skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That leaped out at me as well.

Piaget demonstrated that brain development tends to come in spurts that are closely correlated with growth spurts. One of the key ones generally hits in the range 5-7 and gives a sudden improvement in ability to learn concrete mental operations such as the ones involved in reading, writing and arithmetic.

By contrast the decades long US trend is towards pushing abstract learning younger. There are some statistics indicating that this trend has been strongly correlated with increased gender disparities in school motivation and performance in favor of girls. Which makes sense since boys tend to hit that initial spurt later, and so are more likely to have bad experiences with the start of school. That could easily lead to long-lasting bad attitudes towards school that will guarantee poor performance later on.

Also the Finnish attitude of less school makes perfect sense for me. Because the key is to maintain interest and motivation. The actual hours of instruction we need are not that great, but increasing hours at some point brings diminishing returns on instruction at the cost of frustration and pain for the students.

This brings me to homework for obvious reasons. Research on the benefits of homework show an interesting mixed effect. Homework is practice, but practice can as easily fix wrong ideas as right ones. So homework drives responsibility for teaching to the ability of the home to ensure correct practice. The result is a strengthening of socioeconomic factors on school performance but little net difference in learning. Of course the strongest correlation found is that quantity of homework correlates with conflict at home. With said conflict arising due to the attempts of parents to get kids to do homework they don't want to do.

So summarizing, delaying instruction until kids are ready to learn, giving them sufficient high quality instruction that they do learn, and then limiting the quantity enough to prevent frustration is likely to lead to sustained learning. And sustained learning has good results. Makes perfect sense and makes you wonder why the USA takes the opposite approach on each of those things.
How to Create a Pixel Website of Your Own | eHow.com
Per Statistics Canada, Canada's immigrant population is highly educated, 90% emigrated legally, and a large percentage are Asian in origin.

Is it safe to say that doesn't reflect recent (last 25 years) immigration patterns to the U.S. or to Western Europe?
How did you do the poll, though? Were they supposed to pick between two live demos, or did you just ask "should scrolling up increase or decrease the value"? In left-to-right languages, I would think most people's intuition is to scroll down to move right and scroll up to move left (with a unidirectional scroll wheel, anyway).
From your article: “First of all: doctors say that reading on a screen won’t cause any harm.”

I feel like the post originating this discussion was somewhat alarmist. It's definitely true that some conditions that ereaders (of varying types) present can cause fatigue faster than reading a printed page in a well-lit room.

And please don't take my statements as proof, because I'm not offering anything besides the null hypothesis: reading is reading and there isn't any special magic to screen reading that makes it an eyeblaster.
Not just when promoting.
Is Linux Security an Art?
Hack Cable Modem, Get Free Internet+The cable modem hacking tools
Yeah, it's good. It's just the unbranded build of Google Chrome. I think it's just a bug with one of the features on that page; it seems to zoom to screen width and then crash when I try to go up more. Probably using a CSS shadow or something else uncommon and buggy.
No, its not me.
One of the bigger factors that differentiate between average teachers and great teachers is the ability of great teachers to give a lot of personalized feedback to every student.

Also if other fields of learning like music, sports , computer programming and others, the importance of rapid personalized feedback to learning is very big.

"in virtually every lesson is the provision of an additional teacher who helps those who struggle in a particular subject"

There's a reasonable chance that the most of the advantage of the finish system comes from this method of teaching.
My daughter (5 years old) loves this. Of course sometimes she ends up with one solid block of lit blocks and I unwedge it for her - but she plays with it for 20 minutes at a time. Right up there with "hot games for girls"!
The NFL Draft, Financial Incentives and Self Awareness
"Designed by Apple in California."
Looks like a typo in Rule 3. Should say, "Possessive nouns never use an apostrophe." This point is alluded to in the body of the rule.
Speeding up Google Analytics
Registering Expiring Domain Names | Blogs Eye
Garbage study. They only looked at vegetables as a group - which probably included potatoes and the like (possibly in the form of french fries). They didn't look at particular subclasses of vegetables. And they also didn't look at raw versus cooked (where previous studies have found significant reduction for colo-rectal cancer rates for raw broccoli but no reduction for cooked broccoli).
I'm sure neither of us are going to be receiving a lot of upvotes, but I don't think your completely wrong.

I've spent a fair amount of time in Finland working with various teams at Nokia. While Nokia obviously does a lot of things right, their decision making always baffled me. Watching Series 60 evolve was just baffling. They're emphasis on consensus around decision making led to all sorts of 'designed-by-committee' products built right into the core of S60.

For example, S60 had an app-store long before the iPhone. It was a usability nightmare. It had different 'catalogs' each mostly selling the same stuff. Navigation was nearly impossible. You where dumped into a home screen with no real affordances. The whole thing was just a nightmare. It was that type of decision making and general lack of forward thinking that delayed the launch of the touchscreen S60 phones for years. When they did hit, they where far away from the iPhone in a lot of ways.

