skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The job of schooling isn't to teach skills and knowledge, it's to teach deference and compliance. I can prove this quite straightforwardly. Imagine how our system would treat a student who aced every test, completed every assignment perfectly, but who habitually truanted and generally refused to toe the line.

If schools were simply a place of teaching and learning, such a student should face no problems, but in most schools he would be highly unlikely to graduate. The imposition of discipline is not merely a secondary function necessary to facilitate teaching, it is an end in itself. Children are taught that a teacher must be obeyed because he is powerful, not because he is worth listening to. There is a clear and persistent message that teachers should be respected and obeyed simply because they have a bigger desk. Even in jurisdictions where it is relatively easy to dismiss incompetent teachers, they are rarely dealt with. I believe that there is simply no demand to do so, as teaching is merely a ruse to allow for schooling to happen.

I argue that the failures of our school system are not simply symptomatic of underfunding, union problems or poor strategy. They are the product of our inability to define the purpose of schooling, our unwillingness to confront the role of schools as cheap daycare, and our hypocrisy as to the real purpose of schooling as a thing apart from education.
Yeah, I ultimately decided that it's probably more our nostalgia and attachment or our own way of life than anything else; just like our grandparents probably lament the downfall of records in favor of digital music.
The last time I entered Australia customs grabbed my iPhone, took a snapshot of the memory and logged into my Google Apps Account to find out if I have been working illegally there.

They asked if I was planning tax evasion because I took Google Doc notes in a tax-minimization and asset protection seminar.

They went through my private email conversations with family members and discussed the financial details of my family and who borrowed money from whom.

All with my consent of course. The other option would have been to fly back to Europe with the next plane available.

It's not always the evil Chinese hackers...
> Python still scores far lower on my readability scale. It's seems like it's halfway to being minified, the lines are chock-a-block.

That's likely because you're not used to reading Python. For me, Ruby seems unreadable - you have all these weird << and ||= assignments, {||} blocks, etc. I don't parse those as well, because I don't program much Ruby. I'm sure if I did, it'd make a lot more 'intuitive' sense - ditto for you and Python's list comprehensions.
Unless Level 3 had commits to their customers (e.g. NetFlix), in which case it could be very expensive to drop Comcast users.
Kind of a side note, a complete noob when it comes to A/B, I tried out Optimizely after reading this and I've gotta say, this thing is put together well. I think I created 6 variations for our home page in about 2 minutes, saved it, and started watching results flow in. Amazing execution.
More ads to come to YouTube with the introduction of TrueView
Vostu, the Zynga of Brazil, raises $30mm from Tiger and Accel
Comcast is going about it in a way that consumers won't understand. I've seen a lot of people expecting things like tiered pricing (think the "YouTube package"), but this is much more dangerous.

Comcast is going to isolate the content upstream so that consumers won't ever know that there was other content accessible, just like they don't know about the TV channels that Comcast doesn't carry.
This is the kind of reason I switched from vi/vim for code editing. There is so much available power and flexibility in emacs, and it really makes things fun.
"Sending email to people who signed up on our splash page and asking them to volunteer typically converted 10% of them into volunteers."

Is it wrong for me to be a little startled by that conversion rate? I wouldn't have expected anything that high.
Agree that the question comes down to the purpose of school, and I think that's part of the problem. There's tension around what the actual ask is for students. Is school a force for teaching socialization and competence in the real world, or for learning academics. And should that learning be focused on practical knowledge, or on ways of thinking in general.

I think that's an issue at the core of a lot of the debates around evaluating both students and teachers. You can measure some of it really well, but much of it is on the "soft" side of things. You want to be able to quantify it in order to understand whether or not a student is actually progressing across a wide array of dimensions, but, by it's nature, it is hard to quantify.
It sounds like you are asking the investor to take all the risk of a standard investment, but with potentially less upside. Seems like a tough sell.
I think the rational argument is; if you are finding offense in an innocent phrase that was not intended (or even considered as) to imply a sexist attitude then you are a part of the problem you are observing.

If someone said this to belittle or discriminate; that should generate an outcry. Sadly; it does not because examples like this get the same treatment.

So, no, you probably shouldn't be offended by examples such as this. If you do; rational people will try to help by suggesting you are being over sensitive in an attempt to avoid future misunderstandings on your part.

(I'd also point out that suggesting intent in an utterly innocent phrase is not just over sensitive but outright rude to the person writing it)
Good point. On review I think I agree with you. :-)
It's not just that. Going from records to tapes to CD's for instance was all pretty linear. Not being able to physically look through what you've got is a different matter altogether though, and part of what I feel dubious about. How are they supposed to just browse around, picking up things, having a look? Something like the Kindle is still a bit crude for that sort of thing.
Well, I don't plan on having kids old enough to be browsing most of my books for at least another decade. Have to think the technology will have evolved quite a bit by then.
I have slightly different criticisms (mostly that masses tend to be fearful, hateful, dangerous, obedient, and cruel as compared to individuals and small groups), but I can understand this.

