skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Imagine how things would be different if education were treated as a national defense issue

Good grief, Scott. The problem with unions and/or education is that we keep trying to make one-size-fits-all solutions, eventually treating our children (and teachers) like widgets in a factory. So the teachers and children have started acting like we've been treating them. Further nationalizing it isn't going to help any -- it'll just make matters worse.

Each student is a complicated problem on his or her own. That makes each class an even more complicated problem. We need to be able to give people the freedom and accountability to leverage local minima and maxima, not come up with imaginations of how various global solutions might work. School boards alone have too much concentrated power and make too many global rules. It just gets worse the higher up the chain you go. The way we got here was through a long string of really smart folks imagining what magic bullet might fix things for everybody -- it will not be the way we get out.

EDIT: Interesting trivia point: one of the big pushes for centralized education "reform" originally in the states was that in WWI the soldiers had a hard time working the artillery. It was thought that we had better start having national standards of education so that we could be assured future soldiers would be able to fight effectively. Seems like we will never escape well-meaning people using bad military analogies. La plus ca change...
Using Chronotherapy to Wake Up Earlier
Veto, no, but obviously the JRuby team are well worth listening to. Charles's post isn't really saying that refinements are a bad idea, but rather offering some, well, "refinements" to how he thinks they should be implemented.

It's taken a long time to get Ruby's performance up to the respectable levels it finally achieves with 1.9 and JRuby, so I'm glad to see Charles pushing to avoid letting features creep in which could seriously degrade it.
I'm not sure that his main argument - "education is a vital national interest" (or "national defense issue") - supports union-busting over increased funding and the like.

After all, while the US has no military union, it does spend a lot of money on the military. (Whether the individual grunt is underpaid or not has very little to do with the effectiveness of the organization as a whole, and the US defense system is quite effective, despite its problems.)
I agree entirely with the sentiment, it would be one of the reasons I don't use Windows if I didn't have better reasons already. However, when you agreed to the EULA you gave permission to Microsoft to make any changes at likes at any time it chooses. I don't have the other two bits of software but I expect you gave them the same permission via the EULA too.
Ten questions science must answer
Wow, that tip about using protocol relative URLs is going to clean up so much code for me.

For those who missed it, apparently this works across browser to avoid mixed content warnings:

<script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/prototype/1.6.1/prototype.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
And for English speakers, "Scott's Boots"
This looks like an interesting app. However, the features that you have integrated are not unique or interesting enough for this app to gain a lot of attention.

If your intention is to create a niche app that solves a few problems, you've done a great job of that. The users who like your app will like it a lot.

If you are still in active development and would like to increase the number of people using your app, here are some things that might help:

1) Re-conceive both your self-hosted product page and the Apple App Store description. In short, you need to answer this question quickly and accurately: what makes your browser 100x better than any other browser out there? Currently, your "discover, read, share" sections are not compelling. Your App Store description is a little better with your quick point form feature list.

2) Your integration of Social Bookmarking is very interesting. I recently reviewed Delibar (http://robisit.com/gl). It is an app that saves bookmarks to Delicious or Pinboard. I concluded that the major flaw in this software was that it was limited to these two social bookmarking services. I think that you should integrate every single bookmarking and sharing service into your browser somehow. This is a powerful feature that is not currently being used in iOS apps properly.

3) I realize it's early - but listing real testimonials sells apps. Plain and simple, quotes such as, "I love this app, it changed my life" help people spend $2 on an App.

Without downloading your browser and testing it, it looks like you have an interesting product. The way that you have collected useful browsing add-ons and components into one iOS package might be useful. On the surface, your sales text isn't compelling and presents the biggest problem.
As long as you have one core feature ready, I think you should launch it! I really doubt anybody else care that much about the product other than yourself. Launch it! If it is good, feedback will start coming in.
Submitted a simple card game to the App Store and put http://www.myspaceappstats.com/ online. If I could somehow let app developers know about it, I'm pretty sure many would visit it daily to see how their app is doing, but I'm not sure how to contact them. Tried just going through each dev and figure out their contact info from their homepage / app but that turned out to take a loong time.
No card security code either? That's bound to nip you in the posterior at some point (happened to me, though with tangible goods).
Because the chief goal of educating children should be profit.
I think they are necessary evil to keep the authority on their feet and never take anything for granted.
I don't think there is a chance in hell that google would ever consider augmenting its url structure on behalf of or to play nice with a shortening service.
More interesting than a guy drawing monsters, is the site UpHype itself.

Besides a lot of "I'll spam your site/service on twitter/fb for $8", there seems to be quite a few designers and artists offering logos, voiceovers and other potentially useful things.