It was really no wonder that iPhone leap-frogged them so effortlessly in terms of usability (and has taken a big chunk of their market share as well).
Side Note: One of the major draws for me to learn Objective-J (coming from a Ruby/JavaScript background) was that I simultaneously learned a lot about Objective-C and Cocoa, which is key for iPhone/iPad apps.

I felt like I was double dipping courses in college again.
European data-sharing network for robots to get $7.5m in funding
yep, but not nastily. And in this instance I don't really blame him :)
The problem with your intuitionist approach is that you are myopically focusing on some issues without proposing any real solutions. You are not proposing a path from here to there.

Fire bad teachers: good idea, but you need to train and attract good teachers at the same time. How do you do that? Teaching is a badly overeducated, underpaid, and under-respected profession in the U.S.

Doing more to stop student truancy: This is cultural. Put armed guards to stop the students from leaving, and they don't show up in the first place. We need to foster a culture such that school isn't simply a prison students are coerced into going to for 9 hours a day.

The path from here to there is difficult and there isn't currently any money in improving education, so there isn't any political will either. It's a lot more difficult problem than your simplistic world view admits.
This isn't entirely related, and it's for a totally different reason, but analog watches in advertisements almost always read the same thing, too: 10:10.[1]

Supposedly it's because the watch hands form a 'smile', and this is supposed to evoke feelings of happiness in potential buyers.[2] I'd never noticed it before, but ever since someone pointed it out to me, I've noticed it in _every single_ watch ad I've seen.

[1] http://nymag.com/images/2/daily/intel/08/01/31_eliandtom2_lg...
[2] http://www.ubr.com/clocks/frequently-asked-questions-faq/clo...
As a dual US/Canadian citizen who grew up in Canada, I absolutely agree with you. There are cultural differences between the USA and Canada, but they are much less than the cultural differences that I've experienced between different parts of the USA. And I'm not sure that growing up I even met anyone with Finnish ancestry outside of my own family.
Check out Panama. Seriously. Get a base here and either work locally or do remote work in the same timezone (u.s./canada). Ping me if you have any q's. (Ad: I'm hiring and open to remote workers)
Ah! but it doesn't have the fancy scroll bars that google wave does!
I think you misunderstood his point. Any entity is allowed to trade on information that's legally available to them without violating any duty of trust -- if for example, Google decides to buy rackspace, it is perfectly legal for them to buy call options in front of the announcement to profit from the spike in value caused by the announcement, as no duty of trust is broken.

It would be, however, illegal for employees, shareholders or indeed anyone hearing about Google's intentions about the purchase to buy those options, as they would be breaking their duty of trust to Google by doing so. This holds regardless of the legal status of the entity in question -- a corporate shareholder getting privileged information from Google before the announcement would be just as screwed as an employee.
It's the difference between precocious and smart. Just reading the dictionary definition is enlightning - there is nothing about extraordinary capability there, only about normal capability unusually early.
Dupe:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1018965
Apple needs more than double the average time to review Opera Mini for iPhone
It is true that some useful information is missing from a specific statement, but I would probably expect much of it would be supplied by the context of where or how you found the document . . .
Yes. $99/year makes sense for everything Apple offers to get your software on the App Store, but that should be the only part that requires a subscription. You should be able to compile code for your own device for free.

Actually, I like the model that would create: If you want to sell your software, just subscribe and Apple makes it easy. If you want to avoid the App Store, then just go open-source, since now anyone can compile what you distribute.

The same tech-savvy audience that doesn't like the "choke point" of the App Store can just go full-on FOSS for iPhone development, which seems like a perfect fit.
I've heard it also cradles the logo of the watchmaker so your eyes are drawn to it (which the second link also mentions too).
You actually don't.

The interface throws you to a new page, but you can go back to your previous page/tab without waiting for the current one to load and it will finish on its own unless the browser runs out of memory.

The interface does a poor job of exposing this feature.
One thing that shouldn't be forgotten in all the handwringing about the US educational system is that the US still has by far the best universities in the world. Whatever ranking system you look at, US universities dominate the top of the leagues table (along with a few foreign universities like Oxford, NUS and the Ecole Polytechnique). While there are many reasons for this, it seems like crummy performance in a few primary-school level tests certainly isn't crippling the entire education system.

For what it's worth, the Times Higher Education Supplement ranks the University of Helsinki as Finland's best university, in 108th place equal with UC Davis. Still a pretty impressive showing for such a small country; among the small (<10m) countries only Israel, Ireland and Singapore have entries in the top one hundred.
# There is only one way to get people to do something. You have to make them want to do it.

