skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is annoying seeing these posts. However, perhaps there is a great opportunity for hackers in this market.

I've created a bunch of my own videos (like Khanacademy but better) and have been teaching online classes for 5 years at a community college. My experience is that roughly 30% of the students pass my class without any interaction from me. They just need to be pointed in the right direction and need to know in what order the topics should be covered.

This fact, coupled with the fact that all elearning websites suck make for an opportunity. I don't know enough about programming to pull off my ideas on what can be done. There are inefficiences in the market but not as much as articles about academe being the next bubble suggest.
Age and arrogance go in opposite directions.

We are young, smart and arrogant. We all are. We are smarter than everybody else. The older we grow, the wiser; we use our intelligence to gain knowledge and to balance our life and make the lives easier for those around us.

We become less arrogant and more humble as we grow older.
It may be repetitive, but so were the many books and articles about that recent stock market crashes and housing crises. These things matter to a lot of regular people, and by extension they should matter to entrepreneurs.

There's opportunity here.
"What a silly move."

More like, what an infuriating move. Why didn't he take the well-considered advice of the people in the comments? Or post a comment with his intentions so that someone could talk him out of it?
I know from a FOAF^n that FB-mail is real and they are planning to launch soon.
I think in certain circles it has been dissected enough, but I doubt the message has gotten out to the public at large.

It's still a hot button issue for me, at least. When I was in 7th grade, my English teacher had us read Macbeth, Northwest Passage, The Last of the Mohicans, The Red Badge of Courage, and other notable works. We discussed them in detail and wrote essays ad nauseum. It was hard, but we were the better for it.

Last year, in my son's Literature class (note; it's not English anymore - it's Literature), they read a smattering of short stories from a brightly illustrated textbook and his sole "book report" was to make a pop-up book from his chosen novel "Percy Jackson and The Last Olympian" (now a major motion picture!). This was typical of many of his classes - plenty of busy work, but thin on substance. His middle school ranks very well by state standards, but it's just not a solid education, in my opinion.

This isn't a generational issue, either. Kids' minds are as pliable now as they were in previous generations, but I don't think the schools push them enough on the right things.
I'm not sure what to say about this; my son is in 5th grade (in California), and his experience doesn't really resemble what you describe. A plurality of his classmates are 1 or 2 generations removed from East Asia, but relatively few of the teachers or administrators are Asian and nearly all were US educated.
Good Old Games folds with no warning
I don't think that's limited to this particular Ask HN.

It's a pretty good object lesson in what happens when you ask for advice and then proceed to completely ignore it. Kudos for posting the results though.
It's a huge issue that the vast majority of people remain delusional about. It bears repeating. Did you complain about prescient analyses of the housing bubble, too?

"Bubble" might not be a good choice of term for this case because bubbles pop with some dramatic short run consequences. The only way that happens is if the student loan machine suddenly breaks down, and in that case the driving issue will be a broad credit crisis, not the bursting of the education bubble. More realistically diplomas just start "trading" lower and lower over time, as more people and employers simply don't care.
I thought his response, though tactless and blunt, was refreshingly honest. He's running a business and the people in the PR department are not being paid to help students with their term papers. It could have been a learning experience for her but she apparently knows better. Perhaps she should count herself lucky that Steve didn't get to keep his ninja throwing stars when he left Japan the last time.
How Health Care is Bankrupting our Schools and Innovation
Whereas Facebook is trying to waste the time of the most people.
I used to work through lunch. At the time, if I did, I could go home earlier. Since I got to eat (the only part of lunch I care about) and got to go home earlier, too, it was win-win.

They eventually changed their minds and forced me away from the desk for lunch. Now I take a short one (30 minutes) and actually get out of the office. I agree that it's better for my sanity (and probably digestion) but I really liked having that 30 minutes at home instead.
Can you not run multiple memcached instances on the same node? Wouldn't this lower the cost just as much?
Phone as UI for your web app
Re: cartoons, I had a good time watching Reboot with some fellow interns a few years back. Lots of CS in-jokes, and the production issues / tropes are merely fodder for a drinking game.
I'm happy they are working on this; it's been a long time coming IMHO.

There are plenty of pitfalls for sure, but I think it's a great idea.

(Although I do hope they keep working on the client. It's a little buggy...)
Specialization is more efficient. If we all grew our own food, made our own clothes and built our own houses thee would be no time left over to train surgeons or invent computers.
tough luck...have heard quite a bit of unpleasant stuff about Oakland :(
But,why would you want tell the whole world(HN), the exact contents of the mail?

And if he were to follow HN.. with comments about tracing IP, etc .. he might have gotten really scared...perhaps your laptop is enroute to your house!
If you think about it for a second, we still don't have that great mobile-only social app yet. The mobile versions of FB etc. won't cut it if the next 5-10 years are going to be all about mobile.

