skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(sorry to abandon this thread - I went away for the weekend)
I have indeed been in a classroom, and even had some teaching experience, although I don't claim to be an education expert.

I have 2 problems with your approach. First, I don't want to over-rely on the reports of smart teachers. Not because I don't trust them, but because when it comes to public education we have limited financial resources, and a distribution of ability across the population of teachers. Maybe a smart teacher can consistently get better results with a smaller class. I could believe it. Unfortunately, we have yet to find a system that ensures we only hire and retain smart teachers. In matters of public policy, we are often forced to forgo optimal results for some, in order to achieve acceptable results for the system as a whole.

My second problem is more fundamental: how are we evaluating what's 'better'? If this determination is made purely by those who are most involved, then logic dictates that parents should be the ultimate arbiters of educational quality by virtue of having the greatest intimacy with their kids. Of course, we know that this is not the case in practice, because parents' commitment and ability varies very widely indeed, and so we cannot trust them as objective reporters. If we did, collage admissions officers and potential employers could simply call up an applicant's parents and ask them if the applicant would be a good candidate. In reality, we use testing of various kinds because it gives us some sort of objective yardstick with which to measure academic performance across a large population. We simply don't have the resources to fully evaluate every aspect of every individual candidate, and while statistical methods are rather dehumanizing they do offer enough predictive power to be useful.

Consider that while High School teachers express a high degree of optimism about the future academic prospects of their graduates, college teachers have been complaining more and more about the number of incoming students who need remedial classes in English or Math. Just as an excess of 'teaching to the test' may measure only test-taking ability, an excess reliance on classroom performance as reported by teachers may measure only the ability to perform in a classroom context.
> Or, it could just be that they're making money by raising it from VCs.

I hope that was a joke.
New submissions can't be downvoted, so for those I can only learn from which ones (mine or other people's) get the most upvotes.

I think I have noticed there's a huge time-sensitivity on which stories "catch on". In other words, I suspect you could post the same link twelve hours apart and get a completely different number of upvotes. I speculate that this is because readership is concentrated in the PST timezone. So story lack-of-upvoting isn't quite the same learning experience as comment-downvoting.
Check out the "Lexical ambiguity" section of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example_sent...
To some extent that validates a medium. If you don't have trolls you ought to be really worried.
When the PRC joined the WTO, they pretty clearly were saying they were joining the normal world economic order.

Obviously they lied. And obviously that's going to have consequences, especially for those who helped them achieve their current position in the expectation the relationship would be mutually beneficial.
If anything its a level of convenience that I would definitely support.

Nothing is more frustrating than working with a piece of code (in my case usually a Django app), get giddy about using it and then realize that it hasn't been maintained in over a year and is littered with bugs you need to fix.

I actually think some sort of "no commits after X amount of time" warning / flag would work just as well. In fact, it might actually encourage people to maintain more projects if only to prevent the warning from popping up. Heck you could even turn it into a game...
even though there is a charm; perhaps it's time to up the ante; looks like part of it is scribbles covering something else up :/
pythonistas: we do
I work at ITA, but not on Needle. I have played around with an internal demo, but not for anything serious; I found it easy to use and to require little or no programming.

Check out the video: http://www.needlebase.com/videos/video1

Part of Needle is a browser interface that helps you click through a website and tell it what to scrape without writing any code. It's pretty smart about reducing the amount of work you have to do; that starts at 1:50 of the video.

