skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Even if that's so, you have to consider the probability that your typical, dumb and arrogant (or even your atypical, slightly-less-dumb and even more arrogant) high schooler is going to figure out what that set of alternatives is."

No I don't. Your schooled teenager has almost zero input into their curriculum. It is a false dichotomy that the only alternative is to entirely put it in their hands.

"You also have to consider the cost of failure. The best-case scenario if you teach yourself isn't much better than high school, while the worst-case scenario is much worse."

I dispute that very strongly. I look at the schools-that-are, not the schools-that-ideally-exist. Part of the school memetic program is that they are already almost as wonderful as can be but it doesn't take very much examination of that idea to knock it down. We graduate an awful lot of illiterates, and if that's too extreme for you, the vast bulk of our college freshman require remedial math instruction. I have seen this remedial math instruction. It is very remedial. And very necessary.

I would also claim that the reason that teenagers think those three things is schooling. Of course they have short-term thinking. They've been carefully sealed away from all external reality. Their only future is next week's test, after which they can safely forget everything again. School creates that short-term mentality. I shouldn't even have to defend the claim that school breeds the idea that every student is really sooper special since that has been a core part of the curriculum for the past 30 years. And schools are wonderful at completely negating the value of effort by their ever-increasing focus on the lower end at the sacrifice of anybody who isn't on the lower end.

School created those faults in the first place. You want them cured, get them out of that environment.
Nice site. Love that the proxy at my work doesnt block it.
yeah but the problem is that 99% of the places won't have any reviews because there is just not enough angieslist members.

and those that do will have 1-2 reviews tops.
Sure, but check any number of online review sites. You'll find find hundreds of similar stories. IMO, at some point, you have to say to yourself "Ok, Priceline sucks in the customer service department and using them might actually be risky."
That's spot on.

I don't understand a lot of high-level physics or Continental Philosophy, but the same process that leads me to believe that the physicists aren't sitting around BSing all day leads me to believe that the philosophers are.

(Which is to say, I read enough intro surface level articles that are supposed to give a hint of what you get into once you do begin to understand and talk to people about the same, and form an outsider's opinion. Same process, different results with the two fields.)
North Korea!
Ooh, that would be interesting. Let's start with the first: what is the point of deconstruction?

(Or as Chomsky argues - why is deconstruction necessary when the conclusions it reaches can be simply divined by ordinary laypersons, without all the verbosity and the pretentiousness of language?)
Ask HN: Review my startup: Trendero.com
http://bit.ly/bnP7ll

Trendero is the best place on the web to find exciting new things that are gaining attention around the world. Use our customized map interface to create, report on and discover breaking lifestyle trends happening right now, anywhere on the globe. Top indie bands in Western Europe, underground films in Asia, the most talked-about web destinations in Latin America; these and other lifestyle trends are on trendero.com, right now, where you can find what you need to live like a global insider.

CURRENTLY LOOKING FOR TECHNICAL CO-FOUNDERS. Have great user feedback and detailed plans for a version 2.0, including mobile app, social media API integration, etc. Message me if interested.
I certainly wouldn't write it inline in the CSS. I'd use a preprocessor to keep the style itself readable and have the base64 inserted for the deployment version.

I personally like Sass, but for this purpose CPP or a knocked-together Ruby script would be just as good.
I can't upvote this enough.

A very specific example is this: http://basicio.com/snippets/moz_border_radius/. I ran into this issue a while ago when I was playing around with CSS3. Firefox does some really strange things with multi-colored borders and border-radius.
Good to know - I haven't done any .net development in ~3 years.
If you have any interest in rolling the dice with a fresh startup, I am looking for co-founders to take my site to the next level and raise funding. Am definitely open to launching the new version of the company in NYC, so message me if interested (or if you know folks who might be).
Lemon juice for acne scars &ndash; treat acne scars by lemon
TSA to Block "Controversial Opinion" on the Web
My Plan for Programming Language World Domination
but I saw flights disappear, reappear, change availability, and change details entirely while trying to book a trip to Munich.

I am not sure if this is a bug in Priceline. I've seen the same with Orbitz last week. Moreover, with Orbitz fares reduced or became unavailable while trying to book.
Never mock anything technological and new. People will laugh at you for years if you get it wrong. Ask CmdrTaco.

The other way is not true, ask all the people who praised the Segway. Nobody cares that they thought it would be so cool.
With data URIs, using the same image in two different CSS rules will result in two instances of the base 64 representation of the image in your CSS file. There are workarounds...none are pretty though. MHTML does not have this problem. In fact, in some ways I think MHTML is a more elegeant format for asset delivery.
Tesla stock is now back below its IPO price.
I was figuring you wrote a schedule app. But that's doesn't sound disruptive. I run an online scheduling app. I let google do all work for me. Its mostly hands off at this point, a new feature here or there, but basically on cruise control.

