skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> These kinds of questions usually have negative votes

Or, quite often, substantial positive votes, and the wails of a legion of users protesting the closing. I would guess that that kind of question is more likely to be the target of enough inbound links to lift it into the search results people actually see.

Marking closed, zero- or negative-voted questions as noindex might be a good move, though.
There are two scarce resources: human lifetime, and mineral resources. Money lets you assign the disposition of some of those.
Thanks for this, you answered my questions thoroughly. I'm not entirely convinced by this though:

> [A signed commit] doesn't guarantee anything about the contents of that commit if the repository has been tampered with.

I think most people would intuitively expect the signed commit to guarantee the contents of the tree being signed. The idea that you could "git pull" a repo from a compromised machine, verify the signed commit, but not actually have a guarantee about the tree matching the one that was signed would run counter to most people's expectations, I suspect.

In other words, this to me seems like a "technically, we don't guarantee" statement about something that is de facto thought to be guaranteed.
Google sues to protect Android device makers from Apple-backed patent hell
It doesn't blow my mind, and this article doesn't really scratch the surface.

First off, this is a private school. Right off the bat, we'd expect their educational achievement to be higher, simply down to social class, which is directly correlated. So we can establish that educational attainment at this school is in line with other private schools.

This being the case, the conclusion we can draw from this school is: "children with middle-class parents who are involved in their education can achieve better outcomes than the public school average when they attend well-funded private schools, even with an alternative educational model." Phrased like that, if's pretty obvious.

The Sudbury model is also not the claimed "educational environment where the students can do what ever they want, when ever they want all day long" - that's a bit of a misrepresentation. It's an educational environment where children are provided the tools and support to plan their own education, and are required to be involved in that process.

I absolutely, thoroughly believe that the Sudbury model is an excellent approach to providing a much more well-rounded education for children. However, it requires lots of funding, excellent educators, and is arguably not any more suitable for every child than the current flawed system is.

Formal education and curricula are something I found exceptionally useful as a child, though I of course recognise the limitations there, and I'm pretty envious of the Sudbury model. But I wonder if a more general-purpose model may be effective. I attended a state comprehensive school in the UK, but had a couple of excellent teachers who were happy to provide materials and support for additional or alternative self-directed learning in areas where it was obvious I was bored or disinterested. That worked really well, and I can totally see that a basic curriculum and standardised attainment, combined with flexible opportunities for students who want to take more control of their learning, could be very effective.

Of course, all of this relies of excellent, well-paid educators. And sometimes these can be hard to come by.
Why on earth would I read this article if I am going into it with my mind pre-blown???
Not only that, but Bieber isn't even a rapper! This whole thing is an inverted pyramid of piffle!
Thanks for interesting blog posts. Answers to those questions help to understand what's good or bad about that system. Or any educational system. It's interesting, do they develop into curiosity, or they had it from the beginning.

There's no silver bullet in education, it's very complex thing. And to disregard traditional system on any ground could be too hasty. I've attended two schools. Both traditional system, but second one (last 2 years of education) had good reputation and to get there you had to pass exams (not very hard though). 100% of my class got into college (not US). And much less people from my first school did. The main difference was all the students in my class got in that school specifically because they wanted to go to higher education (also good teachers :).
Today you've convinced me to start on the Matasano challenges. I completed the Stripe CTF from ~ a year ago and I've been looking for something else to try my hand at that would improve my security knowledge.
Ukraine will extradite on a case-by-case basis http://www.crime-research.org/news/15.05.2004/275/
I think professionalism bores down to basic communication skills, be punctual, responsive and considerate.

I've recently hired 2 "developers" from the freelancer HN thread to find them utterly unprofessional, requiring constant chasing and inconsiderate of the projects needs.

Thankfully I didn't spend a significant financial amount on them, but, for anyone looking at using that thread I would seriously consider oDesk or something similar with professional validations as a valid alternative. It really is a crapshoot with little or no comeback, and the quality certainly isn't top end from my experience.
I concur. While I've never met him, he's almost certainly got that thousand-yard stare that pierces through to the heart of your crazy ideas (from "Let's spend several billion dollars on a company that does crappy sales software!" to "Why don't we put a Turing-equivalent cartoon paperclip on the bottom right hand corner of everyone's screen?"). This guy has Been Around the Fucking Block and deserves a shot at Microsoft CEO, he's in research and he's psychic about bullshit.

I would pay folding money to buy a ringside seat at the single combat that finally decides who gets to run Microsoft, because there's just no other way it's going to happen without causing a mass exodus of everyone who's still good working there. I would also put a significant side-bet on this guy, because he's not a biz guy or a sales guy or a marketroid, he's in research and knows how to fight dirty.
That's interesting. For me, in the only somewhat hard math class I took in college, the class meetings were mostly useless. All that I learned came from solving the problems.

