skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The thing that bugs me about articles arguing for performance based pay is that it fails to address two critical points.

The first is why the teachers that are bad are actually bad. I would be interested in what would happen if the lowest paying teachers were forced to addend additional training. Perhaps all they need is a refresher. It is also possible that they have become disillusioned with what they once thought was a great way to make an effect on children's lives. I could very well imagine this happening to me were I to become a teacher.

The other is how they are measuring teacher performance. The only way I have seen this happen is though standardized tests. I do not believe that these actually measure much. The best teachers I have had have not taught me based on what was on the test, which would have meant spoon-feeding me facts and telling me to memorize them, but rather what they felt was important, which often included explaining how I could find the information on my own if I even needed.
Actually it has happened with the Commodore 64: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C64_Direct-to-TV
This highlander, zero-sum-game view of the smartphone market is good for page views but horrible for real thoughtful analysis. Microsoft seems to be betting its Windows Phone 7 strategy on converting feature phone users to WP7 smart phones. It is going to be a long time before smart phones are zero-sum.

What would be interesting is how tough it is going to be for different app types to switch between devices and what the store situation is going to look like in the next couple of years. Those are more interesting questions when considering what a developer is going to do.

For example, OpenGL ES is standard on iOS and Android, but I believe it is not on WP7. This might be a big hurdle for smaller companies and not allow the development of WP7 versions of some games.

"Apple will always be the Maserati of smartphones — leading-edge, trendy, stylish, downright awesome."

I have a tough time believing any article that takes the Apple Mac strategy and assumes it is the same for iPhones or iPads. It ignores the iPod pricing. It also ignores what the current management team has done with a new device entering a new market. I think the big lie about this type of comparison can be found in the lack of iPad competitors with the same features at a lower price point. The days of Apple not being able to get the best component prices ended in the iPod era.
You could put a notice on the bottom of real ones telling the user to look at the address bar.
New 2011 Ford F-150 technological wonder.
Nothing major. But currently I am seriously regretting my decision to buy an iPhone instead of android.
What's seems more important to me is not the degree of inwquality, but whether that inequality represents a poor distribution of resources, for example it seems ok to me that people like Larry and Sergei, or Bill Gates, are mega-rich, because they got that way by providing world-changing value to society.

If the bulk of the inequality is spoken for by people like these, then I don't see a problem.

If on the other hand most of the inequality comes from financial manipulation that isn't also productive to society, then we have a serious problem as the incentives are skewed towards gaming the system rather than trying to produce value.

According the the Bureau of economic analysis, finance accounts for 24% of US GDP from private industry and captures 39% of the profits.

What value is this providing? Learning how to create new derivatives or HFT algorithms to compete against other people doing the same thing doesn't seem to create shared prosperity in the way that curing a disease, creating Google, or making electric cars does.
Ask HN: Is there a list of Hacker News projects?
Over the past few months (and probably even before that), I've seen quite a few projects that either leverage the HN user base or data in order to create some cool little project. A few I seen/remember were things like: HNTrades (trade/sale domain names), SearchYC (search HN), Hackerviews (view other HNers). I was curious if there was a list of these projects, because I'm sure there are a lot floating out there that can be useful.
Startups, Where's your Story? (Tips for pitching your idea)
I've done both, and I would strongly recommend putting your personal stuff in the cloud. It is one of the most frustrating things in the world when you can't work on any of your actual paying work, because you have to spend the entire day getting your personal site back online after an unexpected spike crashed it.

The only caveat is to absolutely make sure that wherever you host your site, you can set your own URL. That is the only way to ensure maximum flexibility so that you can later self-host or move all your info (and google juice) to another cloud service. If you build all your reputation on mysite.posterous.com, then so help you.

EDIT: I'm not picking on Posterous, just saying if you're going to put your blog there or anywhere, use your own domain! If you don't, you cannot undo that later after you've built a reputation and tons of backlinks pointing to their domain.
Timing your startup
Utterly heroic singing piggery. My hat's off to the OP.
Vote with your feet. When you move, look at http://psk12.com for stats on the local schools (originally developed by a couple of parents in the DC metro area).

Unfortunately, I also have to say that our kids got their best years of education thus far in New Orleans private schools, and the private schools aren't ranked in psk12.com stats. The best indicators I've found for private schools in cities have been word of mouth. Anyone have a more systematic resource?
thanks, i will make a new video for it soon as a lot of people have been saying that.
I regret focusing on getting good grades in school instead of building strong connections with people.
I should have put a lot more thought into who I wanted to be and how I wanted to get there when I was in highschool. I'm fairly satisfied with who I am but some more forethought would have helped quite a bit.
I'm a huge fan of WebFaction.com for hosting. I host my personal stuff and sites I'm tinkering with on there, it's shared hosting but acts like a VPS (gives you application memory), and they also have a bunch of 1-click installers for Wordpress/Rails/Django etc.

