skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Any college student with a few years of Unix tools under his belt

I was doing stuff like this when 15 using just Windows notepad and knowing jack squat about Linux. Seriously, anyone at any age who knows anything about (non-web) programming would find it by just opening an .exe in said notepad. That's how horrible this tool was.

And I don't believe that no one noticed it and that it wasn't exploited already. It's just too easy to find.
I had the same issue happen to me about a month ago, and also paid the flat $300 fee. I called Apple Support yesterday, and explained to them my situation and their current program. The employee that was helping me put me on hold a few times and eventually had me talk to his 'Senior Supervisor'. I then had to re-explain what was going on, and to my surprise, this was the first time the 'Senior Supervisor' heard of the Video Card warranty/program. He asked for my serial number and called my back to 'look into it'. About 25 minutes later, he explained the refund process to me. It will take about 4 weeks total, and you will have the option to get refunded via check or bank deposit (you'll need to give them routing number etc. if you choose this route).
Isn't that what the article's title kind of implying though?
> A service you can choose to use. Lenovo was installing malware without the knowledge of their users.

As a site owner true. As a site visitor it gets a little more complicated and murky.
Reminds me of some of the work of Xenakis:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_piece_(music)
The last Lenovo laptop I got came with Norton. I uninstalled that completely. Then I went to download Chrome which Norton decided to protect me from. Uninstall means different things, and they never uninstall completely/cleanly. In this Superfish example they would have left the dodgy certificates behind. The only way you know you have a good install is to do a clean install, rather than attempt surgery on the crap that got shipped.

Fortunately Lenovo do have a system updater that does a fantastic job on driver downloads etc.
Any cloud IDE suggestions?
It's a pain to make sure my machine is setup properly whilst learning to code. Would appreciate suggestions. Thanks :)
> I don't mind if you want to go off-grid. I had ideas myself about doing that. I read about van-dwelling, building my own small house on a trailer, earthships. If that's what you feel you need to do, by all means go play in the dirt, get it out of your system. Just don't pretend it's morally superior just because you've failed to fully appreciate everything that brought you to that point to where you could renounce the modern world.

This is such a great statement. These articles when they come around make finance, business, and work seem like such an "evil" thing, and should be beneath people. But god forbid you tell them how dumpster diving and just being a vagabond can also be a burden to everyone else in society.
There are a lot more cultural issues at play that effect the education performance of the US compared to Finland.

The US has a far more heterogeneous population than Finland, so directly comparing them doesn't mean a lot.

It would be more appropriate to compare Finland to Quebec, given the two have similar racial demographic breakdowns.
Earnest: how hard are they to fire?
Consumers are often willing to buy poor, unreliable equipment to save a couple hundred dollars, but most businesses are not willing to do that.
I am getting the sense that you think asm.js has some troubling interaction with software freedom and I just don't agree with that at all. Whether or not the code you receive is free software is orthogonal to whether or not it's been run through a compiler.

Emacs is free software and people typically download a binary to use it. Is that dangerous somehow? The source code is in a well known location.

I agree that it is troubling that nonfree JavaScript is shipped all the time, but again, that happens every day without asm.js being involved, and asm.js does not help or hinder this.
How on earth can Lenovo/Superfish state:

"But Superfish tells us it stands by Lenovo’s assessment. “Superfish is completely transparent in what our software does and at no time were consumers vulnerable—we stand by this today.” a company spokeswoman said. “Lenovo will be releasing a statement later today with all of the specifics that clarify that there has been no wrong doing on our end.”

Now that an official CERT announcement has been released:

https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA15-051A

I think their misleading comments are going to come back and bite them more than they have already.

[EDIT - Looks like they are back peddling a little on: http://news.lenovo.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=1929

" Finally, we are working directly with Superfish and with other industry partners to ensure we address any possible security issues now and in the future. "

" By the end of this month, we will announce a plan to help lead Lenovo and our industry forward with deeper knowledge, more understanding and even greater focus on issues surrounding adware, pre-installs and security. We are eager to be held accountable for our products, your experience and the results of this new effort"

And on: http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/superfish

"Vulnerabilities have been identified with the software, which include installation of a self-signed root certificate in the local trusted CA store. ... Superfish intercept HTTP(S) traffic using a self-signed root certificate. This is stored in the local certificate store and provides a security concern. "

]
There are tons of WordPress site builders out there. WPMUDEV released one yesterday, calling it 'the future of WordPress'.

