skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anyone who likes this essay would probably enjoy Gatto's book, The Underground History of American Education. It's about the historical forces that shaped the evolution of compulsory schooling it America and in other industrialized countries. The book makes some pretty bold claims. For example, "Ninety-six and a half percent of the American population is mediocre to illiterate where deciphering print is concerned."

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3j.htm

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3b.htm

An annoying quirk of Gatto is that he usually doesn't cite his sources formally because he thinks making the reader peruse the entire primary text to fact check him encourages intellectual curiosity and independent thinking. That being said, many of the excerpts he uses are now in public domain and take about 30 seconds to Google. (For example Gatto is using the 1993 National Adult Literacy Survey to make the above claims, which you can download as a PDF from the National Center of Education Statistics.)

Anyway the whole book can be found here:

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/index.htm
I personally don't. I like to listen to the 'This Week in Tech' podcast, and those guys are obsessed with Twitter. I groan loudly every time the conversation comes back to Twitter which is like every ten minutes or so. It has almost become unbearable. Between that and TechChrunch, I've entered backlash-mode on the service, and I have never even used it.
I got my first job offer for a startup (as a co-op/intern) by email with a document that contained the changes for every employee contract they had given out, including the cofounders. I got to see exactly how much money and the number of shares for everyone. The company was funded by a VC that had some central lawyers/HR folk that handled everything like this, so there really was no excuse.
New iRobot ConnectR Virtual Visiting Robot
it is like a simpler IM
Then why doesn't Apple start a revolt? The music industry (not to be confused with individual bands) are one of the most hated businesses among young people.
seems interesting enough, i'm curious to see how it is actually implemented though.
Well, I've tried twitter for few weeks and ended up turning most of it off, because honestly, I don't give a damn that you're eating lunch at some new restaurant, or giving your dog a bath, or watching TV with your wife.

I find the service is basically a big giant intrusion into my life. 99% of the crap that pops up I just don't care about. 99% I put into the thing I can guarantee others don't care about either.

I think this social networking stuff has huge scaling problems outside of the navel gazing that happens both in the valley and during one's college years. Most people outside of these zones feel neither the need nor the desire to be that connected to others.

This isn't a knock on twitter as a service, just a general observation. It's going to take a profound change in thinking to create a world that twitter and others can truly exploit. This could also just be this Gen X'er showing his age, so take my comment with a grain of salt.
...and why, in hindsight, it would have been a very good idea to have voting and non-voting shares.
It just turns out Twitter focuses conversation in a different way than email, IM, blogs, status messages, etc. And if you are interested in that type of conversation, then you should care.
Do you mean that the Jeff Bay essay is a short method cargo cult? Or are you saying that I missed the point?

The original article contains several suggestions that address things other than method length. Numbers 3, 4, 8, and 9 enforce extreme encapsulation.
What a terrible thing to have happened. I hope your neighbor can switch classes or at least schools.
I have almost cobbed something like this before - the ultimate way to be out of the office and get the benefits of 'wandering'. Of course, a kind soul would have to put you on the conference table during meetings.

Imagine a virtual company, with a bunch of these running around in a room. Each one would have a picture of that person taped on the top.

I guess a problem could be it's not very skirt friendly, depending how you look at it.
>Whether they are intentionally meant to turn students into sheep is one question I don't have the answer to

Gatto's book makes a pretty good argument that this is the case, although mostly accidently as opposed to the result of any secret conspiracy. Gatto does dig up some pretty telling quotes though. For example,

"We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."-- Woodrow Wilson, from an address to The New York City High School Teachers Association, Jan. 9th, 1909

I actually went to the New York public library a couple of years ago and found a copy of the speech in the collection of Woodrow Wilson's papers. Here is the full quote in context:

"I do not wonder at it. I think it is hardly just to blame those who have brought this situation about, because this change in modern life has come upon us suddenly. It has confused us. We are in an age so changeful, so transitional, I do not wonder that this confusion has come into our education, and I do not blame anybody. I do not see how it could have been avoided, how we could have avoided trying our hands at a score of things hitherto unattempted to determine at least if they were possible or not. Therefore this is not a subject for cynical comment, this is not a subject for criticism. It is a subject for self-recognition. The present need is that we should examine ourselves and see whether this be true or not; and, if it is true, ask ourselves whether the air has cleared enough, and whether our experiment has gone far enough, to make a definite program, to make a radical change, in the things we have attempted. This is the moment for counsel. The thing that is imperative upon our conscience is that we should ask ourselves whether it be possible to do it differently and better." [...]

