skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have listened to a great deal of hand wringing since the PISA reports dropped and I think it is easy to concentrate on the negative and overlook the positive news from these results.

Three points I think we should keep in mind.

One, the results were VERY uneven among the states. More importantly, if you look at the Northeast, (Massachusetts, NY, NJ etc), and the western Midwest, (Minnesota, Wisconsin), the scores were pretty competitive relative the top performing nations actually. For instance, in Massachusetts, even if you only counted the scores of black students, the Math and Science average was higher than Finland, which is continuously touted as a model of educational efficiency!

Two, teens in Mississippi, Texas, California and Washington are pretty much the same as teens in Minnesota, New Jersey and Massachusetts. This is good news, as it indicates that there are models out there that can be employed to better the performance of students in other areas of the country.

Lastly, something about the US creates an openness in its citizens that drives a good deal of activity beneficial to society. The article references, for instance, "... America's entrepreneurial energies, its openness to innovation and creative destruction ...". This "Creativity" has some value, which I would admittedly be challenged to quantify. It is the sort of thing tests will overlook. Which is curious, because in the future I think it will be one of the most important skills, (or, 'traits' perhaps), of the high value worker.

My last point had only a tangential relevance to the PISA, I just thought it was an important point to make. That aside, I think the first two points are clearly cause for a cautious optimism here.
> And Linux may or may not run on the latest generation hot stuff,

This is quite wrong. Most of PC gaming occurs on the desktop, and desktop hardware Linux compatibility is excellent. You see more issues on laptops, true, but again that's not where the main gaming crowd is on PC.
> Main tools: In this category two tools lead the pack today - Eclipse and NetBeans.

NetBeans? Seriously?! Where's IntelliJ IDEA? Does IntelliJ have a different way of debugging? I believe it's much more popular than NetBeans
I work at a big bank and we're developing a very complex application using only jQuery Mobile and Angular JS & fastclick.js. If properly executed, the app runs beautifully and very, very smoothly. Even as a webapp it performs exactly as native.

JQM is beautiful if you really know how to use and know what you're doing.

We're deploying on 20 devices with only one code base and it works flawlessly, it's amazing. We only use native to patch holes or do things we can't do easily with html/css/js.
was hoping to see the deadly recursive merge disabled as a default and a one step mechanism to revert a branch.

instead a lot of relatively minor things i don't really care about (i'm sure its useful) - also seeing 'something now implemented in C' instead of 'something now 30% faster (because implemented in C)' is slightly worrying because users don't care about implementation details unless you get something else very very wrong...

my issue with recursive merge is that 'works for 90% of linux kernel changes' or whatever it is is just not the same as 'works reliably'.

git fails to meet my minimum requirements for usable source control because of the extreme difficulties I seem to have with undoing a merge if i don't change settings ahead of time (i.e. there is a bug which is a bad choice of defaults). i give it a good go, i get help from the community, i exhaust documentation and google - it doesn't work for me. maybe i don't understand something - i don't want to understand it, i want it to 'just work' and 'be user friendly'.
"While we wait for the next major git release which will bring about some serious updates"

Is this referring to git 1.9? Are there any resources to learn what that will bring?
Small Business Saturday: Bottom-line Impact or Hype Machine?
Socially worthwhile things have a cost. Commercially valuable things create wealth. You can't have one without the other.
I'm indeed not. Thanks for clarifying, and it could be, but I still think it has a double meaning. Especially in this context I think It's just insinuating and sensational.

I've actually never seen this wording being used ever, so for me it seemed quite similar to "doing someone". Yes that also means "screwing someone over" but for me, when reading "undid" a quote from the movie Trainspotting came to mind.

"Begbie didn't do drugs either. He just did people" and that involved a knife usually.

/edit: Considering the dictionary's definition I will hereby withdraw my suspect of any intent by the author to suggest that another person or entity was responsible for Aaron's death :)
What are the odds he could've blown a fuse and caused more issues?
As some people already mentioned, you should really stop treating your personal opinions (which quite often lack both substance and any evidence) as the one true thing.

I also find it a bit irritating that you love the vague claims like in the last article, but don't like articles with a precise and to-the-point description of issues. It's almost like you want to love all negative articles on Scala, but have to hate even neutral or remotely positive ones, completely irregardless of the quality of the article and the issues raised in them.

It leads to this whole train-wreck of reasoning here which you seem to be forced to post in pretty much every post with the word “Scala” in it.

Nobody can prevent you from spending your time with things you hate, but from my experience, live is happier if you spend it on things you love.

