skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Disregarding the content of this work (the author's conception of electricity, or lack thereof), I found this passage in the preface to be striking:

> After my encounter with those books, I slowly realized that my own understanding of basic electricity was flawed and incomplete. I sat down and started re-teaching myself the subject. I became aware of the source of my problem: I myself had learned a bunch of electricity misconceptions as a child. Those early misconceptions gave me a faulty foundation on which to build further knowledge. As a result, any accurate information learned later became distorted in my mind even as I learned it. If the foundation is distorted, then the "building" cannot be built. It was like trying to build a brick wall on top of a garbage pile: the incoming bricks are perfectly good, but they simply did not fit upon earlier concepts, and any structures that I managed to build kept collapsing.

Many of the textbooks he was reading through (K-6 level books) were using the pedagogical technique of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children , where one purposefully gives inaccurate-but-simple information, planning to supplant it later with more accurate accounts once a foundational knowledge of the terms and laws of the system have been built within the student's mind. Both the misconceptions he is addressing, and his own misconceptions, show that this technique is more dangerous than it is believed to be, because people keep these inaccurate accounts, resisting learning the more complex but real accounts due to some bastardized version of Occam's razor.
You can make pasta in a rice cooker? Do you just stick the noodles and water in and check it periodically until they're done?
I don't want to get too pendantic, but the main thing I developed while living in Italy is a carbonara fetish. What you describe is most definitely not Carbonara...

Carbonara:

4 eggs
1 lb spaghetti
1/2 lb Pancetta
1/2 cup Parmesan Reggiano (although I often use asiago as it's far cheaper)
1 onion chopped

Combine the eggs and 1/2 of the cheese in a large bowl, stirring to break the egg yolks. Cook the pasta. Cook the pancetta and onion together. When the pancetta/onion is done pour it into the bowl with eggs and cheese and mix. When the pasta is done add it to the bowl as well and combine quickly to mix. Pour the rest of the cheese into the bowl (it's important that it's still hot) and mix.

Your left with this beautiful creamy mixture. Most importantly there is no cream involved:)
What is Topic for research paper
Term papers are essentially woven around a particular thesis statement. However, this statement must be closely related to the selected topic for research paper. Therefore, students should devote considerable amount of time and energy in choosing a topic, which they can best describe in their academic paper.
Interesting how you imply product's prettiness to be somehow secondary to its functionality. Apple creates pretty products and that's why they are bought - not because they are marketed as pretty. If you've seen any scifi movies you know that the future is slick sweet, just like the iPad. Everyone wants to live in the future.
Web browsers illustrated
This is the best book for finding words I have ever used:
http://www.amazon.com/Flip-Dictionary-Barbara-Ann-Kipfer/dp/...
Wow, what I said just sailed right over your head.

Git also does not require every file and subdirectory to be modified by every merge...

Uh, nooooooo... git always merges the whole repository. This makes merge tracking easy to implement in a complete way, and easy to reason about as a user.

Fundamentally, svn:mergeinfo summarizes history rather than pointing only to merge-parents. I suppose the latter is what you mean when you speak of clear-thinking primitives.

No, I'm referring to the fact that in git has a strict definition of both branches and the project tree, the notion of a merge isn't a primitive, it just sort of falls out of the primitive definitions naturally. Each revision in a git repo contains one and exactly one copy of the whole working tree. In Subversion the repository just has directories, some of which are project tree directories, and some of which are branches, and some of which are tags. That lack of clarity leads to all sorts of problems with basic functionality that VCSes should have.

it seems less likely the result of muddled thinking than of a design decision recognizing that the entire revision graph isn't locally available to svn users and that the summary is sufficient under reasonable restrictions on usage.

What it seems like is that the designers had only ever used CVS, so what they were working on seemed so advanced to them at the time, that they thought that "cheap copies" and partial checkouts were just icing on the cake and they had no idea of what they were trading away.

However in hindsight it's clearly not worth munging everything together. You are far better forcing users to actually define branches and subprojects. The amount of work that svn saves you is insignificant next to the degradation of the information stored in the repository data structure.

Your condemnation of svn as a "hopelessly hamstrung" "dead-end" seems derived more from your dismissal of centralized version control generally than from the particular details of svn's design or implementation.

It might seem that way because you don't appear to have understood a word I said. Nothing I've said had anything to do with distributed development. Everything I've said is specifically about svn's primitive concepts, and dead-end is a perfect way to describe it.

