skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The particular VAM system used to estimate this metric may be flawed or even completely broken. But at the point in the article this pull quote is located, that argument had not been made.

> My biggest problem with the article is it doesn't describe alternate methods of teacher evaluation. VAM may be flawed, but how does it compare to the other methods? If we accept that teacher evaluation based on student performance is necessary (is it? I have no idea!), what's a better way to do it?

The main point I took from the article is that the VAM approach is a black box. It is data driven and we have some reason to suspect it should be useful, but we simply have no way to audit that on specific cases.

Combine that with the fact that this particular teacher is exemplary, yet got an abysmal score, we are faced with the worst possible result: Someone that should get a great score received a terrible one, and we don't know why. So we can't figure out what went wrong or how to fix it.

This isn't a new issue. Statistical models used to be more human-understandable, then over several decades neural networks and big data and so forth have become popular. They often achieve good results, but often remain partially or entirely black boxes.

It makes sense to use a black box method to recognize handwriting, for example, if it does well on average. It's fine if it messes up on some samples. But teachers deserve to be treated fairly, each and every single one.

That's the tension here - better methods on average tend to be less auditable on individual cases.
>3-D buttons that don't actually depress when I click on them

0/10 closed the page
Here is what perfect forwarding looks like:

(defun wrapper-function (&rest args)
(apply target-function args))

Now kill some instances of that (from a few other languages, too), chop them up, sew the pieces together, apply high voltage, shout "give my creation life!" and you have C++ perfect forwarding!
I had a really bad experience with StandDesk too. Total bait and switch, and they price-gouged on shipping. Poor customer service -- I eventually got a refund, but only 85% of what I paid. Definitely a company to avoid.
I'm curious what kind of help you're looking for. I actually find it a bit odd when I hear over and over that others "offering help" is a strength of SV. Mostly because you really need to do two things, 1) make a product that addresses a need 2) and work to get people using it. You can get opinions on 1 or 2, but I can't imagine not getting them crushing your business. You can seek investment and if you're doing 1 or 2 well people will want to introduce you to investors. And if you're not doing 1 or 2 well you need to figure out how to do something valuable.

I'm not saying SV isn't biased, it is flawed like anywhere else, but I think this whole "startups helping other startups" thing is a bit fluffy in the first place.
Atlas-a high performance mysql proxy
Atlas is a MySQL protocol-based database middleware project developed and maintained by infrastructure team of the Web platform Department in Qihoo 360 company. It fixed lots of bugs and added lot of new functions on the basis of MySQL-Proxy 0.8.2. Currently the project has been widely applied in 360 company, many MySQL business has connected to the Atlas platform. The number of read and write requests forwarded by Atlas has reached billions.
github:https://github.com/Qihoo360/Atlas
The most important giveaway of this post is this:
"But at the end of the day, their business model boils down to taking a 20% rake of a large commodity services business while pushing assets, costs, and liabilities off the corporate financial statements and onto the shoulders of their not-quite-employee-partners."
All JVM build tools are side-effectful from the get-go, and they really have to be. Consider the :dependencies and :source-paths keys in a Leiningen project.clj. The purpose of these is to manipulate the mutable class path. To have a JVM build tool that doesn't revolve around the class path will require a complete reinvention of the JVM ecosystem and all of the existing tooling (like in our demo we use the Google Closure compiler, which mutates all kinds of things–that would have to go), which is, I'm sure, never going to happen.
I watched the video and all the data shown is visible in GA within a few clicks, not "hours" as the video claims. If that's too much, you can also create a custom dashboard in GA that shows all this in a single glance.

This is just another pretty UI on top of the GA API, from what I can tell.
Most HN readers are programmers. Just imagine this logic being applied to yourselves. Your performance is measured in a single week at the end of each year by statistically-controlled standardized tasks. Your manager's performance is then measured by the statistically-inferred effect that working for her has had on your performance given your previous year's performance and a model of how programmers' performance changes over time based on a few variables.

