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

(I mean, sure, start somewhere. But let's set proper goals.)

Sometimes I wish I could start a school of my own, and this is what the school would do, to the extent it could; study the problem of education aggressively scientifically. You'd start with a fork of the current curriculum just to "play it safe", and there are many details you'd have to work out to make it work and make it safe, but I would lay money the end result would be worth it.
to my knowledge, prime applies to everything -- and it's a huge success. piperjaffray reports there are about 2 million Prime users worldwide and a 20% increase in spending on Amazon after users sign up for Prime.

2m users x $79 per year = $158 million by the way. huge. and that's just revenue from the subscription service, not including the average order increase. plus a 92% renewal rate.

re: amazon stores -- third-party amazon stores offer a great deal for retailers who want to backfill their inventory with products they don't actually carry. amazon then pays the retailer affiliate fees, and the buyer doesn't know the difference.
The main problem with FOSS graphics packages is that they aren't focused on being usable and producing beautiful-looking graphics. They're focused on being FOSS packages first, and software that does graphics second. The combination of usability (or maybe just familiarity... but still, it's the measure of the ability of a package to be used) and just really nice looking results are what put Photoshop and Illustrator ahead of GIMP and Photoshop in nearly every area. I just don't see anybody saying "look at this beautiful art I made with GIMP." I see people making lame fan art and bad gradients.
Many of the reasons to want a 3GS apply just, if not more validly, to the Hero or Pre. Alas, there's no mention of other multitouch phones.
Yes, it does count here. I'm working with Google Summer of Code 2009 right now. And incidentally, my project is related to voting :-)
He can't have been the only person in the class who had the thought. I would have; I just wouldn't have dared.

True or not, funny story.
Yes.

If you want to have a beautifully crafted full-fledged computer in your pocket. Yes.

Bonus, it also makes phone calls.
Great commercial software has good usability because they pay good usability people. These people aren't as likely to donate their time to a FOSS project as are hackers who can code raw functionality.
As far as advice on economy goes, I'm still reading what PT Barnum has to say about it: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/8581 PS Reportedly, PT Barnum did not say "There's a sucker born every minute", cf http://sniggle.net/barnum.php

I guess I can only take one source of advice about it, at a time, heheh. I will say, though, that I think it's great if the subject of economy (in a transitive sense) is still coming up in contemporary discourse
Obviously, he made sure to use good penmanship.
This mentality is frustrating.

I used to argue with a close friend about this a lot...

This is the difference between what I called "hippies" and "fascists" (this was a joke, I don't actually mean that the people I'm talking about are fascists or hippies).

Both of these groups of people have the same fantasy. It is almost always something along the lines of "I want to wake up in the morning with absolutely nothing to do. I want to sit on the end of my dock in a cabin far away from anything and catch fish all day without having to worry about anything" or "I want to sail around the world".

The hippie approach to this is almost always some derivative of "You can DO IT! Quit your job, get a cabin or boat or whatever, and just LIVE THAT LIFE!".

This is ignoring what the actual goal is; not having to worry about anything. The fantasy is not having to think about paying rent, or electricity, or gas, or medical bills, or anything at all ever. The fantasy is having enough money that the only things you ever have to consider are things that you WANT to do, like fishing, or writing poetry.

This is why the "fascists" take the approach of "I am going to work my ass off while I'm young, then retire on a boat".

This approach ALSO has a major problem. Often times the "work my ass off" period results in the worker alienating themselves from everything that they love and are working towards spending time with; their friends, family, and loved ones.

My advice? Invest in the lottery.
Translation:
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.idg...
Agree. The other way to pick customer base is pricing - I started getting much better reviews after simply raising prices from $2 to $5.

I guess my point was that there is broad customer base which you don't get to pick much - the 40 million people who bought an iDevice, but then as you pointed out it can be narrowed down to some segments which you like better than others.
Oh thank you! Lambda functions! I'm so sick of working with php's silly create_function hack for lambda functions.

This will make working in php so much more convenient!

I'm also glad to see the ternary shortcut (?:) added.
tesla is clearly a special case. the government doesn't normally hand out loans, and in this case it only handed out loans to financially viable car companies. other car companies got government loans that aren't as technologically cutting-edge.
this is how I feel about my iPhone 3G.
Bonus, it doesn't overheat like the 3GS does.
The reality is, autism spectrum diagnoses are done with checklists. If you observe six of more symptoms out of a list of 12 than there is an autism diagnosis, if there is something less you have a not-quite-autism diagnosis. Depending on the practitioner it gets labeled high funcioning autism, asperger's, or my favorite Pervasive Development Disorder Not Otherwise Specified.

Basically it's a class of generic "something is wrong" but not with the severity of autism. Since the physiological pathways for these diseases are not well understood the diagnoses by definition are going to be a bit mushy.

