skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To your first point: There are certainly rare exceptions. But the broader effect of public schools is to remove competition and choice, so the natural tendency of humans to compare various options and make a choice (as a projection of individual identity) is suppressed.

People value things because they chose them and because they realized that "wait a second, I have to pick which one I want, so which one is better?" (I experienced this phenomenon first hand when asked about my preferences on china patterns, and it's visible even in poor communities with things like mobile phones and athletic shoes).

To your second point: In a rich community (Greenwich CT, the Chicago suburbs, etc.) the public schools are exceptionally well funded and well supported. I know people who attended public schools where most of the faculty had masters degrees and some had doctorates. This does not represent the success of public provisioning, on the contrary, it represents the ability of a community with enough sufficiently powerful and motivated people to shape a public school into what they want (with the aid of lots of tax dollars). I think it's fairly obvious that communities like this would find a way to provide excellent education for their children even if classes had to be held in an old barn. Of course, public school apologists are quick to take credit for any excellence they can find.

Meanwhile, the inner city poor beg for voucher systems and are denied by powerful teachers unions, etc. The poor simply lack the political power and resources to overcome the state sanctioned education monopoly.

Notably, one reason why your statistic of private schools being worse is true is because some of the largest serve vast numbers of the urban poor for pennies on the dollar (compared with public schools). Much of this (due to the shortage of funds created by the public monopoly) is via Catholic charities, but it's still a remarkable accomplishment.

Even so, those schools reach a limit and have to turn people away... Meanwhile funding gets pumped into failed public schools (many of which can't even offer a safe environment free of violence) and parents who weren't lucky enough to get a spot in an affordable private school must send their kids into these awful prisons every day.
What version of Theora did you use? What encoder? What did you use for the H264 one. Can you please provide the source video file?

There are http://people.xiph.org/~maikmerten/youtube/ and http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html , did you see them?

edit: Above is evil. Very evil. Or stupid. I encoded the audio from the MP4 to Vorbis to a size of ~800 Kilobytes and it sounds good. Also the Theora video is so bad and damaged, it does not remotely look like a normal encode. I would like to know what went wrong there. Anyways, disgard parent post and the links inside. It's nothing but FUD in my eyes (and ears).

edit2: I also get far better visuals than in the linked Theora by even transcoding linked H264 with "-K 170 -V 465" in ffmpeg2theora...
When parents are almost entirely removed from the education process, without input into curriculum[1] or teacher selection[2], can you blame many for becoming disinterested bystandards?

In private religious and secular schools, I have noticed that parental involvement is much higher.

[1] Set at the state and national level as a result of funding.

[2] In many locales, set by unions and un-elected administration.
People investing in futures do this every day, and some of them are most certainly credible.

If it were possible to do significantly better than blind luck in speculation about future prices then there'd be nobody around to take the other side of the contract.
Use case where the iPad truly excels: Multi-touch control surface for digital music creation. A Lemur multi-touch control surface from JazzMutant - http://www.jazzmutant.com/lemur_overview.php

Cost: $1,999 Euros.

For that price I can buy 4 iPads and hook them up through Wifi to control any MIDI devices or DAW.
"Farmscape pulled in about $54,000 for the first four months of this year--$22,000 more than last year"
One thing the author of this post is doing here is calling gettimeofday() in every iteration through the loops. That's an awful way to benchmark something. gettimeofday() issues a serializing instruction, which can potentially flush the entire pipeline. It can also cause cores to sync their clocks. Either way, the net result of calling gettimeofday() too often is awful multithreaded performance. Calling it much less often or using a profiler would give very different results than reported.
Fake Steve Jobs - "Adobe, here's the deal"
I guess my only thought is, is this the beginning of a need for sub-HN on the mothership? Or is it preferable to shard them off into their own sites?
Microsoft's Danah Boyd on the Changing Nature of Privacy on Facebook
Wow, that's one hell of a header!
It would be cool if the editor didn't lose focus when you press run. It would be even cooler if the code would be continuously loaded & run as you edit.
What is it with those glossy screens these days ? It's almost like we're going back to the pre-matted glass CRTs.

