skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> As I said, the problem is that when a kid is having trouble, it's very difficult to figure out where he's going wrong

The correct (though inefficient) approach is to keep trying until you see that he starts understanding. However, this is impossible when there are 25 other students in the classroom. Each might require a different manner of teaching to "get it", or learn at different speeds. And so if you're trying to crank out graduates on an assembly line this just won't cut it.

So instead of figuring out a solution where each student can get the education he deserves as a human being, we instead seek to change the student so that he can be programmed with the education that is possible in an assembly line system. This also explains the dearth of highly competent, highly respected teachers... you don't staff your factory with gifted artisans who could carve the pieces. You want someone who will push the button and have the product stamped out in 0.75 seconds.

If you calibrate everything perfectly, some number of students will get a highly optimal (for them) education where everything was timed perfectly, using the easiest-to-understand lessons. For everyone else, for the slow and learning disabled, for the quick and talented... it will be an awful experience. And, whether you call it luck or circumstance, neither of those groups will be educated well enough to be able to express their criticism easily.

> It's like a compiler. Do you want a compiler that compiles really, really fast but just throws opaque error exceptions,

But a compiler isn't a person, and a person isn't a compiler. I don't want to treat people as if they were machines... I especially don't want to treat children like they are machines, it's almost certainly even more damaging the earlier that happens to them.

I'm a programmer too, I do this for a living. I know all too well how easy it is to think of human circumstances and other people as if they were machines to be debugged, and it feels awful. Imagine what the 7 year old kid feels like in school when he's a bug to be solved on the teacher's trouble ticket system. Especially when he's probably marked "low priority, fix when time allows".

You're no longer talking about a system where learning is considered the primary goal. It may not even be a goal at all.
Yes, but this is actually false, so it's probably for the best.

Anything of degree 5 or higher is not guaranteed to have solutions solved by radicals (that is, a solution that can be expressed as some rational number to some exponent). For example, x^5 - x + 1 = 0 cannot factored into linear and quadratic polynomials in this way.* The proof for the insolvability is actually quite elegant.

Even so, factoring a polynomial from degree 3 or 4 into quadratics or linear terms is hard. The most general way I can think of is using the rational root theorem and plugging a few values in.

* - You can factor using ultraradicals (yes, it's a thing), but that is far above highschoolers or undergrads, even.
I don't mean to imply that Apple wouldn't do it. Just saying that if we're assigning blame, that's where it should go.

As for putting food on the table, in general I'd agree, but do ex-Apple employees in SV really have trouble finding new jobs?
So if I'm on vacation in France, suddenly I get the French keyboard?
I think "takes one to know one" might also apply. I don't think "hidden massive pre-mine" is such a stretch, but I'm not a... Crypto-economist? Forensic crypto-accountant? The mining difficulties were much lower in the beginning, right? So mine a load in the beginning, sell the scam, cash out?

I'm not saying it's a scam, but is it unreasonable to suggest it might have started as one?
1. I'm implemented the quadratic formula in software more than twice over the years, I think. In, you know, real programs I was paid money to write.

2. Have you ever been in a life-or-death situation where anything you learned in class in high school was useful to you? "Well, I would have died, but then I remembered that Julius Caesar's last three words were not actually 'Et tu, Brute!' according to Shakespeare..."
There's a common complaint in this thread that is basically "just write your code better, then it'll be readable." There's also a common praise of Haskell that says that its type system eliminates entire classes of errors. It's not accepted by people who use Haskell that "if you use another language and just write your code better, you don't need a type system."

Having to explicitly indicate the precedence of operators -- as in Lisp's prefix notation -- completely eliminates precedence errors, both in writing and in reading. This is true even though "well-written"^1 code using implicit infix notation is readable.

[1] Note also that the level of implicit precedence that you're comfortable with might be different from mine.
Does anyone else think this is a profoundly ignorant and destructive article whose anodyne plausibility underscores the absence of a consistent model of education in the cultural lexicon?

I'm not trying to be impolite here; I just want to know how far my views are from the mainstream.
I drive through one a few times a week, in Västerås, Sweden.
Even if you use a sensor fabric on the road way, as well as high precision/precise positioning GPS (sub-centimeter resolution) for lane keeping, you will still need a sensor that can build the environment around the car in a model software can process. Some sort of lidar/radar combination I believe.
Offer escrow services for trades that can't be made face to face.
Yes, but you'd think they'd have enough awareness that most people on HN don't have paid subscriptions to WSJ which defeats the whole point of posting something to share information.
http://www.volvocars.com/intl/top/corporate/news/pages/defau...

note the:

Our aim is for the car to be able to handle all possible traffic scenarios by itself, including leaving the traffic flow and finding a safe ‘harbour’ if the driver for any reason is unable to regain control,” explains Erik Coelingh, Technical Specialist at Volvo Car Group.

