skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are very mistaken about this. Schools in America are largely funded locally. Poor communities correspondingly have poorly funded schools, while better more affluent ones have have better funded ones.

Research statistics from any source you find credible. They all point to the fact that high performing schools spend substantially more per-capita on their students education then low preforming ones. Funding isn't the only problem by any means, but it is a crucial one.
Well, maybe it is useful for a lot of people, but not everyone. I went to one of the best universities (famous west coast one) and was really looking forward to it. I had dropped out of high school to go to community college where I did learn many good things like calculus and physics.

At the big name university though, I learned almost nothing in the classes.

Partly this was because I had been programming and designing and inventing for years, reading journal articles, participating in conferences, selling my software, freelancing, etc. The classes were really backwards and a waste of time.

But it was also because the professors at research universities are really lousy at teaching and don't give one whit whether they are effective, assuming they can even be bothered to show up for lecture rather than send their pet grad student/slave boy.

Did I learn things outside of classes, like you mention? Absolutely! And I would have learned those things outside of classes by not enrolling in the first place at all.

All in all I wasted a bunch of money and a few years of my life that I should have spent starting my next business earlier rather than stalling out while my competitors advanced.

Now I am not saying it is useless for everyone.

But something like engineering, come on, that stuff can all be learned faster and deeper from practicing it rather than listening to BS from guys that have never released a single finished product in a usable state in their entire lives. What the hell do they know.

Medicine, sure, people should go to medical school.

Languages? Move to that country. History? Library. Engineering? Build and invent things; then try to manufacture, market and sell them. It goes on and on.

When books cost more than a years salary in the middle ages, university made sense.

Now I can buy books for $10 on the net that have more info in them than the $200 college textbooks, and I can participate in discussion groups and mailing lists with professionals to learn more of any craft, and I can send emails to the greatest experts in the world and get a response back within hours.

The internet community has replaced college. Universities are obsolete. Going into debt for that stuff is just for dumb people.

OK, I got a bit off topic there. Let me get back to the post I started with. I absolutely 100% agree that any sort of online learning community that you have to pay for or that is associated with these obsolete institutions called universities will be a substandard way to learn things and should be avoided. I totally agree with that. However, that doesn't mean that online access to community doesn't work. It does! It's just that so-called educators nowadays can't possibly succeed at educating on line when they can't even do it in person. Non-organized independent learning communities, whether they are called that or not (they aren't called that) are in fact a fantastic way to learn and far superior to modern institutions. As learning communities of equals, they are closer to the universities of ancient times when people actually became educated.
> But if the maps, weapons, quests, characters, sounds, music, rendering style, dialogue, plot, gameplay rules, setting, and even game genre are in some way "generated"... how can you still have a shared experience?

Well, you can do static generation. You use a known seed and a PRNG to generate stuff that's the same for everyone. Usually, you do that for background stuff, but some people do it and create big, empty worlds that they then try to fill with other stuff. But often, it's for background stuff like trees and clouds, where it really doesn't really create a shared experience one way or another.

There's also the sort of hybrid approach from Dwarf Fortress, where people can share seeds/worldgen info, but I think you already know about that. So people can all share that broken embark with the adamantium space elevator, but their fortresses will likely be totally different and have totally different stories. Maybe one will have their last dwarf go axe crazy while on fire, while another will drop 300+ goblins from the highest z-level all the way down into hell (literally...), or use those crazy weaponized bathtubs they're talking about now.

I think there may be some sweet spots in there with handcrafted stories layered atop procedurally generated worlds, but you're right that more work needs to be done on it.
According to the link, Bernstein was at least partially successful when represented by the EFF and his case was dismissed when he represented himself.
> "How did you do this?" And Bill said, "It's very simple — you read the protocol and write the code."

Love it. Reminds me of the Feynman Algorithm mentioned here on HN a few days ago. Regarding how Feynman came up with so much brilliant, groundbreaking work, that the steps he supposedly followed were:

1. Write down the problem.

2. Think real hard.

3. Write down the solution.
Funny how "unintended consequences" and "government campaign to poison the elderly" evoke different emotional responses.
Chronon Time Travelling Java Debugger - Now in Beta
The Egos at Id (1996)
This issue is smartarse:

"No instructions on how to build"

https://github.com/msporny/dna/issues#issue/2
Put it on your own website, and actively market it to people who need it (including productization steps that OSS often doesn't take like having a logo, an install guide, etc). You'll be identified as the relevant expert.
Many of the salt flats in the Western USA used to be great lakes as recently as a few thousand years ago. What is now "a dry salt water lake bed a hundred miles from drinkable water" could very well become abundant land in 10,000 years.
Free Computer Wallpapers 2011 – Best Wallpapers
Where do Bad Political Ideas Come From?
Search Still Sucks
OpenGL/CL.

