skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People also say that Finish is fiendishly difficult to learn. Perhaps there's some ground in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
Sorry, I put the wrong link. Here's the direct link: http://tasktop.com/blog/tasktop/atlassian-connector-eclipse
I think the granularity is so different that it's a difference in kind.

And the granularity is at a very high level; I gather few want to wade into the details of SELinux, and if I hadn't been exposed to the concepts for 30 years (sic, I started learning Multics in 1979) I probably would have just turned off SELinux when I was using Fedora last year.
As the bureaucracy got bigger, wouldn't it cost more? More levels of management, more paperwork, more time spent on oversight.

I don't think the cost/size relationship in any government is linear.
Dump your credit cards and get out of debt
Kind of reminds me of this: http://3.flowsnake.org/cheapskate-mac-guide.html
Notice that technology is not a critical part of their success. I didn't see a lot of shots of kids in front of computers, but rather, teachers and students interacting with each other. I work at a private school that has a similar philosophy, which contrasts with the other private schools in the area with which we compete. We're not interested in 1-1 laptop programs because we don't want devices getting in the way of personal relationships. Of the upper tier private schools in the area, we have the highest scores and the lowest tuition, and very good acceptance rates in top colleges. We invest in teachers who are well educated (all at least masters, several PhDs) and are happy (very high retention rate).

I don't mean to boast, but as technology director at this school, I'm always being asked about laptops, SmartBoards, and other cool and popular education technology things that we have decided not to use. I think it's important to carefully consider how technology can best be used, and to know when to stay with low-tech methods that work well.
Natural World Vanishes: How Species Cease To Matter
I never thought these tests were fair comparisons. The United States has a lot more people than Finland and as a corollary the United States has to help a lot of people get through the educational process that are not as well off as the average citizen of Finland. In other words, we have a lot more ghettos than Finland and that hurts our aggregate scores.

A much more accurate test would be to find those of us in the United States that have been afforded the same living amenities as those living in Finland. I would bet that we are not far off at all.
First Pictures: Mystery Disk Eclipses Star
This comment calls for the classic Steve Jobs quote on taste:

"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste; they have absolutely no taste. And what that means is–I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way–in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture into their product. And you say ‘Why is that important?’ Well, you know, proportionally spaced fonts come from typesetting and beautiful books, that’s where one gets the idea. If it weren’t for the Mac, they would never have that in their products. And so I guess I am saddened, not by Microsoft’s success,I have no problem with their success, they’ve earned their success, for the most part, I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products."
Nevermind, this goverment will be gone soon.
If that's the case, why didn't the Tablet PC do the job? Medical applications similar to those described in the article were supposed to be the "killer app" for the Tablet, but the adoption was negligible.
Little Boots had a hardware interface like this at SXSW 2008 she used to build up a song live. It was very cool. Here's a link:

http://www.tenori-onusa.com/
Python MongoDB Notes
Good point. Still, a system an order of magnitude bigger might be only ten percent more expensive per student.
> Doing it one stock at a time might raise some eyebrows; it sounds close to insider trading.

That's not the definition of "insider trading". Insider trading is you trading on your company's info - the company is free to do so. For example, Google employees can't trade Rackspace on knowledge that Google is about to make a big deal with Rackspace. Google, on the other hand, is free to do so.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading

"In the United States and many other jurisdictions, however, "insiders" are not just limited to corporate officials and major shareholders where illegal insider trading is concerned, but can include any individual who trades shares based on material non-public information in violation of some duty of trust. This duty may be imputed; for example, in many jurisdictions, in cases of where a corporate insider "tips" a friend about non-public information likely to have an effect on the company's share price, the duty the corporate insider owes the company is now imputed to the friend and the friend violates a duty to the company if he or she trades on the basis of this information."
That's a slippery slope, next stop is saying that large poor families are just lazy and want to have sex instead of work and be smart. And that has nothing to do with being PC.

cf. Guns, Germs and Steel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel
Although the article mentions the second language thing, Finland actually has two official languages, Finnish and Swedish. All official documents are in both, and street signs are in both, with the local dominant language on top.

They also teach English at the Finnish schools.

My eldest son goes to an English school in Helsinki and he is taught Finnish, French, and of course English.
They may get the best results, but there are a lot of contributions to society that have come from less educated people.

A lot of great athletes, musicians, inventors, generals, etc, have come from societies where the average result is not so high.

Finland may have a high education level - but I could also make the claim that Finland is boring. If everyone gets educated the same, then everyone turns out the same and there is little diversity of thought.

