skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Its sad to see Mozilla go.
I really liked them as a software community, but I think I will soon have to be looking for a different browser.

Or maybe someone at Mozilla will make a stand, and tell out that Mozilla accounts/device sale figures is just wrong, and that it does not make the web more open, but ties them to another "ecosystem"
SAT prep has little effect on SAT scores. From research on this topic [1]:

"Does test preparation help improve student performance on the SAT and ACT?
For students that have taken the test before and would like to boost their scores, coaching
seems to help, but by a rather small amount. After controlling for group differences, the
average coaching boost on the math section of the SAT is 14 to 15 points. The boost is
smaller on the verbal section of the test, just 6 to 8 points. The combined effect of
coaching on the SAT for the NELS sample is about 20 points. The effect of coaching is
similar on comparable sections of the ACT. The average score increase on the ACT math
section probably lies within the range of 0 to .4 points, while the coaching effect on the
English section is about .3 to .6 points"

[1] http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionst...
Ruthlessly strip out all features until hurts. Then build it yourself. Launch. Rinse and Repeat.

Put up a landing page now to gauge interest and start the marketing effort by building a list.
The Apple App Store SEO Keyword Selection Process In A Nutshell
Not sure what you are saying. The claim is that you could have done better had you really tried and taking courses is one way of doing that.
This sounds nice, but I'm not holding my breath for hope that the "new" SAT will be any better.

I took both the "old" SAT (the one that they discontinued around 2004) and the "new" SAT (the one that they're now discontinuing). I actually thought that the structure old one was better in many ways - for example, the analogies were often terribly written, but the idea of testing analogies as a reasoning tool is very powerful, and much more so than just doing passage after passage of reading comprehension.

Furthermore, this is the exact same language that they used to justify the decision to change the SAT 10 years ago. Coleman isn't saying anything new when he's criticizing the SAT today; he's just recycling the same PR language that they used a decade ago.

Of course, perhaps they really are genuine. I'd love to be pleasantly surprised. But reading this gives me total deja vu from the news stories I remember reading in 2002.
Rapid News Reader Prototype
Riding the wave of hype following speed-reading:

I hacked together a webapp for android that uses refined rapid serial visual presentation technology. This is a rapid prototype (pun not unintended) that I made in just under a week, inspired by existing speed-readers out there. I will be updating it frequently (adding books, better news sources, etc.) would love to hear feedback!

I think this really is a great way to read on a device. I've been using it when standing in line at coffee shops, and people have asked me what I'm doing. So far most people think it's a great idea, but there is still much to improve.

Roman - romsa9@gmail.com
If I require the labor I hire to maintain certain standards of cleanliness (running water), communcation (electricity & phone), availability (possibly use of a car), then the cost of production of that labor is going to be higher than if I don't require these things. It's quite possible (though I've no idea whether it's in fact the case) that these things are more expected and/or more expensive (relative to other things included in PPP) here.
This is a Huffman table, right? I'm pretty sure this is how MP3s work.
> but I openly fear this is the first step to getting me fired.

It probably is; act accordingly. Continue working if you want, but do no more than your job requires, and only the number of hours per week your country requires without overtime. Find a new job ASAP and contact a lawyer/solicitor.
Yup, good point.

Apparently a future version of CS or CSRedux will have it so that this CS:

myFn = ()->
# function body

Gets compiled to this JS:

var myFn = function myFn() {
// function body
}
Tell him that you really appreciate his motivational approach, and to return the favour you're going to reduce the hours you work so that you can cut out the 'make-work' and really focus down on just the things that the organisation needs.

His minimalist approach to the work ethic has really inspired you to cut out all the crap from your day and simply focus on getting the important things done.

You really appreciate his willingness to see the big picture and contravene the tired old conventions of workplace motivation, going against centuries of outdated thinking by introducing this radical innovation and clarity of vision.

You will no longer refer to what you do as "work", as that clearly references a model of "work for hire" that he is clearly moving away from by reducing the "hire" component, and instead you will refer to it as "life participation".

He has inspired you to go against the tired old conventions of workplace thinking and "participate in life" at places not bound by the restrictions of obsolete convention, so in future he can expect you to build product from such places as your living room, the park, a public library, or even a bar. You will "life participate" for periods of time not bound by outmoded traditional thinking, and turn up when your willingness to participate in life is matched by your enthusiasm for being at the office.

In short; two can play at that game and he needs to be reminded of the rules.
Yup. Saurik is an Obj-C whiz but seemingly humble.
The true problems with growth on the App Store
Sounds absolutely ludicrous and ridiculous on all levels.

Fire up your job-searching abilities and look to giving your time and talent so someone that perhaps might appreciate it, because it sounds like this Fuck of a boss isn't the one to do so. This life is too short to waste on the stupidity of someone else.
Companies wanting week-long "Game Development for Software Engineers" course?
One of the groups I work with at MIT is running a "Game Development for Software Engineers" professional education short-course this summer.

