skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Scholars have been criticizing school grades for a long time:

http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordD...

And grade inflation is rife at the college level, as well as at the high school level:

http://gradeinflation.com/
I am not adding twists to be nitpicking. The law is tricky, and many people try to abuse it to the maximum extent such as in the article I just pointed out.

A man's home is not always his castle. You cannot use it to break laws. At least in the US, you cannot:

1. Murder someone on your grounds unless in self-defense. If someone is found shot 5 times or in the back, you will be charged with murder!

2. Set lethal booby traps.

3. Smuggle illicit goods.

4. Having dogs fight like Michael Vick.

5. View child pornography.

Discrimination by selectively serving the public on private grounds, I believe has not yet been tested in the court of law, but this was the excuse that many private businesses had in the past when they decided to serve white people only.
Well, I'd say it's an aspect of one of the best things, that MIT is firmly dedicated to meritocracy. If you belong in your department (and there is at least one for you) and put in the work, you'll get As and Bs and the degree at the end.

A reflection of this is that you are allowed a "saving throw" in your final semester: you can petition to graduate if you are lacking just one required course that you earned an F in that last semester. It must be "well earned", you have to have really tried, and I don't know how often the petition is granted but it is upon occasion.
"Green" companies: myth and reality
Slicehost introduce intermediate-sized slices, increase bandwidth
Public schools are not private parties.
If you are hiring for truly bullshit tasks, you are wasting your money. It's that simple.

On the other hand, maybe you wanted to say "boring tasks which are necessary". But don't they stop being bullshit, by definition, when there's some monetary incentive attached to them?
What if your customer or the government demands that your company do some "bullshit tasks"?
You need to take a middle ground. Not doing a mundane task for no other reason than it's "boring" is immature and self-defeating. On the other hand, it's important not to become the office garbage disposal.

"Grunt work" that you learn from or that sets you up to do more interesting work is not so bad. If you build a city, you need to maintain the sewer system. If your company has you maintaining 8 peoples' cities because you're young and expected to pay dues, you should get another job.
Awesome, so what kind of people are working for you? Did any of them pretty much single handily engineer tumblr?

Or do you have a bunch of shmucks who plod in to work, do what they are told (and never any more), and then plod back home?

Have you ever thought that maybe the most successful businesses are the ones where the employees are bright and motivated and will actually call YOU out on your bullshit ideas? Do you really think that every idea that you deem important really is important?
Do they have legacy admissions?
i've had some success with flippa, but even then, only marginal.

i've had better success selling websites by approaching or marketing to niche buyers directly.

if you make a website about tennis, tennis related companies would probably pay a lot more, and they don't spend time on flippa.
Duplicate: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1132138
Yeah, my experience having to swap to TFS from SVN was awful given the completely connected nature of it. The only way to make it bearable was by adding 3rd party add-ons that should of been there from V1 already.
donating $2M is not doing no evil. If donating money to a nonprofit unevils you, then why do people still claim microsoft / bill gates are evil? They've donated billions to charity.

If this is your metric, then Google is way more evil than Microsoft.
Picking a firm from Sortfolio to redesign Signal vs. Noise
In my experience, grades in grad school were a pure formality. You were there to do research not classwork, but the college required grades and you needed a B average to stay enrolled, so half the class got As and half got Bs. As long as you passed your quals and kept your advisor happy with your research, no one really cared about anything else.
Intending to you kill someone for robbing you is illegal as well if you are not in danger (being at work in this case)
Another person who believes that intelligence overrides hard work.

Sorry but I'm calling BS on this one. Intelligence might allow you to score well on tests while not finishing your homework, but it's hard work and dedication that truly makes someone successful at what they do.
I love this quote. My interpretation is that he's saying computers are merely tools for exploration, like how telescopes are just tools to the astronomer.
Who is the "we" who is not allowed to use encryption?
If you're an incredibly self-motivated and intelligent person when your 17 or 18 and you are passionate about learning and excelling, then sure, skip university if that's what you want.

I'd venture to say it's more rare than not to find someone who could successfully utilize 4 years and $150,000 in an unstructured environment. It's unfortunate that this is the case, but I just don't think it happens very often given the emotional maturity of many high school students.

I "did well" in high school because it wasn't difficult to do well by grading standards. College was when it all clicked and I developed a passion for learning. Obviously this is my experience, but I see this sort of thing in those around me (and many that still, even after college, wouldn't know how to use that money in a truly beneficial manner). University often puts you in the company of some intelligent individuals in a learning environment, as well as the opportunity to meet some great mentors that help mature.
What the hell does it do?
When accusing someone of a crime that serious you tread with care. There is no 'undo' button on that operation.