IMO, FB is extending its vertical with a mobile-only social app AKA the "FB OS."
Most coffee shops fail at their primary function: serving a quality cup of coffee.

In years and years of being cafe-obsessed, I've never seen shop fail that went the extra mile with their drinks, whether by roasting their own beans, training their baristas to competitive levels, or simply buying good beans, milk, and machines.

I read this article some time ago, and didn't see the obsession with coffee shine through. Without that passion, a cafe will be replaced by the next hip or quaint establishment that pops up to cater to idling customers.
FCC's Whitespace Ruling: The Real Wi-Fi Revolution Is About to Happen
Well, I'm about as married as any gay male can be. And my boyfriend has learned to put up with it.

"Also, an issue about being stubborn about the truth is that there can be as many versions of the "truth" as there are actors in the situation."

I'd strongly disagree. Different people may have different pieces of the truth (ie the truth could be "Either person x's approach or person y's approach will work"), they might have different perspectives on the truth (ie the truth could be "person x is right about a, b, c, and d but not e while person y is right about e, f, g, and h but not i"), or they might be arguing about a subject where there is no real truth (see religious people for powerful examples). But where the truth exists it is singular.

When presented with conflicting ideas, the goal is to determine if one is correct or they both are correct. Throwing your hands in the air and saying "The truth is subjective" is a cop-out.
I didn't read it as putting him down at all. This wasn't a competition between the patient and the surgeon about whose medical skills where the best, but about the surgeons skills against the reality of the cyst.
Fighting chaos with well defined goals.
I recently told my five year old, that once he can pick up any of the books we have in his room, and read it, that I will buy him a game console. I was thinking I would get him an XBox, since MS Research has a program that let's kids build their own games, and without their knowing, learn to program. Maybe I should rethink this offer and hedge some.
"If you're out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor." -Albert Einstein

A poorly-presented correct idea is still correct. A well-presented incorrect idea is still incorrect.
I recall there being some talk about taking over some closing prisons in Michigan in the last year or so.

They would save significantly less in Michigan so is that more of a capacity measure than cost savings?
There is nothing wrong with wanting to be a small set up if one is comfortable with that set up. But if the idea of somebody who wants to keep it small is really good, even if he wants to keep it small there may be soon competitors who are ready to copy the idea, put more money and send the small shop to kingdom come.

Sometimes, nay, I change it to every time (especially in the tech industry) size is the best defense against competition (Actually it is size and what advantages it brings along with it)

For a company with a really good idea, if it does not grow really fast enough, it soon becomes blood for the sharks, not the future shark.

Thats the beautiful thing about Google, they so quickly executed the finance aspects (book building IPO), the people aspects (freedom to experiment and generate ideas, free food) and the monetizing aspects (search based ads) of their business, to enable them to keep growing at a breath taking speed. If it hadn't and just kept growing at an attractive pace, but not a furious pace, they would have been bought of by some other tech biggie or attracted more serious competition long back.

And whats wrong with the adage "Aim for the stars and you can at least fall on the moon" (or something like that)
I'd try it out, yes. Preferably simply priced, low enough for me not to have to consider running it myself (which is easy enough as well). I think Amazon let's you price something like this through them and the bill is just part of your aws bill? That would work for me.
you can, but then it's like partitionned.
I'm not sure people would pay for 50 or 100MB memcached near their VPS. That's another question.
Best Tools and Methodologies Are Not Going to Make You More Productive
It's an interesting idea to consider. Assuming that it is reliable and secure I would be interested. If Lonode offered it, for example - because I trust them enough.

Instead of having to worry about adding a new memcache host I'd also love if you could handle it on your end. If all of a sudden I need a crapton of memory my mcahe would "expand". I'd get charged for that crapton.

Just some ideas brainstorming.
Hah, and this is one of the few, few times that I've seen someone online correctly saying that an argument was ad hominem.

Can someone who knows Latin give me a name for the logical fallacy of incorrectly dismissing an argument as ad hominem?
As an iPhone/iPad developer, the thing that pisses me off the most is when users leave a low rating and say "when you implement <feature no one cares about> I'll move it up to 5 stars." This happens all the time. It's blackmail but on a tiny scale, but it does have a real, negative impact.

Just because an app receives some low ratings it doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad app or the developer is an idiot. Sometimes users leave bad ratings just because they can.
This surprises me. Although it may not have been doing as well as they hoped, I'd be stunned if it couldn't be profitable on a skeleton crew - probably one part time guy doing support, and someone doing the accounting once a month. It's a reasonably well known portal, after all. There's probably something else going on, legal trouble or founder dispute or the like.