# People love to hear their name. When someone tells you their name, remember it and call them by it

# When someone asks you what you do, or what's new, have a good upbeat answer. No one wants to hear about your problems.
I practically use all the points to get girls and tbh, it goes really good for me.
Pfizer was deemed "too big to fail" like that. Why? I have no idea. If the company really did have to close down, it seems likely that others would have picked up the company's various products -- and perhaps done so without putting people's lives at risk.

Pfizer is the number one drug company by sales in the world, so it seems unlikely to me that not being able to bill Medicare/Medicaid for their products would have shut them down. A more likely scenario was that they dared the prosecutors to indict the parent company and then explain to seniors and poor people why they were suddenly required to pay full freight for Lipitor, Zithromax, Celebrex, etc. Pfizer still owns patents to major, important drugs and it seems unlikely that the government could change that without passing broad legislation or running into constitutional issues. I suspect that the people who run the justice department took a hard look at this situation and decided to let these guys off the hook and spin it as "too big to fail" instead of facing the political consequences of prosecuting aggressively. The law preventing companies from billing government insurance programs looks like more of a bug than a feature at this point because it would give them extra leverage if they decided to play chicken with prosecutors in these cases.
Running ssh on a nonstandard port does NOT make ssh more secure. A better step would be setting up something like fail2ban.

There is nothing wrong with outsourcing this to someone who knows what they are doing.
Take a lunch break: Live blog of Apple's iPhone OS 4.0 event
I am taking away one important lesson: When it comes to promoting your product, every single detail is important.

In the SmugMug interview Chris said he doubted anyone had noticed the angle of the desk. I'm not sure I would take away the same lesson as you to be honest.
5:01 would work best: Time to go home.
One monitor is connected to VGA and the other to DVI. I use URandR to control the displays. It is awesome.
I just went back, and zoomed in and out from max and min zoom levels back and forth several times, with a video streaming on my other monitor -- not a hitch. I really don't think there's anything wrong with the website.
We (CS or SE) do tend to do things more complicated than they should be. This has been recognized by many. There is a very interesting article (I think by Martin Fowler, but I can't find it ) about why you can make any aspect of software flexible. But you can't make every aspect flexible. Making one aspect flexible has the cost of increasing the complexity of the software; making every aspect flexible increases the complexity to the point where the software cannot be changed any more.
There is also the YAGNI principle, which is clearly broken by the CS engineer on the king's story. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_aint_gonna_need_it
I was talking about citations on the web but agree with your point. Quick access to cited material means more time devoted to solving the client's problem (or serving more clients - both are good outcomes).
Actually two of my friends ended up married to Finnish-Canadians: one from a Northern Ontario family (Thunder Bay) and one recently from Finland. So if we go by personal anecdote Canada is indeed full of Finns. :)
Make room, iPad: AT&T to sell Intel-based tablet too | Business Tech - CNET News
Google updated their search UI. I'm not a fan.
Objgraph - Drawing Python object reference graphs
This is why we build APIs
Ending ‘Too Big to Fail’ - Economix Blog
The author is ignoring that:

A) Most sites do have content with which async GA can load in parallel.

B) Where you put the GA snippet is a trade-off. Putting after window.onload will decrease the time it takes to get to window.onload, but it will also lessen the accuracy of your data; especially your bounce rate.

C) If you're worried about delaying user visible functionality that is tied to window.onload, you shouldn't be tying that functionality to window.onload in the first place. There are better ways to detect when the DOM is ready to use.
I am somewhat surprised this is news. I understand that Shit My Dad Says is fun and all to read, but tying it to a social networking site like Status Net or Twitter is just silly to me.

Wouldn't it be beneficial to just have a distinct website not reliant on a social network? (note: I am not sure if they have one or not.)
I think one of the reasons for Apple's famed 'ease of use' is because they do put a lot of attention to the details.

When I read stories like this one, it it reminds me of the story about Van Halen and the 'no brown M&Ms clause' in their contracts (http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/vanhalen.asp). Both are indicators that someone/a business is paying attention to the details.
One of the reasons I stay with Google is because of their minimal design aesthetic. The further they deviate from that, the more likely I am to leave.

Although, I'm not sure where I'd go.
But that has more to do with affiliates. Can Visa do what they want within Visa with your data?

Let's say Google for example, tracking your search habits. Now it uses that data to modify what it displays to you, like ads. This is all internal. They don't release it to the public, or even advertisers.

Even Visa. While it can't release your data, can it use that data to send you information?
Cool, thanks for the info. I was sincere in my question. :) I guess I could wonder how many CS students could actually code too...
Patterns of Hadoop deployment
Truckbot: An Autonomous Robot based on Android
How To Be Invisible In Facebook Chat | Hack A PC
there isn't currently any money in improving education, so there isn't any political will either

That was my point, these are two examples of ways in which education which can be solved with political will alone rather than requiring complicated new research.

