The tour of the white house was pretty interesting. If you typed in "oval offi" it takes you to some gold room that I don't recognize, and if you step outside, there's a big portrait of Hillary Clinton. Do the first ladies all have their portraits?
I didn't read the comments first, spent about ten minutes on it. From a cursory glance, I think it comes down to the following lines:
In modal.register.js:100, 128, 337
$("#veriImg").attr("src", "/present/captchaImage.action?t=" + new Date().getTime());
It doesn't seem like the expected value of the captcha ever actually gets registered on the server side.
My one idea of stopping before the Ajax request and setting the verification code equal to an empty string to try to match a null/undefined on the server side didn't work.
It's possible that, in some really obvious error, the server makes its own request based on a current timestamp to get the captcha value to match against and uses a later timestamp, but the time difference because of latency means that I can't test that without guessing a bunch of times.
It never says that the last car in this incident was a Prius, just that "In a separate incident during the storm, three Toyota Prius hybrids at Port Newark also were damaged by fire"
"raising the question of whether this latest incident is a sign of design flaws, of possible risks associated with plug-in vehicles generally or simply a result of the abuses wrought by extremely rare weather conditions"
That's lousy journalism - not mentioning what the specific weather conditions were, and making it sound like the seawater was some sort of simple throwaway answer instead of the scientifically obvious answer that it actually is.
"Why Did 17 Plug-In Cars Burn?"
"What caused more than a million dollars-worth of plug-in hybrid vehicles, including 16 Fisker Karma luxury sedans, to catch fire Monday night at Port Newark?"
It really should say what the other car was. It's impossible to guess at any sort of trend, because the other car could break it and we aren't told what it was. Was it another Fisker car, indicating a consistent problem with the company in this instance? Were there similarities in the design? All we know is that it was a plug-in vehicle.
I think there's a disturbing trend in our society towards trying to get something that's competitive by "hacking" it or cheating on it somehow. Either that or working insanely hard at the expense of your personal life and personal health. It ultimately leads to a raising of the standard so that only those people can really get what they want.
"Hacking" the Y-Combinator application is an example of that. Suppose some people figure out how to hack it so that they can give the reviewers exactly what they want. Well, then the other people who aren't hacking it in that way are at a disadvantage. Then they have to hack too or be left in the dust. And it becomes this sort of arms race where the original point gets left in the dust.
The same example is true of taking adderall to study for tests. In high school, I didn't take adderall, but I know a lot of kids who did and they would remember information a lot better and score above what they should have been. So if there was some kid who was objectively a worse student than me and he was getting the same grades as me, we both look the same. If everybody started doing it, I'd be left behind or pushed into a lower bracket by virtue of being the only person who didn't do it - who wasn't willing to risk my health (I think, don't know too much about it) for a higher grade. I don't think this will happen, but there are a lot of other examples:
-Doping in bicycling
-Working an insane amount of hours on your startup/job
-Spending months/years studying for the GMAT to get into business school
-Corruption or lying in politics
-Autotuning in the music industry
-High school kids taking all these leadership roles and such things that they don't really care about to try to show passion and get into Harvard. Same for grad school applications.
I was watching some video the other day where Jon Stewart made a random appearance. All the people around him had their phones out taking pictures of him instead of actually experiencing him being there. It was like proving to other people that they'd had an awesome experience was more important than actually having that experience. Or like they were going through life as tourists, making sure they checked every box and shared it all with other people to make them jealous. "Been within five feet of a major celebrity - check".
I'm actually building a website in D3JS myself ( http://uscfstats.com/matches ) and the SVG and D3 work fine there, and I am using the latest version of Chrome.
The first time I tried it, nothing happened. I clicked on the globe because I thought maybe you had to drag it, and couldn't un-drag so it kept jiggling around without doing anything. No red dots came up.
I glanced at the comments to see if anyone said "It's broken" and nobody did, so I went back and tried hitting the play button but nothing happened, same result.
Then I read the first comment on here and went back one more time and it worked; however, this time when it spins and I click on a red dot nothing happens and I get ' error parsing d="" ' in the console, with the line being /quakes/:1, which is just the <html> tag.
The line at the top of the page, for me, says "Undefined".
Firefox 10.0.7, Windows 7.
I debugged it for you - the outerHTML property isn't supported in Firefox < 11. Here's the solution from StackOverflow:
function outerHTML(node){
return node.outerHTML || (
function(n){
var div = document.createElement('div'), h;
div.appendChild( n.cloneNode(true) );
h = div.innerHTML;
div = null;
return h;
})(node);
}
Level 0: Saw the post title and didn't think he needed to look at it because he was so confident in his abilities already.
Level 1: Read the post, noticed a lot that he didn't know but didn't intend to do anything about it.
Level 2: Read the post and went out and learned everything in it that he didn't know.
Level 3: Read the post, figured out which things from it he didn't know but might need to or want to, and learned those.
Oh, and a special level -1: Read the post, noticed a lot of things that he didn't know, and decided the post was stupid because clearly he's an amazing programmer and the post didn't agree with that self-assessment.