For a personal site I'd probably do something static with your blog hosted on posterous - but wordpress w/ wp-supercache plugin works pretty well. Grab a theme off of ThemeForest (or one of the 80 million other theme sites) and tweak it a bit.

I think everyone should have some basic server admin experience, but having to update a personal server can be a hassle. I login to my hosting control panel probably 3-4 times a year, max. It's just a convenience thing, they patch it and make sure my site stays up.
Good article, matches most of the things I have learned about diet and fitness.

A lot of sources state that eating smaller meals more times a day increases metabolism. Personally I'll need more hard evidence before I relegate it to a myth.
It's a difficult one because our decisions & mistakes made earlier in our lives are what make us who we are today.

It's a cliché, but mistakes are an opportunity to learn, that means I've had a hell of a lot of learning experiences!

If anything, the only things worth regretting are mistakes that you've repeated - because they could be avoidable?

I dropped out of dental school in order to pursue a computer-science degree instead. Everyone around me told me I should have done the comp-sci degree in the first place, with hind-sight that's obvious and technically I 'lost' a year. But that one year of studying for dentistry and having to make the major decision to drop-out was fantastic experience.
You should've waited and posted this on Monday.

Your story will inevitably drop from the front page by the time you have a portfolio up. If I were you, I might take the time to get your stuff up on Github now.
Wait, there are non-Asian produced televisions? Philips makes their TVs in China just like everybody else these days.
The reason you don't care is because the web saved Apple. The web will in turn stop Apple locking down the smartphone and tablet markets.
Are there incentives to have a lower/higher barrier for someone else to reproduce your findings and build on them?
The China Boom on US Campuses
Designing Obama
What about IBM's OS/400?
http://users.snip.net/~gbooker/AS400/ibm.htm
Specialization builds trust among Web users
The performance degrades too quickly for this. In two or three months we might be on our old performance level, again. Well, I seriously hope that we'll stay fast this time. Only time will tell.
There are certainly markets where it basically isn't possible to make a living pricing things at marginal cost, which is why we have copyright law. There are also markets with large sunk research costs (i.e. the Kinect) where there needs to be a mechanism to recoup them, which is why we have patent law.

So I'm not particularly sympathetic to people feel like they shouldn't have to pay for a copy of something just because the marginal cost is zero. Leaving aside details like perpetual copyrights on the installment plan, we have a decent legal framework that only works if everyone contributes (cf. taxes).

But game consoles, to borrow your phrasing, are a field notorious for generating a feeling of entitlement among corporations. Same with printer cartridges, mobile phones, and, yes, razorblades. There is no societal need for these pricing schemes when we have an efficient consumer credit market, and they're frankly anticompetitive.

Society benefits from competitive markets, and competitive markets work best when things are forced to be priced at what they're worth. So I would argue that society benefits when loss-leader schemes are rendered infeasible.
I'm not making him a saint. Stallman completely abandoned the Lisp community at that point - he won't even talk about Lisp now (at least he told me to go away last time I tried talking to him about it).

What I'm saying is Stallman is right about the value of Free Software. CMUCL and BSD basically got released the way they did because they were university research projects that failed to get commercialized. Stallman is really the person that came out and said Free Software should be a priority in and of itself and not an accident. That totally changed the way you can think about software, and you shouldn't discount that.

Another thing I respect about Stallman is that he tends to be right about longer-term trends. I don't bet against him anymore.
I haven't said anything against his point. It is just that claiming that Stallman was the only one 'getting free software' is bullshit. He did a lot, but in the Lisp community there were many others which promote(d) free software.

Also Stallman did promote Free software, but his promotion of Lisp was mostly limited to Emacs Lisp. There was an attempt with Guile, but that was mostly it. He had worked with the Lisp Machine, but once he was out, that topic was finished.

Anyway, I find a few points are right and several others not. That Symbolics would have not gone out of business if Genera would have been free software and portable is speculation. It is neither necessary nor sufficient. For example Franz is still around, though Allegro CL is not free software. There are lots of free software / portable Lisp implementations which are as dead as Genera, or more than dead. I agree that it might help, but not more.

I agree with the following: portability and 'free' can help with survival.

