skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not any other investment, by a long shot. Because while there is a potential benefit to government assistance, there are also potential costs in terms of distorting markets, inefficient allocation, and creating oversupply.

The same possible harms also apply to education.
Ask HN: Javascript development?
What is your Javascript development environment? What do you like about it? How could it be better?
Sure that is part of it but that isn't the only thing that happens. For example: when I cycled 4 days about 60 km/day at age ~10 I was completely amazed how much easier & faster it was when I cycled to school after this vacation. This is not due to better coordination, as I had cycled every day for many years.

I'm not saying that you get significantly bigger muscles quickly, but you can get better muscles quickly (or perhaps it's due to the lungs/heart?).

BTW 10 lbs per year is a lot. It's more than 12 grams per day which is about 12 cm^3 per day. This is definitely noticeable. Where do you have this information from? Do you have other information like this? I'd be interested to know what exactly makes muscle tissue grow.
I think the worst part is that they're piling more and more school on top of the higher performers, depriving them of the chance to explore outside of school.

For example, 6 AP courses or start your own business after school? Which one are kids choosing?
Ask HN: Fairly Hotel/B&B on bay area
I'm going to spend about one week on bay area in september. as I can see there's many HN's who live there, could someone give me good/not-so expensive hotel suggestions.

Thanks in advance.
Intelligence with a Data Plan | Quiet Babylon
Odd. I remember reading that the director was impressed with what people ended up making of his work, and laughed about it.
Soldier in Wikileaks video of 2007 Apache attack reveals what happened that day
I don't think Hitler would take kindly to hearing this news... It's a shame we'll now not be able to see his reaction.
Flagging a new post brings it to the attention of the curator team.
Noam Chomsky Has ‘Never Seen Anything Like This’
Summary of NoSQL panel on DjangoDose
One of the panelists, Waldemar Kornewald, summarizes the Callcast http://djangodose.com/podcasts/callcast/episode/11/
What my son has wanted for as long as he has been a teenager is a chance to have grown-up responsibility. That's why he loves working on his start-up project. An actual profit-making business proposal gets evaluated by investors with no "grading on the curve" or concern for "self-esteem." He can deal with that. He found school environments that attempted to coddle teenagers (he wasn't in many such environments, but encountered them in passing) very off-putting.
She is quietly judging all of us..
This statement is exactly why I think Google is evil in this case. This is what Google PR talk, you will never know how their employee feels. In reality, if you read Chinese and the other side of story, you probably will feel the employees are more a victim of Google instead of China. I think Google deliberately add this statement to make them sounds like "caring."

I won't even try to convince you with my opinion, just encourage you to talk to Chinese living in western countries to get a full story. Google has good information about "emotion" and it is a media company. A popular media theory is "if you control their emotion, you control their opinion."
You've been receiving emails from the source, or from the source's laywers?
I love how one guy, MikeTonge, says a plane has engine damage, no citation or anything, and the rest of the channel is people "re-tweeting" it. WTF is the point of that even, everyone in in the channel would have seen it the first time. You did that on IRC you'd be kickbanned.
Apple Says Profit Rises 90 Percent on Macintosh, IPhone Sales
Prosser: But the plans were on display.
Arthur Dent: On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar.
Prosser: That's the display department.
If only we'd read the little laminated form they stuck up.

Arthur Dent: With a torch.
Prosser: The lights had probably gone.
Arthur Dent: So had the stairs.
Prosser: But you did see the notice, didn't you?
Arthur Dent: Oh, yes. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign outside the door saying "Beware of the Leopard."
It's an uphill battle even if you want to do something productive instead of drinking and doing drugs. I started my own company when I was 16... and my higher education (which was supposedly training me for the job I was already doing) did nothing but try and keep me from actually getting real world experience by using real work for my education, or god forbid, intern at my own company.

Not to speak of the artificial group assignments. That model just doesn't work. Period. It's the lowest common denominator that controls the quality, or it's the lone nerd that spends his entire weekend redoing his teammates sub-par work. Ugh.

Unfortunately, nothing learned at that university will be of use to me in the real world, save how to handle bureaucrats.
كيف تروض نفسك - شركة الصباحي
Problem Solving, Inertia, and The Trouble With Technology
To boil that down, Chinese is So Damn Hard due to:

1. the writing system

2. the lack of cognates

3. tones

Comments:

(1) could be argued applies to all learners of Chinese, regardless of background or age, but it should be obvious that a Japanese student would not find characters so daunting--in fact, they would probably find some comfort relative to western alphabets. Characters do form a system--highly irregular yes--but there are definite systematic qualities that can be leveraged once you reach a certain level.

(2)&(3) are relative to your linguistic background, obviously. Mandarin Chinese phonology and grammar is much simpler for children to learn than English or many other languages. It's the end product of centuries of simplification.

