skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: HELP suggest how to empower poor village kids with CS/IT
Background: I'm from Bhilai(India), a city with a large integrated steel plant under SAIL (a public sector steel co). So my mom was asked on Women's Day to come inaugurate their CSR undertaking consisting of "Computer training" for poor kids from nearby villages. They have 4 old PCs for this purpose and one old retired dude who has come to know MS Powerpoint and Word through usage.

The kids are very happy about this (13-17 aged, drop-outs at grades 7-9). We discussed at home yesterday how they need to complete schooling and so we're trying to find people who are willing to teach as volunteers. We think English and access to the internet are very important as well.

To HN: I need you guys to give suggestions for their CS/IT curricula considering their need to find employment soon. Going by local job needs, familiarity with Office will help but I feel they will stagnate, bound to these apps.
1. What tools can we teach them that they can further their knowledge themselves after finding immediate employment?
2. What languages can be taught at this level, so they can catch up to their affluent peers - eg. Basic?

Edit: As suggested by pook, I would need 'a good selection of webapps and tutorials pre-bookmarked'. Please suggest as many as you think will help.
Between us, it is my belief that giving people more buttons to click makes them less likely to click the ads (as most people don't know what it is until a friend shows them), which is why there isn't anything more direct.
This is awesome! Sooo funny! Sooo true... So well done!
I predict that we will eventually come to know of a few dozen different nutrient deficiencies, lifestyle habits, childhood developmental factors, neurological defects, neurotic thought patterns, and other random things that collectively account for nearly all cases of what we now call "depression".

These explanations are not widely pursued because there are no practical and rigorous experiments to verify them (no ethical way to control psychological experiments) and they don't lead to practical solutions (society does not have the wherewithall to carry out the remedies).

However, as this story illustrates, "we don't know" is never an acceptable answer when we demand from science a solution to an immediate and dire problem. The confidence of experts is fairly constant over time, while only their degree of correctness improves.
Hmm...forgive me as I am not a professional coder, and only dream about working in this sort of an environment, but..

Wouldn't you want to go in to the office pretty often? If your goal is getting things done, and going to the office to meet with your team is the best way of realizing that goal, then wouldn't employees come in as needed naturally?
You missed the critical point...health "insurance" in the traditional workplace is not UNDERWRITTEN on individual basis like life or car insurance.

22-year old single, marathon runners pay the same rate as a 37-year old, single, lazy, 300lb HackerNews commenters.

That and the fact that routine care/services are "paid" for by so called "health insurance" is why it's bogus to compare it to standard insurance.
Google is awesome. And frightening. And frighteningly awesome.

But I guess that's partly the status of anyone with that kind of computing power just lying around.

"While many translation systems like Google’s use up to a billion words of text to create a model of a language, Google went much bigger: a few hundred billion English words. “The models become better and better the more text you process,” Mr. Och said."

"Last month, for example, it said it was working to combine its translation tool with image analysis, allowing a person to, say, take a cellphone photo of a menu in German and get an instant English translation."

Simply awesome. Add that to the Youtube transcribing they've been fiddling with for a while now.
I don't see it, myself. He's selling a video file, and those move around like water.
It depends on the individual. I've worked from home for the past three years and have never been more productive. When I was in an office, the constant interruptions by coworkers, the uncomfortable lighting, the uncomfortable seating, the false privacy of a cubicle, the endless meeting requests, the cooing over someone's new baby, the barking of someone's dog, the constant pressure to attend someone's birthday celebration in the kitchen or going-away party in the lobby or baby shower in the meeting room -- all of it kept me from doing my best work.

My living space and work space are the same. But on most days, I'm out the bedroom door at 6pm and in talking to my wife and playing with my son in the kitchen at 6:01pm. Happiness and productivity are very tightly linked.
I've only been a one-man band for about three months, but I have a separate room with doors that close set up as my home office. Big floating desk, ergonomic chair (Steelcase Leap), quality monitor -- and when I'm in here, it feels like work. If you have a room for a true home office -- not a corner in the living room, or a desk in the bedroom -- then I don't think incurring the overhead (expense or commuting time) of an outside office is worthwhile for a one-man band.

On the other hand, if the incubator is cheap and filled with interesting people, I'd probably do it just for the opportunity to interact with others.
agreed. should have included the date
Perhaps it's people falling prey to a time-spent version of the sunk cost fallacy?
Sorry - take it up with the submitter.
No. The energy you get out when the plates would repel will be equal to the energy required to push the plates together in the first place. No free lunch!
So you're saying

"I don't use facebook but I am sure they did their research, therefore it's perfect as it is."