I still tend to like "humans", though, weirdly enough.
Blekko Gets Into Product Search With New Holiday Shopping Vertical /Safeshop
You should be able to get it at http://news.ycombinator.com/apply . If not, go to http://ycombinator.com/late.html
You get that if you do a Windows activation through Firefox instead of Internet Explorer.

Would you prefer the alternative of only being able to activate Windows through IE?
You can still get to the application form to apply late, but they seem to do some session stuff making the direct link not work (which means you have to acknowledge that you're applying late).

Anyway, go here: http://news.ycombinator.com/apply

Click "apply late". Click "Edit your application online" (number 3).
Ah yes, I'd forgotten about groupby. You'll also need to do a

from operator import itemgetter

as well.
Facebook is the Death Star, and we're all building it.
> Ascribing an intent to someone who clearly doesn't mean it is just not cricket :)

Sure, but it betrays a certain cluelessness. I.e. It's not so much that this is an outrageous headline -- ZOMG off with their heads, public apology, blah blah.

It's more a case of -- if they're clueless about this, then what else are they clueless about -- especially from the POV of a prospective female employee.

E.g. I know of a sweet old grandma who described the colour of her sofa as "nigger brown". She had no ill intent, and I don't ascribe any to her. BUT ... it's evidence that she may have other ideas that I may not agree with -- especially if she's my boss.

Evidence of cluelessness is ... at the very least ... evidence of cluelessness.
This is why we need to use encryption for everything, not just shopping, SSH, and banking. The less distinguishable packets are from noise, the more open the Internet can be.

Sadly, I'm beginning to envision the future of the Internet as a bunch of point-to-point VPN connections to trusted sites, almost exactly like UUCP or the BBSes of days past. VPNs are already essential if you live in certain countries (China, the US if COICA had passed, etc.) or want to BitTorrent your TV shows without getting sued for 30 million dollars. Someday, it might be required just to watch Netflix or search with Google. Sad.

In what world do 65536 octets representing a video cost more to deliver than 65536 representing an email? A world where greedy ISPs can tell the difference.
It's just so tiring people being offended by this sort of thing.

Also, TBH, I kinda find it offensive to suggest that the only reason I started programming was because I'm a male, and because there's apparently some 'male friendly culture'.

I'm angry because I hate the whole "Everyone is absolutely equal" movement. They're not. Everyone is not equal. We're all different. We all have different strengths and weaknesses. Embrace those differences. Especially in the sexes.
This happened to me and a friend earlier today, but it seems the problem has been fixed.
There are some similar horrors in the source code for Clojure. https://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/master/src/jvm/cloju...

Java is a harsh mistress. This is why dynamic languages on the JVM are nice, so I never have to write code like this myself.
Netflix's software traffic balances among Akamai, Limelight, and Level(3).

If Comcast blocked Level(3)'s Netflix hosting, customers would still get streams, just pulled from Akamai and Limelight.

I'd guess that Level3 is counting on "Tier 1 backbone" peering agreements to make delivering this bandwidth affordable while avoiding having to negotiate with each cable co separately, while Akamai and Limelight have direct agreements with the cable companies already.

If this is what's going on, that would give Comcast leverage.
If people manage to be productive on a noisy, busy train by not in a quite, nice office, it isn't the interruptions that are the problem.

While I agree that steps should be taken not to interrupt people while they are working, 'quiet Thursdays' could become 'Johnny didn't get anything done because he needed to ask a question Thursdays'.

I do agree with email and IM instead of demanding that someone stop right now and pay attention to you while you phone and stare at them. No matter how urgent your question is, it can wait until someone has a natural stopping point.
This articles misses opportunities to dive deeply into every concept it proposes. Even when discussing the use of Facebook credits, you really miss an opportunity to discuss Facebook credits as a competitor to PayPal, and a scenario where Facebook does for our online spending what they propose to do for email with their Messaging system. It's a shame that you put this article together so quickly without adding any depth.

For example, Facebook could use the same logic they used in their live Messaging launch for our online spending - that by combining our social graph with how we spend money online, we can better learn from, and organize our spending. They could easily compete with services like Mint and Blippy by providing interesting data about what we are purchasing, and what our friends are purchasing. The opportunity to combine this with Facebook Places makes this a likely scenario - a lot more likely than the childish idea of forcing Credits for all FB connect sites simply to enforce a monopoly.
If enough Netflix customers live in Comcast-only areas, Netflix would have had little choice but to lean on Level 3 to capitulate. Even if the customers are willing to switch ISPs just to get Netflix, they wouldn't have had the option. That translates to less money for Netflix, more pissed off customers for Comcast, and a true win for nobody. With Netflix and Level 3 falling on their swords, their customers at least come out ahead in the short term.

