skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Isn't it obvious that the answer is yes? No disrespect to the many people who have Down's or other syndromes, as many of them are wonderful human beings; but the current attitude is that they would rather spend $100K on special assistants so that little Danny can be taught to use the bathroom by himself by the time he is 14, rather than spend that same money encouraging 100 smart kids.
When accountability to the customers (students/parents) is removed, and the ability to select from alternatives is removed (choosing between schools), you get what we have - a complete chronic mess. The only solution I can think of to solve the problem is to completely deregulate education.

Imagine - a large market open to innovation - education startups!

(We send our daughter to private montessori)
Singularity Summit 2007 in San Francisco: http://www.singinst.org/summit2007
Imagine what would happen if all the local police and fire departments were deregulated overnight.

A basic level of education is something that needs to be provided free for all people. It's even in the UN Declaration of human rights. If we go to to a free market education system, every child will need some sort of grant that they can use to attend some school for free.
And here we go with the politics...
Embarassing Bill Gates video
What's with the trashing of reddit lately? Is it not the largest YC success?

I did post a negative comment and for that I apologize. I was just annoyed he did not read the article and his original, unedited post made that obvious(it was the first line of the essay above).
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
It's the final straw that we fix typos and abusive punctuation in submission titles? That seems a bit melodramatic.

I'm surprised to think anyone didn't already realize we did this. Did you really think people on news.yc had that much better spelling than reddit users?
Maybe it won't even be a problem. Birth rates decrease as life expectancy increases...
Eary iPhone adopters are the easiest for Apple to satisfy....
People don't use the internet in the middle of the night ;)
This also just in:

SwellJoe safe after Peru earthquake.

Paris Hilton safe after Peru earthquake.

About 6 billion people I don't know safe after Peru earthquake.

Anybody else think this is an utter waste of a headline/link? Everyone except the people injured or lost in the Peru earthquake is safe after the earthquake. We don't need a headline about every single one of them. The silly rumor about isn't news, and the fact that it was a rumor is certainly now news.

But maybe I'm just grouchy because I'm coming down with yet another summer cold (God must have smote me because of my atheism).
"Did you really think people on news.yc had that much better spelling than reddit users?"

Sure, shatter the illusion why don't ya?

Kidding aside, I don't know why people are flipping out. One should think the editors are carefully chosen to not be power-hungry jackasses out to destroy a story's integrity. It's not even like they're editing comments. Some people are quick to jump on the drama, I suppose. I share in the same sentiment expressed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43650
As opposed to caring about the specifics like fixing punctuation, I think that critics don't like the authority (and potential for abuse) implied by administrators messing with user submitted text, no matter in how trivial a way.

At some point users have to decide if they're willing to sacrifice a purely democratic community if it means an increase in quality. Is the point of a social news site to make a political statement, or is it find cool stuff to read?

Edit: Maybe the admins should just be 100% transparent about everything they do; document their actions in a FAQ.
"Front-end design = HTML/Javascript/CSS/graphics"

I'm guessing his idea of "front-end design" is actually more like "I'll mock it up in MS Paint and tell the developer what the explosions ought to sound like by making sounds with my mouth". That's usually what self-appointed business guys bring to the table, in my experience (and I've met lots of them).
All these smart kids should just do startups, get rich, and skip school entirely, provided they can learn the basics themselves, and their social lives aren't too screwed up by this. If college students can start companies, why not brilliant high school and jr. high students?
Would somebody care to explain to me what's wrong with my comment? I'll admit it's short. Is there something more fundamentally wrong? Feeding trolls?

Frankly, a belief that natural disasters only strike highly religious areas is quite strange, and I see no evidence for it. As Goladus pointed out, San Francisco gets earthquakes; that was also the first thing I thought of. But is there any part of the planet that doesn't suffer from natural disasters? I don't think anybody could make the original assertion without realizing these problems, and my explanation shouldn't be needed. If I could, I would have downmodded it.
True. I'm going to miss all those startup submissions. I think he might have ruined the site this time, but we'll see.
You should have to enter an explanation when you downmod something. Then the recipients won't be left confused, and it will enforce responsible use of the privilege. I feel this is a better solution to the abuse problem than only allowing downmods for 24 hours.
Weeks of hell at Opera Software
Video available here:
http://nettv.aftenposten.no/player/player.php?id=5180
Video here:

http://nettv.aftenposten.no/player/player.php?id=5180
That is pretty shady. Do you include a way to see previous version of the title?
I know this isn't the right place to ask this, but why is there no down arrow for submissions/comments? And why when you upmod something does the arrow disappear! Where's the undo?
Mark completed features as dead
So Time thinks that not letting an already arrogant kid skip two grades is "failing" her.

