skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I found this interesting. I worked for a few years teaching technical subjects to mid-career adults and ended up adopting an educational theory not too dissimilar to the author, but for mostly different reasons.

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8251569

I remember high school very well, and it was a pretty torturous experience. If you could design an educational program that was almost guaranteed not to be a conducive learning environment with poor mastery outcomes, the public k-12 system in the U.S. would probably be it. Even worse, when they measure educational outcomes, the place systems like South Korea's at the top, a system that's absolutely optimized and excels at the lowest possible form of learning, rote memorization.

In the previous discussion, I point out that I believe students need to "complete the circuit", go from input/reception to output/production to say they've learned a topic. In today's school environment, if this happens at all, it happens by accident:

1) The teacher gives a lecture, information is shoved in

2) The students do homework and tests, okay, the students "produce" what they've learned, usually a brain dump of what they've memorized, but let's be honest, not a demonstration of learning or mastery.

3) The homework and tests get an impersonal grade, the "feedback loop" necessary to complete the circuit. But if the student got it wrong? Too bad, the lesson is moving on anyways. There's no time really spent in education to have the student go back with this new course correction and see if they got it now. And out of schedule help in most schools is woeful.

Because of this systematic failure, by the time many students are involved in "advanced" topics in high school, their foundational knowledge is so flimsy and filled with holes that new topics are like turning a strong fan on in a room with a house of cards. Yet the professional educational establishment seems unable to figure this out and correct it.

Keep in mind, without even a template of any kind, we're all fluently able to learn a complex language, a mass of complex social rules so complex that libraries are full of books describing them and how to sanitarily complete a digestion cycle on our own (everybody poops) before we even show up for day 1 of 1st grade. Keep in mind that we spent the first two of those 6-7 years not even being able to talk - so we did all that in about the same time it takes to get through high school. If we learned as much in our 4 years of high school, we'd all be leaving with the equivalent of advanced degrees in physics.

Children can learn at phenomenal paces, yet it takes years before students accumulate any worthwhile new skills in this kind of environment -- skills that should take them weeks or months.

School is doing it wrong.
I flagged this and didn't read it just because of the title.
I've never really understood these comments. As someone who's founded two VC-backed companies and raised millions of dollars I have to tell you that the parts that bother me really aren't "working tirelessly and thanklessly" for the benefit of my "patrons" who aren't taking any risk. I actually really like my investors. Many of them are effectively startups, too: most funds, especially new ones, have to work hard to source and get into good deals and demonstrate a return so that they can raise their next fund. That's far from guaranteed. Those investors are as much entrepreneurs as we are, just in a different sector. I'd say probably 70% of my investors fall into that category.

Occasionally a founder will get screwed by a VC. It's happened to people I know. In retrospect it's very rare that they didn't see it coming, and usually it's more complicated than just "investor screws founder." Investors have to work with the small ecosystem of each other and new startups on an ongoing basis. It's an iterated game and truly bad behavior gets you shunned. It really does.

It's actually more often that I hear that people wished they'd raised VC. I have several friends who have bootstrapped successful multi-million companies who look back over how they got there and the challenges they face now and wish they'd raised money. Yeah there are a lot of great small businesses - and bootstrapped startups - that do well without getting investors involved. But I can tell you first-hand that investors can really add value and drive entire fields much faster than they would have otherwise matured, and at the end of the day come out successful in real terms.

Founders have ways to diversify. I've executed minor equity swaps with a few friends to create a portfolio of my own. It's more "downside protection" (hopefully) than designed to replace the possible returns from my own company, but those investments have actually done really well.

It boggles the mind that in this corner of immense wealth creation and the freedom to do really whatever we want to do - if you don't want to work on something, don't start that company - what people fixate on is "investor vs founder."

Just go do it. A lot of the stuff you wrote about above really aren't things you worry about.
I guess I should stop ripping honeysuckle out of my garden then.