I go nuts when reading light text on a dark background on one of these (yes, I'm that old ;)), it's like looking straight in to a mirror.
Recursion - Google Search
I have no experience with either, but you could also take a look at Flask (http://flask.pocoo.org/) or the underlying Werkzeug (http://werkzeug.pocoo.org/)
Sorry if this is a bit dense: I've had to download a 3rd party app to read qr codes on my Magic. Is there an built in/default reader that I am unable to find?
Pirates of Silicon Valley captured your sentiment nicely: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xflXMZL2stU#t=2m55s (Take a close look at the auditorium :)
One of the classic hunting methods that humans evolved to handle is to just chase after an animal with less endurance until it collapses of exhaustion. Humans are designed to run farther than other animals, and deal with the heat better.
In practice, the screen is completely fine from a glare perspective, when used indoors. Fails completely in direct sunlight, but it's fine indoors.

The Bloomberg app is light text on a black background and it's very easy on the eyes.
When I owned my Kindle, I had about 80 books on it. I'd paid for 2 of them, "Les Miserables" and "The Count of Monte Cristo."

The rest I got by combing the top sellers list and "buying" all the books listed as free.
Even just a simple tagging system would suffice. One to two tags attached to the submitted link would be great. One could use Reddit for this, but I prefer the average comment/article on Hacker News to the average comment/article on Reddit. (:
I believe j_baker is referring to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law_of_Triviality
It's silly to argue over whether humans were "designed" to run that far. There are some things we definitely can't do, like jump fifty feet in the air or outrun a cheetah or stay underwater for two hours. But running a marathon is nowhere near the limits of human capability -- pretty much any able-bodied human being under the age of fifty can get there with sufficient training. I've never run a marathon but I've done a half and I'm planning a full one in the next few years. Of course the mental component is a lot easier for the happy-just-to-finish crowd like me than it is for anyone hoping to actually finish at the front.
Ask HN: Can you explain Calabi-Yau spaces to me?
I have a basic understanding of college level maths (analysis, algebra, discrete math) but the Wikipedia and Mathworld articles are too difficult for me (they use terminology I don't understand, making parsing very difficult). The simple-English Wikipedia article didn't meet my needs.

Thanks.
sloccount says 2,131 lines of PHP.
Precisely. :)
it's a bit bizarre that so many fail to grasp that

Have you considered the possibility that it is not so clear and obvious as you think?
How To Install Wordpress Locally In Your PC Using XAMPP The Easy Way
See the Eastman Kodak case: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US...
I used Google Goggles which is preloaded on my Nexus One.

The only thing I dislike about it is the camera shutter noise (unless you silence the phone first). I presume this is to discourage covert intrusions on people's privacy.
Precompiling Ruby for Android
Diphenhydramine which is an active ingredient in Benadryl is dangerous. It really is. One of the rencent government studies linked diphenhydramine to 26 deaths in children just last year.

When I got bad allergy reaction to shrimp in January and had a few bumps on my skin I ended up at the ER. Allergy to shrimp was nothing compared to what Benadryl did to me. One pill of it is sufficient to put my blood pressure from regular to 180/100, pulse over 100, seizures, heart palpitations and difficulty breathing. And guess what doctors do when they see that when you have an allergic reaction? Of course administer more Benadryl!

Benadryl is old 1st generation anti-histamine from 1943. We have 3rd generation anti-histamines on the market now.

Why would anyone put something as dangerous as diphenhydramine in their system, I don't understand. But be careful with this medicine.
Is There a "Moral Molecule"?
The article talks a lot of scare, but if you visit the supplied link to Visa about what you need to do it gets a lot less scary. That makes sense as otherwise huge portions of merchants would be set to lose the ability to take cards and CC companies / gateways would lose buckets of cash.

http://usa.visa.com/merchants/risk_management/cisp_merchants...