Plus the goals listed.

Volvo did do a land-train style project called SARTRE http://www.motorauthority.com/news/1072088_sartre-self-drivi...
There's not really a conflict here.

"Math" up through high school in the US, and through that freshman calculus course, is mostly about calculating the right answer to a problem. Math is a much bigger subject; calculations are a trivially small part of the whole.

On the other hand, "The much bigger and real tragedy of math education in the US is the very large percentage of kids who have been labeled as 'not good at math'" is also very true. And many of those people might not be good at calculations but would be fine with the rest of the subject.
Has anything been said about an open protocol for inter-car communication? What about sharing point cloud data?

I have a bad feeling that Google is going to keep everything sealed in Google Maps. The industry would benefit from sharing all of their data with OpenStreetMap.
If Swype tried to get your location every 20 seconds on purpose, it would drain you battery within a few hours.
What does WSJ's AUP/TOS say?
Detailed discussion on startup times at http://nicholaskariniemi.github.io/2014/02/11/jvm-slow-start... (and subsequent articles by the same author).
I was expecting this to be around $4-9.99. Which I will gladly pay for a quality music app. You can definitely charge at least a dollar (which is basically free).
If Android has a way of faking location data, I don't see why a contact list would be any different:

https://developer.android.com/training/location/location-tes...
How Close Deals at Your Next Conference For Engineers
FWIW, I'd probably put myself in the same category the OP writes about.

I hit a wall in calculus 2 in University, because previously I had been able to rely on simply showing up and not putting in much effort to still do "pretty good". That was the first time I did poorly in any math/science course, and was a pretty big wake-up call. As a result, I ended up having to study more to fill in the gaps.

I was naive, came from a poor background with crappy public schools, and didn't think of math as particularly important to focus on until I saw how useful it was in physics. I don't think it's an all too uncommon story.
10 Mobile App Favorites For Business
I attended the last startup school. I can say it is much more valuable than those investment seminars. I got some interesting/inspirational stories that may push me to become more entrepreneurial than I might otherwise have been. The talks are all on youtube so you can judge for yourself. I particularly enjoyed chase adams talk.
So Google self driving cars run in a virtual environment prebuilt for them by their street view cars being manually driven, with sensor input to fill in the realtime data variables (people, other cars, traffic light state). Brilliant!
For what it's worth entrepreneur.com had London as #7 globally in the Top 20 Startup Ecosystems, the highest in Europe but well behind SV and Tel Aviv. http://www.entrepreneur.com/dbimages/article/the-worlds-20-h...
The other problem is that to prevent "shoe shining", you need a fast storage system to feed the tape drive. The somewhat slow LTO-4 HP 1760 I use has a sustained compressed (on the tape drive) speed of 160 MB/s, their a few hundred dollars more LTO-5 tape drive require 280 MB/s ... and apparently have two SAS ports. I can get by just fine with one Seagate 15K drive on another PCI-e card buffering the former, I think you'd need something more intense for LTO-5, I've read that no single hard drive can keep up with LTO-5 drives.
Unit testing is all about abstracting / mocking out all the modules connected to the unit you are testing & just test your unit.

If you are programming in python, http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/mock/ would be the most preferred way of mocking out other external units connected to your unit under test.

http://alexmarandon.com/articles/python_mock_gotchas/ should make you an expert on mocking
Saving Network Neutrality Will Require a Culture War on Corruption
http://jeffreifman.com/2014/05/05/its-time-for-a-populist-culture-war-on-corruption
Port of SGI ElectroPaint screensaver made via decompilation
Just another anecdote... when I passed Calc 225 my 1st semester my counselor informed me my math prerequisites were fulfilled(counting college prep in HS). She did not encourage me to consider pursuing further, just that I didn't need to take any more and focus on "business". Working PT/3rd shift & taking 19+ credits a semester I figured my path was paved in business so I took her advice...Until 2nd year, taking motherload of hard classes, I was informed she was incorrect & I had to take probability. I missed first the first week of class, assuming cakewalk, and never caught up. The dominoes fell from there, my GPA suffered & after 2 years of midnight merchandising I realized I did NOT want to work sales or anything remotely retail. After grad, I washed out of corp sales job & Merrill job in under 8 months. Went back to construction and the picture hasn't been especially rosy ever since. Cest la vie.

TLDR: Take the maths for the sake of knowledge, even if you don't 'have to'. It can't hurt.
I think you mean undercutting, or predatory pricing.

Price gouging is when you use a monopolisitic position to charge an unreasonably high amount.
It'd be nice if they poured even a few million of this new cash haul into their IntenseDebate blogging-comments service. That, or shut it down since support there is non-responsive.
95% of the best founders are outside the US? Really? if that were the case we'd have seen a lot more publicly traded companies of the size of Yahoo, Microsoft, Intel, eBay, etc. If it could have happened, it would have happened. We aren't even tapping the founder set we have in the US proportionally.

