skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>But the problem is that we do not need the best teachers in the world, we need a lot of teachers. A good teacher in a class of 40 doesn’t help a thing.

The conventional wisdom on class sizes is being challenged currently.

>Hendrik Verwoerd was not the be all and end all of the NP government. You know that many of the policies changed after him?

In the 1970's, well after Verwoerd's demise, a black child's education got 10% of the funding given to a white child.

>There are many reasons why those businesses moved (from high crime to non-functioning municipalities). The fact of the matter is that work and businesses are now far from where many employees work. So they have to rely on non-existent transport (such as taxis or horrible metro lines) each day to commute 30km+.

This is a rather strange argument. The reason why blacks, Indians and Coloureds have historically lived so far from their workplaces is that the apartheid government (literally) forced them out of urban centres and onto the periphery of urban areas.

Transport infrastructure was neglected for 20 years, starting in the 1980's, and continuing under Mandela and much of Mbeki's tenure. The taxi industry/mafia was deregulated in the late 80's by the apartheid government. Car-centric urban sprawl also first took hold under the apartheid government (even today, mass transit between the black areas of Soweto and white-flight Sandton, established in the late 70's is nonexistent).

If the Apartheid economic model of decentralised and seperate development was so worthwhile, why was did that government have to run up massive deficits to support the system? Communist countries also enjoyed low unemployment, just as Apartheid South Africa did, thanks to similarly massive misallocations of resources, and coercion, in pursuit of a failed ideology.

Apartheid was declared a Crime against Humanity, with good reason. The only place where pro-apartheid revisionism gets much currency is in obscure corners of the internet.
A faster domain name search tool
Just found this... funny site - reload the page and read the different instructions.
No hack will help in the long-term:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_syndrome

Look on the positive side: by sleeping from 4-5am to 9-10am, you have both day and night! While "normal" people have only day and evening.
Sure, the 1st, 2nd and purported 3rd wave feminists all have different takes on gender roles and society.

But given what i know about the 1st wave feminists and the suffragettes, i'm surprised to hear tell that there was involvement that would be worth mentioning (in the sense of the entire movement) any more than you could claim that all republicans are pro-life, or that all democrats are pro-business.
People aren't making money from your work.
It's just the same as contributing code to an OSS project.
Fake goods are fine, says EU study
One of the Most Influential Women in Technology in 2009 and 2010
I made a clitd script I back when I had a box set up at highschool. If anyone tried to connect to standard tcp services that I decided were not supported (time/port 7 and such), I would add their subnet to hosts deny for a day. It was pretty useful for fending off attacks that pre-empted with a port scan.
The only reason to do that is if you want the compiler to check for typos: HTPP is caught, "htpp" isn't. It makes no sense for single letter constants of course.
It's been regulated in the Netherlands for decades, but is't only been entirely legal for a few years. It still hasn't completely stamped out illegal immigrants being forced to prostitute themselves though. These girls are afraid to be sent back to where they came from and they don't pay taxes so they're a lot cheaper (and more willing to do deviant things)
I just posted a logo and I am a design talent vacuum!
I wish there was more explanation for the "never use a false identity" bullet point. Your real identity is out, surely? Does this mean avoid having to use an identity at all? What if you're forced? (pulled over, etc.)
That's the most multi-layered comment I've ever read. I'm not sure how to respond :-)

I've brought it down to 3.24k in the meanwhile. Maybe I'll get there eventually!
While that book is a great classic on product development, it's not strictly about hacking.
Partner is not synonymous with "Programmer". At least not in English not sure where you come from. Learn to read and stop being an asshole.
Thanks for all the info.

Also, they seem to include the heater these days: http://www.mreinfo.com/civilian/mre/civilian-mre-comparison....
Is smoking still popular in the field?
But the false claim is that only 10% of your CPU ever gets used. They're saying you never turn on the floating point circuitry, but you can if you buy this book.
In addition, the server and all infrastructure, are completely open source. Mozilla doesn't really build anything that it can't open source.
I don't think legal templated emails are particularly harmful provided your targeting is sufficiently precise for the content to be relevant to most of the recipients even without you knowing explicit details of their individual circumstances

"Are people more likely to actually express an interest in buying the product than unsubscribe?" is probably a good rule of thumb (and that goes for opt-in emails as well)
I wonder what results a study into the differences in brain function (eg fMRI scans etc) between recalling normal memories and "fake" memories, perhaps using machine learning, might turn up? I wonder if such techniques could distinguish between real memories and fake repressed memories...

They've had success with "mind reading" already http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-mechani...
Agile Development: A quickstart guide to doing it right
Interesting, when I built http://cQuery.com (Content Query Engine), I investigated a number of options html parsing and content extraction options. I had played with Rhino and John Resigs env.js (http://ejohn.org/blog/bringing-the-browser-to-the-server/) to run jQuery server-side.

