skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I grew up in Taiwan, so I think I can shed some light on this. IMHO "the average" Taiwanese student will work harder than the average American student, but not by a supremely gross margin as this article would imply.

The bottom-barrel students never end up in American colleges, after all.

The chief difference is cultural - in Asia intellectualism is celebrated and demanded. Parents don't push their kids to football, they push them to academic achievement. Not being able to make it into college isn't worn as a badge of honor, it's downright shameful. I have personally known people who've shipped their kids away from home to some backwater third-rate academy, just so they can hide the fact that the kid couldn't get into any school locally.

Beyond parental pressure, peer pressure also largely pushes people to academic achievement. Having high marks won't get you beat up - in fact it commands respect (within reason). Having poor marks likewise isn't cool like it is here, but is similarly embarrassing.

Keep in mind though, that this has some consequences that academics who opine about the lack of American work ethic consistently fail to mention:

- Appreciation and participation in the arts, both as a college study, and as extracurriculars, is ridiculously low. People who study the humanities are looked down upon, I even know one guy who got disowned for it.

- Social integration takes a backseat, often to disastrous results later. In Taiwan is it not irregular for a middle school child (age 12 or so) to be at some form of school for 14 hours a day. There's literally only spare time to eat and sleep (and sometimes not even). Socialization is minimal, and add this onto the culture of living with your parents well into your 20s, it produces some seriously socially inept people.

Japan is already dealing with these consequences - look up "hikkikomori" if you're interested.
Long story alert; bear with me. I got my hair cut today, and as usual they had the tv on. There was a game where contestants were asked questions such as (actual question from the show), What color is a banana? (The contestants look to be 20s to me, but I'm old, so who knows.)

Contestants were dropping like flies. Here's what they couldn't answer: (1) What is H20? (answer given, with a quizzical tone, "Blackjack? 21?"), (2) Who is the current Vice President? and (3) In what state is New Orleans located?

The winner had to answer a final question. It was "Who was the second President of the United States?" She couldn't answer it.

The owner of the shop is a recent (last 10 years) immigrant from a former Soviet Block country (can't remember which one). He says laughing, "God bless American education." (Full disclosure: I am a high school teacher. I just bite my tongue.)

The punch line: all three win prizes. Don't believe me? This is why I love the internet in 2009. I have the video: http://ellen.warnerbros.com/videos/?autoplay=false&media...

What does all this prove? Nothing. Just like that editorial. The problem with that article, like most of the articles of that genre, is that it's entirely anecdotal. (The author cites some statistics about missing basic knowledge, but it's a red herring. Basic knowledge is irrelevant to her argument which has to do with effort and work ethic.)

I've come to believe that this is just one of those things. Teachers complain about their students - a lot. Imagine that. No newspaper with a brain on their staff should accept an editorial (on this topic) from a teacher immediately after the end of term - ever.
If the other blogs close down for one reason or other you still have the content on your own blog for your own archive-of-your-life.
Are you familiar with GoboLinux? http://www.gobolinux.org/

It does the self-contained packaging you prefer. So if you install version 1.2.3 of a program Foo, it'll go in /Programs/Foo/1.2.3/ . Yopu can also have multiple versions of the same program, e.g. /Programs/Foo/2.1.0/ as well, if different packages depend on different versions of other packages.
> If white males were being treated differently so were being held back, that would be a major problem, but that's not the case

In some cases this is a problem. A larger problem is the gender preference of studies. White males tend to study subjects such as engineering at a much higher rate than women. Women in turn studies courses such as education and BA at a much greater rate.

The problem (at least here) is that in University of Technologies and engineering departments, women are promoted – which causes a severe imbalance.

I would prefer it however if the government stop all admission preferences (race, gender, etc…) and abstain from attempts at social engineering. The best approach would be to make the process "blind" by removing names and anything that can indicate gender or race from the application process.
But of course, most Ruby and Python applications are safely hidden away on a server you control. Relatively few "closed-source" Ruby and Python applications are distributed directly to the user.
Large Pharmaceuticals spent decades and billions of dollars on developing, trialing, and getting their new drugs approved. Why on earth would they have any incentive to do that if, once it was approved, they didn't have a temporary monopoly on it?

Patents, and Supplementary Protection Certs (SPC) which extend drug patents to 25 yrs in the UK IIRC, are temporary.

Also it's always worth remembering that drug companies spend vastly more (3 times, might even be 4) on marketing than on producing drugs and make humongous profits.
Congrats to Dropbox, Posterous, DailyBooth and Wufoo!
That's what botnets are for.
Right, but that difference (if it were real, which I doubt) should cut across the two groups of students (American and non-American).

