skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The economy is really pressuring the unions. As it becomes clear that public pensions are right up there with the unfunded Social Security and Medicare mandates in terms of "things that will destroy our economy in the next couple of decades", the unions that have obtained their public pensions are having to spend more and more of their political capital just on maintaining their economy-destroying gains. The teacher's unions are one such union. (Not the biggest, but definitely a player.) Teacher's unions have a lot less political capital left over to defend themselves against reforms that may weaken (or eliminate) tenure or create the sort of individual accountability they've been fighting for a while.

I think their ability to resist this is tied to whether the economy gets substantially better in the next two years; if so the pension problem may fall out of focus (even though it will actually only be getting worse, but such are the vicissitudes of democracy), if it doesn't, I suspect the teacher's unions will end up spending themselves politically bankrupt at which point who knows what will happen? There's a lot of "reformedness" that's built up over the years, everyone's going to want to take a crack at it.

There is a potential here that there hasn't been for a while.

FWIW, I mean most of the above as descriptively as possible, without endorsement of the desirability or lack thereof of anything mentioned. Personally I would like to see substantial "reform", but only certain ones, not others. (For instance, I would oppose increasing hours spent in school; I think they are already far more than are necessary to meet current goals and to the extent goals are not being met it is not for lack of hours. So simply slapping an initiative to increase school hours with the label "reform" does not make me approve of it.) I perceive no guarantee that even if reform happens, I will like it.
I'm interested in that.
Can people start posting a warning when there isn't a transcript, like [no transcript] or something?
We all have a vague, intuitive sense of what the appropriate degree of publicness and privateness is in a given situation. Although vague, our sense of privateness is incredibly fine-grained and what is perfectly normal in one context can be a massive violation in another, almost identical context. While some of us geeks might think of "public" and "private" in a binary, cryptographic sort of way, most people have a much more nuanced approach.

Consider for example the difference in privateness between two people sitting on a quiet park bench and two people sitting on a bus seat. They are both obviously public places, but there is a subtle but significant difference in our expectations of privacy. In one context, eavesdropping is perfectly normal (within certain bounds), in another it is quite sinister.

On the internet, these intuitions are frequently confounded. Someone who assumed that their facebook feed was fairly private discovers youropenbook. User 927 assumed that his search terms were just noise in the crowd until AOL published them all. Countless iPhone users didn't know that their photos contained their exact geographic location until 4chan had a go at ruining their life.

The problem isn't the level of privateness or publicness of a particular service, it's not even particularly about leaks or breaches; it's about people being completely unable to judge the level of privateness of anything digital. I expect most people simply would not use a 100% public medium for their private communications, so the "if it's on the internet, it's public" mantra isn't a great deal of use. I think this is one of the reasons why Twitter has been so successful - it provides a platform that implicitly communicates its privacy or lack thereof. Twitter's simplicity makes it easy to understand and integrate into your existing model of social appropriateness.

I think we come back to a very old and very simple principle of interface design - don't surprise the user. We should be trying wherever possible to design systems that are as private in practice as they would seem to be intuitively. Users don't read much of anything, so we need to think about other ways of communicating "publicness" and "privateness" in our software. We need to recognise that designing social spaces is not a primarily technical problem. Small differences in architecture, interface and even general ambience can create enormous differences in how a platform is used. This stuff is really hard and really easy to completely cock up and I think we need to think much harder about it. Nod to PG here - HN is IMO a great example of a subtly, intelligently designed social platform.
I create drupal and wordpress sites currently but not apps, customers are so chincy and difficult to work with because they don't understand the tech at all. I want to get deeper because I need to create something that will stabilize my life and finances. This IT world is so vast and there a billion people flocking to whatever the latest IT trend is.

It takes so much money, time, and knowledge to focus on a venture and on any given day the distractions and discouragement are intense, preventing the focus and the space I need to gain that focus. Also great ideas only come out when I am focused. I have taken on a government job, that is interesting, but I fear it will take me further away from being my own boss. It seems that the only way to separate yourself from the herd is to make an original and "hard to emulate" product that won't be easily re-created or copied by the "big boys". I'm working to save up money, then I'll drop off the radar and go for my dreams. Wish me luck!

I have been surfing the past few years instead of getting to work myself. Thanks for making me feel even worse! :P
I'm guessing someone at the company he worked for deciding a reason for upgrading and whether or not it was a good reason I doubt it was completely forced, more probably the person who decided they needed to upgrade was found with a really good salesman or there was a legitimate reason for an upgrade.

Either way I can't see the difference between upgrading engineering software and say upgrading an entire point of sales system for some new features or because of a good salesman.