This ignorant defense of subversion needs to be stopped. I understand there are reasons people need to use subversion. I understand there are use cases that DVCSes don't fit. I certainly don't think git is the end-all-be-all of VCS. But to defend subversion without adequate understandings of its failings just makes you look bad. It's no different than a Java developer talking about how they don't see what's so great about Lisp macros. If you don't grok the concepts then any arguments you make are just noise.
I thought "sudo make me a sandwich" was the ultimate food hack: http://xkcd.com/149/
In any democratic system, the actual result of taking a vote will be a minimax of sorts: the result with the least aggregate distaste. This is why, if you have a non-niche demography for a vote, the top results will always be completely bland—no one can find a reason to dislike them, so the few people that do vote them up push them "all the way" up. Meanwhile, the contentious items—the ones that some love, and some hate—end up getting pulled down, because those who dislike it dislike it enough to overcome the friction of moving the mouse to the down-vote arrow and clicking (or to going out and putting out propaganda posters against that party, etc. etc.).

It would be a genuine invention, perhaps one of the only things worthy of an "algorithm patent", if someone were to come up with a way to encourage creative focus through the use of democracy. Imagine if "designed by committee" were actually a good thing!

As it stands, democratic voting systems are only useful as trained classification filters (i.e. spam filters where the "spam" is "stuff we don't like"). Actually ranking the "good" results should probably be left to editors.
Jonathan Rosenberg: Rules to success [video]
Dustin's totally got this covered at Hacker Dojo in Mountain View http://breakfast.agileordering.com/
Google Map's New Transit Maps are Gorgeous
I've found people also underestimate the car transportation time, though, so the estimated time difference is compounded. In particular, when people give me estimates of how long it'll take to drive somewhere, it seems to almost always be the best-case scenario, not the average time. Excludes foreseeable complications, like buffer time for the once-a-week occurrence that a freeway lane is closed, and an "unexpectedly" long time spent finding parking.
WordPress 3.0 beta 1 released
It's a simple app and a different concept but why is the the minimum time limit is 15 mins? What if I just have 5 mins? Also, can we set some priorities to the tasks so when you try to figure out what to present you can give the tasks some priority? Also, a way to see all my tasks as a list would be helpful at some point.

A few things could be improved but a good start I think.
Why the laptop will become endangered tomorrow
Jason Calacanis copies article in full
Blueberries also help to fight Alzheimer's disease. You gotta start young, if you want to live long and prosper.
Why not the stick, instead of the carrot? Make any bulk mailer that doesn't follow the rules guilty of abusing federal communications channels, similar to how we prosecute people who are misusing radio spectrum today.

We make things corporations do illegal all the time; it doesn't hurt corporate feelings, unlike restricting the rights of individuals. (And individuals, as far as I know, don't bulk-mail.) What would be the downside to this?
My book (about school, Harvard and Facebook) is now free to read on-line.
why does Apple get to choose what I'm 'allowed' to install on my phone?

They don't. Unless you buy an Apple phone. So if that's a problem for you, don't buy an Apple phone.
Sometimes it's difficult to know if the person is "quality", especially character. You could live with a person and know their worst habits and dark secrets after only a couple of years.

I find both of you to be lucky (well you pushed also your luck by being hard-working). It's refreshing though to read this; lots of food for thought, thanks.
It's not about being open all the way down; it's about being open enough to enable unpredictable innovation. As I said in another thread, even though Mac OS and Windows aren't open source, they are open enough to allow application innovation. Likewise, x86 machines are open enough to allow OS innovation (although there are non-technical reasons why it's hard for non-Windows OSes to take off).

(But speaking of BIOS, I wonder what people will think about Google Firmware once it is released...)
I'm somewhat surprised no-one has mentioned just plain fruit. Often times I eat nothing but apples, oranges, avocados, kiwis, pineapples and bananas after work. Doesn't get much healthier than that.
You'd also be surprised at how difficult it is to get wifi in ancient Rome.
>but that Apple and others are trying to create a future where closed systems are the default, and open systems are either illegal or heavily marginalized.

I myself find it difficult to imagine a future where the vast majority of applications are not web apps hosted on private servers. If you take that to be the likely future, then what you can and can't run natively on your computer (with the exception of the browser) becomes irrelevant. Debating whether or not you have the freedom to run arbitrary native code will be like arguing over having the freedom to install your own BIOS.
Not accurate. Among many problems, when electrons move, they do tend to move near the speed of light. (The low rest mass means that even tiny amounts of kinetic energy really get them zooming along.) However in Ohmic conductors they frequently crash into scatterers, bouncing off at a random angle and imparting heat to the material. In everyday materials like copper at room temperature, they spend so much time bouncing around that the average velocity of a conduction electron is low.

EDIT: If you want to teach electricity, describe it as a fluid acted on by fast-moving pressure waves. Resistance can be reasonably described by analogy to a viscous fluid flowing through a sponge.
This is an interesting turn of events.