If one were to postulate a universal budget for linguistic complexity, the Chinese skimp on phonology and grammar, and splurge on orthography, while most other cultures do the opposite. Note the Japanese have an even simpler phonology, a moderately complex grammar, and an even more complex orthography.

I would add, Chinese is So Damn Hard because the pedagogy sucks, but that's a separate issue!
The Empire of Dreams
It's still a superficial classification leading to narcissistic behavior.

You know why? Because it's easy to make people think you're some kind of misunderstood genius without having any kind of valuable work whatsoever.

I.e. you just need to be a good salesman when selling your image to others.

I love DHH, but how many engineers and computer scientists have pushed the state of the art of our field much further than a web framework can ever do and without being viewed with awe by others?

Here you go ... http://www.google.com/trends?q=steve+jobs,+alan+kay,+steve+w...

All four of them are rockstars. Only one of them wouldn't be where it is today without the other 3. Guess which one.
One of the panelists, Waldemar Kornewald, summarized this Panel at http://djangodose.com/podcasts/callcast/episode/11/
We may get official non-relational DB support in Django 1.3!
You can choose both. The AP courses were nice, and 11 years later I'm making my living running the business.
I feel this article is worth pointing out as a reminder: Almost all concepts of school reform still takes as a given that you will have basically the same foundation of a school.

Sometimes it's worth stepping back and asking, "Does it actually make sense to put all children below a certain age in a big building for the majority of the day, where they spend all their time with other children of the same age, taking classes from teachers who serve as their only consistent contact with the adult world outside their own home?" Very few concepts of "education reform" are radical enough to ask that question.

Maybe it would be better if children spent more of their time in the company of adults in the real world, rather than in the company of each other in a kind of greenhouse-for-children artificially designed to raise them in a certain way.

Or maybe not; maybe after taking a step back and thinking big thoughts, we take a step right forward again and decide that schools as currently understood are what we're sticking with and any problems just mean we need better schools. But it's best to make that decision on the basis of a rational plan, rather than saying that Kids Belong In Schools because that's what the conventional wisdom was last year and we can't think of anything else.
What's your point? We live in a world where communication obviates the need for everyone to be first hand witnesses. The entire concept of news reporting is predicated on credible third parties.
With more context and eloquence, John Taylor Gatto has been saying this for years: adolescence is artificial, and dangerously so. See his sketch of the future Admiral Farragut, who took his first command at age 12:

http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1q.htm

...and of course, Ben Franklin:

http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1r.htm
Interesting... however I would really like to know how could anyone convince the teenage me that moving to yet another step of school doesn't really matter - that I should think about actually starting to do some serious freelance work in microcontrollers / electronics instead, which is what I liked to do. In the end, it didn't matter that much what I did during the studies - being good enough to pass, or even putting uni off for a couple of years could be probably more beneficial to me long-term.

But would I believe anyone saying that? Now I wish I tried... But at the same time I'm thinking about what I could tell my future kids, so that they join studies only if they really, really like learning in the academic way - not because "everyone does that".
Just in case you haven't seen one of these, this one's a decent example: http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/videolinks/thatguywiththegl...
Lets attack this question from another angle then.

Why do you think that China would never do anything to a Google employee if Google the company did something that China didn't like.

It has already happened in countries that are supposedly less strict than China, See the case of Italy issuing an arrest warrant for Google employee's due to a youtube video.
Absolutely that is possible. But when you look at historical data, and you compare the trajectories of countries with and without strong educational systems, publicly available education has proven to be a worthwhile investment.
I'm guessing he means something like "when the user clicks, drags, and releases something, keep scrolling at the rate the mouse was moving at the release point only if the rate is above some threshold." It'd be annoying if the mouse had to be absolutely still when you let it go, most people don't have the fine motor control for that.
Are you saying that, writers and artists are not to be trusted?

Regarding "all the scientific evidence we needed", do you not think the bar should be a bit different for research papers, than for parenting a single child?
If you do this, you can escape the time or notification limitations which the notification services use to segment their customers into “hobbyists” and "enterprises who have an awful lot of money to spend to make sure nothing breaks."

Another free alternative to Mon.itor.us and Pingdom is my own http://wasitup.com - monitors up to 10 of your sites in 5 minute intervals, takes 10 seconds to setup.
this is what a service area looks like:
http://tinyurl.com/y7o56e6
ie polygons instead of points on the map.
disclosure: i worked on it.
Governments compete all the time. If you don't like the way California incorporation works, you can incorporate in Delaware.

Even better is the way the Swiss do it. If you don't like the canton you're in, you and your neighbors can join a different one or start your own. It rarely happens, but the fact that it can keeps government responsive.