I can sneak large numbers of files on to your computer without your notice (you'll have to trust me on that one, I'm not going to explain here how for obvious reasons, but if you want we can correspond by email about it, I'm sure I'm not the only HN'er that can think of tricks like that but I don't want to give the less capable ideas), one phone call later to some anonymous reporting facility and you'd be in a world of trouble.

It shouldn't be that easy to ruin somebody's life.

If a case isn't iron clad why spook the suspect (after all, simply monitoring them would give you hard proof or reason enough to drop the case quietly, maybe issue a warning that the guys card was cloned, which after all is what the police was for).

In the current system you might as well be guilty, even when you are not.

I personally hate child pornographers with a vengeance, for very good reason (they occasionally use my websites as their means of transportation), but I hate sloppy police work even more.
Lessons from best vehicle of all time
Boring does not equal BS-y. BS work is pointless, while boring might be understandably necessary. The authors complaint was of BS work, not necessarily of boring work. You can tell if he is simply avoidant of boring work by seeing if he carries out projects which he sees value toward, and whether or not he does everything, including the boring stuff, to completion. I'll admit his article doesn't actually give insight to this, but it's safe to assume.
People like Gates, Jobs, and Dell who never really had jobs and just did their own thing from day 1 are so far an exception that they're probably worthless as role models in that sense.

Right. They are like pro athletes. Their work ethic is to be admired, but expecting one's life to be anything like theirs without great evidence is idiocy.

Some do, but so do some people who work hard, apply themselves, and get as much as they can out of the broken system. In fact, I'm betting that more of the latter do, but that's just my opinion.

I think so. American high school life is a pretend world. Much of it-- prom, the cafeteria hierarchy, the make-work assignments, the goofy assemblies-- is bullshit. On the other hand, a few of the classes and teachers are really good. Why not take advantage of the few opportunities that do present themselves?
Does this have any implications on Google's pagerank patent by prior art?
I'd prefer that the DOD didn't have the power to sign .com addresses in addition to .mil. Not that it isn't idle paranoia.

Verisign's incompetence is secondary. (The whatever that Verisign (I'm guessing) has the ability to sign .mil is not lost on me.))
I have an 86-years-old grandmother that is valiantly trying to get used to the Internet.

It takes her a LOT of time to learn the most basic tasks, and I know it's an effort on her part (my grandfather doesn't even try).

She has now mastered the Google search, and so... she uses nothing else :) . That's probably what happened to these other old gentlemen (my grandmother doesn't have a facebook account because she's worried about privacy, but it could have happened to her).
That's only the start of it. How many people who use the web know what http means, or why it appears in their address bar? And how many people at all know what :// is for?
I'm not sure you could create your own series two years ago.
I think if you look into the history of the people on that list, they are actually not first timers, even though they are very young.
For instance, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg had built small businesses (programming consulting I believe) before they created Microsoft & Facebook.
I'm not sure of the others. Anybody know?
How to build a GitHub iPhone app with three20
> Welcome to the $20,000 copy of windows.

While we're at it, depending on how exactly the law would be worded, welcome to open source being made illegal.
I'd presume that trespass would apply to this situation, although it would not likely invalidate the lawsuit outright.
My sarcasm meter might be broken, but in case you aren't: Yahoo 'helped jail China writer'
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4221538.stm)
You're right, I misread the statistic. Looks like the actual market share of the majors is ~87%.

(http://www.audiomicro.com/royalty-free-music-blog/2008/07/ma...)

My point, however, still stands. The record labels control the direction of the recorded-music industry, and it is an industry.
If the .gv compilation was in javascript, it would be a complete solution. That's a project i'd be willing to commit some time to.
If you failed a test designed for average people, then by that criteria, you are below average.

There are numerous counterexamples to this in the gifted education literature. If a teacher writes a test without fact-checking the approved answers, it is possible for a child who has a better grasp of the facts than the teacher to get a bad score on the test, while a child who parrots the teacher's mistaken view of the facts gets a good score.

The system actually lets down all learners, above-average, average, and below-average, but that's not only in the form of lousy grading standards. For detailed references to this, see the books

http://books.google.com/books?id=EjkKBotJcyIC&dq=Knowing...

and

http://books.google.com/books?id=7ncMKDdCd84C&printsec=f...

and the articles

http://archive.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/fall99...

and

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

and

http://archive.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues...

There are more articles on similar subjects showing that much school improvement is necessary.

