skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From my observations, I would surmise that in a school of mediocre teachers, the direct approach is probably better; a more flexible approach to lesson planning would just gives those teachers an excuse to throw up their hands and say “follow your bliss, kids”. But the constraints that provide necessary support to mediocre teachers are a straitjacket to the good teachers... thus encouraging good teachers to abandon the field.

When I was an ed student, the guy who taught the reading-methods class said that direct instruction was absolutely an important part of a whole-language classroom; if you see that kids in your class are having trouble reading words with “th”, then you are doing nothing wrong in the sight of God and Dewey by taking them aside and presenting them with a lesson on “th”. But a teacher in a whole-language class who isn’t paying attention will not realize what kids are getting stuck on and therefore will just assume that everything is going to work out, somehow, eventually. A good teacher in a class that is all phonics phonics phonics, on the other hand, will be aware that a lot of the phonics lessons are wasting everyone’s time on unnecessary drills.
On one hand clever, on the other hand, misjudging the probabilities of personal danger is subject to 2 or 3 common cognitive biases, so the public everywhere always has been ignorant of the true hazards.
Aren't You Still Interested in Custom Bumper Stickers?
In fact, custom bumper stickers are matchless products which have a sole purpose to promote your manufactured products and services over the targeted market. They are very professional products. In essence, print bumper tags are designed by practical graphic design techniques while they are printed with full colour scheme.
This is an issue that's taken care of by the advancement of technology in the end. Carr describes well the economic sense for centralized power production in his book "The Big Switch," but centralized power production using legacy technology doesn't lend itself nearly as well to cost/benefit ratios as for instance units of computing power which have gotten substantially cheaper over time, so mainframe computing fell by the wayside. PV technology is more akin to computer technology than legacy power technology, so local power production using PV will end up being cheaper, provided your local utility doesn't step in and squash PV for their own benefit. Means becomes ends.
Perl can now compete with Java for slow startup.

That's my next area of focus for Rakudo optimizations.
Say your name as a statement.
I just paid for mozy (http://www.mozy.com) and it automatically and constantly backups the folders you choose with unlimited storage at a very reasonable price. It seems to me like a much better solution (for backup) than dropbox. However, I also have a free dropbox account for shifting files between computers.

I've been doing a lot of work on backups -- A few months ago I had a crash of a nearly new harddrive. Nothing could be recovered from it. I did have important stuff (like source code) backed up but it was still unpleasant. My advice: spend a few days working on your backups.
Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo, Another Apple Magic Trackpad Review
Perl 6 is awesome. Great work guys.
Yes, and nobody will stop you from incorporating them and their feelings in to your rules to live by.
For far northern countries, I'd put my money on advanced fission designs and perhaps Thorium.
I think you're close but I'll agree with David. A marathon is not something that many people will just go do.

Training for a marathon may be the better route? These are often shorter runs (<10miles) during the week and 1 long run (<20miles) once a week. These are a bit shorter and occur more often which means more accessibility.

How about an interface for creating/managing a marathon/race?
The LINQ support in the original driver is great.
Ask HN: Who's Hiring? (Summer Edition)
There hasn't been a jobs thread in a little while. What are you looking for and where are you?

Edit: Only one entry so far from outside the US. Any others?
Sağol birader. As you see in the news the current situation in the southeastern Turkey is not so pretty. I advise you to try to go abroad to evade military service.
Agreed. I've been enjoying dabbling lately with some of the new JVM languages but with Oracle at the helm I'm really not sure if this is a good investment of time.

I think the open-source community really undervalues Postgres. MySQL does what it does well enough but the Postgres team has done a phenomenal job building a robust, fully-featured open RDBMS. Hopefully the replication features of the 9.x release will get it into more server rooms.
I guess I am in the minority. I found that the eInk displays of these readers made for a poorer reading experience than reading straight off my iPhone with the help of Stanza.

(1) I can read with the lights off.

(2) The default font is not as grating.

(3) I can adjust the brightness.

Without giving my preference, I had an older gentleman compare the experience of trying to read with both devices. He usually needs to wear glasses to read things close up, and even then, he has trouble making out words at times. To my surprise, he was able to read the iPhone text much more easily than the reader's text, and keep in mind that the iPhone text by default is fairly tiny -- smaller than the reader. I am guessing that the high resolution and the contrast helped him make out the letters.

I have not tried this on an iPad; I imagine it will be the same good experience as on the iPhone except with more of a book feel. On the other hand, I have no interest in an iPad any more than any other touch tablet. The iPhone was novel since it was a computer that fit in my pocket.