In the long term, it's obviously disastrous. At some point, companies will have to refuse en masse to pay the protection money. In the areas where it has a monopoly, Comcast could stomach losing Netflix, but not another 10 or 20 big sites on top of it. There are antitrust issues with collective refusal to pay, but there's got to be a way around that.
Your proof is not logically sound. The same failure would confront a total brown-noser who quite literally failed every exam. I know a guy who essentially failed out of high school, didn't do college, and then got into one of the country's best law schools - because he is incredibly bright. You need both sides of the equation to really succeed.

School admittedly has multiple purposes, but your view of it is, I think, unnecessarily cynical. Sure, there are bad teachers and systems out there, but there are also amazing teachers, principals, and superintendents doing unbelievable things with students - both academically, and socially.
Absolutely chilling. Glad I abandoned comcast a few years ago.
I don't know if you've ever tried to uninstall the quicktime plugin for firefox to stop it opening mp4 files in quicktime. It's not easy, and it's far from trivial. There's many unrelated steps and it's making me seriously consider dropping iTunes for Foobar.
The best thing about this article is that it is a giant ad. Informative, educational and useful, but an ad nonetheless.

Wonderful marketing and great article as well.
Now it works just fine... Argh, probably just a stupid bug.
Your first concern should be - does it work?

From the close ups in the video there appears to be way too many leverage points that you could simply break it with a hammer. By looks it's hollow aluminum, a decent gauge but I work with aluminum and this doesn't appear at all sturdy for brute forcing the lock.

Aluminum is rather malleable, meaning it looks like force could easily be used to open the device enough to get it back down to ground level, at which point brute forcing becomes much easier. It also looks highly susceptible to leverage forcing or even wedging (which can be done very simply with two hammers)

Standard bike locks have the advantage that leveraging the bars generally only fastens the locking mechanism tighter meaning force has to be applied parallel to the bars against the lock - noticeably along the mechanisms strongest axis. Every other way generally fails in a way that makes it harder to separate the lock from its bars.

This being a circle allows forces to be applied to directly manipulate hinges, welds, and the lock. However, given that it fits tightly against the lamp post, it is highly susceptible to leverage - unlike a standard bike lock that has a solid 1 foot gap between the end of the bars and the mechanism, which reduces the leveraging potential enormously. You could easily get 40x the leverage on this climbing lock than you could on a standard bike lock.

The actual lock they place on this wouldn't last 2 seconds against a $5 screwdriver, I'm assuming it would be a genuine locking mechanism. However the device will have at least 4 welds at best, or likely a non-welded joint, 1 hinge or set of hinges and 1 lock. This means your lock is only as strong as your weakest element and if you're using a hinge, it's likely only as strong as a 1/8th screw.

Step 1: brake the wheels with hammer and bring it to ground.
Step 2: Force a prybar under the hinge plate.
Step 3: hammer the prybar and brake screws.
Step 4: ride off on bike.
Simply see what the average contribution of people who contributed during the A/B testing was per image/button combination

We didn't measure the average contribution for each variation for this particular experiment but in future splash page tests we measured eventual $ per pageview for each variation and it was very closely correlated to % signup rate.
Comcast pulled quite a bluff, but I don't see how they can win in the long term. As a Comcast subscriber, I'd more than happy to switch to a different ISP if Comcast starts to limit access to Netflix or any other content provider.
I think possibly because it's 'fiddling around the edges'. Sure, it's nice to have a way to reverse a string, but you don't do that very often in practice - assigning to lists, calling functions, etc. are all far more common.

But yeah, I hear you on the downvoting.
O.K. I got it googled. The notion I was looking for is "offshore hosting" which could enable some quite popular free speech platform. Costs about US $120/month for a dedicated server. Thanks for your answers!
The last time I tried js2-mode, its indentation rules really drove me crazy. So now I use espresso-mode (which reliably indents the way I expect it to) to write my JS and turn on js2-mode to have it lint my JS.

Do you know if that has changed, or if maybe I'm missing some easy .emacs magic to make it work?
Thank you. Now I took the time.
What happens if a meteor from space hits a pedestrian? Clearly the government must intervene to build a space shield to protect us all!
Well, there goes the (net neutral) neighborhood.
I've long believed that standardized tests are a better measure of what people know than grades.
I'm not really arguing against these points at all.

