skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's important to consider what we want a standardized test to measure. Is it to check that students have learned the curriculum? Is it to evaluate abilities for future prospects? Current tests seem to skew toward the former, and the article suggests they should do more of the latter.

One wonders what a pure test for abilities would look like. The biggest factors in predicting long-term success are intelligence, knowledge, and conscientiousness. A hypothetical "how good you are at life" test could look something like this:

1. For intelligence, a straight-up IQ test. Raven's Progressive Matrices[1] is an excellent candidate. It can measure almost the entire human range of IQ, and it has little cultural bias. Heck, it doesn't even require literacy.

2. For knowledge, the format would be similar to existing tests, with one caveat: it must be very broad; so broad that no one person could know everything on it. To keep the length reasonable, one could use random sampling. Just as a vocabulary test need not ask the definition for every word in the dictionary, so too could a knowledge test remain accurate without asking for a copy of Wikipedia. To prevent cheating, it would be crucial to keep the exact questions secret each year.

3. Conscientiousness is the hardest to test, because it requires measuring one's ability to work hard over a long time. Besides self-reports, the only short test for conscientiousness involves telling the test taker that the task is unimportant. If they know the truth, the jig is up and they'll work hard.

This sort of test would be extremely hard to game. Training helps RPM very little. Studying for the knowledge section would help one's score, but it would have the side-effect of increasing one's overall knowledge. The biggest wrinkle is the conscientiousness evaluation. It either requires honesty on the part of the test-taker or trickery on the part of the test-giver.

While interesting to ponder, I doubt such a test will ever exist. It's not just students and parents who want to be able to game tests. School boards and other organizations want to be able to show improvement over time. If they can't teach the test, their true effectiveness (or lack thereof) might be revealed.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven's_Progressive_Matrices
NoSQL Solves Everything, Again – Cache Is the New RAM
I find it ironic if banks and post offices are using combination locks as advertised security measures but the people selling those install steel doors on their storefront.
I find it very strange that one of the most important tests that US students take is a bombardment of multiple choice questions.

The equivalent where I am from is written essays and/or math, physics, chemistry exercises (ie. calculation) where you have to have all intermediate steps visible (which means you have an chance of scoring a few points even if the final answer is incorrect).

You take four to eight exams during a period of two weeks (opportunity to participate is twice a year), six hours per exam.

In language exams, there's a listening comprehension part (in addition to the six hours of written exam) where you listen to a recording and answer multiple choice or with a few sentences.

The method used here is not entirely problem-free either but it's a whole lot more practical than having a long string of multiple choice questions where you have a 25% chance by guessing and you get to know all the possible answers. This is not really representative of what you need in life or what you'll encounter in later studies in College/University.
iOS on the oculus? the Apple Rift? (is facebook selling?)
I'm going from memory here. Not 100% positive, but I believe Andrew Jackson abolished central banking and Woodrow Wilson brought it back. There were no shortages of booms and busts in between. The period with the least booms and busts was post WWII to probably the S&L crisis in the 1980's
US should give up on the "leave no one behind" mentality - or at least seriously overhaul that system. Because it seems to have pushed everyone to the lowest common denominator. From what I hear, schools even consider everyone a "winner" now, just for passing the year. That seems a bit much...What's the incentive for excellence then?
Goodbye dollar, hello Bitcoin: is this the end of national currencies?
Let the next 5 years of "when is Apple's VR product coming out" hype begin!
Maybe you'd like Radare, which is free software. http://www.radare.org/y/
Simple: keep multiple addresses (all clients are built for this) and diversify your balance among them. Keeping them all on a single address makes even less sense than keeping large savings in a checking account.

It shouldn't be very hard to design the UI to make it hard to fall into this trap, either. Easy way: when doing a small payment from an address with a large balance, the client can automatically add intermediate transfers to avoid the direct link.
Sorry; I think I mistook your comment for some sort of reality-relativistic sentiment by managing to ignore the context.

