skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't have citations handy at the moment, but...

In locally debating a school construction referendum a couple of years ago, I was involved in a big controversy over this. It really does seem that people consider small class sizes to be an end in itself, rather than a means to a better education.

When I researched the effect of class size on education, the only empirical data I could find were either inconclusive, or in one cases found a measurable effect only for what you might think of as "at-risk" students, who have backgrounds indicating they probably don't get much educational help from home. That is, the only conclusive study I found stated that smaller classes do not benefit most kids.

Tangentially, when I was in elementary school, there were in each of 2nd and 3rd grade, a "double classroom", which had twice as many students, but also had two teachers. I wonder whatever happened to that concept.
Not to get all solipsistic, but we can only validate our ideas against our experience of reality, not objective reality itself. If the imaginary friend is part of your experience of reality, and indeed something that you seek to experience because of its usefulness, what's the significance of the distinction you made above?
Just goes to show how there will almost always be different communities online with differing levels of focus.

StackOverflow's community clearly values the intricacies of tech.

If this conversation was happening in a LinkedIn group, I can imagine many more discussions on distribution models, market size, or even strategic partnerships.

HN has the unique blend of tech+business providing unique insights and answers that takes a lot of these different factors into consideration.
My wife is an elementary teacher with a Master's degree who can't get a job here in Montana. She applied for more than 40 positions for the upcoming school year and has only gotten 4 interviews. The rest of them don't want to spend the extra two thousand dollars a year in salary that accompanies a Master's degree. Several school districts have flat out told her that they throw her applications away because the district is required to hire only teachers without experience. It's a sad state of affairs.
You would have exactly the same issue when applying CSS sprites... the only difference here is including the image data in the CSS file rather than a separate sprite file - removing the need for another HTTP request.
Bottle uses one process-wide application object. Flask supports initializing multiple application objects (such as for testing the app with different configurations).

Flask is built on top of the feature-rich Werkzeug library, which can significantly reduce the amount of code you must write for more complex applications. It is straightforward to refactor Flask out of your code and use Werkzeug directly.

Flask has a growing community of contributors. See the extensions library: http://flask.pocoo.org/extensions/

In a nutshell, Bottle is suitable for very simple websites. Flask has what it takes to grow into a large site.
One of the errors from the article:

"The original report said global warming will put 75 million to 250 million Africans at risk of severe water shortages in the next 10 years, but a recalculation showed that range should be 90 million to 220 million, the agency said."

So instead of it happening in 10 years, it's going to happen in 90 million years???????

I'm amazed at the amount of people that feel that this is no big deal.

My biggest problem is that entire countries are basing laws on these findings, which cost citizens billions of dollars in tax revenue. There is now too much money going around for anyone to really come out with the truth.

Even Al Gore, the visionary behind global climate change (which was global warming, but got changed for some reason........) has millions of dollars invested in green energy companies. Nobody on the left seems to see this as a conflict of interest. Al gore is creating legislation that will make him a billionaire. When there is even a hint of a republican trying to do something like this, people are up in arms.
Actually, that makes a sort of sense. Those ruling-class whites who could afford nannies would be more exposed to non-rhotic speech -- therefore non-rhotic speech becomes associated with the prestige of their class.
Ok great feedback - thanks for letting me know about that :) Totally hadn't occurred to me but I think you're right. Design isn't my strong suit.
Inside the Idea Factory (tour of IDEO's design offices)
Wow, that is intense, eh? I never thought of testing it with Hamburgers and Soda.

So what does this mean then, are we that far ahead of the curve? Or does the internet have a "you must be this smart/informed/nerdy to properly use" sign on it, limiting its potential permanently?
Could you elaborate a bit on the 'fine-tuning' and 'intelligibility' arguments and why you consider them strongly convincing?
Incidentally, Chomsky is a linguist. His primary field is understanding language, for example the effect of context on a word like "drug."
Here's the counter from Venture Hacks, using the company I founded as an example:

http://venture-hacks.com/articles/pinch-media

I found the 'X of Y' formulation pretty useful for getting our first round done. Maybe our experience wasn't typical.
The Way I Work: Justin Kan of Justin.tv
Cappuccino builds this idea in: http://cappuccino.org/discuss/2009/11/11/just-one-file-with-...
I looked briefly at Werkzeug and I've heard good things about it. I have to confess I was deterred for no better reasons than the name and finding too much resemblance between the start page and the classic "under construction" web page circa 1998.
Not 90 million years. 90 million people.
FWIW, though a lot of the details were wrong and changed over time, I’ve got to agree with his unhappiness about the oozing optimism of the time. A couple of examples he brought up:

* e-readers are still relatively new, and have not (yet) changed the publishing industry. That a screen can replace the printed page is still contested.[1] (Stoll: “At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book.” — I still hear things like this today.)