I can't say it any better than dancapo said it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6844600
Maybe you should really at least try to consider the points he raises.
Your post has many implied dichotomies and correlations that simply aren't true. For example:

I find the quoted section to be an interesting statement because, if true (and it likely is true), it simply reinforces the notion that ugly, pragmatic projects endure and succeed

Not really. It simply shows that bad software is commonplace and often not important enough factor to kill an entire company. It still costs companies a fortune in maintenance, client dissatisfaction and employee turnover rates.

You've seen "way, way more" of that sort because they deliver actual value and end up providing an actual solution for the world

Uh, again, no. Bad code often begets bad UI, confusing process for the users, botched transactions and a never-ending stream of database tweaks and patches. I've seen plenty of projects whose overall value to the company was negative. Problem is, that negative was spread throughout large period of time, whereas a proper update or replacement of the system would be concentrated in a much shorter time span. This is where "debt" analogy works very well. Some code is like that credit card you maxed out, but only have enough money to do minimum payments.

I have created a lot of terrible code in my career, almost always doing greenfield development.

Whether you created horrible code is largely irrelevant. What's important is what is your overall trend. Some developers pull the code quality up over time, and them maintain it at some reasonable level after that. Others slowly turn anything they touch into radioactive waste.
> There are probably 10x as many dumb potential attackers as smart ones, and it makes sense to be eliminate the easy avenues for the dumb ones while you concentrate other resources on the smart ones. It's also important not to ignore both the intelligence value of security checks as well as their potential forensic value in the event of a successful attack.

This is the point that is always missed when talking about "security theater".

Smart and practiced people can make anything look easy. An attack on an airplane is simply too challenging for the vast majority of people to execute. Is it impossible? No, but almost nothing is impossible.

Making an attack difficult on a plane also eliminates the majority of severally mentally unstable from carrying it out. You can kill 300+ people in one instant, it is impossible to stop the truly motivated and capable (ultra tail risk) attacker, but it is crucial to stop the rest of the tail from casually taking down an airliner.
Code can last forever; there are people playing thirty-year-old games via emulation. The only problem is that we now have a plague of people who don't take their responsibilities seriously as contributors to the Web, and they randomly break their own resources out of laziness or ignorance.
Some cool ideas here. Not new ideas, but if they are put into a shipping product, that will be good.

Then they have "Stand out from the crowd," ugh. This is an unfortunate bullet point, just for its lameness.

The screen doesn't look like a paper display to me. What am I missing? Are there color paper displays now?
You're right, I should probably have posted the link to the live project instead of the blog post. I figured that the story of why I did it is interesting as well though.
If you want to be pedantic, I should have a said "a github, bitbucket, gitorious, darcs.net or ftp server full of fortran".
Is SumZero a community? It looks like a broadcast medium for research reports.
The graph at http://www.unix-diagram.org/ has it as well as many others not listed in the article.
Thank you for making that comparison.

There are severe economic issues with paying for a giant funnel using the wind it generates.

No one has discussed if you basically turn the funnels into cell tower antennas then you piggy back onto the existing cell phone ecosystem.

Or piggy back onto land mobile radio trunking system ecosystem, or legacy broadcast media ecosystem.

You're building a giant horn antenna. Why not make it conductive and collect some "free" cash?
Biological and chemical agents are perhaps the big next threat?
It is close in pronunciation to 'wanker news'.

Maybe 'Broker News' or 'Teller News'?
Blimey, you're not kidding.

Just for your own amusement..... I followed the link so that I could come back and say how wrong you were. My head ache is your payoff!!!!!! :)
Don't they also use screening by looking at passengers? Don't know about USA but in my country there's usually a few security people just looking at the people who go through the security check. I suppose they are trained to see nervous people behaving oddly and so forth.
Isn't that what Titanium is selling? Not that I have ever tried it
I get his point, but this is the wrong way to express it.

For high-pay, high-impact jobs, 8 hours of time to get through the hiring process is not unreasonable. My current job had a few hours of interviews even after they had narrowed the candidate pool down to just myself, to be sure I was a fit for the company culture. VP/C-level positions in large companies will put you through the ringer with multiple days worth of discussions.

I would gladly pair program for a day vs. 20 hours of interviews, tests, and other evaluations. One day, get it all done, and get a decision. Sounds great, especially if I had already set my day aside for the interview.

So my guess is that aside from the obvious attitude problems, this guy has never held a truly senior level position, because he clearly does not understand the time that goes into hiring. I highly doubt this company had 50 people pair program with them. This guy was probably their final candidate, and probably would have had a job offer by the end of the day if he had chosen to be cooperative.
In other words, you're getting upset that I have knowledge (and maybe experience) about how business really works, and to you that's a liability. In other words, you want sheep who "shut up and code."

