skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why not take a scientific approach to all education?

Because it has been tried, and it does not seem to work very well.

This is not a new idea. University programs all over the U.S. are required to have "outcomes assessment" plans in place. These generally detail the various goals & objectives of the program and how the degree of program success is measured.

So, people are doing this stuff all over the place. Have you ever heard of any significant improvement in the quality of education coming out of it all? As a university professor, I've been involved in outcomes assessment in various ways for years, and I haven't heard of anything like that.

Keep in mind that the scientific method, as applied to figuring out how the world works, is not just something we do because we believe in the principles behind it. We do it because it works. And there are a huge number of success stories to back this up.

But apparently, it doesn't work for education. Why not? Perhaps we don't know how to do it right. But that brings up a meta-problem: perhaps we need to take a scientific approach to figuring out how to take a scientific approach to education.

Is anyone doing that? If not, I suspect this idea won't get anywhere.
It doesn't really matter what you build on the net, if you're successful the scammers and spammers will follow.
If you accept the premise from the post that minimizing support costs acts as an incentive to enhance usability, then i think there's an important factor you're touching on here. Since many open source organizations provide FOSS software and charge for support, they've got less of an incentive to provide easy to use software. Rather, their model is tuned to providing easy to support software.
World Bank chief: We're not remotely through crisis
EveryBlock source code released
The crab cakes look good.
I've heard anecdotally that the majority of people with assets (not necessarily a huge amount) hide assets from their spouses. That can be cash/stocks, but very often it's property or even companies.
If you are truthful, I do not think you appreciate the rarity of your skill.
What a Puritan. "Hey! She thinks she'd be happier if she was taller? How can I stop that legal adult from making a decision I disapprove of?"

What's the compelling basis for us collectively to stop her?
New York City Starts Contest for Big Apple Apps
Ah, Sean is one of our bloggers but he's been dormant since the start of the blog. Maybe I can nudge him to write up some content based on this talk, as it looks quite interesting.

Thanks for sharing these links!
There are most definitely stability problems with Photoshop. You would think something that cost that much would at least be <i>stable</i>, but I suppose "serious professionals" look at feature sets and not stability.

My experience with GIMP is none, so I'm not exactly qualified to comment, but Photoshop has to be one of the biggest usability nightmares on the market today. There are strange restrictions and ambiguous error messages that don't make any sense for the novice. Once you get more comfortable with Photoshop, you realize the power and flexibility of it, but it takes a while to get there.

As someone that spent a good long while being frustrated by photoshop, I can't imagine GIMP actually being harder to use.
You mean like if you were to choose at random and then choose again if you had positive (non-neutral) feelings about the choice?
I wonder if this advances us towards all-electric air travel?
Things to consider:

* If he has certain things that he doesn't want his wife to see he should encrypt them separately and not give her access, even in the event of his death since they are probably things he still wouldn't want her to see (secret sicko porn collection or sex chat logs or something)

* Don't be so quick to dismiss him has having a 'Hollywood marriage.' There are plenty of marriages that start out fine and with both partners completely trusting one another that eventually fail. Preventing some finiance information (or whatever) from being viewed by your wife could be a good thing (for you) in case she makes up her mind to divorce you; but decides to peek at your finances before actually telling you about it. [Before you start talking about trusting your wife, realize that people can (and do) change and not always for the better]

* If someone in government really wanted his laptop then jurisdictions -- even foreign ones -- wouldn't matter because they wouldn't necessarily be using the court system.

* Using something like TrueCrypt with a hidden partition could work for him so that he could keep some stuff from his wife/others while leaving the most innocuous stuff behind a password that she knows. [ That said, sometimes even the innocuous stuff can be used against you -- i.e. in court ]
This. Why wouldn't you just put a password section in your will?
i couldn't say. all i know is what doesn't work, from experience.

i'd really like a college to sit down and do a study on what really does predict success in their student body, looking at and perhaps requiring different things like IQ, SAT, ACT, high school data, etc.. test all incoming freshmen on the things they haven't already taken. etc.
Thanks for the suggestions.

>Spend lots of time explaining the blidingly obvious in terms of social skills.

This is going to be interesting, especially for my wife. As I suspect I'm a bit of an Aspie myself, I can see social rules from an outsider's perspective. She'll have more trouble explaining why, for example, one (at least in America) can not mention an obese person's size in his/her presence. He knows he's fat, he knows that we know he's fat, and he we know that he knows that we know, etc/ Sp. whats the issue? That's a hard one. How do you explain the irrationality of allowing the fat person to suspend disbelief that we're thinking, "Oh mah gawd, you're really f'ing fat!"
It's more likely that the IP ranges he was connecting from was listed as coming from the United States rather than France in their or their providers geoinformation database.