I agree that the most important factor here is not whether the person in question is able to work a traditional job and contribute to the economy. The way I see it, treatment and quality of life is what's important here.

Rather, I meant that he would likely be better off the closer to reality he got (i.e. the less his delusions impacted him), and that the delusional should not be patronized by allowing them their "eccentricities" and to remain in their own bubble (which now seems a moot point).
No. Not likely. No.
'Life is cool here for IT people': Where techies earn 5 times the average salary
What I’ve Been Reading Lately – My Bookshelf #4
The fact that this explanation doesn't even have a single mention of the unfolding currency wars, makes me think this economist really doesn't understand the times that they live in.
Racism is not a disease that requires or even invites our help. Sure, we're open to engage in civil discussion with racist people -- even try to gently persuade them of the error of their ways. But that's about it.

We live in a society where we're supposed to cherish and celebrate the fact that we're all unique (and broken) to a great degree. Not increasingly intervene to make us all the same.

So bring on the eccentric, racist, barely-functioning people. Bring on the people with poor and lavish backgrounds. Bring on the mean-spirited, the generous, the completely strange. The more true diversity -- diversity in outlook, worldview, and experience -- the better we all are. Rough edges and outliers are fine. We need 'em.

As far as finding a job, that's another discussion. As long as he is able to feed and house himself, through whatever means? Why do I care whether he has a job or not?
PhD student adapts cheap microscope and saves £100,000
20 Links for Health and Fitness Techology
What's the minimum number of cylinders required for harmonic balance in a two-stroke inline engine? I'm just curious what the biggest engine you could build would be by cylinder volume.
Yes economists are one of the phalanxes of mercenaries hired to enable this to happen. I am still amazed that the rich have managed to pull this off, but they do get the best advisers money can buy.
A lot of countries do this, and the biggest issue is a practical one: it takes a long time to correct. Multiple choice you can just stick it into a machine.

Just another example of how most guiding principles in US school systems are due to a lack of resources. We can only hope that some innovative people will be able to get around this (big advantage of US system is experimentation at the local level)
0 Jobs found :(
Surely most of the 110m of the Saturn V was fuel tanks? Perhaps they don't count towards the size of the engine. If they did, then I imagine include the fuel for this ship would make it pretty big.
PostgreSQL Hardware Performance Tuning (2010)
Scenekit and Metal both indicate a heavy investment in 3D graphics. VR display technology is a logical next step.

Replace all that C++ crap with Swift, and you have a great rapid game development platform.
Thanks! If you do end up downloading and using PINE, would love to get your comments and feedback!
A few weeks ago an article on Nautil.us about innovations in machine learning. Vladimir Vapnik was mentioned, specifically how he used poetry to teach a machine handwriting. Very fascinating article in general:

http://nautil.us/issue/6/secret-codes/teaching-me-softly
There was good talk on Shenandoah at Strange Loop http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&...
What do you make of “The Prophets of Science Fiction”?/Recommend sci-fi writers
I'm curious what the HN community makes of "The Prophets of Science Fiction"[0]
For one, I've only recently watched it, and I quite liked it and I'm looking to buy a few of the books, but googling around, I see some criticism of the connections between the sci-fi writing and the inventions they portended as being far fetched.
At the same time, I would like to hear your recommendations of who you reckon to be the best sci-fi writers of today. The ones who are currently writing about things that are as inconceivable to us as moon missions were to the people of early last century, for example. Or whatever your criteria for good sci-fi is.
[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2091018/
> OPs software might never have been a productive business if he micro optimized some C++ code in pursuit of best possible performance.

