skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
people are still repeating the "its only metadata" line?
Piwik/Ini: a PHP component for reading and writing INI files
TAFE Queensland + QUT for me.
Why not just go vegan? Pulses are relatively easy to grow and have great nutrition.
The other day there was a "best-of" on Reddit where a teacher said that "only martyrs teach now in America."

http://np.reddit.com/r/teaching/comments/2rj1r1/i_really_wan...
There is an odd duality there.

I recall reading a claim that during the early rock era, labels where run by old guys that would basically do short runs of singles and see if they sold. If they did they would get hold of the band or solo artist that pitched the demo and make some more.

But then came a generational change, where new execs were hired that believed they knew what good music was. And so there was much more of a filter between hopeful bands and the masses.

Now the filer seems to have gone away, in a massive sense. Now anyone with a computer have theoretically global reach.
Is the content generated auto with some algorithn or is it manual work?
Speed's nice, price-per-terabyte is important, but do something about endurance and how it acts when it dies. I want my drive to tell me "x and Y is broken, only Z is available, read your data before I die" instead of simply VANISHING from my system on next power up like EVERY FRICKIN SSD does right now (even ones promising read only failure mode like Intel).
I've found the best way to discern what kids are learning at school is to, you know, talk to them for a few minutes.

I think the idea of trying to stack rank teachers and schools works about as well as stack ranking engineers. It's garbage-in garbage-out. The entire premise is faulty.

"You can only improve what you can measure" works great on manufacturing lines and click-through-rates. Not so much, strike that, not at all on humans.

Edit: analog31, exactly that, you are spot on.
"Poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return" vs "Poor people today have hard lives because government benefits don't go far enough to help them live decently".

If you focus on the latter part of the sentences, I can see how it's easy to be a bit confused about which is the correct answer.
Yeah, I've read it, and tbh, we do interview for a set of role-specific traits for each position; we aren't a million miles off what Kahnemann suggests - however there are environmental factors that do skew things (IT world in geographic area is small which heavily affects prior knowledge of experienced candidates; not primarily an IT company; not in a fashionable sector).

I must say I'm not advocating snap judgement at all. I just think it is very common (as Kahnemann states). What he states as an ideal doesn't necessarily make an awful lot of difference in many situations; the snap judgement can very often be the same as the careful one (though external factors that partly force/aid preselection bias things greatly in this respect).
Probably not, most people threat it like gardening, crocheting, or knitting. Road is more important than the destination.
Amazon, Authors United, and the future of publishing
You did get your bounty for finding the bug I presume?
How to Play Videos on PS4
A gun death is not necessarily a gun death. For many people who commit suicide, they will find a way. If there is a gun available they will use it, if there isn't they'll do something else. Contrast that with someone who wants to go postal, with a gun they kill a someone, without a gun perhaps they toss a computer monitor off the desk.
Browser Trends January 2015: IE8 Usage Triples
The Top 20 Reasons Why Startups Fail [pdf]
this is really really old.

I enjoyed reading the CaTB book a lot. Unfortunately ESR appears to sometimes be very rude in his opinion of others :/
FTFY:

"Poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without having the possiblities to do anything in return"
Most of my friends in high school went to top-tier schools while I shipped over to the local community college. A lack of college-mindedness, arguably. I ended up transferring, but I'm extremely pleased with the education I got there.
> I don't understand how anyone could possibly improve their 30 second impression.

This is not actually very hard: start with good grooming, nice clothes, posture, confidence.

Of course, this doesn't change the fact that the hiring process seems... odd.
> We fund all schools equally, across the board, no questions.

Equal funding doesn't actually fix anything, especially if equal means equally low. And money doesn't help if it gets spent on worthless bureaucracy. Moreover, the home life of the students matters a lot. The difference between going home to a decent meal and supportive parents vs. absentee or abusive parents is not something you can lay on the schools.

These things coalesce into the fact that DC has one of the highest per-student budgets in the country but gets some of the worst results. Because they have an enormous amount of bureaucracy and a very poor student population.

Making the funding unconditional would solve half the problem by eliminating a lot of the bureaucracy and giving the local communities an incentive to show up, but the other half of the problem would still be there.
The only thing is, the content team was building to a budget from the start. So they would have, for example, just planned to use smaller textures if the early memory budget pinched them.