Seriously? The reason why the search is on the bottom is exactly because I thought that

1. Facebook follows the push (feed/mail) paradigm and not the pull (search) paradigm
2. Search in a feed application is a form of filtering (if user testing shows that people miss it, you can still place it under the logo)
3. I do use facebook but I don't use the search because a) so far it has nnever shown me good results and b) it's not clear to me what kind of results it is supposed to show (my stuff, all of facebook...)
Venture-Capital Firms Caught in a Shakeout
The post really seems to frown upon the "work at home" concept, so I was expecting that they had implemented something more substantial as far as office hour requirements than a small 2 hour window in the afternoon.
Have you read about the Hole In the Wall project? http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm

I'd suggest a similar model for education. If this is to be within a school you don't need such an emphasis on durability, so you have much more options for UI(the original lacked a keyboard). Definitely include a Hacketyhack(Ruby) environment, several typing games, etc.

You will probably find that the children will explore and suggest far more interesting avenues than you will initially consider. As long as they've got a flexible starting point (Edubuntu + a good selection of webapps and tutorials pre-bookmarked) you are bound to get results.

edit: please please do not include BASIC. Ruby or Python are far more useful as educational languages. Not only are they far more useful and educational, but I guarantee the children will surprise you with innovation you simply cannot get from BASIC.
It's true that video files aren't so hard to pass around. But it's way harder to pass videos around than a blog post links.

My main point is was related to your interesting "ads that look like content" observation:

That there can be little difference between the things that many people give away (ads), versus the things they sell, especially in terms of labor by the creator.
I second that motion. Go to Fry's, spend $200 on a micro-ATX form factor barebones machine and an LCD screen, mount it to the wall, put ubuntu on it and autostart a browser primed for use with the Google Chart API and meta-refresh.
I just make our office comfortable enough that everyone finds it hard to leave. A relaxed body and mind is a productive body and mind.
I wonder what happens to all the lat/lon locations fetched using GPS and the such on flickr, etc, they're all 10 feet off now..
I don't mean to be a troll, really, but this kind of attitude is what kept me from ever wanting to be involved with the rails community. Now that I am a rails developer, this person and message makes me want to quit the internet.
On one of my sites, I used AdSense channels to learn more about the CTR from those arriving from Google vs regular users of the site. The CTR from incoming Google traffic was 10x higher, so I show ads to that traffic but not to the regulars - keeps them happier.
I think that's a typical urban dweller looking down at the suburbs sort of thing, not necessarily specific to dating. You'd find the same thing from Manhattanites who find out you live in Queens or (god forbid) Long Island.
"respecting institutions, having manners, demonstrating a level of humility"

These are the easy things of which Steve Jobs is the polar opposite. My point wasn't about attending class.
HN is still supposed to have a fairly narrow range of topics. With the userbase growing so quickly, a lot of people may not read the guidelines and the content could start spilling into subjects not really meant for HN. In that case, I think just educating people about what should and probably shouldn't be here isn't bad.
An interesting thing about the Casimir force is that there is a derivation due to Lifshitz that doesn't use the concept of a quantized electromagnetic field; it uses zero-point fluctuations of the charge distribution in the plates to get the same result. So it's not clear that the casimir force is direct evidence for zero-point field fluctuations.

There was a nice paper a few years ago deriving a casimir-like force between (if I'm recalling correctly) a pair of coupled resistors/inductors. I can't find the reference right now, I'll post it later if I can.
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I think you underestimate both the complexity and possible downsides of dealing with computers. Computers can be learned, but it takes hundreds or thousands of hours to master them. Making toast requires putting pre-sliced pieces of bread in a toaster and pressing one button. If you screw up your 50 page MS word document and it gets corrupted and lost, you're shit out of luck, out potentially weeks of typing. If you burn some toast, it costs a few cents to fix, and maybe 2 extra minutes.
Hole In The Wall: bringing computers to the slums [2000]
Try asking the students vs asking the prof. I'll give you two guesses to which finds arriving late / leaving early more offensive.
More recently than that, there was a time -- pre LCDs, DDC and monitors that would shut themselves down when driven at the wrong frequency -- when rolling your own XF86Config file could fry your monitor if you got the timings wrong.
How to Construct 100% Bug-Free Software (Pay Attention, Toyota)
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Any way to easily hide the articles you've already clicked/read and show stories from the "New" archives? I don't like toggling between the two, so i therefore look at much less "new" submissions than i would otherwise.
Liberal Arts students don't 'learn', that's why they're liberal arts students. Science students on the other hand...
I didn't say you were wrong. I said that 12.5 megs will never count as 'very little memory' to me.

