skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Finally, most people who cite these experiments simply assume that it’s better to take a bigger pay-off later than a smaller pay-off now. But is that always true?

I've always thought that this was the key element of the research: that delaying gratification indicates your time-value of gratification is higher, that your "discounting rate" for future gratification is low.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-value_of_money

It happens that basically every observed behavior which is common and financially detrimental for low-income individuals and uncommon for high-income individuals can be explained by a single intuitive variable in the human mind: the discounting rate of future gratification. For example, engaging in rent-to-own is more expensive in total than saving up over time to buy out-right. But if your personal discounting rate for that future spent money is high, the extra money is less valuable to you than the current gratification of purchase, and your choice is the rational one.

This expands beyond the obvious example and into basic life choices: school or no? Depends on how you value the future benefits of school, relative to the current difficulties. Work day and night for years on a startup? Likewise.

If this basic model is correct, then our decisions are profoundly, fundamentally affected by our personal discounting rate. If that's true, then education can likely focus on this aspect of our perspective to improve children's appreciation for the payoff of work and so on.

The comments are interesting, and I'd love to see research expand on the question and address his concerns, but there's a reason this interpretation is repeated: it seems consistent with observed behavior.
Yes, but the questions were really easy. Even a liberal arts major should've been able to answer them. They would have seen problems like these in the first 2-3 years in high school many, many times.
Also with a triangle it can be easily shown how you arrive at 1/2 bh, and I agree teaching this is much more valuable than formula memorization. Throwing in some practical use cases school kids can actually relate to wouldn't hurt either. I mean, when you're in 4th grade, who gives a fuck how tall a light pole is.
To me this is quite obviously a very related issue.

As long as people refuse to recognize the moral interests of animals, it is not logically consistent for them to respect moral obligations to other humans. The moral distinction between animals and humans is a completely arbitrary prejudice and should be immediately identified as such by anybody with even a basic understanding of evolutionary biology.

Humans are animals.
You think 95% of the population gets in 2 accidents a year? Scoble is either overstating his case, or he's a wretchedly bad driver.
Hollywood and Technology Companies Work to Make Digital Video Portable
I wouldn't object about my own comments, because I'd opt out. I'd still have doubts as to whether it was a good option for the community, but that's really up to PG and the YC crew.

BTW, signing your comments is discouraged as redundant, since your username already appears and you can put more info on your user page. See the site guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I would like to have you sync the time with users local time. I am in india, and my day does not change when its supposed to.
I know the same story. I'm not sure what it is, but people do have a real fear of math. I graduated from the UW's ACMS ( Applied Computational Mathematical Sciences ) department which mainly focuses on scientific computing, as is obvious from the name, so I do know something about Math at the UW.

First off, let me say that UW students are not the cream of the crop. They're not daft, but the UW admits a very wide array of people. Many of them absolutely terrified of math. I don't know why this is, I looked at the test and it took me roughly one minute to complete the test in my head. However, I do know some very, very bright people who wouldn't touch math with a 10 foot pole.

Mainly, it is my liberal arts friends who have this attitude ( and I really do think it is an attitude problem ) and freeze when they encounter problems such as these.

I suppose that my point, is really that just because these kids scored low on your test, doesn't mean that they are stupid. I think they are just scared.

On a separate but related note: Until I was 14 I was in public school in Utah, and when I came to Washington in the 8th grade I was 2 to 3 years ahead of my peers in math ( this was the most advanced level offered to my grade at my school ). There really is something very wrong with math education in WA.

Incidentally, here's a link to the description in the UW Time Schedule http://www.washington.edu/students/crscat/atmos.html#atms101

I have had a few friends take your class ( I don't know if it really was your class )and they've all said that it was a very hard class and they learned a lot. Unfortunately, I didn't actually have any friends take it because they were generally interested in it, they actually took it because they needed the credit. I think it's a 'Natural World' credit.

I actually wish that I had taken a few years of atmos. Given what I chose to study, I think I would have liked it. There are lots of numbers to be crunched in the weather. :-)
Is it any surprise, though? Math is taught in a manner that focuses very much on the how but rarely ever the why. And while Discovery Math/Reform Math/etc are lambasted for not teaching kids to memorize certain algorithms, they do something else that's very important: encourage students to use creative problem solving skills to develop their own solution algorithms.

The idea sounds really great, but everything i've ever seen is that the students just end up terrible at everything. I even tried to teach it some, and the material seemed great to me as a teacher, but the students just never got it. I feel like the discovery idea makes a lot more sense in hindsight, but when learning that way, doesn't work out like hoped.

