skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
20% of UK school leavers illiterate and innumerate. Help my partner change this
So, I've just read http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/7691919/Fifth-of-school-leavers-illiterate-and-innumerate.html as part of my morning reads (and on a lighter note, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/7673436/Nothing-is-so-harmful-to-our-childrens-futures-as-education.html), and it gave me pause for thought. Firstly, a little background...

I'd consider myself a fairly bright person. I have exceedingly diverse interests, and a can talk in depth and with authority on politics, classical and contemporary music, literature from 1600 to the modern day, current theories on psychological development in humans from birth to adulthood and so on...

In addition, my partner is currently studying to become a teacher. She has equally diverse interests, and is also extremely bright.

Now, with her insight into the British classroom, I've come up with a theory: very few children are incapable of learning to be highly proficient in maths, English and the logical deductive reasoning and research in the quest of knowledge.

Where failure comes in is where the child, due to the influence of their peers, parents, or some other social pressure feels that they don't actually care to learn these things. It is not that it is beyond them, it is simply that they either passively don't see the need, or actively resist being taught.

This would fit well with the available data, as I can easily imagine (just from thinking back to my own school days) around one in five children believing that what they were being taught would have no relevance in the real world.

So the question that I'd like to ask is, how, as a teacher, could my partner try and beat the odds and ensure that the students entrusted to her care are prepared for the world they'll enter as adults as best as possible?

Suggestions on the back of a postcard, or in the comments below. Whichever...
You'd be surprised how many people have equipment at home, but never use it. There's still required the equivalent move of "going to the gym", that spark of motivation/movement to get one's ass off the couch.
The Facebook question: is privacy dead?
When Entrepreneurs Should Ignore Advice
Where did you hear that? I don't think this is the case under US law.
They've not turned the corner on this, they've announced that anyone stuck on XP is also stuck on IE8 (a.k.a the new IE6).

Instead of waiting until after the obvious problem occurs and then moaning about it creatively like the web developer community did with IE6 there should be a proactive campaign starting now.

Anyone who advocates users upgrade from IE6 should check if they're running XP and push heavily for any other browser than IE8 if so. It's not like IE8 even counts as a modern browser right now, but at least on Vista or 7 you could hope they'll be auto-updated to IE9.
http://www.canonical.com/products/unity

If it's all about speed and lightness they might want to drop firefox for chrome. The difference is very noticeable on an Atom 1.6gighz, and in the upcoming ARM powered devices it will be too.
Actually, asking a question has much higher average latency. Reading a book has much higher total throughput and much better average latency, because it allows you to "ask" questions (look at the index for the appropriate section, for example) from within the correct context, which is key to understanding.
UK billion is also 1,000 million. what do europeans call a 1,000 million?
8 Animals That Could Be Movie Monsters
The nature has provided us animals that are plenty terrifying.
How Do College Students Describe Great Teachers?
What they have said and are saying is that the publishers are so powerful that they, the content creators, don't even get a say in setting prices or demanding better returns, because that's the way it's always been done.

Any requests to them to stand up for their readers (like the recent pubisher price control mechanisms on ebooks or DRM schemes or region controls) results in a "Haha, you're kidding right? We have zero control over what the publishers do with our output".

I'm saying, the publishers have nowhere to go if you dont write the books. The relationship is a total inverse of what it should be. Even music artists, normally thought to be clueless/careless on real world matters, are already taking big stances on DRM and their ability to distribute/sell etc and sticking up for their fans. The writers' backwardness (and plain old ludditism) in this regard is mighty strange.
I've seen a lot of people who have passed through the halls of academia and earned a 4 year degree yet have an absolutely minuscule degree of knowledge, expertise, or talent in their chosen alleged topic of study.
A dollar store where serious sellers are meant to be identified by having paid a tax of >= $1 per item (for the image)? I hope you don't mean "dollar store" too literally.
The experience of an average physical book has gotten worse in the past few decades. In the 80s your textbook would not have flipped shut. I'm not sure just when things went from a very occasional "What the hell? How can package this cheap crap in an attractive cover?" to making it the norm -- around 2000? But it's made me less willing to buy new books.