The most important thing for a school age kid is to become well-socialized.

The correlation between skipping grades and turning out well is just a correlation - it may be that those who were not allowed to skip were so messed up socially already that they were less likely to convince their schools to let them skip grades. In contrast, if you're well-adjusted and smart, it's more likely that you'd be able to convince school administrators to allow you to skip a grade. And, of course, Time misses that distinction, making it into a clear case of "the more grades skipped the better."
Transparency makes this a non-issue. Admin actions like editing titles should automatically show up on a log page.
Most people focus on the technological singularity, the development of strong AI.

I think the more likely singularity is biological singularity, when individual human consciousnesses become immortal. A single human thinking about a problem for 10 million years should be able so solve pretty much anything. It gets easier if we can copy and accelerate ourselves. Hopefully infinite is enough time to figure out the fourth dimension or black holes. Then we get to go to the next level and figure out our next problem.
Cory Doctorow wrote a good short story about this called Truncat. http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2003/08/26/truncat/i...

It describes the coming of age of a member of the last generation of humanity in a post-singularity society where a reputational economy has drastically decreased the birthrate.
I think as wet-ware we are too accident prone. The average lifespan would still be (relatively) short unless we have a way to backup/distribute minds.
I actually have experience on both sides of this issue. My principal would not allow me to skip 3rd grade, despite my teacher's and parents' requests. On the other hand, in junior high, I was allowed to test out of three years of math.

I can assure you that any negative effects of skipping grades are far outweighed by the effects of holding students back. The latter fosters resentment and frustration, which doesn't help social aspects much. For the former, as long as you're sharing classes with advanced students in higher grades (and why wouldn't you be?), the older students are very welcoming.

Also, arrogance isn't a negative quality in talented math/science students -- it's essential. You just can't get really good at math unless you believe you can figure out difficult problems yourself. Maybe you don't have to admit it, but there's a point where denying your abilities looks foolish. The "I've played a lot of Number Munchers" line only works for so long.
Google Working on Social Network Aggregator
When it comes to online forums I have no hesitation in giving up "full democracy". A benevolent dictator and his helpers is a great solution to maintaining a quality community. The way they go about doing it will simply filter out those who don't like their style. Nothing wrong with that. Not everyone is willing to deal with Linus Torvalds and his helpers either. Transparency here is optional but preferred.
I don't think complete deregulation is a good idea. Problem is, the results of education don't show up for about 10 years. Capitalism gives you what you want now, not what you need 10 years down the road.

As a general rule, markets are good when they transmit information (like the relative scarcity of goods) and bad when they hide information (like the chance of default on subprime mortgages). I think it's far more likely that a free-market educational system will behave like the latter than the former, because it's much more difficult to ascertain the quality of an education than the quality of a laptop.

I do think more choice and accountability is necessary. I went to a public charter school, and it was the best decision I (well, my parents) ever made.
Fast Company: Man vs. Machine - Mahalo
"So Time thinks that not letting an already arrogant kid skip two grades is "failing" her."

Kids tend to become less arrogant when placed among intellectual peers, even when those peers are several years older. It's because people naturally compare themselves to the folks around them. If they're always smarter than their peers, they'll assume they're smarter than everybody. If instead they're always younger than their peers - well, they'll grow out of that. ;-)

Going to Amherst and majoring in physics was perhaps the most humbling experience in my life, because it was the first time I wasn't the smartest one in the room. I suspect this is the real point of the university system - by bringing all the smart kids together, recursively, you teach them that there's always somebody smarter than them.
http://humanitieslab.stanford.edu/HumanAndMachine/224

The poster does not know how to resize pictures--so what? To say that only programmers can design successful facebook apps is a bit arrogant. I'd say a lot of social users would be able to help come up with an app and make it popular, if they knew how.

However, almost always, you need a programmer to write something like this, as well as keep it constantly improving, since one can't just create something in a one-shot deal and think they're done.

If you are sure your idea is as good as you say it is, it will be worth it to learn enough programming to make a facebook app yourself, get it popular like you said you will, and when it hits big you'll be able to find tons of developers.

There are some business (or art) people who have dabbled in programming and made some contributions, but it is almost always 'hackers' who do.

I think the problem people have with this isn't just that the programmer might end up doing more work for a program that might not go anywhere, but that the "opportunity cost" (some business lingo) to work on this delays completion of something else the hacker is already working on (with more equity and closer to fruition.)

Finally, hackers would probably rather team up with another hacker (same culture, understanding of computers) than a business guy at our young age.
Doesn't OpenID have facilities for defining other identity information, such as friends for instance?