Or at least, we have no reason to think that "business students are lazier than other students" tracks or causes the difference between Americans and others that the author focuses on.
They're still working on short-term stuff also. Rwanda is investing about $300m in providing laptops for about 1.3m children: http://www.economist.com/world/middleeast-africa/displaystor...
I was hoping to garner interest because its my first infographic-ish creation, and I'd like some criticism before designing another. It clearly has a political leaning, but it was also designed to avoid the current health care debate and any discussion on what the optimal solution is. Rather, it's simply supposed to portray the problems that exist with the current system.

As a side-note, the bill is far from passed; the Senate still has to reconcile its differences with an angry House before it gets on the President's desk.
I've had zero issues with Google Reader and GMail with all prior 9.x and 10.x releases. So maybe your experience is particular to this alpha release.
IIRC i4i is not a patent troll. It's a company with real products, users and - and that prevents it from being called a patent troll - probably licenses the patents from others.

I am all in for banning obvious or bad patents, as well as shortening their duration, but, perhaps, the i4i patents may be really original or innovative.

Microsoft is known for talking partnership, maybe acquisition, learning all they can and then launching a competitor that kills their "partner". Having strategic patents is the only way a small company can defend from this.

Also, I like the way their name sounds. Sounds appropriate.
Versatility is another Name for A4 Folders
As the document size A4 is quite common in offices, the folders of this size have also gained importance over the years. They help in the smooth workflow of any office. They are also an easy source of soft marketing for large businesses.
They have to disclose the contents to be licensed for medical purposes.

My wife did a stint as a student with AstraZeneca (global pharma corp) they were making "new" drugs. One thing they do is take an existing drug and try swapping out different parts for functionally equivalent parts and run tests to see if the drug is effective enough to warrant proper trials and check to see if it circumvents the opposition patents.
Click on any of the stats and they link to the highlighted source it came from.
Nice. Now there's this. I went from an American high school to a Dutch university (admittedly a decade and a half ago, but still) and was shocked to discover that Dutch students as a matter of principle refuse to put in any effort that will push them beyond the barest minimum above a passing grade whereas the Americans I was used to at least tried to shoot for, say, a C, and if they were especially ambitious, a B or even a B+.

(that said, at the "American high school" I went to there were also a large number of Indian, Taiwanese and Korean kids and, like the article suggests, they made it a matter of principle to never receive less than an A+ in any course they took - although, that said, they rarely enrolled in courses where their chances of receiving such grades were in peril: very few Taiwanese and Koreans took history or English literature, for example)
I loved the data visualizations. The only political ideal that this pushes is the need for reform, but I don't think anybody debates that.

As a side-note to the side-note, the bill has yet to even pass the Senate. They have merely cleared procedural hurdles to avoid a filibuster. A final vote is expected late on Christmas eve, however it only needs a simple majority to pass which it is likely to get without a problem.
OO.org Writer is adequate for 90% of Word's users.

I wrote a book a few years ago, and the editors used Word. Corresponding with them by using OO.org was not too difficult; all the features were there, although not completely polished. I looked at the features I thought were unpolished a few years ago again recently (I am not a big word processor fan), and they are fine now. OO.org Writer is now basically Word without Exchange integration.
This was a tongue-in-cheek response to the original article which seems to make sweeping generalizations about American students from the experiences of one professor.

It seems to be that you are subtly implying that the American education system inculcates some sense of ethics (discouraging things like plagiarism) in the students, which for some inexplicable reason the education system of these international students doesn't.

Exactly. The same could be argued about the original author's suggestion that the American education system in-builds laziness while the international system of millions of students does not.

In reality, I wouldn't call it ethics--far from that! American students don't plagiarize (as much) because they know they will get caught and face insane consequences. Indian students(my friends) don't know the perceived seriousness of it so they fail a class they had a 96 in because they plagiarized the final paper. I really pity my friend more than blame him.

Btw, my bias/generalizations are quickly repudiated and doesn't get published in a widely distributed paper for good reasons. The original author gets to make a huge splash. That's the problem.

Also, I split my K-12 education between India and U.S so I have experienced both sides of the education system.
I was surprised they didn't compare it to the energy consumption of the Library of Congress
It's also possible to fully "backport" WebSockets through a flashembed that acts as an intermediate layer. Flash has about 98% penetration so this should make the technology usable right now. Especially with an eye to a future where the flashembed will be loaded less and less when browsers start to implement it natively.
Clump : Say goodbye to Makefiles
Mac OS X has implemented a lot of clever things in this area for a long time.