Teacher salaries aren't as low as often assumed, by the way; the average teacher's salary in the US in 2006 was a surprisingly respectable $51,009 (with all sorts of perks) which, while no path to riches is certainly a ticket to a good middle-class lifestyle, especially in a two-income household. I personally wonder if part of the low attractiveness of teaching as a profession can be attributed to the fact that teachers' unions spend so much time whining about how low teachers' salaries are.

You don't need to put armed guards to stop 'em leaving, you just need to make sure they're punished when they don't show up. I never once played truant from my school; not because it was such a fabulous caring-sharing environment that I never wanted to leave (this is impractical, children will get bored at school) but because I knew if I might get caught and if I got caught I'd be punished. Now for me personally, the threat of detention and having my parents find out was a scary enough punishment, but I realise that this won't work on every kid... which is why I strongly believe that every school needs a form of punishment which every kid is afraid of; and if suspension won't do it for some kids then we need to bring back the cane.
Does being officially bilingual, northern, and woodsy have an impact on PISA rankings?

If I had to guess: yes. I honestly do believe that winters and environmental controls (like pavement) affect your approach to a wide variety of problems, and are immersive enough to do so on a nationwide scale. Not so sure about language, but a lot of other people seem to be.

This might manifest in educational systems more prominently than other parts of culture, or it might not. The thread of discussion is mostly about why the US is feeling inferior to Finland in one particular aspect, and grandparent stated that Canada also tests better there, so I would figure there might be something that Canada and Finland have but the US (and UK?) don't. Like, say, some aspect of culture.

Although obviously bordering cultures tend to affect each other greatly, my first instinct is always to look at a nation's climate.
That's a false analogy. The legal community deals with well-documented, stable, and easily cited statutes. There are strong incentives driving clear presentation of current law. The objectives outlined in the OP would not be served by those incentives, because they are concerned with all government documents, whether they have made their way into law yet or not. Such documents can be unstable and hard to find, so providing clearinghouse through which they can be cited in a time-aware fashion would be incredibly useful for tracking the evolution of proposed laws.
There are plenty of things. From real-world experience, F# code ends up taking a bit less than half the amount of lines as C# does. More interestingly, the number of type annotations can be as little as 1/20th as in C#.

The benefit comes from that many "small" things you do in C# become much nicer in F#:

C#:

int target;
int someValue;
if (dict.TryGetValue("key", out someValue)) {
target = someValue * 100;
} else {
target = 42; // default
}

F#:

let target = match dict.TryGetValue "key" with
| true, x -> x * 100
| _	-> 42 // default

Not only is the code more concise in F#, we get another benefit too. The temporary value x, needed because of the use of out params in C#, no longer exists in the F# version. In C#, this temp val escapes its needed scope - it should only be needed in the branch where it's used, but instead it's now a normal local.

A more large scale win is any async code. In F#, you can use the async workflow (monad), and with 1 character (!), you make the compiler emit code that'd take at least 10 extra lines in C#. Inside an async workflow, a let! (example: let! foo = bar.AsyncGetResponse()) is like calling bar.BeginGetResponse, bar.EndGetResponse, while preserving the current exception handlers and all locals. It makes heavily async code trivial to write, where in C#, it's near impossible.
That wasn't the government. That was a non-profit organisation consisting of all the ISPs in the country and a few other bodies.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders of NOLOH (http://www.noloh.com).

I want to apologize in advance for being so brash. I find that these demonstrations are very misleading. We all ohh and ahh, but not because of the technical accomplishment, but because of the beauty of Mac interfaces. First, sure the app is fast, it's loading the entire application from JavaScript, yet another fat client app.

Second, the capabilities that this provides seems no different than the basics of YUI, or other JavaScript widget collections with unified syntax.

Third, it's misleading to suggest that this is Mac Mail when in fact I can't search. I guess that's not a part of the Mail.app.

Fourth, 15 hours to do a main screen and a new message form, really? I'm sure that we or the guys at Cappuccino & Sproutcore could throw a similarly functioning demo together quicker.

The hard part of this example is getting the image resources, not the implementation. This implementation could've been done just as well in straight JavaScript or any other JavaScript framework just as nicely.
In general, the only things that will generate income for you are work and assets.

So... ask yourself what assets you have (a popular website or a library of photos, e.g.) that aren't currently being monetized.
It just looks like a press release to me. I don't think it's particularly newsy either.
Today's woot reaffirms this: http://www.woot.com/
What is your reason for not using F# in a "typical web" app? Just developer experience and tools, or something with the actual language?
IPhone OS 4.0 unveiled, adds multitasking, shipping this summer