For portability, performance and flexability I finally settled for writing my own HTML parser and CSS selection engine from scratch.
It's true the legalization of prostitution hasn't solved the problem of human trafficking in the Netherlands. The hope once was that legal prostitutes would lower demand for illegal ones, just like legal marijuana has all obliterated the demand for the illegal stuff. That hasn't worked but the legal prostitutes are still a good deal better off then when they were outside the law and nobody is considering making it illegal again.
Not quite so, I do tend to stand in the hall - it is quite short, I would end up walking back and forth. But I do walk, read and type quite a bit. I will go outside and walk around campus if I need to write a chunk of code. I also regularly walk/run from home to campus (mile and a half). On the way in I use the time to catch up on email and plan out my day. I use the walk home to clean up any work related loose ends and transition to home tasks. -Greg
The article seems to reiterate what was posted on http://msftkitchen.com/2010/06/windows-8-plans-leaked-numero...
Hindi doesn't have capital letters either. I think we recognize a name more by it's context than the case of the first letter. If I found a hindi word I didn't recognize, I would still be able to tell if it were a name or not. Perhaps caps exist for purely stylistic reasons.

I wonder what would happen if someone did a design study of showing all caps vs sentence case text to people who have never seen English. Wonder which one would they say looks better.
I have generally no problems with this. I am a type 3.

I am totally convinced emotionally that if I tell people about my nerdy interests carefully, they will understand that the subjects are the coolest things on (and off) the planet.

My saving grace is that I have so many nerdy interests that I can speak to most people anyway.

My message is: You don't need to fear me, just start talking about sports. Baseball is good, if you want to see real fear in my eyes.

It is OK if you don't know anything about sports, you can bluff me. :-)
So the alternative is HTML5 and using the Canvas. But is that really a good idea with the current state of adoption in browsers and standardization being at an early stage?

Consider RaphaelJS (http://raphaeljs.com). You get SVG running identically in all major browsers, even IE 6, without a plug-in. The model is clean and consistent and it's performant.
This guy Till is awesome, real world examples/strategy to scale with CouchDB

http://till.klampaeckel.de/blog/archives/95-Operating-CouchD...

http://till.klampaeckel.de/blog/archives/84-A-toolchain-for-...

here's his github: http://github.com/till
Check out org-babel.

http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/
Habits of Mathematical Minds
Can anyone tell what is the job aspects in Cloud Computing?
Hello guys,

I just want to know what are all the job aspects in the cloud computing area especially in the back-end area of cloud.
The Perl 5 world seems to change quite a lot every few years. If people have an old install, perldoc might be out of date. Wouldn't it be better to just add an URL at the top of the page to a page at perl.org and put the best practices for CPAN there?
Correct bracketing would be plenty in this case. If-statements sometimes (not always) make code much less readable than ternary operations.
But he's actually not knowledgeable or good at what he does -- if you view his Github page, you'll see that his projects are 100-line thefts or wrappers around other people's work.

He's been a major drain/drag on the Node.js community, and makes the IRC channel a toxic wasteland for a good part of the day.

He trolls other sites as well... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrkDqh9ZVog
How much money does procmail make?
Punk'd, Iraqi-Style, at a Checkpoint
Isn't that what unit testing is for?
Why read the transcript of one of the world's greatest presenters?
A VC: What A CEO Does (continued)
This is a fully working chess program with graphics. In 1024 bytes of JS. o_0
Garage Transmitter
All Zappas garage door remotes is a multi award winning, australian owned company with its head office in Sydney. We sell all remotes for all major brands in Australia.
Dude, for fuck's sake. Intelligence and stupidity don't necessarily become key differentiators until after you achieve a reasonable measure of intellectual freedom and individual sovereignty. Where by 'you' I mean 'you and most people around you'.

On balance it's better to be a smart person, that only goes so far when you are malnourished and worked 18 hours per day in a gulag. Or when you simply had to quit school before puberty in order to obtain food for yourself or your loved ones.

Finally: go to China and ask the people you meet how stupid they think it would be not to build a 'democratic society'. You will be politely educated and/or ridiculed, and realize that you are projecting your own (basically correct) way of thinking onto people who don't think your way at all.
Ask HN: Is working for parts in a business a good deal?
TL;DR: I have a product worth ~20k€. The client startup propose we invest in his business for a cheap price. Is that a good deal?

Hello,

my friend and I worked during our spare time. We met the CEO of a startup who was interested to work with us and we made a deal with him: he offered us €4000 for the delivery of a product (setup of server + application development). We all knew (he and us) that the real value of our work was much behond this price but as he was our first (and only client at that time)... we sealed the deal.

After that step he told us he would be interested to work with us for the steps to come.