I've been tempted to do some cold calling, but not interested in the work involved. I'm letting google slowing grow the number of customers. It is a side effort, so I'm happy with the passive income.
Maybe others don't share your opinions.

Just a thought.
I don't know how you're using the word "concentration" here, but playing an FPS (for example) usually demands that you pay attention to something new every few seconds, and definitely does not encourage lengthy focus or sustained thought. I think tends to be even more true for console games than games in general.

In any case, I doubt it's so much that video games are detrimental and more that you ought to have a hobby which actively cultivates concentration.
Internet TV: 10 UK on-demand and live video offerings compared
I want to write a Cloud Base app using any language. How do I proceed?
I want to write a Cloud Base app using any language. How do I proceed? Please give me some advice on vendor selection, cloudapp hosting etc.
Hi. Thanks a ton for the link. I would love to apply. In fact Düsseldorf is the place of my birth. More importantly, the work description is very much to my liking and a good match to my previous experience. Thanks again.
How does it compare to Bottle?

(http://bottle.paws.de/)
It’s Dangerous To Call Your Company The Google Of ____
The problem I see, is that if you change a single line in the stylesheet, the client has to re-download all images - nothing is cached.
Software In Real Life: Requirements Change
If you're using bash as your shell, <TAB><TAB> should do the trick.
I think a lot of the arguments that conclude that believing in God is irrational are actually prevaricating on the word "believe".

You qualified definition '1' with "this is not silly" - on the contrary, I think it is in many cases the most reasonable option.
I am surprised by the negative response this is getting.

High school caters to a very broad audience with it's general curriculum and IMO is one of the worst ways to teach kids. I can say without a doubt that I find applications for about 15 - 20% of everything I learned in highschool past grade 10 in my life, but I'd already been programming outside of school since I was 12 or 13. Most things will simply not apply to most students, but the system needs to cater to all of the possibilities. The only reason I graduated high school was with the hope that university would allow me to actually study things I was interested in, but that's simply not the case to meet the degree requirements. In the end, I dropped out of university and got a great paying job in a startup and have done a good deal of contracting work as well; I don't feel my future career prospects are at all hampered by my lack of education.

I agree that most high school students would not live their lives to their fullest potential if they dropped out, but for those that will, this is applicable. I am definitely an edge case, but I feel that is who he is address here, and I wish someone would have told me to drop out of high school and get an earlier start.
Flask 0.5.1 Released - Python WSGI microframework
Stop for a minute and think about the ads you see online. I I pretty much only ever see ads for companies that sell stuff online or companies that are tech companies. Mom and pop shops may have a website or a facebook page, but they aren't running ad campaigns. A quick google of Hamburger shows zero ads. Where is the ad for McDonald's Burger King or that local hamburger joint I like so much? A quick google for Soda shows a Dr. Pepper ad. Basically the only people who advertise online are those who do business online or are somehow related. It just isn't that big an industry because not that many people are online enough to justify the expense.
I don't understand a lot of high-level physics, but that doesn't lead me to imagine that physicists just sit around bullshitting each other all day.

I'm guessing you aren't familiar with string theory then. :-P

/duck
I like this. I can see this catching on. For the "Report a Trend" input feature, you might want to consider having some artwork done to make it a little more friendly looking. To me it looks very much like input your credit card number here, and the rest of the page has a more trendy modern friendly look. You would want it to match the rest of the site, but not blend in too much. Maybe do a focus group and get some feedback on 3 or 4 designs for it.

I like this idea, and I think you are possibly onto something big here. Iterate!

([edit] I can see this thread has been pending without much activity for a couple of hours. You might want to try reposting later in the day when more of the guys are online in here. This seems like a good idea, it deserves some exposure.)
Traction is absolutely the most powerful asset for raising money.

You will find once you've closed that your investors keep pushing for traction at the cost of everything else including revenue and burn rate.

This is because, from their perspective, they want you to create a market for your stock. Which is now also their stock. They want you to do this the same way you created a market when they wanted to buy. With traction.

There are several target markets for your stock. Future angel and VC investors. The public markets through an IPO. An acquisition. Traction is good at creating interest in all of these [less so for an IPO].

You can be a very effective CEO from your investors perspective if you spend your career in your startup doing the things that are best at creating a market for your stock. This approach has the highest likelihood of creating a successful outcome in the shortest time for your investors.

However, you can not use this approach to build a lasting business or a great business. When your target market becomes investors and your product becomes your stock, you are not only neglecting the fundamentals of building a lasting business - you are working against them.

