skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing I'm always struck by whenever this comes up is how much people underestimate our collective capacity for indolence. As much as I hated uninspired busywork in highschool, and did as little of it as possible, what did I do with the rest of my time? I sunk 70 hours into Final Fantasy VII.

Sure, maybe I would have been more productive if I hadn't spent 6 hours every day waiting my way through the day, but I don't really think so.

Most people do have an equilibrium level joy of learning that they discover when left to their own devices, but I don't think most schools stifle this. On the contrary, school just forces you to do more learning than most people naturally would, and feels like an imposition as a result.

I'd certainly have enjoyed being left to explore at my own pace, but frankly, I wouldn't know nearly as much.
I believe that the speech as a whole is a great demonstration of skill that goes beyond working the system. So far beyond that it even makes the speech look a little self-contradictory.
I agree, she didn't offer any alternatives.

There are some very basic concepts that regular schools completely skip that would make all the difference. In my opinion we need classes (for example):

- dedicated to learning how one specifically learns,

- dealing with relating to people/relationships (it's really the main thing a lot of young people think/worry about),

- helping people find passions/things they care about,

- giving people choices and learning through real-world scenarios.

We all agree that a majority of schooling is focused on memorizing random stuff. It's a fact that people learn more effectively by doing, not sitting in a classroom memorizing and theorizing. It only makes sense that most information needs to be placed into contexts for it to be any useful whatsoever (or stick in the first place), and school eliminates any context in most cases. Math is the perfect example of this.

Other than for the reason that you may appear ignorant in random social settings with mindless/pointless conversation, why do we have to learn all the math that we do, history, literature, chemistry, biology, etc.?
Do the latter first, and then the former a few dozen times :-)
Yes, that was in the first Sherlock Holmes book if I'm not mistaken. Sherlock let it slip that he still thought the sun revolved around the earth. Watson was outraged at such an outdated belief but Sherlock pointed out how it had no bearing on what he did and therefor wasn't worth keeping up with.

I too was partial to this because I've always worked under a similar assumption (limited space in your head for all the things you need so don't waste it with useless info like who won the super bowl 3 years ago).
Cool that you're at KU. I'm living in lawrence -- working at the Journal World on Django stuff :)
What kind of silly logic is this?
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>but worse they bet big on selling media merchandise at their stores (DVDs, CDs, Games).

B&N did experiment with this market, though; keep in mind that they owned Gamestop up until 2004.
It shows a level of meta-cognition not normally found in the "valedictorian" types. The fact that she recognized what had happened and that she should be afraid is the reason she should not be.

She's realized that there's more. The battle is nearly won with that. Just realizing that "the matrix has you" is the most important step.
To illustrate this idea, doesn't it perturb you to learn about the idea of "critical thinking." Is there really such a thing as "uncritically thinking?"

Reading Edward de Bono has got me convinced that there are several modes of thinking and critical thinking is just one of them. Critical thinking as I understand it means looking for flaws, downsides, logic errors in ideas. It is necessary but it cannot be the only thing that you do - you need to come up with the ideas first.
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My partner is currently breastfeeding our 14 week old baby boy and despite being born 5 weeks premature he just keeps going from strength to strength.

The benefits of breastfeeding are incredibly obvious and I now understand completely why most women claim that it is one of the most difficult things you will ever do. Despite being incredibly stressed out by the process, my partner, who holds a biology degree, understands the scientific justification for persevering and when she read this article she told me that it was one more fantastic incentive to keep on going regardless.

I simply wish that this form of research could be made readily available in an easy to understand format for new mothers who are debating with the breast or bottle argument.
The fact that a majority of students enter college having absolutely no idea why they are there beyond the fact that that's what they're supposed to do, is a fairly clear sign that things are very broken. The other day a father got tears in his eyes when I asked him about his daughter who just went off to college. She was clueless. Unrelated to his tears, he was spending 40k/year on her mindlessly and passively attending random classes. How insane is that? I don't care if you can get financial aid, I don't understand how one could claim that's a good investment.