Level 3 merchants (up to a million transactions a year) need to complete a self-assessed questionnaire annually, fill out a form and have an automated external test run. All are very minor hurdles and if you're running that many transactions should be an extraordinarily small amount of expense as a percentage of revenue. If you're doing 20,000 transactions there is even less to do.

tl;dr FUD
You have to keep in mind the Kindle has been out for a long time. Why would people buy 27 books on the iPad when they have not had it for more than a month?
I'm never very bothered handing out my CC details. It's not like I'm liable for anything that happens with it, and when shopping online I generally just the one-time use numbers that all of my credit cards offer. Really, the worst that can generally happen is that I have to get a new CC #.
"I’ve had over 50K visitors to the blog, over 500 subscribers via RSS and email, 221 comments and over 150 Twitter followers."

The OP claimed to get 500 RSS subscribers from those spikes (avg. subscription rate of 1%)--was this similar for the spikes you experienced?
While your concerns are warranted - we've taken over some terrifying projects and cleaned them up in a hurry - I've never been that paranoid about it.
The problem is not with the word. The problem is with how individuals and companies use the word

How people use the word is the word.
That article is very much a scare tactic. The actual stipulations listed in Visa's terms do not sound nearly as bad:

http://usa.visa.com/merchants/risk_management/cisp_payment_a...

While the use of PA-DSS validated payment applications is recommended, a payment application need not be included on Visa’s list of PABP validated payment applications or PCI SSC’s list of PA-DSS validated payment applications in order to comply with Phase 2, Phase 3 and Phase 5 requirements for use of PA-DSS compliant applications. Acquirers may determine the PA-DSS compliancy of a payment application through alternate validation processes, which should confirm that payment applications meet PA-DSS requirements and should facilitate compliance with the PCI DSS.

I was unable to find the corresponding clause for MasterCard, American Express, or Discover, and various forum posts I came across seemed to indicate it was a Visa-only mandate currently.
teilo is right: this really has nothing to do with the act of praying, but rather people's brain reactions to those whom they intrinsically believe to be in a position of authority/power. Related to your question, I remember reading a few articles about this in the past. Essentially, brains deep in prayer == brains deep in meditation. (Quick search - this might be one of those articles: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,995465-6,00...)
Yes, that's a fair comment. Anecdotally, though, I bought a dozen or so books in the very first week - that's why the iBooks number looks so low to me.
Face.com opens facial recognition API to developers
USD 800M seems pretty high for their sales, especially considering: "At the same time, Amazon.com, seller of the Kindle e-book reading device, may boost digital book sales by 83 percent this year to $248 million from $135 million last year, the analysts said in a note today"
I was disappointed that I couldn't read the README in the git repo without a scrolling past a picture that has nothing to do with BDD.
The pg_collkey extension gives you access to ICU's unicode collation functionality from within Postgres:

http://www.flexiguided.de/publications.pgcollkey.en.html

Also see my blog post about it here:

http://russ.garrett.co.uk/2009/01/18/unicode-postgres/
IPad vs. Kindle
Stuart Ellman: Not Everyone Gets a Trophy
Or a small number of people who will buy, versus a whole lot of people who couldn't care less.
Agreed. I made the same decision/trade-off analysis when I posted my articles about "Hyperbrains" on http://inter-sections.net .. and was sternly warned about it by my father!... and had to admit he had a point too.
How to Encrypt your Entourage and Apple Mail Mailstores
"Collapse" a pretty good documentary on the subject
>> but they don't care about what happens before that point in the pipeline.

> They most certainly do.

MS/Sony/Nintendo don't require licenses from all the middleware people. However, SOME of the middleware people will ostensibly want to test on the platform, so will buy the product from MS/Sony/Nintendo. If they do not wish to do so, they need not, then the end licensor of those third party toolkits/whatevers, can still use it.

