skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here is an example of a programmer who was able to produce a much more efficient and reliable C program by applying principles he learned in a Scheme course:

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jsobel/c455-c511.updated.txt

Now, this may not be exactly what you're looking for, in that the C code he ended up with is not what you would call idiomatic C, so whether it made him a better C programmer per se is debatable. But doubtlessly few of his classmates were writing idiomatic C either, and his program's performance and reliability would not have been possible if he hadn't worked through the problem in Scheme first.

(Edit: The closing paragraph, in particular, illustrates the broadly applicable "profound enlightenment experience" that Eric Raymond describes.)
From the article >>In this approach math is substantially dumbed down for "equity" reasons and students are asked to discover age-old principles on their own.

Charlotte Iserbyt, former Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, wrote the free eBook (pdf) "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America" http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/
That's why nethack has such a captivating UI.
I am made uneasy about someone that contrasts 'low income' and 'white' in their graphs.

I do however, still holding a low opinion of the discovery math pedagogical model in general, as it requires more math sophistication than is likely to be found in an elementary/middle/high school's teacher.
Proofs of Concept are evil. Get away from them
this was an ingredient., you might need a logo astrologist/consultant to get the recipe.
> Already there's a comment here claiming the Baha'i (??) may be behind this..

You can file that one under 'it takes all kinds'...

Also anybody that would know even the most cursory facts about the Bahá'í would realize that that is not a very likely explanation.

I'm in the atheist camp and was quite surprised to see a scientist of Dr. Kelly's calibre associated with an obscure religion so I did some reading and I think I could see some of the motivations for his actions rooted in his faith.

It's an interesting faith in the sense that it has worldwide following and was founded in recent times.

The united nations actually figure quite prominently in the followers of this religion.
Just out of curiosity, how did those groups with non-programmers develop their product? Did they go out and find programmers? What did they spend most of their time doing?
His points about Android seem random at the end.

What does he think Google should have based the OS on? Windows, where Microsoft won't let you change the interface? OSX which isn't available for non-Apple hardware? Symbian which has tons of problems? Palm OS (you'd have to buy them first)? Write an OS from scratch (which would take years + billions of dollars).

Android is based on Linux because it's the only sensible choice, the fact that Richard Stallman has some funny netbook this week has nothing to do with it.
You can edit it
You can edit it (I just tested it - don't know how long it's editable though).
$2m file-sharing fine slashed to $54,000
It's mainly convenience. In the educational establishment and some courts, equality is more important than quality. Challenging curricula on the basis "this is bad for non-asian minorities more than others" is more likely to be successful than "this is bad for everyone".

It is considered better for 100% of every group to be a moron than for 70% of blacks and 30% of whites to be a moron.

[Edit: Added words "it is considered" to last sentence. Before it looked like I endorsed this view, which I don't.]
Extensions, bookmark sync and more for Google Chrome
I agree. I don't mind Flash when it's used for something useful, but most of the time (perhaps even 99.99% of the time) it's being used for ads. Those ads are, by definition, very attention grabbing because of their use of animation. The animation uses my CPU.

So, in general I say... go away Flash and browse without it enabled. It's very, very rare that I need to access a web site's Flash.
The Alexandria Project, Chap. 2: The Plot Thickens
The second installment in this online cybersecurity mystery novel
Does anyone know how iPhone apps are licensed? If this Philip guy bought the app and the database was included with it, are there any terms that say he can't do whatever he wants with the database (e.g., use it for his own app)?
I don't know the answer to your question, and it's not a particularly useful exercise to make a blanket judgement on whether judicial activism is undesirable in every case.

What I wanted to refute was your initial statement that a majority of Supreme Court justice leads to a clear interpretation of the law. What I meant by bringing up judicial activism is to say that one's opinion on judicial activism can influence how one views Supreme Court decisions. Dred Scott v. Sanford is an example of a majority Supreme Court decision, that in my opinion, was undesirable, despite its "fair" albeit narrow reading of the law.

I can't help add, and this will be the last rebuttal I make since we're not going to sway each other's opinion, and I do feel like I messed up by adding something political to HN:

As for foreign corporations, again, I want to emphasize, as I did previously, that free speech is not black/white of merely include them carte blanche or else our rights will be infringed upon. Free speech is not that simplistic although it is sacrosanct.

Why not overturn Morse v. Frederick then, which I believe had such free-speech loving justices as Alito and Scalia from the Citizens United ruling also in the majority of that case. In Morse v. Frederick, free speech could be limited by "important—indeed, perhaps compelling interests" (taken from Justice Roberts writing the decision for the majority). Granted, it limits only illegal drug-promoting student speech, but it is again another example where the justices limited free speech and justified it on grounds of public interest that did not include immediate violence. The kid could still hang his "bong hits 4 Jesus" sign on his private residence or yell it on the streets. Corporations before Citizens United could still runs ads, as could PACs and the corporate executives _individually_ donating them. They just couldn't use corporate treasury funds nor could they run the ads a certain number of days before the date of the election.

