skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's unclear to me what the problem is that this teacher encountered. The students were given an exercise to learn something. They wanted to validate whether they learned something, by validating their solution. This could be achieved by reaching agreement with other students or by asking the teacher. So the problem is that only that ne was unclear that they were supposed to reach agreement instead of asking nir?
For me, practical applications of math are about understanding how a system works. More often than not, it really doesn't matter what the exact number is that comes out the end (the precision is often beyond my ability to act), but rather the understanding that well, if I take this action, these other things are going to happen at about this magnitude, so I need to offset them by doing something else, etc. etc.
He's not upset because they want to know if they're right, he's upset because they just grab some options, throw them together, and check with him. There's no thought going into it and I'm sure if you ask the kids why they chose the locations they did, they'll have no response.

I recently graded some of the math final tests for my wife's second grade class, and the students who are doing well all did well because they extracted the parts from the problem that were required (even simple things like how many jugs of milk are shown below), while the students with a history of not doing so good in math instead picked numbers off the paper and either added or subtracted them, assuming they just needed an answer. There was no thought about the process, just the end result. Got some numbers? Good enough.
This is just another Common Core hit piece. More subtle than most I've seen, but the story only has one point: Common Core is bad, because standardized testing of students promotes rote learning in schools. I don't agree with this, but I hope it helps you understand the article.
Amen. Standing up, walking, biking, roller skating, skateboarding, boxing, hot-air ballooning, ...something different!... can be a big help. We are not robots.
Very interested but the page never renders...
Morningstar Acquires HelloWallet For $52.5 Million
This is amazing. I only had read about it but this one gives a first hand perspective. Hats off to the team! Can someone point to the algorithm/exact technology used in this? Would love to read more about the technology.
We just got approved to enter Startup Chile. Now we need your help.
We just got the news we were approved to join Startup Chile's 10th round.
But there's something bothering us and we want to hear what you guys think.
When we filled the application form, we had one idea. Now, a few months later, we are being accelerated in Startup Farm, a 5-week Brazilian acceleration program, with another idea (yet the same name - Yoozon).
The idea approved to join Startup Chile is: "Host websites using Dropbox".
The idea we are working right now is: "Analytics for Project Managers".

The former is sexy. The later isn't.

We have already worked 3 weeks on the Analytics idea, validating our market and getting to a viable market-pain that we can heal. We don't have any code yet in this idea.

On the other hand, we didn't validate our market with the Dropbox idea, but we already have a [micro] MVP.

What do you guys think?

This is a broad question and that's the idea. We want to discuss the whole idea regarding the direction we should go now.

Any help will be much appreciated.
If I were a teacher/professor, the words "Will it be on the test" would be criterion for an an F, or a detention, or something along those lines. But somehow we've codified that mentality into law? Jesus.

We've broken school by making it all about getting a piece of paper with a number on it, rather than by being about being able to do things better each day. Learning is about answering "Can you do more, or do things better today than you did yesterday?" Repeat this process and eventually you're good at things.
I'm still mesmerized - the technology behind the site and the the beauty of nature. I will never make it there in my life - but being able to appreciate it almost in first person, makes me so happy. The sound of the wind adds another dimension.

Would have been so cool if I could send this to my Geography teacher in my school 15 years back. She is probably still drawing bergschrund, crevasses, gorges in a blackboard with chalk.
Hardly any math has a correct sequence of steps. (Unless you meant a sequence of correct steps?)
The point of the lesson/activity is to evaluate whether the students understand that 1/8, 0.35 and 50% are comparable things. It wouldn't be a great idea to assume that the preponderance of 7th graders have mastered this.

If you click through to the pdf, the language in the standards is more careful, so it's a little easier to make sense of.
Registering a SaaS company(startup) in India
Nope, seen many examples of this recently (but I'm a web developer, and we usually pass around links to the latest and greatest). Of course, I can't think of one off the top of my head now...
Haha.. spot on. We need to coin a new phrase here. Thanks for the kind words on the story.
Learned Ada in '80 at university, so the compiler cost was not a factor. Like many others in the UK I did not have a computer at home.
Sure, it might sound crazy, but I've met plenty of programmers who were proud of using tools that make them do lots of extra work. It is a skill, even if it's not the most cost-effective way to get a working product.
Subgraph OS: Adversary-resistant computing platform
I contract for a media company that handles (and cleanses) PII (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personally_identifiable_inform...). We take this information very seriously. We could give a shit about who you are, we just want you to become the same anonymous number for tracking reasons. Why is this such a big deal? AT WORST you'd get ads actually targeted to your interests instead of bullshit ads you can't click through (see: YouTube). Perhaps I'm sort of less sensitive to this since my first name and last name is a primary key to me (there is nobody else with my name combo on the planet, meaning I'm horribly googleable already).
What Julien laments is strange to many people. I found this behavior unexpected and hackish when I first heard about it. Now, after thinking about some of the implications for users and other applications, I'm not sure I have a firm opinion about it.