What Apple is doing is 1 step more: They say you can ONLY use tools made in a certain way. MS/Sony/Nintendo do not limit that.
The political will issue is a tough one, since 45% of the electorate is adamantly opposed to any attempt by government to alter the incentives in play on principle. That means we need perfection from the remaining 55%. I'm not holding my breath.
Does books purchased over a 3-year timespan have any relevance to books purchased over a 30-day timespan? Unlike other kinds of purchases, most people usually consume books relatively slowly (at a rate of one per month or more). If your Kindle is 2 years old, 27 books per 24 months is roughly equivalent to the iPad's numbers...

Also, can anyone who owns/uses both an iPad and a Kindle chime in on how the reading experience differs between the two?

All I've heard is the obvious: that the iPad interface is slicker, but the Kindle is much better in direct sunlight.

I had a first-gen Kindle, and a Kindle DX. I've purchased maybe 20 books, but I've grown to despise the Kindle. It's interface is terrible; anything other than a book on it is miserable (newspaper, magazine article, etc.). I can't wait to get an iPad...
Well, do you know that both of these books are available for free? http://www.gutenberg.org/ and http://calibre-ebook.com/ are your friends.
a lot of people download books from the Kindle App.
As long as Apple has the DMCA preventing a well functioning, commercial jailbreaking kit from being released with every model, I'm all in favor of them being pried wide open by the US government.

Once jailbroken phones are both legally allowed, easy to make, and required to be given all the same benefits non-jailbroken phones, they can make all the rules for their store they wish to.

Ex-post facto control of already purchased items is bupkis, bunk and any other old-fashioned word connoting completely illegitimate.
Ah good point. I would just suggest that listening to someone pray and praying may be quite similar for very religious people.
Michele Bachmann calls net neutrality an Obama censorship plot
Whatever happened to that "thermal depolymerization" process, where scrap turkey guts, etc., were being turned into oil and other stuff?

Several years ago I think I read that a pilot plant was being built that was (IIRC) technically successful but ran into problems with smelly emissions.

Anybody know what has come of that?

UPDATE: partial answer to my own question from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization#Status...

"...He says the first generation of depolymerization centers will be up and running in 2005. By then it should be clear whether the technology is as miraculous as its backers claim." However, as of August 2008, the only operational plant listed at the company's website is the initial one in Carthage, Missouri. Changing World Technology applied for an IPO on 12 Aug 2008, hoping to raise $100 million. The unusual Dutch Auction type IPO failed possibly because CWT has lost nearly $20 million with very little revenue. CWT, the parent company of Renewable Energy Solutions, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. No details on plans for the Carthage plant have been released.

...which doesn't tell us as much about the technical aspects as it does the business. It may all be tied up in the break-even point for the process, and the amount of government subsidies they've found.
Sure, you could do all that with iPads and Wifi, but have you actually tried it? I suspect the usability will not match up, due to a slew of technical issues and lag.
It shouldn't interrupt you once every 5 words of course. What it should try to do is to create a model of what you meant to say. At some point, if the system is unsure, it should ask you to confirm or correct what it has understood so far.
Flash already covers this, doesn't it?
I meant it's new for Apple in relation to, say, OS X.
And then I can make one which is an MD5 hash of your email address and make it look like you buy ... well, all sorts of interesting things.

Also, an MD5 hash of an email address is sometimes reversible. Search the web for the MD5 hash of my email address using duckduckgo.com and it finds a Disqus profile for me, identified by the md5 hash, but if you click 'claim profile' it tells the full email address. And that exists accidentally because I commentented on some blogs using that email address not knowing Disqus aggregates cross-blog comments.

Also, the space of input is vastly constrained, most people will have an @popular-domain address (by definition of popular domain) so @gmail.com, yahoo, hotmail, aol will cover a lot. And the initial bit is probably not random - either names or initials and names or names with numbers will get a lot.

On forums the guess forum-username@gmail.com is likely to be right for a few people.