"Let us go back and distinguish between the two things that we want to do; for we want to do two things in modern society. We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks. You cannot train them for both in the time that you have at your disposal. They must make a selection, and you must make a selection. I do not mean to say that in the manual training there must not be an element of liberal training; neither am I hostile to the idea that in the liberal education there should be an element of the manual training. But what I am intent upon is that we should not confuse ourselves with regard to what we are trying to make of the pupils under our instruction. We are either trying to make liberally-educated persons out of them, or we are trying to make skillful servants of society along mechanical lines, or else we do not know what we are trying to do."
It occurred to me some time ago that many things are confusing because they are improperly named. For example, the label "Education System" is confusing because it implies that the system in question is primarily about education. Having accepted the premise, you now have many paradoxes to explain.

But if you change the label to, say, "Child Processing Factories", most of the paradoxes disappear.

Edit: I originally wrote "child processing system". But I prefer the stronger formulation.
Content precedes design
Breaking news, Twitter style
I suspect the guy in the back was being a smartass. After all, if A hires A, and B hires C, how do you end up with B's in the company in the first place? It's the sort of unreachable condition that your typical computer geek just can't resist pointing out.

Eh, maybe A's or C's become B's while they're at the company.
Seattle Startup School May 31st Sixhourstartup.com
I often think about the same with audio. Finding a song by beat or chorus. I've seen something along those lines, but nothing I'd actually use yet.
Think about this: If you buy a 32 GB Apple iPod touch from Amazon for $472.54, do you think Steve Jobs stays awake all night worrying about whether you will buy tracks from Apple or from Amazon?

Perhaps, but the iTunes Store helps sell more iPods, and vice versa, as long as iTunes songs can only be played on iPods, and iPods can only play DRM'd music from iTunes (and of course DRM free pirated/ripped/purchased music)
AIM Away Messages for Geeks.
If you read the official docs, TutorialsPoint won't be making any money from ad revenue.
I don't find that surprising at all. For a given piece of functionality, if it is spread across more methods, it means:

- more methods to look at, and more things to hold in your short term memory

- more (possible) entry points to any given piece of code, so more things to test, and greater possibility of error

- more lines of code to accomplish the same task

- harder to grok the overall behaviour/capabilities of a class

And most of my experience with big OO libraries is with the supposed best cases: Smalltalk class libraries (Squeak and IBM) and the Eclipse framework.
The title is misleading. I thought this article was going to be about the relative market capitalizations of the two companies. It's actually about the relative price of music. Although, perhaps the author intended the title to have a double meaning.
I don't do much consultancy (less than a couple days per month), so yeah. I turn down a lot of work for various reasons and am happy with more modest ephemeral gigs that fit into my life rather than doing stuff that makes me unhappy.
Haha, not quite, but I've done four hours at that rate before.. though the 6 hour traffic jam I got caught in on the same day didn't quite equalize it out ;-)
Thank you for the amusing antecdote about an interesting experience with an unsolicited business plan.

- Replace "What a douchebag! Fricking hilarious!" with "Thank you for the amusing antecdote about an interesting experience with an unsolicited business plan".
I'm not going to say that the case can't be made, or that it is wrong, but that I'm not the one to make it or defend it.
I don't disagree, but another reason for using triggers and whatnot for audit trails is that if someone were to get direct access to the database (say, even a DBA), application level audit trails are useless. Of course, the other side of the coin is that if someone has access to the DB, what's to stop them from just disabling the triggers themselves, right?

In my case, triggers and constraints are a Good Thing(TM) because our DBs are touched by different applications running on different platforms (and hardware). Maintenance is actually easier with the database triggers and constraints in place, since shared data access libraries aren't feasible.
NYSE and Nasdaq - In the Market for Mergers
Opera Dragonfly: New Web Tooling
Breaking things up with headings, lists, and bold stuff helps people browse. I'm sure that helps longer articles. The post may have mentioned it, but I didn't read it all.
The importance of Twitter is hugely overblown in the web/software geeks circles, and virtually no one outside has ever heard of it, and probably will never care.

Facebook encompasses Twitter's functionality too, but no one really uses the status updates like they do with Twitter.
Why is there buzz over Lisp all of a sudden?
I'm looking forward to this event. As an entrepreneur just starting out, I'm hoping this event will help me learn more of the basics of running my own company, and help me to understand the day-to-day of the startup world.

I've got to say I've learned a lot just reading Hacker News and the articles referenced here, but having in-person events to go to helps a lot.
There is a book called The Addictive Organization that touches on this. Below are a couple thoughts and excerpts cut-and-pasted from my notes:

"What makes the organization addictive is the promise it makes to every employee about the future, which takes them out of the here and now." These promises involve power, money, influence, and social acceptance, the same as the promises of pop culture made-for-TV society.