Yes, it is a pain for third-party apps doing logins or password recovery. That said, it would be possible handle gmail addresses as a special case, which I admit is annoying from a software developer perspective.

But we build tools, supposedly, to please customers, right? What do the customers want? From a user perspective, what Google is doing may be best. It is, after all, consistent with Postel's law / the robustness principle:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle
YesWeCode: a national initiative to teach coding to 100,000 kids
Hm... reading-in the src from the command looks a little brittle, but it's a must try. The makefile will also help with the need to compile 3 times with latex.
Thank you, yes, it is my first and only foray into javascript. I found that it was consistently difficult to give people good visual ideas of what I'm talking about when I make claims like the one above. Particularly the lumens to watt conversion really helps people grasp better the idea of perceptual brightness, and also why when you're using fluorescent paints it's the power emitted instead of the lumens emitted that are important.
The only numbers I've seen are from the Spring 2013 Gamification course. 68% of the signature track students earned a verified certificate. (That's not quite what you asked but it's probably the only meaningful way to measure completion.) Other statistics associated with the class were fairly typical of MOOCs so I assume that's a reasonable ballpark to assume for MOOCs generally.
> If I were a teacher/professor, the words "Will it be on the test" would be criterion for an an F, or a detention, or something along those lines.

So I assume you're not giving tests then? Because jesus, if you are, and those tests are consequential to the kids future, that's a pretty damn relevant and reasonable question. (Also: seriously, you'd punish a kid for asking a question?)

The only way that attitude even remotely makes sense is if your students are there voluntarily, but lets be real: they're probably not. Either they're forced to be there (K-12), or they're compelled to be there for job prospects (college). You're probably lucky if even %10 are there because they want to be there.
A couple features of start-ups:

1. Many-hat-wearing. People adapt to the jobs that need to get done, and there is little or no supervisory hierarchy.

2. Possibility of exponential growth.

I'd say if both of those things vanish, then it's either because the business failed, or stopped being a start-up and is now a mature business.
RE: <The guy built a model, in excel>

Do you have a template of that model?
My point - and I could have expressed this more clearly, granted - was that you have one class for doing the numbers (the boring stuff), and one for doing more theory and explorative stuff. I did not want to imply that calculus and linear algebra are boring by themselves. In practice, linear algebra is not at all taught in school, people are just forced to train a few landmark calculations (gauss algorithm, etc.) as fast as they can.

What I would very much like to see is that people get a good unterstanding of essential concepts, kernel, image, projections, etc.

As you mention, calculating is important, and thats why I propose two classes, one being about calculating, one being about the theory, in practice with the focus on _results_ in school, the conceptual part is left behind.
Even within a company, this is largely a function of what your project is, and how your boss treats you. If the project is challenging, new (no historical shit to clean up) and your boss takes good care of you, yes, great fun it is
Also, it is annoying that this non-standard choice by Gmail puts other companies and services into the position of (a) surprising and maybe disappointing users with behavior different than Gmail or (b) behaving in the same way as Gmail by disregarding dots in gmail accounts.
Math has right answers, but there isn't anyone to tell you what they are. Most of the time you're doing math for real, when you get an answer the next step can't be to check the authoritative answer. The next step has to be something like checking with additional [mathematical] reasoning, running an experiment, (if you're doing math about the world), or consulting with your peers.
> People claim that startups work you hard, I personally don’t see it. From people I’ve talked to, I’d say 50 hour weeks are average. That’s about what you see in corporate America these days.

If you're working at an early stage startup then in general nobody should "work you" at all, rather you'll work yourself 60+hours a week because you ACTUALLY HAVE SIGNIFICANT EQUITY in the company and therefor you want to see it grow quickly.

In a corporate environment you don't have any "skin in the game" so to speak so there's no incentive to push yourself.

If you're working at an early stage startup and you don't have significant equity then you're doing it wrong.
You hear about this all the time these days. Is this issue prevalent in all schools now from public to private and low to high socioeconomic status?
My son's elementary school homework this week included, after a series of arithmetic exercises involving adding pairs of even numbers, this sequence of questions:

What happens when you add together two even numbers?
Is that true for all even numbers?
Why?

Part of me was overjoyed to see an actual mathematical question being posed, but... what exactly was my second grader son expected to write under the 'why' part of the worksheet? There was a couple of inches of blank space left for him to fill in his answer. Is the teacher going to read his answer there and mark is right or wrong and hand back the homework? I don't know if I have much hope that this will be used by the teacher to gauge each child's understanding in order to facilitate further classroom discussion. Have the kids been taught a particular explanation in class which the homework is expecting them to reproduce? What is the teacher's goal in sending home this question as an exercise?