It's not an either-or. Maybe the best long-term approach would be to write it in a high-level style favouring readability, productivity and adaptiveness, while also being conscious not to use features that could lead to performance problems. Maybe you'd write it in a compiled (native/efficient VM) language[1] with garbage collection and be mindful of memory layout, instead of writing it in Ruby[2]and then having to rewrite some parts in another generally faster language later. Then you also wouldn't have to have that "Ugh, now I need to bust out C++/C/Go/Whatever and rewrite that stuff... oh never mind it's probably fast enough" when you start to run into performance problems.

[1] More precisely an implementation of a language which is compiled...

[2] Though maybe Ruby is compiled in the canonical implementation, for all I know.
Well this is the problem of about 90% of the geek population : having the skills to understand machines / code leave you with less brain power for social interactions.

For me it would not be a problem if I could just resolve the female companionship problem (or lack thereof). I'm not even shy, it just seems that if I don't pay them women tend to ignore me ...
I have no idea about sakura, but being a libvte-based terminal, I highly doubt it's comparable (or even approaches) xterm in term of rendering speed.

I'm wondering how people can compare these terminals mentioning speed, considering the actual performance is bound by libvte, and thus will be equally the same between roxterm, sakura, tilda, etc. What are they measuring?

xterm is quite fast (in the order of 3-5x faster) than any libvte-based terminal. Try doing something like "time [term] -c 'cat <bigfile>'", and try varying the scrollback size to have a real measure.

[u]rxvt in turn is even faster, especially with large scrollback buffers, which is the main (I could say only, really) reason I use it. As in, 10x faster than any libvte based terminal.

I also use suckless tools (with spectrwm), though I never had a reason to investigate st. urxvt supports fallback fonts, which for UTF-8 text is essential.
That is not the definition of a perfect crime I know. There are traces, Oleg and Boris for example, or the injuries. A perfect crime would have no realistic way to trace to the mastermind.

Also, shouldn't there be ways to indicate ownership with the private key?
I have the exact same issue with my projects, but recently I read something which seems to have helped over the last few weeks;

"Never got to bed satisfied."

It means, don't stay up all night fixing that issue, leave it till the next day when you will really want to start fixing the issue.

It seems to be a great way to maintain focus and motivation.
Netflix and YouTube Now Consume 50% of the Internet; Net Neutrality Weakens
You also can't assume everyone will want to spend time with their parents. Some people grew up in abusive households. Some families are toxic. People don't spend time with their friends to be "cool and hip" (or if they do, I doubt that qualifies as "friends").
First part of your message makes sense to me. But you may want to check your perception of the reality about the second part.

http://imrussia.org/media/pdf/Research/Michael_Weiss_and_Pet...
I really like this idea. The major downfall to me of other connected light/plug systems was that if you turned the physical switch off the whole system was offline until you turned it back on again. Integrating the physical switch in the connectedness could see a lot of support for this.
They totally avoid saying it's an optical mouse:

"changes in position are measured by sensing the scattered laser light which is reflected by an object."
If your cash was stolen from your wallet, how would you prove the cash was yours?

Besides, I think most "mainstream Bitcoin users" have their wallets on sites such as Bitstamp, Coinbase and so on. So they can prove the Bitcoin was theirs.
Your overall point is correct but I don't think it applies here.

There are deep cultural reasons for why carpooling hasn't become popular in America. From what I have observed as a foreigner, people in this country love their big personal spaces, and their cars are a part of that. It's related to why public transportation isn't popular: most people don't want to sit within such close proximity to strangers.
It means you can do screen splitting on a remote machine and still have the same workflow as your local sessions, which is pretty nice.
Oracle or Sun should just have bought Azul back in the day. I have no idea why they did not. Both there JIT and GC were way better then what they sold to there costumers and maybe hardware would be further along by now as well.

