skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the most interesting arguments against extreme grade inflation I've seen arose in the context of students considering going to grad school in a difficult field. Several professors in the conversation said they weren't comfortable with writing a recommendation or encouraging a particular student to go on to graduate work, but that it was difficult to convince these students that thhe weren't cut out for it after they had given them As in upper level courses.

At my alma mater the grade A+ was used in some departments for this sort of purpose. It wasn't mandatory, and it didn't count towards GPA, sometimes no one got one at all, but it signaled something to the students who did.

Separately I had one professor, in history of all things, who was a notoriously tough grader but was retiring the next semester after I had her. As a one time policy she issued two sets of grades, the one you deserved and the one she decided to give out to be in line with her colleagues. I was much prouder of the B in the first category than the A- in the second.
Thanks! Here are some more links to gifs we've printed for artists:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/338114/gifs/by_me/mrdiv-...
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/338114/gifs/by_me/dvdp-8...
And here's one of the very first we made, only with four frames and with a lower quality manufacturer, but it was a gift for a friend:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/338114/gifs/by_me/firstg...
Ya, that's my difficulty with the article. If all the students learned the material, then what is the problem? OTOH, if they just didn't grasp information, or didn't try, they deserve something other than an A.

There is no easy answer, and it varies by course. In an algorithms course you are going to learn trees, sorting, graphs, and complexity analysis. If you master those, why not an A? Sure, you can make the course insanely hard, and force the students to do essentially original research to get an A, but what is the point there, exactly? You end up with a pressure-cooker, swamped with work school just to create a bell curve. I spent so much of my University time on my own research ideas, helping professors, and so on - course work was almost a back drop. I think I got so much more out of it doing it that way. A competitive fight of churning out massive amounts of work against other straight-A's in high school type-A personalities? Not so valuable (IMO). Time to think, dream, and experiment is what is valuable, and how do you put a grade on that?

edit: I take this back somewhat. In some fields it definitely pays off to have a broader foundation. I took quite a few math classes, but would have profited by by even more. Lots of research papers are tough going because I don't have all the math. So there is value in volume of work, too.
I see where you are coming from, but it's not being called an ad company because it relies on ads to operate. It's being called an ad company because that's the product it primarily sells. It's the same reason we don't call Ford a robotics company and we don't call McDonald's a supply chain company.

I'm fine with calling it a tech company as well because they create a lot of tech at the same time, but your comparisons to other dependencies are false equivalences. Google depends on selling ads, not using ads. Google doesn't depend on selling engineers, they use engineers. Google doesn't depend on selling the web, they use the web. Get it?
I generally agree with the idea of a paid subscription so you're not beholden to advertisers. But $39 per month is extremely high. It matters in that you'll only serve a very small % of the population in terms of readership which will over time impact your content choices. So you've swapped one issue for another.
In my opinion, good people are people who do good things even when they do not expect it to benefit them to do so. Saintly people are people who do good things even when it will be ruinous to them. Many people are reasonably good people, but only a tiny fraction of people are saintly.

You are free to use different terminology, of course.
> You may not even need the API if the CMS doesn't screw around too much with the presentation by putting, say, ads, in the middle of the content.

This is exactly what I'm saying.

> Then you could screen scrape and convert the generated HTML back into Markdown,

Why do you want the Markdown at all?
People might be interested in the Endangered Languages Project - http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/

"An online collaborative effort to protect globa linguistic diversity".
Heh... I've noted an example of a lemon market recently: blenders.

Try buying a consumer-grade blender. It will break in under a year. You have to buy commercial grade (e.g. Vitamix) or don't bother. All the consumer-grade blenders on the market are junk.
An introductory blog post: http://www.troyhunt.com/2013/12/introducing-have-i-been-pwne...
This is a watch I might be willing to wear. I hate the cheap look of all the smart watches. I'm not a Vertu phone kind of guy. I want my phone to be a phone. But a watch is Jewelry to me, and I want it to look nice. Omega like. Not necessarily Rolex, I don't like those much, but I want it to look like a Dress watch.
I think the fate of the pensions is the saddest part of the Detroit bankruptcy. Here are the five options that are possible:

http://www.freep.com/article/20131203/NEWS01/312030138/

The most telling comments were those of the bankruptcy judge who implored why wasn't this done ten years ago? Sure would have been much easier on the retirees if it had been.
We're working on the Mac and Linux clients at the moment; if you sign up, we'll invite you to the beta once they're ready ;)
I think this is a great writeup and so I apologize in advance for what is going to sound like a bunch of armchair criticism...but why is money -- or profit the primary metric here?

There are lots of cool wins here. Putting together a "rockstar team", as the OP says (i.e. building relationships), hustling, and just plain going out on a limb and trying something halfway crazy. Those are all good ways to spend a weekend, young or old.