What I mean by my comment is that, as an entrepreneur, when I detect high marginal return on a given activity, I want to find ways of extracting more value from the situation for myself (profit seeking), rather than just getting a paycheck (profit taking).

All that value getting skimmed off and given to someone else is a lost opportunity, especially when you're working for someone else, as there are rarely ways to insert yourself at a higher point in the value chain.
I think the honors kids at my school were mostly headed toward college, so they made their decisions based on what would impress admissions officers. It might be different now, because Texas now has a 10% rule that grants a scholarship to students who graduate in the top ten percent of their class. (For a couple of years you got automatic admission to the state school of your choice for graduating in the top ten percent, but that resulted in half of UT's admissions going to 10% students, many of whom were very poorly prepared, so they changed the rule.) There were probably a few kids in my class -- very hard-working and curious but not as bright -- whose GPAs were hurt by taking honors classes, and they probably fell out of the top 10% because of it. There's no way anyone could crack the top 1% or 2% without taking lots of honors classes, though.

It's possible our honors classes were less rigorous than yours, too. As I pointed out in a recent thread, AP classes at my school were noticeably more rigorous than honors classes, because our normal honors classes wouldn't have been sufficient preparation for an AP test.
It might be "urban legend" http://www.antarctic-circle.org/advert.htm
If we had proper amounts of competition in ISPs the entire net neutrality problem would simply disappear. It's only because we're forced to negotiate with monopolies that net neutrality is an issue at all.
There is a Comcast employee who occasionally posts on HN, he was active in the OpenDNS thread over the weekend. I would like to get his input on this.
No one has discriminated against anyone.

If it was an advert for a nursery assistant which said "Do you love acting all mommy to your kids?" etc no one would care either.
Odd, I installed today expecting Chrome to tag along (which I was then going to remove) but no Chrome followed.
How To Mass Download Files In One Go
Had an ex-gf who was a teacher and had to do just that - comments on every single student in addition to their grades. It was incredibly time consuming, but, I'm guessing incredibly useful for parents and students.

The problem is that, in our increasingly data driven world, comments are very hard to deal with on the large scale. I'm actually working on trying to define goodness around teaching interactions, and one of the big wildcards is how we structure feedback such that we get the depth of comments, and the processability of numbers. It's tough.
I dunno. I took second semester Chemistry when I was a senior in college... I never showed up at class except to take the weekly quiz. The professor was not at all offended that I got the highest score in the class.
The thing is that while they come under apparently "reasonable" auspices, like automating traffic cops, they are still cameras that already have all the fundamental components of a surveillance system; it just has to be hooked up to a database somewhere and the same thing is easily implemented. They already have OCR software reading plates and printing out and mailing tickets, so if the feds, a state, or municipality were so inclined, they could without much additional effort tack on a database that tracked what-cars-were-where.

That's just one nefarious purpose and deployment, I'm sure if we thought about it more we'd come up with many others. The CCTV cameras that litter Britain were also installed under the "reasonable" auspice of catching people who stab each other. The red-light cameras are not so blatant, but the principle is the same, and as people become more and more acclimated to those, it'll be an easier sell to do Britain-like CCTV monitoring.

So it's really an issue of trust. Do you trust the government to keep their promises and never use these widely-deployed networks of cameras for evil? Do we believe that the government will only ever use these to catch those who violate traffic law? Do we expect an equitable and reasonable enforcement when we outsource to machines? If you're speeding because your wife is in labor or your grandma is dying and you get pulled over, the policeman will usually do an immediate reversal and offer an escort instead of a citation. Do we want to replace that with automated cameras so that one with a medical emergency gets 3-4 tickets from machines that detected he violated the speed limit or ran a red light on the way to the hospital?

The Constitution is proactive against the attainment of such government power because its framers knew that even though you may have one set of administrators that are pretty good and upright, the next set may be more crooked, and when the crooked people see all this unexploited potential, they're that much more likely to attempt to attain to a position that will allow them to enact uncouth practices.
"A Vegan Diet" is nothing more than a diet devoid of animal products or byproducts. A vegan diet could technically be nothing but potato chips. What did this woman eat? What did she eat exactly? What sort of workout did she do every day? How many green smoothies did she rely on for energy for her workouts? This has nothing to do with veganism, but everything to do with a very confused person who did not know how to feed herself.
Is it wrong for me to be a little startled by that conversion rate? I wouldn't have expected anything that high.

It depends on how much of a commitment they're asking from volunteers. If you've already signed up on the website it's not much more to volunteer to pass out fliers at your office. If they want you to work a benefit or something than ya I'd agree it's a little high.

Keep in mind too that these are people who have already actively signed on to support the campaign.