That said, my son was diagnosed with autism to great degree because of a speech delay. His speech is improved so I'm not sure if he would qualify now, but he does still have physical symptoms. For example he flaps his arms a lot when he gets excited, he loves rough play, he has a hard time finding objects using verbal instructions "grab your shoes buddy" and some other random things.

Does he need a label? I think so. I think he benefited some from his therapy and special education in the public schools and a diagnosis helps determine which therapies might help and which won't. Is he going to be socially slower than he would have been if he'd just been treated like a normal kid. I don't think so; especially since a huge chuck of the kids in special ed in Arizona are just native Spanish speakers.

I think you're right to worry that parents will change their behavior based on a label, there just seems to be some worthwhile things that come out of formal diagnosis and whether or not to get one for a child is a serious parenting decision that has lots of consequences, good and bad.

EDIT: parent was worried about negative consequences of an Asperger's diagnosis on the child.
There definitely does seem to be two types of "rich". There is (and my terminology here has nothing to do with his) the comfortably rich and the sociably rich.

The comfortably rich seek to make more money in order to live more comfortably. I see a lot of geeks like this. They like to work their investments more for fun and to build up a nicer retirement fund than to buy a nice car.

The sociably rich seek to gather wealth to change their social status and thereby both attract a different set of peers/partners and increase the number of people below them on the social ladder.

In terms of the former the US is definitely very rich now. The ability of so many people to go to college and enter various job markets or make a living in a small business is amazing.

In terms of the latter only a few can win, because it is a zero-sum game.
and therein lies the predictable attitude that will keep linux a distant 3rd on the desktop.
Note: In a prior life I was a part of the CDO research group supporting the clients at Lehman's trading desk in NYC. I'm familiar with what happened there.

The article contains a few errors. One, the article claims Lehman owned lots of senior tranches, which lost value when default rates unexpectedly rose. That's incorrect. We could sell that stuff to pension funds and make money on it, so we did, and losses in that tranche didn't hurt us; it hurt the retirees.

Lehman got hit hard because they could not sell the highest risk tranches (referred to as "toxic waste"). But they made enormous fees on originating the CDOs, and the toxic waste paid high interest rates (20-30%), so Lehman reluctantly kept it on their balance sheet and constantly tried to sell it off to other people (most of whom were too smart to take it).

We tried to hedge the risk by shorting the mezzanine tranches (those were between the toxic waste and the senior AA or AAA tranches). If default rates went up, and we hedged correctly, the gains from the synthetic shorts would make up for the losses on the toxic waste subs.

But for a variety of reasons this wound up not working as well as expected. Particularly, the correlation of default rates between subprime and quality debt decreased substantially and unexpectedly, which means these shorts did not generate as much cash as was lost when the equity tranche tanked.

Also, for an amusing tangent, we had bomb-proof windows to the outside world on the trading floors. A fertilizer bomb could go off in Times Square and we'd still be trading. Unfortunately we were not so well protected from the bomb that went off inside the trading floor.
"Electrons remain, doing everything they do best (switching), while photons do what they do best (traveling very, very fast)." - brilliant, no?
maybe this explains why i always feel brain dead and jetlagged on work days until after 11am
I think this would make a lot of sense for digital frames. The need for a power cord has always been the main thing keeping me from getting them.
To be fair, what percent of Windows users could actually install the OS if they needed to?
you have to add it. right click when in about:config to add a new entry.
you could do an in between:
http://bret.appspot.com/entry/how-friendfeed-uses-mysql
I think a perfect example of Open Source thriving is IBM. They package open source software (Eclipse for RAD, Apache for IBM Apache), and sell support.

It's not a clusterfuck, you just have business people who need to have support 24/7 from people with full time intimate knowledge of the product.
Customer service, indeed. I use Amazon.com on a regular basis, for their MP3 downloads, and just started using 'em for MTB accessories (gloves, saddlebag, bug repellent, etc)

One thing that differentiates Amazon.com from walmart, though: Amazon.com supports individual retailers, in a serious -- and, I suppose, fun looking -- way
I agree with your perception - most of the modern browsers are just fine at this point.

I've been skeptical of Peacekeeper, though - the tests may be fine but it's hard to tell since they haven't released the source of them, at all. I'm not even really sure how to determine if/how improvements could be made. As far as I know, none of the major browser vendors use Peacekeeper as a benchmark for their engines (which is really what a good benchmark should strive for: to push for the improvement of the browsers that it measures).
I assume that most of the properties that would determine one's constitution as relative to the requirements he lists are largely fixed by the point in life that someone is reading stuff about becoming rich.
One person's opinion ...

You will never read math like English. I'm a Ph.D., I've had this discussion with many other graduates and post-graduates. Math is different from English (or any other natural language).