Everyone is hell bent on turning WP from a CMS to an app platform. This is what results in 5mb sites and gives WP a bad reputation for being slow and clunky.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draper_Fisher_Jurvetson
You're right, but in general I don't think any npm module ought to depend on a feature branch of another npm module. If a feature is worth keeping around, it's worth publishing (even if only to your private npm repo). If 19 different projects want 19 different behaviors from the module.foobar() function, then split the function up or pass it flag parameters or whatever, but don't keep 19 different versions of the code floating around. Pain is inevitable in that scenario. Of course while you're developing a new feature you might want to use it from another module on your dev machine, but "npm link" is what you want to use for that.
I'm on my 4th Thinkpad. I always do a fresh install of Linux, would never trust the pre-installed crap.

But now that I know that Lenovo is a piece of shit company with zero integrity, I don't even want to trust their hardware.
Google to roll out coding classes for 100K New York City school kids
And teachers make a lot more in Canada than they do in the United States. If you're good enough at math or science to do anything else, why would you be a teacher? It's a harsh way to look at it, but it's true.

In the US, states have their own teacher certification exams. They are pretty much just testing your understanding of 8th-grade math and science. I know a lot of teachers and I don't think any of them passed it the first time. It's like passing the bar in the world of teaching. People take it up to a dozen times. After they have gone through two years of graduate school.
Real story:

In Hungary students are rated from 1 to 5, where 5 is the best score and 1 is the worst. During the semester you have multiple tests (both verbal and on paper) each giving you a score between 1 and 5. Your final score is the average of these rounded to an integer. These final scores are the only important measure when you apply to study further, nothing else matters.

I had a [5,5,5] and had to take a verbal test which I didn't prepare for. My biology teacher decided to rate it as "three fourth" and logged it as "3/4".
[despite being horribly wrong it was commonly understood that it actually means "between 3 and 4"]

However...

At the end of the semester she calculated my score as:

(5+5+5+3+4)/5 = 4.4 -> 4

instead of

(5+5+5+3.5)/4 = 4.6 -> 5

Imagine a 13 year old student arguing a 50 year old biology teacher in front of the whole class about how to calculate my score properly. I even tried to convince her to downgrade my "3/4" to a "3" and recalc my score (that would yield 4.5) She didn't listen, eventually I was thrown out of the classroom and finished the year with a 4, because of a math error.

Edit: This was long time ago, so I am almost sure the exact numbers are off, but I clearly remember the broken math and the result.
> Depends on the high school and teacher.

In the US, each student will have between 20 and 40 teachers by the time they graduate highschool.

Thus, you can't just hope to play the public education lottery and get all good teachers for your kid. Even if things work out better than could possibly be imagined, that's what, 10 or 15 good teachers, quite a few more mediocre and 2 or 3 bad ones?

Sorry. The damage that a bad teacher can do outweighs much or all of the good that the good teachers can do.

If your kid would have 40 doctors throughout his life, only 2 or 3 of which were quacks, would that make you happy? Would you say "but the quacks will probably be the dermatologist anyway and not the surgeon, so it's ok"?

I wouldn't say that.

The only way for any of this to work out is for the impossible to happen, for nearly all of teachers everywhere across the nation to be good teachers. The distribution is pretty natural, the various colleges of education don't act as a filter, and schools are co-opted to do too many non-education tasks for that to ever be possible.
As anything else, the situation is more nuanced. Quebec schools as a whole are pretty good:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/editorials/quebe...

The problem is that good students are mostly in private schools and specialized programs (international programs) so "regular classes" in public schools contain a lot of low performing students and students with disabilities.

My gf is a public high school teacher in Montreal and they do miracles everyday with the low amount of resources that they have to work with. She has a M.Sc. in her specialization (history), but do mostly special education tasks since the student level are so low.
I agree that the park is beautiful, and perhaps development should consider better locations. However the Grand Canyon national park is huge. Something like 2000 square miles. Anyone claiming that there should be no development, or that this will 'ruin the grand canyon' is incorrect.
I just talked to a a family member who wen't to McGill's business school and according to her the education program is "the worst one by a mile", and is pretty much separate from all the other programs. Courses in the education school wouldn't even count as electives towards her degree.
It's not grade inflation. We're a small alternative high school, and it's easier for us to do the right thing for students, even if it means going against existing bureaucracy. The smallest unit of credit in our traditional high school is 0.5 credits; at our school it's 0.25 credits. We grant passing grades for the parts of a class students demonstrate an understanding of, and grant partial credit for a class. This mitigates some of the issues involved with averaging over the course of an entire semester.

Usually, when someone earns a B-, they do have a basic understanding of the material they were learning. A student who earns a D- with 0.5 credit at the traditional high school will usually earn a B- and 0.25 credits from us. At the traditional school, they're "done" with that class. At our school, they've got to do something to demonstrate further understanding. It's not a perfect system, but it's not as simple as grade inflation.
Project almanac
Spies Can Track You Just by Watching Your Phone’s Power Use
Can't say I agree with these statements. I would wager that the scale of money a rapidly growing finance sector is using is more important than an unsubstantiated claim of industry brain-drain.
Seems more like a Sony/Samsung move than a Microsoft one.
What's unfortunate there? It's not like Python is hard to install.
Lessons learned from strangers on the Internet
We fought a similar gondola project in my town and won. Developers wanted to build a gondola to the top of the Stawamus Chief, a big granite monolith on the edge of town. It got shot down. The fact that it's a provincial park probably helped. The gondola got built in a more suitable location, to the top of a nearby ridge, and now everyone is happy.

