skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tea-bagging Libertarian/Republicans: "dey tuk er jerbs"

End of debate; not going to happen, unfortunately. Unless there is a drastic change in the next election cycle.
This assumes that "design" should be narrowly construed as "decoration" that "solves a problem" (like: "what color should the header font be to make it stand out?")

On the other hand, the whole UX movement and firms like Adaptive Path have shown that, if we consider the real brand (customer experience) as a design possibility, and let traditional design methods drive not just decoration but also the complete architecture of how the customer interacts with us, we can find much better solutions. It isn't as simple as "find out what your customers want," especially in emerging markets.
It's not only in India where bribery of government officials and bureaucrats is commonplace, so this idea might spread elsewhere.
I thought a bit about this, and a loan system like federal student loans but that can only be used to pay employee wages would help me.
Warren Buffet received a BS in Economics from Nebraska and MS in Economics from Columbia. He does not hold an MBA.
School choice is rejected because the people who have the most to lose from it, public school employees, are very organized and those who stand to gain, parents, are not organized.
What that guy said is true. Indian customs is terrible. And tracking anything in India is a crazy challenge - that includes people as well.

The biggest thing that pisses me off every time I travel there is the inter-state crossings where you have to pay a small "toll." Nothing like your 50¢ auto-vending one.

The most interesting bribe chain is perhaps the driver license (DMV) anything. The bribes for those are so bad that a significant percentage of drivers even avoid getting a license. And if you are getting a car license, you will most likely need a broker - as in you would need to learn to drive from a "driving school," which will broker for your license at a "fee." The best/sad part is that upon bribery you don't even have to drive to pass the test. Of course, this may not be everywhere, but just speaking from observation.

As about bribery punishment, there have been literally thousands of movies with the theme.
I think it's different when you're talking about a family with no income due to not being able to find a job. This is about stretching every dollar because there aren't enough to cover basic needs (like rent), and about re-evaluating whether certain expenses are really necessary.

Not sure what you're referring to with that last sentence -- this family already lives in NoCal.
I don't buy this explanation. In my personal experience, the people with the least time are the most likely to eat well.

Consider programmers, quants, bankers, and other such overworked types. Observing their shopping baskets at Fairway (upper west NYC) suggests they eat mostly fresh products.

On the other hand, you have poor people, the vast majority of whom don't work at all. They have nothing but free time. Observing their shopping baskets (in Harlem or Jersey City) suggests they eat lots of packaged foods.

I suspect laziness is a better explanation for packaged foods than free time.
No offense taken. I have just spent most of my time hacking how to teach, hence the way I have designed my own self-study course. But I realized that I need to look more on the student side in how I deal with the materials and organize it more. I think I know how to be a good student, but then I thought, what ways can I maybe hack this? So as always, I like to see what is out there, and see what people have already done or tried, before I start to re-invent the wheel.

That book looks interesting, how do you find it so far?
I think schools are more about providing jobs to school employees and babysitting (keeping kids safely out of the way) than they are about education.
Also worthy of note:

Man do I regret not funding these guys.

-pg

About a company (postabon) founded by two Harvard Business School MBAs.
There's a recession on. For many people, cutting costs is immediately do-able but making more money (ie getting another job after you lost yours) is proving not to be. You have to survive until that new job comes around.
About 10% of Oxford's Said Business School graduates start businesses, I'm guessing that's quite a bit higher than most CS degrees.

LBS run an entrepreneurship summer school which concentrates on the entrepreneurship parts of their MBA program. Over the last 9 years they've had 350 graduates, and produced 90 businesses. Of those 90, 80 are still operational, which is a fairly good success rate.

Although I completely agree with you that you don't need an MBA to be successful in business, much like you don't need a CS degree to be a good developer. But if you're weak in those areas that the degree covers then obviously there will be value in studying those areas.
And my counter point was that both your Opera/Theater and Sailboat analogy prove his point.

Motor/Steam boats are now used where Sailboats were used, 100% of the time.

TV/Movies have replaced Opera/Theater for mainstream entertainment.
When games invade real life [TED]
I wonder why prepackaged foods are always so bad. If I make a big homemade meal, I can put some of it in the freezer. Then I can take it out and microwave it later and it is still a good meal. It stays good quite long in the freezer too. Why can't I buy something like that? Sure there are ready-made meals marketed as "healthy", but it usually just means smaller portions and no taste.