Now, whether or not you actively hide a budget padding is another thing. That is up to the seniors of the project.
Since I'll probably get more than a few downvotes for my main comment below, I'll start by saying that I adjunct teach software development at our local CC, even though the pay (if you calculate it on a 'per hour' basis) is way less than my 'real' job. Adjuncts get screwed, but I enjoy teaching, and appreciate the opportunities that CC gives to students ... I just wanted to frame my comment so that you understand my perspective.

Now, on to the part that's going to get me into trouble: I completely and totally disagree with the idea of letting students attend CC without paying.

Many students coming into CC, even when they are responsible for part of the tuition (which at most current CCs is only about 30%), struggle to find motivation to work hard on their classes and finish them. Although some students surely would benefit from 'free' college (I put it in quotes because nothing is free -- the rest of us will be paying for it), I do not think that offering free CC is a good use of taxpayer money. Simply put, CC is already heavily subsidized, and I think that if the students have no skin in it at all they'll be less motivated to succeed, which doesn't do anyone any favors.

Additionally, for those students who do try, and who do succeed, the potential return will GREATLY eclipse their investment (as you noted). For these students, it is once again totally unnecessary to subsidize tuition because their increased income will more than offset the cost of their education.
shortcut?
How to write if you cannot concentrate
We are either already there and improving (reprap, add vitamins and lots of human labour) or still far away (no printing of motors, microchips and hotend on a single machine).
Darwinian computing?

Or maybe Core War? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War
Happen to be watching a video by Bill Gross who studied 200 startups and he said the top reason they fail is timing, either the idea is too early or too late.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZS-NCSJ9Zo&feature=youtu.be...

An awful lot has been figured out since the nineties when I did my last startup. But the 'experts' still disagree on some pretty big things.
I once had a conversation with someone who described themselves as "rich." They claimed the poor had it easy. I asked him: "If the poor have it so easy, would you switch places?"

There was silence.

Do the poor not have to pay for things that the rich have to pay for? Yes. Is their life ultimately easier as a result? I don't think so. Coming from a poor background and now having experience with the average software engineer's salary, I'd rather have the latter, 100%.
IT, like the library system, provides infrastructure in support of the university's core mission. I've never heard anybody say, "Damn, the network here just works too well... let's sack the IT folks so we can focus on our research like we used to!" Likewise, no professor or student is likely to say "Do we really need all these reference books?" about the library. The value and need for these complex services is almost universally acknowledged among professors and students.

When I think of administrative excesses I think about how we now have MBAs pulling down high six figures for nonsense like Assistant Vice Dean of Student Life. Each of these superfluous executives is supported by their own mini-fiefdom, with assistants and reports who cost a lot of money and make a lot of busywork for professors/students while performing their functions. Having these corporate-minded people who care little for the original mission and purpose of the university leads to perverse decision making as they work to fatten their own bottom lines, advance their agendas, or increase the size of their influence.

This is how universities have come around to the view that academic labor is a cost to be minimized, forcing a generation of young academics into exploitative and unsustainable adjuctships.

I think a big problem with the corporatization of the university is that administrative incentives are not aligned with it's traditional mission. In a business corporation, highly-paid executives are accountable to shareholders. If their work doesn't advance the core mission of the company (making money) then you can be sure there will be repercussions. Until the compensation of high-ranking university administrators is somehow tied to the university's performance on research and teaching, we'll continue to see growth of administration for administration's sake at the expense of other areas.
The Reason Education Sucks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILQepXUhJ98

Edit: for those wanting something less cynical and more serious, I recommend some John Taylor Gatto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_CeWip5BpU#t=1m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxCuc-2tfgk
US does it Metal Gear Solid 2 style, by manipulating context and censoring information (outright and using chilling effect).
It's not exactly great that race is a decent predictor of education level[1], or of income[2], but that doesn't mean that we have to solve the entire race problem to improve social equality. America has failed miserably for some time now to "cure" racism[3]. So what's wrong with throwing resources at improving some of the social factors which contribute to racial/socioeconomic trends?

As an aside, it's a bit simplified and inflammatory to cast this as a black/white thing. If you insist on boiling this down to only being about race (a stance I would disagree with), the comparison is much starker when cast as hispanic/asian[1] or black/asian[2].

[1] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_caa.asp
[2] http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0691.p...
[3] Any contemporary news story about the police in dense urban areas.
Going state-by-state is going to take decades. The 'laboratories of democracy' thing is extremely overrated, oftentimes you just end up with 51 hills to climb. 'That may work for them over in _____, but it's not how we do things in ______!' It's not like US politicians (or voters) are famed for their analytical rigor and intolerance for logical/rhetorical fallacies.
>"a bit confused about which is the correct answer."