There's the obvious case of user applications being self-contained bundles, which works because nobody ever links against anything not provided with the system by Apple.

The really interesting part is the operating system ships with multiple independent versions of the SDK libraries, and the developer tools ship with several independent sets of headers for them. An application that was built against the 10.4u or 10.5 SDK will run against those libraries even on 10.6.
Opera has had ad blocking built in since at least 9.x, if not earlier. It does the job for me; I don't find it wanting. You can point and shoot to block anything that happens to get through the default filters, and the filtering takes wildcards by default, even. Meaning clicking an ad will block all ads from the same domain or parent path (e.g. adserver.tld/ads/*). Shift click to block just a specific image. The common text ads are also filtered.
Can't help but ask: is rickrolling a serious concern around here? If so, a followup question: Really?
A bar graph of numerical ranking is probably the most misleading way to present data I've ever seen. I'll have to remember that...
Yeah, while this seems to have some weird geeky appeal, it's still way harder than just pulling out a dollar and handing it to someone.
Facial Recognition on Facebook [video]
That's workable IMO.
Unfortunately, I have been unable to open the article, so I am not sure how relevant this is. But the thing that comes to mind, based on some of the comments here, is that Blacks have joined (or were doing so) the military at high-ish rates because it was an opportunity for them to get ahead (the military is apparently somewhat more color-blind than the civilian world when it comes to promotions and compensation). Then the Gulf War happened and suddenly folks were screaming "discrimination" because Blacks were at a disproportionately high risk for getting shot and killed due to being in the military in relatively high numbers.
It's not timely at all, but I maintained the 64-bit patch for Gears for a few months. Upstream didn't want to support it and wouldn't release it as "unsupported" for whatever reason.
Is the expenditures graph adjusted for inflation?
Head about this startup for a while. Seems like they've done a few "pivots" in their time.
How do patient outcomes compare for those with insurance in the United States versus other countries? What percentage of global health R&D occurs in the United States?
I can understand that. What bothers me though is the attitude that it is okay to ask for extensions on a regular basis.

Perhaps this has more to do with the role college plays in American society. I believe that college has become more of a high school extension than anything, and so maybe it is wrong to blame students who treat it as such. I doubt they would be slacking off in grad school (but I can't be sure!)
I'm going to go write up a "Thoughts on a failed launch" post will post in like 30 minutes

ok here is the link:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011341
Yahoo’s New Recruitment Effort: Google Ads On Ex-Employee Name Queries
No I think that's a false comparison. Simply because I favor my computer science classes over others when they compete doesn't mean I don't receive a breadth education -- it simply means I'm a computer science major. Doing nothing but computer science would be treating college as vocational school, but that's not what I said. Instead I said that sometimes I sacrificed high grades in other courses for a high grade in computer science.

In addition, there's only a loose relationship between getting a very good grade in a course (as opposed to a good-mediocre one) and getting breadth knowledge out of the course. To believe otherwise would be to satisfy tendencies of grade inflation. For example, an A in a course was originally supposed to mean an excellent performance beyond expectation. To get an A in every single course should signal that you are either 1) extraordinarily dedicated to your school work and extremely bright or 2) the school is handing out an A not for extraordinary work, but only good work. In light of this, the most reasonable grade distribution for a bright, dedicated student would be a very strong (hopefully A level) grade distribution in their area of specialization with a good but not as extraordinary distribution in their breadth subjects.