Its awesome that we now see opensource project shooting for a pausless gc.
I'd love it if there would be graphical frontend to tmux or screen. Something that would look very much like a terminal emulator, with tabs and splits, but backed by screen or tmux, whereby each tab or split window would be a tmux or screen window. And the awesome part is that when you're elsewhere, you could ssh in and attach to that tmux or screen session.
Sadly this video is incomplet but the most importent stuff is there.
Of course, everybody should do that. But since we live in an imperfect world, not everybody will do it.
As you're saying, this should be implemented in the BTC clients themselves and they should not let you make large transfers without first warning of the dangers. But what if you're buying a boat or a car or a house ?

I've lived in the ex Soviet Union in the 90's and extorsion through torture was a common thing back then.
But now we might see the 21st century version of those guys, probably a bit more gentle - no need to shoot or kill people, just force them to press Enter and you're done.
Show HN: Hashing files with your browser
Tests that require the student draws on a wide variety of skills and knowledge to be able to answer.

When I was a professor I used to design my exams in two parts. The first were pure multiple choice questions that the students could game. The second were complex question that required integrating knowledge from multiple areas. Answering these question required understanding - these can't be gamed other than by learning.

You might be wondering why have the first part? The reason was because the administration set a quota on the pass rate. If I had only used questions of the second part then too many of my students would have failed. The bargain with my students was if you could fog a mirror you would pass, but to get an A you had to show understanding.
This is especially true when using a tiling window manager such as wmii.

In that case you don't even have to rearrange windows - each new window automatically takes part in the split. And you can combine terminal sessions, browser, etc. as you wish. I find this a lot easier to use than screen/tmux.
A friend of mine interviewed for a van-deliverer job very many years ago. He would put a bicycle into the van, drive the van to the customer, ride the bike back to the depot and pick the next van and repeat. The customer would drive with the van for the day. Then the reverse in the evening.
Just to clarify - I wasn't paying full instance prices. I was using spot instances which worked out around $7/mo each at the time.
What we learnt making a company wiki
I agree. As much as I hate learning a platform-exclusive language I do have to say Swift a pleasure to work with.
Also, shouldn't there be ways to indicate ownership with the private key?

Well, it's possible to prove control of the address (simply transfer something to an address of the choosing of the person who you're trying to convince). "Ownership" is more difficult to prove.
> I think what he's saying (which I kinda agree with) is that you have to treat it as actually something that you have to work at, rather than it coming naturally.

Who believes that there are any alternatives? Shy people and people with social anxiety (etc.) don't have a reputation for spontaneously becoming outgoing and so on.
I'd argue that they should go the route that most terminal programs do and just announce they're xterm, or at least have a config file option for doing so.
I read only to the end of the first paragraph, where it says that big data might crack the enigma.

I think their title needs a question mark somewhere.
And this is where the thieves start getting creative. Backups, setting a PIN, using decent passwords--all of these steps prevent the low-hanging fruit of locking up someone's data (and can be installed by technically-savvy friends or family). The bigger question is how to protect your reputation, especially when directory entries can easily be modified on Google, Bing, and Yelp, complaints can be submitted to the health or licensing agencies online, and even cranking out some SEO can get "bad press" filtering near the top of search results.
Incredible Footage of NASA's Antares Spacecraft Explosion in HD and 4K [video]
Maybe Silicon Valley Shouldn’t Manage Journalists
Show HN: Taskenizer
If you're buying a boat or a car, you'll have to do a big transfer. But how is that any different than buying something expensive using a bank account? It's not a new problem with cryptocurrencies.
Oleg and Boris don't need Bitcoin or tipoffs to bash people over the head for their jewllery in rich neighbourhoods, and don't need named bank accounts and audit trails to get caught doing it.

The pseudoanonymity is perfect for phishing and ponzi schemes though...
Why mobile web is slow
Everytime I see a headline about Kim, I wonder why its interesting to people. Is it the equivalent of internet rubber-necking? He did some bad things, made a lot of money, then profited from redistribution of copyrighted material - why is he internet famous?
It is not a lack of resources, it is a resource allocation problem. The usa is one of the highest spenders on education in the world, but for some reason can't manage to find the money to test correctly.
Now you're just misrepresenting what I said.