Correct answer to what question? I'm a bit confused as to what you're trying to say.
It seems very difficult for one group to empathize with a less fortunate or more marginalized group. Whether it's rich vs poor, white people vs non-white, men vs women, each thinks the others "don't have it that bad," or at least not as bad as they claim. As a straight guy, I found this chart quite jarring: http://cdn.okcimg.com/blog/mofo_mysteries/Suicide-Three.png (from the end of http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/mofo-and-other-mysteries/ ); I just cannot contemplate how isolating and anguish-inducing having an atypical sexual orientation is. To feel badly for marginalized groups is a tacit admission of privilege and unfairness in the world, which makes us feel bad about ourselves.
I recall trying a demo of that game. Was very "odd".

It was pretty much the original Decent, but using the directory tree of my HDD as the basis for the map. If it ran into files i could understand, like say images, it would use those as textures etc.
> If the problem is community, why not take the students/families who really do care (from all the schools in a metropolitan area) and put them all in the same school? That would at least be a start.

A big part of the problem is that federal law ties the community's hands. Even if you got all the like-minded people together, you can't get out of the fact that a very large quantity of federal dollars are contingent on you doing a very large quantity of bureaucratic nonsense. Which is why the communities are so disinterested -- if they have no power to change anything then why bother showing up?
ASK HN: Track users if they booked a hotel, coming from our website
So pretty much a 3D tree map.
Your question seems to me to be a false equivalence. The word "easy" is perceived as coming from this: A "rich" person sees him or herself as putting a lot into the economic system and, therefore, receiving much from it but he or she also sees a "poor" person as putting very little into the economic system yet still receiving an amount sufficient for survival and some luxuries from it (and, since social welfare is paid for through taxes, also reducing the amount that the "rich" person receive back from his or her economic input).

In other words, "those people have food, a refrigerator, a car and an iPhone, how bad can it really be?"
No. Press releases always had to goal to pre-write things for journalists and - in the best case - not do too much fact-checking. They are a PR invention and never had the goal to be too rooted in reality.
> From my experience I still think the education problem needs to be solved in K-6th grade.

This is true, but the fundamental education problem is that we're teaching the wrong foundations to begin with. It's not the substance of the curricula that's a problem but the overarching goal: we create adults who either follow the rules or rebel against them. In neither case do they think about the rules or engage with them constructively.

The consequence is, well... today.

> Increasing the pay of teachers and making teaching as a profession more prestigious and rigorous will solve the K-6th grade education problem, which will help with education as a whole.

I disagree. Oh, I think we should do it, and we should stop tying school funding to test results, but making teaching prestigious and lucrative won't fix anything by itself: bad teachers will get worse even as good teachers get better. Look at doctors.

I actually favor the opposite. Lower the number of paid teachers (and raise the salary accordingly) and start creating a social practice of volunteering. Use the paid staff as expert guides and institutional resources for the volunteers and gap-fillers in the curriculum. What you lose in pure rigor you'll make up for in quality and relevance. (This doesn't apply past high school; I'd rather see the consequences of this hit higher education before I speculate about how they should change to suit.)
Sorting Algorithms Illustrated
Read an article a while back about a guy setting up his phone so that any wifi APs detected while wandering around town would play certain sounds to his headphones. This based on signal, encryption etc.

Since then i found myself pondering how we limited our computing interaction to our visual sense, where as interacting with mechanical devices also involve auditory and tactile feedback. A fridge moment was when i was waiting for my coffee machine to do its thing, and how i instinctively responded to changes in the noises made.

Never mind the analog modem days where i got into the habit of leaving the sound on for the handshake, as i could then tell if i got a good or bad connection based on the sounds heard.
Apple, Please Fix the Bluetooth Experience on iOS
"providing all the help they should need to nail their next opportunity". Too bad most interviewers do not care that much to go that far due to legal risks, especially here in US.
Most Republicans are in favor of public schools and, in general, of having a much larger government that a night watchman state, including a pretty robust social safety net.

You cannot call these people "anti-government."

Look at George W. Bush. A good example of a Republican. He certainly expanded the US government, which (in my opinion) was already massively oversized.
Because while great teachers exist, they are sitting on top of a pile of good, decent and bad teachers that largely can't be fired or forced to improve.