Combine that with DRM on ebooks, and the free web wins my time by default.
Greybeard Stories: The Unwise Update
Looking at that Ubuntu Light example image, they could still move the window title and buttons to bar at the top, next to the search field, to save more vertical space.
In the other hand, if they want to make it more usable for touch users, they'll need to enlarge the main toolbar and all those tiny indicators (battery, volume etc.) at the lost of some vertical space.
Ask HN: LLC vs Corporation in CA (single student founder)
Here's the story:

I'm a current college student and am forming my first company. It is a non-traditional advertising company (I'll post some more info in about 2 weeks when its finished... I'm super pumped for it).

Basically what do you guys think on LLC vs Corporation in California?

A couple things I don't like about an LLC:
-800 dollar yearly fee due within 75 days of forming.

-I have heard people say its a pain if you want to get funded later if you are an LLC (although its possible).

Things about corporations I find interesting:
-double taxation?

-You can waive the first year operating fee

Thoughts?
I don't believe in infinity. And most probably the reason is because it doesn't exist.

Every time we expect something infinite in physical phenomenon, it turns out to have some sort of Plank-like constant that compartmentalizes the effect at different levels to avoid that result.

Which is good, because a universe where infinity existed would most likely not be stable enough to support life. I understand that mathematics isn't simply about physical phenomenon. I understand the beauty of i, for example. But I think that screwing around with the bizarre aspects of a concept like infinity is a huge waste of time.
> - meal GI can be lowered by simply consuming more protein/fat based foods, or high grain foods alongside the food.

I'm not refuting your GI point but the combination of foods does have an impact on how they are digested. E.g. want to fatten a cow? Give it plenty of water with its food.

Other combinations such as wholemeal bread & fats are better than fats without wholemeal.

Denatured flour will re-absorb vitamins & minerals from the other foods on the plate.

I'm not advocating the Shang-ri-la but http://www.sethroberts.net/ has some good reading on the subject, particularly
"What Makes Food Fattening? A Pavlovian Theory of Weight Control" - http://www.sethroberts.net/about/whatmakesfoodfattening.pdf
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS released
http://zitstif.no-ip.org/
Local on the Internet is the next big thing and Facebook is wise to step up and take it on before something else gained more ground on it. I don't believe in "checking-in" nonsense, but I do think that being able to get in touch with people near you as opposed to people who aren't near you is going to be important in the future. I'd go more into it, but I have some ideas for startups in the "local app" genre.
Unpredictable hashes generation in php, explained to humans
This explains in depth how to generate random unpredictable hashes in PHP, but it's an attempt at explaining it to normal humans and not only security experts.
Microsoft's Deskerity Project
This story has been kicking around on the web for over a year. I read it over a year ago (I don't remember where it was linked from) when the girl was 16.
I think you have to choose to turn it on. Your browser will ask you if you want to supply your location to the website and you can say yes or no. Here's an example: http://html5demos.com/geo

You don't have to share your location and you make it ask you every time if you want.
5 Simple Steps to Help You Beat Hunger
There are several of us on HN who make our living from flash games. Please can you expand on why there is no market?
And, it supports markdown, ++
> But I think that screwing around with the bizarre aspects of a concept like infinity is a huge waste of time.

Maybe for you, maybe not for someone who enjoys doing it.
Charcoal Is A Medicine: A Solution For Intestinal Gas
Reliance Free GPRS Hack &ndash; May 2010
Well, I'm from Spain, and here 1,000,000 is "un millon", 1.000.000.000 is "un millardo" and 1,000,000,000,000 is "un billon".