You were the one who claimed that someone would have to rush out of bed before their sous-vide eggs overcook. My point is that just does not, can not happen with sous-vide because unlike hot boiling water (or an oven, with steaks) the environment of the eggs is exactly at the target temperature.

Now about your claims of uniformity and "evening out", I haven't cooked enough steaks in ovens to claim this from experience. But you can easily see on photo's of steaks the transition layer between the seared outside of a steak and the target-temperature cooked inside, it's the grey-ish part between the point and the red/pink. It's the chewy part. And it's way thinner if you look at sous-vide pics versus traditionally cooked steaks (suggesting it doesn't even out as much as you say, which to me isn't that surprising because there's no convection--same happens to pretty much every other food you put in the oven). Whether this is desirable is another question, I could agree I like that layer slightly bigger than in some of the sous-vide pics I've seen, because chewiness is yet another part of the experience. However, you can't uncook part of a steak, but you can always cook it a bit further.

With eggs, I can assure you, they are not cooked uniformly. I'm not talking about the yolk either. For the duration of soft-boiled eggs we're talking about here, I've seen big variations.

BTW I might not cook steaks sous-vide all the time (if I ate steak more often, which I don't, for reasons irrelevant here). That's in the first place because I don't have a machine and my DIY solution is kind of cumbersome. If I had one, then yes, for steaks or other cuts of meat (which are special occasion to me), I'd probably go sous-vide. Not because it's strictly better than the traditional way of cooking (from your posts I'm quite confident you can cook a delicious steak), but because I would be more confident that my steaks would come out perfectly if I did it that way. Because it's repeatable, straight-forward, not something you have to do mediocre a bunch of times before you can do it perfectly. It's not for lack of skill, either, but over the years my oven's changed, my pans changed, my gas stove, I'd have to recalibrate for all of that.
It looks to me like they're trying to use not being in AMO as leverage to get Mozilla to implement additional security features. If they said "we'd like these features, but we're ok being in AMO in the mean time" Mozilla would probably mostly ignore them, and these are generally useful features that should help others if developed.
The free version is also Windows-only
I've applied for the world's 1st global virtual #hackathon by koding. Join me
I think you live in the world of illusion. Russia has been on this course already long time - since end of nineties.

http://imrussia.org/media/pdf/Research/Michael_Weiss_and_Pet...

I am not sure if you could even imagine the level and depth of the mass propaganda taking place in Russia.
"Weekly Hours: 40"
DeepSort: Scalable Sorting with High Efficiency [pdf]
Efficient use of resources is a thing as well. Many places use their resources better, and prioritise areas like education.

Education, which people pay the state for, is failing in the USA. With 49% functional illiteracy, it is a catastrophic failure.
Using AES enryption in C++
I doubt the empirical veracity of this claim. You are pushing a convenient mainstream narrative.
> The repeated “success, scale, fail” experience of the last 20 years of development practice suggests something super boring: Development projects thrive or tank according to the specific dynamics of the place in which they’re applied. It’s not that you test something in one place, then scale it up to 50. It’s that you test it in one place, then test it in another, then another. No one will ever be invited to explain that in a TED talk.

Perhaps. That model works very well in Silicon Valley. It's just that the expectation is that most projects will fail. Development projects are similar, only with an unrealistic expectation of success early on, and without appropriate processes to fail fast, recover money from failures, etc.

What I'd like to see is fundraising with:

* Big figures
* Long-term windows
* Milestones

In other words, I raise $10 million as $2 million per year, contingent on meeting specific milestones. Or $200k/$1 million/$4 million. Or whatever. As a fundraiser, I have a strong interest to write realistic plans -- not just grandiose but impractical visions -- since if I fail to execute, I lose funding. I also have a confirmed, steady, long-term source of funding, so I'm not spending 90% of my time selling.

If I do fail, the money is recovered.