skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The quote is not true. I've personally done dozens and dozens of integrations, which can/are all be applied to any district. It's actually fairly simple with a functional programming approach, set theory, working with the k-12 companies directly, and if you think of them as data flows. I've taken over for some ex-fb/ex-google, large k-12 companies, vc funded ones... and every single one does it in a really coupled/tangled-mess manner where the statement is actually true (I take over their codebases). If done right, the integrations are a few hundred lines of code (even doing schools, courses, students, teachers, enrollments, grades, standards, etc). The only thing that changes between districts is typically a couple of business rules which are done as filters on the data flow. The unit/integration tests take more lines than the integration.

Example integration flow of SIS to LMS:
SIS client (pull) <- business rule filters <- integration itself -> business rule filters -> LMS client (push)

Example integration flow of LMS to SIS:
LMS client (pull) <- business rule filters <- integration itself -> business rule filters -> SIS client (push)

Examples of system clients: https://github.com/rockymadden/brainhoney.js https://github.com/rockymadden/masteryconnect.js

Example of K-12 specific spec that is often so mangled into most codebases it causes bugs: https://github.com/rockymadden/lti.js

Some I've done (almost a cartesian product): Infinite Campus, BrainHoney, MasteryConnect, Moodle, IFAS, Blackboard, Safari Montage, Edgenuity, netTrekker, PowerSchool, Canvas, dozens more...
While "fuck you" is a bit harsh, you've got just as much right as anyone else to criticize their use of certain terms. Apology accepted.

Just FYI, I have been (officially) diagnosed with a minor case of OCD, but it's certainly not to the point of being debilitating or crippling, and I feel for those who do.
Minimum income
I let go of my initial preference for SASS over LESS when I started working with TBS2, and continue to enjoy working with LESS. On general principles I'd recommend using the official LESS version.

Yes, LESS is actively developed and (incrementally) changing:
https://github.com/less/less.js

As for Bootstrap, I have no insider information, but would be very surprised if they abruptly switched.

On the contrary: last year when I asked @mdo and @fat if Bootstrap would ever go mobile-first (vs the horrible mid-sized-first-and-scale-in-both–directions approach from TBS2), I got a flat "no" in response. [groan]
So I have no idea what those guys might do in the future. But for them to switch doesn't seem likely to me.

FWIW My current project is using TBS3; so far, so good.
The most infectious of all infectious diseases
Apologies, my post is riddled with misspellings. I haven't had coffee yet.
Pathetic Microsoft shill.
House Passes Bill Aimed at Patent 'Trolls'
While this is technically true, unlike our customers, our main job is the intergration. This gives us the benefit of doing some things our customers don't want to dedicate time or money to do. It also gives us a wider view of the systems that are out there (one benefit of having 1/10 USA schools using your product), and allows us to build some really efficient pipelines.

For the vast majority of schools their data is syncing with their apps within a few minutes of them signing up. This is something that wouldn't be possible if we had to white glove every new school.
That is not the same book that the publisher lists as being offered in eBook form. I wonder if that is in fact not the same new eBook format that Knuth wrote about having approved?
> Objection (1) - a BJ creates no disincentive for work. You can earn $7.25/hour at the BJ or $7.50 at McDs.

If the work they are doing has little value — which seems like it would have to be the case, since otherwise we'd already be paying all these people $7.25 an hour to do it — I don't see how it's substantially different from idleness. It seems like you're basically replacing "Do whatever you want and we'll pay you a basic income" with "Do a meaningless ritual as half-heartedly as possible and we'll pay you a basic income."

In fact, I'd say a Basic Job program might disincentivize meaningful work more than a Basic Income. Somebody could start a business using their Basic Income, but a Basic Job would not provide the same opportunity.
Microsoft's PGO/LTCG implementation does just this. GCC can do something similar as well.
Can you elaborate which part you think reads like being a robot? The main point is to do excellent work if you're going to do any work.
I was hoping it had plunged to like 1$.
While I agree with your point about the sensationalism of "terrorism" over the past decade, I wouldn't go as far to say that "they don't really exist". I mean, I obviously don't know any more than what I hear from the media, but they certainly succeeded in pulling off a pretty complicated and deadly attack at peat once.
Right. Automation increases the overall productive capacity of a society, but does so in a way that (by reducing the demand for labor), allows holders of capital to capture more of the value generated by that production for themselves.

That said, I'm not sure what to do with that realization other than hold on to it as a vaguely disquieting feeling. I'm certainly not advocating that engineers do less in the way of creating automation or communications technology. I tend to believe its the job of the political class to reconcile technological change with societal well-being. But that same thinking applies to engineers in the defense industry as much as engineers in the automation industry.
then it must be great to be you
I really like the implications UBI has for charity. because everyone has a minimum level of resources, charity's revenue can scale with the number of people they serve.

