skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Using flashcards to learn mathematics, computer programming, physics, or anything requiring more creative or analytical thought is not so useful. For these subjects the number of raw facts required is usually smaller, and the thought processes, concepts and problem solving ability are much more important.

My programming flash card usually consists of evaluating pieces of code like:

Question -->

Evaluate the following:

puts "Hello world"

Answer -->
Hello world

I cannot memorize the solution as if I memorize the answer to multiplication problems, which is just straight rote memorization. I memorize the process for code evaluation instead. In any case, I do not think anki and similar spaced repetition flash card software are in any way a replacement for actually just writing code and solving lot of different problems. They are always complementary to learning the materials in other ways.
That's what I thought of.

It is a sort of a societal placebo. Or maybe the subconscious message is "someone cared to put these here for me to prevent me from killing myself, someone cares at least, maybe today is not the day".

In other words I wonder if the color of lights would have been violet or yellow but some "research" had been disseminated that yellow lights are calming and prevent suicide, that combined with the action of someone to install them, then I suspect yellow lights would have worked just as well.
the iPad mini it may be mini, but is still expensive, and from my own empirical experience, 9 out of 10 tablets I see in the user hands are cheap $59 devices.
this was discussed here weeks ago, but theres no search so i wont give links.
The editors note

http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/28/this-sunday-who...
I thought that at first, but then the faces started loading finally. You do have to be zoomed in for that to occur.
Abstracting away the messiness of classes in JS is justification enough for CS, IMHO.

Also, to use your above example, I agree understanding that style of JS is important, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't use the tool.
She also apparently doesn't even understand the NSA violations that she was trying to talk about [1]

[1] http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/09/27/whoa-whoa-whoa-stop-dia...
The Power of Habit and http://tinyhabits.com/ are both great.
In fact, it's not wanting to change the tests that causes the problem here

This is the point I was making. Programmers never want to change the tests as, often, it has taken as long to create the tests than it did to write the code. It adds a layer of syrup to the whole process. You can no longer be nimble as you are carrying the weight of the tests.

And, yes, I've worked with precious designers who don't want to change their design when a first iteration clearly shows that it isn't working.

But to be truly agile (and I'm not talking about some written methodology here — I mean agile as in nimble) you need to work quickly, try things out and make mistakes. Writing your tests first is a encumbrance.

Perhaps you have been on bad projects where TDD has been used improperly

This is what everyone says the moment their dogma is questioned.

I've read the books, I've been on the training courses and I have certificates in my drawer.

My experience is, if you want to create anything well-designed you need to iterate and there is no point in writing tests until your design is fixed it just slows everything down.
So the backstory is that Google replaced the New Tab page this week with a new one that many users don't like: https://twitter.com/search?q=chrome%20new%20tab

Our extension is much like the old new tab page, but with various improvements:

- you can add any app, not just those in Chrome Web Store, including custom ones

- the launcher is automatically populated for you

- you can share the launcher with your colleagues

- the launcher config is synced to our server and we have a standalone service available as well as tab replacement addons for most other browsers

- we have deep links available, giving you shortcuts inside the web apps

- you can have multiple screens

We also have something really neat just around the corner, which you can see in this quick demo video: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/zy8xo0p086ydql8/starthq....

Finally, you can try it out without installing the extension here: https://starthq.com - we don't require you to verify your email to try it out.

Would really appreciate your feedback, thanks!
Cambridge says no to cameras: Pushing back against a local surveillance state
Surely complexity of the tax code is important too? Anyway, Hong Kong is a very developed and modern place, and taxes are much lower here.
How I taught a homeless man to build an app in a week
There is no justification for low-contrast text unless you want people not to read what you write. I'll put money that a simple A/B shows that very few people stayed more than 15 seconds on that blog post.
I don't have anything constructive to say besides that I'm always impressed by your work, Gwern.

Thanks for all the references as always.
Actually to be quite contrary, and just to hear people's ideas, how can anyone judge whether death is right or wrong? Or in a different light, how do you say that the promotion of human beings is a good thing? I'm a human being, and all of us talking are, so perhaps we're inclined in that sense to believe that human life is precious. But can one prove what death is? Is it always better for someone to live, is it always better for someone to die? Death in my poorly conceived view is just a moment in which we choose to no longer accept this world, but I don't believe that I'll cease to exist. In fact no matter how large or how terrifying the experience may be, it will still pass. Yes, in a sense I'm making a relativistic argument, but it's interesting to me to hear people's views on death.
seems they read about disruptive innovation and tried it with QNX - and fell on their face.

christensen is correct in his observations on how disruptions happen, but his proposed countermeasures don't seem to work in a lot of real world situations.

BB tried to run the QNX as a separate disruptive unit which is a really bad idea if you intent to migrate your existing customers from A to B. announcing B will kill A before B is ready, etc.