Interviewees have to protect themselves from unscrupulous companies looking to make off with free work. If you don't want to come off as one of those companies then don't make a candidate do a day's worth of free work. That's what the blog author is saying and he's completely in the right.

Remind me never to work for you.
Right. If the application is easy enough to define that someone completely new can code it up in a day, they can just send it to India and be done with it.

This isn't like a comic book company asking job candidates to submit a page of a script, where they can just use it as is. Software is a very living product and you need live people maintaining it.

I do think that companies should consider paying a candidate a few hundred bucks to spend his whole day with you. This doesn't change whether he's working on "open source stuff" or the company's product they are selling for money.

EDIT tldr: they should have paid him for his time not for his product
Reddit leaking?
Not being familiar with his programming abilities or style at all, if we took all of the code ever written, is Notch's code at the very bottom of the pile? That is what I take terrible to mean.

According to some links posted elsewhere in this discussion, Notch admits himself that he is not the world's best programmer, but can we honestly say his code is bad enough that we can consider him one of the world's worst programmers?

Or are you really trying to say his code is average to good, with some mistakes made along the way?
I felt like I was overusing intuition on the vegetable-patch one. The rectangular design is obvious, but it didn't feel like there were enough measurements to really do the parallelogram and "fancy" designs properly. What's the "right" way to show the answers to those three?
That demigod also has a very long list of complaints about Haskell and Clojure. He doesn't think either of them are worth using either.
There are two displays.
if it's type system is turing complete, how can it not?

presumably it just doesn't have a short syntax for them? if so, given what i know of the rest of scala, i'm surprised one can't be defined...
A Brief Introduction to Urbit
A HTTP request is a function call. A function call is message passing. No matter if you use RPC, SOAP or what not. It's conceptually all the same - the caller sends a message to the callee which responds with another message.
Lazy loading a viewModel with Knockout.js
If there is a plane change involved (as apparently there is), then getting further out before executing the plane change involves less delta-v; performing a plane-change maneuver at apogee is by far the most efficient way.
The Failed Promise of 23andMe
I fundamentally don't understand the danger of "traditional" (box cutters, etc.) weapons getting through airport security. I understand that we need to continue testing for bombs and anything that can actually bring a plane down.

It would obviously be tragic and damaging for someone to attack "defenseless" passengers with "traditional" weapons, but -- in my eyes -- it's not terribly different from a random attack in the street or a shopping mall.

Airline personnel and the typical cohort of passengers would simply never let a terrorist take the cockpit, which effectively removes that entire element of danger. The only super-substantial potential damage stems from an explosive of some sort, not a box-cutter, knife, or anything of the sort.

The cost of TSA (direct and indirect through delays, etc.) is immense, and truly does feel like security theater at this point. I'd be all-for doubling down on bomb-sniffing dogs, behavior analysts, and all that; but this apparent focus on "traditional" weapons seems totally asymmetric to the risk it presents.
Security is hard. Physical security is hard too. Just a thought: you can stuff anything you want in your big suitcase. So if someone wants to set an alarm bomb with some destructive chemical it is possible, no? Though I am in favor of airport security - even if false sense is better than zero. If it can prevent idiots or unstable from carrying a steel knife we should. Yes, you can't prevent more major terrorist attack easily - one could just drive a van full of gas and explode in the lobby if one wishes to do so - but we still need that basic security if it is doable.

The truth is we as a civilization tends to blame all the time. When we fear danger we blame the government not doing enough and when we find inconvenience we ask for less protection. I see no one has yet attempt to provide a better solution - only complaint.

Is TSA making people waiting? I often get to the airport two hours early so I think the waiting is fine. Is it embarrasing when someone stops you and scans you? I have been stopped before for carrying a coin in my pocket before going through the scanner. It's okay. Everyone is too busy to get through.

The last point is last time when Schneier talked about the dry ice bomb he was wrong it being harmless. He just won't admit he is wrong.
I didn't say it was a substitute for testing. My point was that it lets you know what the code is doing immediately. This doesn't remove the need for tests, but it means that you don't have to run tests every time you make a change.
Using Gravatar In Simplifying Your User Onboarding Process
One of the common interview questions for a non-technical management/marketing person is: "having researched our market, company and competitive position, what strategies do you think we should pursue?"

Imagine if I were an experienced exec or strategy/marketing consultant, came up with a few interesting ideas and demanded to be paid for them on the spot? I'd get laughed out of the room.

