skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The education system, in India or any other nation, is largely broken. And it can't be fixed. The system has always been designed taking into account what suits the vast majority of students, and it's fair in a way. There is a lot to improve upon but even the improvement is going to focus on the dense parts of bell curve.

The onus lies both on the parents and educators to realize that every kid is different from other and it isn't necessarily a good idea to force them to fit within the existing framework. No one can claim to create Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Page etc. All that can be done is to provide environment and encouragement for kids who tend not to follow the convention.

More than the super smart kids who suffocate in a system designed for mediocres, it's about kids who are living someone else's life - kids studying medicine because their parents asked them to, kids struggling through engineering because all their friends chose engineering, kids trying to be programmers because they have been told again and again that that's where the jobs are....

The article kinda nails the point but then goes astray citing bi-polar as CEO's disease. If you are reporting on a supposedly thought provoking subject, greater amount of responsibility is expected.
Yeah, when discussing online voting, if it should be done is often overshadowed by the assumption that we can vote online. I'm sure that there's some group that would consider lack of online voting to be disenfranchising them.
If you have "no presence at all" then you either have no money, in which case you can't really afford entering it (in this case, anyway), or you have the money, but then the above rules still apply. Effectively it would be better to market your mediocre product to physicians than to kill the cash-cow.

Also, large risks are actually typical for this type of research. It's expensive and risky, so it has to give really large rewards. Research for completely new cures is even more risky and expensive, and the rewards are smaller.
Fair enough, but it also wasn't clear to me from watching the clip that she wasn't a CNN journalist--I don't think the OP was trying to be disingenuous.

I quickly tried to look up some sources in order to verify her claims but came up empty so I can't say one way or the other whether these claims are accurate.
stupid question, how to set ruby syntax highlighting on bespin?
I'm not sure that's true anymore. I can't find a total figure but they turned the corner and became profitable in 2008, meaning they've now been running at a profit for 2 years. They now even make money on consoles.

Even if they're still in the red, the amount they've invested in it is trivial to MSFT. Whatever they spent, it was well worth it to get a web-connected, media-centric device connected to 40 million TVs.

Also there are ovre 40 million consoles sold, so that 23 million must be paying users. I can't imagine anyone having an Xbox without the free service (I'm not even sure you can).
Clickable: http://karsa.co.uk
Well I'm not getting rid of standard passwords, just that it wont ask for any during registration, and the user can continue to use without until such a time as they want to set it. At least, making it more optional.
check this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc&feature=playe...

Don't "do what you love"... "Love what you do". Aim at something rewarding in autonomy and mastery rather than holding out for a "cause" (if you want to maximize happiness). If you find a cause ("something important") anytime during this process, you can chase that too. But if you look at 100 people who really love what they do with their lives, I think it's surprising how few of those jobs fall into the "something important" bucket.
Not likely - I found out that in order to receive ESPN on your Xbox360, your cable operator has to pay ESPN a monthly fee. So, your chances of getting it without also paying for the ESPN cable channel are practically nil.

Yet another example of ESPN being one of the worst content cartels of them all.
ymacs looks pretty solid.
It's the distinction between attempting an automatic recovery under application control, and the philosophy of the badness happened; get out NOW failure design.

In complex systems, there's always the assumed potential for untoward behavior from unanticipated recovery environments; the handling of recovery can be a bigger problem than a complete failure.

In these environments, clean failures are preferable.

And staging the recovery processing can be preferred. This goes as far as staging application start-up and sequencing the component server reboots manually. Yes, manually.
Http://www.addthis.com/web-button-select
There are lots of pharmaceutical startups.

And, yeah, drug development is high risk. In other news, the sky is still blue.

Type 1 diabetes is still a pretty big market even if you had a one shot cure. There are hundreds of thousands of type 1 diabetics. If they pay a thousand dollars each (a steal at that price), that's hundreds of millions of dollars. For comparison, there are a few thousand people with CML, but that didn't stop Gleevec from being developed for it (it's very expensive).
Would it follow from your argument that Weissman is either too foolish, disinterested, or arrogant to pursue the next step of animal trials that would have made human trials more likely?
It's fine until you want credit card numbers.