BBM for all platforms would have been truly disruptive. Change the playing board, not just some pieces. WhatsApp, etc. show that this is indeed a market. BB had it right before them but got distracted by their handset/keyboard business.

The renaming of RIM to BB would have been the perfect moment to split the company. RIM for BBM, services, network - and BB for the hardware plus OS. RIM could have had a future. All easier said than done of course, but those execs earn a lot of money to execute exactly these kind of maneuvers.
As long as the owner of the apartment is there fine. My upstairs neighbor used to rent out her apt on AirBNB while she was out of town. On two occasions, the occupant flooded my apartment below because they didn't understand how to user a washer and air conditioner properly. I reported the apartment owner to the city by calling 311.

Unless the apartment owner is responsible and insured, this is why it is illegal in New York.

What wasn't trivial was the damage. Thousands of dollars to electronics, desks, furnishings, etc.

AirBNB should be ashamed of themselves for pursuing profits at any costs.

It's one thing to rent your house out in the middle of nowhere. It's another to rent it to eurotrash and let them destroy your building.
"All that happens must be known."

Wow. So much insidiousness packed into six little words.

They conveniently forget to mention by whom it should be known.
Not bad. I think that castle is somewhat busy for a logo.
Where are the best conditions to establish a start-up company 
Hello , Which country has conditions for startups company , And with the possibility of investment or residential
Ask HN: Help us get 2 free kindles for our birthdays
Hey hackers, I’m Marius and today is my birthday. Tomorrow is my friend Valentina’s birthday. We decided to get ourselves a Paperwhite Kindle each.

As a community experiment and hopefully a as a gift, I kindly ask you to help us raise $259 (including CA tax), but not from your pocket: just use this referral link to buy anything on Amazon for your next planned purchase(s). Here it is: http://amzn.to/18zcq4K

The money, provided by Amazon, will be used to buy Amazon products (which will in turn be used to buy even more from Amazon), so we think the folks there will be ok with this :)

Thank you so much, and have a great day!
Marius
He just wants something cool looking and memorable for the FreeBSD sponsors page and for his website. This is part of the problem with paying for designers (something I've done a bunch of times, to varying effect) --- they want to have a conversation about your brand and the message of the logo. No doubt there are productive conversations like that to be had with good designers --- but not in $500 logo projects.
I can't help but feel Logo[1] offered a better metaphor. Actually seeing an "actor" that will perform the actions being given is a huge benefit.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_%28programming_language%29
I've wrote about this a few times on HN before. You guys like to downvote me every time I do but here we go again ...

Good designers, the ones you want if this is important to you, don't do contests. We have families to feed and bills to pay. "Winning" a popularity contest, not based on substance but instead on style, doesn't allow us to support ourself and our families doing our work. So, who are the designers doing these contests? Well, besides the large number of completely untrained laypeople, it's mostly students wanting beer money and portfolio pieces. And lets face it, most designers need many years beyond school before they're anything approaching "good" at their craft. Those years are spent doing grunt work with increasing amounts of responsibility under senior designers, art directors, creative directors, whatever.

My second point about that is how rare it is to win a contest. Designers know that they're often designing blind here. They could spend all the time in the world creating the perfect brand and the client could choose something else because they don't like the color blue or they're scared of clown logos or whatever. Point is, the client is often hardly objective in these situations and the designers know this. What does this mean in practicality? They are going to put as little effort as possible in to this because the chances of reward are small. Personally, I'd love to see the average amount of time spent on these logo entries. I bet most of them are well under 10 minutes.

Legal issues. I'll skim here because I don't have my links handy but most of these contest websites have been caught with stolen logos in their submissions. Companies have been sued for using these logos from contest websites costing them thousands of dollars they didn't expect. It happens and when the "designer" is some anonymous guy across the world, you have no recourse but to pay the fees, lawyer fees and then pay to do your logo all over again. Not to mention the embarrassment to your company when this happens. This stuff is very, very rare for clients working with designers face-to-face.

Lastly, when you're missing the face-to-face collaboration between designer and client, you're also missing most of what makes design "design", instead of art. The research as well as most of the creative process tends to go missing. The designer starts to view the client as the ones to design for instead of the "user" and as a result, the logo/brand/whatever becomes less effective. And you know what? A lot of important questions go missing ... like what are your plans for the future? What is your strategy to deal with your competitors? Even simple things like "am I making the logo for the company, the product or both" ... changes in company strategy are rarely mentioned in logo contests and this could be the most important question in the world. Logos need to be adaptable to company strategy and that strategy needs to be talking out between company and designer. Often NDAs are signed beforehand, good luck doing that with on a contest.
N.S.A. Examines Social Networks of U.S. Citizens
Does this provide the frequently visited websites view?
Using Sidekiq's Redis Connection in Other Places
In a way this is true. If anyone can come up with a definition of terrorism, it's causing an outrage for political purpose. The Snowden revelations and the subsequent revelations have certainly changed the political landscape, just like the Red Army Faction did back then, consequently, yes, Sen. Feinstein qualifies.
That sir is a very handy tip, especially on mobile where typing’s a premium.
Hilarious: free Qurans to burn for "Burn a Quran Day"
I've been using SRS (anki, ankiweb, ankidroid) for almost four years now. I'm up to 4000 Japanese sentence cards and my amazement is constant. When I started I thought I was fooling myself, there was no way I'd be able to read real quantities of Japanese. Instead I can now read the manga for the anime I watched as a kid and enjoy the stories I thought had ended.