That stuff can kill an entire garden in one year though.
Ah, totally missed my own project showing up on GitHub; thanks for liking it gwintrob.

For anyone interested, am working on a better version of the chart and moving it to https://assembly.com.
A friendly explanation of Earley parsing
> I don't understand this. How can anyone know whether what they are doing is wrong unless those rules are built into the structure of the law and the infrastructure of banks?

Criminalizing secondary and tertiary acts related to a crime is a disturbing trend. There's an act that is broadly regarded as a crime -- in this case, tax evasion or money laundering. Well those crimes are hard to detect. So we create a new reporting requirements law. Well, that's easy to circumvent by moving money in smaller amounts. So we create a new law that makes it a crime to move money in smaller chunks if it is related to avoiding reporting requirements.

This is problematic. It makes acts illegal that viewed in isolation are widely regarded as perfectly legal. Even worse, these secondary acts are commonly done legally by many citizens. What citizen doesn't move money around in small chunks? This gives a lot of discretion to the government to charge you with a crime. Afterall, your actions on their face are very similar to that of tax evaders. In fact, even my earlier example of money laundering is one of these secondary crimes because it is used to clean the money obtained through illegal activity.
This is the very reason I take Dash[1]'s approach to success. He has half a lifetime stored up in a savings account, and he works a fraction of the time I do per week.

1. Make a small niche app.

2. Market it ferociously.

3. Don't be a slave to your job, make it the other way around.

4. Be your own #1 customer.

[1]: http://kapeli.com/dash
> It'd probably take a couple hours to walk between Mandalay Bay and Encore

I've only done that particular walk once, but walking from Tropicana to Encore (a bit farther than Mandalay - Encore) took about 45 minutes I believe; a bit of a trek, but definitely manageable.

I think in an entire week on the strip, I took a cab exactly twice; once from the airport to the strip, and once to a shopping mall off the strip. Had Uber been around when I was there, I certainly would have used it more.
Zurb's Foundation for Apps (WIP)
I'm half way through the Culture series, and it really is one of the most uplifting things I've ever read. So much of everything he describes is just so spot-on. It is not often I find science fiction that just sounds so plausible and so right. Especially when it has been written more than a decade ago. There's usually things that seem slightly out-of-date or plot-driven. Or worse, grabs onto a current trend or fad. But Culture seems to nail it and just makes you want to live there, no reservations. In fact, it's hard to stop and realize we still have so many problems to solve.
Startups used to IPO while there was still a large amount of risk, so it was possible for a public market investor to invest and capture value.

Today's startups choose not to. Anti-government types will say that the only reason is SOX. Honest and intelligent people will admit that there are a lot of other factors too, mostly around the finance sector getting better at capturing growth stage value.
Room/building mapping. Would it work for mapping out a floor plan of a building? I've seen a few examples that either require wall access with a tablet, or some bulky backpack device with a bunch of cameras. If you could make something that can sit on a pole and either USB or bluetooth to a recorder and make its map from near the ceiling (where there’s hopefully a minimum of obstacles to compute) I think that would be useful.
There's a public domain copy for Australians from The University of Adelaide: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/machiavelli/niccolo/m149p/
Vulnerability in Microsoft OLE could allow remote code execution
AngularJS: Lowercase/Uppercase conversion
Meat is super easy to transport in its wrapper, eg the live animal. Heck it even transports itself.
I lived in a rural area during this time in my life. School started at 7:30am, the school bus picked us up at 6:30am, which meant I had to be up at 5:30-6:00 to eat breakfast, shower and get ready for the day.

This meant a 9:30 bed-time.

This also meant that I got home by about 3:30-4:00 depending on traffic. An hour for dinner gave me 4.5 hours to study. Let's be honest, I also took an hour for free-time otherwise I wouldn't have any. So 3.5 hours to study every day.

In college at least, when you plan your schedule, you should plan 2-3 hours of study-time per week for every hour of class time. As you can see I really only had time to study 1 subject a day, maybe 2 if I didn't give myself free time by that standard.