Similarly, when you sell a consulting project, you're expected to do a certain amount of analysis in your pitch, with no guarantee of being chosen for paid work.
Software isn't art. If a company can break down its problems so much that complete outsiders can make them work in a day then they wouldn't need developers.
> These 3 Federal Government Jobs Might Actually Just Change Everything

That's the worst kind of link bait title. A type lambasted and ridiculed here, xkcd and everywhere else. HN should have some kind of smart filter to just auto flag these kinds of submissions.

Edit: And it's flagged off the home page. Good riddance. Maybe be a little bit less silly with your headline next time jason.
Yes, you should have the seller file an insurance claim if it goes missing.
Ask HN: Is HN open source?
Is HN open source? I tried various Google queries and couldn't come up with any sort of public repo. How are people making all these HN clones?
For you and me maybe, but not for GMAT. It is my experience that the primary motivation for big organizations is to get their beaks wet. GMAT charges for additional score reports after the initial 6(?) that are included in the test fee.
Does this only work with stock Android installs?

Verizon S3 and S4's are not popping up as devices.
SmartAsset (YC S12) Needs a Senior Product Manager
I also had a look.

The homepage look very nice but I had pretty much the same issues as you.
---

Frankly I built my own UI because I didn't like the opaque layer most mobile web framework are doing (exception being jQtouch but it's pretty old). It's not "that hard".

It's also bound to angular out of the box. While that's great for people using that framework, it's a big learning curve for anyone else.
>> The way government jobs are evaluated require them to map the requirements of the job against things that they can find on your resume. So while you might be used to the one-page resume for industry, it is not unheard of to have 15 page resumes in government.

Just curious - does "require" here really many they are legally required to evaluate your resume in this way? Wow.
I think you're being unfair to netcan here. Netcan is talking about system problems, not individual moral deficiencies. It doesn't really matter whether netcan assumes that these systems are good and individuals should operate a certain way inside of them. The point is that these systems are designed under that assumption, and that causes problems (for those systems). It's pretty clear that the story about the guy who barely made it out of school highlights flaws in school admission and employment recruitment mechanisms. By any reasonable objective measure, his high profile employment is contrary to the design goals of those mechanisms. Whether or not you agree with those goals, it is very plausible that the flaws are present because the designer made the implicit assumption that actors would (to some extent) agree with those goals, and would act "morally" from that point of view.
With the story about the executives, either they acted in the best interests of the company or they didn't. If they did, then there's no moral judgement to be made. If they didn't, then the implicit moral judgement was made by the board of directors who hired them (not netcan).

Netcan's point isn't that people at the top are sociopaths and people at the bottom are dumb. It's much more complicated than that. Bad systems set up moral hazards which incentivise sociopathic behaviour. Different people react to moral hazards in different ways. However, once one person (who may be morally deficient) starts following the incentives, many other people (most of whom are simply normal flawed humans) will follow suit. Thus, practically dealing with the problem means treating it as a flaw the design of the system, not in the individual actors.
The diffs make me think it's hand-crafted.

http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/share/misc/bsd-family-tr...
I've always found it odd as well, so I was happy to see the terminals at a number of airports this summer all offering copious outlets for passengers to top-up devices.
> Good people in bad systems act in bad ways.

You have an odd definition of good people. People who act in bad ways aren't good people, regardless of the system. Good people remove themselves from situations and systems that try and compromise their morals.
Luckily, as the cross sectional area shrinks, the price of valves shrinks. As for pressure inside the horn theoretically bursting it, well, I think you'll be OK but if you insist, protection gear would be little more than hinges along one edge of a panel and a spring on the other, not much different than a very large turbocharger wastegate (very large as in stationary multimegawatt class diesel size)
Maybe it's because Canada is so cold (at this exact moment the temperature is minus 20C with a foot or two of snow on the ground) and block heaters in cars were the norm for so long, but just about every parking lot (that isn't in a shopping centre) has electric outlets here. At schools, apartment buildings, etc.... When I park my car at the University there's electric outlets for every single stall (of course nowadays most cars start easily without block heaters).

Electricity is cheap enough that being able to 'plug in' is generally acceptable anywhere, except where explicitly forbidden...
> airport security is there to prevent someone to walk onto a plane carrying a boxcutter knife

Sorry, but no. Sharpened edge of a credit card, pieces of belt, metal parts of the shoes, pins from the hat - that's just what I can come up with in seconds - these are the things I always get on the plane without issues and would be just as effective as weapons as the boxcutter knife. They may prevent boxcutter knifes, but they don't prevent sharp items in general.

If you want to go for dangerous, cutting items, you don't even have to take them with you. Buy a bottle of wine and smash the bottom off in the toilet - it's both better to hold in hand and more damaging when you wave it around.
Is this targeted at bankers? Why are people going to leave wallstreetoasis for this?