However, I study applied math and I would say i learn in a more discovery way... But thats at the graduate level.
What is an e-book, asks a publisher
I think it's important to remember this is a reference design not an actual product. So when they say $199 they're presenting a low ball figure to attract companies to manufacture the actual devices. I sincerely doubt they're factoring stuff like marketing and administrative costs into that estimate.

CES is full of stories where some no-name manufacturer shows off a reference design promising the world only to have it never materialize as an actual product.

I spent a good size chunk of my young life waiting for this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glaze3D
Sadho re - eSnips, share anything
Do you think he'd hate them jumping ship to SQLite?

Supposing he actually is being Machiavellian, he wants MySQL not to be so strong a competitor for the middle and high end of commercial installations. He can afford to concede the very low end - Oracle doesn't play there, except perhaps with BDB (a minor sideline).
Interesting premise, questionable conclusion. Kids can't do simple concept problems, so they need more drilling? Failure to calculate 1/.1 is not due to lack of practice, it is due to fundamental lack of understanding of fraction division. This is not a problem you fix via repeated long division of 4 digit numbers. This is a problem stemming from the fact that these students were never given a good idea of what the symbols they are being forced to move around really mean.

And who cares that they don't know the definition of cosine, or the formula for the area of a circle? These are not fundamental ideas for non engineers.
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In all reality most high school students don't pay attention in their math courses and only do minimal effort for what grade they required.

To be honest I was taught how to do scientific notation in one day in high school and if you asked me the rules for how many places to keep through operations I could guess but I truthfully wouldn't know. I have taken 2 chemistry courses and many other high level lab courses in college and have only heard that scientific notation was preferred not required (for the chem courses) and given no refresher course.

From personal experience I have met people who made it through AP Calculus in high school (passing grade in class not test) who really have difficulty understanding and passing a basic college algebra course.

Summary: just because people are introduced to problems in high school doesn't mean they can do them.
The Wikipedia version seems better laid out, IMO.
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Those requests for the ability to have range limited data types reminds me strongly of Ada.
uh...then why are the darpa challenge guys having so much trouble? surely darpa would just give the money to one of the big car manufacturers if this was a solved problem?
Conceptually I think that this is right on. I realized that what I want most is an adjunct to my normal computing environment such as an LCD graphics tablet for scribbling on. These tablets (say, by Wacom) are north of 1000USD, and they aren't even computers, just graphics tablets with an LCD screen. Maybe Apple will blow the status quo completely apart with their tablet, but it will have to be just mind-blowing in order to justify the Apple price. It's going to have to be more than a way to browse the net on the couch. I can do that well enough with my phone. It's going to have to change the way I think about tablet computing and maybe even touch computing altogether. In the 200USD price bracket though, all bets are off. A `good enough' way for me to hack little diagrams together makes it money well spent.
Thanks a lot for this post! I'm currently looking for a tool to help apply semantic analysis to review content. Just signed up for OpenAmplify to get a better look. Let me know if you find anything else.
If students are ending up terrible at everything, then the problem is deeper than just tradition vs reform. What's likely occurring is we are much better at teaching plug-and-chug than we are at developing problem solving. That's to be expected, as it's significantly harder to develop problem solving skills than it is to simply memorize steps, grade, correct, and repeat until perfect. This is especially true when you consider most math teachers really aren't trained in the art of problem solving, and were likely taught in a traditional manner themselves. As such they have no real frame of reference to go off of when attempting to foster problem solving skills in their students.
Ask HN: If you were in the position of [insert name of successful founder]...
Hey HNers, I was thinking earlier this evening about if I had been in the same position as many variously successful startup founders (eg those of Craigslist), there are uncountably many ways in which I would have made decisions that would ultimately lead to a flop rather than the successes those various companies have become.

I'm sharing this thought because I think 1) its an interesting mental exercise for understanding ones's own decision making processes and 2) I'm curious about the nature of the hypothetical mistakes other people think they might make.
This is a fascinating account of the difficulties involved in implementing STM, written by someone who worked on the problem for several years and ended up disillusioned about it. The article is unusual, even highly unusual, in how frank and substantive it is. (By "substantive" I mean grounded in experience.) People nearly always argue for or against things like STM based on whether or not they like the idea, which leads to a lot of (not necessarily intentional) hype/FUD. By contrast, this article contains hard-won intellectual honesty. The author worked hard on the problem with a smart team for a long time, so the fact that he was forced to change his mind is significant. I'm glad I read it through; it gets more readable (and more dramatic) towards the end.

I don't understand all the details, but the three "disillusionments" that end up knocking their efforts off the rails seem surprisingly obvious. These are: (1) what if a transaction contains code that talks to an external system; (2) what if non-transactional and transactional code write to some location at the same time; and (3) what if code reads a write that was performed by a failed transaction but hasn't yet been rolled back. Design problems are always more obvious in hindsight, of course, but surely these issues were known?