Oh you meant /web/ APIs. As if Javascript is a language anyone really wants to program in. ;)
The problem is that intustrial installations of the type stuxnet targets usually cannot be patched at all because changing anything important in a system like that requires a full reevaluation of compliancee with all current security and other regulations as if the installation were new. And this can easily cost tens or even hundreds of millions in hardware changes if the requirements for new installations have become stricter since when the installation was built (which is quite common for nuclear facilities).
The rural parts. I used Idaho as one of many rural states as an example. Those areas are in bad shape and there is massive meth use, which makes people crazy and violent and quite likely to break into houses and sometimes kill the inhabitants. Had to pick a state so sorry Idaho. I could have said Kansas, Missouri, South Dakota. Family farmer era is over. Farms are owned by Monsanto and ADM slaves. There's been mass-depopulation to the point many towns advertise free lots and sometimes houses if anyone will just move there.
"The protests and Internet crackdowns in these countries have revived talk in the United States of giving the president an Internet kill switch."

I would hope that these events would be useful in convincing the people of the US that it is a bad idea to give the president a kill switch. The internet wasn't turned off in Egypt to help the Egyptian people, after all, and, if it is going down in Algeria, it isn't for their benefit, either.
My problem with most of social, sharing, reading apps is that they save time in the beginning, but reality is the more you engage, the more you notice they all have a very low signal to noise ratio. I don't need to administer all my streams from one app, what I need is apps that give me the content and functionality I really need instead of generating an endless flow of links (the long tail).

IMO personalised web is in its infancy. And that's where I agree with Jordan, that for the moment developers want us to waste time and boost stats, so we're flooded with suggestions we don't want on websites bloated by functionality we don't need. Paying for apps just to be able to get rid of distractors and replace them with better quality services seems like a solution.
The website is a gallery of themes listed on other sites. YMMV but the ability to quickly preview each theme looks useful.
How to rip DVD to iPad 2 
http://www.blistechnology.com/how-tos/dvd-to-ipad2.html
We were already in the middle of deploying an algorithmic change in how we trust links in our scoring. So between Feb. 1st and Feb. 8th, lots of rankings for the pages in question had already dropped. The author of the NYT article, David Segal, noticed that independently and we confirmed that algorithmic changes had been responsible for those drops. After Segal contacted us, we investigated and ended up taking corrective manual action as well.
"Central California is very Republican"

The voters might be but not the population, most of whom are not US citizens. Only US citizens get to vote.

I lived in a couple of places in the central valley and have spent quite a bit of time in the area, so don't try to pull a fast one, I know how it is there.

Tons of drugs, despair, organized crime, and the crime gangs pay the police, who are corrupt. A big industry is running prisons, a boom economy for the guards who make a fortune shaking down prisoners to deliver them drugs, phones, and contraband.
The Internet Archive or the Library of Congress may archive much of the material:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitters_entire_archive...

http://www.archive.org/

If you want to archive it in a searchable way yourself, you may find that a very technically daunting task. People use large clusters of computers and pretty advanced technology to attempt stuff like this.

On the other hand, if you restrict the amount of data you want to ingest, you can get pretty far just by configuring existing software. You could set up Drupal on a hosting service that include Apache Solr search/indexing, such as Acquia or Pantheon, and then configure Drupal to pull in information from selected twitter searches and feeds of various blogs, and archive it.

Eventually you would run into space and volume restrictions. If you picked enough data sources, you eventually might max out the rate of wrties to MySQL. But you can go pretty far just by point and click configuring what exists.
I don't know exactly what you are trying to do, but all Tweets will be archived anyway. (Source: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2010-04-14-library-congres...)

I think a visual collage of the revolution on social media would be very interesting.
I think besides requiring an exam to get entrance into the schools, it's a sense of pride that helps to push the students to excel. They're in that school because they're smart, so they work to uphold that image.