Of course, decisions there are mostly done by referendum anyway, so its hard for government to get far from the people.
Why not ship a self-contained demo where all you have to do is double click it to try it out, like Atlas?

I have to admit I am having some trouble installing this and setting up a sample project.
Libraries are heavily influenced by the semantics of the language they're written in / designed for. It's quite easy to see this in the Clojure community today, by Java libraries are good from the clojure perspective.

The goodness of a java library has little to do with syntax (because clojure can easily call any java library), but semantics. For instance, java commonly uses mutable state. A fundamental principle of Clojure is that data should be immutable. Immutability makes testing easier, it makes parallelization easier. Clojure was built to make pmap easy. If I have a java library where I have to remember that Foos are thread-safe, but Bars are not, that adds to the incidental complexity of my solution, and reduces my ability to bring Clojure's new tools to bear on the problem.

As another commenter pointed out, syntax of a language is heavily influenced by the semantics of the language. A language starts with a few high level principles, and a favorite hammer or two. The syntax of the language is designed around making those common operations easy. Libraries written in that language will tend to follow those same principles.

Having Java libraries available to Clojure is a huge advantage, but it's not the be-all end-all, because the semantics of those libraries may be incompatible with your new language.

Instead, focus on semantics. Figure out which high level principles are good. What abstractions and design principles result in better, easier to understand solutions? From that follows your libraries and syntax.
Wonder how many people bought the actual DVD because of all those videos?
Interesting, I thought start ups (at least of the VC-funded-grow-fast-and-sell-to-google/ms/oracle/ibm type) normally offer higher salaries than average to mitigate the longer working hours and lack of job security.
I don't think the book encourages this. There are several instances where it concedes that consistency should take precedence over using the "bestest" practice for example. Also, the dogmatic manager will be dogmatic regardless of the book or standard they use as a reference.
where in the bay area? It is pretty large!

I am in San Jose.
Well, in writing -- Internet discourse in particular -- multiple exclamation marks are occasionally (ab)used to indicate absurd levels of emotional intensity on the part of the speaker. The factorial operation is also denoted by an exclamation mark; to someone unfamiliar with that fact, or someone capable of intentionally conflating the two usages, it appears that the statement "9945 = 17!!!!" represents someone excitedly asserting a falsehood (i.e. "9945 = 17") or possibly suggesting that shouting a number somehow increases its value.

Each line on the linked article is a more-or-less stoic mathematical fact, and the humor comes from the subversion of this expectation when the entry for 9945 is misinterpreted as I described.
Boring website? Step on up to the Heyzap (YC W09) Social Games Bar
Come on dude, handling bureaucrats is one of the most important principles one can learn anywhere in the world. (I think this remains true for only this generation).
Oddly enough, Newt Gingrich agrees:

http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/08_45/b41...
I have mixed feelings on this one:

Some organizations get checklist happy and make checklists for procedures
which essentially can’t fail and which require no judgement. Those shouldn’t
be checklists — they should be shell scripts.

That's in principle the right thing to do, but shell scripts have this nasty habit of accumulating complexity, to the point where you end up with, say, a backup-and-restore process that everyone is afraid to change the slightest thing about, because nobody actually remembers exactly how it works (even if you wrote it yourself!), and the bash script has grown to be some opaque monster.

Maybe it could work to insist on very well-commented shell scripts, so well-commented that someone could use it as a checklist just by reading the comments, if they needed to. But then the comments have to stay in sync with what it's actually doing!
The Portwell site requires the user to request a quote which almost guarantees it's more than $199. I'm guessing somewhere in the $399 range but I could be wrong.

I bought a pico-itx board two years ago from Logic Supply with the intention of building an embedded robotics system. Cool stuff. Worked too. But the add-ons get pricey and it was difficult finding a case for it. Started to fab a case but ran out of time.

Logic Supply's price is still the same as it was two years ago.

http://www.logicsupply.com/products/px10000g
The most interesting part for me was the link to the stock photo of the girl on all the expired domains. I wonder if she knows that her photo is everywhere.
Quantum Cryptography Hits the Fast Lane
/raises hand. (well, rented)
YAWN! n00bz, you really bore me here.
Why the Freemium Model is a Lot Like Dating
HeyZap (YC W09) Launches A ‘Meebo Bar’ For Social Games
A couple good pieces I've gotten regarding pricing are:

- If you're not being told F-off 50% of the time, your rates are too low.

- Price so that you would be happy no matter the outcome - whether you get the project or not.

I've been using this one lately and for projects I'm not really interested in, I quote a much higher rate than for projects I would enjoy more.
Nice blog post on the New York Startup Scene...
Absolutely! But I'm not sure if it was worth the 4 years of tuition ;)
http://airbnb.com
"All four of them are rockstars. Only one of them wouldn't be where it is today without the other 3. Guess which one."

Jonathan Ive.