This reminds me of when iVideoSongs stopped updating. They had very high quality tutorial videos, and I've basically learned to play guitar from them. Having purchased 6 or 8 of the videos after the site was abandoned, I'm pretty happy they didn't just pull the plug like this. How anyone prefers to spend hours of their life learning a song to a crappy youtube video to save a few bucks is beyond me.
I think any NES game that was good "back in the day" holds up even now. Gameplay and graphics had a nice simplicity that holds up today, unlike most pre-NES games. It was a period when games were just starting to become what they are now, with plots, actual level design, and "thinking" enemies, but without all the complexity. Sure, most NES games won't hold your attention for hours at a time, but they're still enjoyable in brief sittings.

What I find impossible to play today are early 3D games. So much time and effort was spent trying to make the games look cool and flashy at the cost of gameplay, and it was when most devs really didn't even know how to make a 3D game. Most first-year PS1 and N64 games are examples of this.
I think the difference between creativity and insanity is that the former has lots of ideas and hates all of them, and the second can't help but fall in love with every last one.
From the tweet, it sounds like they were fighting with publishers to keep things DRM-free. Still doesn't explain why the entire site was shut down, though.
The Daemon is working in the background, preparing for its activation.

http://www.amazon.com/Daemon-Daniel-Suarez/dp/0451228731/
The focus on money speaks to motivation problems. You need to be in it for the process, not the success...
Also from my experience there seems to a culture of negative motivation going on around engineers/programmers. I've seen a lot of it in open source projects and amongst engineers both professionally and in education. People berate and punish in order to make people understand what is wanted/needed, instead of engaging in teamwork and constructive feedback.
This is why we have more developers working for others instead of working for themselves. They're in big corporations, working on the latest version of whatever snoozefest their information infrastructure needs to just produce a better TPS report that now highlights this stat instead of that stat.

It's not software you go bragging about in the next user group meeting, or even to your spouse or your kids or best friend. It does, however, pay the bills.
Contrasts In Style: choice-based vs. rule-based (1988)
Their Twitter feed is an interesting read. Lots of updates, new games added in the last week, a sale announced yesterday, the complaint you linked to, then the site is pulled 13 minutes later. Whatever happened, it happened quickly.
Naval Ravikant Keynote - Rise of the Angels video
I don't know much when it comes to ips, i.e., I can't tell whether that is a shared ip, or otherwise.

Nonetheless, a quick search reveals this individual (http://www.scamwarners.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=34&p=32...) used/had that ip 3 months ago. (S)he appears to be a security specialist, which goes with the impression I got from the email.
Did nobody notice the other articles linked at the bottom of this one? For example:

"Black Children Do Not Need a Western-style Education"

I, for one, would like to see a little bit more criticism of things being posted to HN, and their sources. Because once people know the HN push-button issues, unquestioning readers can be easily lured down the path to thinking and believing very nasty things.

Despite what the 'logical' HN cannon says, an author's background and intent actually matter very much. It may be popular on HN to assume that only facts matter, but I invite you to read the following piece to see how "facts" (real things that really happened) can be skewered by intent:

http://www.alternativeright.com/main/blogs/hbd-human-biodive...
There's a fine line here. Letting the chickens run the farm is not a good idea, but neither is letting the bank.

In the company I work for, The CS Manager often dictates the workflow. If we let the CSRs do it, they'd pick the way that was easiest for them, but would ignore things that were less visible or useful to them. So their direct manager does the deciding. Whenever she outlines how changes to the system work, she always talks about how it'll improve their efficiency and how it'll improve the efficiency of the company as a whole. When work comes from the next rung up the corporate ladder, it's almost always about management's side of things instead.

So you have to balance it all out, and have someone that can see all the angles. And let them decide on the process.
I bought Fallout from them - I really hope they find a way for me to download it one more time, I really liked that game.
Apple working on 'iTunes for Newspapers'
The fact that many "performers" are somewhat unfocused doesn't mean that planning is overrated. These people would likely do even better with a little more discipline.

It just that big successes more often come from people with lots of ideas and lots of experimentation as opposed to people who pick relatively unambitious careers and rotely execute day after day.
For people without scaling/HA needs, the new permissions enhancements are a god-send for DBAs. PostgreSQL has very granular permissions, and it used to be impossible to grant default permissions within a database, as one can in MySQL. This can be very frustrating in multi-user environments.
I bet not many saw that coming though.
Is this really Dave Winer, the guy behind RSS??
What do you think their selling point would be? "The socially connected phone"
And why would people want that??
Coincidence that they were distributing Codemaster games and then shutdown? As avid http://www.worldofspectrum.org/ fans know, Codemaster have always been very careful about protecting their copyrights. None of the Dizzy games are available, for example, despite being 20+ years old and without a new release in almost as long.
Actually it looks like Android will be basis for Facebook's phone.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/09/19/...
Facebook released a statement claiming this techcrunch article is inaccurate
http://mashable.com/2010/09/19/facebook-we-are-not-building-...
Stuxnet worm can control industrial systems
Thanks Gary and Michael for emailing me about the broken links.

