skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was a TA at a medium-sized US university 25 years ago. I had a lot of (20 or so) Malaysian students in a class of mine and it was very simple: if they were Chinese Malaysian they worked their butts off. If they were ethnic Malay they were lazy as hell. I caught several of the latter cheating as well.
Microsoft didnt write js engine well, I wont expect a simulator even.
dnt worry abt IE compatibility, Firefox is a go.
An Indie AppStore Section
Sorry Yelp, Google Is Determined Not To Have Deals Negotiated Through The Press
I like it - reminds me a lot of RelaxNG compact syntax.
Catastrophic for many, not for all. In particular island nations, and nations already susceptible to drought.
The emissions-per-GDP is probably closely related to technological development and energy efficiency. (At least it seems that way looking at the wikipedia list posted, the top countries are all 3rd world nations while for example the UAE is near the bottom.) So, I don't think they've passed the US, I think they've never been below.
I just read this article: http://nickgravgaard.com/cgi-bin/elastictabstopsnews/blosxom...

He compares proportional fonts with monospaced fonts for programming, and after looking at his screenshots I think I'm going to have to try it for myself.
but can you build and maintain a wind turbine without using fossil fuels?

Or mine and refine uranium?

Total lifecycle analysis is complicated, and important in these questions.
Toast Printer For Batch-Baking Breakfasts
Have you considered that maybe they aren't a programmer and don't have the technical knowledge to add a feature like that? This kind of attitude is one of the things that drives people away from Linux and the open-source movement in general.

Personally: every time I use OO, I'm reminded of how much better Word is--in interface (the ribbon is GREAT), features (everything you could ever need), compatibility (you can save in PDF), etc.
And the best part is ... now you can QUOTE ("retweet") from movies :)
UK students are worried of working hard. Western figureheads are often the child protegy, the uneducated polymath. 'Hard workers' are failures -- not geniune. We all strive (the right term?) to be the drop-out who can turn up on the exam morning and pull 100%.

'Hard worker' is an offensive term.

It's a cultural problem.
If Google really wants to claim openness...
I love CodingFontTobi (http://www.proggyfonts.com/). It's all over my system (Visual Studio, vim, cmd/cygwin etc).
Rumored couple Joe Chen Qiao En and Roy Chiu Ze competing to cry more
It's probably two things:

a) The foreign students and their families have had to sacrifice more and faced more uncertainty to get an education in America. When people have to suffer and struggle for something they value it much more than if it's just given to them.

b) There's a selection bias too, deadbeats overseas are less likely to have their families spend the time and money necessary to get them a foreign education.
Kiek mes žinom apie visatą?
Monaco at 11pt

on windows

Droid Sans Mono at 11pt with a dotted 0:

http://www.cosmix.org/software/
An astrophysicist reviews the science of "Avatar".
CS seems to have the strange belief that CS is pure and SE is just vocational stuff.
If that's true then everyone should do maths instead.

It's like only teaching general relativity and then making someone a civil engineer - after all they know the fundementals of gravity so the bridge should stay up!
LINQ to Twitter
Music by Natural Selection
Surely there is a better source of "What Should We Teach..." than the fellow who pulled C++ out of Pandora's box?
A couple of bridges were destroyed during WWII, so right now it can be solved.
They are obviously different leaders (and I suppose the PRC have changed quite a bit since 1958 in any case) but my point is a more general one - "the leaders know best" is never a good assumption.

Assuming most HN readers consider themselves independent minded and skeptic towards authority it's disappointing to see the credit given here to China's leaders, who are chosen and operate mostly behind closed doors, as if they really operate with their people's best interest in mind (or even know what it is).

I wouldn't rely so blindly on any Western leader, certainly not on a leader in a closed, one party system like China's.
I have seen these issues first hand with my own family. Last year and the year before that, my daughter was given 3 hours of homework each night. The first year the massive homework began, I attributed it to the teacher and told her that it would be better the next year. The next year came along, and it was even worse. So, I talked to the teacher, and the amount of homework went down slightly, but in my opinion, it was still too much. Other than math, I really do not think there is much benefit in home work. This year, she has four different teachers and only about 30 minutes of homework per night, and interestingly, she is learning more now than she did in those previous two years. I think homework burns out kids. After a day of school, they should be able to come home and put those new abilities to use in play they consider fun. I figure if the teachers cannot teach a kid when they have 7 hours per day to do it, they are doing something wrong. Her current teachers are doing something right. The difference is obvious.
Looks nice, and I've seen the Marvin Minsky demo, but the fact that there is no Linux version means it would probably be useless to me. I'm not sure how practical these interfaces will turn out to be, other than for entertainment purposes.
...attacks the strawman with gusto...
You've twisted my intention and words and the karma hit is probably because of your unsupported attack. I actually assumed the author had some authority and was pointing out a) a small error needed correcting and b) that even the best have trouble taming CSS.