I applaud the concept of adding diversity to the pool (even-gasp! people with accents--) but I have a sneaking suspicion this is really about finding cheaper labor for the us based companies in the end. What investors are really going to put money into companies in countries in Africa and Asia where property rights, IP, and other laws don't protect companies as well as the US? What about places that demand even more corporate taxes? Color me skeptical.
If macros are used properly, they should make the code easier to read, not harder. If you can't figure out what it does from it's signature and docstring (maybe with a reference to some documentation for more complex or abstract things,) there's a problem. You shouldn't have to read a macro's definition to be able to use it.

Also, redefining a function should cause every function which directly references it to use the new version. You can sometimes run into issues if the functions are defined in separate namespaces or if the redefined function was passed to the other as a higher order function during the latter's definition.

If it's a macro you're redefining, yes you'll have to redefine functions which depend on it, but you should be defining too many macros.
Show HN: I open-sourced my iPhone app side project
The term is very loosely derived from the character from the book. Speaking as an American not given to hypersensitivity on this issue --- my immediate association was with the epithet. If I polled my block, which is majority African American, I'm guessing you'd get the same association from them. If you want to evoke the book in America, you probably use the whole title.

Not that there's anything wrong with the name, at least that I see. I'm just affirming the feedback you got previously. This isn't hypersensitivity; it's simply a cultural difference.

(PS: we chose the name "Matasano" for our software security firm because we gave up on naming and flipped through a list of cool-sounding plant names; turns out, in South America, a "Matasano" is an incompetent doctor.)

The best answer you could have given was, "it's from the name of our favorite Warrant song."
I did this for a UK-based defence company back in 2002. I used a single top mounted lens that was like a fisheye, but more so (that is, more than a hemisphere of view) with a helmet-mounted inertial box to track the direction of view the driver was looking in. The entire more-than-a-hemisphere of captured imagery was post-processed to match what the driver would see were the tank transparent in the direction he was looking. Lag was good enough that you could drive around a car park with it. Not quite so swish as this, true, but cost about the same back then as this does now (a few thousand all in for the single prototype - would have been much less in production). "See-through armour", as the phrase we used as the time had it. We had plans to fill in blind spots on request with additional cameras, and a recording was kept so that at a later time, someone could play back the tank's journey but look wherever they liked (we hypothesised sticking it on vehicles in hot places so that after a vehicle patrol anyone interest could have a good look at everything, or play back any incidents).

The UK MOD (or rather, one of their gatekeepers at the time) weren't interested so we binned it. I expect they were only interested in solutions costing millions of pounds. :)
Target is generally higher than Wal-Mart because a lot of the merchandise tends to be higher quality. With some items, though, price varies, and Target can be cheaper if there's a sale involved.
In a sense it already does: there were instances of Ingress players "moving" from place to place at 200km/h or so during rush hour in London.

IMHO it's better if developers know about fake data so they can factor them in, using plausibility checks. As is, they seem to assume that the data source is real.
On the other hand, Acetaminophen is used to supposedly make prescription painkillers less subject to abuse. I wonder how many people are killed by liver failure this way? That's pretty much intentionally killing people who could be put into addiction treatment.
I do this as well, because the cart has the property of notifying me of price changes of items saved in the cart. I'm actually not sure if wish lists do this as well, but as I am in the cart so often (shopping online as much as I do), it's easy for me to keep an eye on items that I might be hesitant about pulling the trigger on.
Not WordPress.org, WordPress.org is a separate open source project supported by the WordPress Foundation (http://wordpressfoundation.org/).

Yes there is some overlap in people involved but Automattic / WordPress.com and WordPress.org are separate things.
As a concrete example, you are warned not to use a bulk eraser on LTO tapes because they have servo tracks that will also get erased.

In the bad old days there were multi-platter disk drives that used e.g. the bottom surface for a servo track.
I disagree. This attitude...and teaching style often extend well into college.

I literally had a professor who read from the book for lecture and then did his tests out of the book. Granted, it's probably one of the best physics text books ever written (David Griffiths) but it's very, very difficult to learn this way. Students resort to memorization when they have no other options. Nearly every student could solve problems within a range of 'like' problems (change a variable or two, a power, etc.) but had no actual ability to solve truly unique equations in the subject or even formulate their own questions.

This was a 3rd year physics course at a top-50 school.
Full Crash Dumps: They’re Just a Few Gigs
Open Source Brain
For notes, I rely 100% on paper. I don't remember things as well when I type them out, and keeping it on paper gives me a sort of spatial awareness on where to find what I need.