Recipe for success? Ha!
Non-paywalled links (incidentally, Google Scholar is very good about digging up free PDFs, often uploaded by the authors themselves):

>More than two decades ago, I conducted a study in which I presented women enrolled in a weight-reduction program with several short, open-ended scenarios about future events — and asked them to imagine how they would fare in each one.

Oettingen, G. (1991). Expectation, Fantasy, and Weight Loss: Is the Impact of Positive Thinking Always Positive?. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 15(2).

http://www.psych.nyu.edu/oettingen/OETTINGEN1991WEIGHT.PDF

>In a 2011 study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, we asked two groups of college students to write about what lay in store for the coming week.

Kappes, H. B., & Oettingen, G. (2011). Positive fantasies about idealized futures sap energy. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(4), 719-729.

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/46284/1/__libfile_REPOSITORY_Conten...

>In a recent study on healthy eating and exercise. we divided participants into two groups.

Stadler, G., Oettingen, G., & Gollwitzer, P. M. (2010). Intervention effects of information and self-regulation on eating fruits and vegetables over two years. Health Psychology, 29(3), 274.

http://www.psych.nyu.edu/oettingen/Stadler,%20G.,%20Oettinge...

Stadler, G., Oettingen, G., & Gollwitzer, P. M. (2009). Physical activity in women: Effects of a self-regulation intervention. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 36(1), 29-34.

http://www.psych.nyu.edu/oettingen/Stadler,%20G.,%20Oettinge...
More relevant reading: Where Good Ideas Come From [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003ZK58TA?btkr=1]
TempleOS: RedSea Direct Disk Cluster Fun
tldr the person got old, and realized they were old.

In HS I had English, Physics (very fun and active), Drafting (elective), Algebra (1or2), spanish 1. Caring a full backpack was worse for me. I remember it tearing apart on top from the weight
for your wife, check out http://www.mothercoders.org/ - great organization for software engineers that are mothers. I'm sure they will have resources for both of you and it's a wonderful community of developer parents!

My dad worked from home while my mother worked in the city when we were younger. One way they made that work was by hiring someone to do the house hold chores (cleaning & laundry) so that responsibility was covered and their focus outside of work was about taking care of us instead of the house. hope that tip helps!
A new way to learn electronics
Hackernews,

A little bit over a month ago, three guys started a new website project. Our goal was to approach learning about electronics, and low level programming in the same way several other sites have already done with high level (web) programming.

At www.devfactor.net we have a small staff of volunteers trying to get everything up and running at full speed. Our goal is to build a collection of beginner, intermediate and advanced tutorials centered around DIY electronics, low level programming and the idea that you can make anything if you put your mind to it.

We are producing a monthly magazine newsletter (PDF/HTML form), which covers some hot topics in our space. So far we have about ~100 subscribers into the ~10,000 visitors we should be seeing this month.

We've opted for an ad-free, user-oriented model. The only money generated by the site is Amazon Affiliate links right now, and every penny is going back into the website.

We really need some new authors though. We would like to be producing one high quality tutorial per day. If your someone who wants to get your name out there, and have a free space to talk about your hobby projects please contact us using the contact tab on the right. We are willing to discuss profit share with excellent contributors :)

Anywho, we just wanted to share this with you because a ton of work has gone into it. Three guys with day jobs are producing branding elements, migrating servers, implementing ssl, working on getting a cdn, mocking up tutorials, building projects, etc... Really hope you can benefit from it :)

Its an exciting time to be in smart electronics.

I hope you will check it out: www.devfactor.net

Cheers,

The DevFactor Team
Pharmaceuticals Not Energy May Have Been True Target of Dragonfly Energetic Bear
I think it's because it's easy. Dystopia bring automatic conflict which is easy/lazy to dramatize.

