
(Etc)
I understand that you're advocating for helping people develop a thick skin. Where I take objection is when you start talking about abuse. There's enough other kinds of adversity out there to be resilient against.

> My experience in the professional world is that its full of assertive, aggressive individuals men and women included.

It's possible to be assertive and aggressive without being abusive.

> There are only so many slots at the top

Not everyone wants to get to the "top".

> Is it a disservice to create these mushy teeball environments

They certainly sound better than environments full of mental/emotional abuse. Why can't we create abuse-free environments in the real world, too?
While it's true that there's no guarantee Brown will get the maximum sentence, it's also true that he's publicly threatened the FBI and has made high-profile enemies.
That is also terrible teaching. A good teacher sets up a productive classroom environment from the beginning, with expectations set out in words and also modeled in behavior (calling on a wide variety of students, modeling how to ask questions about a student's thoughts, modeling how to give praise and criticism, giving a continual example of how to work through problems). When issues like negative interaction between students come up it's easy enough to set up a group work lesson that separates problem personalities, put people in groups with supportive folks, leave alone students who want to be left alone and try to channel energy in the right direction. I've worked with nerdy teenage boys and socially awkward types of all genders, and it's a matter of skill to deal with this but that is after all the job!

For instance, I had a student (13 yrs old?) in an advanced math class that was all male (I'm female) and he had a habit of starting to blurt out mildly veiled sexual comments to me. I said a few things to him about what was appropriate in class, in a kind way and privately, and I also arranged for a male administrator to chat with him. It stopped. Grades have nothing to do with this -- they're not effective in any way in setting classroom tone, especially as they're feedback far after the semester ends.

I'm sorry for all these Hacker News readers who had shitty high school experiences, but you do need to grow up and realize they were shitty. Turning around to dump the shit downhill -- or indulging in some sort of Stockholm syndrome -- is not going to make the world a better place and it does not make you a better person.

I don't always do things perfectly; I remember one female student who was being aggressively and unwillingly courted by a football player in one of my classes and I wasn't able to prevent all the distraction. But I noticed and did what I could, and commented to them separately about what is and isn't alright in the classroom. Seriously, folks, it's not that hard to have expectations for appropriate behavior and enforce them.
I went to an all girls school, and while I'm sure there was bullying, there was definitely no violence or rape.
What is Precog? Why this is being upvoted? Anyone care to explain a bit?
Voxel: Enable users to experience your app before installing
Of course it is, but so is a lot of "consumer driven" technology these days.
PayPal hardware powered by Go
> Unless I'm misunderstanding, the author claims to have spoken to the teacher and offer solutions

The author spoke with her daughter about things she could do: talk to the class, have a friend talk to the class, etc and the daughter decided that she would rather "plow through" than have her mom come to her high school and talk to her class.
> After getting our ice cream we went back to the table only to find our jackets gone and some fat people sitting there, eating ice cream with their fat kids.

> When I asked where our jackets were, a man, presumably the father of the obese family, told us that there were "some jackets" on the table but that they had the security guard come and clear them.

Is it just me, or is this comment really absurd, off-topic, and offensive?

First, why would you leave your jackets on a table out of your sight? The whole "put your jacket on a table to reserve it" thing is somewhat socially acceptable (though irritating), but it usually also involves keeping an eye on your jacket. You're lucky it wasn't on the floor or taken by someone other than the security guard when you got back.

But the larger issue I have with your comment is your reference to the size of the people who you're still mad at for taking "your" table. What does their obesity have to do with your story? In response to an article about discrimination, it almost seems like you must be trolling. Seriously, you could just substitute "slanteyes" or "niggers" and the substance of the story would not be at all changed. It read exactly that way to me.

Normally I'd just move on and assume others were offended as well, but this is somehow the highest voted reply...
That's really insightful.
Man, I'm starting to think there is a cult around JSON.

If you need to accept arbitrary binary data, JSON is a profoundly bad choice. At a minimum, you would expect them to base64 encode the data and put that into a JSON string.

If you are looking at error reports, how is it even remotely acceptable to have them silently modified to include invalid unicode replacement characters?

The lesson here isn't some crappy hack workaround they found, it's a case study in the lengths you'll have to go to when you insist on making technology choices without considering the problem you want to solve.
> This is nothing but a marketing ploy.

Its groupon, what is groupon if not a marketing ploy?

> Firstly, selling any commodity for 10-15% of its market value will attract lots of opportunistic buyers....

Well yea, thats the whole idea of groupon, the news here is that an onion sale crashed their site, that is funny to westerners because, well, its onions.

> Secondly, Groupon was selling 3000 kg per day, with a limit of 1 kg per order. Some sites mention they sold out the first day within 80 minutes. Other than that, I haven't seen any evidence/data about the incoming traffic that caused the site to crash. So till I do, I'll treat news of the "crash" like a marketing gimmick from the company.

If you check the listing, http://www.groupon.co.in/deals/shopping/Groupon-India-Onion/...

You'll see they already have a large amount of press about the sale, I believe the crash is less a marketing gimmick, and more is a result of one.

The "crash" if you beleive this source, was only for 10 or so minutes. Which is well within reasonable belief imo.

"The first day itself we ended up selling 5,000kg. Today (Friday) our site crashed completely for 10 minutes. It's been absolutely fantastic."

http://news.insing.com/feature/sold-out-onions-fly-off-india...

> Given this history - of poor design, senseless acquisitions and multiple u-turns in strategy - I wouldn't be surprised if their code is a taped-up patchwork that will crash regardless of 90% discounted onions.

I don't even know how this is relevant to the story or has anything to do with this discussion.

R u just mad cause you can't move that much onion?
You're most ... welcome (bows from the waist). :)
Yeah, it's come up a few times in the past.

https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=anonymous+font
I wonder at what point the structure would become non self-supporting though, in terms of scaling up the size.
MS SQL Server to Amazon Redshift in Under 5 Minutes
What's the end result of our brains being "fixed"? More productivity? Who cares.
Forget the freaking gender issue -- a 9 year old presented. It wasn't an environment for "risque" apps. Now, to be fair, the hosts should have made it clear that it was a G-rated affair, and I am guessing they didn't.
Those hypothetical cars and trucks would wear out twice as fast and consequently need to be replaced twice as often as before.
Just as well. Human operators only prolonged unfair and very negative sexual stereotypes.