Their "All for only $8, $16 or $24" model is simple enough to work well. I'll keep an eye on it.
Arsenic is only toxic to our understanding of biology. Some extremophiles have unbelievable resistance to heavy metals, so I wouldn't doubt some configuration of our biology would be resistant to arsenic.

However, with the problems arsenic causes blocking PDH enzyme, causing H2O2 in the cells and a huge list else like IIRC thiamine deficiency.

Then again, life exists in such a broad range of conditions that I find it hard to believe that life couldn't adapt to life with arsenic for one main reason. If it is using arsenic as a DNA base, it means it is sequestering the arsenic rather than leaving it in the cells to do damage.
Text should be fully justified, rather than just left justified.

Ligatures would be nice too, but I guess that is dependent on things outside the apps control.
One click: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/578454/3932344-40-Sleep-Hacks-The-Ge...
Interesting proposal. Why would someone want a monster though?

Who owns the image copyright once the work has been done?
Hire Flash Designers, Hire Flash Web Developer
Politics gossip or not, I think they are less boring than most of the news this year. They are certainly very eye-opening.
WikiLeaks is Doing the Security Profession a Favor
Wanted to correct a mistake I noticed: Seth Roberts (as far as I know) has never documented trying a raw, whole foods diet. If you search his blog, you'll see that he has been tracking other things to see how they effect his sleep. Eating animal fat, standing on one leg, and sunlight are all examples.

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:blog.sethroberts.net+sle...

edit: Maybe he's referring to this post? http://www.blog.sethroberts.net/2008/06/09/less-carbs-better...
That's awesome!

If you want to pre-compose your beat and then paste it into Google Beatbox, you can use this simple GUI script:

https://gist.github.com/721611
I've been planning to integrate a web-based version, but I hadn't considered the photos first, title later idea. I'll have to think about how it would in to the existing interface, but that certainly seems like it has potential. Thanks for the suggestion!
if school was a Walmart, would teachers be shipped from China in Panamax container ships?
Early Windows Phone 7 numbers show Android outselling 15:1
Agreed, forget the spamming stuff, but the creative work looks interesting and well priced.
More or less. I'm pointing out that incentives are not set as well as they could be, without specifying in great detail how they should be set.

Formal end-of-term type grades do not directly serve the students. They are used by others to rank the students and decide who among them are useful for a given purpose (jobs, college admissions). Students are still going to want these so they can signal to employers that they are valuable.

The grades are incentives that the teacher can use to control students. The intended use is of course to get them to learn the material. One point of the article is that they are also easily used for other types of control.
Because teachers are to some extent judged by how well their students do, there is often pressure for them to give better grades. Occasionally there is some inflexible rubric of X% of each class must get grade Y. There is no direct pressure that these grades should correspond at all to mastery of material.

Grades on e.g. homework assignments and quizzes can also serve to help the students (or their parents) gauge their progress and find weak areas so they can better learn the material.

Most schools in the U.S. make the final grades incorporate these earlier grades. This means there is pressure on these grades as well making them less useful for the purpose of helping the student learn better. This also means that they are useful for control, because students care about their final grades.

Suppose instead that the final grades were not at all set by teachers. Imagine something like the AP tests. Because the homework and quiz grades would not factor in, they are less useful as means of control, and theri only use is now monitoring and helping he student learn. Because the testers are not teachers, there is much less incentive to score the students highly. They can measure mastery with much less bias.
I never have read it, but I will definitely check it out. Looks like it's even available for free online.
I can't imagine them having an actual veto, but they are definitely worth listening to.
Of course, that's true, but we can't test EVERYTHING. If a very large test has been made with a very general population, then I think one should just make the assumption that will work similarly on your audience.

If we start testing everything, we'll just be stuck testing the whole time! There are an infinite number of things to test, if there is a large and credible study showing one particular thing to be true, and no "anti" study, then I will just accept it and not retest it. Rather, I test things unique to my product or presentation.

Running a test, particularly a multivariate test is not an easy or quick task. It requires a lot to do it properly, and if I had to do hundreds of them, I'd be wasting a lot of time.

Most times as a small company, one should not be focusing on if a button is red or green, but on if you are at all in the right business.

Such small-scale and detailed testing is really a way to stick your head in the sand, when larger optimisations or corrections could lead to a much much bigger jump.
Yeah, but now we have 8 cores in our desktops, and our popular languages can't handle that so well.
Microsoft, Wikileaks and the nobility of lies
How to Promote your Photography using Facebook
Cornell's Cancun Climate Conference Crew
I still managed to get my focus to escape the box when I tried playing it just now.
User-generated 8bit TV. Back to pixel world.
I get what you're saying, and you're not wrong in general, but in this specific case, there are plenty of counter-examples. For example, there's an awful lot of affiliate marketers out there who have found that video squeeze pages convert at a much higher rate than text squeeze pages. And they only know that because they tested the shit out of the options, not because they prefer one over the other.