Having a self-important and grandiose mission statement can make an organization addictive, even if it has little or nothing to do with the actual work being done. "The very fact of having goals can be enough to con employees into believing that everything is all right in the organization."

"One of the ways employees react to this addictive process is by changing their perceptions and thinking, therefore deluding themselves. They try to make themselves believe that the stated mission of the organization is really what is happening, even if what they are seeing and feeling as they work is quite different. When organizations function as the addictive substance, it is in their interest to keep promoting the vision of the mission, because as long as the employees are hooked by it, they are unlikely to turn their awareness to the present discrepancies. They choose to stay numb in order to stay in the organization. The mission is a powerful source of identification for workers. It is a type of philosophical orientation that appeals to their values. Through the mission they find a link between themselves and the organization."

BTW, the sociologists refer to these hidden agendas as the "latent functions" of the organization, in case you ever want to search through the academic papers about this.
It's unpleasant how many of his points just ring true in my mind instantly. I connected it with PG's essay, too, where he asks why students should have to ask to go to the bathroom.

But my theory is that a school system cannot be designed in a one-size-fits-all sort of way. There are students who will take advantage of lenient teachers, instead of learning. It is because of them that the rest of the students cannot progress as they could have.

I've wondered about it often. I have no idea what to do. None.
In my last job I worked in closer proximity to the music industry than I'd ever want to again.

My understanding, from talking with some label people was that they hate iTunes store because it has a fixed price per track. The reason for them not liking this was pretty shocking to me at the time: a price that can be varied allows labels to threaten artists with price signaling. In essence, "do what we tell you, or we'll reduce the price of your tracks far enough that consumers will assume they're crap".

From what these guys said, they couldn't care less about DRM. If iTMS would just allow them to vary the cost per track, they'd love it.

I am so glad I no longer work in that industry.
I half expect to find Waldo if I search the poster well enough.
Why was the meeting at the Seattle airport and not the San Jose airport? Who wanted this more?
And therein lies the brilliance of Twitter. If someone is a navel-gazer or otherwise uninteresting, you don't follow them anymore, end of problem. You have influence over the signal to noise ratio and you consume it on whatever schedule works for you.
Ask YC: Anyone else trying out zenbe's email?
I just got an invite to the beta, but I'm a lazy emailer and a little wary of importing all of my yahoo mail to their site. Anyone already playing guinea pig?
"Like Startup School, but more expensive and with people you haven't heard of!"
19 Secrets From LA's Top SEO Firm
The State of the Facebook Platform
I find it amusing that "fucking" was euphemized while "douchebag" was not :-) IMHO the latter is more "shocking" :-p
Try taking a look at part II of this: http://chimprawk.blogspot.com/2008/05/twitter-imagined-ident...

(complements of HN a day or two ago)

Personally, I'm still not a user, but the conceptualization of Twitter as more than a simple messaging service significantly raises its value in my eyes.
Have We Crossed the Chasm?
I bill $125/hr for Ruby on Rails development work. If you are the Rails core type that writes books and presents at confs you can charge $200/hr. If you are new and just starting out you may get $50/hr.

In the software world it seems people are scared to talk $. Be upfront about what you charge so you don't waste time talking to those unwilling to pay what you are worth.
It seems like I'm a little slow today, because I don't get it. I can buy DRM-free music from Amazon and play it on my iPod, so what's the problem? How is the music industry stopping people from buying iPods and forcing them to buy devices with DRM?
When location is everywhere
17-year-old creates impressive Mac OS X multi-touch table
Raganwald I know you're reading this - I'm your fanboy. Very insightful.
OpenTouch: webpage, camera, programming language, capture library selection
The stuff I want, I don't find useless. I like having the ability to choose.

As for the consumer being dissatisfied, yes, as a consumer of health care, I am dissatisfied with still having to die from cancer, heart disease, etc.

Does humanity get distracted and work too hard on dumb stuff that we shouldn't. Yes. What person, startup, or species for that matter doesn't. "Lets just give up, accept what we have and work less" does not strike me as the most appropriate response to that observation.

The great part is that everyone is free to chose in this system. You can move to Alaska and be a hermit and choose not to work at all. You can choose a life of quite contemplation free from material goods. I think the line should be drawn when someone sets themselves up as an authority and tells someone else that its somehow "wrong" for them to want the Nike shoes he saw on TV. This is my problem with the article. In it is hidden the implicit suggestion that there should be a central authority that decides who should work on what and for how long.

Soviet-style communism fell with a dull thud. It seemed a bit idealistic but many saw no reason why it would not work. It just didn't.
Facebook’s platform issues: Fewer developer activity, slower app growth
Those are great points.