In my circles of math, programming and education there is even a phrase "Read like Math" as opposed to "Read like a comic book". Math is its own language, and it is dense. When interpreted into English a single equation can become several paragraphs. Learning to read and visualize an equation is possible, but always necessary.

Simple equations are easy, but if there's real content, it's hard. You need to ask what you're trying to accomplish, really.

If you want to learn stuff, you need to do it. You can learn about it by reading about it, but you can only learn to do it by doing it (under guidance or with hints).

See also:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=672067

http://www.scientificblogging.com/carl_wieman/why_not_try_sc...

EDIT: added reference:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MathForProgrammers

Quoting from the this last:

I'm not certain that reading like prose is a benefit.

When algebra was first invented, people didn't use
variables, operators or other notation. They just
wrote things out in natural language. Here is an
example from Al-Khwarizmi's famous book:

If the instance be, 'ten and thing to be multiplied
by thing less ten,' then this is the same as 'if it
were said thing and ten by thing less ten. You say,
therefore, thing multiplied by thing is a square
positive; and ten by thing is ten things positive;
and minus ten by thing is ten things negative. You
now remove the positive by the negative, then there
only remains a square. Minus ten multiplied by ten
is a hundred, to be subtracted from the square. This,
therefore, altogether, is a square less a hundred
dirhems.

Compare this to
(x+10)*(x-10) = x*x + 10*x - 10*x - 10*10
= x*x - 100

Now imagine trying to do even simple calculus like
this. If there's a lot of essential complexity, I
claim that natural language becomes much harder to
understand than specialized notation, which is why
notation exists in the first place. A good notation
is understood on its own terms, not in terms of
translation to some natural language statement, for
instance, algebraic manipulations are done according
to certain rules, without having to re-justify them
each time, because of the underlying soundness of
algebra.
I haven't had any problems with overheating. The increased CPU speed, RAM, better camera and oil resistant screen coating are a big improvement over the 3G. (Note that I don't particularly care about the compass, I've never needed one so far).
Farrah Fawcett’s Funeral Redmond O’Neal will attend | Buzz Online 24/7
What a crock. This paragraph says it all:

"'If you take a laser and shine it on the moon and swing it rather gently, for example, the spot on the moon travels faster than the speed of light,' Singleton said. 'If an effect can do that, it makes you wonder if you can do things with light to get the equivalent of a sonic boom.'"

Um, no it doesn't. The "spot" is not a thing that is traveling at all. In fact, the spot does not exist, because each of the photons from the laser, you know, those little tiny wave-particle thingys which actually DO exist, traveled at the speed of light to get to the moon. Other photons took a different angle to get to another part of the moon, also at the speed of light. So, just what, exactly went faster than the speed of light? Nothing.

And we are supposed to take this guy seriously?
I, and probably a lot of other developers, have an immediate, negative, visceral reaction to "gotos". The reason is simple: If a language provides the appropriate control structures, gotos aren't needed. They will only make your code soupy. In my opinion, if you find yourself using a goto, you should be seriously reconsidering your design.

This article was posted a little while ago, and I thought it gave a very good, non-partisan account of gotos:
http://david.tribble.com/text/goto.html
Out of curiosity, what kind of CD-ROM drive requires a special driver?
Linq to SQL produces expression trees. These expression trees are interpreted by the query provider. In the case of Linq to SQL the query provider produces SQL for the SQL Server dialect. The SQL can be optimized. This SQL is sent to SQL Server which then parses and optimizes the execution plan for the SQL (or not if it is already in the procedure cache).

Are you saying that the Linq expression to SQL optimization will replace the SQL Server SQL plan optimization?

The gory details of producing a Linq query provider are covered in this series of blog posts:
http://blogs.msdn.com/mattwar/pages/linq-links.aspx
The author doesn't know/understand SQL and he should be kept away from databases.
Their interface is pretty unusable. They need a "I want maps" button.
Blogs AOL Could Buy Tomorrow
First, regarding CLRS: have you looked at the videos of Leiserson & Demaine's MIT course on the subject? Watching video lectures might get through where the book doesn't.

I was going to recommend the Knuth book, so I'm trying to better understand your problem. Where, in the first chapter, did your "lack of basics" manifest? If you spell it out in a bit more detail, perhaps we can make more specific recommendations.

Needless to say, it helps to make sure your expectations are reasonable. "Reading Maths like you read English" is probably never going to happen-- every mathematician I know can knock through a novel in half the time it takes to read the equivalent number of pages of a mathematics book, and that's in the best case.
Marketing engineer generally means that you have enough technical design experience and intimate understanding of the product to sell it, probably to other technical people and companies given that his job is at a semiconductor company. I wouldn't immediately discredit the author for his title at work. And yes, people are really like this. Everyone is different.
> Solution to Deflation: Abolish Cash... Without physical cash, a central bank can set rates exactly where it likes, runs the argument.