They ran it last year with some success but had a kind of obvious problem bringing in the right mix of attendees: the MIT folks' contacts are either educators (who don't have the money to attend) and game industry people (who don't, usually, need the course), while the ideal attendees are software engineers working within companies less familiar with games. (The MIT'ers shy away from terms like 'gamification' and 'serious games', but basically that's what they're describing.) They've had interest from industries like health care, defense, and entertainment app development, but, still, they don't know who they don't know.

So does anyone know of specific non-gaming companies getting into game development, or maybe even struggling with their current attempts at it?
Yeah I meant more than it is very easy to go from the 400-500's range to the 600-700's range with SAT prep. Especially on the writing section -- they only test on 20ish grammar rules, many of which are subtle and wouldn't necessarily be noticed without prep.
Well, slashdotted is generic. It's got the "have you googled it on Bing" issue but, good enough.
4-clause BSD is actually the original BSD license, even though it's not very common nowadays. According to wikipedia, it was first used in 1990 or before, so roundabout the same time as the GPL v1 (1989). It's certainly not self-written.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#4-clause_license_...
Almost makes me want to fly United again ... almost.
One possible option that required 10 seconds of thought to come up with- multicoin wallets on both ends of the transaction.

Why can't people (on this site of all places) spend just a little bit of time thinking about how things could work well instead of merely pointing out problems?
That's not a bad idea. I think addresses can be matched to postal delivery routes, so they could be a little more targeted with their mailing.
Sounds like they're dumbing down the SAT. Those soon-to-be-cut "obscure" vocabulary words are critical for mastering English.
Sounds like you've been motivated to find a new job.
Transparency is nice and the guy paying the bill answered questions for curious minds.
> Apps are merely doing what has been happening in full on computer games for years.

[Citation Needed]

I have never seen IAP in any computer game until the rise of micro-transactions. Even then IAP has been restricted to MMOs and other niches. The prevalence of IAP on mobile is several, several orders magnitude different than on PC.

> The difference is that many purchases are made by children because insufficient parent oversight. So instead of putting the blame where it belongs we go after those who sell it?

Saying "the user is to blame" again is not helpful. To be clear I would like my platform of preference to be free of "bad IAP" altogether, because it encourages a style of game design that is distasteful to me.

I'm cognizant that some people love this type of game. That's fine with me, I'd just rather they go somewhere else.
Any chance of incorporating other psy improvements, instead of just targeting SSIM?
"She still embodies all the awful stereotypes she did before!"
"But she's got a new hat!"
GestureDB: Querying Databases Without Keyboards
who still has money in anyone of these online wallets?
Everything else aside, what caught my eye was "Change network connectivity, connect and disconnect from WiFi."

That seems bizarre.
In one sentence: they don't want to have the only income from having the search engines (especially Google) in the search boxes and links, so they want to have their own cloud and services and in-browser ads.
Basic algebra and geometry: Order of operations; simplifying expressions; solving quadratic equations by factoring; finding area and perimeter of shapes; the classic "garden problem" (maximize area of a rectangle given fixed sum of 3 sides); naming the Platonic solids; adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing complex numbers; logarithms; solving exponential equations.

I think probability, in particular Bayes' Theorem, and basic number theory should be covered in a high school curriculum for the college-bound as well. Including converting numbers between base 2, base 10, and base 16; solving linear congruences with small moduli by trial and error; finding gcd and lcm; prime factorization; determining whether a pair of numbers is relatively prime. Teaching the extended Euclidean algorithm in high school would be on my "nice-to-have" wishlist, but there's only so much classroom time available.
Right, this is how mathematics really works. But formalizations of mathematics may suffer from leaky abstractions. If we prove facts about numbers by compiling them into sets, and then using set-theoretic axioms, we might accidentally make it possible to prove things about numbers that are incorrect or meaningless.
> It's not that the plates are being logged, it's that the data is being used in a malicious manner

Is it easier to prevent abuse post-hoc or ban types of data gathering prone to abuse?
> For many students, Mr. Coleman said, the tests are mysterious and “filled with unproductive anxiety.” Nor, he acknowledged, do they inspire much respect from classroom teachers: only 20 percent, he said, see the college-admissions tests as a fair measure of the work their students have done in school.

What is really interesting to me is that while the rhetoric against the SAT (and similar tests like the MCAT and LSAT), have increased over the last few decades, in practice the tests are more important than ever. In the last 30-40 years, median scores at the top 10-15 schools are up about 100 points adjusted for recentering in 1995. In practice, SAT scores are almost entirely determinative for college admissions. High schools pump out so many 4.0+ students, that 100-200 point differences on the SAT dominate differences in admissions outcomes.