P.S. It may be you are not a native speaker of English, or you are a native speaker of English like me who types rapidly under conditions of distraction. I just wanted to point out, in a way that I hope will be friendly, that "criteria" is the plural of "criterion," so one can write of "that criterion" (singular) or "those criteria" (plural) as occasion demands.
For any intelligent youth, a typical high school education is not unlike a dull corporate job, but with a blessed excess of Google-style 20% time. The effort required to achieve the goals expected of you is minimal, and meanwhile, you have a level of free time to explore your passions that most people will never have again. Some teens recognize this and exploit it.

On a personal note, being able to blow off high school and still go to college requires a level of financial privilege that neither I nor anybody else in my family enjoyed. There are plenty of reasons to play the high school game.
My school once told me that bill gates wouldn't be hirable for the IT department because he doesn't have a degree.
Doug Engelbart: Toward High-Performance Organizations
If all they were doing was not supporting third party clients or failing to provide an API, I would agree with you. However, from the article:

> ...they are implementing byzantine security to actually prevent 3rd party apps from accessing the same functionality that their Android native app is capable of or their new mobile site is able to access.

There's a big difference between failing to support and actively creating obstacles to use. Seems like Apple and Google are both equally guilty of this, to the detriment of end users.
Best Operating Systems Apart From The Windows, MAC
3 Tesla Execs Dead In Palo Alto Plane Crash
The data from http://gradeinflation.com/ (posted in another response) suggests that MIT is worse than average for grade inflation.
Canonical research findings indicate edupreneurs will end reign of kleptobankers
Hire dumb people who won't mind being garbage disposals in order to have pay and prestige that would otherwise be out of their league. In investment banks, this is known as the "analyst" program.
Actually, no PageRank wasn't even the first web search algorithm to do that. HITS, by Jon Kleinberg was the first rigorous formulation of that notion (which is mentioned in the article) and was cited in the original PageRank paper. It was widely known at the time that it was a concept imported from library science for correlation in co-citation patterns.
If you don't think that conversation is a representative simplification, get out and talk to some more people. :)
Today's XKCD is now a real Facebook group
On the contrary, even if you don't use the web on a consistent basis, you actually do still depend on it. When people coordinate shipping groceries, they use the internet. When people plan any aspect of any product you use, they use the internet. When newscasters and radio announcers ready their words and check their facts, they benefit greatly from the internet.

One of the greatest benefits of the internet is that information breathability has increased drastically. A generation ago, if you wanted to know why the economy was falling apart around your ears, you might look at a newspaper, but if you didn't understand, there wasn't a lot you could do. These days, you have a million web sites and powerful tools for organizing information. Ignorant people these days versus ignorant people those days are drastically different.

And the debate is not about whether Facebook is intractable social DNA. The debate is whether it is a tremendously bad thing that users can't tell whether they're on Facebook or not. They can't, and therefore their ability to access information is greatly diminished.

I don't honestly see how you could think anything different.
Please give me feedback on my simple site idea
http://www.isthisgameworthwatching.com

Over the weekend I concocted this site; it's for people who Tivo sports games and want to know before they watch them if they're worth watching at all. The idea is to remove subjectivity from the equation; what one person considers "worth watching" may not be what another considers "worth watching". Instead it uses simple metrics based on the sport/league/score to determine a basic "worthiness" and then just answers "YES" or "NO". I use it for Euro soccer games that I often can't watch live.
I think I speak for a lot of people in the NYC startup community when I say trying to work with NYC Seed last year left a bad taste in my mouth.

Read the wording they use very carefully: "up to 20" (i.e. could be no one). Last year they decided to just give 250k to two startups instead of going with their real "incubator" strategy. I've heard one of those two startups already went belly-up.
Is this a nugget of wisdom or a naive frustration / hate piece? I can't help but relate to the author (in this post, too: http://www.marco.org/43768310) and feel annoyed by the "average" person's lack of passion and inattention to detail. It seems that his main concern is that school as we know it is geared towards creating this type of individual – and that people need to be more like us and care about stuff.

Judging from the year he graduated college, the author is in his late twenties – pretty young. Since he's still several years older than me, I'm inclined to let him validate my feelings. And that worries me.

Would someone older (and wiser) like to chime in and tell us why we're wrong and why the "average" person doesn't suck as much as we think?
The temptation for smart people is to reject the system and secretly congratulate themselves for being enlightened enough to do so. This is the approach the author advocates. I will admit, I had similar thinking when I first started college. However doing down that road can really limit (although not remove) opportunities later in life that you deserve. I've seen many extraordinarily intelligent friends get rejected from graduate schools because they took the scorched earth approach towards busywork.

Being completely subservient to the system and rejecting it outright are not the only two options you have a student. Personally I found the most effective method was to maintain a GPA over 3.25 with minimal effort and make my real focus undergraduate research. This has worked out incredibly well so far. I have a blast doing research because I get to work on intellectually stimulating problems and I only spend the minimum amount of time necessary on busywork for courses.