But it could just be a learning style difference.
The reasons other than the ones I've outlined are caused by implementation details and wouldn't exist if they chose the correct abstractions.
It needs to mention two important facts:

1. the students are self-guided
2. you have built a theory based on your observations

I'd suggest, for example:

"How is your mind not blown by students who seem to succeed through self-guidance?"
hmmm if you love library-building, then you probably won't like wrangling clients, chasing them down for payments, finding your next clients, etc. ... not to mention what happens when clients want you to customize your library in some bizarre way that goes against your core sensibilities, but you need to do it to get paid. doesn't sound very unicorn to me, since clients are ultimately driving your business.
It's Christmas, so I'll just say this...

You have the power to put these guys out of business, or give them a break and help them find a way to promote their business in a more "ethical" way.

I hate spam as much as you (founded/exited Defensio), but I think it'd be awesome if you took the unconventional approach, had a call with them and gave them a break to whatever extent you deem appropriate.

Merry Xmas!
Not to be smug, arrogant or patronizing, but I would be completely okay with that. ;)
Ask HN: Prepaid mobile hotspots with no expiration? 3G, 4G, or LTE.
I'm wondering if anyone has a good solution to this problem:

I want a mobile hotspot so that I can browse the Internet on my MacBook while riding the train/bus/whatever. I want to prepay for data transfer with no expiration. e.g., pay $50 for 5gb of data transfer that I can use whenever I want.

From my research, it seems like the major carriers all offer hotspots, but either confine you to a monthly contract, or offer prepaid plans with expirations. So yes, you can pre-pay $50 for 5gb of data, but you need to pay it again the next month even if you did not use all 5gb of data.

It seems like the best solution is a USB modem with a SIM card slot, coupled with a prepaid data plan loaded onto a SIM card. But this raises many questions: Which USB modem? Which bands should it support? Where to buy the SIM card?

I imagine this is a problem someone on HN has already solved. But the literature online is surprisingly sparse. So... any recommendations?
Okay, so brand fail. I've using linux since my first lead dev introduced me to it back in '97-98, and it used to take a weekend to get set up right, and the only help on the newsgroups or BBS's was to RTFM. So maybe the brand could work for others, but I have not seen any really positive images of the brand. Ugly Gnu ink mascot, Restrictive GPL Licence that is less about sharing and more about control, Richard Stallman unable to give it a rest. The brand isn't a good one.
>As far as I can see from this article, this law doesn't block German companies from serving German-served ads from German servers to Italians. It doesn't block anyone else outside Italy from serving any ads from anywhere to Italians. It only blocks Italian companies from using US/German-served ads.

Yes, you don't seem to be in disagreement with me. It doesn't block German companies from serving ads off of German servers, featuring Italian businesses. But they can only do so for free. They cannot be paid by the Italian businesses. I find this to be a rather ridiculous restriction on the purchase of services.

Especially if there is no exception allowing Italian companies to use German-served ads to target Germans.
Ruby 2.1: Profiling Ruby
I did a bit of quick reading on this and at first glance my description of how git tagging works appears to be on point, i.e. all it guarantees is that a particular user asserts that tag X points to commit with SHA1 Y.

I'm not sure that it says anywhere in the documentation that it guarantees anything more than that, but I agree that a significant proportion of developers would intuitively expect that the entire content of the tree to be signed rather than just the SHA1.
For me, it's not that the joke is offensive, it's that it's offensively lazy. Nickelback is a band that gets regularly shit on and putting that option in your app just says you wanted to make a joke but weren't creative enough to think of one. I'm surprised they didn't throw a mother-in-law joke in there for good measure.

Relevantly lazy xkcd: http://xkcd.com/528/
I think we should clarify that building can always be breaking. You can implement a script that automate the breaking process (think fuzzer). I can fire up Python interpreter and start playing around with AES encoding with ECB and then figure "shit, ECB is not semantically secure". I can have a damn vulnerable web app and web server. I can implement them, break them and improve them if I am really that dedicated.

I can also learn by reading standard and read how people implement in projects like Firefox or Chromium. And ask questions. I think we should be careful with the meaning of "learn by breaking" because obviously only a handful of people can really break cryto system. And average developers like me are probably better off just learn and break.

Steps like that are probably my way of getting into security engineering and cryto engineering (at some point). I guess I am a different audience, I am not here to break RSA, I am here to learn how real systems are implementing RSA, TLS and see whether those implementations have flaws or not.
I noticed that too for some things (especially things I picked up at Home Depot). However, with Prime, I am still often inclined to buy things if the premium is only 5-10% vs big box because I'm not paying tax and/or I don't need it now.
Though that being said, I have recently found myself ordering stuff to target and picking it up in store (during holidays to avoid the cashiers).
I feel carsick when I try to read that.
I'm not sure what people that earn below the required threshold do if their state isn't expanding on medicaid. How do they apply for medicaid?
It's honestly something that i found out entirely through self-experience. I'm a self-taught Perl developer who spent 5 years to reach a proficient level. I managed to get another developer with little Perl experience to nearly my level within 6 months by handing him two excellent books and reading his code and pointing out issues in his algorithms and semantics.