This kind of thing just seems to happen in business no matter the type, but a large portion of Autodesk software is sold through resellers and this is probably where the marketing issue comes into play.
They're not, that's true. Be sure to count all your car-related expenses, though. Even minor repairs quickly cost over 1.000 € and you'll be racking up a lot of those over the life of the typical car (if you have an older one). For a new car, depreciation runs even higher.
"No idea, but I do know that if that district had done even the most trivial of standardized testing, those students would have been flagged for remedial work long before they started college."

Unless you taught a long time ago or are in a very strange state, odds are those children were tested with standardized tests, probably multiple times. I live in Michigan, so I can guarantee that pretty much every child coming out of Detroit has been tested in a standardized manner by the state at least three times while in school (conservatively, I remember having more but I'm not sure what all they were), and they still come out with problems. You can't even get a real HS diploma without passing these tests. (At least when I graduated you would get a diploma from the school but it lacked some sort of state endorsement.)

I don't think total lack of standardized testing is the problem. The problem is they are either being cheated on or gamed, or nobody really knows how to solve the problems being identified.
That was only reason to keep windows partition on Mac. Good, I will get 15GB back.
The joke is that (TextMate || Coda) as any OR operation, returns either 0 or 1, so if Photoshop is >=2 then that if condition is always true, regardless of the value of TextMate and Coda.
This is delightful. What I'd really like to see now is one that could learn from people's reactions to it: pay attention to which of its tweets were retweeted or favorited and try to generate more like those.
Parents need to take the leadership role in educating their children. Here's a more radical idea. Get rid of the school system and the teacher's union. Give the $19,358 back to the student's family. These families can pool the money to hire their own education facilitator. You get a market driven education system. The best "teachers" will always be in demand and the families can have more choices in their children's learning.
I don't get the point. Openness really doesn't mean you keep your bank locker open in a street and ask people to pick any amount of money they want. Openness should be viewed in the right perspective & context.
"the biggest waste of some of the industry's best talent"

I've seen this first-hand. Incredibly talented people losing DAYS of productivity to trivial disagreements, corporate power grabs, and other wholly avoidable problems. If you start noticing it, it is really quite painful to watch. Sadly, most people just let it float on by.
New Photos of White Next-Gen iPhone Leaked
Random House's 100 Best Nonfiction Books: A Lesson on Internet Polls
Besides the obvious in the reader lists, I'm extremely skeptical of Principia Mathematica being on the board's list.
How do you get Delicious to work with the Android browser?
Another technique for keeping VFFs stink-free (other than washing them) is wearing Injinji toe socks. The socks are expensive, but if you rotate them they stay stink-free for weeks at a time, so you only need a few pairs. Plus, they are easy to wash (even in a sink) and quick to dry. Some people (e.g., Tim Ferriss) find them uncomfortable, but I've never had any problems.
Hmm, how would you compensate the twitter user for giving up their time and social credibility?
I am done with trying to be super productive. I have changed my working style quite significantly lately. I used to work out plans and to-do lists and have everything organized and feel in control. I reckoned that if I really love programming I can do it for long hours everyday. Unfortunately, this kind of trip fails time and again and starts to feel like a chore. I realized I cant play video games, golf, read for long hours on a regular basis even though I love doing these things. So why should programming be any different. I will only code when I feel like it. I think its less productive then the traditional style but the code feels better.
Personal revelation: things really start to move when you measure your progress on a project in terms of business value. It's incredibly easy to get caught up in near-field stuff and just do whatever is at the top of the to do list. I found that when I started asking "what do I do today to add maximum value to my business?" I spent a lot less time in my IDE and a lot more time in Gmail.
It'd be interesting to see an up/down tally on karma for any given comment score, like at http://www.urbandictionary.com/

You'd see the controversy or variability around a comment.

On Digg, I think submissions reaching some threshold of buries get killed, even of already obtaining lots of digs.
Duck Duck Go better than Google?
Thank god for this... I had no idea what Markov was!
First of all I thank all of you to post such a nice explanation (without flaming me). I don't have much time to put all my thoughts but I must tell you I have realized that the confusion I had was due to my differing background and some wrong inferences of the topic at hand itself simple barriers to communication which led to this catastrophic failiure of communication. I always assumed online means public and that was a wrong assumption.I will elaborate this as soon as I can.
Facebook Disables KNOI Radio Facebook page
finish a website layout, work on a logo for a new client and some work on the front-end on fancydocs.com
Why would anyone do this? Not you, I mean. The user?
He's already apologized for the comments he made towards VanL. Your comment has little value to distinguish itself from what is already in the thread. Please stop doing your part to fan the flames.
When you think about a lot of what's considered to be "cool" math, logic or CS stuff, there's a good chance that Martin Gardner helped introduce it to people. He's up there with Douglas Hofstadter on my list of people who taught me that those things could be interesting (and even beautiful), even if most schools taught them to me as a disconnected set of silly rules to memorize for a multiple-choice test.
My Sony Walkman gets 35 hours continuous mp3 playback.
The Web is not about code. (but it is important)
I've been doing a lot of the encoding work on Rails 3. Curious what your issues are so I can be sure we get it right for Rails 3
(And also - what kind of demographic would your advertisers be able to target at that level of payment?)
So change the code.
There is a law of nature at play: the greater your desire to make money, the more time you spend selling. Holds true in every field.
Currently the bill requires that the GAO do a study of whether it would be a good idea and report to Congress about it. (That would be the watered down to meaninglessness bit.)