For example, a halfway house could collect BI funds on behalf of its residents. it uses these funds, plus monies from other sources like donations or grants, to provide in-kind aid (food, shelter, security, medical care). as a resident requires fewer services, you can progressively phase out the in-kind aid and pass the BI cash through directly.

obviously this would require oversight to ensure that the charity is a responsible steward of the residents BI. we do this with the foster care system already.
Ask HN: Startup invoice not paid. Should I refuse separation agreement?
I've had a falling out with a startup founder I've been working for almost a year.

I submitted my final invoice, and he's refusing to pay, but instead is offering a bit less then half.

He seems very anxious for me to sign a separation agreement...should I use this as leverage to get the full invoiced amount?

I believe he's in a hurry because I was to be awarded a small chunk of equity if I worked with him for a year, and that year is up on just a couple months.

Worst case scenario is the agreement doesn't matter & I get none of my last invoice paid if I resist.
"Hotspot is an app that helps you meet up with your friends in real life."

Seriously? Who needs an app for this?
Save money on your ride to the airport AND rack up free gift cards
Not really. There are countless Android powered game consoles too but it hasn't exactly lead to an explosion in Android gaming.

Releasing hardware doesn't automatically lead to developers providing software. Linux still lacks 100% of triple-A titles not developed by Valve. What's upcoming is almost entirely indie ports.

Whether or not that is enough to start the cycle of shipping units, gaining more attention and seeing bigger titles dip their toes in the water remains to be seen. OS X had a decent advantage at launch, there were already smaller porting shops producing OS X ports of triple-A titles. Gaming on OS X was never popular, but it was there.

Valve is looking to pretty much single-handedly launch gaming on Linux. Nothing here is a trump card, everything is up in the air.
That's true, but to have the best chance of designing a good method/analysis, I need to know what the variables in my analysis mean. Otherwise, it is tougher to make decisions about what variables it makes sense to include in a model, what sorts of transformations make sense, what sort of approaches might work best, etc.
Valuing Bitcoins as a Speculative Asset Class
Swype sucks if you use a lot of acronyms. Most of my work emails involve such. The iOS keyboard is really good at hunt/peck typing which is what's needed for such terse communications.

Swype causes keyboard popup delay of several hundred milliseconds on my N5. I stopped using it after 3 days.

Also what's with the default throb on key press in Android? Why would anyone find that useful?
The FDA is reacting to the marketing/advertising, not the product itself. If the fortune teller was promoting himself as "Bob the Medical Psychic" who can predict whether your cancer will be terminal, then that's a different story.

You're not allowed to make medical claims in advertisements that you can't back up. Cheerios famously got into trouble for claiming it's heart-healthy or some such.
I don't think anything intelligent can be said about a "completely unobserved and unrecorded tree." We do not know an object that has the qualities of being unobserved and we can never know, because then it wouldn't be unobserved any more. That's the idealist argument against materialism.
Appreciation and respect.
Sorry about that. I retracted my comment because I felt it was meandering and muddled.

This kind of thinking only works if all intelligent people end up sharing and following your same ideals. Since that's just not going to happen, is it better to leave your country in the weak position?

Indeed, this is one of the reasons why there's not really much to say on the subject of ethics regarding the NSA's behavior. It's in people's nature to want to acquire as much power as possible, and there are endless justifications for doing so.
Plus the critical thing here: Backupify has restore. Who wants backup without restore?
Google allows you to download your files from Google Drive.

Is Google dropping Drive as well?

/sarcasm
Bitcoins actually have real value
I don't think it really qualifies for "gift" status.
To play devil's advocate - you willingly gave it to them, with almost zero contractual expectations. In a technical sense it is their stuff, and they have graciously implemented a feature allowing you to retrieve a copy of it.

I definitely agree that it's the "right" thing to do, but this kind of comment speaks of entitlement and lack of personal responsibility. They're offering a service, they don't have any inherent obligation, and you can choose not to use it.
Gmail is one of Google's core services...they couldn't just kill it off.
If you look at these things at an individual level, individual morality is a useful lens. But this topic is really about a class of professionals within a whole society. Influencing behavior through moralizing unfortunately works much better in the ancient tribal environment in which it evolved, where shame and ostracization could be used to punish wayward members of the tribe.

The reality of large societies is that a certain percentage of people will do immoral things even when they know those things are immoral, because they can get away with it or even profit from it. And they will do this especially when the rewards for immoral behavior increase asymptotically due to supply constraints.