How well do you think that would work? Would it accurately reflect the work you had done in the previous year? Would it generate the right incentives for you to actually do good work and for your manager to help you grow?

Or is it more likely that random variation would dominate meaningful variation. That getting sick or feeling depressed that week would have markedly more impact than all the ways you really got better or worse that year? Or that it would generate perverse incentives to, say, learn about the standard task early, to prepare for the kinds of tasks you were measured on instead of the ones that produce value?

Or, for that matter, that it would destroy the motivation of everyone involved by replacing their intrinsic motivation to do well with an extrinsic motivation to get rewarded?
Thanks for the measured reply, f.u.n... I can definitely sympathize with your point about your not being able to realistically ask for the amount you ended up with!

We are at a serious disadvantage, even though it seems to many outside the industry that we make an incredible amount of money. But our high salaries are actually quite a bargain considering how much value is potentially going to be realized by the founders and investors (across multiple investments and over the long run).

A few days ago I was actually thinking about the challenge for a developer of achieving a salary closer to what one is worth. I was wondering if job searches can be better managed so that offers land at nearly the same time, perhaps through some sort of software-based mechanism that is well-understood and widely accepted.
OpenBSD doesn't support ZFS or any exotic filesystems.
It looks good but with the beta availability of InBox, I am not sure if I will even try the new Gmail UI.

InBox is very nice, BTW. The web client is OK on my laptop, the iPad InBox app is nice to use, and for me the Android InBox app is such a hugely better experience than Gmail.
I've found the best way to avoid downvotes on HN is to pose your assertion as a question (as sincerely as possible) :)

"This isn't even a problem though." -> "Is this really a problem? I thought that... correct me if I'm wrong!"

Your karma will move in the positive direction almost every time.
Position:fixed isn't a panacea either, I've seen it horribly overused as well. Lately I've seen a lot of UIs recreating the worst mistakes of the era in the late '90s when everyone discovered frames. I've seen some cases where sites are so broken that they have maybe one line of text of scrollable content on mobile devices because of all the dumb mostly useless fixed content on every page (ads on the bottom, headers on the top).
This is really great! I find myself dipping in to Open3 (and friends) pretty regularly in my shell scripts because shelling out allows me to take advantage of tools that are much faster than working in native Ruby. Ruby is often a "glue" language for me. I could accomplish the same in a Bash script, but I never fell in love with Bash scripting like I did Ruby. It's probably a bit hackish to use Ruby in this way, but it gets the job done and results in very readable, maintainable scripts.
Funnily enough Dynomite was also the name of an Erlang implementation (https://github.com/moonpolysoft/dynomite) of Dynamo that seemed to get off to a very promising start before it was abandoned a few years ago.
I would advise both of you to give Ember another chance!

I like to think of things as lying a spectrum: On one end, you have completely hand-rolled framework-less JavaScript. This requires no learning curve whatsoever, but things may get slow and messy as time progresses and you miss out on the cumulative benefits of a framework. At the other end of the spectrum is something like Ember, which takes a while to learn is is just plain overkill for small projects, but which for big projects starts to pay dividends in the long run.
You need quorum writes and reads. Like Cassandra you can use timestamps even though vector clocks would be much preferred.
Agreed on most points except last.

Linus is never direct. He takes the scenic route, describing, someone's ancestry, mental capacity, and personal hygiene (figuratively speaking), and only after he is done taking down the individual, does he get to the actual behavior. His exchange with Kay could have been much shorter too:

"Kay, this behavior is unacceptable here. I read through the threads and it looks like you are causing real problems. Because of this, I am blocking any future PR'a from you."

