skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wonderful speech, but a bit of a misleading title on the article as she's not speaking out against schooling, but against a specific kind of schooling that's common throughout the United States (and elsewhere):

H. L. Mencken wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not "to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States."

[.. snip ..]

For those of you that work within the system that I am condemning, I do not mean to insult; I intend to motivate. You have the power to change the incompetencies of this system. I know that you did not become a teacher or administrator to see your students bored. You cannot accept the authority of the governing bodies that tell you what to teach, how to teach it, and that you will be punished if you do not comply. Our potential is at stake.

For those of you that are now leaving this establishment, I say, do not forget what went on in these classrooms. Do not abandon those that come after you. We are the new future and we are not going to let tradition stand. We will break down the walls of corruption to let a garden of knowledge grow throughout America. Once educated properly, we will have the power to do anything, and best of all, we will only use that power for good, for we will be cultivated and wise. We will not accept anything at face value. We will ask questions, and we will demand truth.
First, if you read the threads where this stuff comes up, you'll see that most of these discussions are in the context of work and dating, both situations where personal exposure goes way, way beyond what you can learn from stereotypes. In particular, the desire to abstractly characterize women reflects a sad attempt to depersonalize, out of fear, what should be a very personal, individual relationship. (Don't try to tell me that the guys driving these discussions are all dealing with aggregates of women -- they wish they were dealing with aggregates of women, because dealing with individual women is too confusing and distressing for them.)

Second, hiring a babysitter is a terrible example of making a snap decision based on age and sex. I've never heard of parents hiring a babysitter without personal familiarity or references. Lots of grandmothers are incredibly ignorant about child care, even downright irresponsible. Hell, in areas where meth is popular, I bet grandmothers do a lot more meth than 13-year-old boys.

Hiring guys to do heavy lifting is actually a decent example, but I've never seen any discussions on the internet about how to pick good workers from the crowd of day laborers hanging out near Home Depot. Do you take the young, wiry guy or the gray-haired guy who's built like a tank? Are tattoos a bad sign? You haven't read any discussions like that on HN. No, instead, people talk about how to have a deep understanding of women's sexual desires (scary and bad) and moral scruples (even more scary and bad) without actually knowing a woman.
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Looking at journals isn't the only way to do it. You can take encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries, and check for citations and mentions there.

Funnily enough, one such attempt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Accomplishment) finds that per capita scientific achievement seems to start declining around the 1920s or 1930s, which is also (with WWII and whatnot) the beginning of the modern university system.
The network interface in general on most operating systems seems kind of absurd from a server point of view. You've got data coming in from N clients. The data from all those clients gets physically multiplexed into a single data stream that comes in over the wire.

Then in the kernel you've got something that demultiplexes it back into N separate streams, which it accumulates in N different buffers.

The server software is aware of all N of these streams. Through some mechanism the kernel notifies the server software that data is available on some subset of the N buffers, and the server software has to ask for that data.

If the server software is using a queue and thread model, it likely then gets that data which the kernel has gone to great effort to demultiplex into N streams and provide it through N separate file descriptors--and multiplexes back onto a single queue for the worker threads to pull from!

Why not get rid of some of this demultiplexing and re-multiplexing? Let me have a single file descriptor, and everything that comes in destined to my port comes through that single file descriptor, as a message with a header that tells what remote IP address and port it came from and the length, followed by that many bytes of data.

Instead of N separate buffers in the kernel, just have one big buffer per port. You'd still have to keep track of how many bytes in that buffer are associated with each remote connection, for purposes of dealing with TCP flow control, but I think this could be made to work reasonably (yes, I'm hand waving right now).

Now you don't need poll or epoll. Heck, you don't even need to use select. I'll just have a blocking thread whose job is to just read that one file descriptor using blocking reads in a loop to pull in data and put it on my queue.

Looking at this slightly different--everything destined for, say, port 80 is going to the web server, so why does the web server want this to come in through N different file descriptors? Especially when you consider that the code its going to run is the same no matter which it comes in on? All the multiple file descriptors are really accomplishing is providing a way to tell which bytes came from which client. Is that really the best use of file descriptors, as opposed to just having the kernel tell you which client the data came from when you do your read system call?