It is a matter of perspective, not correctness.
Selfplug: This is something I collected to show what other iPad developers/designers are up to: http://tumblr.com/xjl76lu8h
Buckle Up, Intel Preps 8-Core Nehalem-EX Chips for March Launch
I am starting to think this blog is an elaborate Markov-generated hoax.

That said, I've often wondered what Sokal is doing nowadays.
I don't personally use the stuff. :) But I have seen environments where that does happen, and it works pretty well for them.

If you're not doing that, I think they're kind of silly.
Do I hear a call for the Erlang defense mechanism to be activated?
how do you go about that? Are there services that facilitate such article writing?
I feel as if you've missed the point of the article.

Yes, the kettle corn example doesn't compare in scale, but he's simply trying to show the difference in philosophy. No one's saying that screwing up kettle corn is the pinnacle of innovation and experimentation. I don't see how father's story discredits the article.
EFF on Apple's iPhone Developer Program Agreement
No wonder landlords ask for a security deposit.
NYT to sell Sunday Book Review on ebook readers
The BDD reference is not just an analogy, it's what these are for. And it's not about non-programmers maintaining the code. Not at all. It's about a business owner and a programmer sitting together and making executable specs together.

I don't really get it, but I'm curious. People I respect swear by it.
> That's about 80 years of combined, daily, multi-hour a day driving.

Not to belittle your point, but you're making a common mistake. Just because "80 years" feels like a big number doesn't make it significant.

You've presented the data point of two (2) drivers. On the other hand, there are hundreds of millions of drivers, just in the USA. Even a vanishingly small percentage of failure cases would still cause hundreds of failures, across so many billions of hours of driving. And easily not appear in any sample of two drivers' experience, no matter how much driving they've done.
Video: Our new office, pre-construction. Lease signed
You're wrong. There are serious people working, as I write, on implementing the author's vision.
Regardless of where you stand on the global warming debate...

"California's farms and vineyards could vanish by the end of the century, and its major cities could be in jeopardy, if Americans do not act to slow the advance of global warming, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said Tuesday."

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/04/local/me-warming4

So were to believe within 90 years all the farms and vineyards will vanish from California if we do nothing?

That's just headlining grabbing bunk, hardly befitting a "scientist".
Or navigation systems using GPS? 10 feet is enough to confuse navigation systems used in automobiles. I wonder how quickly the map makers will update their databases and turn around sell the update?
That's because you had a terrible work environment and you're honey mooning, not because working from an office is evil. Separating life and work is generally a very good thing, particularly if you're an entrepreneur because it forces you to unwind. Way to many people don't understand how toxic living and breathing your work can actually be. I speak from experience having worked from a "home office" for 7-8 years.

I recently went back to a separate office, it's been a freaking blessing. And don't get me wrong, I was very productive at home -- I'm just more productive in the right ways now. Working at an office generally gives you more focus on what's really important.
I'd love to have a few of these babies to crunch for Rosetta@home.
While I mostly agree with the prof's response in this situation, as the student should've both accepted that his actions may be rejected and should've spoken with the profs first if possible, professors seriously need to get over themselves. Quite frankly, they are not, much less all (despite the apparently common belief), the most important part of anyone's life, and other events do indeed come up.

The part I disagree with is the policy. How is interrupting the class further to turn them away at all helpful? Speak afterwards; you're only turning a minor distraction into a major one. Especially since people who come in late are demonstrating that they are interested enough to arrive and face that glare / lecture, more often in-class than out.

Laziness / shit not together would be far better demonstrated by not going to class at all, but no professors I've encountered take as strong of a stance on that. It's disproportional and insulting to the people who do show up to make a big deal out of it (prior to other attempts to change things), both the late arrivals and the ones who have to sit through the whole fabricated event.

Manners and respect should exist? Absolutely. But that doesn't give professors any additional right to that feeling of entitlement. I've met some real jerks of professors in my time, and they're typically also the worst teachers around. What right do they have to act like that? Oh, right. Tenure (forgive my expletive).

Respect is, and should be, earned. They get a little bonus for being in the teacher role, but for many (note: not saying most, not denying its possibility either) the line "those who cannot do, teach" is true.