I was in the group feeling 'dumber' (in a way) after college. I wouldn't say I was prevented from learning [random stuff], but I definitely wouldn't attribute my schooling for assisting me in becoming a better and more capable person.
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'flyover states'? What is this elitist shit supposed to mean to 90% of the population of the US, anyway?
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I remember reading something about him personally and tried to not let it taint my recent reading and then next year rereading of Ender's Game. I've forgotten what I was so upset about, thankfully, so I can still enjoy that and Speaker for the Dead for what they are.

I don't often get really emotional when I read books anymore (I'm newly in my 30's), but Ender's game just hit me so hard. I'm glad for the experience.
Definitely. Good point. I agree, the fact that she says she's scared (and if she means it) is proof that she will "cure" herself someday. Good luck to her.
I don't buy it. Yes, people learn in different ways, and one teaching method that one person gets perfectly may be entirely inadequate -- or even harmful -- to another person.

But all people are not created equal. All people do not have the same level of intelligence. All people do not have the same potential for success (however you want to define success).

It's nice in a theoretical/feel-good sense to say that everyone has a chance to be great, and all we have to do is figure out that perfect environment to place them in to help them thrive. But this is the real world. People who adapt better to their environment will do better. Doesn't that trait alone make those kinds of people "smarter?"

Now, I'm not saying the American system of schooling couldn't be better (it certainly could), but I don't think there's any one (or more) perfect system that would give everyone an equal chance of being "successful" or "smart" or whatever.
I think we should have a law that everyone who votes on legislation should actually be required to read the final version of the legislation and take a reading comprehension test about it before voting on it.
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>She was clueless. Unrelated to his tears, he was spending 40k/year on her mindlessly and passively attending random classes. How insane is that?

Very insane and totally unnecessary. She could have gone to her state university for 8-9k if she wasn't confident what she was going to get out of it.
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I do not agree with her as well. Yes there are problems with the system. Yes, we can have a more liberal flexible system. But the system is designed for everyone.

How many people in your class didn't know the capitals? How many couldn't write a formal letter? How many couldn't solve for x? I'm sure majority of HN thought this was trivial, but many others need this, and the only way they can learn it is through repetitive, boring, tedious tasks.

It would be more helpful if schooling allowed everyone to excel in whatever they wanted to, but the fact is we still need a basic understanding of everything. Yeah, it's easy to subscribe to the romantic view that doodlers will become great artists, but the fact is being a great artist and knowing differential calculus are mutually exclusive. She has a very black or white view of the educational system. She half expects this magical school system that would transform her into this creative genius if she just demands it loudly. She seems afraid of failure, she doesn't want to work hard for it.

If it weren't for these boring tedious tasks, I would've never known about the works of Shakespeare or how cells multiply and many other things I would've never considered studying for, but later found really interesting. The educational system isn't meant to be a one shop stop for your enlightening. It's meant to show you what's possible, what doors you can take. Then you can walk through any door - work on whatever excites you, whatever interests you.
I had the same bad experience with a cofounder explained in the article, some years ago.

I started a little company in my city with what I believed was a close friend. I had a job and I was still at university, while he didn't and had a wife and a newborn daughter, so I thought he was committed enough. I was wrong because he had backing from his parents that are quite wealthy.

After some months in which I was the only one that made some work (website design), bringing some money in the company while he was losing time with the excuses like "I'm not ready and I don't want to ruin the company reputation (he was the sales guy), he decided that it was better to split our paths. I "sold" my part of the company to him and after one year he closed it full of debts.

From then on I always found myself in a better position doing things alone. They say that the weight is to much to endure for one single founder, but I don't think so. I was always able to endure everything. If you have friends or relatives or a partner in your life, you are never alone. If you need their support, it does not matter if they are in your venture or not.
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It's the new "it turns out.."
My hunch says that this is a culture-specific study. The findings might break down in some Asian cultures, especially those in which it is polite to speak highly of everyone, regardless of one's true feelings.
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I think the problem with the CrapStore isn't that there is too much crap(Sturgeon's Law afterall, it's to be expected), rather Apple's interface to search, sort and present apps completely fucking sucks. Apple really ought to at least try to be more like Google search. What's ultimately tragic is that Apple won't let anyone else make a better or even different interface for searching for apps and have it be available as an app on the AppStore. What Google gets right is that any idiot can find what they want, nearly immediately, and they don't even need to see or know just how much total crap is out there on the web.