I've gotten into a rhythm, four new sentences per day which at my memorization rate works out to ~60 cards to review a day. Thus 20-30 minutes per day of review. It has become such a part of my day that skipping a day makes the day feel like a massive failure.

Its interesting how 4 cards can translate into 60 even with high memorization rates: for every card you add you'll see it again in 2 days, ~4 days, ~8 days, ~2 weeks, ~1 month, ~2 months, ~4 months, ~8 months, ~1 year... A review session is thus made up of multiple standing waves. The effect is noticeable you'll see a workload increase as the next standing wave of review starts. Right now some reviewed cards are getting scheduled next in ~8 years!
A facebook profile picture of smallest dimension (50px X 50px) will have minimum size of 3 kb.. So, if this site will show real profile pics all together, it'll have to load almost 3.5 TB of data for 1.2 billion pictures..
A connection with 100Kb/s downloading speed will take around 430 days, and a connection with 1MB/s will take around 42 days..

I don't think anyone would be interested to spend more than 2 minutes on this page.
Latest update:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/09/26/video...

Maybe this is real...

Maybe this is just some perverted marketing for Nitrous.IO whom I have never heard of until now...

Maybe this is just what happens when you're homeless...

Kids pay you to fight on video (Bum Fights), resellers pay you to queue up for phones (iPhone launch) and others believe they can take any homeless person and mold them in their own image (Trading Places).
I clicked because I wanted to see something controlling a steam engine. Oh well.
While light has proven an effective treatment for Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), an optimal wavelength combination has not been determined. Short wavelength light (blue) has demonstrated potency as a stimulus for acute melatonin suppression and circadian phase shifting.

CONCLUSIONS:
Narrow bandwidth blue light at 607 microW/cm2 outperforms dimmer red light in reversing symptoms of major depression with a seasonal pattern.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16165105
I had to unblock Facebook Connect in Ghostery and AdBlock before it worked.
the last thing tarsnap needs is yet another logo with a padlock / key / chain / castle / fortress / shield / guard / dog.

I'm inclined to agree... I'm not saying it's impossible to produce a good logo with one of these, but I'd need to see something really inspiring to put up with a cliche.
Anki is written in Python. Maybe you could fork it and wrap its core in a command line app.
Liberal Senatrix from Cali that says, "The chase is on" while referring to Snowden.

What a fat, disgusting, old hypocrite.
What designer?

Small agile teams don't have a designer and a 'front-end guy' and a 'PM' and an 'architect'. They often only have one and in my case he (I) is also the PM (or PO in our case).

Design-led software requires a designer. In large projects you might break this up into lots of different roles with trendy titles but they are all just designers, just as a database programmer and a graphics programmer are just programmers.

Changing the design simply means deleting those methods and throwing away those unit tests.

Which is wasted work, wasted time and totally dispiriting for a developer.
What Undercover Boss and The Jetsons Tell Us About the Future of Jobs
Have asked him to try that but he's just disappeared away from home for a week without the 5 and doesn't want to break the 4s.
Javascript: Dynamically inject javascripts when you need them
from what i've read, you can bind any section of the track wheel to whatever you want - so in this case, probably not a combo press.

as for needing to press something, there's this new haptic feedback stuff.
> I was taught that you should solve the problem first, and then write the code

It is sad that in this day and age waterfall is still taught as a serious methodology.
You do, if you zoom in.
> If you must support outdated versions of IE then your future is grim.

Hello from military industrial complex business world. A hundreds of billions of dollars market where exactly almost nobody uses latest firefox, chrome and quite a few use IE8.

What looks grim for you is a boon over here. Supporting IE8 puts money in the pocket, money in the pocket makes the future not so "grim" ;-) Saying you need latest Chrome or Firefox guarantees just getting laughed at and shown the door.
The other thing that will happen is that the most credible submissions will come from places like Indonesia and Vietnam and Bulgaria. I wonder what freaks pro designers out more, concern over the wasted time of contest losers, or concern over the extent to which offshore piecework designers can drive the prices down for people like Colin who simply don't want the full 40-80 hour project.
I say exactly that in my comment. I'm not suggesting that tests shouldn't be written — I'm suggesting that tests shouldn't be re-written without just cause.
Not as such, but you can put that on our roadmap: http://starthq.uservoice.com

The launcher being populated automatically effectively does that though, it just doesn't keep it up to date yet.
By using a contest format and only offering $500 to the winner, you're significantly limiting the talent pool of designers. Designers who are good--and know that they are--probably wouldn't design a logo for a guaranteed $500, much less for an effectively random chance of payment.

