skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of the controversy comes from the reality that there's no single definition for unschooling so it can range from montessori style progressive education in which facilitators help the independent learner explore a curriculum of their own choosing, right through keeping the children chained in a basement and fed raw potatoes and water. Everyone would agree the latter is abuse and not really homeschooling or unschooling, but the minute fraction of parents with children chained up in basements are of course going to claim that the children are homeschooled in order to explain why they aren't in school.

In between there are parents who allow their children to play in meadows each day as Rousseau recommended, to run their own private web business at age 11, as well as those who feel that watching TV and playing video games for several hours a day is educational.

Overall, most unschoolers produce kids more educated and capable than public school graduates.

This is mostly possible due to the poor state of public schools in general, which comes from trendy theories and government muddling rather than any lack of funding or talent.
This is the thing I'm most excited about for the future of the internet. Forget Amazon - anyone with an internet connection has access to audio and video lectures, notes and classwork from Harvard, MIT and others. Almost anything you want to learn can be picked up online, and (illegal though it is) any book you want to read can be found online.

But the best part is, this hasn't sunk in yet. So few people understand that the world has gotten to a stage where you can get a university-level education by yourself, based on what you feel like learning, from the comfort of your own home.

I love this for two reasons. Firstly, I imagine that 20 years from now, when this fact starts changing the world, that the world will be a much better place for it. And secondly, as a person involved in tech (and entrepreneurship), I have the ability to take part in the creation of this brilliant future. A great time to be alive, I think :)
What about when you're me and you sell firearms, ammunition and firearm accessories? You're banned until you have enough money to pay them. It can be frustrating.

Edit: I'd love to hear some alternative options on how to advertise on large networks (small firearm only networks haven't done much).
Excel 2010 :)
Yours is easier to read. Wasn't wasted.
Cool thanks, I'll remove it.
15 tips every computer geek should know to stay healthy
In related news. Irony is apparently dead.
Well I'm adding Last.fm support to my clients very soon. And my API (not yet released) is based on Last.fm's API. So soon you won't have to switch. You can use both!

I can't say about Spotify since I've never used it, but how strong is their social component? Can you use the service, share links, and browse profiles via a browser for Spotify? It seems Spotify is for listening to music like an iTunes replacement, where Like.fm is for analyzing and sharing what you listened to (the info). So we have different focuses.
> "A company with $200K per year revenue with a single person and no plans to “exit” would be a failure in YC"

It might not be what YC is after but I don't think it they'd consider it a failure either. Am I wrong?
I said unlike everything else, not everywhere else. Gasoline is the only thing I can think of in Canada for which the advertised price includes taxes.
Because the article mentioned not memorizing the alphabet, I thought I could ask a question I've been pondering on a while.

Beyond looking at print indexes and dictionaries, is there any compelling reason to learn the order of the alphabet anymore? Lists are often in alphabetical order but it's not a strict requirement to know the ordering to use those lists, and most datasets online have search. As do digital dictionaries. Could the relentless switch to all-digital content make the alphabet only a cute, optional thing to memorize?
The irony of Steve Jobs not liking onerous terms for getting app approval is almost too much.
Really interesting and (should the authors read this) thanks a ton for sharing it. I am curious about one thing. I sort-of already know the answer, but will ask anyway: I saw in the post that you used Pusher for handling your realtime updates across clients (looks like a very cool service, btw). Isn't part of the strength of node.js and socket.io that things like push-based client/server apps are/should be trivial to implement without resorting to a third party service? If so, did you try? And do you know if other node knockout apps use pusher? (I assume that a: it saved a little time and b: was an easy way to get around Heroku's current connection limits, but want to know if there was more to it than that).
how is Match.com still charging $30/month when Plenty of Fish is still pretty much free?

100% branding and brand ranks probably at the top when it comes to things that people perceive as "serious" - like finding a mate.
Exactly what do you mean by "Swedish consumption level"? Do you think we have 14" TV's and live on ramen here?
Android iPhone clients aren't high on my list, as I'm not sure what I can do for them. They might be useful for scrobbling TV shows and Movies you watch (a future target area) or manually scrobbling tracks. Was there something you had in mind for mobile clients?
As a result of their tax rate and size of government? That's ridiculous.

Denmark is wealthy and comfortable because it's full of Danes. I bet you Danes in the US are even wealthier and more comfortable than Danes in Denmark.
Canon's Omnidirectional Camera is 50 Megapixel Eye That Looks Everywhere
Airlines wouldn't exist in the "free market". Are you arguing that air travel has no net value?
It's definitely something I've been looking for - I do wish there were a demo video!
> Twitter's approach to OAuth is obviously misguided, but it gets even crazier when you compare the company's implementation against the actual standard. The OAuth specification itself describes the secret key security issue and says explicitly that implementors should not do what Twitter is trying to do:

That's embarrassing, considering Twitter's prominent role in designing the original OAuth specification. http://oauth.net/about/
Importing is a great idea, but it seems Last.fm's API restricts using user data for commercial purposes. While I'm not commercial yet, I have intentions on becoming commercial. I'm not sure how well importing would work but it's definitely something I'm looking in to. I guess I could let the user somehow export their own data, if that's even possible, and import it themselves.
Long-form reading isn't dead.  We're going longer.
Most people with the freedom to choose believe the benefits of time off do not exceed the costs.

