skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for sharing.

I think you're somewhat overgeneralizing from your own experience, but there's no question that experiences similar to yours are widespread. Some school boards (and some schools, and some teachers) are better than others, but there's certainly a strong case that schools overemphasize obedience and conformity and underemphasize creativity and innovation.

It's an open question whether this tendency is more related to indoctrination per se (kids are future patriots/employees/consumers who need to be conditioned for obedience) or merely to the default imperatives of a bureaucracy (kids are forms that need to be filled in properly).

My anecdotal experience seems to suggest more the latter, but I live in Canada, which has somewhat more freedom of thought than the US because it doesn't matter what Canadians think. :)

Sometimes it's possible for parents to address these issues from within the school system by advocating for a change in the school culture (even within a pilot program) that is more geared toward the dignity, autonomy and creativity of the children than on maximizing obedience.

Others deal with it by removing their children from the school system altogether. In the US, there seem to be two more or less unrelated groups of home-schoolers: those who home-school because they want to teach their kids the universe is a few thousand years old, and those who home-school because they want to teach their kids to be creative, resourceful autodidacts.

You'll find a lot of sympathy for your concerns among the latter.

>I searched for the post to link it, it was +120 or so and very well received, but I couldn't find it - if anyone has a link for people who missed it, it was a very good piece

You're very likely thinking of John Taylor Gatto:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto

Also, if you haven't already read Paul Goodman and Ivan Illich, you'll find some hefty philosophical undergirding for your skepticism about institutional schooling.

By the way, do you have a blog or website? This comment is clearly essay-grade and should be read more widely than as a reply on HN.
If you find something interesting. please feel free to share.
> As for the article, crony capitalism is precisely what happens when capitalists control the levers of government.

Actually no - it's when cronies use govt to control capitalism.
Read the license. Hackintosh is an illegal use of Apple's IP.
With Perl 5.12 comes a working test example already using the pluggable feature: http://search.cpan.org/dist/perl/ext/XS-APItest-KeywordRPN/K...

Here is the code example from the docs:

use XS::APItest::KeywordRPN qw(rpn calcrpn);

$triangle = rpn($n $n 1 + * 2 /);

calcrpn $triangle { $n $n 1 + * 2 / }
It may be a firmware update, but there wouldn't be many technical reasons they can't correct this. Worst case is that they could shut down their network stack before going to sleep (what ever you wish to call that mode).
Even the changes you suggest would not be as significant a difference as there was between phones before the iPhone and phones after. The basic design of the laptop has been with us for two decades with only minor changes. The the current form factor and UI architecture for the smartphone would persist is not unreasonable. The next significant departure in form factor and UI would will require technological innovations on the scale of those that led to the iPhone, namely, touch screen technology and increases in capacities for power, storage and processor for the form factor. Heads up Display technology is a possibility.
Imagine you are an employer. Do you want to hire your employees from a pool of uneducated or educated prospects?
A Basic Overview of Kayaks and Kayaking
The meditation I do is being aware of one's awareness. Its the simplest. Notice the awareness that is reading this post. This is the "awareness of 'you'". Also, called the "I am".

Its impact is profound. After a while, you realize that thoughts and your identification with a person arises out of this simple silent awareness. Thus the constant stream of thoughts related to "I" arise from this silence.

I am thus this pure awareness, not the mind or personality that I thought i was. The identification with the mind-created story crumbles and with that a huge amount of suffering, longing, craving etc. The freedom experienced is immense.

Once starts freeing from the mental conditioning that has happened since birth, so relationships, decision-making etc improve.

One can put one's mind to one task without thoughts interrupting. Also, a lot of inessential tasks, time-wasters etc have also dropped off. One can focus on important activities.
There's still plenty of room to innovate in phone design post-iPhone, just as there has been plenty of room to innovate in PC design post Xerox Alto (http://www.davidstringfellow.com/parcimg/GUI.jpg). The problem is not innovation, it's that platforms exert a conservative effect on hardware.

Our PCs today still looks recognizably similar to the Xerox Alto in 1973, the reason is every piece of software is written with the assumption of a screen, keyboard & mouse. Any attempts to deviate from this, the microsoft tablet for example, has tended to fail because of the sub-optimal experience of using a pen for software designed for mouse & keyboard.

We're used to phones looking different all the time because nobody has ever built a true app platform for the phone. Now that we have, we should be seeing about the same amount of innovation in phone design in the next 37 years as PC design since the Alto.

I wrote a blog post about this a while back: http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/technological-progress-happens...
The excellence of this article has caused me to reevaluate my attitude towards Smashing Magazine. I formerly knew it as a source for "50 Sweet Free Wordpress Themes" writeups and thus I largely avoided the place.