Therein, lies the question of what one considers best for public interest. Blue-collar wages of workers have remained stagnant over the last 30 years while white-collar and executive salaries have seen a nice rate of growth. The Chicago School of Economics elegant theories towards markets have not been substantiated by the uglier, noisier empirical evidence. Having studied psychological/behavioral economics and interned for a government official as well as interned with a non-profit lobbying group, I have a more skeptical view of the "well-informed" voter and the "public" servant. So this largely explains why I think differently than you do.
Accomplish tiny versions of a goal today versus waiting for a miracle tomorrow
Welfare. These low-income and minority kids know they won't starve to death, they think that learning is "acting white". Here's the result.

Oh well, better for the rest of us.
I wonder if we're heading for a split in computing devices: the hackers and "content producers" will get stuck lugging laptops around while everyone else uses pocket computerphones. That's kind of depressing.
This already happens pretty often with low budget sci fi and other genre fiction. Publishers have a very specific template for a type of story and they bid it out to unknown authors.

Maybe JK Rowling didn't know about this option, but obviously she had her own story she wanted to tell. Ghost authors are not given much freedom in character design or plot events. The plots are literally formulaic.
When I edit I can only update the title, not the URL.

(Which makes sense, b/c someone could submit something that gets voted to the frontpage and then change it to a spam link, etc. But sometimes it's inconvenient.)
Ask HN: Please review my website, job4dev.com
Job4dev was a simple free job board website that I started with a friend of mine in 2007. We were looking for a way to learn Django development and there was no equivalent to a simple board (like 37signals') in Brazil. After that, we haven't changed much about the site.

That changed a few months ago, during the "Stackoverflow Careers" debacle (http://www.cforcoding.com/2009/12/joel-inc-stackoverflow-careers-and.html), when I started thinking about how one could fix the hiring process. We have some ideas about it, and we started working on them.

Motivated by that, and also by the "who's hiring?" threads here on HN, we are putting together an international version of the website and started working on new features.

We are trying to make it as easy as possible to foster communication between professionals that are already employed, recruiters and job seekers. Also, we are putting together a resume editor/publisher, and it's optional to make it public or not.

We are releasing it as early as possible, and we sure know that we are going to be terribly embarrassed by it, but this still is just a side-project for us.

Any feedback will be much appreciated. I think that the best thing you guys could do is to try to revive the "Who's Hiring?" thread and put those companies and listings on the site.
New Wordpress Default Theme for 2010 In Development
I was disturbed by the "low income" vs. "white" separation. Does the white group also include low income white students? Or, to further their point, did they decide low income whites aren't really white?

Nobody should have to "rediscover" the Pythagorean Theorem. I'll go out on a limb and say Newton, Leibniz, Einstein, Descartes, etc. just went ahead and read Euclid, and they did pretty well for themselves.
With the recent Vimeo and Youtube announcements that Flash would effectively become a fallback delivery format in the future, people have been too caught up in the Theora discussions to say much about this potential deathblow for Flash.

As Gruber says, when people say Flash support, they basically mean Youtube. Once Youtube goes native, all the other sites need to rethink their usage because Flash is no longer necessary on phones, tablets etc. and indeed, even for platforms that support it I can see Flash blockers and selective Flash usage becoming popular for battery life reasons alone.
Seriously, what do you think would happen if, magically, all those Flash ads disappeared one day?

Bloated, gif-based animated ads and/or HTML5 <canvas><audio><video> animated ads would take their place. (With, in many instances, much worse performance).

Flash isn't the issue; CPU-pegging animation, and ads, are the issue. The Medium != the Message.
That interview showed me that "Die Hard" resurrected the dead metaphor of "diehard". This is a powerful way to capture attention. I might also watch "Lethal Weapon", for it's 3/3min dialog/action structure (and to observe how engaged/entertained I am).
Mozilla's crash stats often show Flash as a very large percentage of crashes. You can see a dozen or so crash lines in there that happen in NPSWF32 or "Flash Plugin":

http://crash-stats.mozilla.com/query/query?product=Firefox&#...

I think that plugin instability is a big problem overall, probably just as big as the 32/64-bit plugin divide, which itself was a serious blocking problem on 64-bit Linux for a while.
The grimace project
I used to think these claims were a bit bogus. However, my macbook pro was locking up solid and completely unresponsive at seemingly random times requiring a hard-reset (running 10.5.x). The constant thread I noticed was that I was always using either NetNewsWire or Safari when it happened. I kept trying different things to fix the issue (erasing preferences, verifying permissions, etc...) but no luck at all. There was nothing in the crash logs and no kernel panic or anything like that for me to even trace the culprit. It would just completely hang without so much as a wimper.