Another question I have: what's different about Clojure's and Haskell's STMs that allow them to escape the same fate (if they do)?
In my opinion, those are fundamental ideas for human beings in the year 2010; obviously we have to lower our expectations to match reality, but we shouldn't pretend they are unreasonable. Really, how difficult is the idea of a cosine? That's not exactly an unapproachable level of abstraction.

Remember, these are people who have had 12 years of full-time mandatory schooling, and have signed up for a few more years on top of that. If anyone with an average IQ cared even a tiny bit about such things, they could learn all of it in half that time; and if they don't care at all, parents and teachers didn't do their job.

Of course, I agree with the main thrust of your post. Somehow, you have to actually encourage (and allow) the students to understand what they're dealing with, instead of giving up, moving numbers and letters on paper, and passing to the next class. If that doesn't happen, there's no surprise that they've forgotten it six weeks after the course.
Interesting that a lot of what he is saying goes against the "release early, release often" mantra. Good design takes time and is hard to change once you've released. I'm not passing judgement, just observing.
A very informative post. I have used Alchemy and I am very impressed with their Named Entity extraction.
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one thing you might like to look into is having it talk with some of the todo websites out there, like remember the milk (one of the more popular ones)
Actually, I'm pretty sure this problem is exclusive to Washington. Go here

http://www.wheresthemath.com/

and scroll down to 'Washington State Facts'. Anecdote: I attend a community college in California, found the problems laughably easy, and have met tons of people in my classes who would feel much the same way.
As shown on the scanned answer key, this was an anonymous quiz. College students have a tendency to put in pathetically minimal effort on things they're not being directly graded on. Also, the quiz's stated purpose was to help the teacher calibrate the assignments; maybe some students purposely answered questions wrong in hopes of dumbing down the class. (Though I don't dispute the author's central point.)
We have HQ in Italy but most of our business comes through our US presence, so yes we report to the IRS...AND to the Italian taxman. We're a micro-multinational! :)
Ah, ok, totally my bad. I had the wrong context around "trick" I thought you were referring to our business and not a potential method we used to uncover social data.

On an totally unrelated note Cassie says "Hi" - I was at her place for one of her roommates bday's and I was on his computer responding to this thread and she's like OMG jfarmer is that who you're talking with... such a small world.
If you haven't read the book by Thor Heyerdahl you should. It's an amazing and well told adventure that can only command serious respect.

http://www.amazon.com/Kon-Tiki-Across-Pacific-Thor-Heyerdahl...

Here's a link to the heavy water sabotage in Norway during the second world war that Hauglund was a part of. Amazing stuff.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_heavy_water_sabotage
Too bad the article never really answered the question.
If you're interested in reading anecdotes from dozens of genuinely smart people who were or are scared of math, you can visit this fascinating Metafilter thread in which posters address the issue.

http://ask.metafilter.com/135720/Does-math-have-big-scary-te...
Creating a game on Google Android game with Flixel - Getting Started
This device uses very similar processor cores (Cortex A8 + PowerVR SGX)as the iPhone 3GS & Motorola Droid does.

Considering an iPod Touch 3rd Gen starts at ~$189.00 - The market for tablets in the $200-300 range will be hot.

Android or any other linux distro could be easily ported to the MX515 based device.
Please avoid CAPS in HN. This is a civilised place here. Thanks
I would bet these students got excellent grades in math.

EDIT: As in, I'm sure that during high school they got high marks in math class without actually understanding the fundamentals of what they were 'learning'.
Communication, curiosity, and personal style
I'd guess that he feels that what the author is describing here is an example of self-control, even if it's a bit indirect.
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Training yourself to enjoy what you want to work on is where it's at.
Yes, I wasn't sure about that either. The whole thing really is worth reading (in fact the sidebar was arguably the less interesting part).
Language and Library API Design for Usability of Ruby
Creating a game on Google Android game with Flixel - Adding a player
Http://www.ufone.com/welcomeuser.aspx
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The White Collar Underclass
Ars Digita Univ: online resources via post-bacc comp sci program
How Sean Johnson made Chicago Jelly Awesome
"UW is a public university. It may very well be the best public university in Washington, but I'd bet the best students have a nontrivial rate of private school attendance."

Don't kid yourself. This is an epidemic problem at all schools, public and private. I have friends who teach at both public and private universities, and they all have the same horror stories. My own personal experience (private undergrad / PhD at UW) bears out their anecdotes. With certain institutional exceptions, private school kids are richer, not smarter.