Still all isn't bad, it isn't Star Trek, but there are non-dystopic popular fictions:

- Her

- Stargate SG-1 and spinouts

- Fringe

- Warehouse 13

- Eureka

- Sanctuary

- The new crop of super hero shows and movies, Arrow, SHIELD, The Flash

- Heroes

- The short lived new V series

- Dr. Who

- Guardians of the Galaxy

- Inception

- Gravity

and more....

in Literature there's a huge bounty of great non-dystopic stuff too.

- The Golden Oecumene

- The Culture series

- The Night's Dawn Trilogy

- The Gap series

You just have to know where to look.
The Mandalay is at the southern tip of the strip—further south than the Tropicana and further away from the Encore.
I know tons of high school students who attempt the strategies you just described. The great majority of them barely scrape by with Bs and Cs and they do indeed crash and burn in college. You are not even remotely a representative case.
There are some distinct ideas that this article at times seems to conflate:

- Obscurity, speaking in fables, non-clarity, indirectness. Multiple layers to one's teaching. This possibly for the sake of pedagogy.

- Teachings for the public versus teachings for the initiates/elite/true disciples. Two contradictory or opposed layers to one's teaching.

The former and the latter are quite different, and I wonder whether the latter might be far less common than the former.

It seems clear that some thinkers, particularly in ancient Greece and Rome, had opposed esoteric and exoteric aspects to their work, and that we should acknowledge and try to discern this where it exists.

But I'd question whether esotericism is "of the greatest importance for our understanding of the whole course of Western philosophy". The author seems to think of it almost as a kind of skeleton key, as though maybe there is a significant stream of thought that people have radically misunderstood. The idea of a hidden thread of elite, secret knowledge has an alluring, conspiratorial feel to it that the author doesn't mention -- a vibe that is not so foreign to our modern sensibilities (Scientology, Kabbalah, New Age, ...).

Melzer writes that "with pedagogical esotericism, the writer actually embraces concealment and obscurity (of the right kind) as a positive good and as something essential to the primary purpose of his act of writing: philosophical education". How does this not describe art of all kinds -- e.g. fiction writing -- where the creator has a didactic purpose, but artfully weaves this into their work? ("Ars est celare artem.") Again, there is no distinction made between nonclarity and the demand for active, engaged, creative reading and thinking on the one hand, and on the other, radically opposed esoteric and exoteric meanings.
I always ask for Kiva or Watsi gift cards/donations in my name, and make it very clear that any other gifts will get sold or returned to fund those two things.
Knowing decision makers who are going to bypass HR filters.
sharing ideas that solve impactful issues

Except ideas don't solve impactful issues, groups of people applying time and resources to a problem solves impactful issues.

I think it would be more accurate to say that the service is for "sharing ideas for how to have an impact on complex issues."

I'm still not really sure what it is supposed to do.
... until you want to eat, and then realize you have to convert to a fiat currency because the grocery store doesn't accept bitcoins.

Bitcoins are pseudonymous, rather than anonymous - and worse, every single transaction ever is documented in the blockchain.

The IRS, I'm sure, is quite happy about this complete documentation, and while they haven't gotten around to (ab)using it, I'm sure they will sooner or later.
The Science Inside Your Blender
Google does use Angular on many sites in production - the number is somewhere over 120 according to their metrics last I heard. They even use it for static pages - I noticed that the older Google Nexus pages were done in Angular. They prominently tout using Angular for DoubleClick, among other sites. It is also used widely internally.

Angular is also used by a formidable set of companies in production - Microsoft, Google, Apple, VMware, Netflix, MSNBC, Bloomberg, Washington Post, USA Today, US News & World Report, Amazon, Udacity, Cisco, and countless others. I have heard of it being used in the financial sector quite a bit as well. The prevalance of Angular and the strong support by Google is far more telling.
Props to the #quitpic team for working on this.
I do sit a lot during my day job, but I can tell you that my sitting conditions are vastly more preferable than those of the typical high school student. I sit in an $800+ chair, with a desk with more space than I need, next to a huge window. I can get up anytime I want and go for a walk or break.