But making $1000 for 26 hours of work, with most of that money coming from the seller's personal network? That's not a headline-worthy achievement, nor is it a real measure of success. 44 hours between 8 people is a lot of work-hours, nevermind the opportunity cost of the recovery period the next day. The main problem, of course, is that the sales came primarily from the personal network, which is not a real indicator of anything when the time period is just a few days of sprinting.

So while I again commend the OP for taking the time to write down thoughts and reflections...I think there should've been more reflection on how reliable these conclusions are. "Acquiring customers is ALL that matters"? Matters for what? Making a nominal amount that matches a number (1,000) that looks good in a headline? I agree that people can obsess with things like website domain and styles too much...but that's different than concluding that customers don't really care. I've seen unremarkable Kickstarters become huge because of well-written pitches and a lot of time invested into the pitch video. You can't really say that user/customer experience doesn't really matter...especially if your sample size is your personal network in a period of days.

Another thing to consider...what about the ongoing costs? It's one thing to ramp up to get customers...it's another to service these customers who, presumably, have to be managed during the lifetime of their subscription...That's another potential opportunity cost.

OK, one more complaint. I think this bullet point is really specious:

> Determine what works and focus on it… this takes discipline.
We started off with low hanging fruit — close friends and family.

The OP describes a telemarketing type situation...which, I have to say, is something I regret not doing enough of because my friends who've spent summers/years doing telemarketing as a temp job are some of the most easy-going, well-balanced people I know, due to their ability to take rejection. However, they've been doing it long periods of time...doing a weekend of cold calls is not quite the same thing for building that tough skin. And you don't get discipline in a sprint, but continuing to do the work after the euphoria is over.

OK that was more complainy than necessary...Again, great writeup by the OP (putting yourself out there is never trivial) and hope to see a follow up in 2-4 weeks
“There was no national infrastructure for this, so I’ve funded it”
A simple scaffold for angularjs + requirejs + d3
See demo at
http://kristw.yellowpigz.com/demo/angularjs-requirejs-d3-seed/index.html

View source on github at
https://github.com/kristw/angularjs-requirejs-d3-seed
Why not? Personal licence allows you to use it for work-work.
Any plans to add LinkedIn?
We were lucky enough to have Sha and Rachel come to ultravisual for lunch yesterday, first time I got to see some of the lenticulars in person and they look awesome. I think they're taking this in a really fun direction, can't wait to see what people make with the service :)
Also, whilst I don't know how common it is in the US, every employer I've ever had in the UK has thrown into my pension as well, ranging from matching me pound for pound (up to a limit) to matching me two pounds per pound; I certainly couldn't have taken that as cash in my paycheque instead.
IOS vs. Android Engagement
The logo reminds me a lot of the Trillian IM client logo (which IIRC is itself taken from something?)
I am not questioning that Sam knows about startups.

But Sam made an all inclusive statement regarding business and not just startups and startups that would be (I'm guessing) the type that YC would fund. I would send someone to Sam for that as well.

In the comments on this thread (in response to me) I am being taken to task over suggesting that he is not a business school professor (who has studied many types of businesses over many years) or an experience businessman (who has observed businesses over many years). Consequently his knowledge of business is almost certainly limited to what he has seen since college (mid 00's) and in a particular niche in the business world. Which was my point. His statement didn't reflect the niche that he knows about. And as you pointed out he didn't use any qualifiers or footnotes.

As far as business school professors I am quite aware of the limitations and the idea of "that who can do those who can't teach". (And exception might be someone like Steve Blank who I have worked with in the past.)

As an example I was sent a document to review by a business school professor that had already been distributed to students and found several obviously inaccurate statement about a subject that I know more than the professor does simply because I have been involved in the subject since 1996. And I work with it every single day. When the professor heard my comments they invited me to speak to the class.
I don't know how your private sector works, but it is perfectly natural for private pension funds in other parts of the world to offer those kinds of plans. You can exchange cash now for an insurance against living longer than you can otherwise afford. Normally, there's then governmental oversight that tries to ensure, that you can be sure, that the pension fund can actually deliver on their promise.
Hi Saurik, I'd love to hear your response to the substantive aspects of my email as opposed to an ad hominem attack. I didn't send it until this morning because I was sick and traveling for the holidays.
>Android has made more money for Samsung and Microsoft than Google

Are you accounting the massive increase in mobile ads, and everything else that Google gains by having hundreds of millions carry Google with 24/7?
It would be cool if the user could pick the 10 frames out of the gif rather than requiring 10 sequential frames!
LastPass has a similar service for some of the recent (and not so recent) hacks:

* https://lastpass.com/adobe/

* https://lastpass.com/linkedin/

* https://lastpass.com/lastfm/

* https://lastpass.com/eharmony/
Your overall point is well-taken, but the Harvard admissions people always stress that there is no definitive profile of an admitted student. If they wanted to fill the class with perfect-SAT valedictorians from NYC and Boston, they probably could, but that is not what happens.
I went to ETH Zurich, Switzerland for both my BSc and MSc degrees.