Cite?
I don't understand why Google can't bother to put together a solid app distribution platform. They advertise apps because apps drive phone sales, but the apps suck compared against the iPhone. The distribution platform is too awful for developers to care. Global delivery is weak. But it's all almost there. Why can't Google just finish building the platform?
Hire Great Guessers
I think a better solution might be more along the lines of system-supported (as in linked to the full app) trial applications that can be upgraded in place, along with the application provider being able to specify if refund is allowed or not. Maybe not shareware style where the license server unlocks the app since that's usually pretty easy to crack open, but two different apps that the system treats the same.

It's frustrating trying to find the free vs. paid application and then having to upgrade and potentially lose settings defined in the free one. This was the case when I had an iPhone and is now the case with Android.

But an ability for trying an app is essential. On the iPad I find it incredibly frustrating how many apps I am interested in that don't seem to have a trial program. So I'm being asked to spend $6-10 for an application that I have absolutely no clue if it's good or not. At $1 I can justify that, but $10 is a meal and isn't so easily just tossed aside.
My favorite part of the article: "When I encounter a woman I find relatable succeeding in tech, I hunt her down and I interrogate her. I’m desperate for examples of how to do this, how to carve out a path for myself in this world as myself,..."

Translation: "I'm desperate to follow in someone else's footsteps while carving out a path for myself. And that person needs to have breasts!"

Strangely, she seems to think her problem is that she can't find someone to follow, rather than the fact that she is desperately trying to be a follower.
They say employees could see even higher costs in their plans come open enrollment for 2011.

I just got the notice this morning from my HR department. They say that company contribution as a percentage of cost will remain constant (the company is subsidizing 90% for employee-only coverage). However, the actual rate is increasing 12%, so the employee contribution is also increasing 12%.

The notice explicitly stated that the increase in cost is due to expanded coverage as required by the Affordable Care Act.
I've subscribed for as long, and Netflix occupies the same place in my lifestyle. It's a testament to just how great the core service is that they could make some very bad decisions, such as removing the entire social subsystem of friends, lists, and notes, yet not once did the thought of canceling cross my mind.
Steve Jobs made a similar point in a speech to a graduating university class. He mentioned how he popped into classes just because they looked interesting, even if they weren't part of his curriculum, and said it's a great thing to do. He gave one example: he went to a class on typography just cause it sounded fun. As he put it, the only reason Macs have decent typography is because of what he learned in that class.
Didn't the same article get written around the advent of radio, motion pictures, and TV? Books are an incredibly dense conveyor of knowledge. In the hands of a good author they are far superior to a collection of smaller articles (think unifying theme). Sure, I expect the addition of other media inside electronic books will probably hurt the paper book, but it is still a book.

// I really hate every generation writing an article about how the next generation doesn't understand discipline / concentration.
I thought it was refreshing to read an article by somebody who was obviously involved - rather than just a puff piece written by a PR person who had never seen a helicopter
Americans all know Swedes primarily subsist on 99 cent soft serve ice cream cones.
Great article. I have been trying to implement a lot of those points that you make.

If you really need to try and drink something other than water I would recommend Apple juice. It's really the only thing you can find that is 100% pure all the time. Even OJ isn't something especial if it's from MinuteMaid.

For taking breaks I would recommend a few applications a computer geek can download.

Mac OSX: TimeOut: http://www.dejal.com/timeout/, AntiRSI: http://tech.inhelsinki.nl/antirsi/

Linux: Workrave: sudo apt-get install workrave or http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/workrave/

Windows: Workrave works for windows as well, Bigstretch: http://www.monkeymatt.com/bigstretch/
At first I thought this was another "launch" of a skinned, Google custom search. Those tend to fade away when the curator loses interest, etc.

But looking at your about page it seems to be different, looks like you're doing an interesting and useful thing to find/index talks, good luck with the site!

I like the all-slide thumbnail view, that will be really useful.
I think WM7 will be at least a modest success for Microsoft. The Android handset makers are pushing the platform in a weird direction. Larger handsets & more software complexity. I think there's probably a lot of people out there who don't want either an iPhone or an Android device for various reasons. Most of them are probably RIM users today due to the simplicity of BBOS. WM7 will be a legitimate option for them. I could see WM7 having a 10-20% market share within a few years.
Could there be an AirBnB for planes?
I think it's a sweet spot. For $9 a month my wife and I don't need to discuss it. For $30 a month recurring, one we'll discuss it, and two, we'd better see a lot of value.