I think the reason is that since you cannot tell what went into a packaged meal, the producer has every incentive to replace good ingredients with something cheaper, and hide it will coloring, flavors, etc.
I'd say it's cost, not lazyness. And also the fact that there aren't any real grocery stores in poorer areas. I'm way lazier than most poorer people, but eat only fresh food that I make myself.
It's pretty easy to modify it to hide other types of articles too if you understand regex. At the moment it hides all articles with a title matching this:

/\bi-?pad\b/i
I suspect what you are comparing is people with high/low education, not busy/free.
Your remark makes me think of some show on HGTV where they were staging a property and the stager talked about using art and other visual design elements to maneuver people down the hall, right past the so-so kitchen, and on to the great view and living space at the end to make the place sell. If you know what you are doing, web designers can similarly direct attention, etc, of the user.
I personally don't see the point in going more micro than those

Learning curve.

At some point the next generation of hackers will wander by. They'll want something easy to grasp, simple to read, small enough to start their hacking.
how do you beat the efforts of multi-billion dollar corporations

Pass laws about proper labeling of foods, what can even be sold as food, and educate the public about healthy eating (which doesn’t necessarily require home cooking or to take more time).

I think that is probably the root of the problem, that food in the US is not labelled and regulated as strongly as in most of the EU.

Related to the discussion: http://www.foodincmovie.com/
I bet the media moguls would love it if the only way to digitally obtain their content would be to buy an app (on the iPad, for example) and they could shut down the web site to all free access. I'm not particularly concerned with the iPad but this enticing fact (away from a big open web) is kind of scary.
All about marketing: this is big business, so a lot of money is spent pushing the convenience life style.

I have a difficult time relating to this however since cooking is a favorite activity of mine and my wife. We just got home from a trip so yesterday I made up a shopping list of fresh food that my wife picked up and in the afternoon I made Pad Thai with 6 different fresh vegetables from our garden and our local market.

Cooking is a lot of fun, and I can't understand why people can not make it a priority.
This seems to be an accurate reflection of my font woes on Mac OS X, especially with my browser. Everything is blurry.
Android Is Apple’s Burger King
That is a really good point. BTW, food stays fresh in the refrigerator for many days, so often there is no need to freeze it. I like to add a small amount of fresh finely chopped vegetables to leftovers while I am heating them: adds a minute to preparation time but gives meals a fresh taste.
I've just started watching Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution series on ABC and it's quite shocking to see so much prepackaged/processed foods. This trend is happening everywhere, but nowhere as much as the States. I really hope movies like Food Inc., the new ABC series and articles like this will reverse that trend.
Also, please excuse plugging my own little project, but here is my cooking web app: http://cookingspace.com I use the USDA nutrition database to assign fairly accurate nutrient values to recipes. (Runs on Heroku, and I just spun up extra dynos, so try it out - I don't advertise this web app since I more or less wrote it for my own use.)
I love cooking too, but my wife couldn't care less.
It's not everyone's hobby! (sadly)
Well, but there is no difference in the learning curve.

The code presented in this joke-framework is the exact code that you'd use with werkzeug. It is werkzeug after all.

It's also almost identical to what you'd use with web.py, bottle or one of the other "micro" (or rather: modular) frameworks.

The only difference would be that those provide you with the tools (all strictly optional) to plug in authentication, cookies, template rendering etc. when you need them. But as said, they are there when/if you need them. If you don't use them you can just as well pretend they don't exist.
Breast Cancer - Reverse and Prevent Breast Cancer
I'd say it's cost, not lazyness. And also the fact that there aren't any real grocery stores in poorer areas.

This is simply not true. Fresh food is available in both the poor areas I mentioned (and is cheap), people just don't buy it. It's not overpriced either, on a per-meal basis (rather than a per-calorie basis) it tends to be cheaper than prepackaged crap.

When I lived in Harlem [1], I noticed an interesting fact. There was almost a perfect correlation between the contents of a shopping basket and the appearance of the person carrying it. Poor looking people ate prepackaged crap, yuppies ate fresh food.

[1] For those unfamiliar with NYC, Harlem used to be a terrible neighborhood. It became safe under Giuliani/Bloomberg and yuppies have moved in because it's cheap. The neighborhood is now roughly 50% yuppie, 50% local.
I find How to Read a Book really promising. It seems like it will provide a solid framework for reading for really deep learning.

I found so far, that I'm not a bad reader. Apparently I already master several of the techniques described. But anyway I find it very valuable to become much more consciously aware of my own reading abilities. And I definitely expect to improve my abilities from the study of the book.

Also I find the arguments and supporting explanations in the book so far of distinct value.
A magical and revolutionary script at an unbelievable price.
There are several dubious links in the chain of reasoning here.

First, because many, including Steve Jobs, say that this is a game changer, that it is going to make the laptop obsolete, it is going to change the future of computing forever. So it may be.

Second, therefore, because it is a closed platform, and because it is going to change the future of computing forever, when you buy one for your kid, all possible learning about how to hack things will instantly die in that child.

Third, who here learned, on their own, by using something in exactly the way that the manufacturer intended? I don't see all that many hands up.