* Your password is never stored in a list of bookmarks

* Your password isn't permanently stored in email

* Those password-change random URLs that get mailed to you expire

* Your password is never logged in standard server logs

* Your password isn't a part of your browser history
Does anyone know where to get good pizza in Boston or Cambridge? An absolute prerequisite before answering this question is that you must agree almost all pizza in NYC is delicious and almost all pizza in Boston is the most inedible, greasy, rubbery, piece of shit ever. Especially Upper Crust's burned garlic pizza.

Acceptable pizza I've found:

* Felcaro's BBQ pizza (Cambridge St)
* Bostone's plain Sicilian (Newbury St)
* Figs' spicy chicken sausage (Charles St. *must* eat on the spot)

Notice none of this is just plain pizza, as I haven't found an acceptable slice yet.

Getting good food in Boston is such a fucking chore.
Ideally Education System should create Employers and not Employees
Google had no presence at all in the spreadsheet market in 2005. I guess they really couldn't afford to enter the spreadsheet market.

Too bad, because if google had money, and the above rules didn't apply, then google might create a free spreadsheet web service that competes with MS Excel even at the risk of destroying a gigantic cash cow owned by somebody else.
Ask HN: What is the name of the conference video viewer?
There is a presentation video viewer that shows the presentation on the left of the screen and the powerpoint on the right, and it allows comments to be linked to certain points in the video. What is the name of this site? I need to use it.
That's not really fair.

Ask 100 hacker news Firefox users if they used Firefox 12 months ago, I bet most would say yes. As them what they use today and I bet a lot have moved to chrome for a host of issues. I certainly have. He's not advertising-- he's expressing frustration with a browser that used to be good enough that people evangelized it.
I'm always learning. When I come back to some code I've written before, I'm never happy with it because its missing an idiom that I learned in the meantime that would make it simpler. Or, I didn't completely understand the problem, and some of the assumptions I made at the time turned out to be wrong. Or, it's more complicated than it needs to be. Or, its too simple, and I need to add more functionality.

Code is never finished, it's just released. Then modified, and released again. Then abandoned.
These numbers almost assuredly are based on "units shipped" which means you only count a Linux sale if someone orders a server from Dell or HP and requests a RH or Suse Linux license with it, rather than a Windows Server 2008 license or the default.

Because, as others have mentioned, the vast majority of large webhosts or Linux users "roll their own free distro" or purchase an enterprise agreement from RH or Suse, they will never be counted.

Microsoft always plays games with the numbers. They are playing a similar game with Windows 7 numbers - You can buy a Windows 7 upgrade for $99, which only gives you a single license, or you can buy a "family upgrade pack" for $99, which gives you 3 upgrade licenses.

Guess which one allows them to count 3x the number of licenses sold? Right, and they made it so that the family pack can even upgrade pirated versions of XP (I know this because I used this to bring one of my home copies up to legit status). It's a genius marketing move because for basically $33 per computer they get all the pirate computers to become fully legit, counted installs of Windows.

Never mind all the double-counting and triple-counting of licenses - MS has always been king at this. They force Dell/HP to bundle a license of Windows 7 with every computer sold knowing that corporations have Volume License Keys and wipe and reinstall Windows with their corp version. 2 copies of Windows sold for every physical computer.

What I would really like to see are the numbers of Windows computers receiving updates. That would be a legitimate number.
One such case is of Barry Marshall and H.Pylori, he was awarded the nobel price in 2005 for discovering the cure to ulcers, (antibiotics) but he first discovered the cure in 1983 and after about 10 years of 'trying' to convince the medical community of which (Glaxo who was dominant in that market) was making 90% of their profits from Zantac (an anti acid treatment) - (known inside as the 'Zantac years'), they were accused of thwarting his discovery. Tired of the lack of interest, in about 1992 he did a live experiment on himself by swallowing a wapping dose of H.pylori and induced an ulcer, then proceeded to cure this with a course of antibiotics. He did this in the glare of the media and thereby changed the course of treatment worldwide for ulcers... How many would do that?