The price is at a point where even if we're busy and don't watch more than 1 or 2 movies that month, we won't mind, because of the convenience of having them instantly available via streaming, and knowing that the price is low.

It's low effort, high convenience.
A binary search on a sorted list can only work if you know whether the item you're looking for is earlier or later in the sequence. Not knowing the order of the alphabet is like not knowing the order of the numbers 0-9. You have to fall back to a linear search, which is prohibitively slow for many day-to-day operations.
Whoever prefers the hassle and crappy experience of using Bittorrent instead of spending a few bucks a month for Netflix, their money isn't worth chasing. It would be like Econolodge trying to market to the homeless population.
"Ask NH"? Is this question for residents of New Hampshire only?

Barring that, first off:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License

Basically, looks like FSF suggests that any software that would run over a network (like a web application, web service, etc.) should be AGPL rather than GPL.

I like the MIT license, because while I love free software, I don't want businesses hindered from using it.
Agreed, it's huge. And there is more to come due to the flexible plug-in model.

BTW. The mockup of your CMS looks impressive.
Anecdote: I have multiple relatives, including a police officer, who are dumb as a rock about how computers work, but through their friends have managed to pick up on how to use BitTorrent + Pirate Bay to pirate not only movies but music. And they see nothing wrong with this behavior, in an extremely conservative portion of Ohio; the same people who insist our President is a Muslim Kenyan.

If this sort of use case has penetrated this portion of the population, I'd have to imagine that it's prevalent enough to be at least a tiny competitor to Netflix et al, if not more.
That is an excellent... duology? For anyone tempted, "Fire Upon the Deep" is actually the first book while "A Deepness in the Sky" is a "prequel", but one that is a full force novel and not some blatant attempt to capitalize upon the first.

I keep wondering whether he will ever issue a third book in the series -- there was definitely a potential open thread at the end of "Sky".

Many things now cropping up on the contemporary science and technology horizons, Vinge explored in detail in those two novels. (And, as a personal comment, wow, how progress does keep seeming to accelerate. Those novels are not that old!)
The Pirate Bay alone reports 30 million peers, although it doesn't report uniques so it's hard to tell. But then there are people who just come on, download, and quit.

Really I think the onus of proof would be on anyone claiming that the pirating percentage is insignificant, not the other way around.
I totally agree re: single language/data model instead of spreading time and abilities. It is definitely cool to know a variety of programming languages (and I've used about a dozen of them in commercial work). But it's great to work with a single language from top to bottom -- like we do when writing native apps). In my opinion, it frees-up brain space and cycles.
Ask HN: How to avoid double-post in HN?
Hey, guys. I was going to submit an article to HN. More often than not, the article has been posted already. Aside from clicking through all the New article pages, and manually trying to find key term. There must be a better way.
I left reddit for Hacker News as soon as I discovered it. Aside from the excessive Paul Graham worship (which I suppose is excusable considering this is a Y Combinator experiment), it is a veritable oasis of reasonable, rational people interested in intellectually-stimulating topics.

I found reddit's obsession with trivialities and knee-jerk vitriol against capitalism in general to be disgusting.
This is because the purpose of the OAuth standard was to mitigate the password antipattern, not to holistically solve every security problem.

Since none of the other comments have anything favorable to say about Twitter OAuth, let me make the point that it does accomplish its primary goal

I agree with the writer that OAuth doesn't create a absolutely fool-proof way to authenticate the app itself. However, in terms of authenticating the user, it does much better than the old basic auth scheme (where some apps ended up sending passwords over HTTP).

So Twitter OAuth is a security win from a user perspective.
Princeton, New Jersey -- anyone want to start a coworking space here? ;)
I agree. I make piratable media, and I don't lose any sleep over it. I'm just challenging the assertion that they're not competitors at all.
Why not just search? http://searchyc.com/
Thanks very much.

That's a great idea, I'm going to edit the article and add those links!
Hmm, just when I'll be entering the job market. I wish I knew what that number meant in relative terms, some way of visualizing how much more difficult my job prospects just became.
I've heard this is true as well. I wonder if this one point is because women were liberated from having to stay with their parents, but were still unable to truly support themselves given income discrepancies.
I have to agree about Chromium, but Opera has one of the smallest memory footprints of all the browsers I have. I don't use it much because of the UI, but it sure as hell doesn't take up as much memory as Chromium.
I don't think that's the paper that this particular piece was take from, but maybe I am wrong. It looks to me like this is the actual paper:

http://www.kotlikoff.net/sites/default/files/Comparing%20Ave...
One contradiction I have yet to resolve from the neo-Darwinians: The universality of language is taken as a precondition for our humanity and a legitimate form of scientific study. Yet the universality of religion is taken as an exaptation. The problem for me is that both arguments rely on the same limited evidence. In fact, the evolution of religion may have better concrete evidence if we consider the appearance of human burials. That's at least one place where I'm thankful for religious influences. Saying goodbye is deeply symbolic and I can't imagine what humanity would look like without some form of this basic rite.