The fact that two even numbers always add up to an even number, as do two odd numbers, is an interesting insight into the shape and flavor of numbers. It gives you a practical tool - you can use this knowledge to parity check mental calculations and intuitively reject wrong answers - as well as an insight into the idea that esoteric mathematical properties numbers have can have interesting consequences when they interact, which is kind of the essence of a lot of mathematical thinking.

Is that always true?
Why?

are probably the most important questions in mathematics. But... I have no idea how you teach that, except by having a one one one conversation with each student about it. I don't think you can get much value out of asking them on a single page worksheet and sending it home as homework, though.
It may be an unpopular opinion on HN, but I would urge you to seek meaning in your life in something more fundamental than your career. Once you find your identity in something more important (God, family, relationships... don't hate, HN ;) ), it's actually easier to make an objective decision about what to do for a living. It makes it easier to take intermediate steps (unfulfilling in the short-term) between what's available and what the future may hold. I would even dare to say that it makes you more adventurous in your career because failure in your career no longer equals failure in life. You are not your code.

The perfect job isn't always on your doorstep, and it doesn't define the rest of your future. For my first job after school, I was writing enterprise APIs in old, deprecated languages for a large insurance company, and I had the same fears you do. However, I am now working at a cutting-edge startup writing Android apps. They were smart enough to see potential in me rather than a collection of acronyms and technologies on my resume. Working hard is important no matter where you are. Showing genuine interest in the startup is also huge.
Your questions are on discrete probabilities with knowable objective answers (cards/coins/dice), but the teacher also needs to teach the sense that there are continuous probabilities with fuzzy subjective answers (weather/real life events).

This may be one source of the teacher's frustration: most likely the students are answering the question "what's the probability of rain tomorrow?" as though they are guessing the teacher's password "umm... is it 0.5?", as the teacher has effectively taught them to, when in fact they are being asked to have their own opinion.
One key difference from other "let's get people coding" initiatives is that YesWeCode targets low-opportunity youth.

> There are currently 300+ coding and computer education programs serving youth in America. Of the 300+, less than 13% target low-opportunity youth. With our involvement, these small but mighty groups could grow stronger -- and their number could grow exponentially.
Where the emphasis is on discussion and understanding each others feelings.

>We brought it back together as a whole class to follow it up and each group shared the most interesting conversation that they had.

Where's the part about explaining a correct methodology and the correct answer? I don't believe that rote memorization is the right way to teach math, but discussion and actual understanding are not the same thing. Discussion can LEAD TO understanding, but should not be mistaken for understanding.
Certainly people with 'turing' in their user names. I would have guessed.
I'd wager that you're in the small minority here.

I've gone through a number of MOOC courses and structure, schedule, TA interaction and shared experience seem pretty important to most enthusiastic / best performing course takers.

Some courses, like CS50 are already completely self-paced. Others run quite frequently, restart every month.

Being able to have it all in terms of TA/instructor support and an arbitrary schedule seems to be the direction Udacity is going with subscriptions.

I do agree that being to easily grab some/all course materials at once would a nice option. However, I've completed a majority of the work for my courses offline and only one had its coursework structure in a way that necessitated a frequent connection to complete.
The bang path and "store and forward protocol" bit probably refers to mail routing in the UUCP days: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Mail_routing
Google and “the right to be forgotten”.
Kids do what they're told. Problem is there are several types of learning. Among them are skill learning and another is exploratory learning.

For much of education's history - we teach skills. That we can test easily. That's fine - kids need skills. We also need to teach creative and exploratory thinking. But teachers must tell the kids to be mindful when they are working exploration mode.

Perhaps mornings are skill learning and afternoons are creative/exploratory. Perhaps you can test exploratory skills but don't ever give an evaluation to it back to the child - as they probably won't get evaluation for it in the real world.

In exploratory learning - you will need to test or check your own work. These kids need to learn that. There may not be one right answer - but a person should be able to evaluate their own hypothesis and not get upset if they're wrong. That is a life skill we could all use. Why do we have grade it anyway - a teacher can see when a kid is slacking off and grade on that.
Lucky you! I spent the first decade or so of my professional life buying machines + software just trying to keep up with the world, I barely ate in those days. (the downsides of not finishing school...)
Are these creations manipulations of binary trees?
I think it's more a matter of expectations. I've worked OT non comp places that will still expect you to do hotseat outside of hours, deal with fires, or regularly come in early/stay late "lest you look like a slacker." This often isn't even institutionalized, but just some sort of weird culture that's built up around time spent "looking busy" corresponding in some inane way to being a productive employee. If you're making the choice yourself, fine. But if you're being pressured to work past that boundary, it may be as the parent poster said, a canary, if not for the whole company, but how the company culture will play in concert with your own personal choices/life balance.
Wat zijn de beste manieren om te stoppen met roken?
There's a story that the Sun486i, which went as far as a small pre-production batch, was vetoed by the internal SPARC types in part because it was faster than what they were delivering at the time, so the company didn't followup on the wildly popular Sun386i....