I don't think they've ever had a special deal with any IP organisation in France, however - I might of course be totally wrong.
You must of talked to a lot of people ;-)
For those with more technically inclined audience, something like http://domai.nr could work. I would not use a gimmicky domain for a general audience though (does anyone still remember the original delicious domain?).
You and I have different understandings of death.

You've been dying since the moment you were born. I was once a child. That child is nowhere in the world. He is dead. In his place is a young man. Some day, very soon, that young man will no longer exist and in his place someone else will live.

Death and rebirth are constant processes. You cannot live without changing. And what is death but change? Three weeks ago I was a man who was ignorant of opengl. That man is now dead forever. In his place, reborn, is a man who has a passing knowledge of it.

The event we normally call death is simply a dramatic version of what occurs every day, every possible moment.
http://lickmyspoon.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/dudes-nigh...

Ow ow ow
I doubt anyone has ever argued that an intelligence test didn't have statistical errors.

Certainly no professional psychologist would claim that IQ tests have no error of estimation.

http://learninfreedom.org/iqbooks.html
"perhaps we need to take a scientific approach to figuring out how to take a scientific approach to education."

That's part of what I meant by "aggressive". I've actually been involved in some education research too and was generally unimpressed by the end result, which I would define as "impact on the education given to real students". (Ultimately, isn't education research a very practical thing? In the end, abstract research results are irrelevant.) Partially, the problem is the same as the one nutritionists face; it's a complicated system resistant to the sort of reductionist analysis that science really thrives on. All any given study can do is nibble around the edges, with no guarantee that the edge in question has any particular relevance.

On the other hand, there are massive structural problems too. I don't see much evidence that any of this science is actually feeding back into schooling itself; it seems very detached from the process, whereas schooling remains dominated by political concerns and people just sort of spouting theories off. It was certainly that way when I was a kid 20 years ago (I clearly recall being on the receiving end of educational theories that when I checked up on them ten years later never had anything remotely resembling a scientific background, it was just some educator's pet theory), and I'm not seeing a lot of evidence that has changed much. Schools are now too busy teaching to the state mandated tests to have any room to try anything new that might fail. The feedback loop between science and schooling seems to be almost entirely severed. Please do correct me if I'm wrong on this. But in all the endless debates about school I hear I sure don't here much science getting cited.

Note that for both issues, I have no beef with the researchers doing real science.

Perhaps, at the risk of offending the scientists who wrote the initial post, what we need is a more engineering approach to schooling. Engineering of the sort that engineers do when they have to run ahead of the science a bit, but still produce results. Certainly looking at it from a computer programmer's point of view, I see a system that needs to be rolled back to step one of the engineering process. Now, you might think I mean "burn it down and start from scratch", but I actually mean, it's time to sit down and do requirements analysis again. Do we even have a clear sense of what we really want from schooling? I'm not even sure we have an answer to that question, and from an engineering standpoint that indicates to me we're not starting on a firm foundation.
Awesome movie. I literally just watched it today and it was totally inspiring.

If anyone needs a break, you can watch the whole thing here (Parts 1-10):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6zvCmQAHQc&feature=chann...
The problem with having it in a will is that there is a 'single point of failure' to someone obtaining it.

He also mentions moving it out of jurisdiction of the UK, so I'm assuming he's trying to prevent court orders from trying to force the contents to be revealed. If that's the case, then it's possible that having a will stored/signed with a lawyer in Toronto, Canada (or just 'another country from where he currently lives') is not 'legal' or provides issues with the execution of the will in the event of death. If that's true, then he has to have his will in the UK with a lawyer somewhere. I assume that a court could order his will revealed/unsealed if they thought that his password was there and they were trying access the contents of his laptop... If it's possible to have foreign-country wills, then that issue doesn't exist, but I suspect that a will in a foreign country presents legal problems if it isn't outright declared 'invalid.'

Of course, if he put it on his will and didn't tell anyone that he did; it's possible that authorities wouldn't even think to go after it (or maybe a judge wouldn't allow them access to it unless they had some sort of evidence that the password was stored there).
Cool Search Engines That Are Not Google
Nokia N97 Theme : V Series Theme
If you've hit memory, you've already lost. Running instructions will basically be line noise compared to that. Similarly, function call overhead will probably dwarf actually doing the xors.