I'm in the middle of the machine learning coursera course, and registered for this one as well due to interest in the material.
My one complaint is that the programming assignments weren't interesting at all. The results were interesting, but the setups were mostly given to us, and we just had to code an algorithm that was in our notes. For someone who understands the basics of linear algebra and programming, it was just a syntax challenge, and that got irritating after a bit so I stopped doing them.
I won't get the certificate for completing the course, but I have a few extra hours of free time each week to add this second course, so I'm happy. I doubt that the actual homework that Stanford students taking this course get is so easy and repetitive, though, and I'm positive they wouldn't complain about not getting to retake quizzes after getting poor grades.
Not to knock the course. I've learned a lot and the professor (Andrew Ng) does a good job.
I didn't know it had a point at all besides surviving for as long as possible. I made my little 4 pixel bubble survive for almost ten minutes purely out of curiosity, to see just how massive this one bubble would get. Then I accidentally hit a blue one and, surprise, it makes me bigger.
Andrew Ng, who founded Coursera, is a professor of machine learning at Stanford - I am taking his course right now. I wonder whether, once Coursera has been around for a while, he might use his machine learning knowledge to predict such things as how likely a person is to drop out of a course or to do well in a course, or to compare people based on the university they attended or other factors. Could be really interesting.
This is from 2004, but I thought it was interesting and relevant in today's world of ninjas, rockstars, cowboy coders, and interviewers who think a good programmer has the memory of Von Neumann.
-Linkbait articles rapidly accelerating to the front page while good stuff like questions or Show HN gets lost in "New".
-The slight trend in the community towards vitriol and nasty criticism, which there was a lot of chatter about two or three weeks ago.
In both cases, in my understanding, there's a lot of upvoting of the controversial links/comments from new people with low karma, which is how they're kind of taking control of the community.
I came up with some ideas in the shower about this. First, I thought it might be a good idea to create some logarithmic mapping of karma value to vote weight. The weight wouldn't give the user more karma for being up-voted by a high-karma person, but it would factor into the site's systems. That way, people with more karma have more of an impact on the community.
Second, I thought that the quality of a user's previous submissions should factor into their reputation or something on this site somehow. Maybe HN could look at the trend of votes earned on recent comments and the ratio of downvotes:upvotes or downvotes:views (since controversial comments get upvoted a lot, we want to look at how many times they were downvotes, not the total score since that will probably be very positive regardless of how many downvotes there were) and use that information to somehow affect the user. i.e. if someone is getting a lot of upvotes for mocking someone's project in a nasty but particularly clever way but also getting a considerable number of downvotes, the system should say hey, this guy writes posts that a lot of people don't think belong on our website, and then take action on that somehow.
Note, I'm "new" (198 karma, joined about a year ago) so I may not know what I'm talking about.
I'm the same age as you, Dan, and just started to realize a similar thing. Your post really struck home with me.
Right now I'm in the middle of a seven-month internship with IBM. Back at the start, I distinctly remember when Hacker News was full of articles discussing 42 Floors' open job offer to you, and I felt miserable - "I could be that awesome if only I managed myself better" - and determined to spend the entire seven months in a mad self-improvement frenzy.
At the start of the summer I made this big sheet of paper with little letters and numbers next to each day to be crossed off. There were different things I wanted to do each day - read a bit of this book, work a little on this project - and they were all meticulously planned out. Since the work was divided up into such small chunks, however, it was easy to just miss one because ultimately it didn't matter. I also resented that the paper was planning out my day so much. Once I'd missed one, it was easy to miss another, and pretty soon it all fell apart. I don't think it's a good idea at all to micromanage yourself this much.
Next, I tried making the goals slightly more long-term. I divided up what I wanted to do into months instead of days, making columns for each month between now and January and writing down what I wanted to accomplish in each month, all the books I wanted to read, etc. The problem again was expecting too much of myself and being too strict on myself. When I wrote down a reading list, suddenly reading the books didn't feel enjoyable anymore - it was something I was forcing myself to do and so something that I had to do. Even writing "Do a Rails project" made it less of an enjoyable experience because I felt like I was doing it because I had to instead of because I wanted to, even though I had only written it down in the first place because I wanted to do it.
I've grappled with the second goal set for the last two months, talking to my friends and discussing a lot of the same ideas that you wrote about in your blog. I think you and I both came to the same conclusion, which is that you just need to have some vague idea of where you want to go and go there in a way that you'll enjoy. When the inspiration hits, you'll be free and flexible enough to do something with it, instead of being imprisoned by goals. So right now, my goals are just "Learn more about algorithms and do cool projects", which I'm enjoying a lot more. In particular, I think that we as programmers have a bad habit of assuming that we're capable of a lot more than we actually are, an assumption that kind of handicaps us by making us think we can jump into things in an unrealistic way such that we feel frustrated when we're not as godlike as we imagined.
If this is utterly unreadable, thank Bill Clinton, haha.