The local maxima i am aware of here are:

1. Outdated books. When i learned Perl i wasted a lot of time on books that are now known widely to be objectively bad, but are still recommended widely. The ones i recommended allowed learning with little friction.

2. Algorithmic and semantic problems that have to be resolved through lengthy investigation sessions long after they're implemented. I spent a LOT of time figuring out what doesn't work well in the long run. He's been able to skip those and spend his time more productively on problems that i haven't encoutered or solved yet.

I'm not trying to toot my horn here and i think i'm not a good teacher. But the advantages he had from me being available were staggering.

(The wordy rant to offset my quotable. ;) )
I just dropped out of business school because I realized that if I went through with it, I'd be paying an additional 6 figures to get into a job where I'd have to put on my corporate persona again. I've done this in the past, and it was just unnecessarily draining and stressful.

After weeks of internal debate, I decided that I'd rather have a significantly lower pay but be able to the same self both in and out of the office.

(Helps to have almost died earlier this year. Makes decision making a bit more straightforward than otherwise)
Based on what everyone else says, it's probably sample size. The number of people we have who buy something with their own card and then chargeback is pretty small for us (and it's usually in error).
Thanks for the input!

We definitely want some degree of autonomy with the drone, and most likely a quad/octoroter. A big things for my friends is payload and possibly custom actuators (grabber or claw).
Interview: Bruce Sterling Answers Your Questions
Cheers for taking my criticism and actually considering it. I hope it will influence your future writing positively. :)

Also, now that i think of it, let me make a recommendation. Please either read, or listen to the audiobook, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" about Richard P. Feynman. The latter part of the book discusses how even NASA accidentally deluded itself into making gross mistakes in the use of statistics and, if i remember correctly, describes at the very end a general philosophy and attitude towards science that would greatly improve your ability to contemplate and argue scientific matters.
"Internet on the go" at Walmart.
Read My Book Online For Free
>you can almost write the actual code just the pseudo code.

Yes, often true. E.g. in this case:

(->> [2 3 4 7 5 3 11 12 7] ;collection
(group-by even?) ;get a map of evens and odds
vals ;get just the values
(map sort) ;sort them
(map first)) ;first is smallest

(disclaimer: there's probably prettier ways to write this - I was just trying to keep it simple)

I agree that there are sometimes inscrutable errors. For me it's often because of a type conflict between a function and what it's operating on.

Example: I'm a little rusty and when I tried to quickly code the example above I did this:

(->> [2 7 5 3] (partition-by even?) vals)

And got:

ClassCastException clojure.lang.Cons cannot be cast to java.util.Map$Entry clojure.lang.APersistentMap$KeySeq.first (APersistentMap.java:152)

Doh! I wanted "group-by". And partition-by doesn't make a map! But why this specific error? Frankly I'm not sure. I'd probably have to look at the source. My sin of course was trying to compose operations in one go, rather than build them up by baby steps in the REPL. I don't think the errors ever get that much more readable, but you start to recognize the category of error you've made by the type of error that's thrown.

Spending time on 4Clojure is very helpful to build your intuition for this.
What would be a better platform for storing, say, a database of torrent magnet links, or a dump of leaked documents, in a way that makes censorship computationally infeasible?
Just want to point out a few things:

1) There are no requirements for students to be "involved in the process of planning their own education". They are only required to be attend school a certain number of hours per year (I'm not sure the exact number), and serve time on the judicial committee. There are no requirements at all around any educational goals.

2) Sudbury Valley School operates on less money per-pupil than neighboring public schools.

3) The only requirement for adults who work as staff members is that they are capable of treating students as equals.
This is not unprofessionalism; it is poor UX. The sensible backlash to the Nickelback feature is that is was set "by default," not that ripping on Nickelback is a humorous, widely accepted activity. This app could have retained that "cleverness" and "easter egg" vibe by keeping the setting but not having it be active by default. With proper UX considered, the backlash in this case could have been avoided.
DIY: Arduino Experimenter Kit
That's a great way of putting it, and I have been working on precise templates for certain tasks, which are now bearing fruit.

Why daily reports, as opposed to any other interval?
I'm never sure how to take these stories, but they provide a good litmus test of my emotions.