Using morals to provide solutions only gets you as far as "X should Y". But prescribing "shoulds" doesn't solve anything. Changing incentives does. How to do that is the real question.
Not first time that somebody tries to make quant news: http://quant.ly/ . Wish yours site has more luck that this one.
There is still motivation to be honest about receiving unwarranted money. Tax fraud is a felony and there are already regulations about receiving unwarranted tax funds.
I got an email but assumed it was a phishing attempt until I read that they were actually doing this.
I may be entirely off the mark, but reading about this gives me pause as I think of all of the 3rd parties that invested in other platforms (Twitter), only to be cut-off later. Why would I hitch my ride to this wagon?
Please don't use fetchmail -- it loses data. Use offlineimap or mbsync instead.
Have you had a second to check out the video?
BTW, when I said developer productivity I didn't mean actual productivity (which is harder to quantify, as it includes all time spent on testing and maintenance throughout the lifetime of the project), but "developer productivity" as it's become known in PL vernacular to mean less boilerplate and fewer LOC.

And I guess we'll just agree to disagree, because I think we disagree about what's important even more than we disagree about the merit of each feature in Scala on its own. I believe Scala's tradeoffs are very misguided (and yeah, C++ is certainly similar) while you think they're justified. I believe that even an excellent feature should be left out of a language if it increases its complexity and the benefits do not solve a problem I care about every day, while you might think it's OK to increase a language's complexity even for features that won't be used so often. I think that in modern software development, application developers are better served by an opinionated language (especially when it comes to concurrency) while infrastructure software developers (assuming your software environment allows to easily mix languages) can certainly live with some annoying boilerplate if the language "closer to the metal", but both value simplicity; you might think that "one language to rule them all" with few constraints is preferable even at some cost to both types of developers.
https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads

https://www.google.com/settings/dashboard
Good idea. But I think pricing needs an update. Usually eating out is $5 a meal.
Awesome post!!
Until you get the "lockdown in sector 4" error message and have to sit in the timeout corner to start again. It took me over 48 hours to actually download all my mail out of gmail. (about two years ago.)
Schools have been buying applications since long before Clever. These are usually (but not always) gaint contracts across multiple schools or districts. after they are signed it can take months or sometimes full schoolyears to get the app provisioned and set up. This has to happen every time data changes as well. With clever it takes minutes.
According to PAIR, your patent was allowed after you responded to the first non-final office action. So no you did not use the method set out in the article of wearing down the examiner by continually filing continuations to get a yes.
No, I would like for this tool to work with deactivated accounts so that data can be retrieved in the event of Google deciding to deactivate the account.
I also keep a lot of tabs open, that's why I'm using Firefox and not Chrome. Firefox is very memory-efficient recently, whereas Chrome is a memory hog and can't handle the number of tabs I keep open in Firefox.

Firefox also does a neat thing with tabs that have been opened and not used in a long time, effectively unloading the website and reloading it once you visit the tab (for some reason it doesn't do so with tabs that I keep open in the background on purpose, like Gmail). They also had memory fragmentation problems, which they gradually fixed and now I'm very, very pleased with Firefox. Chrome is really draining my resources at 30 tabs opened, whereas I've had Firefox open with 100 tabs without issues.

The one process per tab model does have an advantage for misbehaving long-running apps. For example I had problems with Asana at some point, as I think it was leaking memory or something and Firefox couldn't handle it. In Chrome, you can find out what misbehaving tabs you have and simply close it.

If Firefox can switch to the one process per tab model, but somehow keep its current efficiency in managing memory, that would be so awesome.
Software patents rarely provide enough detail to reproduce, so there would be no loss.

And one click purchase is a terrible example to use, because there is no way to use such a thing as a trade secret, since it's a frontend innovation.
I would. The only use case I can see for it is if you're adopted and so don't know family history. Other than that, it can only lead to bad things.
Agree! It is the outliers like snapchat @3billion and instagram @1billion that were not created to solve problems but to start a startup, which are covered 90% of the time and influences developers to follow the same path.We hardly hear of companies like indeed.com sold for $1billion, climate corporation $930 million and solve real problems.

I actually think it is easier to enter an existing market, with an existing problem and competitors.
Transport Co's Need Two Twitter Feeds During Events Like #UKStorm
I just bought a $1000 plane ticket a few days ago for bitcoin. Seems like that's fulfilling the role of a currency.

You should know that you don't actually have to hold bitcoin to accept it as a payment method. Services like Coinbase let you instantly exchange it to cash if you use their merchant tools, so the merchant is actually exposed to zero risk.
Yeah, I do use playonlinux for reasons like this, but to me it's a bit of a bandaid to the pace of patch acceptance to the wine project. Don't get me wrong, in spite of that the wine project moves at an amazing pace, but working fixes sit on their bug tracker for months and months before being integrated into the mainline.