Just 2 weeks ago when this story popped up on HN recommending unpaid interns (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1202168) I thought it may have been legal, but now we know where the lawmakers stand.
I assume there's a list of valid PO boxes provided, much the way addresses are taken off of a list somewhere, addressed to "Current Resident", and delivered that way though the mail was not only obviously mass spam but not even addressed specifically to the resident.
XScope is a lesser known alternative Android browser that has a lot of potential. I particularly like its "pin zoom" gesture.
Don't like it - shop around.

Oh Wait. Sorry - .GOV now runs the whole show.
I was in the job market for the past few months and stumbled across postings where even certain well-known tech companies (startups can be considered as exceptions) were looking for unpaid interns. You could see smell their BS from a mile.
+1 for the lack of cream

-1 for the inclusion of onion and the exclusion of garlic..
Two reasons come to mind,

Even a 5% error rate is unacceptable. People may take offense to machine tag errors.

Second, facebook probably likes the time commitment people make to tagging photos and adding friends in order to tag them to the picture. It increases communication and also adds cases where people get facebook invites so they can get tagged.
I make a big batch of 30 - 40 wraps (burritos or kebabs) and freeze them. After a 60 second nuke they are good to go.

I'm also a student and have found that carrying a water bottle everywhere stops me from buying sodas. It saves me money and of course is a lot healthier.
There's the bowl method, or you can use a strainer. I often do a combination of the two. Instead of getting a separate bowl dirty I just rinse it in the rice cooker pan itself and do a final rinse through the strainer.
Can you point to any research that says real money exchanges perform any better than the play money exchanges? Here's some saying just the opposite published by Wharton: http://bpp.wharton.upenn.edu/jwolfers/Papers/DoesMoneyMatter... - this opinion about needing real money in a prediction market to be effective is a long held conventional wisdom that has proved to be wrong time and time again.
An extreme but his perspective highlights how the iPad could effect the entire consumer electronics industry.
Was I the only one that found the upside down picture of Jobs distracting? I had the hardest time even getting through the first couple paragraphs. I'm sure there is a study that will shed light on why that is... and now I have to find it.
Whether this is true (I'm suspecting not), it would make for an interesting world—the laptop would be a niche product, made for those who do a lot of typing, even on the go: programmers and writers/bloggers. I'm imagining the term for them would gradually revert to "electronic typewriter" :)
I'm not an AI guy, but isn't having people tag their photos is creating a gold mine of data for when they do automate the process?
Contrary to its title, this article does not say that the government will require in-school repayment of student loans. It only says the gov't will offer a tax credit if the student opts to do so.
Is that all that needs to be done to steam them?
I'm personally pretty motion-oriented, on a small scale head-tracking is noticeably stronger for me. Certainly, when viewed on an IMAX, my motions don't effect my view enough to throw off the feeling, but small and close it does. Especially with larger motions, where the incorrect perspective just plain weirds me out.

I could very easily be abnormal in this, though.
Doesn't "Growth of Unpaid Internships May Be Illegal" mean it's legal not to pay interns, but illegal for them to grow up?
Missing perspectives:

1) The laptop still has several advantages over an iPad or similar device. The full keyboard, for example. And in the specific case of the iPad, open apps.

2) Many of the supposed weaknesses of laptops in his diagram -- expense, low battery life, etc. -- are not necessary conditions of laptops, but incidental. Cheap, high-battery-life laptops (like netbooks) do exist.

3) One of the main reasons camera-phones replaced point-and-shoot cameras is that people already carried phones and the things came embedded. I'd never have bought a camera of that low quality if it didn't come attached to something I already carry.
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I don't buy it. Many people do real work with a laptop as their only computer. They code, they word process, they process obscene amount of email, whatever. No one used point-and-shoots for real work. No reporters, professional photographers, etc. used point-and-shoots, save maybe in very weird circumstances.

The laptop isn't really a lesser desktop. It can do anything a desktop can do, but with slightly worse performance.

It won't be until the iPad's input device is just about as good as a physical keyboard and you can code and word process effectively that it will be viable, and I think that's a long, long way off.

Laptops fit much better into many people's lives than desktops as a primary computer, including power users. And a power user's primary computer can't just be good enough in most situations.

Most importantly, there's a lot more power users of computers than there are of cameras, and that number is growing quickly. It won't just be a tiny niche of hackers that aren't ok with being physical-keyboardless whenever they're on the go.
I suspect a slightly different scenario will play out, at least at first. Instead of folks cutting back on laptops outside of their homes--afterall, they left home to work--we will see iPads in more places than anything before.

Laptops will continue to be used for the intended purpose, that is, mobile computing. And suddenly we will see iPads where we didn't even see laptops before. A laptop is 5 pounds. An iPad is 1.5 pounds. One you consciously think about bringing, the other just comes with you anytime you have a bag.