The last thing I tried was that I installed click-to-flash. I haven't seen one of these crashes since. I thought for sure there was no possible way it could be flash since the mac usually does a pretty decent job of managing hung apps without bringing the whole system down, but for whatever reason it really looks like flash is causing this. I suspect it's some odd problem with my flash installation or configuration.
"Dumbing down" and "discovering age-old principles on their own" are not necessarily the same. There is definitely value in learning to do creative work in math and science, beyond just rote memorization and learning to regurgitate what the teacher tells you. It pretty clear that many people with high grades in school are poorly prepared for situations where you actually have to do original work, like grad school. Of course, there has to be a balance between base skills and that.

Also, for another take on math education, see http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_03_08.html
Buy Adobe. Owning Flash source code problem solved.

Market cap of adobe as of writing is 17.82 billion. It's been rumored for a while and might make a lot of sense (or none at all).
This reads like a spam article.
I work for a registered non-profit charity financed partly by The Arts Council and National Lottery Funding. You'd certainly call our licensed bar and restaurant a commercial enterprise, as would the employees.

I also volunteer for a registered co-operative part-financed by said charity, the rest from ticket sales of our film screenings. We have no legal obligation to be non-profit or otherwise.

If I used your non-comm image on our website, how would you feel ?
I assume you're using histedit, rebase, and/or other tools and not just mq for your hg history munging needs? mq is a great tool, but it's not always the best one.

Also, you might find bookmarks useful if you don't use them.
Amusingly, (old-school, paper) mapmakers would do this, partly to defend against these problems.
Lisp dramatically lowers the bar to make a compiler. You don't have to mess with parser generators and do complicated parsing, the Lisp reader and s-expressions already provide a ridiculously simple and powerful framework to make your own syntax and semantics.

You can easily invent your own language, basically you can just represent the structures of your language as objects and then walk that structure to generate a tree of closures that represent the semantics, the code to execute. With a compiler, you can give your language very "special" semantics and performance isn't adversely affected (it might in fact be better). What's more, if your custom language is very declarative, really close to what you actually mean to say, your "programs" written in that language is actually useful data you can use to make high-level debuggers and such.

And for generating that tree of objects in the first place, you can use macros to make a nice s-expression representation that expands into object instantiations instead of having to do objects manually, which is harder to both read and write.

If you try this, you'll see that languages really are not that magical, that it's within your reach to design and implement one even without investing hundreds of hours in learning arcane skills, if you use the right tools.
what do you think would happen if, magically, all those Flash ads disappeared one day?

Users of FlashBlock, ClickToFlash, and platforms that don't support Flash (such as the iPhone) already know what would happen, and they like it.
Types Of Barriers: Scale Advantages
I was explaining it to myself as much as to you and I am thankful for the opportunity. That's really the only case when I am compelled to speak of such things - to gain more clarity myself.

I am not entirely over this either - far form it. I do iPhone apps with a loyal user base but modest revenue, while my friend is making crazy money on affiliate marketing. I should really just go and join him, yet I can't bring myself to do it. Unlike you I don't find appealing to users base instincts beneath me, to the contrary I think that emotional engagement is something people crave and I must provide to create a great product. The basic problem however is similar - I have a seemingly more profitable opportunity that I am not pursuing for reasons that are not entirely rational.
Pure javascript Dungeon Master demo/clone.
From 0 to 60: Our stats since we launched.
Clicky: http://job4dev.com
not as a web 3.0 designer, though ;)
Learning to prove mathematical theorems is an important skill in mathematics. If you only learn to use what comes served on a silver platter, where will you learn to handle situations where you haven't had the theorem taught to you in advance? My impression of UC undergraduate students is that "find the correct formula and plug in the numbers" is the only type of math they know how to do, and encouraging that doesn't seem like a way forward.
Simple Rules for Better Jury Selection
Design Revolution Road Show
I suggest regular exercise as a part of any entrepreneur's daily routine, not so much for the physical benefit, but for the mental benefit. I recently lost 50 pounds and I have to say it's the best thing for me physically AND professionally. It builds up dedication, gives you time to think, and makes you see that hard work pays off. You won't lose a pound the first day, or sometimes even the first week. Once you do see things paying off, it usually motivates you a lot more. Applying these same principles to starting a company is one hell of a motivator.
The GIF patent is the first one that comes to mind.

A more recent one is Acacias patent on video transmission via networks and this gem: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2007/04/acacia-claim...

Are there cases where software patents can be proven to have fostered innovation?
To be fair Flash doesn't help the issue.