I don't think OpenID or any other open schemes will succeed by having information stores divorced from applications. They will only succeed as protocols for existing sites to cooperate. I don't doubt the large players will be slow in adopting this sort of thing, but the smaller companies can bind together.
Democracy has a weird tendency of favoring idiocy.

Just take a look at this discussion:
http://reddit.com/info/2ga89/comments
I think it is a great idea that a human editor is involved, and site content being edited. A similar process happen on a good wiki, and I always enjoy when my prose is translated to English behind my back :-)
I would never argue to privatize the legal/law enforcement system - this is necessarily run by the state as there are obvious problems otherwise.

The options I have now: put my daughter in a "free" system that will destroy her future, or pay dramatically too much in a private school so that she has a chance. I've chosen option 2.

What the UN thinks is quite irrelevant as the current system is not only broken now, its been broken for decades and continues to get worse. School isn't "free" now, it is paid for by taxes. The problem is, there is no incentive for the public schools to get better, and they just won't. In a private system, all the "free" money taken out of the private economy in the form of taxation would be put back into private hands. Then parents could decide where to send their children, weighing the costs/benefits and choosing schools appropriately. There has been and will continue to be very large sums of charitable money to help educate - I believe Gates now has the largest charitable fund focused to a great degree on education.

The bottom line: privatizing education would be dramatically less expensive (think of the immense cost of the beauraucracy now in the education system) and more efficient, and more innovative. Why, you ask? Because the schools would be competing for students, and the bad schools would go out of business as they should. The good schools would get bigger and more plentiful. The cost of education would go down as new innovative ways are found to provide quality education. etc.

The alternative: dooming our children to mediocrity in the public system.
Hmmm, think of the tech industry 10 years ago and now.
I'm embroiled in parts of this debate with myself. By most measures, I'd be identified as a smart person. Perhaps even "really, really" smart. But back in the 4th or 5th grade, I wasn't selected as "gifted".

The practical upshot is that instead of going to a different school and being surrounded by teachers who were in tune with my needs, I stumbled through a public suburban high school replete with all the drama that Judd Apatow can fit onto the screen.

I consider this a very lucky occurence.

Why? Because it forced me to keep myself occupied rather than expecting anyone else to do so. It freed me from a mindset of educational entitlement.

By spending this years in a regular school, I was able to learn take on a host of other activities that I found interesting at my own pace and at my own behest. My intellectual development and curiosity drove me forward.

And it forced me to learn how to navigate elements of the "real world" that end up being speedbumps along the way. Isolation from that is a mistake. I've many friends who've learned that the hard way.

Now I'm a happy adult with a precocious son. I'm getting worried about his teachers in kindergarten are going to deal with a child who happily decides if numbers are primes and points out square roots.

How do I teach him to learn for himself. To realize that his school gives him a starting point for his education, and not the entireity. To help him end become a ferociously curious individual who gets stuff done, not in some isolation chamber gifted bubble, but in the real world -- omplete with alliances and politics and emotions and conflicts.

It's hard. It was hard to live through as the student, and I expect it to be hard for me to live through as his guide.

But it is absolutely the right place to end up.
Milton Friedman, Meet Richard Feynman
Let's see PG dance like that.
"Authority (and potential for abuse) implied"? Well, I guess different things upset different types of people. Why does this have to be "democratic community"? Is the "democratic community" paying the bills for the site? I'm not a PG sycophant, but I come to the defense of the site maintainers. I would rather read a sanitized and on-target news.ycombinator site than a mob-rulz reddit site. But ultimately, they serve two different purposes.
"I wonder if this is the eventual fate of all online communities. I've been through at least half a dozen now, and I've yet to see one survive as something other than trite, meaningless bullshit."

This is best described as "reversion to the mean". A democratic, non-moderated site like Reddit and News.YC will start off attracting folks on the right end of the bell curve, and over time, gain traction to attract the unwashed masses. Then, someone will get fed up and go start another site, and the cycle begins anew. I'm not being elitist or snobbish; this is what I have observed since the USENET of the 1990s. It always happens.
"... That's a pretty naive analysis of the situation. ..."

I'd say thats more "punk - attitude" than analysis. There is a bigger problem(s) here that the title alludes to. Try reading this article ~ http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/
Using Data to "Brute Force" Hard Problems in Vision and Graphics (Google TechTalk)
How Startups Get A Foot In The Door
How do startups attract those crucial first customers? A venture capitalist shares four key steps. In a previous post, I wrote about balancing the risks and rewards of buying from a startup.
Valuing A Web 2.0 Startup 
Getting any kind of value on a startup is difficult to begin with, but the CEO of eSnips, Yael Elish had a great idea, and created an incredible graphic to give it a start, based on those companies that have already been bought and their alexa traffic.
Feature requests go here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363 . You can use GreaseMonkey to change the fonts on your own end.