But the reality of the world we live in is that you occasionally need to raise money. So you need to somehow resolve this conflict which I leave as an exercise for the reader.

Recommended reading: Jim Collins - Good to Great.

Recommended viewing: Boiler Room
And using 3to2 you can easily "downgrade" your code should you desire that. Green field projects should totally feel comfortable with using it.
>>I'm keeping the business small by design

Fantastic comment, thank you for taking the time to speak up. "Small by design" is exactly how I feel about starting a business.

That last sentence is a great statement. Larger operations can be complex and at some point it you might wake up one morning and not look forward to managing your business. That is not what I want to happen.
Hiroo Onoda may be dumb, but I believe you can't tell that based on this story. To suggest otherwise is myopic.

Apply Occam's razor: news of Japan's surrender is a (probably not uncommon) Allied trick vs. the US created a magic secret weapon that would force Japan -- a country so dedicated to winning they crash planes into boats -- to surrender shortly after Hiroo left it.

In Hiroo's Japanse solider's shoes, which seems more likely?

So, true, you'd think he'd eventually figure it out (i.e. give up), but perhaps his grip on reality became a skewed after living alone in a jungle for decades (i.e. he's made of tougher mettle than I am).

Still doesn't indicate dumb to me though.

(Edit: Added epiphanic id ests to last paragraph.)
Lucas to Wicked Laser: no lightsaber for you
Alzheimer's ibuprofen &ndash; reduce the spread of Alzheimer
Use Quickbooks, it ties everything together for you in a way that spreadsheets cannot.
Think of it less like a coupon site and more like a StumbleUpon for businesses. The prices aren't supposed to be sustainable, they're just supposed to get exposure.

I think it's useful for places that offer something that people would like, if they knew about it. A good example was a cupcake boutique bakery. If I got a Groupon from there and tried it, I would keep going back. Before Groupon was around, I stumbled upon a cute little bakery like that and liked it so much I continued to drive well out of my way to go to it, even though I'm sure there are a million places to buy cupcakes. I also used them as my bakery for cakes, etc.

By the way I use Groupon and have happily tried new places. A couple of times I've even opted out of the Groupon itself but remembered the place at a later date, so it's plain old advertising also.
From the mailing list:

"And two hours later: the 0.5.1 point release. Why that? Because when
you had a module named A without templates in A but the application's
template folder in the subfolder A, Flask would have chopped of the
leading "A/". Fixed that now and expanded the testsuite."
Flask 0.5.1 released (bugfix): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1491638
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Flask/0.5.1
Hi Techiferous. I love your reply. I'm looking to learn more about Monetization. It sounds like you know a great deal. Can you suggest some sites or books I should look in to?
The Managed Runtime Initiative
>major props to him for admitting he got it wrong.

Well, he really didn't have much of a choice now, did he? Nevertheless, props to him for seeing the funny side of it.
I found that switching pages in GoodReader was pretty painful, but this seems to have been fixed in the most recent release. (The main UI is a little weird, too, but it gets the job done.)

iBooks PDF is decent, especially for a 1.0 product. They do need to add TOC support and 2-up would be nice. But my biggest issue with iBooks is organizational, with only 30 books, my collection is hard to manage. (I'd like to keep separate lists of "to read", reference, "already read", etc.)

Ideally, Apple would also add PDF/epub podcast support for magazines. I imagine Saveur (PDF) or a SciFi magazine (epub short stories) automatically feeding into iBooks.

epub is good for novels and the like, but I appreciate PDF for stuff where formatting matters. (e.g. Autumn Omakase http://www.tastingmenu.com/autumnomakase/default.htm ) PDF is also helpful for stuff that iBooks epub can't handle well, like technical documents.

On OSX, I really like Preview - it's a dream to use. My only complaint is that it's a little sluggish with JBIG/JPeg2k PDFs. (Scans of old books.) I think it's possible to render these pdf files as quickly as djvu files, but Apple hasn't yet made the necessary optimizations (rendering jpeg2k at reduced resolution).
Are we going to see a headline like this when a report contains an error that makes AGW appear more dangerous when that error is fixed?

If not, we're exposed to selection bias.
This seems like making lame excuses to me. If an american high school seems too easy for you, there are far more interesting / challenging schools elsewhere.

I hear nordic and asian countries have very strong education systems. Fwiw, even my little high school had a neat robotics extra-curricular class w/ Lego Mindstorms.
I'd say they need not be "morally net positive," but I'd prefer they didn't engage in practices that are morally detrimental.

Or, you don't have to sponsor a tree-planting program, but please don't irresponsibly dispose of all that used motor oil you're collecting.
An Inkling (how to learn a new language properly)
I bumped you just to support your excellent use of tl;dr in the post. :)
It will be really easy to follow the trail to see who is buying the submarines.
RIght now, if you google "Date of the Battle of Trafalgar", the first hit is wikipedia, which in google's excerpt tells you it was October 21, 1805.