I think kids or adults learn new ways of doing things by hacking. That is, they pick up some device and ask "hmm, I wonder what will happen if i connect these two wires".

So let me ask a semi-rhetorical question: Is there a way a kid can learn from an iPad by using it in a way that it was not intended? Of course there is. Are you telling me that there is no 8-year old that will find a way to use the iPad that will surprise his parents or peers?

Does anyone remember tube radios? I do (at the risk of dating myself), and I remember the sounds of doom when transistors came out. No user serviceable parts inside, says the label on the back. So has experimentation in Ham Radio died out? They build and launch satellites for goodness sake. New modes of digital communication, like WSJT (by Joe Taylor, Nobel Laureate, discoverer of a type of pulsar) to bounce signals off of meteor trails, or PSK31, a very narrow-band keyboard-to-keyboard mode of communication, or Cliff Stoll hooking up a kit from Ramsay Electronics to his Macintosh to graph the speed of cars going past a kid-filled street to help petition the city to put speed bumps there.

Fourth, where new ideas come from is not readily anticipated. And that is the point. The net of the article is that iPad totally locks down any possible avenue of learning for kids. I don't think so. If I were raising kids today, I would be much more concerned about their exposure to television.
"Paying $17.29/mo for WSJ iPad app should disqualify you for something important, like being allowed to use money."
Clickable link: http://mouseflow.com/sign-up
Wouldn't that be phrased better as "a part of the" instead of just "the". The definite article alone directs the connotation towards exclusivity.
This might be the dumbest thing I've ever seen. Getting an MBA does not mean someone will be boring, unmotivated and unethical. If a predominate number of business leaders and executives have MBAs then certainly a majority of the mistakes in business will be made by people with MBAs.

There are certainly many different reasons for getting an MBA. Some people go just because you can demand a much high salary when you graduate. However, many others go to develop their analytical skills, expand their knowledge base, and meet highly capable individuals who have similar interests. Furthermore, most people getting MBAs have been in the workforce for 5-7 years. They are not trying to start the next Apple. They have found a niche in business they like and wish to accelerate their development.

If you have already started a successful business, then why would you get an MBA? You wouldn't, but if you don't have a large network of capable friends, what better way to meet one than by going back to school?

I love participating in this HN community, but think the amount of MBA bashing that goes on here is just ignorant. People aren't successful because they have an MBA, but getting an MBA certainly doesn't make them less likely to succeed. It's silly to generalize then marginalize a group of people because they do not take the same approach as the hackers here to making money and succeeding. Not everybody was meant to be a hacker, and while the members of this community should probably not be looking at getting MBAs, its stupid to have a disdain towards people who do.
Sorry, that's just wrong. Delivery systems in India are pretty good in most cities and online stores are a dime a dozen (nothing as dominant as Amazon however). There are even sites which deliver direct from the US (pretty much everything available there). Online payment systems are actually more advanced than in the US.

The real reason is due to a penny-pincher mentality. Even young highly educated people with well paying jobs tend to forego internet connectivity at home and scrounge about in internet cafés or libraries. The value and productivity gains of access is completely discounted. Laptops are still considered luxury items for the elite. Folks here consider actually paying for shipping to be stupid and will spend entire an afternoon walking about in the sun shopping for second-hand books at road-side stalls etc in lieu of forking out hard earned cash just for convenience.
One of the reasons I like iPhone/iPad. It's brought a mass purchased platform that developers can flock to, make money, and not have to worry about:

* Operating System

* Web Browser

* Plugins

* Resolution

* Input

* Connectivity

* Libraries

The rapid spread of platforms over the last ten years has really fucked developers. We have to spend 50% of our time making sure the product works on 3 different Operating Systems OR 5 different web browsers.

Desktop/laptop computing has come to bite us in the ass.
Yeah, I would agree that this presentation is overly focused on the finance side of an MBA, since that's what all of the negative studies linked seem to focus on.

Other things I found disingenuous:

3. MBAs Cheat. 56% of all MBA students cheat at Exams. Source: study by the Academy of Management Learning and Education of 5,300 students in the U.S. and Canada

Business students are only rivaled in their cheating by engineers. Should we make a presentation about not needing them either?

"The college level cheaters act more often in science and math classes. Interestingly, the college students most likely to cheat are engineering and business majors."
http://www.antonnews.com/columns/mcmillan/6872-cheating-in-h...

"Their investigation revealed that 82 percent of engineering students reported engaging in some form of cheating. Only business students, at 91 percent, reported cheating more."
http://www.prism-magazine.org/mar09/feature_01.cfm

5. Can you name any successful, path-breaking, innovative company started by an MBA?

While I'm not going to spend too much time looking up a whole host of examples, but how about the company I worked with last summer? Flat World Knowledge is an open-source college text book company, co-founded by an MBA.