But the mixed 32bit/64bit thing is just a fundamentally broken part of wine that got seems to have gotten turned on by default before it was ready. It makes wine look bad.
Huh. Any theories as to why that is? Highly tuned coalesced reads that backfire on the kepler arch?
Have you actually tried? There is throttling in place, meaning it can take ages depending on your account size.
Why Jeff Bezos's Drone Is More Than a Joke
The Most Tech-Savvy Stadium in America [video]
Best case, the core may still block predicted execution shortly after due to running out of non-dependent instructions, until it knows for sure the address it should have branched to. Worst case, the branch can't proceed until the two memory accesses access.

You seem very familiar with these issues, but this doesn't sound right to me. Maybe I'm not understanding your terminology, but don't all modern processors support speculative execution? All instructions (including dependent) are executed, but the results are held in the Reorder Buffer until the branch choice is confirmed. If this is still a large issue, why don't Eli's measurements show it to be?
Conflict may also come from misunderstanding. Imagine a civilization where individuals are blobs of goo, and their way to understand each other and procreate/mutate is to mix with each other. Now if they would encounter a human being and realize that it's sentient, they would try to understand it by trying to mix as they usually do. From human's perspective that would be an act of violence and would prompt immediate defense/offense.
Congrats to Homejoy on their continued success.

I could see labor classification being a major stumbling block for them however, and I'm curious as to your thoughts on this. Profitability may be attainable at $20/hr given sufficient scale, but it would be completely impossible with an employee based workforce.

I know SV has a culture of moving fast and breaking things, and when you look at companies like Uber and AirBNB you can see them facing a number of legal challenges around established regulations, many of which are protectionist in nature.

However, worker classification seems to be an altogether different issue, as it's much broader than the relatively obscure hotel or livery laws that those companies are facing, and which vary from city to city. Worker classification impacts nearly every service-based business in the country, and is mandated on both the state and federal level.

I know smart people don't invest in things that have fundamental, life-threatening flaws, so I'm curious to know how they expect to get around this issue.
Does it really matter which method of resending the same patent was used to get something invalid granted?
Google And Rockstar
And this then becomes the problem.

Clever act like they are doing this out of the kindness of their hearts. They aren't.

They act like this is "free" for schools. It isn't. Because the costs of Clever and LearnSprout get sent right back to the school in the form of higher fees for the other apps they buy. Oh, and instead of paying one price for Clever, they are going to pay that price over and over and over.

Clever is just another "Vertically Integrated Network" right out of 1999. Their customers are largely going to be VC-funded startups who want to show that they have "solved" this issue by paying the Clever tax. Since most of those VC-funded startups are going to be offering free-services themselves, Clever is really just a giant hoover vacuum for VC funds.

It's a 1999 business model and it will likely lead to the same resolution in the end.
Not too far removed from tracking for advertising purposes, honestly. Just a lot more sources to work with, presumedly.
Yeah, but you have to think of the precedent: if 23andme doesn't have to provide proof that their results are accurate, there's nothing stopping me from starting a company that reads the lines on your palm and tells you if you will develop cancer. Regardless of the number of disclaimers they attach, people will use it to make medical decisions, and 23andme was aggressively advertising capabilities they had not proven. There is (and should be) a higher standard of proof for medical services/devices/etc.

The FDA was started because companies were making medicines that either didn't work or weren't safe and people were relying on them. Consumers lost faith in the health care industry, so we have a much higher standard of care. I understand that it's expensive, difficult and time consuming to fulfill this higher burden of proof, but the alternative applied across the entire market really just shifts those costs to the consumer while degrading confidence in the market for medical services overall.
I doubt the FDA would find the time to care if the people at 23andMe were just sitting around diagnosing themselves like a bunch of hypochondriacs. Their interaction with the public is what has gotten the FDA's attention.

There is a rather shameful history of doctors experimenting on others in an improper fashion.
Thanks! Just curious, but where can I get a $5 meal in SF? (Not trying to sound rude, I just can't find anywhere that cheap :)

Also, I would say that most popular catering option in SF is ZeroCater, and their website says that meals start at $12-14/person.
http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=3052

Podcast with Stephen Cohen speaking at Stanford on starting Palantir.
8 new Outlook windows on the other monitor later, I realize it's a mailto link.
And show me some pictures of the food!
Hmm. This is data which has no real value to schools themselves, which they are enticed to give access to for free. Other people wanting access to the data in aggregate are then required to pay the aggregators. Other aggregators can not plausibly compete with a better price, because the original aggregators (Clever) have occupied the very scarce mindshare of the schools’ “we give our data to these people” role. The schools will not be bothered to give the data to more than one aggregator, and so Clever thereby obtains an effective monopoly in providing aggregated data.

(It reminds me of Google book scanning thing, which has the same issue, but worse.)
I don't understand the distinction the author is making between defining the problematic word and the process of "tabooing" the word.

I do see the distinction in terms of the actual game: certainly 9 innings, 3 outs is not a definition for baseball. But the tabooing process described by the author seems no different to me than coming up with a definition.