The second hit is a commentary on this very article.
Human contact isn't black & white, and there are tons of small important non-verbal things not only in fist fight or romantic dinner. Actually even a smalltalk carries lots of information of deep psychological value which is mostly beyond words. All this is cut off when you use internet or do a phone talk. It doesn't mean you can't use these media to do business, joke, set things up, but dear gods, please be honest to yourself and observe how many things are cut off and lost.

If you do it you will be able to admit that actually internet communication IS less valuable in many ways, despite the fact how much you wouldn't want to think like this right now.
"...but that's been changing in the recent decades since the FBI, NSA and others were founded."

I wouldn't exactly characterize the last 6-8 decades as "recent".

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nsa
Immutable data structures are several times more useful if they're built-in to the language because all libraries assume you're using them.

There's no technical reason they couldn't be added on with a 3rd-party library, but it's really a cultural thing.
Are you kidding? Compare to software: There is a lot of bad code in the word. This code was written by hacks, who in my experience, seem to have no idea why their code is bad -- to the point of justifying it beyond absurdity\. Showing these people beautiful, well factored, well commented code frequently has no impact on them, they say "Oh, that is nice", but don't understand what makes it different than their hacky version.

This is within the field. From the outside, this is even more dense and impenetrable, and probably looks almost masturbatory. Despite this, there is a fairly strong correlation of "good style" and "good software" so there is at least some objective measure there.

Of course, since there are hacks in the software world (arguably the majority of them, since very few HNers run in the circles of bank software engineer or .Net programmer, and those people are the majority of programmers), the discussions on what makes good software probably don't result in anything worth knowing, or barely anyway.

I am not commenting on your overall conclusion, I don't know if lit. crit. is a worthy pursuit, but your argument is definitely lacking a sound basis.

\ I worked with a guy who would copy and paste program, with many many repetitions of blocks. After of getting a barely working result, would seemingly decide "oh functions are important in programming" and randomly break the code into a few functions, which each took 10+ arguments to carry state over from chunk to chunk. Since these were essentially just chaining the calls, none of the functions would be called elsewhere, no repetition was avoided, and extra cognitive load was added to reading the results. When this was done, the original author could not understand how it was different, let alone better.
It may have more to do with the customer's history with AmEx than AmEx general policies. Does the customer do $thousands or $tens-of-thousands in charges per year? If so, they get a fair hearing or even a presumption of correctness. Is this the customer's one charge this year? Higher or impossible burden of proof.

The author's claim, while it seems credible to me, is also made complicated by the fact it presents to Priceline/AmEx the same as someone who didn't understand the Priceline commitment-even-if-you-don't-like-the-exact-times model, or who did but then wants to renege on the deal.

Not that I would have been paranoid enough to do this the first time through, but having read this account, I now know what I would if I were in a similar situation in the future. I would not only capture the screen showing no active trips (as did the Buechelers), but also seek redundant confirmation via both phone and email support, with CSR rep names, that their record of the inquiry included them telling me no trip existed.
Partly, we've learned to deal with it. The tools for searching for stuff we want have gotten better, and the amount of good content has improved, but we've also learned not to be surprised when our searches show up completely irrelevant junk.
The Peltzman Effect
Googolplex...Advantages and Subscription
Redis benchmarks on EC2 vs Rackspace
I believe stylesheets must be downloaded first before any further rendering can be done. Therefore you block rendering until all images have finished downloading, while a traditional external image sprite can be downloaded asynchronously.
I got to this item starting here:

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/07...

and here:

http://timharford.com/2006/02/driven-to-destruction/
In general, I think the problem here is that the post looks at one out of dozens of inputs into the educational process and concluding that an improvement in that one input is noteworthy and significant to the output.

What's more disturbing is that this claim is made in light of evidence that the outputs in America are trending unfavorably to other countries and is still trotted out as a favorable sign.
Better, (ok, so _much_ better) but it's still a barely-modified default wordpress template.
I can believe that he couldn't find out the date of the Battle of Trafalgar back in 1995. I was curious to see how hard (or how easy) it is today.

First I went to Wolfram Alpha and entered "when was the battle of trafalgar?" The response was "21-10-1805" (plus some other information about that date).

Then I went to Wikipedia and entered "Battle of Trafalgar" to find the eponymous article, which begins: "The Battle of Trafalgar (21 October 1805) was a sea battle fought between..."

When I Google "When was the Battle of Trafalgar?" the Wikipedia article is the top result.

So answering that particular question is indeed much easier today, if you know where to look.