As for down votes, they're only available to members who have enough karma. (Paul claimed 20 a while ago, though my experience didn't confirm that -- maybe you need 21)
This probably won't be a popular opinion, but from a truly objective standpoint, I think it's possible, for the same reason that non-blacks are a standard deviation worse at athletic endeavors. Two factors of evolution point me to this conclusion. Europe became civilized long before Africa, which I would guess leads to a natural selection for intelligence in Europe (as opposed to physical abilities in Africa - hence better athletic abilities for them) starting longer ago than in Africa. The second factor is Africans' earliest days in America, when they were actually bred for physical ability while the intelligent dissenters often were killed or not encouraged to have children.

See, I told you it wouldn't be a popular opinion. I don't think it's something that should just continue to be ignored, though. Turning a blind eye to possible facts just because we don't want to believe them doesn't make them go away.
I think modern society's damning of "arrogance" and pride is also a bad thing. The fact that we aren't all as self-confident as some of the brightest doesn't give us the right to try to strip them of their own self-confidence.
Stanford Educators Corner Podcast: Social Networking 3.0 Panel with MySpace, Facebook, Ning, ...
Heretical Thoughts About Science and Society, by Freeman Dyson
To be fair to Paul and the moderators, the title of this submission used to be:

Goodbye, HACKER NEWS!!!! I'm going back to Reddit.

I don't think this site was meant for everybody to post whatever they want. There should be respect for other people's resources; while Reddit and Digg want as many users as possible, there is no such leverage here.

I think the mistake is that users start thinking they can do whatever they want just because a social site is free.
usenet?
Coding Horror: Thirteen Blog Cliches
Fast String Searching With Suffix Trees
Liberal Arts Professors on Attending Grad School--Is it the same in Comp Sci?
This story is only interesting as a historical artifact in itself. It was a nice example of the current "conventional thinking" refuted by that other story yesterday about how England escaped the malthusian trap. Why is this story still here and the newer one gone already? Jared Diamond is very useful in this field, so maybe vote up some of his newer stuff?
GreaseMonky does not seems to work with Safari. If the site used 100% font size, everyone would just get their preferred font size.
SIGGRAPH 2007 paper and presentation here:

http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/scene-completion/
An alternative alternative: teaching children and parents not to rely solely on educators.

I went to that mediocre public school. No, realy, it was that lame. We were really a place for a lot of kids to get enough shop skills to end up at the local GM plant.

I slipped around the edges of it all, did stuff I wanted to do, and, frankly, succeeded.

My goal now is to teach my son to do the same. In the public school system.
Vote down for any user, because it more useful to vote down, and for ranking it does not matter how a link count is reached, by voting down or up.
Caaa iOaass
100% font size for body text, relative size for other text. A user should get his preferred font size set in the browser.
Use black text color for author comment text, the current gray is hard to read.
Undo for voting, see reddit implementation.
My advice: only consider grad school after you have completely given up on startups.

It's better to be a cofounder of a successful startup than to be an academic.
It's not as bad in CS. In English you have the problem of working on fundamentally bogus stuff in addition to the structural problems inherent in grad school.
You're probably right. No one complains when whole submissions are deleted as spams, presumably because you can see them if you want by turning on showdead in your profile. So maybe I'll add something to preserve original submission titles.
I should add that anything graphics related is probably an exception to this because you need quite a lot of knowledge and mathematical sophistication to succeed in this area. A masters degree in graphics will probably help you.
Very fitting that this link is posted by someone who shares the same nick as Richard Stallman.
10-15 lines would be nice.
Four Square Hip for Startups
This was definitely the most interesting paper at siggraph this year.
Immunity to disease was much more strongly selected for than intelligence in Europe. Hunting requires more intelligence than farming, so intelligence was more strongly selected for in Africa. That modern African Americans were descended from slaves bred against intelligence is more likely to be true.

However, even if that is true, it still may be the case that some small amount of bias does indeed exist in IQ tests. For example, I was given an anecdote about a Chinese boy, who, when shown a picture of people using umbrellas on a dry day and asked what was wrong, responded that nothing was wrong with the picture. Apparently he interpreted the umbrellas as parasols, something Americans would be less likely to do.
Try submitting this paragraph as your next grant application!

It is actually possible to make educated guesses as to what's interesting and what isn't. It is just very hard.

The management of the old Xerox PARC, for example, was very good at it. So were the people at DARPA - about 40 years ago. So, once, was Bell Labs. And so on.

Needless to say, the actual process of guesswork has nothing in common with the modern scientific budget process.