But the Kindle was a thumbs down for me with all its DRM limitations and the lack of reading improvement that was promised with eInk.
I find it fascinating that people these days are willing to pay (a premium) for less features or less choice. It's counterintuitive, but if you look at e.g. Leica's exploding sales, or Macs, or indeed bare-featured Kindles, there's a pattern. In a perfect world (or, at least, one with perfectly consistent people) less features could never be worth more. People would do what they want and whether the device offers more choices or not wouldn't matter. Distractable as we are, however, every feature introduces a new decision calculus we need to make, and one more temptation against which we need to fight.
Must this be the only opinion? Perhaps, there was something in my life that makes this quote resonate with me and some other folks...
No, in this case irony applies. Click through to the link, and have a look for yourself. Specifically, the ironic reading is that it has in fact made no difference at all which road he took.
There's a British company that makes evacuated heat-pipe solar hot water elements. They work very well in England in the winter.

http://www.thermomax.com/
To directly address whether leaving the comfort zone always results in a positive outcome, the answer is clearly no. Putting aside the obvious possibility of something going catastrophically wrong (to use an old quote: If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you!), there are some types of knowledge you may not want.

I personally benefitted greatly from my military service, but I have friends that bear both physical and mental scars from it. For them, it did not have a personally positive outcome (I emphasize the personally because they served honorably and contributing greatly to their country.). Similarly, I have two close friends in law enforcement. They both are stronger for their work and have had many interesting experiences, but many people would not want to have seen some of the things they have or had to make some of the choices they did.

With that said, it generally has a positive outcome, especially if you are talking about things like just studying a new programming language or academic subject.
Yes, that's it. Thanks.
"An educational technique that [...] shows that even the most disadvantaged children can excel"

I would argue that any program that lets disadvantaged children excel should automatically be viewed with suspicion.

Is there a good book about these studies though?
bash control-r. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go try it.
And those additional reasons are the 4 paragraphs surrounding the paragraph I quoted (and I don't disagree with the points made there). But that paragraph is wrong.
Not bad, but I don't like the "no morals" part.

Ethics come from the satisfaction of preferences.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_utilitarianism
Information technology in transition: The end of Wintel
With the end of OpenSolaris I think it would be wise for the open-source community to write off Solaris support. Time spent supporting Solaris is time better spent making Linux a better server OS and making sure that things like Postgres work as efficiently and reliably as possible on Linux.
They do: http://goo.gl/maps/H4IZ

(admittedly, it's only available as a Labs feature and in a handful of cities).
Find some of mine here. www.flairjax.com
And after tax paid.
I was just pointing out that the specific article Dave points to is even more proof that we're dealing with the illiterate (I also have no problem with rudeness and snobbiness).
This post teeters near the edge of linkbait.

It should probably read "why 37Signals advice regarding pricing is irrelevant and unhelpful for some types of software startups." That's the claim that is actually defended in the body of the post, and I might actually agree.

That said, I don't think the blogger isn't trying to pull a fast one here. When Nick Carr wrote "IT Doesn't Matter", then defined IT as something much more limited than the way most of us think of it when it came time to defend that statement, he knew damn well that his claim vastly exceeded his definition. The title, not the substance, was what got him attention. Kind of reminds me of sports writers who wrote "Roger Federer is Finished" headlines a few years ago, then defined "finished" as "only winning a few more slams." Strange definition of "finished" you got there. Hey, even with his resurgence, winning RG and Wimbledon the next year, they're still right!

The body of this article is very clear about the scope of the claim from the get-go... the title is link-baitish, though.
What the south needs now are cheap 12 volt AC units. Install some solar PV, and have regulation circuitry that turns it on when the panels are producing enough juice. This would still save a ton on summer AC power costs, but it would be (relatively) cheap. (No batteries! You'd have to have a hefty capacitor for startup surge power, though.)
Then I want to email the link to that page, so I have to open the full Safari, then do the email link which opens my mail client, then close the mail client which goes to my home screen, go find my twitter app and open back up to pick up where I left off!

I like my iPhone but it has it's flaws just like any other device.
True, but a system that has to be parallel at the single, shared memory level and at the distributed level is going to be very, very complicated.
I'm sure. In fact, I felt obligated to respond because of the unusually powerful rhetoric of that quote. As I hinted, I spent a while hampered by similar ways of thinking--whereas they are appealing, I now consider them very dangerous.

But, hey, your mileage may vary.
The book seems to say a fairly obvious point, which is:

If you attempt to diversify by socioeconomic status (including race), those that are overrepresented be SES and race will appear to be penalized. This is due to the fact that admission to elite colleges is a zero sum game. There are X number of spots. If you somehow diversify to get Z more members of group A then there will be Z less spots to go around.

Not really rocket science.