I can see that the N file descriptor model made sense in the days before threads, when to get concurrency you had to use multiple processes. You then need to have data coming in on port X from different clients not necessarily all going to the same process.

But for servers that are going to use the "single process with multiple threads" model to handle concurrency, a single stream network model would seem to be a lot nicer and efficient.
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There's a lot of selection bias here - the majority (all?) of the readers of this site are far more intelligent than the majority.

So all (most? many?) of us will probably agree with her (at least as regarding our own schooling).

I know I do.

But the trouble, the reality, is that most students can't do what she suggests, using our minds for creativity, and not rote work. There really is a difference in intelligence, and the sad truth is that for most students school is exactly right.

The good news is that the really intelligent rise above it and succeed anyway. The lost ones are those that are just a bit more intelligent than the rest, but not quite enough to succeed on their own.
1) Fund lots of science.

Why do we need this? By every metric I know of, governments spend orders of magnitude more on science than they did in the 1800s. Are we getting orders more "Profit!"?
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You will never really be able to tell that you're an expert, if you are an expert. One of the reasons for this is because of the Dunning-Kruger effect in cognitive psychology whereby "the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect)
Go here, center anywhere on Manhattan and type in "cafe": http://maps.google.com

Surprise!! Cafes!! Everywhere!!

Surely more than 5 of those have coders at work.
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When the kernel is executing a function call placed on the stack, all the addresses on the stack are assumed in the same vm space. It does not know that an address is actually a virtual memory address belonging to process X and tries to figure out the value in the physical memory.
Are we not giving first picks to Lamo anymore?

Sorry.
Your mom is rubbish.

(Did you see what I did there? I responded to a worthless comment with an equally worthless one.)
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Workstation Benchmarks: Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu Linux.
- Customers.com: How to Create a Profitable Business Strategy for the Internet and Beyond by Patricia B. Seybold.
- Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application by Jason Fried, Heinemeier David Hansson, Matthew Linderman.

These books top my list of MUST READ for web startup.

Customers.com is very useful if your web company is more service focused. It teaches you how to target the right customers, own the customers total experience, streamline business processes that impact the customer, provide a 360° view of the customer relationship, let customers help themselves, help customers do their jobs, deliver personalized service and foster community.

Getting Real is more for code monkey making their own stuffs. This one I hope for all my bosses to read it. :P
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I'm in the middle of deciding which tools to use. Constant Contact, Mail Chimp, and iContact have a lot of the same functionalities. I think there are a few standard functions you need and the rest comes down to how well you like the software's dashboard environment.
I don't agree with her, well, sure a little. The fact is, like capitalism, the schooling system is the worst system, except for all the others.

And for the majority, it is great for them.

I think this is one of the areas where it is so easy to criticize, because of course there are problems, unless someone actually recommends a good alternative system, I just ignore them.
I would think it could be optimized to be quite efficient, and breakeven value might be possible via the data it throws off -- every Gravatar is a web bug.
Paradoxically, I think some of these businesses 37signals is listing are more interesting than they are themselves. Part of their 'unfair advantage' is simply being famous. Github is famous too, because they took a smart approach to the free/paid split that works out pretty well.
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Don't you think that almost by definition, the more free a society is economically, the more unequal wealth will be distributed? As entrepreneurs, we are certainly aware of this fact in striving to found businesses. In a society where people are not free to easily start businesses, then it becomes very hard to get ahead because there is no way to effectively make oneself more productive, or magnify ones productivity via a business. It seems to me like any act of forcibly taking wealth from those who created it and giving it to others is a perversion of freedom, since it acts against the very freedom which created the disparity.

Not positive that this means that redistribution is absolutely a bad thing, but I also think the argument in favor of it is far from clear. It seems to me like the default would be to leave well enough alone and leave people to keep what they earn in a free society where there would be a separation of economy and state.
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Python 3 lets you have named keyword arguments too. Anything after the star-args is a named keyword argument, and you can have a simple star if you do not want the argument list:

def search(foo, bar, *, baz):

Then, foo and bar would be named arguments, and baz would need to be passed by keyword.
And as a result, we get inferior sodas with corn rather than sugar. The only country with corn soda as far as I know. =(
One could argue that the phrase "this conversation may be recorded for quality assurance purposes" is both a warning (WE may record the conversation) and granting permission (YOU may record the conversation).