The undergrad program that leads up to the BSc degree is ridiculously easy to get into (Swiss nationals even have to be accepted into the program by law AFAIK -- I'm not Swiss) but the first year of that program is so absolutely horrendously hard to survive (one massive set of 10 or so finals at the end of year 1) that you literally come out of your first year with five kilos off the scale and pale like a ghost (I'm Caucasian ... ?).

At any rate, point being at ETH Zurich in particular and other European unis in general (again AFAIK) the goal is to survive and get your degree whichever way you can.

Grade inflation at "top notch" American unis with their laughable grading standards, the constant availability of extra credit to push up your final grade at will, and the weird financial and social hurdles that applicants are presented with utterly confuse me.

Speaking of which, tuition fees at ETH Zurich were 750 CHF per year (830 USD).
Disney Research: Triboelectric E-readers
From my roots in a Michigan automotive city, the first thing this makes me think about is the massive amount of jobs this will eliminate if successful. We will need drastic changes in social policy to make up for it, and I have absolutely no faith in the government and voters to make it happen. I find the idea of replacing millions of labor and service jobs with cheap robotics before the world is ready to accept the consequences terrifying.
It actually exposes multiple removable drives (with independent drive letters) which can than be interacted with, just like a USB drive.

On top of that, we add a cache which minimizes interactions with the various provider APIs so it feels local, even though we're actively making calls over the internet in the background.
Breaking News - API's are copyrightable
Don't forget ICANN!
But, malloc doesn't have to be significantly advanced. In a situation where you have a large chunk of memory unallocated, the simplest thing to do is just to "bump" allocate it. Freeing it is a bit of pain of course, but you could build a freelist out of the chunks that are free.

So, the suggestion looks like this:

struct freemem {
int len;
char *addr;
struct freemem *next;
};
// globals
int total_mem_size;
char *start_of_memory;
char *bump_pointer;
struct freemem *freelist;

Allocate is simply:

if bump_pointer + MIN(size_to_allocate, sizeof(struct freemem)) < total_mem_size:
int *b = (int *) bump_pointer;
*b = MIN(size_to_allocate, sizeof(struct freemem);
return b + sizeof(int)
else
iterate over freelist, checking for size_to_allocate < freelist->len
return freelist->addr (the *b business is already taken care of)

Deallocate simply turns the discarded memory into a struct freemem and prepends it to the freelist, setting addr = the discarded address, and len = *(addr - sizeof(int)) (it's for this reason that we allocate a minimum size of sizeof(struct freemem))

That's a basic malloc / free.
Yet, players could have some amount of foresight, and not wait untill MS actualy pushes a knife into their hearth (lucky Valve this one was dull) before trying to defend themselves.
Replacing Regular Expressions in an Xcode project
>>> because there are all kinds of rules and regulations "to protect the public"

So what you need to fix this? Of course, more rules and regulations. Because there's no problem with rules and regulations that can not be fixed by more rules and regulations.
Right now it's a fork of rustboot [1], a proof-of-concept repo for implementing a kernel in Rust. I'm working on extending rustboot [2] to support handling keyboard interrupts and to have a real print function. It's not remotely in a working state yet, but I'll definitely update my blog when I get keyboard interrupts working.

[1]: https://github.com/charliesome/rustboot
[2]: https://github.com/jvns/rustboot
Well for a start, there's a very common [far]-right wing argument that Finns and Chinese are probably innately smarter due to not having many native black or hispanic citizens. You can either ignore it, or you can demolish it pointing out that black kids in certain states actually do better than the very, very white Finnish population....
Ask HN: Open-source native mobile app analytics solution?
It seems that mobile analytics solutions abound: MixPanel, TestFlight, Flurry, KeenIO, Google Analytics, etc. but as far as I can tell they are all proprietary cloud solutions with their own visualization frontend, etc.

We're currently using Google Analytics for our iOS and Android applications but I dislike having that data locked into Google's servers and the limitations that imposes on what we're able to log.

I'd like to be able to send analytics to our own servers so we can integrate with our existing nginx and backend application logs so we can correlate everything together with Splunk.

We're considering rolling our iOS and Android analytics integrations—it's not too difficult—but neither is it super trivial when you're dealing with opportunistically batching logs to reduce network activity, persisting the logs when temporarily offline, automatically detecting view/activity transitions, etc.

Any suggestions for open source SDKs for doing native mobile analytics? It seems like this is so common there must be something out there that I'm just not able to find…
Hypnotic: Let JavaScript Sleep()!
It sounds like you just had a bad math teacher. The Pythagorean Theorem has quite a few proofs, a number of which are understandable to students with only basic geometry knowledge. I'm almost certain I had to prove it in my math class at the time.
You've just given me a fact I'm already well aware of ("Wayland is being developed...") and then restated that X11 is antiquated, but you've never given me a reason why you think that.