Needle is currently in open beta; try it out for yourself!
All other things being equal, I'll take the candidate who's better at pinball.
Do you want to take a crack at it? If so, ping me at jason@tinycomb.com
WebGeekPH 1st year Anniversary Meetup
I don't think so. That was the first mainstream channel which provided convenient links to news in English even from other countries.
The actual content in this story seems to be here:

http://www.connectivityscorecard.org/countries/united_states...
It looks like it's not too late to switch back to right side and keep importing used buses from the US :-)
I'm not sure, but I believe V8 is (or was?) not thread safe. Even web workers in Chrome get their own processes.
I use a CD ladder for this purpose. Twelve one year CDs, each maturing on different months, set to automatically reinvest unless we decide otherwise. Works well for the people who need to have their emergency money a bit harder to get too, too. We just like getting slightly higher interest.
Unless the non-technical founder has a lot of involvement in the business (e.g. the founder is a designer, the idea is very business development intensive / sales, etc...), I think the chart should be updated to start the tech founder at 95% ownership or more if all that's there is just an idea.

Ideas are cheap.
Rent tried those things, but they were never more than small sidelines compared to the main business.
When an AT&T representative suggested to one of Jobs’ deputies that the Apple CEO wear a suit to meet with AT&T’s board of directors, he was told, “We’re Apple. We don’t wear suits. We don’t even own suits.”

That's the joke, jackass. It's easy to make someone look stupid by reporting a joke as a serious suggestion. If you get called on it, you flaunt your low opinion of their intelligence by saying, "Whatever, they say so much bizarre and retarded stuff it's impossible to tell when they're joking."

None of that is unusual, but why did Wired decide to include itself and its readership inside this junior high put-down instead of reporting it straight?
Why would you expect that to be the case? Can you install Windows 7 on your 2000-era PC? Can you even install it on your 2005-era PC and expect it to perform well?

Some phones will be updated, and some will not. Some won't get the update because:

1. The hardware is too old/slow/underpowered/too little RAM for the new OS

2. The manufacturer/carrier doesn't give a damn and doesn't feel like pouring money into an old phone when doing so doesn't give them any new revenue.

Either way, your complaint isn't with Android or Google.
I love my N1 because it has none of the carrier-enforced sponsorware and I can use the data plan I pay for however I choose (using the built-in tethering functionality, for example). I appreciate that Google recognizes that Android is an open OS and provides an unlockable bootloader if I want to run a modified firmware.

The N1 was what moved me out of the iPhone camp because I found this to be a breath of fresh air. The N1's contemporaries just aren't as open, and given the phone vendors' track records if you buy an Android phone today you're not guaranteed any software updates in a timely manner or even at all. Google made this their flagship device and was what they were using to dogfood the OS, so I was confident the N1 this would continue to see improvement for the useful life of the device.

I'll probably be in the market for a new phone by this time next year, and I hope there is a decent replacement for the N1 in terms of openness with a vendor who's committed to supporting it. If my phone is going to be locked down tighter than a drum, I may as well get an iPhone, because Apple has at least established a track record that the device will get software updates through the life of the 2 year contract.
It's interesting they chose 6:00am rather than a less populated time. I think my first instinct would be to make the switch at like 3:00am on a Sunday a la DST, but I guess this way there was no avoiding it.
If I could go into my investors with 5 signed contracts and an endorsement from somebody like Donald (assuming it was actually relevant to the product), I can guarantee they would be standing on their seats cheering.

Your pitch has outlined very real successes that are far more important to the success of the business than 15 slides of how cool your idea is.
Making the Kindle app available on a multitude of devices (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, etc.) was a very smart move by Amazon. If someone has a kindle now, it is absolutely no problem for them to get an iPad or other device and continue reading/purchasing books.
The article states that they only considered top secret facilities, because they would get swamped even worse by the merely secret ones.
Urban Dictionary is a pretty good site for looking things like this up.

(possibly NSFW for some..)

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=iirc
Now they need some kind of robot gizmo to do the page turning....
Reason not to envy the French as the head of a startup:

You can't (afford to) fire anyone
“While I am sure that there has always been a tempt for people to spend their time on insecurity work, new technology and ubiquitous online access has made it easier now than ever before. Data that COULD make you feel more at ease is now always at your finger tips. Much like a drug that promises instant gratification. And therefore, we always have a desire to access it - again and again. Why? Because, deep down inside, we are always wondering what we are missing. We want to feel safe.”
— Reduce Your Level of Insecurity Work (http://the99percent.com/tips/5810/reduce-your-level-of-insec...)
Speed Tracer Server-side Tracing with Rack
Please do write a blog post, and what do you mean by "drop-and-swap component"?
Same here. $40 shipping charge on a $30 purchase really puts me off. Especially on something that is as light as your product.