Whenever I hear that phrase, I always think "Thank you, don't mind if I do!" :)
I am working on a few finance/trading gigs;

- something similar to timothy sykes' timalerts, with iphone/androoid email/sms option. much coding need to get data out to these platform.

- my trading algorithm for forex and stock. working to translate all these algorithms to codes.
what good thinking gives you when your assumptions are wrong?
Organizations don't even have to be large for this to happen. If you're ambitious there's no place for you to move up finding a new job isn't the only option. People often try to redefine or expand their current job.

When it gets out of control it's a sure sign of a management problem.
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Well, I had a look. Thank you for the reference. It seems like an interesting idea, but I wouldn't use these findings in a casual setting like a job interview. As a lot of reporting on scientific studies, the findings are overstated in the linked blog. (For a quick illustration of "the science news cycle", see: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174 )

This just seems a bit too much like a Rorschach test (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_test#Controversy ), and the interpretation that you can directly come to some conclusion about a job applicant based on what they say about a hypothetical person is even warned against in the actual article:

"First, the studies clearly demonstrate that perceiver effects represent more than simply the projection of an individual’s self-image onto other people."

Projective tests have their uses in clinical psychology (e.g. with the crazies) - but whether you would want to apply them to normal situations is questionable.

"In each study, we found regular relationships between personality traits and perceptions of others. Individuals who perceived others positively reported higher agreeableness (particularly aspects associated with friendliness and low hostility); higher life satisfaction; and lower endorsement of measures of personality disorders, depression, and antisocial attitudes."

In other words, the test is likely to tell you two things: first, how positive you are (which is unsurprising, since positivity is almost by definition related to seeing things and others in a positive light) and second whether you are not totally nuts (e.g. positive people are likely to be associated with lower measures of personality disorders, depression and antisocial attitudes).

But in non-clinical settings - such as in a job interview? "The magnitude of individual differences in the positivity of perceptions of others is fairly large, and individual differences in perceiver positivity impacted judgments of single targets to a considerable degree." That is, the positivity measure is stable, but there is a lot of variance. This suggests that you don't want to use this for finding out much more than how positive a person is - and if that is your sole criteria in a job interview, good luck!

Edit: to clarify that last quote - it basically says that among a normal group of college students, positivity measures have high individual differences and these differences impact judgments to a high degree. So big differences in the results of the measure may be simply explained by individual differences in positivity measures.
It's hard to speak to another's educational experience (I know I've been really fortunate) but is it really as apocalyptic as some of those paragraphs suggest?

"Conditioned to blurt out facts" -- "this period of indoctrination" -- "an educational system that clandestinely sets us up for jobs that could be automated, for work that need not be done, for enslavement without fervency for meaningful achievement"

Nuance is important in arguments and creating pathways for dialog even moreso. But maybe that's not the goal of an 'inspirational' graduation speech.. Despite the last paragraph.
Is that really idiomatic other than for people used to Django's ORM?
Not really, he means the current system is how it is and if you want to there is a way to game it. I know people who took subjects based on their interests, the way it should work, in high school and ended up getting a much lower score than those of similar ability who sort to pick subjects to best maximise their score.

Sure the people picking the interest based subjects may have learned more and got more out of the experience but they failed to get a direct path into something they wanted to do in higher education.

As much as the tide is changing there are still plenty of occupations in which your not going to get anywhere without the relevant degree.

But yes this is a tangent from the point being made, which is a good one.
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They said above that they were turning the conditions into XML in the request. That's one of the reasons why C# expression trees were out.
Privacy being such a gentle word to describe what's at stake.
To a financial professional (or at least to me), the info that's available without signing up is a little vague. It would be great if you could clarify things in the details pages. Maybe a demo or tour?

How exactly are you optimizing portfolios? If I had to guess from the description, I'd guess you guys just cracked open "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" and made a big if/else chain based on people's age as to how much they should invest. Is there any kind of mean/variance optimization going on here?

Also, how are you determining which funds are "similar"? Is it just the description of the assets or are you actually calculating correlations of returns and finding historically similar assets?