And apparently, even companies are asking people for their SAT scores these days: http://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-bain-mckinsey-j....
Without taking a position on either side, I have to wonder why the rhetoric and the practice are so out of step on this issue.
That's funny, but seems pretty passive aggressive and probably wouldn't end well for anyone.
Hm, it's very possible that SAT prep companies game the system by making their diagnostic tests quite difficult.
If the javascript comes from your computer (because it's embedded in the page you self-host), how could it get compromised?
we're talking research stuff here, not books for children
China to test new smog-busting drone to help clear polluted skies
To expand upon this because I think it's interesting and not something that everyone appears to understand with how the blockchain works: those are effectively the same. Everyone's coins are distributed across the entire Bitcoin network, and everyone who has a copy of the blockchain has everyone's coins, but only those who hold the corresponding private keys for each address (public key) the coins belong to can use them. So if you don't control the private keys to your coins, you don't control the coins.
It's also great PR for Google.
Exciting stuff - love watching Stripe evolve.
How about if they are implementing a public standard that states this other arbitrary type of data is valid?
The new Checkout
For clarification you write puts at or out of the money. If executed, the premium earnt offsets the difference between strike price and spot price. No one is saying this guarantees against a market crashes but it acts as a cushion. You are still trading when you decide not to place a trade.

To put it another way, you make money when you buy, not when you sell. Therefore your purchase price is a margin of safety if done right. I carefully select the companies I trade by building up a 'conservative' price target based on a company's tangible book value per share (TBVPS). I try to write puts that offer a good risk/reward profile relative to the TBVPS. Even if I was caught in a market crash I'm as close to book value as I can get. Having done my homework I'm sure this company will outlast the extreme market sentiment. When such events occur I add to my position on the strength of my fundamental analysis. The market always overshoots and creates a wealth transfer opportunity.
That is one way. I don't know that putting people in jail left and right and hoping eventually one of them is famous is the most efficient way to go about getting the law changed.
Maintainer has different priorities, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7349117
This reminded me I wanted to investigate switching to this for our infrastructure, but uh... it seems that on at least ubuntu's build of openssh if you pass a serial number to ssh-keygen it segfaults. Even if it's the default (0). That's kind of terrible.
Ok, I believe you, it's been over 10 years since I tried it :-) Maybe I was thinking of the forever iframe, where a regular application/javascript document had content added to it incrementally over time.
Firefox has a long way to go.

* Australis

* Electrolysis (http://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/multiprocess-f...)

* Fx Accounts

Speed wise, I really think Fx is pretty much on par with Chrome. There are areas where Fx is faster and Chrome is faster. In general, both are great.

If you install a lot of addons/extensions, I will expect some performance hit. But that's an not excuse, yet I personally not a big fan of addons (well, addons are common in web development) anyway so that doesn't really concern me.

Memory hike usually happens with plugins (flash, java applet) but normal browsing is fine. Plus I have 16GB to spare...
> I have never seen IAP in any computer game until the rise of micro-transactions.

IAP is, arguably, no different than "expansion pack" + "purchase online". But for the online purchase part, computer games have been doing that before most people had even heard of the internet. Even the "free-2-play (but play for full experience)" model goes back to at least the 1980s (in the form of shareware).

Sure, the reduction in transaction processing costs and latency of the modern online world have facilitated adapting those models to ones with more, smaller, and more frequent purchases, but the essential characteristics of the models are, in computing terms, ancient.
Well, if we're shipping a common database and you're maximizing transmission efficiency then yes of course.

In information theory, my understanding (which is quite limited) is that when we talk of bits transmitted we can think of it as "uniquely identifying from within the set of total possible messages". So, if you shipped the entire 10,000 image catalog "transmitting" an image from within that catalog would take you a mere, uh, let me count my fingers, 13 bits.

We could go one step further and find some way of hashing all the data together to remove any redundancies and so forth - but the problem alas is about defining arbitrary images :).

What you described tho is kind of what happens with all compression algorithms except on the "micro"/individual image level. You may already be aware but check out Huffman coding: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding for a simple intro.
At CircleCI, we've been using Stripe Checkout for quite a while. It was increadibly easy to set up and very high quality (we replaced a hacky ugly checkout page with it), and it looks really professional. That professionalism is really important at the final stage of the funnel.

One of the things that's really interesting about Checkout is that Stripe is actively focusing on increasing the conversion rate for us. Their new layout (with the phone number) has a 20% high conversion rate than the previous version.
> Everything we do, everything we say, has consequences that spread through the great web of causation

Like tracking, which could be used by political authorities to suppress political dissidents, employers to discriminate against homosexuals, or police to stalk or sexually harass a young woman.

