skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Several of the comments here have asked how we compare the United States "top" students to students from other countries. The TIMSS tests (a different data set, also based on international sample surveys with consistent methodologies among countries) suggest that there is a lot more "top" in some countries than in others. Take a look at the very well constructed data chart "Distribution of Mathematics Achievement" for eighth graders in Exhibit 1.2 of Chapter 1 of the TIMSS report from the 2011 testing round.[1]

This issue is familiar to Americans like me who have lived overseas and have learned the local language of another country and have read the math textbooks available there. Better instruction can produce better educational results--and for less money besides. The top student issue is illustrated also by results from the International Mathematical Olympiad[2] and other international academic competitions. The United States has a huge population base, and it has many families in which the children are brought up by parents who are first-generation immigrants who received their own primary and secondary educations in other countries. (Such children do conspicuously well in academic competitions in the United States.) And the United States is wealthy, a heritage from the good governance structure set up by the United States federal Constitution. But even at that, the United States national team can be beat at the International Mathematical Olympiad by countries that have many fewer people and much poorer economies. Some countries have a very impressive group of top students.

Is America rich enough that many young people here feel they can be complacent about their futures? Sure it is. But isn't it an especially good use of wealth to gain more knowledge and more ability to make the world better for everyone? Why can't the young people of the United States grow up with a sense of purpose about improving themselves and the world around them, as earlier generations of Americans apparently did?

As to the public policy point, Minnesota (where I live) was the first state in the United States to have public school open enrollment, the first to have any charter schools (and it still has more charter school places per capita than most states), and the first state to have a comprehensive, state-funded program to allow dual enrollment in colleges or universities by students completing the last two years of high school.[3] (We also have a flexible homeschooling statute, which I take advantage of as a parent.) Even at that, we here in Minnesota have a long way to go to reach the level of the top-performing countries. But any state that doesn't have as much flexibility in schooling choices for families needs to follow Minnesota's example right away. More choice and flexibility in the state education system is definitely a good idea and worth imitating in the other states in the United States.

[1] http://timssandpirls.bc.edu/timss2011/downloads/T11_IR_M_Cha...

(You can also download the full report for more context, but that download is slower.)

[2] http://www.imo-official.org/

[3] http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/CollReadi/PSEO/
This is the most succinct explanation I have seen, most attempts make people's eyes glaze over from specifics.
That's a great idea to handle those sorts of edge cases.
'It's going great' Decoding the biggest lie in startups
GitHub testing new Issues-like Discussions feature?
Specifically, note that mistaken use of `=` vs. `==` is impossible in Rust regardless of this proposal, since:

1. assignment is an expression that returns nil

2. `if` expressions require their conditions to evaluate to boolean

3. no types can be implicitly coerced to boolean

An example:

fn main() {
let mut x = 2;
if x = 4 {} // error: mismatched types: expected `bool` but found `()`
}
Brutal. Hilarious. Some good points. Some dumb ones (they don't seem to understand how important failure is and why it's good to share your failures). Their mockery is actually quite diverse.

===SV Celebrity Worship===

"Why Elon Musk is the most perfect human being alive today"

===Political===

"A Heart Divided: How a gay JavaScript programmer feels about Brendan Eich"

"Please don't mention Condoleezza Rice. Our autism is above politics."

"10 ways we unknowingly oppress female programmers and enforce patriarchy"

===Juvenile Cliq===

"Reasons why this <obscure new non-stable language that can't even compile™ yet> will replace C as a system language and why you SHOULD use it if you don't want to be left in the dust."

"Why we switched to [obscure framework] and you should too."

===HN flaws===

"<userX>, you seem to be hellbanned for no reason."

===Feel Good Superior Heroism===

"Check out this TED talk about teaching node.js to kids in Africa."

===Love of Javascript===

"Have you heard about our Lord and Saviour JavaScript?"

"How to touch yourself at night without JavaScript knowing it."

"Breaking news! POP3 and IMAP written in Javascript!"

"How I ported the control software of a nuclear reactor to reactive Javascript"

"Linux kernel ported to JavaScript running in the browser. See how we did it."

"How I made a filesystem in javascript."

"How I got my girlfriend pregnant using JavaScript."

"How to avoid getting HIV using JavaScript."

"The Linux kernel doesn't have enough javascript."

"I recommended my boss to rewrite the local powergrid infrastructure to javascript and how I lost my job."
College students flock to computer science(1985)
Nope. I'm using ownCloud now on a VPS. Dropbox worked hard to lose my business, and I hate to see hard work go to waste.
Agreed. It drives me nuts how much Safari, Mac Notepad, and Skype try and do this for me. So many technical terms are corrected to nonsensical words as I'm typing, with little or no notice. It's ironic to me, because I have to proofread my comments and technical documents more now than I ever did before spellchecking was integrated.
I think placing the onus on google for this is the wrong precedent and I think it speaks to the public and the court's misunderstanding of what a search engine does.