However, I agree with the point though that too many HNers often seem to be naive about the larger picture which I guess we could all be accused of in some way.
Google "drug startup" and you'll see that's not true. Startups in that field have to be larger scale than a ycombinator startup, but they do exist.
But they're also much more fuller spec'd than a Mac mini.
Good call. The API Playground just has some surface-level results from different APIs. The OpenCalais viewer is much more comprehensive.
I tried KDE 4 a while back (maybe last summer?) and didn't like it at all. I'm very conservative in terms of UI -- my KDE3 desktop looks very much like the Windows 95 desktop I used 10-15 years ago -- and all of the modern glitz bothers me.

That said, I'll probably upgrade to KDE4 some time soon... and then disable all of the distracting graphical features.
If this was the case, it would come pre-scratched as an option. Can you still buy those iPods that are scratched with U2's signature?
To paraphrase: The government allocates dollars obtained via taxation to the development of military technology, which often finds unintended peaceful uses.

The scientists who develop military technology (weaponized nuclear, a nuclear-proof decentralized communication grid, code braking machines, etc.) are simply hired to build it or to weaponize promising areas of reasearch.

Anyone with lots of money and the desire to develop powerful weapons would have developed the innovations you cite. To credit "government" implies that something about the government (other than money and the desire for weapons) is responsible for the success.

Any dictator could do precisely the same thing with sufficient money. Fortunately for those of us in the US, our economic system results in incredible wealth, and the taxes generated by it can buy lots of weapons tech.
How to approach an alpha product
Yes, but I don't want to give up the availability of short bursts of high CPU, so I only do this if I'm expecting to spend a significant time compiling things.
No no no, not replacing the login, just defering it.
Tropical Storm/Depression Alex Dead Set On Gulf
A popular desk amongst many technical people I know for many years was IKEA's "JERKER" desk. It was well-known to be extremely sturdy -- able to hold very large CRT screens -- and relatively inexpensive in most countries.

There were a couple models, but they now seem to have been discontinued.

Lately I've seen more people buying the "GALANT" as a replacement, which is a similar series of desks from IKEA, except with far more configuration options. These desks are not as industrially-weight-bearing, but I guess not as many people are sporting CRTs anymore :)
Yes, but I'd have to sell this huge house first :-(

I have lived in places at the extremes of size. From NYC to where I am now: a small farm in Minnesota. It's easy to live on $1.5k in a nice part of Minneapolis. Even with a mortgage and car payment my monthly burn wasn't much more than that when I lived there.

I absolutely love it out here and never want to live in a city again. But have you ever lived outside a city or suburb before? There are drawbacks that aren't immediately obvious: no or very few good restaurants if there are any at all; everything is spaced farther apart; if you have an emergency help may not be close at hand; trivial things like making sure your car has enough gas become important when there isn't a gas station on every other block.

There is a campaign running now in the Duluth area called "Offshore to the North Shore" or something like that which plays up that the North shore of Lake Superior (most beautiful area of the state, BTW) has a low cost of living and well trained people and can be cost-competitive with offshoring. Maybe they can offer some relocation literature?

Not to be a booster for my state, but Duluth, MN is the gateway to enormous tracts of unspoiled wilderness and has plenty of affordable rental housing, culture, an international seaport and a few colleges. Might be worth a look.
Hmm, I may try that. Thanks!
Seems like KDE 4 is stable enough for regular use, as long as you don't delve into any of the more fancy features.
No, what I wanted to say is that I'm familiar with meditation but I was trying to figure out what is the difference between normal meditation and TM but all TM websites described how TM will influence your life without actually explaining how is it different.
opening a new tab for each email you read

This can be disabled. I don't use it.
In the E-Mail and Twitter Era, Is ‘Actual Malice’ Easier To Prove?
Why not make your own? If you don't need drawers then you can just take two sawhorses and put something on top of them, and if you need drawers then put something on top of two filing cabinets.