Really a good article, especially for a developer like myself who doesn't do all that much JavaScript.
That might work, as long as the charter schools aren't allowed to risk-select.
> The engineer in question is a good friend of several of us here at HN.

Do you mean that literally, or similar to "Ich bin ein Berliner"? If the former, that's a rather incredible coincidence, wouldn't you say?
I have one simple test to determine is something is a Lisp. Does it fit the statement "The program is the data"? It is a simple statement that implies a whole lot of power in a language, like the ability for a program to create a new program.
When you say: "A/B tests will tell you nothing you did not already know, they will just PROVE it if you need to convince someone else." you are wrong.

Hypothesis testing is a way to distinguish, with a given level of confidence, those events that happen due to chance from those that do not. It can very easily tell you something you did not know, because you mistook noise for signal for example, or because you failed to see a pattern that is obscured by noise. Furthermore hypothesis testing does not need a very large user base. You can get significant results with tens of samples, though obviously the more users you have the stronger the power of your tests.
The whole language is made of macros and you are nearly begged to extend it with more grammar. Or you can throw theirs away and write your own for something. Or you can throw theirs away, take some of it as a base, and extend it.

And people wonder why Perl is known as a "write-only" language!
Can someone shed some light on why the water needs to be released into the sewer systems at all? Instead of recycling someone else's water, why not turn the pipe around and recycle their own? Does it take too long to cool back down to a usable temperature or something?
We have a lot of "interesting" chemicals and plants available to us that can help resolve or reduce medical problems, and it's great that she lives in a country with a progressive medical system that can get those things into the hands of people who could benefit.

There are a lot of people who think the US has gone to pot (pun totally intended) in many ways but there are very few countries progressive enough to take similar steps (even in the UK, medicinal marijuana hasn't spread, legally, beyond trials).
You're misrepresenting Ryan's statement. His argument is not that public education benefits society more than the individual. His argument is that public education is a net benefit for society.
Generally speaking Glass is uncomfortable to rest against your bare skin while talking. It's one of the things I miss about my flip phone, that it had some air in there.

Earpieces are a bit better, but I can't stand dealing with a second battery and the battery hit you take from Bluetooth. It's really a shame you can't plug in a normal headset to these things.
Yes, I mean it literally. And no, not really a coincidence - he's got a lot of friends.
In they article, they mention ternary notation. I personally wish that people didn't use it. While it's great for saving (a little) time, it really muddles the readability of the program IMHO. Its far too easy to simply skip over it as a simple assignment operation.

There are a lot of gems in this article though (aside from that).
While its not science - it is a perfectly valid application of scientific method on a small scale. He's got a variable he measures - the money he has coming in, and a single variable he changes - whether he wears a suit or a tshirt.

To make it more reliable he should have repeated it several times.

If he had done that then I don't see why this is an invalid way to prove his hyothesis.
Excuse me, but why do you have the notion that Educated people are somehow better than uneducated people?
Trip down memory lane: Early Apple II, Mac apps and games
MacBook Pro Pro Review (3/3) for Writers and Coders
The utility to a compromise is that it actually gets implemented.
The graphs appear to reliably show the bi-polar nature of US investors. Either everything's going to ruin or it's "up, up, up!" It's hard to pin down why, but Europe's financial conservatism (in terms of risk, rather than economic policy) shines through in its relatively unwavering figures.
Well, I think you have to define what you mean by "college course". From past experiences, core college courses seem to have bell curves because everyone has to take them and not everyone will be good at them. Graduate core college courses have less of a bell curve because the students tend to be smarter and more motivated, but there are still those who do poorly. I would say, Graduate College Courses in Your Major are the ones that resemble a homogeneous distribution.
You're entitled to your opinion, but how is this smug or conceited? I'd like to disagree. My viewpoint is very humble; I am not judging anybody or making snide comments.

The first half of what I wrote explains how I am a customer despite acknowledging its flaws, because in the end, it is superior engineering. How is this smug?

I am only critical of Apple's rare but poor engineering decisions. Everything else, as I say in my text, does not matter. And I think I am fairly objective about this. How is this conceited?

If the last few lines of what I wrote seemed out of place, here is the context: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USn5t5nQWU8&NR=1 . This ad, along with other Apple ads, clearly paints the picture of Apple Computer's target demographic. This is the Apple I identify with -- a motley crew of "hipsters", in your words. Yet, this is the Apple that doesn't exist anymore. Which is what I am sad about. It is frustrating sometimes to feel abandoned like this, yet I know there are others like me. Hence I wrote this.