I hate watching a 5-minute video when I could skim-read a 30-second block of text instead. But I'm not necessarily representative of the population as a whole. And specifically as it relates to text over video, a huge number of people are finding that video converts better than text for their audience. YMMV.
Which is basically a clone of http://www.fiverr.com/ (everything is $5 there though).
Last time this was up, some people pointed out that the two companies didn't deserve high google rankings. That may or may not be the case.

The last complaint is correct however. Googles user requirements for its adservices prohibits webmasters from placing other contextual ads on the site. I wonder why nobody has complaind before (its not exactly a secret, it was written in the agreement).
Apparently making less than $2500 / month is impossible?
Oh, gossip is not boring, that’s what’s so devious about it.

I don’t know about eye-opening, though. There are interesting pieces here and there, nothing good journalists didn’t already know or (in the best case for Wikileaks) suspect. Much is nice padding material for articles journalists have already written, another piece of evidence. Nice to have but no game changer.

I like Wikileaks, I really do, but it’s very hard for me to convince myself that this leak is in any way a big deal.
Installing KVM Guests With virt-install On Ubuntu 10.10 Server
I was able to get Tower to open the Linux kernel git tree (>200,000 commits) on my MBP. It was sluggish but worked as expected.

For comparison I tried Brotherbard's gitx fork on the Linux kernel tree as well. It also loaded the tree as expected and was faster then Tower but had a somewhat slow startup time.
My current policy is that unless a piece of code suddenly makes the world a worse place to be in (hopefully I haven't done that yet :) ) I'll release something (normally on my website) and make no further commitment than that.

My philosophy is that it's still better to have your code out there and unsupported where someone can have the option of using it, rather than leaving it stuck on a hard drive never to be seen or useful to the world at large.

While it pains me not to answer every person who emails me about code I put out there, I try to live with it. Plus, it gives them a chance to solve their problem for themselves. :)

In order to get to that point I had to get past the "Oh noes, what if people/future employer/rockstars see my code deride it, laugh in my face and not give me a job because the hacky code I put out is..hacky". I still have flashbacks though. :)

I would encourage you to lower your standards for publishing your code. Is there a "CPAN Unplugged" where lower standards are explicitly accepted and okay?
I'd look to the Django community for examples of what hackers are doing in the field--that's been their bread and butter.

LJ World, lots of stuff at Washington Post, Washington Times, EveryBlock (who received a Knight Foundation grant and was acquired by msnbc), "open data/hacking government" by Sunlight Foundation and others, PBS, etc.

I'd think this would interest young developers: lots of things to dig into, your work is seen and has an immediate impact, hone your skills "with deadlines" and it beats working on the intranet.
People who say they managed to pull it off for a month or two keep popping up. They could be just pulling our leg of course. When I suspected the people who say they've successfully done polyphasic sleep are just making up stories aloud in IRC, someone on the channel told me they'd done polyphasic sleep for several weeks.

I'd consider polyphasic sleep as working if after within two weeks of starting the schedule a significant number of people could start going instantly into REM sleep when they nap and could stay reasonably alert and functional with these naps for several weeks. This should be easy enough to test in a lab.

My guesses are that it can really work (but I'm not sure if it can work for most or for not that many people) and that it's likely to impair mental performance a bit even after successful adaptation. I haven't read many polyphasic sleep accounts from people involved in seriously brainpower and creativity intensive work like mathematics research. Also, I'm a bit wary of cutting away non-REM sleep, since it seems to be the time when the body heals best. I keep thinking that the body might be using the NREM sleep to clean out cells turning into cancer in addition to healing wounds and fighting sickness, which would make long-term NREM deprivation life-expectancy shortening.
Causing Terror on the Cheap
That is certainly more polished. It seems that they get their data from oembedly as well, so support for sites is probably the same.
UI Spoofing Safari on the iPhone
The Internet is causing the world to shrink
If they did a better job, they would.
I tried running, but it didn't help at all. the only thing that has worked, so far, has been a strict meal/sleep schedule and melatonin.
While unions make it easier for workers to defend their rights, they make it _much harder_ to create a meritocracy in the organization, and so much harder to reward people based on their performance - just ask anybody who have ever tried to transform an organization with a strong union. (Notoriously ineffective PG&E comes to mind first).

Here is an example of how "easy" it is to fire a low-performing teacher: http://www.laweekly.com/2010-02-11/news/lausd-s-dance-of-the...
'Father' of British computing dies
You're correct - I intended to create a niche app and tried to integrate useful components into the users' workflow. Those who wish to use Cyberspace to replace his main browser might be disappointed by the lack of features compared to other alternate browsers.