In high school, I sat in chairs that often felt like they were going to fall apart, and my butt was numb or in pain half the time and sometimes my back too. The desk rarely was big enough to accommodate even just a book and a sheet of paper side by side, which was incredibly infuriating to me. Classrooms were typically horrifyingly dreary. And just getting up to stretch or walk around often wasn't an option.
I think the technical term you're looking for is "a good story".
It looks like the point is actually identifying problems first.

Nothing on the site seems to force people to implement solutions to the problems - which means it's an option not a requirement of the service and definitely doesn't "come first."

I think there is power in a "pain-point" ranking service, if that is what you guys are going for. Definitely needs to be redesigned to make that clear if that is the case.
I have heard the term "business novel" about the books written by Eliyahu Goldratt.
Can someone explain AnyPerk to me? Is it just a middleman for employee perks? What is the added value? Why couldn't a company look at their landing page and say "thats a good idea, I should buy my employees movie passes", but not sign up for AnyPerk?
"Predicting the future without a causal understanding of the system is epistemologically questionable."

That is an intriguing assertion, but it is circular. One can only demonstrate a causal understanding of a system by making usefully accurate predictions about the system's behavior.

To attempt that with a system consisting of market prices of tradeable securities is an exercise in frustration, because such markets do not operate by consistent, unchanging causal rules. In fact, financial markets are not systems at all in the usual sense, because their parts and connections are continually changing.
It's not Clojure but if you are interested, there is an effort underway to build the basics for a complete web stack in F#: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/web-stack-fs
The part that interested me was that they were able to get meetings with 100 investors with just an idea. We have an in-production startup with traction in Florida and we are lucky to see an investor every few months. Trying to get email contact to VCs is next to impossible. If it's really that easy to get meetings in SV, then we are going to move too.
Despite what the blog comments suggest, gdb does not have to link to libbfd.

But what about objcopy? Much more important utility than strings(1), in my opinion. I admit I rely on it and do not a have a substitute at the ready.

At some stage we need a BSD alternative to the GNU binutils (aside from gcc alternatives). I have seen it discussed several times over the years, but as far as I know it does not exist?
Couch potatoes have killed the Internet dream
>I disagree, there is tons of intra-strip cab travel taking place.

There's alot of it, but it's decreasing. Someone that just got ready for an elegant dinner or a night at a club will take a cab or limo up or down the strip to get where they're going. However, the monorail now runs all the way from the MGM on Tropicana Ave. down to the SLS (formerly the Sahara on Sahara Ave) and has a station at the convention center. There is also The Deuce, a very tourist-friendly bus that traverses both sides of the Strip every 5 minutes or so 24/7. If there's a cab line at the hotel, The Deuce is actually faster than a cab.

I would suspect that walking, the monorail, and The Deuce handle the vast majority of inter-hotel travel. The cabs make most of their money on airport trips & trips to off-strip properties like The Palms.

Regardless, Uber should be allowed to do what they were doing. The way the Strip is setup, they couldn't really compete with cabs & limos, and that was never their plan. It would have been great for locals to get around the city.
Awesome project! Just an FYI, your project shares a name with Linux Desktop Markdown Editor

http://remarkableapp.net/
As someone who used Windows for development for a long time, depending on what languages they're learning, using Bash is a much better idea than `cmd.exe` or PowerShell. The latter is quite nice, but when you're using *nix based software, the differences between the two are great enough to cause (at least for me personally) a bit of confusion.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out this was not a true history of his ice cream addiction.
You guys are depressing. Try living in the Soviet Union. It's all relative !
I found her description of being tired in an icky way very good. I remember feeling exactly that way at the end of the day in high school.

I also agree with her suggestions. Short bursts of information, plenty of chances for physical motion, participation rather than passive listening. I believe all of this would have greatly improved what I got out of high school.

Oh, and also cutting out a significant portion of the bullshit and indoctrination which was passed off as eduction but which was not. That's a different topic though I guess.