I thought that a in US a billion were 1,000 million but in UK it were 1,000,000 million.
Are the features of the premium plan (search across all projects & time-tracking) part of the installation?
Buying stock for dividends is usually not a great investment since dividend income is taxed at a much higher rate than capital gains.
The Right Tool?
We all talk about using the right tool for the job in the context of programming languages. But which job? And what's the right tool for it?

This nifty little web app sets out to determine the answer to that by asking a bunch of questions and getting the user to rank the languages they know in order of how well that statement fits each.
Yo!

Not only that but the obviousness of "and so on" is often elided. "And so on" assumes unbounded time and/or resources and also assumes you know intimately the (undoubtedly recursive) algorithm and can codify it. These proofs often blatantly ignore that _in practice_ someone or something must perform this algorithm. (Er, not sure if I used elided correctly back there.) Anyhow, if you have an innate distaste for these types of proof then rest assured that you are not alone.

You may check out the esoteric philosopher René Guénon, R. (1946) The Metaphysical Principles of the Infinitesimal Calculus
http://books.google.com/books?id=9KyLPwielTEC

Also check out intuitionism by keerazy Dutch mathematician L.E.J Brouwer which asserts that we must essentially modify some preconceived logical tenets/laws in the face of infinity.

See also intuitionistic logic, intuitionistic type theory and constructivism (mathematics).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(mathematics)

Apologies if you were aware of all this already. I have found it very helpful to respect my suspicions. Regardless of what people may tell you, this stuff is neither simple nor straight-forward once you start thinking deeply enough about the minutiae.
A poor person has a different relationship with the things he/she purchases than a rich person. One of the ways this manifests itself is in store returns and higher demands on customer support (as well as, sometimes, a lack of appreciation or desire to pay for quality). This seems obvious to me and I don't feel the need to be PC on the internet.
QCubed - A Rapid Prototyping PHP5 Framework
Derivatives traders build ways for great companies to hedge risk. They also push the price of assets towards their correct value, allowing the price in the present to reflect information on the future.
You can check

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1000000000_(number)

"In modern (short scale) English usage, it is usually called a billion (although in many other languages and long scale usage, a billion means 1,000,000,000,000 - a million millions)."

"The term milliard can also be used to refer to 1,000,000,000; this terminology is rarely used in English, but often in other languages."

Here is explained

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales
I realise that PHP gets slated as often as not, but considering it's a language I am familiar with, and that time constraints in many instances mean I must simply sit down and code, I find myself dipping into PHP frequently while Python/Ruby projects sit half-baked on the shelf. Has anyone used this? Comments?
The Google Logo in 884 4×6 Photographs
Does it have anything to do with betting on the browser they can probably influence more in the future rather than one they essentially have no control of?
Ask HN: Spam filter statistics?
I turned on the 'view dead' feature and was surprised to see so many dead links, namely on the 'new' tab. Out of curiosity, does anyone know some statistics on how much spam is typical of a social news site and what kind of filter HN uses (reliance on user?)?

Thanks.
I love the way in these sort of articles they say things like "May hold the key to aging". As if scientists will suddenly discover some magical formula that prevents aging and gives everyone everlasting life.
> A bagel at breakfast has over 100 grams of refined carbs that become glucose in your blood within minutes of eating it.

Are you sure about that? My experience is that if I haven't eaten enough and eat bread and then go running it doesn't help much, whereas if I eat sweets or something else with a lot of sugar it helps almost immediately.
Interview with Alain Robert, the spiderman
"It’s about how fast you have a running system that is responsive to the needs of the user." - This is the key.