1) It's interesting that you find the App Store description better, since the text are the same - on my product page, I just reorder them and put into different sections.

Cyberspace is a collection of tiny little features that add to the users' browsing experience, and indeed, I find it difficult to put them into words, trying to sell to the users.

2) I would love to hear about other social bookmarking services. I am only aware of Pinboard/Delicious and wish to add more to Cyberspace. Currently they're in the simple form of each site's mobile version, which I find suitable for a small screen/popover. In future version, I will add the ability to add your own service to Cyberspace.

3) That's a great idea.

I wonder if you want to give Cyberspace a spin. I'll send you a promo code right away.
For example, it said, Foundem "duplicates 79% of its website content from other sites."

"We have consistently informed webmasters that our algorithms disadvantage duplicate sites," the firm said.

Search engines duplicate content by necessity, so this isn't really a very fair test when it's applied to Google's competitors (i.e. sites providing search for specific areas and industries).

It's entirely unreasonable to state 'these are the rules, we're simply sticking to them', when the rules have been set by the organisation in question.

No matter how much desire there is to project (and enforce) a healthy, non-stifling culture - when an organisation reaches a large size, the stake individuals are responsible for grows, and (some) people will act recklessly and aggressively to provide gains for the organisation in question.

When an organisation or company grows to a very large size, I think it can become analogous to a large pike in a small pond, consuming almost everything it can.

Our economic system isn't the pure system many people wish it was - it's not perfect. As much as I like the idea of a free-market, I think intervention is necessary.
I see this with clients all the time. Pitch a "stupid" idea and 10 weeks later the client comes back with a "brilliant" one (that is identical).
According to a Guardian video I watched yesterday, all of their (the Guardian's) stories so far have been based on "a couple of hundred" cables, which seems to suggest the media does not have to full set yet either.
Mockups 2.0: the Symbols release
The link to the online HTML version is broken:

http://blob.perl.org/books/impatient-perl/iperl.html
Rapid Business Model testing talk from Ann Miura-Ko
Very cool. I'd definitely pay for a service to give me a history of my web apps over time. I'm often asked when we implemented a feature and have to dive back into (poorly documented) subversion commits. This would be much easier in many cases.

Would love to hear the storage/cost requirements for archiving a site over, say a year. (I guess that would depend on archive frequency).
Steve Pavlina lived on a polyphasic sleep schedule for several months, fascinating reading:

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/
Because the profit component makes any system more efficient.
The new Street View in Earth features seamless movement. They apparently do it by mapping the Street View images onto 3D building models. The end result is pretty terrible, though: lots of warping and a visible "pop" when moving from one image to another.
Here is a though experiment. How fast do you think Salman Khan, of khanacademy.org fame, would advance in a US public school system?
Breaking anonymity to fight trolls
True. Didn't know that one either, thanks.
Pretty awesome thing! Also, it's nice to see a link on the HN frontpage to a project of a Swiss university (or two, since the INI is part of the ETHZ and UZH :)
I've found in the discussion below a link to a non-scribd version and submitted that separately:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1953834
I do think that Google search by definition "manipulates search results". A tautology? If it didn't, then there wouldn't be results.

Curious that legal threats and regulatory challenges came up in an interview discussion...
Tales Weaver
I've heard an interesting argument that states education has become the number one reason for one's under-achievements in today's society (like sinning in the middle ages). The point is that education will always be bad and a LOT of people have and idea (usually wrong) about how to improve it.
Against the apparently total absence of breakers anywhere in the bridge console circuitry, the computer's passive-aggressive refusal to anticipate requests seems pretty tame by comparison.
Please note that there is no system in existence which is a Universal Turing machine. All possible physical systems are finite state machines.
Secret $2.5bn LCH.Clearnet carbon trading data put on web
At making a profit.
Your argument can apply to any industry with generous government subsidy and monopoly.

I can argue that if the Government borrowed $40 billion and built a series of science labs, that research would take off. That if they built $40 billion worth of roads, that businesses based on transport would take off. That if they built $40 billion worth of factories that manufacturing might get a new start.

My point is not that new business opportunities can't be created with money, but is wealth being created or destroyed? Sinking public funds into money losing projects destroys wealth, it doesn't create it, no matter how many new business models are created. And that's what I'm against.
Has anyone tried the suggested 28 hour day (hack 3)? Does it work? What are the advantages/disadvantages?
I don't know if I would read too much into this. Maybe programmers already have books on subject X so only buy subjects Y and Z during this deal.
The broken window fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window as a parable was new to me. A good debunking of the justification that all this security activity is a net economic benefit to the US.
Don’t Ever Assume Anything Online
The author recommends at least 5.8 so that is a few years out.