Don't get me wrong. Language is extremely important for our cognitive abilities. But while religion may seem more superficial, especially in modern traditions, I don't know how to see humanity without it - past or future.
Not being socially awkward is pretty basic stuff, like: making friends easily, making small talk with strangers (to pass the time or to be polite when meeting friends of friends), knowing what kinds of questions to ask to keep a conversation going, knowing what topics make people feel awkward or offended.

Edit: I'm not the one claiming that all home schooled kids are like this. I'm just answering what social awkwardness means.
Technically they weren't serial killers at all--their killings were not really in series so much as all at once. They were "parallel killers".
1021 byte real-time raytracer in JS. Not cool enough for js1k, though.
This is completely wack. Drinking is only a symptom of a much more serious problem. Taking a drug before you drink is not going to improve your psychological health. This is an obbvious scam, thanks Newsweek.
It seems they don’t understand why it is useful to draw a distinction
between control-C, used to cancel an operation in a terminal environment,
and Command-C, used to copy content in a desktop setting.

anyone know what he's referring to? why is it useful to have a distinction?

Microsoft also added a special key for opening contextual menus...
it’s not only superfluous and clumsy for PCs using two button mice,
but also less elegant than Apple’s convention...

I use the context menu key regularly. using a complex app without ever needing to reach for the mouse is pretty elegant, in my opinion.

Microsoft’s contextual menu key is also typically placed on the right
side of the keyboard, making it even more puzzlingly useless for
right handed users. They’d have to hit the right side of the keyboard
with their left hand while pointing the mouse with their right

I've never once used the context menu key that way, and that's not even how it works. it invokes the context menu of whatever element has the focus, not whatever element is beneath the mouse cursor.

an interesting history with unnecessary and obnoxious editorializing.
I think you're thinking about the parents when you should be thinking about the kids. Let me explain.

As a kid, I spent all my free time reading the encyclopedia. I'm naturally curious, and could probably have learned more researching on my own than going to school. Of course, I'm atypical, but the point is that I didn't so much need instruction as I needed guidance. There are many kids who are like that and will even be held back by traditional methods of education. These kinds of kids deserve a different approach that our current educational system simply doesn't provide.
This is a wildly editorialized and misleading article.

Here is the gist of what Ars Technica is saying: the OAuth "consumer secret" exists as a sort of obscured "user-agent" string, a "hint" to Twitter about what client you're using. Because end-users can usually recover the consumer secret easily by basic reverse engineering techniques, there's no security in them, and therefore they shouldn't be relied on for anything.

Well, almost. But before you get there, note what Ars Technica hasn't reported: anything an appsec professional would term a compromise in Twitter's OAuth security system.

The issue here isn't that attackers can violate OAuth security. It's that Twitter may want to use the OAuth consumer secret as a way to revoke OAuth access to suspect applications. The claim here is that devious malicious people will steal the consumer secrets from popular native applications, abuse them in some overtly scammy way, and get those native apps cut off from Twitter.

That's maybe true as far as it goes, but it ignores the fact that Twitter would face this same problem in a myriad of other ways even without OAuth. It also shellacs Twitter for the failings of OAuth, which was intended to facilitate cooperating web applications, where the consumer secret really does provide some benefit, because it's hidden on web servers that attackers can't readily access.

(Incidentally, native app developers can simply keep consumer secrets on their own servers, which seems to me like using OAuth the way it was designed to be used, rather than as magic cross-platform authentication pixie dust, which it simply isn't).

Has Twitter done everything right here? Probably not. They're the ones promoting OAuth as the preferred standard auth method. The documentation could be clearer as well. But nothing they've done merits an article that suggests they've fielded a bona fide security flaw because of how they handle OAuth.

The rest of the claims in this article --- particular the last page's worth of complaints about obscure errors --- be aware that when it comes to (psuedo-)crypto authentication protocols, it's pretty easy to get dinged for having distinguishable error messages. The best practice is: be as vague as possible whenever possible. At best, Twitter could maybe do a better job with error reporting on a staging server developers could use to prove out their OAuth support. But that's hardly a news story.

I'm prepared to be wrong about anything here. But I think Ars got this one wrong.
That's a nice review - I'm toying with the idea of trying to write a simple hierarchical OLAP database (like Essbase or Hyperion HFM) and trie's seem like a potentially interesting starting point.
Have you tried media buys, both on the big CPM networks and direct?