So I really don't think the world should aim towards using the finish system.
Ask HN: When does the Apple-AT&T iPhone Contract End? 
There is quite a bit of hooplah today about the new iPhone OS release. I've been searching for an article stating the month and possibly the day when the contract will end between apple and AT&T, but I only find articles that say sometime 2010.

So do you know when the Apple-AT&T iPhone contract ends?
Launch of Margin Trading, Short Selling in China
Another Paywall Experiment Ends Badly
Links and Resources for Lean Startup geeks: Vote or submit
Are there any reasons to believe that is relevant?

If you take PISA scores to be a good indicator than there are homogeneous and non-homogeneous societies near the top and bottom.

Canada ranks right up there with Finland every year http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PISA sometimes topping Finland in a category. It is easy to find countries that are culturally homogeneous near the bottom of the rankings as well.
Relevant: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230333830457515...
There is a lot of confusion about the possessive form of singular proper nouns that end in "s". I've seen it both ways and have never found a consistent pattern in American English. Historical figures usually just get an apostrophe, and normal people get an apostrophe and an "s". Example: "Jesus' desciples" vs "Chris's bicycle". There are exceptions to even this rule, however, such as "Zeus's infidelity". For regular nouns, it seems more consistent ("for goodness' sake" but never "for goodness's sake"). Does anyone know a concrete rule for this?
The education level is very high. However, the relatively low level of entrepreneurship is more likely due to the high cost of employing people. As the social benefits (such as parental leave, etc) are very high, it is difficult to be a small businessman with few employees. A couple of babies and an illness and your entire workforce is gone for months. You need to be a big company to balance it out.
Twtfiltr - the twit filter
It also lowers the chance of cancer, which you wouldn't guess from the headline:

"Eating more vegetables was associated with a small but statistically significant reduction in cancer risk"

It's a 4% reduction for 2 extra servings of veg, which they helpfully illustrated by saying if you had 10% chance of cancer without vegetables, eating them would mean you would then have a 9.6% chance. I'm guessing that was an attempt to downplay the significance. If they'd said for every 25 people who get cancer, one wouldn't then it might have seemed more like good news.

They also claim that number could be wrong and list various factors why the results could be skewed, but never explain why they think the number would only get worse, rather than better due to these confounding factors.
Mail.app implemented on the web using ukijs
> the least they could do is seek out experts and remember that lobbyists are not impartial experts.

Note that experts aren't impartial either. Yes, they may be impartial on some things (such as the appropriate length of packets), but those are rarely the issue in the political sphere.

For example, the 2 degree "threshold" in the AGW debate is completely artificial. There's nothing scientifically significant about 2 degrees warmer (1.5 and 2.5 are more and less of the same) yet look at how the "experts" talk about it.
I'm sure the Parc guys that founded Adobe would beg to
differ.

Maybe, but I am not sure how much. I'd say Apple played a major role in Adobe becoming Adobe. It was Jobs who persuaded them to change initial plan to build the whole package: computer + printer, and focus on software which Apple needed for LaserWriter.

"Steve did a prepayment on royalties to make sure
we had the resources to stay in business, and Apple
also bought a little less than 20 percent of the
company, which quintupled the value of the original
investors' money. Steve wanted to make sure that we
finish this product, because it was critical for him
to have the LaserWriter"

"Fortunately, there was a young marketing guy at Apple
named John Scull, who aware of what was going on (as
were we) at Aldus up in Seattle, because PageMaker come
out at the same time as the LaserWriter did. He came up
with the idea of getting the three companies—Apple, Aldus
and Adobe—together to put together a marketing campaign called
"desktop publishing".

Source: Interview with Charles Geschke, cofounder of Adobe Systems in "Founders at work".
Product Management is Really Business Operations
http://duckduckgo.com would have been a much better choice!
So what your saying is the more socially stratified US is falling behind the socialist (compared to the US) Finland. There shouldn't be a lot more ghettos compared to Finland but there is. And the priorities are all screwed up.

Obviously, Finland should be spending more money on defense, corporate welfare, and privatized healthcare so that their education budget should shoulder the cuts and they can brought down to the US level.
the thrust of this article is good, but there are a lot of annoying details such as: (i) no content above the fold and (ii) he cites "How to draw comics the Marvel way" but shows an illustration of two D.C. characters underneath it.
The lunacy is further advanced by the artful use of different font-sizes and colors.
More education is less time in the workforce prior to parenthood, which probably has a lot to do with founding startups (less work experience, frustrations, capital, confidence).
But Firefox (Mozilla foundation) make around $100 million a year from Google already.
Copyright is essentially theft? Only in the sense that "property is theft." Copyright is protecting the creator of a work.