I make games in Flash and performance is frequently an issue I and others battle against. The point at which Flash performance begins degrading is stupidly early.
I think Techstars is a really cool program, and the founder dating thing looks like a good place to find other people to start businesses with, but I think it would be nice to just have an in person way to meet some of the folks who share a common interest in the community around Hacker News. I think a no pressure sort of event where the goal is to have a beer and meet other nerds in the Boulder area is what I am looking to put together. If people find other people to start businesses with, then that is great, but if they just have a beer and meet someone interesting, that is great too.
Don't fall into the trap of listening to Eric Raymond too much. He likes to romanticize the whole thing too much, as this quote kind of demonstrates.

That said, let me echo some of the other posters: Learning any new languages will improve your skill in all languages. Even if the only benefit you get out of learning Lisp is a better understanding of recursion and linked lists, you win. There is also a great deal of satisfaction for a newcomer in writing a good solid Lisp routine, because you're thinking it'll never work, and then it works perfectly.

Where C is so close to the machine you can taste it, for example structs and pointers, and I love it for that, Lisp is quite far away. Maybe Lisp is also useful to pull your head out of the MMU and think at a little higher level.
Except moving to PNG was progress...
i don't think it is an idea that will, by itself, sustain a dating site. it is a good single facet, as things like this do help when pairing people, but it misses other facets that combine to make a good match.

i think that an interesting idea might be to combine hyper-personal data like this into a site that is more closed and private. can't freely browse people and the data they submit, you only get algorithmically matched up to a handful of people per time period.

that would address one of the bigger issues with dating sites, i think, which is that people don't tend to get good matches because they don't feel comfortable putting their entire personality out on display to the internets-at-large.

just my $0.02, though. wanted to give some kind of input since you were having trouble getting some before.
I really like them too, it's quite a refreshing break from the full-ness of the rest of the web. It recalls a time when the web was meant distributing information as opposed to another sales channel.
No Triumph: The IP that Conan is leaving behind
China Tries to Steer Public Opinion on Web Issue
It could have been a backwards compatible extension to GIF instead.

More formats = fragmentation = consumer confusion and problems.

Progress is not a single variable either, there are plenty of ways that you can define progress that are more or less orthogonal to each other.

Forward, sideways and 'up' are all movements that you can interpret as 'progress' depending on where you are and where you want to be.

From that point of view PNG was sideways and 'around' rather than forward.

Any kind of dataformat, any kind of protocol, anything that is not a completely closed box that performs a function (an 'appliance') should be as open as possible.

And that should be enshrined in law, interfaces and formats are automatically in the public domain, and have to be documented.

PNG as a GIF replacement is superior, for most applications. But if you think in terms of browser support then you could interpret it as a step back during the introduction phase as well.
there's ~45 snatches from that user
'Oral sex' definition prompts dictionary ban in US schools
Maybe he renamed the database that way so anyone trying to extract data from his app would have a harder time.
> I know it's a somewhat extreme view, but I believe that every dollar spent on a CD or MP3 download in this day and age is a dollar donated to an evil cause.

If you are an extremist, then so am I, and so are many of my friends.
Were there patents on compression algorithms? Are there any weird things Linux has to do to work around patents?
As a university level instructor, I find so many things high school teachers have to put up with appalling. I choose my text book for one. My lesson plans are not approved by anyone except me (yes, in fact my sister-in-law had to use recycled old lesson plans because they were "AP approved") The decision rights should be located as close to the in-the-trenches information unless the coordination benefits outweigh the costs. I doubt the benefits come anywhere close here.
we were working with hg for a long time and had a very elaborate workflow with queues. When we finally switched to git we missed our patch queues a lot. fast forward today, I don't even remember exactly why did we need them as much :).

Today we do all the same only better with git.

If I had to draw parallels I'd say hg's queues are used in a workflow like topic branches are used in git. its a way to 'edit history' that is basic in git but requires patch queue in hg (and don't really comes close in terms of functionality and easy of use). and just like in hg you can't change once you commit your patch, in git you can't (or rather shouldn't :) change once you merge into shared branch.
"Oh well, better for the rest of us."

Do you really think so? I'd prefer to live in a society where everyone was well-educated, or at least enjoyed learning.

I think you'd find there is some spillover benefit for yourself to be had from "these low-income and minority kids" receiving high-quality education.
It's much cheaper to push Flash further into irrelevance by growing their new platform(s) without it. The things that Flash can do that just straight up can't be done with HTML/CSS/JS is actually pretty small, and competitive pressure is likely to push JS performance ahead of ActiveScript in time, if it isn't there already.
LZW, but that is the problem with GIFs; and the subsequent move to PNGs
Flash is still the system of choice for any video requiring a low level of protection, e.g. iPlayer, hulu and needing near-universal coverage.
Sorry, you're right of course.