Are you guys a registered RIA? Your terms of service say that you are not providing financial advice, but I'm curious as to how that actually holds up. I mean your company name is "future advisor" and you are recommending people invest in different areas based on dschobel's comment. That seems like advice to me.
Like Spotify? More like Last.FM with a cheap AIR client. In fact the main reason I love about Spotify is the state-of-the-art desktop client.
Don't you incur large potential liabilities by dispensing financial advice over the internet?
Ask HN: What softwares that train advanced math skills? 
Such as Calculus, Differential Equations, Topology.. etc..

The online training software at khanacademy.org is still too rudimentary, at least at this moment, though I like the idea very much.
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<rant>

ok, for all you school-haters out there on HN, one thing that i think is often overlooked in the 'discussion' of how public schooling is such a mind-numbing rote memorization grind is the fact that it is a way of developing grit, discipline, whatever you call it ... the ability to endure through boring or tedious tasks to achieve some measurable goal. i think that for most people, the biggest determiner of 'success' or 'happiness' in adult life isn't raw intelligence or inspiring creativity, but rather the ability to just finish something! even the most anti-establishment f*-the-man entrepreneurs here on HN would never have succeeded in their businesses without GRIT.

how many friends do you know who say "oh i'm so much smarter than all these tools who got good grades" but then they can never actually finish any one of their 'divinely-inspired' projects because they quit as soon as some part gets tedious or boring?

in short, yes, public schooling can be improved in many ways (so can the registration process at the DMV or other bureaucracies), but i hope people out there realize the value of developing grit through doing seemingly boring rote work.

</rant>
I've never used Spotify, but I'd equate rdio to lala with a subscription pricing scheme instead of last.fm. I agree with you on the desktop client though. It is sub-par.
You're misquoting Churchill and objectively inaccurate. The USA version's of capitalism and schooling are not ideal for our culture or the world as a whole.

There are plenty of alternatives.
Engine Yard just keeps snapping up all the talent.

When's EYConf? They should just start doing their own, and start making some bucks off the conference circuit.
Ah yes, I find myself wondering: how to explain to younglings that even more important than the realization that one needn't conform to the status quo (and indeed one might reject one's entire frame of reference) is that the truth -- rejecting only those things you can honestly, authoritatively reject -- is a much more sustainable approach, even though it takes longer and appears harder. But, within one's expanding limits, hard things are efficient. They're dense. You solve hard things, and then you can easily solve easy things.

If the idea is to maximize innovation and happiness in the world -- it's a little bit trickier than everyone should start rejecting things too cavalierly and promoting their own innovative ability to quote H.L. Mencken.

But that's not to knock the speech at all. I think it's a great part of the conversation about what really is the best way to prepare high school students? And how do we get there? Identification of a large problem is key. A key prick of conscience at the beginning of many large solution spaces.

But if I were to say one thing it would be:

Be as truthful as you can.

ETA. I really shouldn't joke about 'younglings'. Although there is an argument to be made about appreciating the benefits of any situation (even misguided high schools have enviable qualities and resources, in a certain light). But it's really bad these days. Getting into college is 2-3x as hard as it was a decade ago, just on admissions rates (let alone how that factors into other qualities and explodes exponentially into other headaches). And economic hard times exacerbate things dramatically. In that sense, this speech is increasingly pertinent. It's important to jolt people into a much more focused approach to high school education. But also, in a certain light, I guess what I'm saying is that challenges are what you make of them. It's easy to make speeches as you're leaving. Even if the speeches end on the idea of coming back some day.

But the key thing is to solve actual problems.
How are you people measuring this time to travel? It seems a lot of people here only count the time on the train, disregarding the time it takes to get to the train station, wait for a train, and get from the station to the destination.

It seems people talking up this method always minimize the journey.
I'm guessing not even the US.

You don't go to a specialized HS (Hunter, Stuy, Bronx Sci) in NYC and graduate low in your class and get a scholarship.

You're lucky to get into a school. MIT isn't looking for 12 people from the same HS, even if they're all geniuses...they want diversity.
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Amy Louise Jackson is a British film model, actress and Miss Teen World 2008. Jackson is from Knowsley, Liverpool, United Kingdom. She plays an important role of female lead in debut her film in Tamil film, Madrasapattinam, a period drama set in 1945. After winning the Miss Teen Liverpool and Miss Teen Great Britain pageants, and hard work, she was crowned Miss Teen World 2008 when she was seventeen years old.