Here is his deal:

- He asks to pay today €3500 each to get 5% of the shares of his startup
- We give him
* the iPhone application we are currently developping
* the improvement of the product we developed during the first step
- He will pay us €3500 in return each for the products mentionned above (this is a way to show us that the €3500 we pay the shares will not be lost for us)

In 12 and 18 months timeframe, he will offer us some stock options (for free). In 18 month we should then have 7.5% of the shares each.

The problem I see is the that the work we provide him cost around 20k€ and not 3.5k€.

Knowing I have a relatively good confidence in the success of his startup. Do you think it is a good deal? If not what should I ask for?
The red cone one looks like an undercover ruby ;-)
Nothing.

Did you notice his line at the end, "Ok I made that all up right in this comment box." ? That kind of implies that the Zen labels were not to be taken seriously.
Melatonin. Much better than conventional sleep pills.
The State Monad in Python terms
what do they say?
This article only shows that some C programmers are not able to think at an higher level than whatever their compiler sees. They don't understand that a programming language standard is not a style guide.
In a untrained person, at maximum effort you can activate about 30% of the fibres in a muscle. Not the same 30% every time obviously, that's just what your nervous system has the power to drive. In a trained athlete that goes up to around 50%. Now that's intriguing; if an untrained person could achieve full activation (say in a moment of dire need) they could more than triple their strength...
So far I am liking the one marked 'original logo'...
I doubt that it's physically possible for a phone battery to last a whole year at 100% even when it's turned off.
If you are using Java you could use HtmlUnit which has fairly good JavaScript support (including AJAX).
Dear csabi,

This is the fifth completely trivial article you've posted to HN in the last 24 hours. I appreciate your enthusiasm, but this really isn't the place for absolute beginner articles on C++, or any language, unless the language is new, weird, and mind-expanding.

Please, take some time to look around first, and notice that the stuff here that people appreciate is somewhat deeper than the articles you've lunk to.

Thanks.
Level 0: The cellphone conversation

Maybe this is a little bold to be stating on a tech-oriented blog, but I dread having a conversation about cellphones. I don't care what kind of cellphone you have. I don't care that you care what kind of cellphone I have. I don't want to talk about what kind of apps I use, or the new features, or the latest goddam iPhone.

Its probably because the conversations are usually so freaking trite and predictable, and 99% of the time no one has anything interesting to say about their cellphones, my cellphone, or what kind of cellphone they want and deserve. It's also a reminder of the consumer culture we live in and it makes me feel like a yuppie when I'm fighting my hardest to avoid becoming one.

That all said, I inevitably end up in them, and a part of me dies every time, even as I smile and laugh and talk about the great speech recognition on my 3GS and how AT&T sucks.
Detecting and Correcting Dead Shortcuts on Windows
I really, relly like the urban myth about polygraphs.

There was this man, and he was not confessing. Thus, creative police officers got a lettuce sieve, attached it with some wires to a copier and put a paper reading "He lied" on the copier.

Given this, they put the sieve on his head and whenever he said something they had a slight doubt about, they pushed the lie detector button and the lie was "detected". Eventually the man confessed.

Its an urban legend, but it illustrates the point quite nicely in my opinion.
That's part of it, but old media like CNN and the New York Times are losing revenue because of Craigslist (among other things); I doubt it's a coincidence that they are targeting them.
we should go back to that embedded shellscript thingy that was common back in the day. Its name escapes me.
Rare colour footage of the Blitz
Realizing that fear of failure lowers self esteem and increases the chance to fail is a very strong step.
You're only considering one of the three parties; the spammer.

Party #2 is the spammee: "they can always unsubscribe" shows a callous and naive disregard for the depth of the problem. The spamee has incurred a small cost in time to deal with this particular spam; this may not seem much but soon multiplies; If the spammer is now dealing with tens of crap messages, on their mobile phone, during a ten minute lunch break, the spammers have just suceeded in breaking the spammee's email system. Completely.

Party #3 is the legimate email sender. Sending email is now so complicated that legimate mail users must delegate to ever more technically proficent third parties to deliver legitimate mail, and the deliverability of mail between consenting parties is compromised.

Whether or not they "subscribed" is irrelevant, due the number of ways people get "subscribed". What they actually wanted was the item they purchased online, or the service they are paying for, or whatever; not an inbox full of special offers.

Interestingly, this debate is about to blow up in a different area. The cost of access to the PSTN from disposable numbers is collapsing thanks to competition in the VOIP space, most PSTN terminals have zero filtering, and unlike email, the PSTN started being used for important stuff long before anyone started abusing it. Voice spam will be huge in 2011.
I wore-out my welcome, I know. It's their site. Downvoting leads to monoculture as people vote against things they disagree with. Linux people can ban anybody against Linux and most of these sites are full of Linux people. Atheiest, too. No surprise.