Let's forget the issue of derivative works for the moment, since that's not what was at stake in the original poster's argument-- we're talking about wholesale copying. And if people in Afghanistan can legally copy a Salinger book without paying him or his publisher, then my beef is with Afghanistan, now with the fact that others can't also rip them off.

How does it rob you of a part of "our culture" if I require that I get paid for any re-publication you do of work that I create?

I'm not saying that LotR shouldn't enter the public domain someday-- but I don't think that 20 years is the right time frame.
Why Bing and not DuckDuckGo? It is an excellent search engine, in many cases it has much better search results, and it logs no IP addresses.
Ask HN: What's a good place for South African programmers to emigrate to?
I am a South African programmer. Due to growing instability in South Africa (which I don't want this thread to become about), me, and some of my friends would like to set up a "plan B".

What countries are good fits for experienced South African programmers, currently developing enterprise systems, who speak English as a first language and have university degrees? Australia, New Zealand, the UAE and England seem to be favourites, but I'm sure there are other suitable options as well. I'd also be interested in hearing from programmers who have emmigrated already, about unexpected challenges and surprises that they have encountered.
At the top it says they were behind South Korea in a test score. And South Korea is around 50 million... But South Korea's system is basically studying 24/7. Two very different systems with great results.

Then again South Korea's culture values education highly as well.
On a related note, drop-down date selection has always driven me nuts. Isn't it easier to type "1977" than to find it in a drop-down? Isn't it easier to type "1 <tab> 17 <tab> 1977" than to select each in a drop-down?

Drives me nuts, mostly when clients request the drop-down over the text field...
That is definitely not an answer. Grandparent suggested that genetics plays a role in why people in one country are different from people in another. And you respond by saying that if he says that, he might say something else, which you find even more unacceptable!

It should be possible to admit that if 1) you're dealing with a country of genetic relatives, and 2) genetic factors are responsible for 60-80% of the variance in IQ, then Finland's superior education can be explained in part by the fact that it's full of Finns.
It needs some easing and transitions to let the user know what's happening.

Maemo has a similar date picker, by the way. It's vertically, and the scrolling is more intuitive partially due to this fact.
But that means people eating more fruit and vegetables will actually increase the cancer rate in the society, as fewer people die before they develop cancer (which is an almost inevitable event in an ageing body).
Of course, this is related to the effect that you can double the number of people that suffer from a aggressive form of cancer by finding a treatment that makes them live twice as long after diagnosis (if you count all current cases and not only all new cases). Statistics and epidemiology are, ahm, fun is not quite the right word.
"Why is the word 'how' in the title?"

Because TDB raise tens of millions of dollars so they could hire dozens of celebrities and go on Colbert the day they launched, and they're trying to make their money back.
Driving cars doesn't stop cancer.

Is everything now being judged on whether or not it stops cancer? What a rediculous headline.
You're right that I don't know that the two would cancel each other out. But even if there is some non-zero effect at work, when you spread it out over all taxpayers, any additional costs/savings are probably trivial.

The main factor at work here seems to be that education is highly valued in Finnish culture, as opposed to the US, where for a large segment of the population, it is not a priority. You can scale processes, but you can't scale culture.
As a new parent myself, I cannot agree strongly enough.

My 3-month-old can say "hungry" (way ahead of the curve) but can't yet roll over (behind the curve). That's simply the nature of people -- we don't all learn every topic at the same rate. Trying to push kids into learning at the same rate simply means you'll be ineffective at teaching some fraction of them. Recognizing that some of them just aren't ready to learn such-and-such topic yet, and pacing their education according to what they are ready to learn, is a far better approach.

Related: I've really been enjoying the book "Your Child's Growing Mind"[1], which makes this very argument in its first chapter.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Your-Childs-Growing-Mind-Development/d...
Canada also scores highly in PISA rankings. However it is officially bilingual, has high immigration, many ESL and FSL students.

Within Canada: Alberta, Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec score higher than the national average and they are the provinces with the highest in-migration.
Finnish is not insanely difficult to learn. It is however very difficult to teach using traditional methods. It is nott an Indo-European language, shares next to no vocabulary base with other language groups in the region, and is incompatible with the standard (historically Latin-derived) models of grammar. This makes a formal description of the language much more complex than the language itself. It is possible for non-natives to acquire Finnish (I did it, and natives have problems telling I am non-native) and it doesn't take much longer than it does to acquire any other European language. People who take Finnish lessons, however, tend to be unable to make the leap from passive understanding to active usage, and I suspect this is because language course present the grammar formally, making it much more complex than it really is in order to explain it.
HomeRun: Like Groupon, But Ridiculously Social
Perfect summary! The linked article was almost information free.