However, with research papers now, I've started to use Mendeley. Imports downloaded pdfs and automatically has author, title etc filled in, can download pdfs from a number of the major publication websites and automatically add to your collection, allows sorting via author, year, etc., allows you to take notes and highlight, and has a search bar that searches through all of the papers you have. It additionally can keep your pdfs synced between computers, creates BibTex entries and I believe can help you find related papers, although I haven't used that function. It's a great way to keep semi-organized, and works a lot better than any file-naming system I've tried.
I liked one of the responses to the SO thread:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3755606/what-does-the-exc...

!function () {}()

This will also return the boolean opposite of the return value of the function, in this case true, because !undefined is true. If you want the actual return value to be the result of the call, then try doing it this way:

(function () {})()

Why would you ever not want the actual return value of a function to be the result of calling that function?
>Life is suffering regardless of your position in time and space
Is it though? I've lived several third world countries and a couple of first world countries. I know from first hand experience that life in rich countries is much much less suffering and is good 80% of the time whereas in third world countries is 80% suffering.

What is the point of our developments in science and technology if everyone is still suffering equally.
Why did you start using Swype if you didn't trust them in the first place? Of course your keyboard can log everything you type.
...the checkout experience at Walmart is usually abysmally slow (self-checkout makes is sometimes OK).

Checkout was why, when I last lived in densely-populated areas, I would put off the WalMart run until I absolutely had to go, for those things Target or other stores didn't carry. (Out here in the hinterland WalMart seems adequate.) It has been a few years, but in my experience self-checkout did not speed up the process. It seemed as if most of my fellow shoppers might have had better luck if they'd been asked to operate the Space Shuttle.
The Ever Increasing Size of Godzilla
On the contrary, it might just mean that their product is expanding beyond its original tech-centric customer base and is now reaching a much larger but less tech-savvy demographic as well.
> "lack of integrity in the press"

> "macRUMORS.com"
Someone didn't use exponential backoff perhaps?
Those look like dual GPS antennas.
The author has a strong point. There is a serious disconnect between "math" as it is taught up through high school and "math" as it is taught in college (and how it really is, as a subject).

"Math" in high school is about calculation. Math is about useful abstraction. Students are expected to jump that gap on their own, without any outside help. At the same time as being expected to learn some concepts that are actually fairly difficult in their own right.

God help any students that have a full math professor teaching freshman calculus---the lectures will be about proofs while the homework and tests will be about calculated answers.
Three Musts to Retaining Superstar Talent
I appreciate the idea of making startup school a more global event. Frankly speaking for a lot of entrepreneurs making a trip to the bay area can be a substantial dent on their pockets.
I attended the previous year's startup school and the experience and outcomes was phenomenal.
I hope the quality of speakers continues to maintain the current high standards and provide deep and much needed insight.
I disagree. The US has already built all this cable and telecom infrastructure (only ~50% of the UK has access to cable, which is way lower than the US).

The expensive part - digging the road and laying the physical cable - is already done, and was done 30+ years ago in many cases. These assets have been paid for.

The high internet prices in the US are down to terrible regulation. While there are many things that the EU hasn't done well, it has really nailed telecom (both fixed and cellular) regulation.
> The scale of operations of the 100kgal/day site would vastly exceed the available onboard space available within any existing warship -- you'd need a floating platform of some sort dedicated to the task.

How do they compare to the space available inside and on top of the latest post-Panamax container ships? Even having a handful of ships like that (with their own nuclear reactors) trailing after the carrier to supply the requirement might be somewhat viable.
Not quite true that VDSL interleaving can't be turned off. BT's line management software will adjust the interleaving depth, which can vary from quite a lot to not much at all depending on line quality and noise.
Analysis of Reddit's ad inventory
One of the most important products to happen to marketers in a long, long time. Congratulations guys! I love your product and find it incredibly easy to use.
The update dialog should also be displayed upon opening the Play Store app, but yes I agree.

The user should be given the option to upgrade the moment an app requests a feature not provided by the current Google Play Services version.
Maybe it will drive credit card companies to start implementing chips. One can dream ...

Travelling to Europe without such cards is extremely painful.
The Alexandria Police Department is taking pictures of everyone’s cars
Exit strategy?
What happens today if an app requires address book access but the user has an empty address book?

What happens today if an app requires calendar access but the user has never added anything to the calendar?

What happens today if an app requires location but the user is out of both GPS coverage and wi-fi range?

App Ops should simply be passing apps the results of the above cases when denying them to a an app built for the current Android permissions system.
I find at times like this, it's good to offer an alternative perspective as well, as public criticism of a product can be easy to take personally.

For what it's worth, I found the product incredibly intuitive and very easy to setup. (This was 2 years ago, and the product was young, so I don't know what new features, read complexity, have been introduced to the product.)