If this piece came across as smug, conceited or hipster-like
, I apologize for the clarity in my writing.
There's certainly a networking and pedigree advantage to be had:

"Social marketing is just starting to bubble up and everybody wants in. But only ex-Googlers needed to apply to invest in MyLikes, a social marketing ad network which just raised a $630,000 seed round. The company, which was founded by two ex-Googlers—former Google Apps product lead Bindu Reddy and former AdSense tech lead Arvind Sundararajan—took money only from 11 other ex-Googlers."

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/13/mylikes-raises-630000-seed-...
Google CEO talks about Chrome OS devices
Demand Media Will Be The First $1 Billion Tech IPO Since Google -- Here's Why
If they did, someone else would snark: "Just looked at where it's being held...Maybe they should change the name to 'Big Omaha.'"

Disclaimer: I work in Omaha.
BlackBerry OS 6.0 Screenshots and Details
> That's not an A/B test - you already knew a bigger button will result in more click-throughs, you don't need a test to show you that.

You'd be amazed how often "intuitive" things like that often don't actually work.

One product we sell is a specialist piece of software for managing "projects". Let me paint a picture of the interface: you have a list of "projects" which you select then hit a button at the bottom of the page to open the case. Within the project screen there is another button to go to a report page.

As this is about the most common page people use so I trialled installing an "open reports" button directly next to the "open" case button. Hardly anyone clicked on it in our test period (even clients who got an update notification telling them about it) - we actually got one piece of feedback saying it confused them.

I can list 10's of similar examples with our products where a) "intuitive" improvements turned out to be useless and b) split tests caught useless changes quickly.

Users are very fickle :) split tests can be useful.

(sure, not an exact science though).
http://www.bradcolbow.com/archive.php/?p=225
I agree. I've never used ternary notation regularly so it always takes me out of the flow when I'm trying to decipher someone else's source.
When I found out about National Novel Writing Month, I declared February to be an extra November in my personal calendar, and wrote a 204-page fantasy book. It actually came out a lot better than I expected; my writing improved enormously, and once I was a couple chapters in, I was producing something that was actually fun to read. (It was still hugely embarrassing, but fun to read.)

I can't recommend this strongly enough. When November comes along, if you have any interest in writing, you should participate in NaNoWriMo if at all possible.
I really enjoyed this bit from the Jhonatan Ive:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0fe800C2CU#t=1m49s (1:49-2:25)
Unless you've found a way round it, Flash P2P file transfers requiring loading the whole file into memory - so you can't transfer massive files.
I'm really torn on my feelings about this article, it's mostly great, but the example of anonymous functions grates with me. I think it's a flawed example as it takes readable code and turns it into an unmaintainable mess, when the natural solution would be to use an object in the first place.
The thing is, some authors _do_ imagine the world in more detail. Some of them are very visual, and when they're writing about Arthur Dent at his computer they're imagining it in enough detail that they could tell you the model that was in their head at the time.
It depends on enrollment at the institutions in questions. If overall enrollment has not increased in step with population, then it makes sense that the quality of the students at the most selective schools has increased.
Building Highly Reliable Websites For Small Companies
To be fair, this wasn't an A/B test. If it was actually an A/B test, he would be isolating one variable against a control. In this case, the variable he didn't control was time - maybe he made $5 on the day he wore jeans because the weather was bad or because he scowled at customers.

To be fair to the kid -

1) He's probably right about dressing the part. I wonder if he optimized; is a suit the best way to dress to increase Lemonade sales?

2) It's REALLY hard to isolate variables in this type of marketplace, even for corporations. So, in lieu of a side by side A/B test, what he did shows a lot of forethought for a teenager.
Ryan didn't claim that society benefits more than the individual, he just said that society benefits "as well as the individual".

This is an important distinction, because I think a big part of the disagreement here is how big a gap you'd need to see to call something a "public good" and accept some degree of government regulation.

In my intro economics textbook, on the section about externalities, the authors used the typical example of pollution as a negative externality. For a positive one, they wrote (paraphrasing) "economists have long recognized that certain professions, such as science and engineering, produce benefits to society that greatly exceed the immediate rewards that the practitioners are able to recoup..."

So it really is a question of degree. The people who did the original research that led to the creation of the internet or decoding the genome have contributed vastly more to the general wealth than people who lobby for the extension of copyrights that were set to expire (who probably profit personally but destroy wealth), but I bet they earned a lot less. I'm not opposed to a government that provides incentives through grants to the researchers.