Hopefully the people organising against this Grand Canyon silliness see similar success.
"Like a lot of Airbnb listings, it was rented as “entire place” rather than “private room,” which meant no host was in residence. But in this case, I’m not sure any host was ever in residence. The listing was run by some sort of conglomerate or management company, and checking in involved no human interaction whatsoever. To get there, I carried my luggage up a neon-lit hill — past something called Hotel Fifteen Love, past places called Pub Slow Jam, Adult Shop Joyful and Baby Doll and a pet store that sold fluffed-up puppies and kittens and still somehow managed to look seedy — to the concrete apartment building where it was located. The door was unlocked. A key had been left inside. I had no idea where I’d landed."

That's wild, is there really such a low expectation of crime over there?
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/super-neutron-driv...
CLASSY LADIES TRAINING – FAMILY IN DISTRESS – ROBINLYNNES PRODUCTIONS
This is one of the things where mathematics gives way to linguistic manipulations.

If you add a "late fee", it's a no go. But if you get an "early payment credit that will appear on your next invoice", it is ok.

Don't know if this is still the case, but for a long time, merchants couldn't add a "credit card fee" (even though they pay it at 2-3%). However, they could give a "cash discount".

Mathematically (and financially) equivalent. Yet somehow different.
Why not go the Plugin route and let the user use Layers on any theme ?
The point of accessibility is to allow proportion of humanity to live normally, to do the same things that most of the rest can do; i.e. work, see a movie, and yes, take in a view. The reason to do that is that it improves the lives of the smaller proportion while at least not injuring the rest. (You believe only having stairs in a tall building would be a feature?)

Are you willing to make the argument that looking out from the top of Everest or tramming to the bottom of the canyon for an afternoon is something that everyone should be able to do? That it's more important than preserving those areas for the future?

A while back, I had the opportunity to visit Blarney Castle in Ireland. As it turns out, the castle is an unreconstructed ruin; if you want to kiss the stone or at least take in the view, you have to climb a long, cramped, tight, steep spiral staircase. I'm old, out of shape, arthritic, and not fond of being the cause of a fairly large scale body recovery in the middle of a major tourist attraction, so I didn't go up. So far, I haven't noticed any consequences of the lack, and from what I enjoyed about the site, I'd just as soon they didn't strap an elevator to the side of the tower.

Everest tourism has costs, both in terms of sheer litter and in the lives of people who probably shouldn't be doing it anyway. Grand Canyon development also has costs which would reduce the value of the site. Are those costs worth the benefits?
Can we assume their firmware is safe though?
There is ongoing work, first we want to tackle golang.org/x/mobile/f32 and github.com/go-gl/mathgl, after that we can start thinking about GL bindings.

There is an open CL about it, but it's moving along very very slowly. :(
I think you need to expand your horizons. There are large portions of the US population that view our public schools as little more than glorified daycare. While I agree for the most part, I admit that there are exceptions where we do have really solid public schooling. The exceptions are for the rich kids in schools like New Trier, etc.. There is a nearly unlimited number of edu startups trying to address this very problem, they wouldn't exist if we had good schools.
The very same thing happened in Portugal, where the Ministry of Education's guidelines for gauging teacher performance included taking the mean of a test graded in percentage points with another evaluation on a 1 to 5 scale.. by adding them and dividing by two!

Made even more embarrassing by the fact that the Minister is a mathematician.
the major player I'd say would be the community
Whoa - which U.S. state are you in? Most of those benefits are not really as good as you make them out to be.

My dad is a teacher and just announced his plan for early retirement this week. With the stripping of teachers' collective bargaining rights there have been severe drops in take home pay and changes to their benefits. He actually makes a little more money if he retires now than if he waits five years for some of the planned changes.
The DOM is to slow on mobile issue is what spawned http://famo.us/. They go beyond virtual DOM by creating their own layout engine that then outputs to optimized DOM (or canvas/WebGL).
You would have to really flex the definition of authoritarian to include the US, to the point of making the word uselessly broad.
The program 'officially' started today. I called them yesterday for my reimbursement, check my other reply explaining the process.
Some dangerous things are worth doing, in spite of being dangerous. Some dangerous things are worth mitigating the danger so more people can do them. Some dangerous things aren't really all that worthwhile.