* The Internet has not yet revolutionized and re-democratized the government. (During the whole Google Fiber hub-bub, I heard many an optimist bring up this idea in my community.) Hell, in the United States, up to 25% of the population does not use the Internet.[2]

* I’m a self-driven learner but I don’t think I ever learned anything of practical application via an online course or a multimedia-driven online museum. Learning information is one thing, but I still think it’s hard to replicate the experience of in-person discourse and interaction. Just a personal observation.

Discounting a medium entirely is likely a poor choice since media (as in “formats for communication”) tend to last a very, very long time. All of the science fiction hopes and dreams tacked onto the medium? Not so much. These things take time, and Stoll was at least spot-on calling out things that were at best disappointing about the Internet in the 90’s.

[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/200491/reading_on_paper_is_fa...
[2] http://www.internetworldstats.com/am/us.htm
4chan. One doesn't even need to read the article to know who's behind it.
Great article. My favorite part is this:

"Early on, before the brand rollout in mid-1994, FedEx's public relations agency was preparing to emphasize the arrow as a secondary graphic to underscore the "speed/precision" positioning. They proposed to leverage this in their FedEx communications. Landor put its foot down and said, "No way."

That's why firms like Landor are worth the money. Telling a client "no" is hard, but that's what they're paying for.
Wow...great feedback.

Yep you nailed the exact same pain point I had. When I would sometimes do "best *" type searches on google before buying something, I'd get back crappy results with old forum posts or affiliate link filled ezine articles.

On adding an item to multiple lists, I thought about this but decided against it just because an item could have different ratings for different categories (iPhone is a great computer, not as good at making phone calls), and it would make the UI simpler.

Good feedback on the up/down voting. When you say Amazon metadata what are you referring to? Not familiar with that.
Syntactic support, immutability semantics, and compile-time limitations on side-effects.

Of course, it's POSSIBLE to do everything with a library + discipline. For example, I can import the Clojure jar and use Clojure's data structures and STM in a Java program. But it is _very_ verbose, and you have to know that certain variables are immutable, or that certain operations are illegal in certain places, etc, rather than having that information encoded into the language.
Oh, and Prince — in the year 2010 — has no excuse for his own “the internet's completely over” argument.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/7874307/Prince-th...
What is a good use case for a microframework?
Really? Racist discrimination in lending policies is non-evil nowadays?
> The question is, what's the point of the DRM once you have something like Steam?

These decisions aren't made by programmers or people who otherwise deal with facts.

The point is that when your boss's boss asks why it's showing up on TPB, your boss can say "Look, we put DRM in it. We did the best we could. With more funding we could make the DRM system better."

The next project gets a few more hires (probably only DRM-related on paper), your boss practiced CYA, his boss practiced CYA, and everybody's doing great except the legal consumers of the product, who nobody really cares about anyway.
Be sure to skip down to the comments here: http://lwn.net/Articles/392365/ (or find the first one from bgallmeister).

Where a reply to this posting is made. Further comments following are generally quite interesting, e.g.:

"In general, current virtual memory implementations in almost all OSs assume that virtual memory manipulation is a relatively rare event, and we have put forward an algorithm and an application for rapidly-changing mappings that makes a real difference to a vast array of applications, but it can't do so within the limitations of current virtual memory APIs and manipulation speeds."

"[...] Our GC code is all in user space (part of the OpenJDK based code we put up along with the kernel mods) - it just needs some very scalable and somewhat different virtual and physical memory manipulation semantics form the kernel." (http://lwn.net/Articles/392745/)

And:

"The duration of the stop-the-world pause in all current JVM GC's is generally linear to the amount of live data the heap contains (you have to scan all that stuff and fix all the pointers to the relocated objects). This means that the larger the heap - the larger the pause. Sun's CMS (the Mostly Concurrent Mark Sweep -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC mentioned above) will delay the compaction as long as it can and track empty spaces in free lists, but it will eventually fall back on it's compaction code and pause for about 2-4 seconds per live gigabyte on a modern x86-64 machine. This is why JVMs are generally not used with more than a few GB of data, except for batch apps (ones that can accept a 10s of seconds of complete pause). Since a 256GB server now costs less than $18K, there is a ~100x and growing gap between commodity server capacity and the ability for individual runtime to scale with acceptable response times." (http://lwn.net/Articles/392797/)

Azul has claimed they've fixed this on their own custom hardware (a generic 64 bit RISC with some extra instructions including at least one to implement a fine grained memory barrier) and this is a version of their software based on that.