Personally, I plan on making a "door as desk" one of these upcoming weekends: http://theinspiredroom.net/2009/04/15/diy-an-old-door-makes-...

If that doesn't appeal to you, then I would recommend to at least get a desk that has adjustable height settings, we have desks like that at work and its a very nice feature to have. Anything to make you more comfortable.
My sense is that he followed the basic science, working deeply in stem cell biology and adding significantly to our knowledge. This is another important route to convincing people that they should pursue something like stem cells - if you know how they do what they do, then you can make educated guesses about how to prevent side effects, too.

So, to the contrary, I think he's done many things over the past 10 years to make human trials possible!
I liked what I saw in Lima, Peru: excellent private schools everywhere I walked throughout the city. Even the poor send their children to private schools. The elementary schools are brightly painted with pictures of happy children, flowers, and mottoes about healthy bodies and minds. Notices are posted about upcoming parent-teacher events. One prominent example is the "Albert Einstein Institute" for kids. Trade schools and universities abound. Near one major shopping center for computers and software, which occupied 5 whole floors of a building, I saw a large computer training school. I looked in the large windows from the street and saw rows of huge Apple monitors (30 inch I guess), must have been 50 of them, each with a student concentrating intently. I thought: there's the future, right there.
Well. Usually if you are googling .NET questions regularly, there is a good chance that you would have stumbled upon stackoverflow from the results.
The $800 budget hackintosh seems roughly equivalent to a $2600 quad core Mac Pro.
Good point. I think the French are the only ones that develop any decent pharmaceuticals outside the U.S. One of the most successful French pharmaceuticals is Tianeptine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianeptine

It's sort of a French Prozac but with a number of unique benefits that Prozac doesn't have. It's approved in several European countries but NOT in the U.K, and is only available in the U.S on the imported pharmaceutical grey market. Once it goes out of patent, and if it has not been approved for use in the U.S, it will NEVER be approved, ever, for any use in the U.S. That's because nobody would pay the 100s of millions of dollars to approve a drug that a competitor can produce as a generic.
Do you think his research will result in type I diabetes being cured in humans in our lifetimes?
>What I would really like to see are the numbers of Windows computers receiving updates. That would be a legitimate number.

Actually, that number wouldn't be valid either. How many corporations block Windows Update because new versions of IE break some intranet we app?
I'm sure the shareholders of Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk and others would like to squelch a cure for diabetes to protect their markets, just like any established company would like to squelch disruptive technologies. So what? What are they going to do about it if some startup cures diabetes?

That's all you really need to know about any story about big, evil companies supposedly suppressing new technology.
There's also Antennas.
From my experience, my colleague who were programming with kwrite and nano were the worst programmer ever. Of course, this means absolutely nothing about you. But maybe you don't see the point in the vim vs emacs war, however, don't you like having a complete IDE to help you out?

And the idea of vim vs nano.. it's just that once you've learn a couple of commands, you can't go back. And, once you've learn those obscure commands, who want them everywhere. (Delete up to the next "(", vim got it easily)
As someone who ran a hackintosh for over a year, here's the summary:

CON
- even if things work now, they can and will break in the future (removed hardware support etc)

- every update takes time and work

- don't even think about running it on the hardware you already have - only use specifically built systems (such as those linked)

- backups aren't as nice as on a mac (disk cloning, time machine)

PRO
- you get a lot of harddisks (internal, cheap and fast ones)

- it's almost stupid not to use a raid setup (such as 10)

- serious GPU power is affordable, but OSX is picky

- repairs are really really cheap
Stem cell therapy is not likely to be curative for Type I DM, although this is simply my opinion and I have no evidence to support it. Part of this is definitional. A true cure for Type I would involve stopping the autoimmune attack of the pancreatic islets.