Sens. Merkley and Levin proposed an amendment to make it a hard rule. The Republicans repeatedly blocked a vote on it. To get around this, they added it as an amendment to a Republican amendment. The Republicans withdrew their amendment to prevent this vote. Now there's word that they'll try to pass instructions to the committee in charge of combining the House and Senate bills to try to add the amendment there. If you want to support something like that, please sign our petition:

http://act.boldprogressives.org/act/petition_gambling/?sourc...
Less thinking. More testing.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658267 where he asks in english not whether this fails (he already knows it does) but how often

http://lamsonproject.org/docs/unicode_encoding_and_decoding....
It is a good lesson to learn that the board largely picked the books their professors told them to like in college.
Modular Typechecking for Hierarchically Extensible Datatypes and Functions
Query.mb.menu 2.8.5
Android 2.2 home screen inspired by the iPhone?
Sounds great, how does it work?
Video proving Google openness http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt2NJRybcxE
Not to be pithy, but I'd be more interested in the ability to fire bad parents.

Even a weak teacher can guide a class of students through the chapters of a textbook. Sure, the kids would learn a lot more from a good teacher, but they are shaped far more by their peers. Crummy parents produce rotten kids, who slow the class down, cause disruptions and set bad examples. Furthermore, there are many talented teachers who are poor baby sitters.
The latest version of the LittleDog robot
Normalize Android: Turning off HTC Sense UI on the HTC EVO 4G, Incredible, etc.
Would you (or did you) use them for hiking as well (on very light slopes and soft grounds, obviously)? My running shoes are old, so I am considering going barefoot. Using them for hiking too would be nice, but I can't imagine if there's any downside.
Having to pass tests prior to getting a diploma is a recent thing, at least to old dudes like me.

I stopped teaching twenty years ago. There were standardized tests in high school, but they were not used to determine progress or as graduation requirement. Social promotion was common - students were not held back under any circumstances, as it was assumed that the social stigma would be worse than the failure to actually learn anything.

We tested the students at the time they applied to college. Because were were publicly funded, open entry, we accepted all high school graduates regardless of how they scored. If they scored low, we moved them into remedial programs/courses.
Definitely a cool feature but I don't get the "deadly" part. You need to be logged into your Google Account in order to send remote commands. It seems that pop-ups on your phone would be the least of your worries...
It's not even about hacking emails. Some people have legitimate access to the information and abuse this by simple snooping or eavesdropping.

Back in the early 2000s a friend of mine worked for a large consultancy in Canada and often had to work on equipment in the Bell/Sympatico (largest ISP in Canada at the time) data centers.

While he was there, he said the network techs would routinely snoop the traffic of the customers at the router level to see what web pages they were looking at, and grep'ed mailboxes on the servers looking for funny/dirty pictures or private information (credentials for porn sites were a big one)...

I'm sure this isn't a common thing, but you can bet it happens..
This is an awesome paper on language design that demonstrates support for open algebraic types and extensible functions, all with modular type checking. This is kind of a thing that could perhaps open the algebraic types in Haskell.
Absolutely. Cleaning your home is also very effective.
What are your thoughts on this, HN barefooters:

1) With my VFF shoes, the skin of my feet gets rubbed raw in a few places when I walk more than about 5 miles (8km).

2) I noticed two areas (you could call them bumps, although I can't see them) on my right foot that are not flush with the ground. I only notice them when running/walking barefoot or with VFF shoes. It's annoying.
Well, essentially i would be adopting the pay-per-click model.

And have the same kind of profit share with the twitter user.