However, with a good register allocator and inlined functions, your point becomes even stronger. The compiler can simply remove all instructions associated with the naieve swapping version, and simply record that before the swap %eax holds b, and after it, %eax now holds a. (Even the most naieve of code generators will do this sort of thing if the values in the swap don't fall outside of a basic block). The xors are far harder to optimize.
Congrats! this is great!
http://www.5min.com/Video/How-to-Properly-Use-a-Kitchen-Knif...
Common Sense Problem Page
Something that could have saved me a load of time earlier. I spent a solid three days trying to get yacc to play well with ObjC. I'll check this out this weekend.

Thanks!
Assume you had a sorting algorithm that swaps values, and in some cases would swap two of the same values. It's easier (and often faster, thanks to the high cost of branch misprediction) to simply assume the swap of something with itself is a no-op than to explicitly check the address of the value to make sure it isn't the same. Or you could have just forgotten to make the check, and allowed the user to pass in their own swap functions (say, to deep-copy structs in C).
Would you by chance also be able to post us toward a blog post that gives some convincing examples of why unit tests / TDD are so great. I have read many advocacy posts that basically repeat the same mantra of how awesome it is, and I have read ones that use simplistic examples, but I honestly don't see how they can be so compelling. Or, to be more precise, how their value exceeds their cost.

Whereas the automated functional testing advocated by the OP makes a tremendous amount of sense to me intuitively.
Maybe not files, but things like email account passwords and such would be good. Also passwords to accounts that get charged on a regular basis (hosting or something) would be easier to deactivate in the event of your death if you heirs had your password (vs. needing to prove to the company that you're dead or something).

At the very least, maybe an encrypted file or something with bank accounts, passwords, etc in it would help them out. And it would be easier to update than a will.
That's surprising; it's more than twice as slow in Ruby (yeah, yeah). It's also (for obvious reasons) orders of magnitude faster in C --- if you were crazy enough to actually write code that way.
I didn't take the article to be "with just a few bit manipulations", but rather "how to start working with bits". But yeah that's a sensible reason not to attempt it.
The guy who wrote this has a channel on YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/user/LiberalViewer?PHPSESSID=5a91ae4c...

and he talks about this critique on one of his broadcasts - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-tIY99QFFk
Dying your hair used to be controversial. These days you just do it.
Good job, Russell. Konstantin hits hard with the point that corporate culture in a start-up will reflect the attitude of the original founders - and it will stay dynamic for only as long as the venture works hard to maintain it. I'd venture to say that in 1908 Durant was eager to build a great product. One should ask what changed over the years.
As a shorter person myself, that is amazing to me. I've heard of that surgery and am baffled that anyone would go through that. (Also, I'm fairly sure athletes don't go through that because it leaves your leg bones too weak.)

I mean, being short is generally not a good thing, except when you're in coach on an airplane and have ample legroom. But it's not bad enough that I'd willfully even break a toe to correct it.
Ok, lights are a good example.
My understanding is that the problem isn't the cost of labor per se. Instead, it's rising health care costs. The medical provisions of GM's pension plan are pretty lavish, and it's been underfunded for years.

GM isn't all that unusual here -- a lot of other firms (and a number of state governments) have underfunded pensions.

http://www.businessinsider.com/gm-retirees-rush-to-get-dentu...
> Who's foundation? I'm a web developer, so to me, I want the latest ruby, apache, etc... However, a server admin might want the more "stable" versions of the same.

What happens when the "stable" version doesn't have the same feature as the latest one? For example the latest Python is 2.6 and it's even declared stable, but RedHat comes with 2.4 IIRC. There were quite a few changes between these versions, so you have to use the same version for both production and development.
I thought the main point was that they run as internet-enabled desktop apps. I guess it's debatable how central that is.
I assume the dryer they are referring to is the AirBlade: http://www.dysonairblade.com/

They have them in several airports I frequent and they are, in a word, awesome. One of those genuinely better mousetraps I wish I had thought of first.
Truly amazing - giving away the source code!

This will encourage many others, using this system, to start local micro-news channels in their own communities. Instead of the local newspaper/TV channel owning the regional media turf, this could enable discussion culture in a more democratic way. The question is... aside from hackers: who is ready for this? I remember the cartoon from Gaping Void - "the future belongs to the geeks, nobody else wants it" - http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/003301.html
They really seem to have gone beyond the terms of their funding and tried to extract the code into useful standalone pieces. Thanks for that, guys.
you can also print binary in python like so:

>>>print bin(12)
0b1100
>>>
What do Programmers Feel About their Software?
CrypTool - Educational Tool for Cryptography and Cryptanalysis
Sure, but at least it's uniform within a desktop environment. If you looked at what I was saying, Windows doesn't even give you that. Mac is better, even though it also has 2 gratuitously different available look-and-feels.
I agree that this release provides some much-needed missing features, but I fear that the culture of php, when presented with these new features, will use them to build even more crufty, difficult-to-read code. As a coder and debugger of much php code, I hope I'm wrong about that.
I wish I could up vote your response more than once. Good Job!
Asperger's is very poorly understood, and this misunderstanding is really hard on suffferers (I am one.) The cause of all the varied symptoms is that we have a slight delay in processing sounds, as explained in this article: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16174-brains-of-autist...
This means that if you say "Hi" to me, I know instantly that you said a word one syllable long, but it takes me a fraction of a second longer than a normal person to decipher the word as "hi." This isn't a problem when a person says just one syllable. But in a whole sentence, the delays snowball until I miss a big chunk of the sentence, especially if the person speaks quickly. That's why, in danteembermage's example, his son "has a hard time finding objects using verbal instructions 'grab your shoes buddy.'" If you handed him a piece of paper that said "grab your shoes, buddy," he would get the shoes as fast as anyone.
Poor speech comprehension is the root of all unusual Aspie behaviors. ShabbyDoo's son "physically cringes when there's lots of noise/confusion." The confusion comes because there is too much noise and not enough signal. Aspies shy from social situations because they can't understand what people are saying.
Even things that seem like deep-down problems can easily be explained by poor speech comprehension. The article spends a lot of time on empathy, but empathy is not an emotion, it's a social skill. You act like you care about somebody else's problems so you get along with them better. Aspies suck at it because they have a hard time understanding what people are saying, and they just have less chance to develop social skills in general, because it is so hard for them to talk to people.
A lot of this comes from being lied to their whole lives. How many of these people were told (in many different ways, some subtle, some not) while growing up that school and college and grad school were important and the key to a meaningful life? Sorry, but in reality, there is no universal shortcut to having a meaningful life. There was nothing special about the structure you've gotten used to in two decades of schooling. You have to accept this and move on. This part of the crisis has gotten much worse in the last half-century or so -- the unquestioned faith many middle-class urbanites now have in schools and colleges.
Flagged. Not hacker news.
California Business Law
Specializing in entertainment law, Erik S Syverson ?Attorney at Law, is based in the Las Angeles, California Area.
Adobe really impress me as a company who has been through that territory a few times, starting with fonts in postscript, way back in the mid 80's I think, only 2-3 years after the company's formation. With their recent(ish) acquisition of Flash (Macromedia), they also opened up the Flash fileformat and protocol (yeah, flash is an open standard), which seems to me to have been intended to deflate nascent open source alternatives. (If you haven't heard of them, it's measure of the success of Adobe's strategy.)

I think Adobe is adding support for HTML5 as we speak (or and perhaps a standalone product); that it will only release it when it is strategically advantageous to Adobe; that it will protect Flash by improving it beyond the features available in HTML5. Note how Photoshop has managed to stay ahead of the Gimp.
Free vs Freely Distributed
Q: If you were given a "Name your Price" type of offer, what would you ask for?
If you are really good at your field, and you have specialized software engineering skills which suddenly happen to be in demand and have many companies interested in you, what would you ask for?

I guess, what would be an offer given to you right that you can't refuse? (I am assuming base only, no bonus/stock options).
Everybody has a price, what would be yours (realistically speaking).
Ask HN: Collect payment info before 30 day trial?
For our app, we have a free version (no expiration, it is just limited) and we have several paid plans. All of our paid plans include a free 30 day trial.

My question is: Should we collect payment information during the signup process for any of the paid plans? Or should we prompt for payment info after the free trial has ended?

Are there any studies showing one has higher conversion rates?
It's up on Github: http://github.com/brosner/everyblock_code/tree/master
I would appreciate it if you would resubmit, as all the top comments here are complaints about a different (version of the) essay.

Generally, people like having their attention taken up, provided you follow their advice. :-)
The truly hilarious episode is here:

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=675
Like many security measures, he does not have a technological problem, he has a social problem. Namely, he is the lynchpin of his own security and he is very bad at estimating risks.

It is an absolute certainty that he will eventually die and his data will eventually become totally unavailable.

It would take an extraordinarily speculative sequence of events for him to run afoul of the British authorities who would then, being naturally covetous of the secrets of minor authors, abandon their tradition of spousal privilege and sue his wife for the contents.

Realistically I think he has a problem greater than either of these: assuming every bit of his data passes to his heirs as planned... then what? Does it have a comprehensible filing system? Does it have a document saying "Hi honey, if you're reading this I'm gone, the documents you need today are in ..."? And, the biggest question, is the data in there meaningful to anyone but him at all?