It will be very interesting to see if it's truly practical to put all your GC code in userspace; they made a decision to put almost all of their secret sauces in userspace and say that's saved them many times.
Isn't this the one that was written based on an april fool's joke?

i am finding choosing a python framework to be stressful.
BP Cleaning Up Less than 1% of the Oil it Promised the Feds
I imagine you could put your base64 encoded images in a separate CSS file to solve this, but then you are back up to one extra HTTP request like CSS sprites.
How is the YC-funded competition doing? ( WePay, right? http://wepay.com/ )
Working with an individual investor to inject 50k into a mobile app
This is my first time taking in investment. I have the developers in line, a licensed framework and a business based app that will be ready in 45 days.<p>He is very interested, we discussed the app and investment. I am probably going to offer him 50% for the investment... What should be my first steps?<p>Should I form an LLC for this and start from there?<p>Any good reading material anyone would recommend?<p>Does anyone happen to know good resources on the value of apps as well (obviously they will greatly vary, but is there a compiled list on popular apps by category?)<p>Streamed thoughts... any responses appreciated.
People always are eager to downvote an uncomfortable truth.
Wonder how many sites search for 6 in the user agent to filter I.E. 6 or to set a custom css file
Rule #35: If it exists, there is Bieber of it.
Having a Masters degree does not improve student performance but does cost taxpayers more money.

It sounds like a happy state of affairs that the taxpayers are not being forced to pay $2000/year for nothing.

http://education-portal.com/articles/Teacher_Training_Experi...
It’s simply a step in the right direction. I'd be the first to agree that there’s plenty to improve in education, but with so few “wins” it’s important to single out some of the positive stuff.
True, good point. (leaving aside the tiling subtleties, anyway)
* A quick google of Hamburger shows zero ads*

For you...remember that online ads are targeted, so you'll see different ads. I'm in Los Angeles, and I googled "hamburger" and got ads for Chili's, Albertson's, Pavillions, and a few recipe sites. You'll see more local ads in certain places like Los Angeles, San Francisco, or New York.
In most circumstances these tags are annoying, here they are useful.

...at least in the case of <marquee>, precisely because it's annoying.
I remember reading this article in 1995, in its context. And remember long discussion on mailing lists on this article. All these problems were real at that time. We overlooked most, because we were working to fix those. This article worked as a reminder of current situation at the time.

Back then I took it more as the author's expression of frustration than as prediction.
Apple Doctored iPad Star Trek Image
I up voted your reply, not only for your magnificent input, but because of your recommendations. Absolutely spot on.
Great feedback!

Agreed, the naming and duplicates are an issue. I was planning on doing this like StackOverflow with a "did you mean?" type suggestion box, but haven't built it yet.

Yeah the revisions might be useful in a wiki way if people try to hack it, but aren't really right now.

For categorization - I thought about this but it kept making the UI more complicated to pick a category first. I was definitely trying to go for a Twitter-esque bare minimum approach and solve the overwhelming amount of data with search instead of categories (like wikipedia). I'm not sure yet if this will work though. And Google has yet to index all the pages so the Google custom search I have setup is not 100% functional yet.

On Paul Grahams blog, it does have a link to the "external site" at the top: http://buyersvote.com/items/paul-graham-s-blog-reviews
But it's probably not that obvious. Thanks for the help!
Has anybody explained Kant, or Einstein, or Descartes or Newton or any other difficult thinker in words of four letters or less?

Four letters? No. Not even this sentence has only words of four letters or less.

However many major contributions of Newton, Descartes, and Einstein to mathematics and science have been broken down and simplified until they both can be and are routinely taught to high school students. Seriously, when I graduated from grade 12 I understood the basic coordinate system (Descartes), simple Calculus (Newton), conservation of momentum (Newton again), the Newtonian theory of gravity (Newton again) and the Special Theory of Relativity (Einstein).

Furthermore if you pick up The Feynman Lectures on Physics you will find understandable expositions of all of these, and plenty more. All are covered, along with a great many other things, in the first half of the first book alone. Often a major concept, such as basic Calculus, is explained in just a few pages.

Given that that's what scientists tend to do with their theories, are you surprised that they would look for something similar with other people's theories?
they just keep on coming.
I submitted page 2 by accident, here is page 1 http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100701/the-way-i-work-justin-k...
Yes.

It is stressful.

Look for libraries that make working with WSGI as painless as possible. Working with WSGI directly allows you to write modular code that works together gracefully with other WSGI code. Pylons is really just an amalgamation of WSGI modules. Smart people can amalgamate their own modules.

Django was written before WSGI was an established standard. It has the advantages of being established, a relatively large pool of developers, and the admin interface. It has the disadvantage of dictating your project layout, not integrating well with other WSGI modules, and having a large degree of lock-in.