6. MBA Salaries Are Insane

This slide doesn't even mention MBAs. It refers to CEO salaries from 1991 when an MBA wasn't even a common degree.

Sure, there are plenty of douchebag MBAs who would add nothing to a company and are just out for themselves. But you will find these kinds of people from any walk of life and prejudicing yourself towards any group of people is going to do you more harm than good.
A good example for a language tutorial with audience considered and selected is the official python tutorial. If you are firm in some other object oriented language, this tutorial can teach you almost the entire working set of python in a day, at most. However, if you have no clue about programming, understanding this tutorial will be extremely confusing and time consuming to the point of being pointless.

I have to say, I like this very much. I could just walk through this tutorial and associate existing concepts with pythons implementations of these concepts and just use it. Other language tutorials tend to annoy me by changing the level quite a lot or being way too low level.
I don't see this happening in Europe, not in the near future. Consumers are waking up, here in the Netherlands it's become easier to opt out of all kinds of marketing. And the Dutch are crazy for it. The moment these opt-out services came online they went down because of the load ;)
A few thoughts:

1. I'm an Ugly American and am confused by prices in Euros.

2. There's little incremental value in session playback between 100 and 100K recordings. It's not like anyone is going to watch more than a couple hundred. So, it's not an incentive to pay for more than the first tier.

3. To make me feel more comfortable, I'd like slightly more detail about how the recorder works on the client side. It could be under a "more technical details" link or whatever. What if I'm recording my sign-up funnel? Will a user's credit card number be sent key-by-key in plaintext? "Supports HTTPS protocol" isn't quite enough information.

4. Can your client-side code randomize who gets recorded? Or, do I have to make sure that only X% of users get the extra code?

5. How does Mouseflow integrate with Google Analytics and A/B testing? People sophisticated enough to be using your service are probably already using some basic analytics tools.
I quite like the idea of using a decorator on a view function to define a URL path. Could someone explain to me why this is a bad idea?
This doesn't really seem to match its own title though. It answers "why iphone apps are better" - but really makes no comment on why having it closed helps matters.
Early thoughts: The iPad as news curation tool
Here's my general thoughts on the subject and the slides:

- Dropping out of school won't make you more successful. It just ensures you won't definitively fail. You can't work 16 hours a day, build a company, and be in school full time. You'll end up half-assing two things, instead of doing one really really well. If you do decide to stay in school, stay curious and build "projects" for fun.

- MBAs can start innovative companies, but it's an auxiliary skill. It's a nice to have skill after having other things like: a sense of technical expertise, product expertise, having built a startup before, working at a startup before, etc.

- MBAs can make good day to day operations managers when the company is growing. That's often the problem as to why a lot of startups lose their way when they grow. So make sure the MBA here is also an auxiliary skill and the skills listed above exist as well.

- I enjoyed the slides until it turned into a commercial at the end.

- Go learn how to build a great product, get some engineering skills, and fail a lot. That's been my real education over the past 4 years. It's paid off way more than my over priced useless degree in Computer Information Systems ie- Computer Science via the business school. Spend tons of time here on HN. It has been one the greatest sources of networking and knowledge for me over the past 2 years.

- If you go to a top tier MBA program like HBS, MIT, Stanford, etc. you do have the opportunity to network / meet some smart connected people. Honest truth, that's kind of bullshit. As a college "stopout", MIT Enterprise Forum added me as their CTO in Florida. I now have access to their entire alumni network without the degree. If you're in the Valley go volunteer and help out with the Stanford/MIT VLab program. People make it seem like you can't network with people from MIT or Harvard outside of the MBA program. Guess what? That's horseshit. You can meet every single one of those people. They're actually dying to meet smart people like us.
Because you make it the way you like it, which is different from the way your mother makes it, different from the way your neighbor makes it, etc. Even with the same recipe and ingredients: a different brand of dried peppers, a slightly larger amount of tomatoes, less water in which you boil the pasta, etc. can be enough to change the taste. Small differences can be decisive in chemistry.

On the other hand, they make it in such a way that the average consumer will consider it reasonable, which means that many people will rate it 'meh'. Convenience trumps taste and it's considered 'good enough'. It's impossible for a mass manufacturer to make stuff so that you like it as much as you like your own (or your familie' designated cook's) food.
I guess I should thank you before I install the script.
Very cool. I changed it so that it ONLY shows iPad articles.
Customs is terrible only because people don't want to pay the actual customs duties as set by the government and will try anything possible to avoid paying including indulging in corruption.
Thanks. I'm waiting for my 3G iPad and want to use it to annotate pdfs
First Look - Mandriva 2010.1 beta 1 - Gnome Edition
The Essay Correction
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