Wisdom is knowing the difference. Or something.
Wish I could save HN comments, but I can't so I'll reply instead. Great stuff.
Their possession of advanced degrees says, sadly, little of their overall educational achievement.
Have you told your gaming buddies that you love them, lately?
The chance is locked in because, by the rules of the game, the host can't open that one and show you anything -- regardless of what it contains. You know that there's at least one door that the host can open (of the two remaining doors), so them opening a door changes nothing about the door you've chosen.
Ask HN: CSS Grids Systems vs Flexboxes?
With the in coming of display: grid (flexboxes), is it the right time to say goodbye to grid systems like 960gs, or is there a catch?
Why schools are failing our boys
Google is in dire need for a marketing unit, that educates regular consumers about the possibilities of the applications and products Google has.
Otherwise Google always ends up with low traction for a lot of its products. And sometimes these products are killed.

It seems Google wants to do consumer tech only to get money to be able to do high tech. But otherwise it has no real interest in consumer tech.
UK has tests in Mathematics and in English for anyone who wants to take teacher training for schools (not needed for 'post compulsory' or pre-school yet).

http://sta.education.gov.uk/

Might be fun to try the practice tests out on colleagues...

Helping managers to aggregate pass rates per class into an overall pass rate used to be a fun thing to do many years ago. They are better at data management now because of our focus on targets in the UK. Not so good for holistic education but managers can certainly hack their stats.
Oracle – Virtual Technology Summit
You picked up on a really important issue that is often assumed. Thank you for not letting me just slip it under the radar without question.

To answer your question: we treat the MF and FM differently, just for ease of calculation.

What we're doing is taking a set of possible situations (different 2-child families), each with an attached probability (I'll come back to this), throwing away those that don't match some known information (i.e. those without a boy), taking those that do, grouping them into sets (the set of families with the other being a girl, and the set where the other is a boy), and calculating the probability the actual scenario was in each of those sets.

Now the 'attached probability' probably sounded odd in there, because that's not what we've done, right? We've just been counting situations. True, but that's because we carefully started with situations that are all equally likely. So rather than bugger about with those attached probabilities, we could just use raw counts, knowing that it would work.

So, if we start with four possible sexes of two children: MM, MF, FM, FF, those are all equally likely. I'm using the birth order as a way of breaking the two MF cases apart, so I've got two cases that are equally likely, letting me do the counting trick. I can just count the 2 out of 3 remaining situations that match the information, so 2/3. Easy.

But I don't have to do it that way.

Let's say we follow your intuition and start with three possible sex combinations: MM, MF, and FF. Now, those aren't equally likely, right? There are twice as many families with MF children as with MM children. So I need to use the attached probabilities.

MM (1/4 of 2-child families), MF (1/2), FF (1/4)

We can remove the FF as inconsistent with the information (as before), then the probability the parent has an MF family (i.e. their other child is a girl) is

1/2 over (1/2 + 1/4) = 2/3

as before.

In fact, for any reasonable calculation based on data, we're almost certainly not going to be able to use the counting trick. In the case where I was using actual birth rate statistics for sex (rather than assuming as many girls as boys are born), I'd have to do it this way. The counting trick is really only useful for toy problems and teaching basic probability: you were right to call me out on it.

---

The Tuesday's child doesn't drop a case. There are certainly seven cases where, in an MM family, the eldest is a Tue child, and seven where the youngest is, but one of those cases is shared: a case where both are Tue children.

In terms of the intuition you can think of it this way, identifying by birth-day-of-the-week is identifying which child is which, so we're almost at 1/2, but there is one case (both Tue boys) where this information does nothing to distinguish them, so that tiny bit of ambiguity remains, and it can't quite reach the full 1/2, there's still a trace of the 1/3 result that came when the ambiguity was total.
After you choose a door, Monty cannot choose it -- he's stuck choosing one of the two doors that you did not. So, the order of choosing the doors absolutely matters.
"...who like the idea of enabling a large number of people to enjoy the great canyon’s very heart, a stunningly beautiful and remote site long inaccessible to the masses."

Don't they realize that being remote and inaccessible is a big part of what makes it stunningly beautiful? The moment you arrive there with 10,000 other people, the place will no longer have what you came there to see.
Oh my god — I can't believe it.

A professor of mine in college (I'm currently a freshman — this happened a few months ago) told me a story _exactly_ like this — just at the University of Pittsburgh Masters in Education program and wherein nobody knew (or cared) that 1 was not a prime number.

I may be more dumbfounded now than I was sitting in his office during office hours... one is an anecdote, two is pattern.
5 of the Most Famous (And Effective) Growth Hacks of All Time
>teaching is viewed as overpaid babysitting.

I think it's also an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which parents think that just because they have kids, it makes them experts at education.

This is ultimately harmful because it makes parents feel superior to educators in their respective field.