If this man had problems with his debts being online, he should have contacted/sued the sites which displayed this data. This is like suing TV Guide because there's a show on tv that is offensive to you.
US overtakes France as world's biggest wine market
I believe this is the final level of appeals, and the only option for changing the ruling is to make new law.
Ah, so you're speculating. Why is your speculation any different or any better than my speculation?
Images like this are created due to bug in our JPG decompression algorithm — I like this one and put it as a post title photo. =))
From what people tend to elaborate on what they mean by homogeneity, it seems that it tends to boil down to "has a very large percentage of white people"...
can we get a link to your book?

I'm thinking about digging into Go soon.
Fantastic. Great answer and now much clearer to me. Thanks! (both of you ;)
I went ahead and published Python code to generate fake webhook requests. See https://github.com/dropbox/dropbox_hook.
If BIND is fairly vulnerable, why does everyone say it's the best/de-facto standard in Linux/DNS Servers? It's as if you use BIND & only BIND. Is it really that bad underneath?
<reply from relatively new user that'll get voted down>
Wonder what Brendan Eich would have thought of this.
Many thanks! (to both of you ;)
Autodesk announces new 3D printer and open platform
I doubt $200 will get you an invite to the wedding of a Senator's son. Those are the types of connections I'm talking about. Not a phone number or address.
You're right; that seems to be the way these people think.

But still, I have an answer for them:

> Why would they [give some thought to beginners]?

Because they want there to be a next generation of OpenGL experts.

Once upon a time there was OpenGL and there was DirectX, and an awful lot of people chose DirectX. Today every week brings a new API/framework/language. Most of these quickly die a well deserved death, but some don't. The competition for developer mindshare is fierce. Why not target beginners?

The answer seems to be that they wanted the API to be cleaner and easier to implement. Starting with GL 3.0 they've been tossing out the old cruft to get a more focused, streamlined API.

That sounds good, but I think it's idiotic. Everyone still implements glBegin anyway. The ARB's approach has made the maintenance of API implementations more complicated, not less.
<Irrelevant circumstantial evidence based on a single experience>
Really, this is an age-old problem. Journalists have had to deal with this for years. The general consensus was that if it's true, tough crap. The difference between journalism and google is that anybody can google someone. Journalists generally had to spend a lot of time digging up someone's past. The "problem" is just how efficient Google (and other web crawlers) have been at aggregating data. And I'm kind of on the fence about that
Claiming that rentals don't make sense in the digital age is focusing far too heavily on the technical fact of how digital data works, and completely ignoring the legality of things, including intellectual property.

If I make a movie and sell you a DVD, the terms of the sale prohibit you from, say, showing this movie in a theater to a bunch of strangers and charging them money. Yes, you own the physical DVD, but you don't own the intellectual property of the movie itself. This holds true for physical copies, and it holds true for digital distribution as well. You are purchasing the right to personal use of the movie (i.e. viewing), and that's it.

If you want to e.g. show it in a theater (whether or not you're charging admission), you have to purchase that right separately. And that costs a lot more.

In the case of rentals, the company that is doing the rentals pays for the privilege of renting out the movie, and the cost they pay is predicated on concurrent access to the movie being limited.

When it comes to digital rentals, limiting concurrent access to the digital movie file doesn't make sense. Users who rent things digitally expect there to be no wait. But in turn, they're only given access for a limited time. For iTunes, that's 30 days since you paid for the rental, and then only 24 hours since you started actually watching it. You can't rent a movie on iTunes and watch it every day for a month, because you don't have that legal right. You must pay for that privilege, which is to say, you must buy the digital movie.

For Netflix, the limited access to the movie is gated by you having an active Netflix subscription. The moment you stop paying for Netflix, you no longer have access to the movie. This again makes perfect sense, since you're paying Netflix for the right to access all of their streaming movies for the duration of your active membership. You are not paying for completely unrestricted access.

Unfortunately, due to the nature of digital content, the only way to actually enforce these legal restrictions is by use of DRM. It sucks, but it's a fact of life. This is true for rentals, and it's generally true for purchases as well.
The tools installed by pip won't usually work with the old versions of Python found by default on some systems. They break because they want a new Python feature, and that makes you want to upgrade and that... you can't do that because it will break dependencies at system level.

And then you want to install a new Python side by side and you sort of do that but /usr/bin/python still points to the old version and you have to be explicit with /usr/bin/python2.6 in your scripts. But then some scripts will work and some still don't and you make /usr/bin/python point to /usr/bin/python2.6 and now you really broke yum.

And all you can do now is hate python because it gave you all these problems.
GitHub is not just hosted git. There are other features like the issue tracker, pull requests, editing files and committing from the browser, etc.