On the other hand, you're comparing a 1991 or earlier SPARC chip with the late 1992 486/66. Weitek offered their own after market clock doubled SPARC POWER µP, although I'm not sure it gained as much as the clock doubled 486.

The Solaris story on x86 was poor, indeed: in 1999 I set up a x86 machine with a removable hard drive so it could run the various operating systems our customers used, Solaris was the only OS we couldn't get running on it (and I first bare metaled a UNIX(TM) system in 1981 (sic) so I don't it was our fault). One or two BSDs including the commercial one, Linux, forget what else, but not Solaris.

Then again, as I note plenty of people were willing to run another OS on Sun x86 hardware, but couldn't buy it.

And echoing your other Java comments, a 2001 project I was involved in, running on SPARC hardware, dropped the idea of using Java because the SPARC implimentation at the time was too buggy.

As for their closing down their free C complier, I myself never found it difficult to get GCC running on a SPARC machine through the '90s. But, yeah, that added a barrier.
If you remember them, please post here... I am surprised there is so little interactive HTML5-MP4 examples right now.
Yes, you always have to be aware of the current visa situation. For back-packers, it's been very popular to get a tourist visa and just cross the border back and forth once every month to get it extended. But lately the government started parsing new laws to try and close this loophole.

I'm not exactly sure what the new rules are, but it's something you have to be aware of before moving here. We are on a visa where we "only" have to cross the border every 3 months, and the new rules doesn't yet apply to people arriving via plane, so so far this haven't been an issue for us (it's easy and recommendable to get cheap plane tickets to the neighbouring countries and combine it with an extended weekend and some sightseeing while you're at it).

Do a Google search or check out this popular forum for the latest on Thai visas: http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/forum/1-thai-visas-residency-a...
Braggadacio, information control, and fear
Amazon remembers Maya Angelou
This is a nice description. For me, working at a mega-corp is like living in a city. There are people who take my garbage away and keep the barbarians out. I don't have to do those things, so I can focus on what I enjoy: Developing new technologies, for which I'm rewarded. I've set myself up as a sort of entrepreneur living in this city, where I can take on more speculative projects, but at no risk to my own money.

I make damn sure that what I'm taking away is not only money, but also learning, even if it's at some cost to the efficiency of any particular project. And should I ever get into a start-up, I'll benefit from having observed the inner workings of a business from end to end.
Not true at all. You can always look for projects that interest you and start to contribute: browse github and knock yourself out.

For entry level jobs, as long as you can show adequate knowledge in a certain technology, I don't think any employer will care if you get it in a full-time job, or from your personal projects. In fact, I do think a candidate who does personal projects is more attractive because of the initiative and will-power needed to go this path.
These guys have video of a lot of that climb.
www.trekvisions.com
Question: Do you guys agree that for the mentorship process to work both people need to live at least nearby, to be able to meet in person one a month at least?

In the past I asked for someone who is in US to act as a mentor, and he agreed, but after a while it died down because exchanging emails and a call once in a while wasn't enough to solidify the bound and it wasn't work as intended.

Thoughts?
Exactly, also some us also enjoy working a lot. I do 60+ hour weeks because the work and results interest me.

That said there is a limit too.
~= I drank the koolaid.
I believe so. She probably wouldn't know how to change her DNS settings, and I don't think I would have changed either hers or my own from the default. I do recall turning off my ISP's auto-redirect on bad DNS spam. (It would try to suggest sites they got money from if I entered a website that didn't exist, for example.) But beyond that, I don't think we did anything to change DNS.
~= They drank the koolaid.
Ask HN: How bad is it to use a self-signed SSL certificate?
I have a few "information only" (i.e., no customer data stored, no user logins) for almost 20 years that I just added HTTPS support for.

I did this after reading the EFF's "Join us on June 5th to Reset the Net" article and the two linked articles at the bottom of the page.

If any accesses my sites with HTTPS, they have to look at my certificate and OK it. A pain.

Ask HN: How bad is it to use a self signed SSL certificate?

Also, suggestions for the cheapest/easiest ways to get signed certificates?

BTW, I used this article for configuring nginx for SSL: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-set-up-multiple-ssl-certificates-on-one-ip-with-nginx-on-ubuntu-12-04