To me the two big questions really are:
1) Are race and SES the right things to seek diversity, if anything at all? This is oft debated.
2) Is merit the right measuring stick for admission in general? This is rarely debated.
I'm thinking of it. But the thing is I'm working on my own company with my associate. Leaving him is something I hesitate to do.
It sounds like you didn't monitor RAM in use and proactively make sure you had enough. In 5 years of working with the sysadmin I am talking about, we never once ran out of RAM. Nor was any performance problem ever caused by the webservers.
I recently heard Wikileaks described as "a source", and that terminology works for me (as opposed to "a news organization"). The difference is that this source is connected directly with the public (world-wide). Its material is unfiltered (1) -- meaning what it does provide, rather than that what it provides is complete. There is also the feedback loop of direct, public attention.

----

(1) Actually, recent interviews with the New York Times and particularly the Guardian reveal that they sat down with Assange and -- over many hours -- reached an agreement to withhold some materials that would per their determination truly be damaging. (I guess that doesn't include the names of indigenous assets, though. :-( )

http://www.wpr.org/kathleendunn/index.cfm?strDirection=Next&...

[Particularly the second half of the show.]
Getting Paid in Equity: A What to Do Guide
"At least it's cached so it's faster, that's not to bad, but I find it less integrated than VS."

Perhaps you used an older version, because the version I'm using is caching (2.22.3).
Did Southwest just throw us under the plane? Sneaky fine-print changes explained
> the actual pattern and placement need not be as proposed.

Doesn't matter. Do you have a Reddit account? They, like a lot of sites, have stored passwords in clear text before, and these passwords have also been compromised.
How to Cut Through Crowds Like Butter
QA at Apple would not have stopped this. I'm not surprised that people fall for this BS. Apple would have caught this just like Apple would have caught a flashlight with a SOCKS tunnel right?

If the App requests permission, wtf do you expect? I don't think Google even has an obligation to remove or crackdown on these types of apps.
On the fourth hand: of all the things you have done you would for regard some of them.
Just go through the included tutorial. That's what got me started years ago.

Though I've switched over to emacs now. ;)
The Importance of Hotswapping For Java
This looks like a legit organization but it appears to be a project of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.
What was your role in the Army? Would you do it again?
Sure if by "deliver" you mean a lot more than just making the site and by "instant" you mean a long fucking time.
What's next for data analysis?
Sometimes just knowing something is possible is enough to encourage you to find out how it's done. Probably nothing beats sitting next to a vim pro and watching them slice and dice code.

I didn't have that opportunity, but a few screen casts really opened my eyes as to how far down the rabbit hole I should consider going...this one in particular is a pretty amazing example of someone with some serious keyboard AND customization chops:

http://vimeo.com/7642937
When People stop growing, the organization stops growing and then the decline starts ...
> How green is solar panel production, BTW?

The term "green" is probably too vague to answer that question. However, I once read (a long time ago, so no link) an article on some research that reported that EV solar was net-energy negative, i.e., if you add up all the energy that went into producing EV solar panels and subtracted the energy output over its expected lifetime it was negative. This is not true of hot-water type solar just EV solar panels. Of course the conclusion rested on numerous assumptions but they used conservative assumptions and argued that EV is not an energy source and would need some wild breakthroughs in reducing the energy costs to manufacture or a huge jump in energy output efficiency neither of which, as far as I know, has happened.

Edit: I got that reversed, Energy Output - Energy to make < 0
How Facebook Complicates Romance
This step-by-step script building demonstration (with highlighted "new" lines!) is just awesome. I've seen this approach in a couple of programming books, but hardly ever on programming blogs.
I once opened Squeak and said "True := False"

The image halted immediately.
If PV technology is indeed akin to computer technology (how, exactly?) then perhaps subsidies aren't needed, just as they weren't needed in the arena of computing. I am just not convinced that the government funnelling huge amounts of money towards buying technology that isn't economical results in the technology becoming economical any faster.
I don't actually see a trend in the last 2-3 years of people getting more excited about Haskell, Clojure, Scala, and F#. Two years ago, people on forums like this one were extremely excited about these languages. Outside of the forum scene, and into the industry, I see a lot more eye-rolling and knowing "here we go again" stares than excitement about these.

I don't think we should lose sight of the fact that extreme enthusiasm about functional programming and Lisp taking over as the dominant paradigm in programming is almost as old as programming itself.
It could also be that with fewer features, we expect the manufacturer worked really hard to do those features well.
Is this a GSM vs CDMA issue? I'm pretty sure I can due this on TMobile.
Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage
Google Adwords: Understanding Match Types
At this point the Kindle is so cheap that if I actually commit to buying any quantity of Kindle books, I might try one.
Project: MyWorld - What if Nintendo built Google Earth?
One note for Windows users: Dropbox doesn't work well with symlinks. So you'll have to put the actual directory into Dropbox, and create a symlink to it from wherever it is you want.
Ask HN: can I teach myself the skills needed to succeed in NLP/IR/PA/DM?
where NLP = natural language processing, IR = information retrieval, PA = predictive analytics, and DM = data mining (had to fit the title in 80 chars :P)

for example: http://www.recordedfuture.com

their jobs page makes it sound like they want PhD geniuses. I don't have a PhD and don't really think a PhD program is right for me. that being the case, is it possible for me to do anything meaningful in this sort of field, even on a smaller scale?