More simple, direct, addresses behavior and let's everyone know that the buck stops with him. And this probably would have taken much less time than his actual rant.
Qake: GNU Make-based build system with a different approach
Downvotes are likely because one's brain learns, "After you hit the space bar, look at the top of the text you were reading, except 15% lower. That's where the next line will be." Sites screw with this assumption and become very hard to read - even if the text is all visible after a scroll.
Thanks for mentioning this I hadn't heard of it! Sorry, I think it's awesome, and not because I care what other people eat.

http://www.fatchancerow.org/blog/2014/8/4/zero-miles-to-go-d...
Knowing some of the principals, I thought it was a well written.
This seems like a rather silly edge case though. What if you accidentally leave a phone or tablet at home and it's sending packets intermittently?

Or what if someone decides to hack you when you are at home?

These are not real security measures.
Syria War 2014: ISIS militants advance into besieged Kobani
ThreatGRID, now part of Cisco, uses clojure in our malware analysis and threat intelligence platform. It's a core part of our analysis engine, which examines all the things malware does and how to detect it on the rest of your systems. We've built a 1980s "expert system" startup using core.logic.

It's also the core of our API service, and the UI built on top of that. We use clojurescript extensively in the UI, and have been moving large parts of it to Om.

It is a key technology for us, letting us build better analysis tools, faster and more performant than other languages. We have clojure code in production both in our SaaS offering, and shipped to many large finance, government, and corporate customers around the world.
Nigerian virologist delivers scathing analysis of Africa's response to Ebola
I'm the same way. Money is scarce. I need to know what I buy is going to work for me, and I can't do that with the 1-3 options at the store.
What's wrong with .tar.gz like most other *nix software uses for downloads?
Do you have pictures of this anywhere? I'm pretty young (28) and worried a bit that I might be going down this path. I seem to be dealing with injury after injury while training for my running races and am fairly convinced that part of it is due to muscle tightness and tension from sitting so much during the day in a bad setup.
A little offtopic, weird they chose to keep the URL at: www.domain.tld, domain.tld even redirects to www
I don't actually think you're going to get as many downloads as you think from being in a blog almost nobody reads.
Actually your answer makes the most sense. But It's confusing for the most users (people ARE the creatures of habits after all) I'm a business owner and customers asked me: "Why i can't do the same thing i do in VLC player!?" So i was curious.
Haha, they seem to be working (although a little choppy) in Chrome. However their hover is set to opacity, so on the main "Watch Video" button it becomes transparent rather than just changing to a lighter colour.
What do you think about codalab.org?
Huh? High schools in NYC are merit-based. If a kid is in a school where kids can't read, it's not the city's fault.
Why Gandhi Is Such an Arsehole in Civilisation
I met him at the first DARPA challenge. Before he did the Lidar thing he had an interesting realtime stereo vision system powered by DSPs. I'd say he's a modern day Edison in his tenacity when it comes to solving problems.
That shouldn't be the reasoning behind the key that's just there lying being the 'biggest'.
Six top marketing predictions for 2015
Good. See also my related <rant> below.
The Gmail app has always felt like a web app and I much prefer Mail.app
Gmail on iOS works completely fine.
Electric Turbochargers: The Next Big Thing in Fuel Efficiency
Then the message is "Obey the law, or you will be slapped with trivial and meaningless fines".
Is there any 3rd party product that can sync gmail with apple's calendar?

I have google phone/Chromebook, and my wife - iPhone/OSX. So I haven't really looked, but we were thinking of starting to use more and more the calender to sync up with things we need to do.

Any recommendations?
Inbox was sorta neat in the beginning but I quickly went back to Gmail. It actually doesn't seem all that different from Gmail's tabs.
Bootstrap and Zurb foundation are probably the most popular these days.