What shipper are you using? Maybe you should give people an option of choosing a slower delivery time for less cost.
Froyo was not released on May 20th. It was formally announced at Google I/O at around that time. I don't know the exact release date but a quick Google reveals a staff member denying that it had reached final realease as recently as June 23rd.

Why you (or Mr. Gruber) would consider it a problem that one phone model would receive updates sooner than others is something of a mystery to me, particularly on such a short timescale. It's not even out for the Nexus One in my country yet.

edit: US rollout began 28th June, and phased in with most users getting an update notification within that first week, http://googlenexusoneboard.blogspot.com/2010/06/new-android-...
no, it was announced on 5/20.
Bezos: The Kindle format has now overtaken the hardcover format
Possibly because 6am is the least populated daylight time. Switching at night would be far more dangerous, since it's hard to see what side of the road an oncoming pair of headlights is on.

And Samoa is in the tropics, so the sun rises at roughly 6am every day of the year.
Where in the BSD License does it say you can re-license the code? Or does this just mean no including this code with GPL code?
99% of the market for smart phones, before the iPhone were corporate customers.
We do care about what our users can install on OUR phones, we also don't want to only be able to install OUR software on OUR phones for OUR users with Steve Job's permission.
Three Ways The Web Is Changing Our Identities
So often in the contemporary era, we talk about how the web is changing the world around us: of how media industries are having to adapt, or how the practices and concepts of doing business are being affected.
nothing personal but i downvote any question that could have been answered quickly by the asker themselves if they took a moment to Google.
I agree up to a point, but on the other hand we've seen a situation where the latest OS release for a particular range of phones does not run well on the oldest model of that phone. Someone made a humorous video recently illustrating the problem.

Some support cutoff point for old models makes sense.
Howdy Philip, maybe I can be of help.

I find that ideas that really grab me can hit just about any time of day or night, but only if I'm open to them. When I'm idea light, it's because I discard ideas as low value without giving them a proper shake or playing with them (hashing out a design).

My poor cofounder get's rained on by my ideas when they're flowing, At this point I'm pretty confident he auto forwards them to his junk box :D.

Talking with folks about their needs can help trigger your creative side as well. Helping other folks can inspire us to experiment in ways helping ourselves can't.
True, but I was trying to keep this in the realm of reality. A large org could actually shift this much data in a single day from step A (shutdown/pull drives) to Z (start using the new cluster on the other side of the world) using this method. Expecting someone to have a million or more SD card readers is not really a practical plan. I could have probably also increased the density by using blue-ray data disks, but having a similar number of optical drives waiting for disks was also not really practical.

At one time this general process was how chunks of yahoomail migrated from our original Four11 colo on stanford campus to the yahoo colos in san jose and sunnyvale (except it was netapp drives and shelves packed into my miata instead of a 747 -- 1T of 18G drives with the top down doing 80-90 southbound on 101...fun times :)
> Google’s plan to cut out the middle-man from the sales plan (that is, the mobile operators) sucks (unless you’re talking about Apple).

Except Apple hasn't cut out the middle-man. In fact, the notion that carriers are middle-men is silly. If anything, Apple is the middle-man getting consumers locked into AT&T's poorly priced and overpriced data plans. The hardware is incidental, which is why Google 'failed.' The carriers refuse to offer data service, only phones with bundled service.
It looks like Rent.com still ahead of mynewplace.com
http://www.quantcast.com/profile/embed?img=http%3A//www.quan...
I didn't know that the term was considered a synonym 'democracy', and was using it in a more general sense. The main link between the two seems to be usage along the lines of the Jefferson quote. Saying that a democracy is a type of mob rule doesn't make it the only type of mob rule.