Make it look nice with excellent fonts and i am sold. I know this is not designed for a workstation - but for standard browsing, checking emails and general usage , this could be it.
I use a similar trick to the scheduling - if I'm undecided, I just start and do all the weighing up while I'm getting on with it. Once you've started, chances are you'll continue as you've already done the hard bit. If not, you don't feel like you've cheated, which, for me at least, is for too easy a habit to fall into.
In Czech Republic the situation is very similiar. But there are still many people who would like to pay for video and music on iTunes, because it is really easy and fast. Why we in 21st centure have to go to store and buy physical media? "Stoneage!"
It would be more exciting if there hadn't been so many in the recent past, like quantum computing that's been going to have a practical application Real Soon Now for the past decade.
I think they always have done at a certain level, but of course good developers do not make good "joe average" users, and the open source movement has really always been about programmers, not graphic designers/UX/IA people. That's always where companies have added the real value when they build off open source imo. While I admire what people like KDE and Gnome do in terms of effort, the results they return have always been questionable.
I am not sure what you mean. How do they have more control on Firefox and not Chromium? Both are open source, both can be forked and customized in to whatever they want it to be. One is exceptionally faster than the other. Since they are concentrating on speed, shouldn't Chrome/Chromium be the obvious choice?
Fair enough. But I'm saying, let's get rid of it. Let's kill the concept of infinity, and we'll all be better off for it.
Inside China's unique brand of hybrid capitalism
This is a poor example:

For example, they’ve publicly acknowledged on their blog that they will just support the industry standard codec, H.264, when there are still debates of what codec HTML5 video elements should use.

What’s so important about this particular example? It shows they’re being open about where they stand on an issue, instead of leaving us guessing and theorizing. Whether we like it or not, at least we get a chance to provide feedback before the product launches.

So on the issue of Canvas support, Microsoft leave us guessing and send mixed signals. But if they can torpedo their competitors, in this case Google, Firefox and Chrome, then they're incredibly forthcoming about final decisions.
It would be lots more interesting to Parents if they said something like "May hold the key to maturity", where they learn how to stop a 17 year old from having the behavior of a baby. ;)
So, the problem is that the body doesn't respond to insulin well enough if you keep eating that kind of stuff. And this is a problem because blood sugar levels are too high. So is this reasoning correct: if you are fit and have more muscles then the blood sugar will drop better because more muscles => more stuff that takes sugar out of the blood => lower blood sugar => good.
It makes a lot more sense to start with a relational DB, because as pg notes, you are likely to make at least one change of direction in your startup, and various NoSQL databases are optimized for different things. Beginning with a common RDBM like MySQL will help you get started quicker and you can optimize or upgrade later, if it ever becomes necessary.
I love it, however there are still a few things off.

1) The gradient on the window titlebar is too pronounced and isn't consistent with the left sidebar.

2) Fonts don't look awesome - they are okay though. Please just license or create a truly great font!

3) Icons on the sidebar don't look right. I'd rather no background personally.
All I can tell you is that the linked book points out his reasoning.

The book I mentioned does not talk about #1 and #3, but does mention his reasoning concerning #2 - that a lack of specific nutrients during pregnancy can lead to health problems, and that crowded teeth has nothing to do with genetics but instead has to do with nutrition.

If you read up on livestock nutrition, you will find that a lack of certain nutrients during gestation does lead to certain well-defined problems in the offspring; and for the next litter fixing the nutrition for the mother, stops the problem from recurring. I suppose a search for "pig gestation nutrition" will get you some links.

Personally I do question the need for fluoridation of water supply, given that other countries do not do it and their populations do not have significantly higher dental problems, i.e. lack of fluoridation is not correlated with higher rates of dental problems.

If Price's argument about nutrition is correct, fluoridation is treating the symptom rather than the cause in any case.
Does this mean she will live for a very very long time?
Agree. This is just full of fail. Also, anyone could see this is likely to be an IO-bound operation, not a CPU-bound one. The smallest instance going should be just fine, and you should be able to parallelize the hell out of deleting this stuff.
Color me skeptical of fattening cows via water. Got any references? I'm guessing you mean simply storing more water with every gram of glucose in the muscle rather than fattening.
But that's like saying let's get rid of zero. You can make the argument that zero doesn't exist as equally convincingly as you can that infinity doesn't exist.
There seems to be an assumption that academic success leads to successes in life in general; and it's assumed that the converse is also true. I don't think that this is necessarily true.