Also, if e.g. a research group already has a GitHub organization with their open source work (many do), then it's reasonable for them to want private repos under the same umbrella so that they can collaborate using the same tools irrespective of whether the work is open yet.
To better understand the project check out the commit history

https://github.com/markjaquith/BetterBible/commits/master/bo...

-11. And the angel of the LORD called unto him out of heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, Here [am] I.

-12. And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only [son] from me.

+11. And the angel of the LORD whose name was Ashton Kutcher called unto him out of heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, Here [am] I.

+12. And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for I was pulling thine leg. Thou art Punk'd.
I thought there was something going on with Python v2 & v3 that would solve all of this? Then v3 was shelved or something? I saw an older post here on YC about it, but it was above me since I'm mostly a Windows admin :(
The old machine is probably less likely to fail than a newer one. I know of many machines which are still running today that are 10+ years old.

Survivorship bias, sure, but if his writing machine has lasted this long, it's well on the "will last even longer" side of the bell curve.
I bet they don't fail at Minecraft.
First, it's not a precedent, Google filters search results to comply with the law in pretty much every jurisdiction, in Europe they are already filtering Maps to comply with local individual privacy law.

In the US these are frequently DMCA requests, and in Europe frequently anti-hate requests. In Europe they simply have found a more expansive view of privacy than that of the US.

If there's a precedent here it's a pretty minor one.
I am glad they don't give thoughts to beginners.

Low Level Graphics APIs are about perf and giving as much access as possible to the hardware in as much as possible a cross platform way.

It's called layering. Let OpenGL focus on the lowest level. Use other libraries for higher levels.

People learning should choose what the right level for them is. Whether it's starting with Unity3D or Unreal and not worrying about the low level details, or going slightly lower level with some other library.

Adding more high-level beginner friendly features to OpenGL is the worst possible thing you could do. It clutters the API and needlessly brings all kinds of baggage with it.

For those who do want to learn though I'd suggest starting with WebGL. It's way way easier. You don't have to deal with all the system specific setup. You don't have deal with figuring out how to get some image loading library to compile and link. If you want to get started instantly use [three.js](http://threejs.org) or if you want to understand how it works try [WebGL Fundamentals](http://greggman.github.io/webgl-fundamentals/)

BTW: Those fundamentals, could easily be adapted to C/C++ and current GL.
> why would renting cost any different than buying?

So that you can segment the buyers into two: Those who want to see a movie only once and those who want to see it more than once. This way, you can double charge the second segment and use those funds to reduce the price for the first segment. Classic market segmentation.

As long as there are customers of both kind, rentals (even for digital goods) will make sense.
If you're polling client-side for a single account, you should just be using longpoll_delta[1] and delta[2]. But maybe I misunderstood the use case?

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/developers/core/docs#longpoll-delta

[2] https://www.dropbox.com/developers/core/docs#delta
Think of DH key agreement, for example (although this is not precise). Once the agreement has been reached you might "verify" the sender by asking him the key (if he knows it, he is the sender) but you cannot create any binding "signed" certification that he is the sender (knowing a secret you already know is not a signature, you might have faked the communication).
>There is completely no need to prevent users from retaining a copy once they watched it.

For Netflix there's one big reason to: PROFIT
It's very important that users be able to disable ALL of this functionality with a simple compiler flag. Not just disabling it in the process.

We've seen the failure of "sandboxing" over and over again, and especially with a closed-source, certain-to-be-compromised payload, it's guaranteed that at some point it will be breached.
"We’re building a platform ourselves, and we work hard to ensure that Stripe treats businesses of all size neutrally."

Since they set up the comparison themselves, I wonder if Stripe would be in favor of legislation that forced them to forever treat all their customers neutrally vs. us just trusting them to "work hard to ensure" that end. Perhaps making it illegal to offer sweetheart deals to bigger clients for example? Arguably payments is the next most fundamental piece to a functioning internet after bandwidth, so its not unreasonable to request. If MegaCorp A received much lower rates on credit card processing than little Startup B, how could we have fair competition after all?
I use QtCurve. Will give try to others you mentioned. I like Qt5 theme too, however never tried hard enough to see how to enable it as my KDE widget set (don't see it in system settings). Can you tell how?

I'm generally happy with base apps. Its just the other apps like Kopete, Kmail etc. Though its been very long, so there must be good improvement there.
Judd is deeply stupid.

So… greedy companies “might” restrict us from things, or they “might”
prioritize content delivery to the highest payer.

in the sense that they are (to also use stupid quotes) "already" doing "just that"

Further:

One problem with the diagram above is that our homes are not connected to
just one big ISP. The FCC’s own data shows that as of June 2008, 98 percent
of zip codes have at least 2 broadband providers, and 88% of zip codes have
at least 4 broadband providers

oh, wow, two (maybe four) isps! Ignoring, of course, that for most of us there are only two (cable + telephone) and everyone else has to pay to run on those wires. And for many, telephone line delivered internet is very slow, so now we're down to one actual isp.