I see this as different from the point-and-shoot to cameraphone scenario. A cameraphone replaces every feature of a P&S, whereas an iPad does not replace 99% of the use-case for having and using a laptop. Not yet, anyway. Wait until the apps catch up. Major apps like Photoshop, Skype, TextMate, Lightroom, Visual Studio, anything corporate.
Somebody should be recording all these predictions so that in a year we can come back and laugh at the hype.
Federal law for unpaid interns in for-profit organizations requires that six criteria be met: (1) the work or training should function as an extension of the intern's educational training; (2) it should be provided primarily for the benefit of the intern; (3) it does not replace the work performed by regular employees; (4) it does not provide the employer with any immediate benefit; (5) it does not entitle the intern to employment at the end of the internship; and (6) there is no expectation by employer or intern that compensation will be paid for the work or training. To have a bona fide intern, all six of the criteria need to be met.

State law may also impose additional requirements, as for example in California where the training must be part of an official educational curriculum at an accredited school - California imposes other restrictions as well.

All in all, the rules may be well-meaning but they effectively kill opportunities for students to get training in many situations where the employer would otherwise normally be glad to make the opportunities available. In practical terms, it means that an employer wanting to open opportunities to students needs to pay minimum wage at least. Of course, the idea of the regulations is to prevent employers from circumventing minimum wage rules by dressing up what is really a job as an "internship" and in this sense they serve a protective function.

Mark Cuban once did a piece entitled "Want an Unpaid Internship So You Can Get Valuable Experience - Screw You" (http://blogmaverick.com/2009/09/05/want-an-unpaid-internship...) in which he recounted his frustrations in dealing with the federal regulations, and this in turn elicited an interesting and lively thread here at HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=806563).
When I was a student the first year of a UK law graduate's work in a practice (articles) was unpaid.
This was necessary to keep the wrong sort of people out of the legal profession after they started letting anybody go to university in the 60s and 70s.
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I think both optimizing and wife-selection are best left to another four letter word that isn't 'math', but rather love. I don't think love can be computed nor would it make sense to even try.
The laptop is not the tool of choice for the consumer seeking entertainment. The laptop is the tool of choice for the professional: the doctor (me) or scientist (my dad) doing research after hours, the home-health therapist writing notes (my wife), the math teacher (my mom) putting in grades, the sysadmin (my brother), the grad student writing papers (my other brother), the author, etc. Turns out most of the target audience of consumers seeking entertainment can only afford them because they are also people are employed in the knowledge economy.
Can we just forget about this iPad stuff and return to our everyday hacking?
I love point-and-shoot cameras. When my cameraphone can give me an 8 megapixel shot that is actually clear enough to print, let me know. A point-and-shoot camera lets me turn everyday events into something beautiful. A cameraphone only lets me snap a picture of a misspelled ad for my Twitter followers.

Similarly, my netbook runs Emacs. An ipad doesn't. Anything that can't run Emacs isn't usable.
Without the cheese, bacon and sauce... But even then, there is way too much sugar in the bread.
Oh Wait. Sorry - the title is sensationalist lies.
You need the Julia Child Omlette! All you need are eggs, water, butter and a hot pan and it takes 3 minutes and tastes awesome! The water is the trick. When you whisk water and eggs together, as they hit the hot pan the water turns to steam and fluffs the eggs up. I've made this many times and once you get the pan shaking and timing right, you will impress the hell out of your friends every time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWmvfUKwBrg

Get a dozen eggs and some friends over and practice making this. Then start throwing in pre-cooked items like bacon bits etc. The possibilities are endless.

Once you've got it down, make this for breakfast for a date one morning and you won't be single long.
They didn't -- it was melted by the dragons that attacked those forts. ;)
The shipper is the paying customer here, not the person who receives the mail. How would you like it if the post office decided they didn't want to deliver something you mailed out? Or maybe you want them to start collecting money in exchange for not delivering mail? But only some mail - how are they supposed to know which you (and everybody else) want delivered? Can you imagine how expensive keeping a detailed list of what not to deliver to what address would be?
Tips to replace your Laptop LCD Screen
There's nothing preventing other loans -- they just won't have the federal subsidy.

(If someone's reasons were good for deferring repayment while getting further education -- and thus they're still a good credit risk at prevailing private interest rates -- a private bridge/refinancing option will emerge.)
In correct JSON, all strings have to be quoted, even keys. Why not just use, instead of o["fooBar"] or o["foo_bar"],

o["foo bar"]

You know, actual spaces? Spaces don't make for valid variable/method identifiers in most languages, yes, but it's not like keys you received from the network should be leaking into your identifier namespace anyway—that's how MITM attacks start.