Maybe you don't really care if it's a very good logo, or if you're collaborating with a professional who can walk you through the process of discovering what you want. (You do want something, trust me--you just won't know it for sure until you start rejecting the things you don't want.) And that's fine--it's your choice. If your business is doing fine without an awesome logo or a slick brand, then good job!

But if you really do want something professional, something that can be built out into a bigger brand, and something that someone put a lot of thought into, then this is the wrong way to go.

I wouldn't hold a contest for $500 for a developer to write a piece of code for me. Why would I do it for a logo?
This isn't a problem with TDD. It's a problem with the developers using it. TDD doesn't protect you from being a moron.
The danger is that it's very possible to memorize 100s of answers like this without having any idea of how the code is working.

Imagine if instead of static flashcards there the SRS worked on items like:

- puts

- the '+' operator

- variables

- functions

Then an algorithm would generate problems incorporating those concepts. The exact same problem would never appear twice so you can't learn by rote and it ensures you actually learn the concepts. Your progress on each concept would be tracked by the SRS algorithm to help schedule your learning.

I think this would be a huge improvement on static flashcards.
The real question is - does this have the image from the profile I requested that they delete over 1.5 years ago?
If you were to ask me to choose between Steam Controller and a 360 controller, I would choose 360...if tomorrow all game controllers were wiped off the earth and the only option was the Steam Controller, I don’t think this would be a bad thing.

Resounding endorsement.
Spaced repetition, also known as rote memorization, is a terrible way to "learn" anything. The trouble is, you aren't learning at all, you're hacking your brain to force information into it that has no relevance and really doesn't want to be there. It's not a useful or pleasurable activity. It definitely won't make you smarter. Even Mr. Supermemo himself admitted that after FIVE YEARS of constant daily marathon memorization, 60% of it is gone within the first year of stopping (http://supermemo.com/articles/kowal.htm). The brain does not want to work this way.

I'll propose an alternative to rote memorization for learning: critical thinking.
Typical capitalist.
Yes. This is why I keep saying that to sue for infringement, one should have to supply objective evidence of nonobviousness: evidence that the problem the patent solves was previously known and was considered difficult.

The mere lack of demonstrable prior art should not suffice.
I have to say I really liked the magic of automatically filling the app launcher. I first nearly didn't notice, because it the apps seemed very obvious to me. It took me a minute to realize that this came from my browsing history and booksmarks. Good work!
Why Does This Man Have a Nose on His Forehead?
She's an opportunist scumbag. Usually the liberal (and libertarian) ones are against a surveillance state, but she has no core, no backbone.
i am looking for that as well.. if you use emacs there are org-drill.el and flashcard.el:

http://sachachua.com/blog/2013/02/rediscovering-emacs-featur...
Beastie leaning an elbow on a treasure chest, looking cool, as though it were a bar. Cool like he's taken down marauding hordes with his bare hands so keeping you away from that box isn't even a thing.
Those company do not have a right to exists then. It's a privilege.
A letter from a flat designer
I always like sticking to the very best, so SuperMemo was the choice for me. I remember spending a couple of weeks just reading the whole website (http://www.supermemo.com/) because it contained so much interesting information on learning and memorization. It also took a while to understand how to use the program properly because it probably has one of the worst UIs one can imagine ;-).

Anyways, I ended up dumping SuperMemo because once my item database grew I became too lazy to spend 30 minutes (or more!) each day going through this drill. I might get back to it at some point, though.

Edit: By the way, SuperMemo offers a few more interesting tools.

One is "Incremental Reading", where you can import an article or text file into SM and SM will let you incrementally process it.
For example, it might pop up as part of your repetition routine, and you can read a few paragraphs (you read as much as you want), and pick out the important parts of what you've read (parts you want to remember). Once you're done reading, you continue and the whole text will come up again and again, until you finish reading it and then you can dismiss it.
The parts you cut out from the text become separate learning items and they too will come up in your daily routines, which let you further work on them until you ultimately reduce them into a Question & Answer form.

Another tool is sleeping monitoring. SM will let you track your sleep data, and it will tell you how your sleep affects your memory performance.
The real shame is that you can't install 7 and, if you don't like it, reinstall 6. Apple's head is up their ass when it comes to allowing people to install older versions of iOS.
Or maybe a critique of Google + FB + TW, if not of the pervasive "ideology" that permeates the whole social media/cloud everywhere discourse.