Do you actually know, or are you just repeating something you read somewhere but didn't really understand?
A naive question to founders who have taken such seed funding before - can you directly take money out of a investment like this to pay for your living costs or you have to go through the headache of establishing payroll and a small salary for the founders?
No one gives a shit about GPA in the real world.
This is the entire issue summed up. If pensions were limited in value to the amount payed in + any gains on the principal during the saving period. Then pensions would be simply deferred wages. Instead they are written as "some fraction of your last years wages" (common) or another formula which when applied against actuarial tables means that anywhere from 500 to 1000% of the 'money' that is paid out in pension wages will have to come from some other source. It is this that is the source of the great un-funded pension obligation California is looming under, and the one that did in Detroit. Once you cannot tax enough to pay the pension obligation and provide critical services, you are dead. There is no money, there is no exit other than to liquidate or restructure the pension obligation to something that you can pay. There is no 'stealing' here (unless you mean from working tax payers), there is simply a failed financial promise.
And then this happened:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25213846
Haha, you've gotta love these armchair Linux critics man.
I'm glad spacex.com website looks more modern. Congrats by the way. :)
Is this a clever way to harvest email addresses? :)
Link for the non-US: https://showyou.com/v/h-rYcJg2xNKK3Qb30j/the-double-robotics...
> I fear you're making the calculation the end in itself (we have computers for that!)

Well, I have to disagree. Of course it's rather silly to make the calculation the goal in itself, but one needs to have a decent "feeling" of what would happen in a given domain. In math (up to college freshmen) or physics, that involves a lot of number-crunching. Until you get familiar with it.

It's same as CS students implementing quicksort, merge sort, heapsort, etc., even though when they graduate they will all use libraries. You can't really grok quicksort by reading the textbook and say "Hmm, I see."
Omg this is an amazing idea! I love gifs so much, I will definitely try this out!
You suck Adobe.
From the term cheat:

"The Investor will invest up to US$150,000 and would hold no less than 15% of the Company on a fully
diluted basis."

I'm not a lawyer, but doesn't this say that their 15% never dilutes? If so, that would be a horrible scenario in case of future fund raising.
I went to a liberal arts college that didn't do grade inflation. The average grade was nominally a C. The campus bookstore sold t-shirts with "C+: Better than average!" on them. Oh, and our diplomas are comically large :)
You jest, but you'd actually get surprisingly far just doing:

void* malloc(size_t size) {
static void* everything = 0;
void* result = everything;
everything += size;
return result;
}

When people are hacking together VMs for garbage collected languages, the first allocator often looks like this until they get around to actually collecting the garbage.
Prepare and serve images with Go, using OpenCV and GroupCache.
I have to be more productive
I liked the video. I hate it when people take themselves too seriously.

Good luck to the team.
Indeed, and I am not asking malandrew to act like this is important to him. My point is that we should not oppose it, not that you personally need to take action of some sort.

In other words, I'm fine if you don't want to go through and revise your docs to be more gender-neutral — it would be nice, but you should spend your time on what's near and dear to you. But to say that such a change "shouldn't be in any project" is a very different thing. It has practical benefits, even if they don't personally affect you, so opposing it is purely harmful.
It's good SpaceX is not traded, not at this point. Think about time the ceo will have to spend talking to the money heads. shuddering...
Nonsense. There are, at best, a handful of desktop environments targeted at daily desktop users: Unity, KDE, Gnome-Shell, maybe LXDE/Razor if you're being generous.

I've love to hear a single specific complaint about an experience you had with KDE that isn't "it was different from windows", especially given that it's the closest to the Windows daily interactions.
Well, rand can be defined as a Linear Congruential Generator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_congruential_generator), or some other well known algorithm. LCG's don't require anything that the machine doesn't already do (mod, addition and multiplication)
I am convinced the best way to deal with classes is to make failing a non-factor, i.e. if you fail a class, it doesn't affect anything, and no one really "knows" outside of your school. Then, make all classes graded on a pass-fail basis, perhaps with a professor's ability to note that a few students went above and beyond expectations.

This way, you can actually say "This person knows x and is capable of doing y at z standards. See, they passed the course that required you to do all that." And you don't end up with weird situations like the "gentleman's" C, where you've passed a course but gained next to nothing from it. If you've passed an intro physics course with a C, what does that mean? Can you calculate vector forces? Or are your diagrams sometimes OK looking, but you can't crunch numbers?
Yes, a few, but why not do those in something else...say, Gimp?

I can't think of a decent looking button (even for very loose definitions of "decent") that couldn't have been done with vectors. Can you give me a good example?