Whether the mob is every citizen or just the citizens that wear majority-approved costumes doesn't change the meaning I was trying to convey.
Let me rephrase that, since you appear to have entirely missed the point of my post. It doesn't matter that Android 2.2 isn't out yet, because Android 2.1 still compares favorably to iOS 4.
Rapid Prototyping in TEX
How is recommend a difficult term to understand?

They don't recommend it. Simple.

I find the idea refreshing that someone can still speak plain english as well as hold up high standards.
2.2 is basically 2.1 with some performance enhancements and a few features sprinkled in here and there. A better question is how many are shipping with >= 2.1?

An even better questions is... who cares? I have an N1 with 2.2 on it. I was happy with it with 2.1 on it. I'm slightly happier with 2.2 on it. I know people with Droids with whatever is on it, and they're happy with it. I know people with Droid Incredibles, and they're happy with what's on that.

Why do you assume that the average smartphone user is always chasing the most recent version of software that may or may not be available for their particular handset? It's all just hypocritical argumentation. On one hand we have the people who say "well you can install CyanogenMod on it" get shot down by others who say "your average user won't install CM," while these same "others" claim that the average user actually gives a damn that they don't have 2.2 yet. I don't think they do. And I think minority who actually does will be informed enough to decide if they want to take the leap and install CM. Probably most won't, but that's their choice.
Were you asking similar questions the month before iOS4 shipped? Why do you care so much about "now"? The number of Android 2.2 phones being announced recently is astounding but they're not releasing them all together on Apple's yearly iPhone schedule just to make comparison shopping (or pointless internet arguments) easier.
I don't agree that "it's fairly easy to make important speed gains when starting from such a lowly position" has any relevance:
In my micro-tests Opera's JS can run the same numeric loop (producing the same result!) almost 200 TIMES faster than Python, and for example, faster than the C code compiled by gcc 3.
Opera manages to achieve that from plain JS code, and up to then only ActiveScript and Microsoft's JScript were able to match, but they both needed explicit typing for the same results.
So it doesn't matter where they started, now they really achieve impressive results.
It's true, though, that Google's move resulted in everybody else having to do that too. Microsoft tried to avoid, as they knew that Google benefits more from really fast JS, but the pressure continued...
that's fine. you work towards getting yourself a pony and I'll work towards a world without nuclear weapons.
Not surprised. I love my Nexus One, but as soon as you have problems it is a horrible experience. I realize this is HTC's fault, not Google's, but damn.

One month after sending it in for repair they lost the thing twice, sent it back with the same issue and want me to go through it all again!
Amazon Says E-Book Sales Outpace Hardcovers
Rakuten To Buy PriceMinister For About EUR200M
The LA Times published a piece on Tumblr earlier in the year that includes pieces of their projected revenue strategy -http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2010/04/tumblr-ad....

At the moment, it looks like themes are the central piece in their monetization plan.
Unfortunately no matter how many times I write that "you can do this in [LANGUAGE]" - people don't see that part :). It's no the doing of it - it's the doing of it well. Cleanly and expressively - that's what I like about Ruby.

You have to see in the code you write here...
PiCloud promises simple access to the cloud
The point of comments is to add something thoughtful to a discussion that hasn't already been added. Thus, if there is a comment that is not contributing, a downvote is feedback about that comments contribution, relevance, or politeness.
It's called the Social Federated Web now or OStatus for the set of protocols.