Here's one issue that I think is lurking in all this. Even agreeing that a large function is easier to read than, say, 10 small ones, it doesn't follow that a system written that way is easier to understand. You still have the problem of how to factor the system into large functions as opposed to small ones - a question that is not addressed by this discussion (or, I'll bet, by the research). And it's a big problem, because complex systems usually have a great deal of intertwining, partly-but-not-completely overlapping functionality. If you could factor all this into a few large functions, you'd probably get something more readable, but in most cases you can't. So in order to build a well-factored system (with minimal duplication, separated concerns and so on) you carve things into smaller pieces that can then be cobbled together to create the various behaviors you need. (At least, that's how you do it in OO.)

So the business of function length plays out quite differently at the system level than it does at the function level. The function level is easier to discuss and to study, but what matters in practice is the comprehensibility of the system as a whole. That's why your caveat, "for a given piece of functionality" is a very well-placed one. You're presupposing that the functionality has already been carved into pieces.
Trolltech: Qt 4.4.0 fully released
While there are many great things in the release of Qt 4.4, I'm especially excited by the integration of WebKit into Qt, allowing dramatically enriched Web/desktop integration.
This conference sounds awesome. As an efficiency consultant, I can't think of anything better than getting all your business basics taken care of in a single day!
Live results from tonight's primaries on twitter
The Financial Crisis: An Interview With George Soros
Infinitely more expensive, in fact.
It seems we have similar interests. I've run across The Addictive Organization too, in addition to Gatto, though in his case I read Dumbing Us Down, not the book you cited. Gatto seems courageous to me; a real freethinker.

Was it Durkheim who said that the first purpose of any large organization is to perpetuate itself, and only secondarily to accomplish whatever mandate it may have?
It's where the net's pulse is at the moment.

<sidenote>Who knows where the pulse will be in a few months time. Everything changes so quickly.</sidenote>
Impressive indeed. TC makes it seem like their uptime is 40%.
I remember reading a news story about this exact type of thing a few years ago. I can't find the article but it might have been about LeafView:

http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/graphics/projects/efg/uist06-abs...
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/graphics/publications/white-marin...
Is Yang Still In Control At Yahoo?
This comment sounds suspicious. As a long-time News.YC reader, I can't think of anything more obviously sockpuppetish than a newly created account whose first comment is a breathless puff for an obscure conference!
If you google for "visual search" there seem to be a few places trying to do what you are thinking of, for example http://www.evisionglobal.com/
The problem is Facebook's status updates are not accessible, for either reading or writing, outside of Facebook (at least it used to be true, I deleted my Facebook account a while back). This changes the way people use it.
I know this wouldn't solve your problem, but TinEye (http://ideeinc.com/products/tineye/) fits in the "send an image and get results" paradigm.
"... From his second graph, it looks like the sweet spot is a bit under 100 words ..."

Maybe this is why Amazon wanted their book reviews under 100 words. With all the data they gather it's possible Amazon examined this metric. In "Amazonia" a book by *James Marcus" the first question Bezos asked Marcus was, "what's your GPA?" then "how quickly can you do a (mini-review) book review". Which happened to be on or under 100 words ~ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22101-2004Jul...
Six Hour Startup runs monthly free events on every Second Saturday of the month her were we build really great cool projects like timelope.com, poormikes.org. (our next project is on May 10th.

The conference is being run as close to at cost as possible. This isn't comdex, and we have a huge number of college student discount admissions.

The goal of the event isn't to have a bunch of famous people lecture at you, (although we have some really cool seattle based speakers attending) its to give you the hands on tools you need to build a great startup. At the end of the day you will have a hackers guide to getting your company up and running.
I will be there! Will be great for local startups to get some great information on how to form a company, building it up, etc.
Designing a Mobile User Interface for Automated Species Identification
Here's the full report linked to in this article.

http://20bits.com/2008/05/06/the-state-of-the-facebook-platf...
Article from last week with more info:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=177287
Goodbye real-time era, hello ‘event-driven’ era
I know this person and the people doing the conference and trust them both. Feel free to contact me directly nathan (at) npost (.) com if you have any questions.
The non-scribd pdf is here: www.cs.columbia.edu/graphics/publications/white-marino-feinerCHI07.pdf
Their startup is one I've thought would be a good idea (a universal inbox), and it sounds like they already have a calendar and some other features built-in.
Automated Captcha cracking on the rise
And here we have an architecture astronaut. Once you get out of academia and start programming in the real world, you'll realize that there are other considerations for determining which programming language to use besides a robust feature set.

So go write your program in Lisp, but don't complain when you discover how few developers out there are capable of maintaining such an application.

Is English, with its hundreds of rules and exceptions, the best spoken language to communicate in? Of course not. But it's ubiquitous, and that's all that matters.