For reference i'm slowly building up articles about things I don't pretend to be an authority on which you can happily attack in due course.
That would have been too n00bish, and besides, some people are going through and systematically down-voting every comment I post if you notice (as I'm sure this one will be, jerks).
Cheating in school is a cultural thing, far more accepted and normal in for example Eastern Europe than US.
Plagiarizing and cheating are fairly normal and culturally accepted in some parts of the world. For example, if caught cheating in a college in Bosnia, the absolutely worst thing that could happen is that you're not allowed to take that class for 6 months, but it is more likely they would just kick you out and made you retake it.
Developer Resolutions for 2010
3 Tips About Massage Therapy Schools
Free Christmas Vector Art
From Johnson's Life of Milton:

"Those who tell or receive these stories should consider, that nobody can be taught faster than he can learn. The speed of the horseman must be limited by the power of his horse. Every man that has ever undertaken to instruct others can tell what slow advances he has been able to make, and how much patience it requires to recall vagrant inattention, to stimulate sluggish indifference, and to rectify absurd misapprehension."

When I think back to high school, a long time now, I had some very good teachers and some that were sound. I don't remember any I'd call inspiring. The deficient ones were not less inspiring, they lacked a mastery of the subject.
Bilbo0s, I am not trying to criticise but your interpretation doesn't pass the sanity test. You are doing something wrong if you are getting the result that Australia produces 5 times the CO2 as the USA. That is just prima facie ridiculous. The total should be maybe 10% of the USA's　production, max, and that's already 50% worse per capita.

We're bad, but we're not THAT bad ...
It's exciting to think where this could take us in 10 years.

Remember the first mp3 players? http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0b/Rio_pmp300.jpg

Now we have stuff like this: http://i50.tinypic.com/30cn1va.jpg

Computer assisted telepathy, here we come.
Why is this even on HN ?

This is just a childish, single point of data, no depth or span article. Nothing thoughtful or interesting.
How would that work? Meaning what would you expect it to do?
Even though the genome hasn't unleashed a flood of new cures, it's still a great thing that we're getting excited over each new potential avenue of fighting disease. That way, one day we'll get enough knowledge together to make medicine as effective as we would like.

A few false starts along the way is fine as long as we keep going.
Programming fonts - proportional vs monospaced
"I think Microsoft today is a lot like IBM was in 1985. When I started my career IBM dominated the tech world."

In the entire article, this is the only comparison he makes to IBM. He follows with zero support for the argument. It may not be a bad article, but its a misleading title. I worked at IBM starting in '87. I was expecting some meaningful content from someone that knew what it was like working at IBM in '85, but nothing provided.
Solar Power Is Wonderful, Except When You Build It Anywhere Near Anything
Here's a pretty nice list of programming fonts.

http://hivelogic.com/articles/top-10-programming-fonts/

I like DejaVu sans and Monaco
Why should a changed climate result in worse droughts in places that are susceptible to drought? Might it not lead to more rain in some drought-stricken places and less rain in some rainy places?
Here's the patent in question:

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...

It's not really.
i'm dubious these things can accurately interpret anything more than face muscle tensions, eye-movement if that.
which are common noise sources in EEG recordings

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroencephalography#Artifact...

anyone have some anecdotes otherwise? the demos on youtube are not really satisfying.
Another CS professor: "I never code."

Sort of like a linguistics professor saying "I never talk".
That's not a tragedy of the commons, it's a simple externality. It might be readily solvable simply by moving those people who are affected.

For example, consider the Maldives, with 300,000 people making about $5k/year. Relocating every person in the Maldives to the US would probably be cheaper than most climate change solutions. This would also quadruple the standard of living of the average Maldivian, provided their income increases to the US poverty line.
The Downsides of Large VC Syndicates
Spanish ham: the king of Christmas gifts
For those folks who live in a large enough urban centre, I think you're right. When I was in high school (public HS in Converse, Texas, just outside of San Antonio), I was fortunate enough that most of my classes were AP or honours classes and we were highly intellectually competitive. Those classes that I didn't have AP for were, on the other hand, sheer torture (on many levels).