The best options are Flask (for a simple start), Pylons (for more obvious out of the box functionality), WebOb (for a simple and slightly too magical WSGI library), and Werkzeug (for a well-written library that dictates nothing).
The problem is that the unions pushed through requirements that people with advanced degrees should be payed more, where she would most likely forgo the extra 2k a year to teach she is now priced out of the market. In industry this type of stuff doesn't happen, sure you may like to earn more for having your degree but if it isn't valued by the employer then it has no bearing on your compensation.
Ask HN: Your development setup for Ubuntu?
Hi,
I'm bored, so to change things, I installed Ubuntu 9 and decided to do some light web development on it.

I made some research on the web but found nothing interesting.

So Ubuntu users, what software do you use for your development and productivity?

So far, I installed Chrome, Skype, PHP, Abyss, MySql and Aptana.
Thanks for the encouragement. Yep - I like the idea of free form lists like that because it does allow anyone to create niche type lists that aren't predefined in certain categories. So if someone did want to start a "Expresso Machines Under $500" list it would be fine. Then there oculd be some discussion in the comments for whether it should be merged into another list etc, like Wikipedia, and some tool to merge them if needed (although I haven't built that yet).

Anyway - thanks for the feedback. The hardest part right now has been getting critical mass. So we'll see what happens with it!
this is why i don't get it that pivotal doesn't charge for tracker. it would make me feel better.
The speculators done gone made a lot of money off the geeks. Tesla was a typical speculator IPO, now the reality of the risk facing the company will set in and the price will go to its standard level till they start to show real potential.
Yes, looks pretty clean and intuitive. Here are some caveats are see thought:

- I don't really like the name Fake.. I thought it was a lying page or something..

- As I see it.. it kind of make it extremely intuitive for a newbie user to add action.. however, how this newbie user will know the id in the post field..? (Ok, maybe those users will only use the "click" action).. but still, it could be good to separate the action into a beginner mode and advanced mode.. this will make it even easier for no-tech people to use the application.. and maybe make it more powerful for developers to build test suite, etc.
Being able to get off the ground quickly while still determining the structure of your project. Thinking like a system programmer rather than a plugin programmer / integrator. Using the libraries of your choice to implement your site in the best way for your requirements.
I can do that too:

If you're being put on medication because you can't cope with your job, it's not a problem with your job. It's a problem with you, or maybe a problem with your doctor, but your job generally isn't that difficult an environment. You show up every day, you hang out with your friends, you go to meetings, learn some stuff, you do some stupid crap that you're told to do, and you figure out a way to avoid doing some other stupid crap that you're told to do.

If you're being put on medication because you can't cope with prison, it's not a problem with prison. It's a problem with you, or maybe a problem with your doctor, but prison generally isn't that difficult an environment. You wake up every day, you hang out with your friends, you go to community service, learn some stuff, you do some stupid crap that you're told to do, and you figure out a way to avoid doing some other stupid crap that you're told to do.

Or maybe I should consider whether their job environment really is toxic? Maybe prison really is nasty? I don't know if I shoot the messenger.
This argument only applies if you replace in-person communication with internet communication.

Most of my communication on social networks is with people that I would otherwise not communicate with because they are too far away.I see only gain there.
Reverse shortened urls
That's so 90's.

The new thing that technically unsophisticated people do is buy a new HD television and leave the aspect ratio set to stretch their 4:3 picture out to 16:9, making everybody look fat.

I think that I can safely say that I've only seen one single wide TV in a home that was not set that way.
Without the shock of the atomic bombings there would almost certainly have been more Japanese civilians dead before the end of the war, even discounting a landed invasion. By late 1945 the allied bombing campaign was sufficiently geared up to destroy entire cities on a recurring basis. It was as effective as the atomic bombings, it was merely a lot less efficient (hundreds of planes and crews instead of just one). Had Japan held off surrendering, and had that conventional bombing campaign continued much longer the destruction would have been far greater.

Had the allies then lacked the courage to mount a landed invasion and been satisfied with a negotiated peace instead of an unconditional surrender, Japan would have become a devastated country with few allies and many enemies, it would not have been rebuilt with foreign assistance and would almost certainly be a 3rd world nation or perhaps even a failed state today.
I didn't know what you were talking about, so I looked it up. I guess you're referring to this:

> 5.3 You agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Google, unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement with Google. You specifically agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services through any automated means (including use of scripts or web crawlers) and shall ensure that you comply with the instructions set out in any robots.txt file present on the Services.
Best Technical Support Chat Ever
It will impact drug lords. They will probably move to other illegal activities and violence is likely to increase. Still it will eliminate a big incentive for people to choose a criminal life.

This is really becoming very serious. Today, we woke up by the noise of gun fire. They killed a police officer a few blocks from my house. A LOT of innocent people are being killed everyday. My 17 year old nephew and his dad were killed last week. And every week something new happens.