I have some textbooks and read articles and blogs on the field, but I get the impression that to do anything commercially viable it has to be serious, grad-level work, not some toy someone like myself could build.

is this the case, or are there examples of successful products in these fields built by people that weren't hardcore experts?
But the more typing you do, the more time u'll have to spend on thinking later.
Which is kind of funny since paper is more expensive than e-paper.
I've come across ones with only "ed", but the last time I had that was 20-odd years ago. I would counter all unix (like) operating systems have an editor because I've never run across one without "ed" (and "sed").
Radiolab also featured a story about them last year: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2009/10/02

As an aside, I think Radiolab is one of the best podcasts out there and it's certainly worth a listen if you've never heard it before.
The Fable of the Keys: evidence in the case of Qwerty vs Dvorak
a) As I already explained to you yesterday, teachers don't work as hard as other professionals (and certainly less than I do right now): http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf

b) Teacher and other govt employee pay is hardly a small portion of state and municipal budgets, and the upcoming pension crisis is going to be a huge problem for the entire country. This is not a small problem.

c) I have criticized other big spending as well (e.g., assorted bailouts).

Also, you seem to have no compunctions against "kicking public servants in the teeth": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1557874 You only seem to object when the "public servants" in question are your political allies.
I'd argue we need to ship them off to pre-k programs that emphasize reading and writing and basic math. socializing the kids a lot at an early age is also critical.

the large number of kids coming in lacking reading/writing skills could be due to the parents not feeling comfortable enough to teach them those skills.
I like 37 Signals and their general message, and certainly appreciate their willingness to take a strong, uncompromising public position in support of what they believe.

That said, my biggest objection to their whole discursive space is that a lot of their advice is implicitly elevated, both by them and by those who listen to, interpret and relay the message, to a more cosmological status than it should be insofar as it's characterised as general "business" advice. It's not. There is very little in their general methodological core that is useful unless your business model is exactly theirs: selling subscription-based hosted web applications. Most of the same advice they give would be extremely ill-suited toward other domains of commercial endeavour within IT, never mind anything capital-intensive and/or outside of mass-market technology per se.
Stand up and stretch now. You don't do it half as often as you should.
What Does Julian Assange Want?
How to Turn Your Android Phone into a Fully-Automated Superphone
"There seems to be two types of encouragement others give me: encouragement and discouragement."
I'm not sure they do anymore, but elite colleges and elite prep schools used to have a hillbilly quota. In this sense they are biased against poor whites, and they know it, so they provide(d) an "affirmative action" program for some of them. My father was born and raised in a town of about 1000 in Montana and received full-ride scholarships to Philips Andover and Princeton, which he believed were mostly due to this quota. He turned both down because he was into football, and eventually received a full-ride scholarship to play college football.
Merit as determined how? By SAT scores? Doesn't that give a bit of an advantage to people who could afford SAT prep classes?
How are recruiters a drain on the industry? I've never seen a place that used recruiters that didn't have a direct path for candidates to get into the hiring process.

People here seem to be shocked, shocked at the fees recruiters charge employers. I presume, unfairly perhaps, that those people have never had to scale hiring. The fully loaded drag of an employee --- including their fully loaded cost and the lost productivity across the team to ramp them up and the risk-adjusted cost of lost productivity in the months leading up to you firing them --- that drag is huge. Recruiters are expensive, even in comparison to that cost, but they're not ridiculous; they're priced roughly where the on-paper value they bring to the process says they should be.

(We don't use recruiters, but that's not because of ideology).
sleep, sleep, sleep.
> Emacs is an operating system that's built around editing text.

It amuses me that people actually think that's just a joke.
Since the beginning, we've focused on providing the best user experience possible. Whether we're designing a new Internet browser or a new tweak to the look of the homepage, we take great care to ensure that they will ultimately serve you, rather than our own internal goal or bottom line.

Google's support for their free products is terrible. While they may take great care to keep the user in mind while designing products, and take care to optimize for the variables they track, their claim above rings hollow in my experience.
A sidenote, but when is Dave not shouting at the people who comment on his blog? He should really disable comments entirely, since they only bring out the worst in him.

Edit: As further proof, see his latest post today - http://scripting.com/stories/2010/07/29/doYouThinkBeforeYouC...
It certainly sounds like it.