---

"[Steve Jobs'] return to Apple in 1997, after it purchased NeXT, is now the stuff of legend. In the design department, Jobs saw the work of a young Briton called Jonathan Ive and asked for a meeting. Ive, underused and ignored for a year, turned up with a resignation letter tucked into the back pocket of his jeans. He left with instructions to unleash his talent. The result was the iMac..."

(Source: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1976935-1,0...)
First, the disclaimer: You obviously can't expect language evolution to be logical. People say "couldn't care less", for example, to the annoyance of pedantic people everywhere.

Second, one can't rule out the possibility that "rockstar" started out as irony, or even an insult, applied to a specific handful of people who later became famous and carried the word along with them. That's what happened to the word impressionist, for example, which was coined by a derisive outsider as part of an insulting review but then got adopted by the Impressionists themselves and eventually became a standard term for a specific flavor of artist.

Having said all of that... There are lots of traits of actual rockstars that the word "rockstar" is meant to convey:

You're looking for an artist, not a bureaucrat.

You're looking for someone who attempts to connect with an audience, who understands that their job is communication.

You're looking for someone who shows evidence of patient and diligent practice. Though the Sex Pistols might be the exception that proves the rule [1], you don't become a rockstar by sheer luck, or charisma, or the right hairstyle, or by taking heroin and smashing up hotel rooms. You need talent. You have to practice a whole lot. Generally alone, and in obscurity, for little pay, because you take joy in the practice of your art, and because you are a forward-looking person with big goals.

You're looking for someone with big goals, someone who aspires to at least a little more than the average session musician. Someone who is going somewhere and can inspire others to follow.

---

[1] Remember: If progressive rock had never been invented, the Sex Pistols could never have succeeded: AFAIK the first wave of punk rock was a reaction to other genres. And it was extremely temporary... within literally weeks the punk movement was dominated by people who had some practice, if only because the early bands inevitably got some practice. ;)
The Virtual Revolution
Man loses part of finger as result of iPad theft
where's the booty call analogy!
It's always seemed odd to me when the owners of the media from which some internet meme is based destroy the videos that made them popular in the first place, given that it would be completely unknown without the meme. The artist's biggest enemy is not piracy but obscurity.
Does it actually make sense to put all children below a certain age in a big building for the majority of the day, where they spend all their time with other children of the same age, taking classes from teachers who serve as their only consistent contact with the adult world outside their own home?"

Yes, because like it or not, our current set up sees a large secondary function for school: babysitter.

The larger problem when dealing with what to do about school is addressing this issue.
Isn't today his birthday? (Random factoid lodged in my brain)
Thanks for posting this. I enjoy blogging but have found linear writing difficult to organize -- I'll have sections above and below, filled with thoughts, and try to merge them together.

Just yesterday I was playing around with FreeMind and it seems promising -- I think my next post is going to evolve from a mind map.
I've already chosen which side of the fence I'm on, so with my bias in mind I'd like to say that I evaluated Cappuccino and nib2cib+IB before I settled with SproutCore. IB is the best of breed tool for creating interfaces, but the fact is nib2cib is nowhere near complete and many widgets failed to translate correctly or at all. I eventually gave up on it.
I'm not that familiar with iPad. Is there a point in stealing one? Can't Apple detect/disable the device remotely, assuming you know the serial number?
If this is true, then yes:

http://yousuckatwebsites.com/web-trends/the-most-infamous-gi...

That's a comment from the supposed photographer who claims the girl is his sister.
Actually, on Chrome/OSX there is a "refresh flash" :(
I would think that people would pay more because they are involved in a face-to-face transaction. There is peer pressure when you are buying to pay a fair price. In the online world, the human element is missing so I would guess that more people would pay much less to buy the CD than when buying it in person.
Do you know how many people are jailed in US because of Patriot Act, with no reason and no trial?

People like to bring this up, and I have a few things to say about it.

1) Just because the US does something, doesn't mean it's OK. We nuked fucking Japan. Doesn't make nuclear war OK.

2) The people held by the US are not citizens, they are soldiers picked up in war zones and held outside the US. Completely unacceptable? Yes. Violation of international law? Hopefully. But this is not what's going on in China. Normal citizens, with full rights under the law, are being openly convicted and suffering harsh penalties for speaking out against the government.

If the US government did what the Chinese government did, in this narrow category, the government officials would be the ones in prison. The US is far from perfect, but it is pretty good.
Bought a copy for my dad for Christmas because he was such a fan of the Hitler videos.
Is the article trying to suggest this is fair use under parody, at the end?

Seems like it wasn't really qualifying. Taking 5 minutes wholesale out of a movie and overlaying text is a tough sell for "parody", which typically involves shorter duration.

I hope someone challenges this ruling. It'd be interesting to see if we can expand what parody is.