There is more information on their wiki. The elevator-pitch version is here: http://citability.pbworks.com/Onepager

IMO, it goes off the deep end after the WHY section. The scientific community has been dealing with the issue of citability for a couple of decades now (that I have witnessed) but, it seems like the folks at citability.org are intent on reinventing the wheel on this one.
yeah, they could've paid Canonical in duck feathers.
1) and 4) seem to be the most important to me (not only reading specifically, but spending time in general). #4 is simply not possible in a lot of American households where school's primary function is daycare.

I certainly learned a lot about physics and algebra in high school, but I learned how to learn from my parents and my family.

I grew up in NYC going to public schools with a parent and a few relatives working as public teachers, so I'm pretty intimately familiar with the struggle of fixing public education on limited budget. Most of them generally share the opinion that schools can only do so much. They are absolutely necessary, and should continue getting better, but someone who is offered every resource in the world and doesn't have a home life that can support it will throw those resources away 99% of the time (from my experience that number is actually roughly accurate).

So I would look at education as something that can and should be improved, but it's also really important to look at education as the symptom of bigger cultural issues.

Americans tend to be pretty anti-intellectual and reject unfamiliar ideas. You can't really change that with education (alone), because people will always reject what school teaches them if their family doesn't support it, and in many cases the citizens will never vote in the budgets anyway. Main point: our mediocre education system is the symptom, find the cause.
New Giant Lizard Discovered in the Philippines
Thanks for reminding everyone of that. And of course Swedish

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

and Finnish (Suomi)

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

are not even cognate languages, being from two different language families. So students in Finland learning English in their school courses are learning a language with what are to them rather puzzling grammatical patterns. By contrast, many Americans don't attempt to learn any foreign language while in K-12 schooling.
Analyzing Bandwidth and Latency of YUIBlog readers
Float Your Cloud Software With Linxter and CloudMiddleware.com
Museum turns code into art
Most likely June 2010 is what I've read several places.

http://www.businessinsider.com/apples-contract-with-att-is-d...
In which he calls his detractors "flaming idiots" and tells them to pick up their toys...
The story is entertaining, but the con-man angle tacked at the end is highly dubious. Even if there was reason to believe that Valfierno even existed, its hard to swallow a century-old third-hand tale from an admitted con-man without a shred of evidence. Moreover, there's nothing about his story that explains the theft and plenty that contradicts known details. Sometimes lone nuts really do commit crimes beyond their stature.
I think that "15 Great For Loops and Iterators" article is on Coding Horror.
A lot of big universities have research schools where they test schooling techniques on students, run assessments and see what works. The problem is most of these schools are near big universities. So you've got an overwhelming amount of students who are nurtured in an education rich environment (mama is a professor, papa is an adjunct, etc.), they are well ahead of the rest of the country as far as educational experiences. Then when they run the tests and think they have a success, it usually results in failure once they try to roll it out to schools in a completely different environment.

What they should be doing is working on the baseline students, inner city schools, poor areas. But this requires professors to get out their comfort zones and they don't want to do that.

A lot of these research schools are very competitive. They'll basically ace any test you put in front of them just because they can.
This isn't just silly, but can actually be dangerous. The "checkpoints" we have for learning are determined by our third-party mental model of that activity, not by the first-person experiences of the learner. A child will learn to do something when they are mentally and physically prepared to do it in the first person, when a whole variety of variables we have no awareness of align.

Even something which may appear isolated from other areas of development (walking, talking, holding a spoon) is an extremely superficial heuristic for the development of millions of interconnected systems within a child's body.
The definition of insider trading is alarmingly flexible; it's safer to avoid the appearance of impropriety, since that can still get you convicted.

I wasn't aware that a corporation could trade based on insider knowledge. That seems very unlikely; it would imply that, e.g. Boesky was busted because his fund was organized as a limited partnership. And wouldn't a corporation with one owner be equivalent to that owner in terms of economic interest? Could I just form byrneseyeview Inc. to take advantage of my insider knowledge?

Do you have a source for the statement that corporations can engage in insider trading?
You can play with the actual demo over here: http://ukijs.org/mail/index.html

It seems pretty interesting.
Actually, Finland has been shutting down small schools in favor of less bigger ones for a while now, for administrative and financial reasons. So I guess you build three schools three times as big, or something.
A China-Approved Facebook Would Be A Total Disaster
The question is how big a hit on reading speed. It's possible to read on anything so that's not a useful criterion.

Personally e-ink is only a small difference off paperback and faster than a hard back. My last LCD was about an hour longer for a book but it had a smaller screen (and the big problem wrt the LCD was a backlight turning off).

Realistically it's things like: how do you turn a page; can you do it with either hand; is it easy to hold. That make more difference.