The introduction of AP and other advanced classes was a godsend for intelligent kids being able to be reaffirmed by their peers. But a lot of kids don't really want to be in school, and like to pick on kids who do. (Which was my experience as one of the "smart kids" at a private school in Charleston, South Carolina.)
Pitching Tips for a First Meeting
Microsoft yanks Custom XML from Word, offers OEM patch
WinPassword password recovery software release
WinPassword is an application for Windows OS password recovery and finding breaches in system security. It tries to recover plain-text passwords by analyzing user password hashes. If it is possible to recover a password within reasonable time, the password should be considered insecure. Windows Password can also be used to recover lost passwords of particular users. WinPassword uses both the traditional recovery methods (Brute Force Attack, Dictionary Search) and the new Smart Rainbow Table Recovery (based on Rainbow tables) technique that allows recovering long and complex passwords quickly. You can also rent additional computing power to recover long and complex passwords.
Teenager Wins Science Fair, Maybe Solves Environmental Problem
Please note that the developer headset and the EPOC consumer headsets are a separate line of hardware products and are not interchangeable. The developer headset supports development whereas the consumer headsets ($299) will only work with approved applications.

Or: "Please pay us an additional $200 for the chance to create anything that would create a demand for our product." No mention of the cost of "approval".
There are a number of ways to demonstrate 'success' as a manager. There are the 'hard numbers' - such as meeting your financial targets/cost figures, SLAs/performance targets, customer sat ratings, employee survey results/manager feedback results etc.

Then there are the harder to quantify results but which mainly revolve in being able to explain how you achieved (or attempted to achieve) the hard numbers.

A lot about being a good manager is seeing what needs to be improved and then actually making that improvement happen. It sounds pretty basic - but you will find most people do their job that they are hired to do and not much else. Many people know what is wrong with their area/company, are happy to complain about it, but won't go and work out how to fix the problem, and then put in the hard yards to make that happen. Alternatively, many people confuse putting in long hours with 'making a difference'.

A good manager should be able to identify and implement fundamental changes to how the business operates that makes it 'better' (happier staff, more productive, great profit/revenue etc, less overhead/red tape). Being able to explain what you identified and implemented these changes is how I demonstrate how good (or not) of a job I'm doing.
Other than math, I really do not think there is much benefit in home work. . . . I think homework burns out kids.

What was the nature of the homework? Why do some learners not get burned out by homework? Is there an age at which a learner can do lots of homework and indeed has to do lots of homework (for example, college age)?
Have you been to the maldives? I live in a particularly beautiful part of the US (Sarasota, FL) and I can say without question that moving to the Maldives would increase my standard of living.

You're right that it would increase their incomes. But standard of living is much more than income...
He is pointing out that "would of" should have been written as "would have."
The Life Scientists at FriendFeed: 2009 summary
I'd personally prefer to have a new cornea rather than Lasik, but I hear that recovery periods for this type of procedure are fairly long. Hopefully that will improve.
What? Which areas? I suppose "tourists" are not allowed into govt facilities and military bases. Everywhere else is fair game.

Disturbing you have collected 8 upvotes for this utter nonsense. I challenge you to name any area of the country permanently off limits to foreigners. China is hardly perfect but what you insinuate is just BS.
Dr. Zeilberger's Crystal Clear Calculus Handouts (First Edition)
YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.
Who Gets The Highest Ad Rates Online?
wow nice site pakiisp.com
Really? How so?

Linguistics is the study of language, but CS at its core is the study of algorithms and theory. A CS prof never coding is more akin to a Physics professor never designing his own bridge. Sure, he technically could if he wanted to, but that's probably still better left to the engineers.

Dijkstra said (rightly, IMO) "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." I think a corollary to that is that it's also not about programming/coding per se, but the theoretical study of techniques we use when building programs.
I targetted both, about ~15 tech blogs, and about 80 style ones.
Yes, exactly. He clearly likes Apple but is still willing to call them out when they do terrible things. Which is the opposite of what the parent comment was implying.
Lots of speculation, but the only official information we've ever gotten was Google saying this was a development device to test new features. Where is all this "Google phone to sell directly to the public without a carrier lockin" stuff coming from?
So was the ^Republican Senate...

Fixed that.
Awesome project but I don't think this really counts as solving the problem of plastic bags:

* Ideal conditions are unlikely to be encountered in the wild.

* Plastic bags are spread out throughout the environment. How to get the plastic-munching bacteria to this disparate plastic isn't solved. (If all the plastic is in one place, well, we've got recycling already).

* The existing bacteria in the world will probably outcompete the bacteria this guy has developed.
Whether or not an appropriate, relevant licensing scheme would be developed is a different issue from whether or not it could be developed.

As for the details changing, yes, programming has changed a lot, but programming is such a small part of any project.
See also: Avro

http://hadoop.apache.org/avro/docs/current/

(Not for the JSON, but for the lightweight cross-platform schema part.)
Ask HN: A scheme for normalizing crowdsourced evaluations?
I'm on a selection committee for an organization at my university. The first part of our selection process involves having current members read incoming applications. Current members are broken into groups of O(10), and each group reads a set of applications, assigning 1-10 scores to each of five attributes.