In other words an MD5 hash of an email is only pretend secret, so make it clear that it's not intended to be secret and use a QR code of the email address itself, or use some unrelated ID which really keeps the email address secret.
Wouldn't that be Reddit?
Is Michael Arrington About To Sell TechCrunch?
As the hosting site, userscripts.org, seems to be having difficulties (http://blog.arpitnext.com/2010/04/userscript-org-is-down.htm...) with alleged unintentional DDOS, I've uploaded the script on github as well: http://github.com/danielribeiro/PaulGrahamSideBar/raw/master...
From the outside the scientific community can often look a little like that; but on the inside it things are very disengaged from ritual observance and faith.

Of course at certain times assumptions are made or theories wrongly rejected :) but, in the words of a great man, "it all comes right in the end".
from what I remember, you might be right that Dragon is not that great, PowerScribe is the one I remember being more popular -- I was doing RIS (Radiology Information System) work at the time about a year ago.
Well, I might have if I had setup the <strike>RSS</strike> Atom feed correctly. I literally "launched" the blog that day and in the midst of the craziness, setup Feedburner and plugged it into typepad incorrectly. Long story short, anyone who tried to subscribe during that time probably got an error, but I didn't notice it until the end of the spike.
Why Venture Capitalists Don't Like To Be Rushed Into Deals
Leaking private IP addresses via DNS (Cisco, Facebook, etc)
Slow website? Five ways to speed it up
Yes, there is proof of this. While the article is loaded with "Scare text", the warning is real. PCI-DSS compliance is required by July 1st, 2010. PCI - DSS = Payment Card Industry Digital Security Standard.

Simply put, there are 12 areas that you need to pay close attention to, and I've pasted them below.

Build and Maintain a Secure Network

Requirement 1: Install and maintain a firewall configuration to protect cardholder data
Requirement 2: Do not use vendor-supplied defaults for system passwords and other security parameters

Protect Cardholder Data

Requirement 3: Protect stored cardholder data
Requirement 4: Encrypt transmission of cardholder data across open, public networks

Maintain a Vulnerability Management Program

Requirement 5: Use and regularly update anti-virus software
Requirement 6: Develop and maintain secure systems and applications

Implement Strong Access Control Measures

Requirement 7: Restrict access to cardholder data by business need-to-know
Requirement 8: Assign a unique ID to each person with computer access
Requirement 9: Restrict physical access to cardholder data

Regularly Monitor and Test Networks

Requirement 10: Track and monitor all access to network resources and cardholder data
Requirement 11: Regularly test security systems and processes

Maintain an Information Security Policy

Requirement 12: Maintain a policy that addresses information security

For more information on PCI-DSS, go to https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org. Also, consider downloading the PCI-DSS, its a 60-70 page PDF with all of the information that you need on the PCI-DSS. It also contains a Self-Assessment Questionnaire that you can use to review your site or app.

As I work with ecommerce sites daily, I can assure you, PCI is not something that you want to ignore. At the same time, its not terribly difficult to adhere to the rules.

As a quick reminder, any site that is found to be non-compliant at the time of a breach could face fines into the hundreds of thousands of dollars ($ USD)
That's a valid point, although you should note that 800M is a gross number; what Amazon may report in their digital book sales is just their 30% share of the sell.

I clearly need to investigate it some more.
Not merely tilting at windmills — investing in them too
On a side note, I hate it when sites, such as SFGate, append the story URL when I copy the title. If a writer is honest they will give credit either way and if they're submitting to say HN the URL just makes problems. <End Rant>
This has been posted multiple times already. We get it - programming is hard.
It makes video & color come out much better, i think.
I think you make an accurate point that people who teach (who are capable enough to have other options) are probably not motivated solely by the financial rewards.

But there is nothing about teaching that would prevent a top teacher from earning $250K per year. The reason that doesn't happen (and the reason we don't see more luxury cars in the teachers' parking long) is because unions have forced wages to be based on seniority and not based on merit.

This means that rather than one teacher (a good one) making $70K and another (not so good one) making $30K, they both make $50K. This gives the bad teacher every incentive to continue being a mediocre teacher for decades rather than moving on and finding a career he/she is good at.