And comcast costs $65/mo where I live for just internet. And they're looking at neflix and google and all those other internet businesses and chomping at the bit to steal some money from them.

Also, weirdly enough, my internet bill keeps going up but the speed doesn't. Feel the competition!
You seem not to have not only read the article, but not read the title of the article. The entire point is that not only are US children of parents with low parental education behind countries like Portugal, Estonia etc., but US children of parents with high parental education are behind Portugal, Estonia etc.

The analysis of this study dovetails with other analysis of PISA rankings, about how the top 10% of students in Japan and Korea have significantly better math proficiency than the top 10% of math students in the US, how their top 20% is better than the US's top 20%.

This is what the data says and the analysis of the data. The typical reaction is of your type - you don't even read the article title, assume it is saying average rankings are below, and repeat the Panglossian idea that the US children of the well-educated who are ahead of most US students are on top of the world, or near it. The data shows otherwise. Even non-stringent observation shows otherwise, if you take a look around at who is getting doctorates in mathematics and the like at top American universities.
In part, this is due to the fact that features were added to the protocol as needed - or as it seemed necessary at the moment. I don't think anyone is to blame, the whole Internet grew like that.
"We’re building a platform ourselves, and we work hard to ensure that Stripe treats businesses of all size neutrally."

One assumes larger customers get more favorable processing rates than smaller customers. So if two services do largely the same thing and both use Stripe and one is substantially larger than the other then I suspect Stripe is directly, even if inadvertently, favoring one over the other. Stripe's in the payments business and they favor one set of customers over the other based on their size and pricing power.

My issue isn't with Stripe. It's with the language around net neutrality. Basically 1000+ entrepreneurs and VC's who generally bemoan all things government are now asking that this area be protected from market forces. Very awkward. Any half way decent free market economist will tell you that every non Netflix user is subsidizing the crap out of Netflix users under the current set up and that's not very free marketish.
Typically I'm very anti-regulation -- but it seems proven ISP's need to be regulated to some degree. An ISP should do nothing more (or less) than just pass data from point A to point B (aka. "dumb pipes"). We are in the Information Age and unhindered access to information should be a commodity.

It's a conflict of interest to be both an ISP and a content provider.
"Gonzalez had his home repossessed 16 years ago. If you Google his name, you can still see newspaper stories about his debts. 'It hurts my reputation,' he says in Spanish. 'My debts are long paid, but those links were the first thing you'd see.'"

Congratulations, Mr. Gonzalez; now when people Google your name, your reputation won't only be defined by your foreclosure and past financial troubles--which is now discussed in 10,000+ articles (good luck with those takedown requests!)--but also for being the jerk who killed the internet for Europe.

You have to appreciate the irony...
The series actually suffer from... feature creep.

He wrote the start, with a ending in mind (that he still wants to reach), and he was supposed to write three books.

The problem is that when he ended the first book, the story had not advanced enough already.

Then when he ended the second book, the story had not advanced enough AND he created lots of unplanned characters and stuff.

When he tried writing the third book, he decided to "hack", or rather have a five year timeskip.

Except he noticed that all the new unplanned characters and stuff introduced meant he would have to figure what everyone did during the timeskip... And he could not, because they were unplanned in first place, and he could not figure how to write toward the ending without plot holes.

So he decided to not do a timeskip.

The result was that the book he was outlining as the third book now started to look like a ridiculous humongous tome, so he decided to divice the third book in two books that happen in parallel.

Those two books are relased, and now he promised everyone that in the next two books he will tie up plot points and characters, not open more... Let's see if he can resist the urge of the feature and scope creep :P (well, as a coder I can say that resisting the urge to finish features and fix bugs before making another yet cool shiny feature is something kinda hard :P)
Can anyone reverse engineer this piece of JS malware?
Show HN: WebFundamentals – A handbook for multi-device web best practices
Sadly I'd choose comcast over ATT. Let's hope we have more options than that in the future though.
Sure, but re-encoding will degrade the quality. It's much better to just strip the DRM.
> Article is from 2011, but still pertinent.

Except for the whole part where what he decries as non-existent (ISPs slowing down traffic for non-payers) which thus does not need regulating is happening right now.
A Substitute for Dogfooding
> Simple solution to a complex problem.

Anytime you think you have a simple solution to a complex problem, you probably don't understand the problem.
???

You lost me on that one.

This really isn't about politics... since both Democrat and Republican states seem pretty much bad. I think this may be more indicative of a reticence, on a societal level, to value education.