Obviously, some reviewers will be more generous than others, so there is a need to normalize the feedback to make use of it (I look at it like cleaning up data from a bunch of uncalibrated sensors). I thought I would ask this here because I think it's an interesting problem that may have application elsewhere, too. I have some of my own ideas, but I'll withhold them for now so as to not bias any discussion.
What this kid has done is certainly cool and I can definitely see very legitimate uses for this technology. But what is so awful about burying plastic garbage? I know it supposedly takes 1000 years to decompose, but what does that matter if it is buried and can't easily be accessed by any animal?

I know that there is a problem with plastic getting into the oceans, but how does this technology help that?
Slideshow of fake Accenture ads: If Camilo Villegas replaced Tiger Woods
You can eliminate noise/artifact like that by subtracting it from a reference point.
awi didn't claim that catastrophe is unavoidable. In fact, the implication is that catastrophic consequences of anthropogenic climate change can be mitigated by international cooperation.

Some actual IPCC reports are available from [1] and [2]. They describe observations of "The atmospheric concentration of CO2 and CH4 in 2005 exceeds by far the natural range of the last 650,000 years," "wide-spread melting of ice margins [...] with implications for sea level rise," and increased frequency of extreme precipitation events. They predict "irreversible changes in climate and ocean chemistry" and "rapid and large changes of the statistics of extreme events."

Droughts, floods, cyclones, and ecological disruptions all threaten human life. The IPCC data and reports suggest that these and other adverse events have increased in frequency and severity, that human activity had a causal role, that things will probably get worse, and that our future behavior matters.

Not that someone's death is the only possible justification for international cooperation in limiting pollution.

[1] http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_da...
[2] http://www.ipcc.ch/presentations_and_speeches/presentations_...
I don't know, it seems an awful lot like listening to a conference hall for one user's voice commands in an unknown language. Brain-wave activity is largely unknown, not understood, and noisy as hell. There isn't even any concrete evidence that distinct portions of the brain are singularly or wholly responsible for specific tasks. Anything we do related to the brain in this period of human development is not much more than witch doctoring.
Referencing movies in your argument (and not even in a way that could possibly be categorized as rigorous) seems to support the other (lazy students) article.
Office/Word won't drop off store shelves for any period of time. In the months since this case was initially filed and the injunction granted, Microsoft rewrote the small bit of Word code the company claims infringes to no longer use that method. They reprinted the Office CDs, repackaged and are shipping out new copies to be on shelves before the day the injunction ends.
Minimum wage laws only apply to a situation where there is an employer-employee relationship between the two parties, this is much more like a free-lance situation.
Well said.

It is amazing how much motivation the danger of a bleak future could be.

That is basically my story. In my country (in Easter Europe) there were plenty of dead beats in the school, but they never left the country. Some of them are now in jail, many are living in the proverbial "van down by the river".

I made it out not because I was the smartest but because I was persistent.

What made the most difference for me personally was:
1. I saw my parents lose their jobs and strugle trying to make ends meet.
2. My parents encouraged me to learn from at very young age.

For example: When my father would take the back cover of our old vacuum tube TV to clean it from dust, he would call me over and tell me what each of the components did and how electrons flowed and so on. I thought it was the best thing in the world.

Another example: When I was 12 my mom, spent a month of her salary on a ZX Spectrum computer. I didn't ask her to. She just saw the way I looked at it and she knew it would help me to have one. Well, I loved it and I learned English just so I can use my new computer and read all the docs and write BASIC and Z80 assembly. That in turn, helped me pass a series of english proficiency tests need to get a scholarship to come to US. Long story short, I've been living in US ever since, doing what I love --programming. I'll bring my parent over soon as well.

Note: School wasn't in my 2 bullet points above. And that is because school is secondary. It will not teach anything if the student doesn't already want to learn. They will provide the tests and homeworks, students will get marks to show they know how to take the particular test or do the particular homework. That is all. To rise above, there has to be an internal motivation.
Seth's Blog: First, organize 1,000
There is already an ideal language to teach kids, and it exists right now.

PHP.

Whether or not you think it's a good language for building real world applications, it does have a lot of going for it when considered as a teaching language.

* It's weakly typed, dynamically typed and lacks variable declarations.

* It doesn't require learning OOP concepts before you can use it.

* The internet is full of free tutorials, documentation and knowledgeable people.

* There is only one variant. It's in active development.

* It's not so far removed from today's widely used languages. PHP -> Python is going to be easier than BASIC -> Python.

* It can be used to build real things. Despite what we'd like to think, command line interfaces are hardly ever used by the general population. Kids use websites on a regular basis. This is what will get them excited about programming.
Recently found http://www.sl4.org/archive/0205/3632.html . Not too sure what Goertzel's interest is - it looks like 'this is neat'.