Seriously, what the hell is Steve thinking with so many hundreds of thousands of apps? When you want vanilla apps that are simple and popular enough that you know ahead of time which app you want, then the AppStore is great. When you trek even slightly off the beaten path, maybe exploring what's out there, or looking for something very specific and rare, and for which you would be willing to pay a lot more than $0.99, well, that ends up being a lost cause. All iPhone devs know that users simply won't spend any time sifting through apps, and this is why spamming your way to the top of any category lists is just as important as being on Google SERP #1.

Case in point: tonight I went to order a pizza, and thought to myself that it might be neat to try one of the pizza ordering apps. Seconds later I'm scrolling through more than 50 different pizza apps. Half of them I can't even tell whether they are for ordering pizza, nor whether they are local, nationwide, integrated with chains or just mom & pops. If I can't figure it out, and I'm a programmer, how well will a completely non-technical person fare? Do I have 30 minutes to tap and dig down multiple menu levels on several of them, read each one's spamtastic description, then read the user reviews which are worse than YouTube comments, then install it and try it out? Then do that again 50 more times? Does Steve think I'm a moron? If you can't even create software that can semantically represent "order a pizza local to me", how the fuck can we expect them to do something more complex?
I ended up going to dominos.com in Safari.

It's almost as if Apple doesn't give a shit about promoting exceptional software for the long haul over the next few years, no, they only care about churning a fast buck right now, with a horizon of just a few business quarters ahead. What Apple will end up doing is driving all of their users to the web, and then html5 is going to mop the floor with Apple's entire Objective-C walled garden. Sorry, as much as the web is flawed, it is always going to be infinitely more simple to use than apps.
Worked perfectly on my iPhone 3GS. I was going to hold off on iOS 4 but I had to try this out. Easiest jailbreak yet, no computer required.

It's awesome and scary. I really hope Apple gets a fix out soon.
Drag and drop attachments to save them to your desktop
Thanks that is helpful feedback - definitely don't like annoying widgets and just stopped noticing it after awhile. I just took that out - it was supposed to be linking to our GetSat forums but was broken, as you said.
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Exactly. And why stop at 8-9k at a state university? She would be equally clueless and most likely surrounded by even greater confusion.

This is the state of most people entering college in the United States. A person should not consider college unless they have some focus or understanding of why they are there. With focus, so much more will be achieved with what's given to them.

How do you gain focus? First and foremost life experience. Secondly, applied knowledge in areas that interests you or attracts your attention. This knowledge can be learned at school, though it's a terribly ineffective way of doing so.
The Right Thing To Do would have been to created a redirect page on WP.
@satyan - absurred should be absurd, in the article. I can't help nitpicking spelling/grammar mistakes. Sadly, they seem to be so commonplace on the internet.
>All people do not have the same level of intelligence.

True, but I'm talking about potential for intelligence and in this I think all non-handicapped people have close to the same potential.

Of course what I have in mind isn't person A is exactly equal to person B (and "intelligence" is probably the wrong word for this), but rather if you could somehow give "points" to the persons level of effectiveness then person A's points would add up to person B's even though they took completely different routes to get there. For example, one person might be able to get insanely good at math, while another is awful at math but is an amazing artist.

I can accept that there may be overall differences in the potential levels between individuals but I don't think that difference should be anything remotely as dramatic as what we're seeing right now (especially in the US).
A pilot's license is $5-10k and maybe 400 total hours of time (50+ flight hours, maybe setup and commute to/from, ground school and study). Most of the good/cheap flight schools are in Florida (since the weather is consistent, land/fuel/etc. is cheap -- one of the main issues with doing VFR training in a place with variable weather is that VFR conditions aren't always met). I think Arizona and Texas are popular too.
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In theory I agree with you, but in practice I don't.

For most of the people I've seen delay college, they only life experience they gain in the meantime is in waiting tables. (Which they usually already had from jobs in highschool anyways.) The only positive effect I've seen is that people realize they don't want to work a shit job for the rest of their lives, and get some motivation for education. On the margin this is definitely a win when it happens, but I've never seen the sort of identity discovery you're describing actually occur.
Yeah, this really doesn't seem at all like Spotify. The beauty of Spotify is the amazing, AMAZING quality of their free offering. Using it enough makes you kind of itch for the paid one a little, because it has some nice additional features, and eventually you try to upgrade.