I wonder sometimes if these sorts of things are 'leaked' to see if anyone inside the country will flinch and take action, sometimes I wonder if they are wishful thinking on the part of people would like to see the PRK gone. It is always unsettling though to have a nuclear power that is quite unstable near a critical resource to the work (S. Korea). So emphasizing that instability is a great tool for news services to ratchet of the fear views.

Lets consider three possible scenarios:

1) I its a hoax.

Ok, so far (5:30PST) the mainstream press hasn't picked it up (and they would if they had any sort of confirmation). Who benefits? Asia Press?

2) Its disinformation.

So if the PRK "leaked" this to flush out malcontents in the PRK, how would that work? Would people who read this self identify as potential targets and head for the hills? (Thus calling them out as targets for the current government)

3) Its "real"

And there are a bunch of high level military and diplomatic personnel in China waiting to be processed through into the country. What is the PRK reaction? Anger? Retailiation? Do they do something stupid and try to kill their missing minions in China?

All it does it raise questions.
I am not sure its all positive though. I only heard bad things about Netflix and the atmosphere. I stay away from it and their recruiters proactively because of that. Just like the "there is no limit on vacation" scam that they pull over their employees got implemented in many startups, I am sure a lot of that "culture" spilled into the startup world as well.
CDNSolutions - Protect your site from any attack and make it 10x faster
I have done things like this, like adding "get your war on" to the svn repo navigator page, http://www.mnftiu.cc/category/gywo/war81/ I thought it was hilarious, they paid some dude to "work the weekend" to figure out how to remove it. In retrospect, I should have DONE EXACTLY WHAT I DID, but also add a button to hide the artwork. We need to be human and express ourselves. Nothing of interest happens by consensus.

The nickelback feature should have popped up a dialog, the problem would have solved itself. I see you are playing nickelback 0_o ...

I put this right here, http://funkatron.com/posts/empathy-is-our-most-important-att...
Tools for the data science craftsman: R, Python, Clojure and Julia
I'm a little unnerved by someone who lists honesty as "unprofessional". Perhaps he meant tactlessness or lack of a filter?
I've thought about it a bit. I realize the title is annoying on Hacker News, but I think the title is ok within the general context of my blog for those who read it regularly.

I'll think about another title, and I'm sorry (sort-of as I've enjoyed the debate here) for the sensationalist title on Hacker News, but I don't think it's a huge deal outside of this specific context...
Sometimes I dream being that productive (although his exercise routine is ridiculously short). But then I also want a social life, I want to party with my friends, I want to meet new people, I want to take holidays, I want to meet women... overall I want to be impulsive sometimes.

Having a routine like is just looking for troubles when you end up breaking it one day.

The first thing is to know the tricks that work to make you effective when you want to get into an effective loop: [The chain system, the pomodoro technique, getting good sleep + eating well + sport, no alcohol] does the trick for me.

The second thing is to learn how to balance those things with a social life, with a good one. And I've yet to read an article about it. Maybe I'll write about it if I find the solution one day.
Well this is like your opinion, if your goal is to learn, I find that looking for productivity is great for you. You learn more and feel more connected.

Then if your goal in life is to get rich or make history I don't know... But it's not everyone's goal.
His facebook page is also a hidden treasure trove of hilarious writing!
I think that's true for any Valley company. Customer support is frequently an after-thought for which you bring someone with a title Director of Customer Relations, give them limited budget, and let them figure out how to take care of things.
Author here. Great idea! The problem is that I would be hard pressed to come up with projects that are universally appealing. Crowd sourcing for ideas seems like a good option here. If you have a list of ideas please reach out. My contact can be found on the page :)
Warning flags should get raised when statements are made about how a company's health makes more sense "when we stop trying to understand it by looking at financial statements".

In finance, creativity is not an asset and the standardization allows the public a structure to critically assess the organization. Specifically against other similar organizations. Of course, if there were financial statements made specifically for (let's say) Twitter - Twitter could highlight all their strengths and quietly hide their weaknesses. I'm not sure that's what is best for the public.
> The government just doesn't have experience managing and running such a site with such requirements.

They still don't. They outsourced it, first to Verizon, then to HP

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230356290...
No, I am willing to execute them, to the extent of volunteering for the firing squad, without any interest in mine being the rifle loaded with a blank -- if they succeed in maiming or murdering. I notice my previous comment was not clear on this point, and am glad of the opportunity to clarify it now. The mere attempt, in my estimation, merits only a term in prison, as with any other deliberate but unconsummated attempt to inflict grievous harm upon another person, in the absence of extreme provocation such as the need to defend oneself from attack.
Author here. Adding a community aspect is definitely an end goal. Right now I'm trying to create a reasonable project list and perhaps a few sample solutions. I'm toying with the idea of test suites but that really adds constraints on the final solution.
What would be the main differences between a client side js framework like this and a server side setup like Node+Geddy?