I don't think adding C to Lisp is of much help. The mismatch is huge. There are two options: 1) repeating the design of the past (with the same problems and maybe slight improved. There has been lots of talk and little action. It's difficult because we don't have the hackers with knowledge and time for that. 2) doing a new design which gets rid of the limitations of past designs (single user, single image, no security, ...). That's even more difficult.
I don't think this chart makes much sense: if you compare them to the phones generally sold in the west, the dumbest japanese keitai is already a smartphone much more than a "feature phone": it can surf the web (iMode & such, including Flash movies), playback movies, watch TV, send and receive mail, serve as wallet, mass transport pass and identity card, video call, do GPS navigation, handle calendars, address books, memo pads, etc...
Your physician was identified for medical school, residency, and fellowship based in large part on standardized test scores. And the schools and residency programs are tyrannized by their students and residents scores. I gotta say, it doesn't take long to identify the docs who did well on those tests: they're generally the best docs. They're the most articulate, ask the most insightful questions during their patient interviews, develop the best diagnostic and management plans, and accomplish the most difficult research.

I suspect the same goes for lawyers, law programs, and their bar exams, engineers, engineering programs, and their EIT exams, etc. Why shouldn't kids learn to play by the same rules their parents do? Indeed, isn't that what kids want to do?
I saw that, but in the end some of the images are only about 700x400 px. At 200 ppi (which is what t shirts should be printed at, I guess), that just isn't a high enough resolution. And I'm not sure If I really want to make it larger since it will not look all that good.
That quote is a forgery.

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/jefferson/banks.asp

Turns out "inflation" and "deflation" weren't used during Jefferson's lifetime:

http://www.bartleby.com/73/1204.html
Book: The Design of Approximation Algorithms
We shouldn't cherry pick only the examples which support our position. E.g. Allegro Common Lisp has traditionally been about as unfree as possible (e.g. $$$ required to distribute solutions to your customers (for the Lisp runtime)) and it's still around. LispWorks is three years older and is still around.

Also, would the MIT Lisp Machine system or Genera have gotten as good as they did as fast as they did without outside funding (government and VC respectively)?

Or look at the failure of GNU to produce a kernel.

My general point here is that all this is much more complicated that a simple "free survives, unfree doesn't" ... although I'd need a few good examples of unfree dying to round out it out (good as in perhaps "was big, then totally failed").
In the same vein, dealing with women. Sex is human being's strongest motivator, choose to ignore it at your own peril.
Fantastic job, and well done in taking real, practical and positive steps to get people involved.

Giving people the underlying skills of git, bug trackers, etc, means you're giving them the chance to join in and learn the other things that they can learn simply by participating in open source.

I do a similar thing in math, giving people the basics of proof techniques, math notation, how to read math, etc. The kids can be amazingly responsive, and it's incredibly rewarding.

Well done.
Pizza deliveries are all basically that last-mile, you're not normally ordering a pizza from another city/country.

That means the company has lots of individual restaurants with their own delivery operations (guys on bikes) who handle that last mile on an individual basis, or maybe doing a couple of pizzas at a time.

If you've ordered a pizza, then you're also pretty much guaranteed to be at home. There's not much point leaving a note saying your pizza was taken back to the depot or left with your neighbour!
My spouse teaches part-time in the UoP (University of Phoenix) system. Their interface is sparse, the classrooms are largely asynchronous, and the faculty largely anonymous. It works because UoP knows what it's selling - College Degrees.

Public universities can't admit to themselves that selling degrees is what they do for political reasons - doing so is anathema to alumni and academics. So they are compelled to "deliver rich media," hold classes at scheduled times, and cater to the traditional leanings of brick and mortar professors. It's a model that doesn't scale.

The opportunity in higher education is cheaper degrees with higher customer service...I personally believe it is quite achievable. Particularly if one replaces accreditation with reputation.
It's easy to fire "ineffective" teachers (quotations used to show the mutability and variability of the term, rather than sarcasm). Even with the supposed difficulties presented by tenure, so many school districts are struggling for money that it's a simple matter of invoking the RIF-hammer.

It's harder to identify what makes an teacher ineffective, and harder still to identify what makes an effective teacher.

Even harder still when lesson plans are mandated from up top and are seen as things to "deliver" (like a pizza, or a newspaper). I worked in a school district in which some of my lesson plans were written for me (down to the "Spend 5 minutes on this, 8 minutes on that" level), and was evaluated (on those days) based on my ability to comply with them to the letter. One of the comments I received on an evaluation was "We were hoping you'd show more creativity in your teaching" of a lesson that was assessed on how well I followed a script and how well I got students to follow the script.

Frankly, I think the thing that will truly reform education is an entire change in mindset away from students "doing well on tests" and toward students doing good and interesting and challenging work.

That said, your notion of attending professional development is good not only for struggling teachers, but for everyone. It's stupid to expect teachers to improve if the only thing we give them is a carrot or a stick.
You got it:

http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2009/01/31/therovingcaval...
Is there the remotest possibility that there is some problem on the cocoa plantations, and the South American suppliers are cutting the supply to hide the low production levels.
If you're running a static site, then you can host it on S3 for much cheaper than the $5 / mo you're probably paying for your VPS. All you have to do is create a CNAME www.yourdomain.com that points to bucketname.s3.amazonaws.com, then upload your site to the bucket. Make sure to set the ACLs on the objects such that they are publicly accessible, and also upload the files with the correct mime types.