Then the fact that you don't actually live in the UK gets exposed by your credit card and you go back to the free/proxied version :) Regardless, another Yahoo Music/Rhapsody/whatever really doesn't seem like a big deal.
Why do you equate intelligence and creativity?
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I also happen to stumble upon the link, yesterday. Looks awesome.
loopholes:

1. no sales tax on anything considered an investment. only on "consumer" retail goods.

2. if you owned say a farm to grow food and owned a company or factory or machinery that could provide for you all the goods and services you needed (directly, without "selling" it to you) then you would pay no federal sales tax and therefore no federal tax at all, of any kind. Guess what class of people would most likely to be able to pull that off? That's right, the very rich, especially the inherited rich (remember, no tax on inheritance in this scheme!). Oh but you'd still have to buy the farm/factory/company right? But that would be an investment. No tax on buying an investment/asset.

3. buy a "used" good there would be no federal sales tax. only when buying a new good. (This would probably be abused. Imagine a bunch of people suddenly only wanting to buy "used" new things (one previous owner, still in new condition, no more than say 1 day old, etc.)

4. only retailers would have to collect this tax. if one private individual sold something to another private individual (or business!) then no tax.

Also, in a system like they propose where there is no IRS and no income tax reporting, how do they know who is below or above the poverty line? Psychic powers?

I'll stop now. I haven't even dug very deep.

FairTax.org has some attractive elements but it has a lot of suspicious elements too that makes me think it's a ploy by the rich/aristocratic class.
That's an interesting way to see taxation: as a possibility for a group of people to purchase something that otherwise would go unpurchased.

"sharing the value of common resources through taxation and public expenditure" is a related article: http://www.feasta.org/documents/feastareview/robertson.htm
Your post should be in the HN submission guidelines. With the banishment of politics, religion and the other usual suspects, "formal education" has become HN's flame war topic.

It would be an interesting experiment for pg to list flame war topics when they emerge, link to a few insightful summaries (like yours) in the posting guidelines and then ask people to write about something else.
I understand, but that post was written as though you were running an exclusive nightclub, not a startup. Surely if the product really is as good as what came across to me as arrogance suggests, the buzz will happen organically, no?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0559769/quotes
It is comforting to see some positive stats on one founder startups, it is not easy to find a co-founder that's just as passionate about the product as I'm. I am a firm believer that small team work best! Being a single founder company is very easy to get derailed and overwhelmed, I guess that's why some of the most successful entrepreneurs I see has got amazing focus to deliver and follow through.
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wanderphiles is a lovely idea. I didn't sign up because I decided I really didn't need one more distraction, but I wish you luck.
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People might be interested in Chomsky's overview of the educational system, as one where even stupidity has a role -- if there's a lot of stupidity in the system, then the people who'll succeed are obedient people (including him) willing to follow the orders of someone who "couldn't think his way out of a paper bag", to get to the next rung. The rest are filtered out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xq6lFOhLJ0c
Bismarck called these "cabinet wars".
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He's really a nutcase, and a significant portion of a population seem to be willing to vote for a nutcase. I think this applies to any country. It wouldn't be hard to give a recent US example (at least, from the perspective of a non-US citizen).

This group is attracted by populist parties. And research has shown that many Wilders voters favored Rita Verdonk (populist right-wing) and voted SP (fairly extreme left-wing) before.

The interesting question is how large this group is. 1/6 of the voters (Wilders has 24 out of 150 seats)? 1/4? 1/3?
He also said he would try hard to forget that the earth went round the sun, so that he could reuse the memory space for other things.
True, but Twitter breathes down the necks of everyone in the space of supplementing and complementing services. Twitter is looking to own the ecosystem and keep control of the user experience. One of these days Twitter will buy an image service, make it the default, and say to all the others: "oh, you can play too, but we're the default", effectively shutting others out. Just look at bit.ly and other URL shorteners and what Twitter has done.
Actually it's not really that bad. I had dinner parties when I lived in Tokyo. Rents really aren't that bad either.
The Supreme Court is fundamentally just a bunch of people wearing robes. Just because they think money is the same as speech does not mean it really is, or rather, that it should be treated as such. Also, they are humans, and can be bought or threatened behind the scenes.