A therapy that's as good as a cure (such as one that is stem cell based, or otherwise) does seem likely in the next 15 years to me. I've worked on this problem briefly; my role was miniscule, but the basic idea is that you can encapsulate beta cells in an artificially immunologically privileged space, such as an alginate capsule. If done just right, this will let you sense glucose, secrete insulin, and avoid immune attack.

At any rate, yes, I think that we're getting closer to meaningful "post-insulin" therapeutics. Whether or not that will be due to stem cell biology, I don't really know; to be honest, I don't really mind what technique is used so long as it is safe, effective, and maximizes the patients' quality of life.
I've had and heavily used the phone since launch. I frequently hold it with my left hand both for calls and for things like Foursquare checkins. I do not use a case or tape.

I've yet to have the issue come up in a real world scenario. It's certainly not a problem for calling unless you hold your phone like a coconut shell to your head. It's more of a threat when you're using your thumb on the phone while holding it in your left hand. Perhaps my wife, friends, and family all have curiously shaped hands that find the required grip renders actual use of the uncomfortable.

Of course, in every other way the iPhone 4 seems to be an incredible smartphone; I suppose even if there is a problem requiring conscious thought for some people, it's on balance with the kinds of problems other handsets have. I mean, the battery life alone is something to drive upgrades: http://bit.ly/aeKf0n And the iPhone's past reception issues has been dramatically improved. I'm one of those unfortunates who has a home "sort of" covered by AT&T, and the difference between the iPhone 4's dropped/missed calls and the 3GS's dropped/missed calls is very noticeable.
I found it quite interesting that you seem to be a minority in the way you use the desktop. I would have expected you to run a tiling window manager and emacs or vim but it is somewhat refreshing (and interesting) that you use kde with konquerer as your browser and kwrite for code.

As an aside do you use konsole for you console as well?
Wait, they're OK jailbreaking, but they won't release it because it contains Apple's code?
Fraggle Rock: Complete Series Collection | New DVD Releases
I was going to post Puredoxyk's rebuttal here too, but noprocrast kicked in. Thanks.

The main weakness in Wozniak's argument/rant is that he assumes all people work the same way. For most people, monophasic or biphasic sleep is most comfortable, and normal human biology seems to back that up.

But Puredoxyk says she has always had spectacular sleep disorders, and that prompted her to try Uberman originally. I doubt her brain chemistry follows the usual biphasic pattern, so it makes sense that frequent, regularly timed naps would work better for her than a forced monophasic schedule.

Steve Pavlina seems to have incredible self-control.
the html5 app won't be capable of using device specific input, such as accelerometer, compass, multitouch, etc. All of that is not yet part of the html 5 spec.
So when we compare html5 vs mobile apps it's just an apples against bananas type of comparison
Sub-question: Are there any good web text editors that support formatting and work with Mobile Safari?
Anecdotal evidence isn't to be trusted. You haven't seen much Windows in your world, I've seen very little linux in mine.

A finance firm with over $50bn under management had over 300 Windows servers and maybe a dozen linux machines. Mostly security appliances, firewalls, etc.

A law firm with offices across the globe has over 600 Windows servers and not more then 2 dozen linux machines. Again, mostly security appliances.

Having worked at both these places I can assure you that the licensing fees are a rounding error in the overall expense budget.

That said, I run only linux and mac at home :)
When do politicians learn not to hold these kind of conferences? If they need to talk, conference calls have been invented and it would save millions (properly billions actually) of public money.
Nations And Networks
Has Sharepoint helped Microsoft preserve cross-organizational network effects? I perceive it to be used mostly as an intranet.
I would chuckle, but I don't when I hear things like 20 percent of Americans are functionally illiterate and read below a 5th grade level.
Yeah, I would use Latex with the beamer-latex package.
Are dating websites past their prime?