Solution to Everything: introduce an Orwellian total control scheme. I like my anonymous money just fine, thank you.
Pandora shut down internationally because of licensing
Grow VC Launches as Company / VC Matchmaker
I used to have the same problem.

Wake up at the same time every day, even weekends (important) and take power naps in the afternoons.

I think our bodies are biologically wired to require naps in order to stay alert/energized.
I think it goes without saying that anybody who takes medical advice from Tim Ferriss will get what they deserve, and deserve what they get.
Firefox 3.5 Approaches 1 Million Downloads; Watch in Real-Time
The recent improvements in efficiency are great, but this is still a very wasteful way to transmit power. And it always will be more wasteful then wires.

Convenient perhaps, but I think we'd get a lot more convenience out of super low power devices and super capacitors and better batteries.

Me personally, I'm waiting for very high (like it wouldn't kill a human) temperature super conductors.
All these disproportionately strong reactions show that Tim Ferriss is still relevant and still very good at what he does. I look forward to the book.
It'll only hold you back so long as you're wanting to capture 100% of the potential market. Obviously Facebook and Google can't afford to give up any potential customers, but a lot of businesses can.

How many websites have you seen that demand IE? That was acceptable because IE was a majority, and offered certain features like ActiveX. Once IE becomes a minority, isn't it reasonable to demand that users of your HTML 5 application use something else?
I was reticent to mod up such a short comment but that really does hit the nail on the head. I like Ruby far, far more than any other language I have ever encountered. It's probably the first programming language I have ever actually liked, even loved, using. It's the first language I thought was designed for someone like me, and although I am well aware other languages are superior in many technical ways, I just don't care.
It's not usually the CDROM, but the chipset it's attached to. A lot of recent motherboards have multiple disk controllers -- usually a standard one that's a part of the motherboard chipset, and a second super-shitty one (often from JMicron) so that they can advertise extra ports (also because Intel chipsets didn't support SATA hotplug for the longest time).

It's fairly common for the CDROM in an 'enthusiast' desktop to be attached to the single PATA port on a secondary controller.
Yes!

http://labs.pimsworld.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/demo-co...

http://craigmod.com/journal/font-face/

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/pop-art-video/
I greatly over-simplified the algorithm in my initial post, but there are advantages to a straight hash of the password.

Even if you can intercept the person's hash and login to that site, you still don't know the user's original plaintext password. A lot of people re-use the same password throughout many (or all) of their online accounts. The attacker may be able to impersonate the user for the current site, but they don't have their actual password to gain access to other sites.

What I was talking about in my original post (but didn't properly explain) was using hashing as part of a larger algorithm for doing a challenge/response login. The idea is explained here: http://pajhome.org.uk/crypt/md5/auth.html

I agree that HTTPS is the way to go if security is a huge concern (like for banks), but for a simpler site you could get away with using CHAP and still provide a reasonable level of security.
And thus they were the central force driving good usability. They did it just for fun - or was it a company?
I think you're absolutely right, but I guess I'm just a little bit surprised it is so bad. Oh well.
The compass is fun! You can wager with friends: "That's due north." "No, that's about 12 degrees off towards the northwest." "Wanna bet?"

It's almost as much fun as "guess the driving distance between two randomly chosen landmarks" with Google Maps.
Does anyone have any experience with how VirtualBox performance compares with VMWare?
That's the most economical way to own a car, sure, but there is opportunity cost to driving something you don't enjoy when you're young enough to enjoy it. If you don't care about cars or driving, this is the best option, but if you do, it might not hurt to spend a few extra dollars on something you'd actually enjoy.
There are projects for which mainstream UI design is unsuited or unimportant, and there are undoubtedly a few people whose egos would prevent it.

Apart from those, I would expect most projects would be happy to accept advice if the UID demonstrated competence.
I agree with RiderOfGiraffes. You must do. Reading alone won't do the trick but I'm sure you know this. I have found that there are two types of mathematicians.

1. Can not read a theorem without knowing every little detail.

2. Can read a theorem, accept that it is true without knowing every little detail and being able to justify every little detail.

You sound like type 1. For type 1 person I recommend taking courses and asking the teacher lots of questions. I am type 1 and it took me a long time to really understand how to read a mathematics book. I learned this in graduate school because my teachers mostly sucked at teaching.

Good luck.
When we designed our new layout, we looked around and saw that many sites who do the ajax login have a link to an ssl page - like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/39989785@N07/3675346915/

We chose "Standard form | Secure form" as the verbiage but I've seen it several ways.
Let me add that one way to become a type 2 person is to play a game with a theorem. Say you encounter something you don't really understand. The book says it is true but you don't know why it is true. Forget about why it is true and see if you can do problems assuming it is true. Say to yourself, "Provided this is true what must logically follow from it?" See if you can use the result even though you don't know why it is true or where it came from.