Gotcha: It turns out that quoting links using "&quot;" (say, if you had previously run a script to do a bunch of search/replaces) works in Safari, which apparently just fixes it for you, but does not work in Firefox (and presumably other browsers).
This girl was operating under the premise that her needs and desires are a valid claim on someone else's life. This premise is wrong, and the more anyone accepts it, the less successful they will be, not only in business, but generally in life. True success can only be achieved honestly, by trading value for value with others, voluntarily. This is something that can only be accomplished through focused effort, the maintenance of which is a painstaking task in itself!

Suppose that you were to get thousands of emails a day from strangers, all wanting a piece of you in some way. The only way to deal with this is to act on principle, which is exactly what Steve Jobs did.
Another idea would be to have really good reports so I can see cache misses, num of reads, num of writes etc. Having that in a nice we GUI would be great.

Basically, make it easy for me to optimize my cache store:).
Chilean miners: A typical day in the life of a subterranean miner
Could it be that the phones would be intended for parts of the world where not everyone owns a computer? It would get more people onto Facebook.
Oohf, I've bought quite a lot of stuff from them, thankfully I have everything mirrored locally. Really nice site, really well packaged games, excellent support, I really liked them.

I was wondering however whether they were going to be sustainable with Steam increasingly offering a back-catalogue of games that were increasingly similar in age and there being only so many really old games worth buying.

They genuinely seemed to try and fight the good fight but I got the impression they had a hell of a time with studios. I contacted them a while back about offering packaged versions of older games they were offering via Dosbox on Linux & Mac as well and it seemed they couldn't due to licensing issues which seems insane given those platforms didn't even exist when those games were made!
Using Zipcar may damage your credit
I think there is a fine line between confidence and arrogance. And if you know for a fact that you are right, it can be difficult to back down, even in the face of enormous social pressure. I'm not comfortable with saying that arrogance and stubbornness about the truth is a virtue, but I would say that someone who is sincerely devoted to pursuing the truth and sharing it is at high risk of being viewed as arrogant and stubborn.

I used to frequently get accused of being an egomaniac. More recently, I am fairly frequently accused of being a liar. I have concluded that, in my case, accusations of ego indicate people think it can be done, just not necessarily by me. But accusations that I am a liar mean they don't believe it can be done at all, by anyone. Since I have, in fact, accomplished what I claim to have done, I can't bring myself to claim otherwise merely to appease the critics. I do still wrestle with the possibility of whether or not I should simply shut up about it, but that brings up the dilemma that people who are sincerely interested in the information would also be denied. So far, I have been unable to reconcile myself to that route. I still have no good answers. But I wrestle with such questions a lot.
Customer Service At A Startup
The diplomats said we were on the right track, but it was just fancy words for we are totally fucked
It's three overlapping wedges of sizes 46%, 54%, and 72%. The two unlabelled segments are the opposite ends of the 54 and 72, and the empty part is indeed empty. Very strange presentation.
I have to defend jobs here. The PR department of Apple does not exist to assist students get their grades. Yes, a person can walk into a grocery store and ask to see the ledgers for a school project, when the clerk says "no" he can complain about not serving the customers, I've been coming here for years, etc. In the end of it all, the store is still dedicated to making money, their customer relations does not need or should not include their customer's school or personal wants from the company.

If, however, the customer walked in and said "please let me see your department of health inspection information," it would be a completely different issue, as that directly relates to the business.
The mobile versions of FB etc. won't cut it if the next 5-10 years are going to be all about mobile. And thus the need for a true mobile-only social app or "social OS" pending already existing vertical data.
The 404 restriction is driven home in the comments. Many users ask and its repeated several times that all errors should be 500, even 404.
Getting started as a PhD student
IPad Useful for Document Review
Pet Weddings
There are all sort of strange things in the world, one of those things is pet weddings. WTF?
Sit Down, Please, and Tell Me How Smart You Are
Hello this is malignant melanoma it does not take a genious to use scientific method to compare the results without a control. The end result and time for that result is not in question. Once it sperads you are going to die in a very predicta le amount of time.

The definition of insanity to trying the same thing over and over expecting different results well this qualifies.

I am usually horrified by the lack of true controls in medical research because of poor understanding of the variables and unintentional(or gaming) results. To me this is just one more example of medicine not understanding scientific method and statistics.

Please not if you catch it early it is often trivial to effectively treat. Be aware and see a doctor befor there is noting to do.
Big companies notice increasing demand for Android devices
I meant that I was joking about putting a dollar number on "justice". Although, I'm not sure how unreasonable that is.