If you're looking for something super light weight and responsive you might also want to check out getSkeleton.com

PureCss.io is also nice if you're looking for modular options.
If want a combination of standing and sitting I recommend this. http://www.focaluprightfurniture.com
I though the article was cute, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it was crappy. The essence of the article was on point.
You can't just report the time anymore, once special and general relativity become important, you have to report space-time. Sure, other effects are going to become important as well, but the essence of the article: time is not absolute, and this has practical difficulties for clock-makers, was well communicated.
What version of Chrome/IE are you using? I see the correct behavior on both (Chrome 38 / IE 11 on Win 8.1).
And yet people still choose to drive for Uber. Are they all being taken advantage of?
If you don't have some sort of system to extrinsically reward people with different skill levels different amounts than the best people are eventually going to figure that out and go do something else where they'll get paid what they're worth.

If you don't believe this think about how pissed you'd be if that idiot down the hall who couldn't write good code to save his life made as much money as you do.
China Successfully Completes Mission to the Moon and Back
Fastmail is the only good option outside of running your own email. Glad to be a customer as I'm currently fed up with fighting spam. Also, you can't beat the Fastmail web interface.
Not taking surge pricing into account probably plays a large role in explaining this article's findings.

Another thing to note in his section with self driving cars: the pool of cars would be fixed in that case, but the amount of uber drivers fluctuates throughout the day. Now, uber doesn't really care if drivers are 70% utilized or 50% utilized, as their revenue doesn't depend on that, but they do have an interest in keeping the drivers marginally satisfied

Also I don't have the numbers but at least in SF, taking an uber to the airport is much cheaper than taking a cab ($25 vs 50 from my office, last I checked), so I could imagine that something like that skews the distribution of ride lengths.
I bought it a month ago in Montreal, last weekend we went back to Ikea and didn't see the table anymore.
I'm very happy with this table.
Is anyone else as confused by this explanation as I am?

"Unfortunately, Ikea isn't releasing the Bekant just yet. After sending tryout models to journalists, it emailed to say that there was a problem with the labeling. No word on when it will be in stores, though a spokesperson says, \"it’s not a quick fix.\""

Labeling problem?
Not a quick fix? A labeling problem? o.0

Whatever it is, I hope it's resolved soon, I'm quite interested!
HTML Wasn't Made for Apps: A Response to “You Have Ruined HTML”
The physicists definition of time is "What clocks measure". It sounds like he was just saying the party line.
Ask HN: How do you find a non-technical co-founder?
I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions on finding a non-technical co-founder. I am looking for someone to help me out with the inbound/content marketing side of things but I am not sure where to look. Any thoughts or ideas?
A Hacker's Introduction to Partial Evaluation (2002)
So as the designer you're telling me that your lock-free (excluding the locking necessary for updating the page tables) and possibly wait-free algorithm (unsure on the last part), simply can't be modeled as a transactional memory algorithm? If you're willing to claim that, I'll acquiesce. Because excluding the low-level details and the context of what's happening, the barrier algorithms look exactly like what you'd get trying to implement, e.g., the N-word transactional memory copying algorithms from 30+ years ago--in particular what Hoare laid out in the paper proving the universality of the LL/SC primitive--in a way that works on x86 for the JVM.

Regarding performance: number of allocations is not the same as transactional throughput. If you can also claim that the object system and VM subsystem of your JVM has no overhead over a traditional lock-based system (which doesn't use extensive mapping tricks, nor needs as many atomic operations), _or_ if you can show me TPC benchmarks where C4 is faster than the other existing locking collectors, I'll acquiesce.

Otherwise, I'm quite comfortable sticking to my guns.

I think what you've written is exceptional in numerous regards. And I don't mean to diminish the work in the slightest, but to only counter the hype--namely, that the algorithm uses techniques unknowable to others, or (as sometimes discussed elsewhere) that it's solved the problem of implementing a generic transactional memory model using regular x86 primitives.
I don't think you need any 3rd party products. I use an iPhone, an Android phone for work and use a Macbook Pro and my main calendar is my Gmail Google calendar which syncs among all 3 devices without any 3rd party software. I guess you may just need to know how to set it up on iOS and Mac products.
more than 50 companies use Atlas in their production environment
This sounds a lot like the issues I had a little over a year ago. Most of the issues didn't seem to be related to Azure itself, but instead to the logging in and account management experience. It's a shame, login should be a solved issue at this point, but very few people get it right.