For a 50MB site that transfers 5GB of data per month, you'll pay $0.61 / mo. Not too shabby, and if the site is just your resume and a few static pages you'll use much less.
As a means to the end of getting a working system done sooner rather than later, and most especially supporting a zillion device drivers that will never be ported to a Lisp, C in Lisp may make sense.
Regrets are a funny thing. We did what we did because we lacked the help of "hindsight" which we have now. In that context, it's far too easy to end up criticizing ourselves. As for me, I prefer to not regret, but just learn from my past.
The Airport Security Grope
I may have missed it, but I didn't see the new 3 points that remain in the test anywhere in the article. Would appreciate it if someone could summarize the new tests in the comments.
That I did not become proficient in programming during my undergrad in EE and CE

About the things that I did not regret is the bold decision to come to the States for PhD: I did not regret that for a second
for what its worth, i work with oracle for my career and do the side project/job in the evenings.

it sucks.
Not explicitly tech related, but since a lot of tech folk are photographers and we all tend to fly a bit more than the average person, thought it was good info to have here.

Just wait until someone tries to smuggle something onboard using their iPad or Kindle. shakes head
Indeed; whatever the mistakes these companies made (also include the TI Explorer), they were zapped first by 32 bit microprocessors (a sustaining technology, but not one adopted quickly enough by Symbolics (plus they picked a bad initial platform to put their microprocessor on)) and then PCs (a classic disruptive technology).
Being there at the right place at the right time definitely makes a difference. But - somehow I feel that there is always an element of luck involved in deciding that. You don't want to end up waiting and waiting and realize, oops you were too late!
oh :(
thought was a nice addition.
His remarks about home ownership are astute - it is depressing how rarely politicians consider the 2nd order effects of their decisions.

"Mr. Palyi warned in 1938 that a push toward universal home ownership would "make the population fixed to the ground" by "overburdening them with housing costs." That, he foresaw, would limit the mobility of American workers—helping explain why unemployment is so stubbornly high today."
Easy Change Hair Color In Photoshop
Easy Change Hair Color In Photoshop, In this Photoshop tutorial, we’re going to look at how simple and easy it is to change hair color in Photoshop by tinting and colorizing someone’s hair in a photo.
Comparing Python frameworks: A simple webapp in Flask, web.py, bottle, juno ...
Add value to your Blog with a top profesional wordpress theme
Take Interest, Don't Fake Interest
Pretty cool - could definitely use some more work - but still well done. (Got a copy of the html from Google cache, and the javascript from the Gist posted in this thread.)
I regularly see dotfiles in github repositories.

Maybe there is a barrier to adoption in the form of git. A more polished version of Gist - marketed to scientists and researchers - would increase uptake.
If it's a battle between manufacturers, Apple have already won.

Out there in the grown-up business world where CEOs don't wear trainers to board meetings, they have a saying - "sales are vanity, profit is sanity". The dot-com delusion of losing money on each sale and making it up on volume remains to this day.

While the margin on an android handset is low and falling, some analysts are suggesting that the per-unit profit on an iPhone is actually increasing. Android manufacturers have very little opportunity to defend their margins, because they have so little room for differentiation other than price and performance. That is one reason why we're seeing things like HTC Sense and MotoBlur.

HTC are very profitable at the moment, which is the best evidence for why you don't want to manufacture Android handsets. Remember where HTC started - making cheap, generic WinMob devices that were house-branded by networks. They broke the back of other WinMob manufacturers by viciously competing on price. They are now facing competition in the Android market from the likes of ZTE who are employing exactly the same strategy.

Here in the UK, you can buy a ZTE Blade for £99 ($160), prepaid with no contract. It's a handset with an 800x480 OLED display, a capacitive touchscreen and Android 2.1, upgradable to 2.2. Great news for consumers, terrible news for manufacturers. I have absolutely no idea how an Android manufacturer could defend against that.

I read an NPD report recently that stated that although Apple had less than a 10% share of the PC market, they had over 90% of sales over $1000. The average Windows PC price was $515, versus $1400 for the average Mac sale. I know which business I'd rather be in.
Unexpectedly small effects of mutations in bacteria bring new perspectives
After doing some searching, found http://www.ipeg.eu/blog/?p=1742, which claims only two tests survive:

(a) substituting one known element for another, which requires that the result obtained would have been predictable.

(b) the obvious to try rationale, which requires a recognized problem or need in the art and a finite number of identified, predictable solutions to the recognized need or problem.

I wonder if previously rejected obviousness claims can be reopened? If so, companies with issued patents have some strategizing to do.
Got a mirror?