But that is true for all countries, while the pervasive test culture is a phenomenon mostly observable in the US. The quality of teachers (or their education) can't be the major reason for the test dependency of the educational system in the US.
Le Paper Globe: a do-it-yourself terrestrial globe
I think the article presents a false scenario. Leaving aside the notorious ease with which some of these "polls" manipulate results by virtue of changing the wording of the questions.

I mean, if you really ask yourself what does it mean: "Do you think the poor have it easy?" It's vague, and already has a pre-implied bias associated with it. There's no "yes, but". There's "no" and there's "yes, I'm a selfish rich bastard because my privilege blinds me of the plight of the poor" (if you believe the tone of the article". Most people when answering yes probably do so because they have "some" notion or reason that the poor have it easy in some way. Perhaps they simply believe that the poor should work for the benefits, etc. It all get's clumped under "yes" in their mind, but the interpreter and subsequent reporter blows it out of proportion.

What, I personally believe, it boils down to is that the "rich" are not comparing the poors' situation to their own. They're mostly comparing it to the hypothetical situation of the poor having to work hard (I assume via manual labor) to be comfortable or the receive the benefits mentioned.
I think those people are just suggesting that we should be writing apps and NOT android app, ios app, windows app, linux app etc etc.
Macroeconomically, a program like this would have made more sense at a time of low-growth/high-unemployment, like a few years ago. (It might work best as a countercyclical program: when many people are idle, subsidize skills-building education, but as unemployment drops, expect people to pay their own tuition or learn-on-the-job instead.)
Part of why I find HN so refreshing is that the majority of people here, while probably having above average wealth, also seem to have above average empathy. One example is stories about basic income; they tend to get a generally positive reception, even though a basic income would not be likely to benefit most HN contributors. Similarly, the (largely male) community seems to be very much behind making the tech sector more welcoming to women. Those are just a couple of examples of many.
It bothers me that the entire premise of this poll seems to be that someone ought to be able to live comfortably on government benefits. Living at somebody else's expense* should be uncomfortable.

* Note - in the case of private charities, where the funds to provide benefits are not collected by force/with threat of imprisonment, I'm perfectly OK with providing higher levels of support.
A calm rational deep and insightful explanation that will be completely ignored and forgotten.

Oh I know, let's spend more money on weapons for police and the military while draining all resources from schools, that will solve everything.
> I, seriously, don't understand how this works, unless your candidates appearance and accent are your main tools for judging a candidate. I would prefer to think that's not the case.

Companies would like you to think this, too, and law makers would very much like to think that their rules regarding non discrimination have any effect. The real situation tells another story.

But it's OK, companies can just include a nice stock picture of an ethically diverse group of people in business attire working together, an all is well.
"He called me into his office, and we set out upon what I imagined would be another exhausting session of freeing up memory."

This itself implies that the guy WAS one of the "actual engineers" busting their asses.
What is the reddit link?
1) It will probably give people who actually can't afford community college the ability to do so. Yes, it's "incredibly cheap in most places", but a penny is still costlier than free.

2) It means people can spend what savings they make from attending community college on tuition, room, and board at a -year, if they go that route. If this program works for longer-term students, that means borrowing less overall.

That reads like progress to me. It certainly doesn't solve the issue, but it does help.

Edited to add: I found this article while Googling around for other stuff: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/uc/2014/04/s... It's not entirely relevant, but it's certainly an interesting counterpoint to your thoughts.
But even if you don't install new apps, phones still call the play store regularly at least to ask for updates of the OS and the installed apps so they should be counted in the stats.
It seems very difficult for some people to empathize and understand that certain other groups have different ideals and different definitions of "fairness". Once you realize that, then you'll realize why these things occur, and why some perceive others as not empathizing to the supposed plight of others.

E.g. The big differing views on "fairness" are: One side believes that fairness is determined by end-results, others that it is determined by fairness of opportunity (irrespective of end-results). If you're so inclined (to judge and examine your own ideas), then I'd recommend this hefty book to you:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Conflict_of_Visions
I used to go out and catch some crickets just for snacks when I was little back in my hometown. I don't think they're that bad. A little much can make you dizzy though (dunno why).
Pervasive test culture is far larger in Asia than in the US. Wealthy Asian nations perform very well, though admittedly most of that performance is likely due to unmentionable factors.
They have those- private schools. Unfortunately they're not financially accessible to everyone.

The public school district I was in did not have magnet schools, so my parents had to look for an external solution. I attended a Catholic college prep school (I'm not Catholic), and it was great to be in a place that prioritized education over football BS.