I don't want yet another email address to use a service, Flickr having required a Yahoo.com email address is a prime example, as is Azure.
Sorry, I should have mentioned that while boot, like any JVM build tool, does begin and end with the class path, we have spent an enormous amount of time experimenting with ways to mitigate the effects. We ended up with a system that provides many of the benefits of immutability while still living in the real world where files actually exist.

Here are some of the things boot provides:

1. We have "pods", which are separate Clojure runtimes in isolated class loaders in which you can evaluate expressions. The actual building occurs in these things. They are lexically scoped and can have a different class path than the main Clojure runtime where your build pipeline runs.

2. Files emitted during the course of the build are created in temp dirs managed by boot. There are a few different kinds of these temp dirs, one of which is lexically scoped. We also have temp dirs that are effectively immutable from a given task's point of view (we use a copy-on-write scheme to achieve this).

3. We make liberal use of hard links and directory syncing to emulate immutability wherever we can. Boot provides a kind of structural sharing with these hard links that really makes the pain of dealing with files go away.

4. We put a great deal of thought into how artifacts flow through the build pipeline, and how tasks that don't know anything about each other can cooperate to work on these files.

This is the most interesting part of boot for me, and I'll be making a complete writeup about it soon.
Check out Woodside and Maspeth.
An attack on the timestamp semantics of Bitcoin
Sure, crypto is hard, but I don't think for the last 20 years or so we have been living in a world where the five countries (and one specially-administered territory) mentioned in the article as having received the software (China, Hong Kong, Russia, Israel, South Africa, and South Korea) would have significantly more trouble than a private company in the U.S. producing secure cryptographic software based on known algorithms and protocols. The only consequence of export restrictions on crypto beyond the things that live in the classified/military world, is reducing the competitiveness of American software firms and decreasing economic output by having every piece of security software developed twice, once in the U.S. and once in say Switzerland or India or whichever country doesn't have insane export restrictions on crypto.
Pretty cool. When I saw the headline, I expected a boat hull filled with some sort of lubricant and another hull inside, containing the "actual boat," such that the "actual boat" would always be level. In terms of form, this would be similar to a Double Boiler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bain-marie). I always assumed that this would be how to stabilize objects like this. It's interesting to see it done in a different way. I wouldn't have imagined such a design. With the lifted body and the long legs, it vaguely reminds me of a waterbug (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerridae).
Should journalism worry about content marketing?
As Peter Thiel has observed, if we tried to bring the world up to an American middle class standard of living without changing anything else, we'd quickly destroy the planet. So your choices are a: leave everyone else poor (a.1: wait til the oil runs out so we're poor too), or b: find some way to get us off oil and other things that keep us from raising that standard of living globally.

Silicon Valley, at its best, is doing exactly that. And sure as hell isn't anyone else trying.
I haven't finished it yet, but I find this much easier to understand than any other article on neural networks that I've read.
It works for my domain/apps account on a Nexus 9.
You need to eventually be side-effectful, but that doesn't mean you need to start side-effectful. The :dependencies in a Leiningen project map are just a data structure until they're passed to eval-in-project, which happens at the end of a chain functional operations.

One of the core ideas of Clojure is that we should try to favour simple solutions over complex ones. Side-effectful functions are the some of the most complex tools we have, and while they are necessary eventually, it would be nice to have the majority of the code-base work with simple data structures, and push out the complexity of I/O to the edges of the application.
Open Source Sleep Tracking – BodyEcho
I've signed up (as a user, not driver) for Via, Gett and Lyft. I believe drivers can do the same. As long as they don't collude and are constantly competing, it could be good for everyone. That said, I still prefer yellow cabs and use them when possible.