That part, I understand, but the broader question of my reality is questionable -- 6000 downloads and only 3 emails in 3 years, all of which from fake people. No suprise, considering all the other unusual aspects of my reality.
Starting-up while the head of household is a tough decision. It has to be well thought out since it's not just you. I took the approach of establishing my management consulting firm first, then used this income to fund my start-up and ensure a stream of revenue while in start-up mode. I have others doing some of the consulting work to keep that business going. Something to consider
and to avoid silly warnings from some static analysis software (e.g. findbugs telling you you are repeating a hardcoded string N times and you could use a constant)
Ask HN: Would you pay for email?
The recent startup idea from Matt Cutts reminded me of one of my own. Imagine an email service that acts as a proxy between email senders and your inbox. The senders however have to pay an arbitrary amount of money to get an answer (I won't go into other details, I think you get the point). This seems logical as your time is precious and (in some cases) you should be rewarded for answering emails. This would also filter out spam. On the other hand, my perception of such a service is that it's evil. That's the main reason why I haven't pursued the idea. It certainly would not replace standard, free email, but I can see how people would hate this.

What do you think? Do you also see it as evil or would you appreciate this service?
You can't successfully own code that you don't control.

I believe that the best outcome for both of you would be 20% of time set aside for refactoring and increasing test coverage. Sure you'd want more but features have to roll out too. Management may not realise that refactoring that much is necessary.

You may have to pad out estimates of new work, and say things like "in order to do that we'd have to understand the guts of the foo subsystem, and make sure that we don't break it while we change it, so we'll have to put tests around it while we change the code" while mentally adding a week's time refactoring and adding unit test coverage to foo to your estimate. Grease the moving parts - things that change once tend to change again, and you'll be happier the second time around.

If you can't even do that, ask them what they mean by "take ownership". Maybe they just want you to the go-to-guy for that particular monster. Say what would do if you really owned it. If you are completely overruled, you may have to be blunt and point out that this is not ownership in any non-bullshit sense.

If that fails, as the wise man said: if you can't change your company, change your company.
Okay, be naive and don't even read my comment. Nowhere is going to legalize the sex trades when it goes hand in hand with organized crime.

I know here in Ontario many apartment buildings can actively discriminate against sex workers, drug dealers or anyone working illegally and they can do it quite simply: rent isn't accepted in cash. If you're getting paid in cash, you're not paying taxes and if the government catches a paper trail then you'll be in jail and they'll investigate every iota of your life.

Or, like I suggested, the government performs the actions any employer does: pay your income taxes, pay your Employment Insurance, pay your Pension; pay the rest to you. If you don't want to accept the government taking the money that by law they are entitled to through you earning a living, then you will always be illegal.

Either be realistic or stay illegal and naive. Governments will not allow a business that has been hand-in-hand with organized crime to simply go legal and allow the mob their easiest opportunity to money-launder in existence.

If you don't believe your transactions aren't already being monitored, you obviously don't have a bank account. I've seen people's accounts locked for buying a laptop, putting in a check, taking out $200. My UK card got locked when I first used it in Canada. I don't get why you'd be adverse to the government checking to make sure you're not depositing large sums into foreign bank accounts when your own bank already checks every detail of your spending to ensure it doesn't break pattern.

I'm sorry if you took offence by what I said, but I really don't give a damn if you're too naive to see the real world. You honestly sound like every whining moron who doesn't want the government taking their income tax.

Here at HN we like to discuss things. You add nothing to this discussion but the tired old dogma of the victim. You provide no justification of why the government shouldn't be taking the taxes they're entitled too, you provide nothing.
Maybe it's different in the USA, but having studied in the UK I find the jab at the olympic class sports facilities a bit populistic to say the least.

The University is a place with a LOT of young people, so already putting a sport facility there is a good idea (the ones here are always very much used). Second at least where I have been, they are open to local residents too, who can therefore benefit from good facilities.

Finally I am a bit discouraged when one day I hear we need to do something to incentive sports and lower obesity, and the next they shoot on the sports facilities of unis. To me it seems a lot like sour grape: "I don't have it so you shouldn't either".

Edit: Oh, forgot to point out that there is such strong competition between unis, that good sports facility are a very easy and relatively cheap way of getting students to apply, and hence to get money for the rest of the uni.
re: not trusting the BBC - smart move. I'm from England and lots of people regard it as the most unbiased source out there, that and the guardian but if you step back and look critically at them you realise just how bad things are. I'd advise anyone to swingby medialens.org and read some of their articles and buy their books, especially their new one. Unblievable stuff.
Boost brain with 11 hours of meditation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shar
tar never cared about encryption or compression because mostly you would get them "for free" in your tape library anyway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Compression
I like the idea. Unfortunately the 'Empire State Building' page takes me to a particularly rural part of Algeria.