Some people fail academically but feel that they have good lives later on, and I'm sure there are academic successes (however you define "academic success") that end up living lives they never wanted.

Some experiences (or often, failures) outside the sheltered educational environment might just teach some lessons that could lead to success.

Disclaimer: not saying we shouldn't try and nurture the gifted, but formal education isn't the be all and end all in life.
Google backed by almost all U.S. publishers on digital bookstore
Seems to indicate that there's often a balance between codification and informality. If your codified practices miss something important that should've been formalized (but of course you can't formalize everything), it's sometimes nice if people give enough informal reasons to each other in even routine communication so that it's possible for someone to notice, "wait, that's why you want this?"
Possibly BioBricks and the parts registry: http://partsregistry.org/Main_Page

Or iGEM: http://2010.igem.org/Main_Page

If neither of them perhaps DIYBio could point you in the right direction: http://diybio.org/
> But I think that screwing around with the bizarre aspects of a concept like infinity is a huge waste of time.

It's playing around at the limits of human reason. I don't see it as any different to most sports, music, and art. All are appreciated by different groups of people but, ultimately, "useless" if you do not value the enjoyment gained from exploration for its own sake.
I'm not convinced of the value "check-ins" give users, and with Facebook's ever eroding privacy I'm not giving them my coordinates.
Liv Boeree, è lei la sexy giocatrice di texas holdem
To get the key:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys AA2BB78B7AE26941
A moral right, not a legal one. He did say "steal".
"Well, but that's per capita. That doesn't say anything about the average hours per worker..."

True, but presumably the author's claim is based on reports such as this one, where the figures are also per capita:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/439595.stm
Did you know there are different sizes of infinity?
Incentivise and Inspire the students to care about what she's teaching. I've been through the British system, it absolutely diabolical, if you want more information follow me on twitter @ajrajanathan - send me a DM we can talk over that
I've seen a few tests that claim Firefox beats Chrome on overall page load (and e.g. memory usage). Do you have anything that shows Chrome to be exceptionally faster in the general case, or is it just reducing Javascript execution on the average page from 1 millisecond to 0.5 milliseconds?
More likely they are in for a minor user backlash.
Mark Shuttleworth UDS keynote (ogg, mp3)
don't forget the key @ https://launchpad.net/~canonical-dx-team/+archive/une
fonts get insanely better for my systems the moment i turn on full hinting.
if you're a programmer, disbelieving in infinity is a crippling flaw, because big-O analysis of algorithms faces the exact same kind of "event horizon" that you speak of.

I've never liked people who don't understand math and dress it up with philosophical gook. Math is a practical matter, not high philosophy. If you don't know math, your bridges will fall down and your airplanes won't fly.
Sure, smart people can do this, but you'll find many don't simply because they question its necessity. Or even simpler because it just isn't interesting and they could be thinking about other things.
What makes you think the universe is finite? As far as I am aware, the prevailing view of cosmologists is that it is finite, but there's certainly plenty who believe it could be infinite.
That's like saying "let's get rid of recursion".

Imagine defining a function in terms of itself! That's circular and you can always get away with just using a loop instead.

Well, it turns out recursion often works and is very useful. Just like infinity.
Don't forget your teeth. Dental health is correlated with general health, and some dental problems are not reversible (I have severe erosion because I used to drink soft drinks all day).

Apart from diligent tooth brushing (give the inside of your teeth as much time as the outside, and brush at least 2 minutes) eating habits are very important for dental health as well.

- Limit the amount of times you eat (it is better to eat 6 candies in one sitting than it is to eat 4 pieces of candy during the day)
- Don't drink soda, but realise that for your teeth apple and other fruit juices are just as bad, so severely limit them as well.
- Don't brush your teeth immidiately after eating.
- Eat xylitol mints or chew xylitol gum after meals