The concrete results in terms of awards and internships has been excellent. I've never once had an interviewer ask about GPA; it's high enough to be acceptable and is overshadowed by research experience. One recommendation from your research supervisor eliminates any doubt concerning intellectual ability and/or work ethic. If you want to optimize for both understanding and marketability at the same time, I believe in and strongly recommend this approach.
Did they fix it? It looks like black text on a grey background for me.
Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch Talks About Flash, Apple
I wish I didn't get karma for submitting this :(
Makes me think whether using Twitter is worth it.
> One, to motivate people to consume less, to accept a reduction in their standard of living.

While I agree with your point that some people do argue in favour of ACC for the reason you've given, I'd point out that consuming less doesn't mean a lower standard of living. For example, per capita oil consumption is lower now than it was during the 1970s, yet per capita GDP is a lot higher. So we're doing more with less.
It made me wonder what are else things we leak, using Twitter.
The help screen explains a little more:
http://www.google.com/support/moderator/

But it's still unclear to me how this differs from, say, a typical phpBB installation.
Some teachers may know what they are doing but by the time highschool rolls around the smarter students already have been through so many bullshit classes and assignments to have figured out how to get the grade their parents (or themselves) want or require with minimal effort and work.

I didn't like homework in school and I didn't do it but that doesn't stop me from doing it in college courses where I don't understand the material but it does stop me from doing grunt work for the sake of doing grunt work.
Fuc^W

My deepest condolences to their families.

I'm suspicious it is somehow related to the oil overlords. Big money, big risks.
Sad News.
This reminds me of the time I was working at a startup and the office admin booked a flight for the three founders to attend a conference or some such. Same flight for all three, seemed reasonable to me, but after some stern discussion that never happened again.
At least in chrome it highlights the line when I click too quickly (i.e. double-click). Other than that, looks nice.
I agree with the title of the post and little else. Marco seems to be extolling the virtues of doing nothing in high school instead of explaining why grades are broken or even why not doing schoolwork may be a good decision.

Why do people treat not doing schoolwork as being inherently virtuous? The view that the activities required to do well in school are a waste of time(though I believe that it wastes very little time) is valid, and I agree, for the most part. There are also some who believe that the potential benefits of doing well in high school(for example, going to a good university) are not worth the cost. I disagree with them, but if they make a considered decision that attending MIT or Stanford or the like is not worth the opportunity cost of doing well in high school and that their time would be better spent doing something else, then I'd respect their decision and them for giving more thought than most people to the consequences of their actions.

However, even in this community that I consider to have noticeably above-average intelligence, I sometimes see people almost boasting of how they did nothing in high school. This is somewhat understandable when they are explaining what they did instead of their schoolwork that was a more useful use of their time, but I simply cannot understand why people will brag solely of their inaction during high school without describing what they did instead. If you don't have something else you did in the time that was a better use of your time, doesn't that mean that you wasted the time even more than if you had done all of the work?
News organizations make a ton of money when lots of people die in some horrific way. You're not profiting from the bad news, you're gaining from informing others.
Good point. But one of the key robbin times is vacation. People definitely tweet about that.
Yes this is very fortunate for a current product we have in development, but do the authors have information about what additional frameworks are available? It is important for our legacy application that a FORTRAN physics engine be able to be integrated, is this possible?
Consistently using the same non-home location is probably better. If you're moving it around, the average location for your pickups is probably pretty close to where your home actually is.

For the ultra-paranoid, pick a spot away from your home, and always pick a location randomly within a predefined circle around that point.
Study questions widely-used ADHD drugs
They missed out SCCS. Anyone remember that?
My "lowly DSL line" in Japan, 6 years ago, was 40Mbps.
Hilarious and totally credible!
I just emailed my school district to find someone I can talk to about this.
I was just on a conference call today with some coworkers out in the area when the power went out. Had no idea why.

This is truly sad news.
13 year old Americans (in families that can afford a computer with broadband) will have their whole social lives cataloged on Facebook or its successor. Indeed, even younger children will have their milestones shared by their eager parents, until they are old enough to take over. This is the divide: those who've had the ultimate social family tree preserved in a convenient database, and those who go on a road trip to search public records for traces of genealogy. Any effort an oldster takes today to preserve 'who they were' will pale next to a lifetime of crowdsourced social biography.
I don't see any reason why this "should" cover the reals. And it obviously doesn't -- it's trivial to prove that (1+sqrt(5))/2 isn't covered, for example, based on well understood bounds on how closely it can be approximated by rationals.