Unless you're an extremist, the principles are the same, it's just where you draw the line. I'd call myself a moderate fiscal conservative - in general, I'd prefer market solutions, but I'm not a small government zealot. P

One quick thing about public health care - I got an interesting perspective from a physician who worked in an emergency room. He said that people who are broke and have no health care still get their health care paid for by the taxpayer. They just wait until problems become so awful that they have to crowd the emergency room, where treatment is at its most expensive. They're on the hook for the money, but you can't get blood out of a turnip, so the hospital is never reimbursed, and private emergency rooms transfer the patient to the county (taxpayer supported) hospital asap. Unless you're prepared to deny people with extremely bad health conditions access to the emergency room, you, as the taxpayer, are going to pay for the "emergency room public health clinic". So would you rather pay early, when it's cheap, or later, when it's extremely expensive?
Python has some FP features. More importantly, it's incredibly easy to learn, available on just about every platform (JVM users and .Net users can use it, Mac, Linux, Windows, etc).

Yes, but having "some FP features" is a far cry from being able to use FP to do lots of reasoning about your program.
It's funny you bring up that anecdote about tenure because I had several professors tell me that exact same thing. Except in my scenario, I had brought forward allegations of cheating and the full professors were the ones to get behind my cause while the up-for-tenure ones (generally) looked the other way.
Engine Yard vs Heroku: Getting Started
Daring Fireball points out that iPhones with double the resolution will be out soon.
Maybe I'm just a douchebag, but isn't all that stuff in the "Javascript: The Definitive Guide" book? Read it once (at least the part that's focused on the language itself, not DOM) and you know it.
Awesome tat sounds good... BTW how did u find out im in MA ..i dnt rem putting up the location info on HN
The issue has been closed by Google, they no longer accept new comment from now.

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=41467
One of the more delightful moments in my programming career was seeing that ReSharper could convert ternary notation to the (sometimes) more readable if/then construction automatically.

I'm pretty sure that other automatic refactoring tools can do the same.
Just for clarification, as the author of the post, I should point out that this is a guest post and it is most unlikely they would change IMHO.

However I am applying the technique on 4 other blogs and carefully monitoring the results. So far all seems to be functioning well.
To take a topical example, I'm sure MIT's EECS department looks like a candidate for a grade inflation accusation after the dot.com crash.

What really happened is that when enrollment also crashed, the students still taking the major were serious about it per se, not just as a good and high paying career (hah!).

So nowadays almost all the students are making As and Bs, with the notable exceptions being those going through some sort of personal crisis unrelated to academics.

And thinking about it, to the extent the 1/5 of MIT's students who are no longer taking EECS are instead in majors that they are a better match for, I'd expect their grades to increase as well.

Or look at the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider. Some departments had lines of students switching their majors out of physics; to the extent those students found their new majors easier (physics is hard) I would expect a bit of "grade inflation" as well.

A final note on MIT: this is not the first time this site has been forwarded to HN, and I'll note again that its grade inflation ended in 1970. It was pretty much a phenomena of the turbulent cultural '60s (which didn't quite start in 1960), which is not surprising for a whole bunch of reasons, e.g. I'm pretty sure MIT decided to make itself a bit less difficult to succeed in (e.g. when I attended in 1979-80, the entire freshman year was pass/fail, now it's only the first term, and I'm sure before the '60s they didn't do this).

Oh, that rule of thumb predicts 3.00, while MIT including the freshmen is 3.17. Given the tremendous self-selection in the applicants, that's interesting.
What you read on this whole topic from most any source (yes, including me) is arguably suspect.

This even including audited postings based on FASB rules, given what's been allowed under that in recent times.

This whole area is incredibly murky, and there's way too much spin generated from all sides.

Here's a different view of the numbers behind the "profit":

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dean-baker/did-we-make-a-profi...

The loans that are available from the US treasury are a huge amount of cash flowing into certain businesses, for instance.
Is English such a mess partly because humans are highly intelligent and can handle the mess?

If humans were not so smart, wouldn't evolution prune away languages that are too messy?
Society gets an educated worker, who can produce far more, over their lifespan, than an uneducated one.
"I decided to add "inertial" scrolling, where you gave the image a push..."
This article is schizophrenic trash. In one breath the author complains that the failure of the market is due to lax regulation and corrupt officials, while in the next he calls for further deregulation and less government oversight. He completely ignores the actual issue brought to light by the financial crisis which is exactly that this same spirit of "deregulation" has squeezed regulatory agencies like the SEC of funding and allowed them to be infiltrated by industry insiders, to all our detriment. The SEC ignored Madoff because they didn't want to rock the boat and even if they did, investigations cost money they don't have.

The Wall Street Journal has been a real Newspaper of Liars since it was acquired by News Corp. Get this garbage off HN please.