Just because Google or Facebook or ALPRs don't intend for tracking to be used maliciously doesn't mean it won't. In fact, this is the entire argument against the NSA dragnet.
You definitely could have been less sensationalist in your advice.

Something like, "Looks like you might be infringing on the trademark of a company that produces a similar product. You should consider changing your name to avoid legal complications."
I used to work with major telecom accounts as a jr PM/analyst and saw first-hand vendor negotiations with multi-million dollar accounts (say, $10MM per year in spend with AT&T for example).

These executives are well paid because politics/provider capture is highly important in accounts that large. They create a mini fiefdom around these accounts. Normally, if you see a huge change-over (say, AT&T for 10+ years, then show (my former company) that they have been over spending by 30% and cut the cost in half, the entire team will get fired from VP to Procurement. Many times, a $5MM account would have a Sr. VP (say, or Americas) involved if it looked like they could move away.

It is not to hard to understand why politics are 1. necessary, and 2. valued, but, 3. positive AND negative towards companies.

3. refers to politics being necessary in companies, especially diverse/global firms. I performed some Organization Behavior research (which I don't have on hand), but, politics can create "positive" fiefdoms, in relation to protecting a team from outfall of higher-up politics, procure more resources for that team, and other positive effects by way of "good" politics by the manager.

It flows both ways.
What can you use if you don't want to download the entire multi-gigabyte blockchain?
It would be awesome if you could "close the loop" between analytics and SERPs!

For instance, say that you return a SERP with 2 results. Using your analytics and some conversion pixels, Swiftype would know that for that search, the first result has an estimated value of $10 and the second result has an estimated value of $20. From using Swiftype on a Wordpress site, I know that you give admins the power to change the order of results on a SERP page manually. Could you also do that automatically?

So for an e-commerce client, you could automatically re-sort the SERP so the $20 link shows up first (and hence gets more clicks). You could even calculate and display the benefit to the customer of doing this, e.g. "You have generated $1,234 in extra revenue this month by using Search Auto-Rejigger".
I would use this if I didn't get any initial help - sometimes you don't. Or sometimes you get put up in a fancy hotel in Copenhagen without asking because there is a snowstorm and the pilot couldn't get there. But maybe I could have gotten cash instead?
https://multibit.org/
AirPnP rent-out-your-toilet app launched
World's smallest tweezers, capable of picking up a single virus or molecule
Protein folding isn't a good "proof of work" problem. Really the expression "proof of work" is misleading. The main point of mining is not the lottery part. The lottery is only a side effect.

The main point of mining is to extend the blockchain. Pick the last block in the blockchain, add the recent transactions and create a new block in a way that is almost imposible to forge. The blockchain keeps all the transactions without a central autority.

-

Q: How are we sure that nobody replaced the old blocks with fake versions?

A: Chain the blocks, so they have to forge the old the chains of block up to the newest.

-

Q: How are we sure that it's difficult to forge a lot of blocks?

A: Made it as difficult as possible, but not so difficult that it's impossible to find the next block. Pick a problem where we can predict and adjust the difficulty of the problem.

-

Q: How are we sure that the blocks are legit?

A: Made it easy to verify. Finding a block should be difficult, but checking it should be easy.

-

Q: How are we sure that it's really difficult to forge them?

A: Use some cryptographic secure problem (and hope that it's secure). Don't create your own apparent difficult problem.

-

Q: How do we convince people to mine?

A: A lottery! Give 50 BTC for each block they found, plus fees.
I never understood this... As a programmer you have tons of options, bosses just can't treat programmers as normal workforce anymore. Do take these options and move on. It is really simple.
What are these "clear socioeconomic preferences" of the SAT?
Don't quit, YET.
Go back at working 40 hours a week and start looking for another job. Once you find a new gig don't show up to work the next day.

Once he calls you up as he needs your help tell him that it will cost him $xxx per hour for contracting, granted this only applies if you actually want to do it.
Data compression and image compression is a great way to improve the overall internet, bandwidth and speed. Maybe as important as new protocols like SPDY and js/css minification and cdn hosting of common libraries.

As long as ISPs/telcos don't go back to the days of AOL network wide compression to reduce bandwidth beyond low quality I am for this at service level like facebook/dropbox uploads. I hope this inspires more in this area. Games also get better with better textures in less space.

Still to this day, I am amazed at the small file sizes macromedia (adobe now) was able to obtain with flash/swf/asf even high quality PNGs would compress. So yes we all have lots of bandwidth now but crunching to the point of representing the same thing is a good thing. With cable company caps and other bandwidth false supply shortage that focus might resurge a bit.
Knowing your BATNA is important so you don't take a deal worse than your BATNA, but the whole point of negotiation is to get something better than your BATNA.

You should never lead a negotiation with your BATNA because then your counterpart is only going to give up the absolute minimum above your BATNA, thus depriving you of all the surplus.