Also, the GPA and SAT scores of incoming UW freshman are astonishingly high right now (IQR of 3.60-3.91 GPA, 570-680 SAT math, according to http://admit.washington.edu/Numbers). Admittedly, those aren't Harvard numbers, but one would still expect a 600 math SAT student to be able to do well on a basic high-school algebra quiz.
"Caution! The only thing protecting the movie and TV industries from the fate that has befallen music and indeed the newspaper business is the size of the files."

Hmm. Greatly improved choice, better access between artist and listener; one can only hope these things come to the movie and newspaper businesses.

"A decade’s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators — in this case, the young, fledgling songwriters who can’t live off ticket and T-shirt sales like the least sympathetic among us — and the people this reverse Robin Hooding benefits are rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business."

Bono's a bit clueless here.
The combination of two English words may be harder to comprehend than just one idiom.
I installed it on Ubuntu and the menu/tool bar was missing.
"Did you even understand the article? The argument is not that there are more women Fields medalists from the UK; rather, it's that supposed 'innate' differences in mathematical aptitude between young men and women turn out to be not so innate at all."

The claim was, specifically, that "in (presumably less sexist) countries, the difference between male and female mathematical ability goes away, so sexism must be the cause of these differences". She named the United Kingdom as an example of a country which is supposed to be less sexist. Yet, we do not see a single Fields, Wolf, or Abel medalist. If math in the UK is sexist, then why attribute the better female performance in the UK to lack of sexism, rather than luck or genetic differences or climate variation or some other random factor? If it's not sexist, where are the female Fields medalists and IMO team members?

"To get Fields medal, it's not enough to be a brainiac. You need someone to step up and give you a good mathematical education in your formative years, take your questions seriously when you're a more advanced student, and so on."

Then why don't British IMO teams (http://www.imo-register.org.uk/) have a larger proportion of women?

"See the biographies of Sophie Germain or Rosamund Franklin if you want examples of how being the 'wrong' gender can hold back a first rate mind."

(I presume you mean Rosalind Franklin?) You mean, fifty years ago, when it was perfectly legal standard practice to openly discriminate against women (and blacks, and Jews... ) in employment? No surprises there. But the article is talking about today.
As in: "here is my id"
That might be true during periods of unrest, yes, as the government is concerned about media appearances. Basically, if the disturbance is making headlines overseas, you'll have difficulty gaining access.

At any other time, though, it should be fine. It's not North Korea.
Arrington won't be happy about this.
Maybe the layout of the real one has some symbolism thats specific to Herefordshire that we don't know about. Hard to say one is better without knowing the history behind the real one.
That's not what the article said- all it said was that there was a correlation. But saying "there is a correlation" surprises no one- how strong is the correlation? Does it still hold up even when we only include Western democracies (girls from Saudi Arabia not performing well being of little surprise)?
Here's hoping. I was also glad to see this prediction in response to my question: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ai988/my_dad_is_a_theo...
Ages ago I worked at a peer to peer startup named Kontiki, named after the boat. Our founder was very much the "always wearing a hawaiian shirt type" and flew both Knut and Thor out to our launch party. They were both jovial old guys!
> Nice to see that disputes can actually be solved without laywers.

Sort of - they solved the dispute without lawyers by capitulating. Usually you can avoid a legal fight by backing down and doing what the other side wants.

That said, still probably the correct course of action. They didn't have any real brand equity built up in Haystack, so moving on now means they don't run any risk of getting shut down later. More importantly, they've got a small team and no legal department, so making this not on the minds of their team is very valuable.

That said, Haystack was a very catchy name, and I don't dig on Sortfolio as much. Still a decent name and important to not run the risk and waste the brainpower of their team though. I like to think I'd have made the same decision, but I wonder if I'd have gone on an ego trip and gotten ready for war. Something for me to consider and meditate on, and seems like a pretty enlightened and safe call by the 37S team.
I agree that just drilling on the mechanics of long division doesn't help. But, drilling the concepts can help. The point of the article is that instead of letting kids discover everything on their own and then feeling happy, teachers should direct their learning. In doing so, I would say they should drill the same concept repeatedly and ask questions that test both the ability to do the procedure and understand the concept.

Anecdotally, this is how I taught my sister multiplication and how my friend tutored someone in calculus.
Ask HN: review my startup, a planning/analysis app for cyclists
I hope this sees daylight at this price point, but I'm not going to hold my breath. On the other hand, there are ARM tablets out there already, e.g. http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/ . I've been keeping an eye on them for a while, and the device seems to be pretty cool, but sadly I can't justify the cost yet. (I'm looking at it for ARM kernel development, and I can build a nice little ARM desktop for the same price, which will be easier to work with)