In summary: act respectfully. Both of you.
Start Up Sells Dog Collar with a bult in leash
where are some good places to buy or commission such articles?
Middle-Finger-Flaws: Perfect For When You Hate Your Customer
Or maybe offer folks who spam the site with partisan politics, profiles of "dating tricks" classes, and ad pitches a script that will redirect them randomly to Reddit or Facebook.
I love that the "data recorders" are a cell phone and a camera.

This is awesome. Everybody should do something this awesome in their lifetime.

edit: Yikes, anyone got a torrent / mirror for those videos? They're crawling at sub-30kbps for me.
I think the idea is that everyone still comes to work every day, but some people may want to start earlier and others later. On most days you'll still be in the office for 6 hours or whatever, but you have the flexibility to take a morning off for personal or whatever reasons without having to clear it with everyone.
Wanted: Co-founder.
Straight to the point.
I'm a single founder starting a small company that has the potential to become huge. I emailed YC regarding co-founders and they suggested HN, so here I am.
I only qualifications needed are to be well versed in social network advertising and a massive amount of free time. That's it.
I can't discuss the company details here but, obviously, it has something to do with social networks and advertising.
Let's go.
"Mathematicians notwithstanding, a computer is a class of automaton known as a behaving machine. As such, it must not be seen as a function calculator that takes input arguments and returns an answer. It should be seen as belonging to the category of machines like brains and neural networks" from http://rebelscience.blogspot.com/2010/02/computer-scientists...

I am sure there is meaning in this, but I am not sure it is a meaning that yields readily to rational thought. Hence my classification of the blog as noise.
Thanks for the suggestions! Now I have a starting point. Didn't know about Hole In The Wall, so one part is

1. unfettered access and exploration.
2. Edubuntu and Hacketyhack.
3. I'll browse around for webapps and tutorials.
I find that it's pretty easy to determine what is on topic. I usually click through about 60% of the articles that make it to the front page, plus a few random new articles from time to time. 95% of the time, one makes the realization that this is a new school of thought or an interesting piece of commentary on a current topic. 5% of the time it is just people self promoting their restating of things that someone else already said (on hacker new no less) and other people self promoting their company. On that 5% I leave a "why is this here" comment. And every time I get a well written comment telling me why this product is interesting or why this persons opinion should be considered. If you can't stand people asking questions about things they don't understand, then maybe you sir have problems sharing this "digital playground".

But whatever the case may be, thanks for the link, although not sure why this post is here instead of just a link post ;)

also, here is the on-topic rules for people too lazy to click the link: "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
The video linked from the post (http://vimeo.com/9945353) was very disappointing. It promises 'PageRank in 5 lines of Ruby', but delivers nothing more than the mathematical definition of PageRank rewritten in pseudo-code. Not helpful at all.

I'm calling it pseudo-code because it can't possibly work as written, as it would just recurse infinitely. Your time is better spent reading the actual paper:

infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf
I've always seen this too.

The classes where the prof doesn't make a big deal out of it? The lecture continues. Nobody remembers in 5 minutes, and everyone keeps going. More students pass the class too, as fewer end up annoyed / insulted that their non-laziness is being attacked, while everyone who simply didn't arrive is silently ignored.

The classes where the prof does make a big deal out of it? Lots end up skipping over time, and everybody notices that someone came in because the prof takes time out of class to berate them, causing the prof to lose their (and their students) place in the lecture.

The only "reason" I can see for behavior like that is that the professors are acting childish: they want to get even, at the expense of everyone's time, instead of getting over it.
You are being disingenuous or purposefully obtuse since the author explains what he means in the same sentence. It's not rocket science.
+1 for "So much cash offline, go and take it. It may be harder to do it based on the country, but I refuse to believe there isn't at least some need for it. If not - hit up craigslist in the US and start pimping your offerings"

I can't echo this enough -- small businesses have so much cash for offline stuff, it's not even funny. I'm learning that via my latest startup, MailFinch.
also of interest - people have started investigating who built the worst damaged buildings - http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_url?doit=done&tt=ur...

original - http://ciperchile.cl/2010/03/06/estas-son-las-constructoras-...
Question: How do you know the true capabilities of your employees when you measure work solely by results with no correlation to time? Does your company get a pay discount when an employee finishes a milestone in half the time?

I ask because from my perspective startups generally have a finite amount of capital and resources, and maximizing those resources is key to survivability. There is always work to be done, so until you've earned the stripes there is no cruise control.
Loved the "Runs were conducted from the relative safety of the next room while peeking through a crack in the door.".

Thats the (Tesla) spirit!
Despite doing a lot of computer programming, after finishing university I knew little about how the modern PC went together. It was only after building together a few PCs (at work) that I understood just how easy it was.