It was interesting that you noted me as focusing on CS like vocational training when I actually take pride in my choice of courses as true liberal arts education. For example, while I am an engineer CS major, I will have taken enough courses in the physics and philosophy departments to almost qualify for a minor in the fields. Simply because I am unable to dedicated my time to all of my varied classes at once does not mean that I do not participate in number of different liberal arts.
Thorium was ignored because the government wanted to build a lot of nukes and uranium reactors allowed that to happen. The DoE did not have the budget or the manpower to research both solutions and private industry was not going to do the research so we ended up with uranium reactors for both military and civilian usage. Honestly, I think the US nuclear industry has done a fine job and has directly caused far fewer deaths and environmental damage than coal even ignoring the climate change issue.
It certainly was new to audio engineers and producers. It wasn't wholly new to researchers in the field of psycho-acoustic compression, but then, there's rarely much that is new for the inner circle of researchers in a field.
I didn't find any solid stats on that sort of information. Patient outcomes are difficult because there is room for subjectivity. R&D I really wanted because a common argument is that one of the reasons why costs are so high is because taxpayers subsidize research.
Also "Lower bars are better" is quite ambiguous in this case.
It's OK to ask. You may not get the extension, but given the amount of unannounced lateness teachers often see, asking for an extension in advance with a "how can we work this out" attitude looks like an attempt to be responsible. Contrast with an attitude of starting things the day they're due and then acting surprised when you can't finish a multi-week project in one day.
Yes. It's based on National Health Expenditure Data, but it's more or less a replica of this by the NYT: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/02/28/business/0301...
The first part seems to be motivating something like a macro system for comments. What if one abbreviated compound situations using a single word or a phrase along with a separate file with expansions of the abbreviations into more detail. So, one can comment at a more abstract level and still be understandable (using say, a tool which displays the expansion when hovering over the abbreviation, or a separate window with expansions of all the abbrevs used nearby).
Ideally, of course, the abstraction would be captured in the code itself, and the expansion would be the comment before the function or the macro defining the abstraction. So this system will be useful only when there are abstractions in comments which are not reflected in the code.
OO.org Writer will be adequate as soon as they come out with a decent Outline view. Until then, I and a whole whack of other people are staying on XP rather than Ubuntu primarily because OO.org lacks this one feature!

http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3959
The title could really be better -- the article isn't about Dropbox users, it's about your feature. Calling for attention in a title rubs me the wrong way.
The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly. --Abraham Lincoln
I think the actual argument is bad anyway. Open-sourcing their product is a bad idea because malicious people will read the code and exploit its flaws? This is security by obscurity and it will not promote the open internet. I don't think it's wrong but it's not altruistic either.
This is based on your assumption that a patent system will actually result in more inventions, than it would otherwise without its existence. It is also based on the assumption that novel inventions necessary mean it should be protected in the market place because of its presumed usefulness. It also mean that you believe an invention can be judged objectivity to be obvious or not.

You also forget the enormous difficulty for reforming the patent system to the economic benefits of the masses due to regulatory capture by special interest. If you want to reform the system, you have to reform the overlying political system that allow such regulatory capture in the first place.

Secondary, I would like to direct your attention to a book called Against Intellectual Monopoly by two economists, Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, who explains the evidence for why patent and copyright monopolies shouldn't exists in the first place.
Guitar hero with an air guitar (muscle-computer interface) w/video
We've also left out the new code that also has to match things against js2 line endings.

That said, this does require some taste. It is horrible to spread a single logical operation across multiple functions, classes, and files just for the sake of "object orientation" or "self documentation", but judicious application of bottom-up FP really helps code size and readability.
Yes, for both of these reasons I felt somewhat hesitant of including that chart. There really is no way of quantifying the effectiveness of any health care system very well, but I feel the need to try to provide some sort of perspective, so I figured munging some of the most common indicators together might have some sort of value. Any ideas on another way of doing this?
True cost of higher education
This application is useful for resizing and moving: http://coderage-software.com/zooom/index.html

However, it's kind of ordinary that you have to pay $15 to get functionality that should be included in the WM.
Coupling Django Style
Haskell also uses type inference. It does have a lot of type system stuff, but because of how the language works the types are not just metadata. The types are often just as important as the rest of your code.
What he says sounds good in the abstract, but I worry about how it will be implemented. For instance he raises the issue of licensing people to practice computer science. However as he acknowledges that it is difficult to even identify who should be in charge of deciding what should be tested for such a license.

And that is a big issue. A license created to meet the needs of business 40 years ago would certainly have required learning COBOL. A license created 20 years ago would have no relevance to web development. One created today would likely be geared towards the needs of large organizations with large code bases - which would put most agile development techniques, languages, and practices off the table.

For better or worse the programming world has diverse communities with rapidly changing, diverse needs, and no possible solution has any hope of fitting all of them.
"Smaller bars are better" ;)
1) That's not a multi-dimensional array, that's a one-dimensional array simulating a multi-dimensional array.

2) Why not

arr[n1 + i][n2 + j][n3 + j] = calc_foo(i,j,k)

? It's a bit more work to write the proxy classes, but a Sufficiently Smart Compiler(TM) can make that all go away for you.
Augmented reality system lets you see through walls
They're all (minus the world map) generated by the Google Visualization API and the Google Chart API. Part of the reason I made this was to learn those APIs. They're pretty cool, although the chart API has some infuriatingly bad habits in rendering.