The model allows for the user to do the targeting for us. Because they will only promote the things that personally interests them. I suspect that their interests would also be their followers interests
[Interviewer]: So, Google claims to offer more freedom than apple

[Stallman]: It's hard not to respect freedom a little more than Apple does, since Apple is about as nasty as exists in world today. Google does some things that are good and some things that are bad. I think it's usually best to look at the various things a company does and judge each of them separately. That way we put more pressure on a copmany to change the things that are bad. Now Google develops a lot of free software and funds substantial amount of free software developers, that's good. Then, look at the Google services. Some of them work okay with free software, and there's nothing particularly bad about them. Nearly all of them, maybe all of them, try to install a piece of non-free javascript program to the user's browser. But many of the services will work okay even if you block the JavaScript. Some javascript code does things that are so simple that we can think of it just slightly extended markup for the HTML, but that's not always true -- some JavaScript is quite complicated, and it's not acceptable for that to be non-free. So, somebody's working on a program, which I think will probably be an added feature on NoScript that will make it possible to block all non-free non-trivial JavaScript. I think for instance that Google Docs won't work if you don't allow a half a meg of a JavaScript program to be installed.
Man goes home with "Total Artificial Heart"
> they can release a google search version that is one year older than the current version google is using, than they can release a new version every-year which will be one year older than the current version.

I don't think that would ever happen. Even a one-year old Google Search probably contains things that no other search company knows about (not to mention how it would help everybody better reverse engineer the current version). They'd have too much to lose in their core business by doing that.
So You Wanna Be a SaaS Provider?
"Capture the spirit"

"Gladiators"

"Absurd night"

Yep, that seems pretty accurate. How did we end up being caricatured and accepting this representation, and doing stupid, risky things to get into conferences for free?
To make money really. The fact that they can find interesting information would be the bonus.
I think the article does a disservice by focusing on Allard’s work on the Xbox and Zune. The truth is JAllard has been at Microsoft since 1991 and has had some pretty big accomplishments. The man built TCP/IP into Windows for God’s sakes. He’s credited as one of the people who put the web onto Microsoft’s radar (he was the only non-VP involved in the original plans for Internet Explorer and was pushing the web browser internally years before Gates knew what one was). He (with his team) created IIS (Microsoft’s web server for LAMP folks out there). And so on…

I mean, there’s basically a book written about him: http://www.amazon.com/How-Web-Was-Won-Idealists/dp/076790048...

(Good book. Very pro-Microsoft but still entertaining)

So the fact that he’s leaving after 19 years says something very profound about the current state of Microsoft. It says the wheels have really come off the wagon at this point and that they’re pushing away the few good people they have left.
Ask HN: What should I do with a large twitter dataset
I have a large (10 million tweets) dataset over three years (most of them are from 2009 though). I was interested in knowing any ideas you may have for analysis/application of the dataset.
Designers Create Video Games to Teach Kids About Healthy Diets
Craig Venter: The dazzling showman of science
Eh?

1. The comments I'm remarking on are in Zed's article after his changes.

2. It's not "the comments he made towards VanL" that bother me, apart from his claim (which is still there) that somehow VanL's lightning talk encouraged the idea that "Python delinks". What's lacking isn't an apology but an explanation.

3. I think what I said differs from other comments in the discussion here in both content and emphasis. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

4. I have no intention of fanning any flames. What I want is to understand what Zed is saying, which at the moment doesn't seem to make much sense.
But why make your information public by default? What's the real gain there?

The more public data there is, the stronger the network effects can be? There are a bunch of decently supportable practical and principled reasons for this.

Since there are going to be leaks anyway, reducing the expectation of privacy is in their interest.

Getting more data searchable and public means people are more likely to consume more facebook time/data (alluded to above).

In the medium term, privacy for things people put on the internet is dead, and spending a lot of effort fighting a rearguard action seems pointless if you've already accepted where this is going. I think this is actually where most of this is coming from: Zuckerberg, Schmidt, and others have spent a lot of time thinking about privacy and the implications of a basically open internet (largely unused SSL, DNSSec, public key crypto), and they understand that the battle for keeping things private was lost more than ten years ago. We could have all been using encrypted-by-default everything by now, but the fact that we're not, and the fact that there's no movement on the horizon to do encrypted-everything, means that we're just not going to be able to put the privacy genie back in the bottle.
Haha, that too.
If you would just open up MT through the backdoor for us Europeans that would be great.
This one worked for me .. http://nowdothis.com/
> "I think it's usually best to look at the various things a company does and judge each of them separately. That way we put more pressure on a company to change the things that are bad."

Actually, that sounds pretty darn pragmatic and even-handed to me; I'm not seeing this radicalism.
So this program, he talks about that will block non-free non-trivial javascript; thereby stopping Google docs from working...

Isn't the easier way just not to use services like Google docs? :) (i.e. with non-free non-trivial javascript)
If I cleaned my home every time I hit a slump the neighbourhood would think I'm an obsessive compulsive.
Interesting. Where do people play Go in Toronto btw?
It's ironic that now that Scribd is no longer PDFs, people want the content in PDF form.