http://federatedsocialweb.net/wiki/Main_Page

http://ostatus.org/
And as a startup employee, you can't be fired. But don't think there aren't any way around... Internships, time contracts and external contractors give more flexibility for the employers and more insecurity for the employees.
Yep. If only because the author is a regular contributor here. What with the recent spate of questions here about what the ideal country to live in is this is one way in which you could answer that question.
On the last point, I hadn't noticed until I looked it up just now that a bunch of organizations are now advocating a compressions-only approach to CPR ("CCR"), as opposed to the alternating compressions-and-ventilation approach I was taught a long time ago, especially for non-professionals administering CPR. One article: http://emsresponder.com/print/Emergency--Medical-Services/CA...
iOS4 was announced in January.
Froyo was announced in May.
I leave the arithmetic to you.
CM6 has been 100% solid for my Nexus One. I'm getting noticeably better battery life compared to stock 2.1, probably from the JIT compiler needing fewer cycles to do the same operations.
High Ground Maneuver (Scott Adams on the iPhone 4 press conference)
I think there might be more to it than that. I think Sprint uses 1.9 GHz and 800 MHz frequencies, whereas Verizon uses 1.9 GHz and 850 Mhz.

But they both use EV-DO (specifically CDMA2000 EV-DO Rev. A), which is a standard...

On the other hand, it looks like Verizon is fast moving towards LTE. See: http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/18/verizons-lte-rollout-is-i...

and

http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/19/verizons-4g-lte-sim-in-th...

My guess is that the next iPhone supports LTE and is available on either AT&T or Verizon.

Sprint, on the other hand, is only now thinking about using LTE:

http://gigaom.com/2010/07/13/sprint-going-lte-makes-sense-bu...
Okay everyone thanks for your answers. (I'm only replying here for convenience).
The point was not "Coffeescript is better than Clojure", it was "destructuring assignment (like in Coffeescript, for instance) is a better solution than the one proposed in the post". If Clojure has sophisticated destructuring assignment, awesome. Use that instead.
Right. For that purpose, the system tells you (when you add links), on average, how many messages you will get per day. I know it is quite rudimentary for now, but I will be adding friendlier analyses tools soon, maybe even on the Pricing page - e.g., tell us what you want to monitor and we'll estimate which price plan you might want.

Also, I just got my first paid monthly subscription users this morning (1st day of launch, woot!), so I might be keeping this payment option for now.

However, I try to avoid recurring charges as much as I can myself, so great pre-paid options are a must.
The Truth About Alcohol
The complexity around callback heavy code is why I think that the Clojure Aleph library's hybrid approach presents an avenue worth exploring - if your language has good syntactical support for dealing with concurrency.
Curb Appeal
Puzzler answers used to be moderated (but now show up immediately).

Puzzlers are only published once a week and are hand picked.
This comment is listiki-related but I notice they don't have an auth system and insist you log on using facebook or twitter! Not sure I agree with that. Anyway, the site looks cool.
In order the remedy this problem, the unlocked multi-carrier phones should be just as available as ISP-neutral PCs. This is clearly not the case, a typical user does not know where or how to buy an unlocked Droid X (and even if they bought it on eBay, it only works on Verizon anyway).

So your comparison is not adequate.
I've switched from wordpress to posterous to tumblr. I like Tumblr's lack of branded drop down button that Posterous has even on self hosted, custom themes. Photographer Terry's Diary is a minimal Tumblr powered blog thats pretty interesting - http://www.terrysdiary.com (mildly NSFW)
The main reasons I envy the French are: Chamonix, Val d'Isere, Courchevel, La Grave...

And the language, and the food, and the trains...

Not to mention that if you do get into serious trouble French people are quite often more helpful than other nationalities - I believe this is linked to an odd law they have that requires people to render assistance to people in danger.
Google will continue to improve the OS

And if for some reason they don't, Cyanogen and others will. I expect an N1 will have a longer useful life than a Droid X.
Upvoting: done when you think the comment deserves more votes that it has.

Downvoting: done when you think the comment deserves fewer votes than it has.

Asking HN About Downvoting, in A Tone That Suggests Such Negativity is Incomprehensible to Someone of Your Elevated Consciousness: done when you are miffed about being downvoted (although you will deny this vehemently) :)