In regular schools, I assume, that they don't have the extra pressure (and pride) that motivates them. That motivation would have to come from within the students themselves, their parents/family/friends, and their teachers and role models.
We'll check that out--thanks for mentioning it. Feel free to write up something on the web and tweet me a link to it, if you want to send more details.
Professor gives up back of head robo-eye
Try Subsonic. Standalone installer, excellent web client (thought it uses a Flash player) and mobile clients for just about every platform. Video support was just added and an HTML5 player is in the works. Highly recommended. http://www.subsonic.org
'Peernet' separate from today's Internet infrastructure?
And from that document:

Third, avoid using a lazily-initialized Singleton unless
you really need it. The classic Singleton implementation
is based on not initializing a resource until that
resource is requested. An alternative is to use eager
initialization instead, i.e., to initialize a resource at
the beginning of the program run.

I've personally never found the need for a lazy-loaded singleton and I expect the same to be true for most other software developers. This whole problem stems from the premature optimization of thinking lazy-loading something would be nifty.
RAZRs are programmable. I've used some of the programs.

There's a difference between being able to program on a device and being able to program for that device.
> Pay to get rid of the ads, pay for fewer pages to click through, pay for less of whatever annoys you? I don't know. It seems to me I could save a lot of money, and a lot of time with a completely different solution: ditch the service entirely.

It's not that we don't need their functionality. The point is, we come for the basic solution, but we're flooded with a whole ecosystem which is far from the core functionality we seek. I could loosely compare the 'paying for less' idea to sportified versions of road cars - there are a lot of such examples in the automotive industry, where a more expensive version is the one where producers got rid of all unnecessary items and instead boosted only the core values - power, speed, handling, weight loss (Porsche GT3RS, BMW M3 CSL, Mercedes Black Series, and lots of others). And you get what you really want - you didn't get rid of the car, you got a faster better handling car without 4-zone a/c and 2 speakers instead of 16. Not a direct example, but you get the point: sometimes less can be worth more.

Summary: the annoyances are there because they need it, maybe if we paid them, they wouldn't be there.
Thanks!

One of the things we really wanted to have before we launched was an initial version of an API ready so that people could experiment with building things like you describe. We've been happy so far that people have started to do just that, including someone going so far as to start working on an Android client! https://github.com/Pewpewarrows/Convoid

We happily encourage efforts to integrate with other services, although it can be tricky due to our added layer of structure (topics) that both sets us apart, but also makes it match up less cleanly with existing clients and services.
The point I was making was that they had very little control over the state government because they elect republicans. So only the voters are relative to that argument.

Beyond that your evidence is all anecdotal. There are certainly cities that are as you describe but there are also a lot of cities with perfectly nice communities (Coalinga, Frazier Park, Clovis and others). I don't think either of us has the statistical evidence to know which scenario is the norm
Eventually, we'll settle on a conversation formatting that really works for the Internet.
I really appreciate that--thank you. HN is a pretty fun place to hang out. :)
GeoHot Hacker Released Rap Video, Rapping about Dissing Sony [video]
We've definitely heard this feedback from others, especially those coming from other web-based chat products that tend to include this feature.

Right now we haven't offered this as a feature because we're a free app, and hosting more than a few files and images would be cost prohibitive. We're definitely open to building it in the future if it can be subsidized somehow, or if we directly charge for it.
Animated Water Caustics Sprites on Canvas
SourceKit 0.6.2 is OUT! No more asking for email, pass; now with more Dojo and Ace! http://bit.ly/dRvLmb
A load of crock and, from the stock drop, everyone knows it. As the article states, it's simple risk vs payoff - nothing wrong with either choice.

Of course, with Android, there's the extra risk of Nokia software engineers "innovating" in the software and UI. :)
What Anon would do if it isn't a bunch of hypocrites: Release the source code, in the spirit of the WikiLeaks they love so dearly

What Anon will do: Be a bunch of bastards about it
10 Awesome Theorems & Result
I'm just glad to know it's getting some attention. They attacked a small game wiki I use and I started to get alarmed once I realized the scale of their operation.

I don't know if you got it, but I wrote down a bunch of URLs for spammed-up wikis and some information on one of the Google feedback forms a few days back. I realize that that kind of thing can be lost in the noise, though.

EDIT: Here's one search that will show you a (now deleted) wiki that was spam-filled. You can follow the links on the spam pages to other vandalized wikis.

http://google.com/search?q=site%3Apreventioncommunities.com+...
I don't know how, or why, but people seem to persist in misunderstanding and misrepresenting me, willfully or otherwise. Perhaps I'm just not expressing myself clearly, or perhaps this is a lessonon why politicians never actually say anything - they know that no matter how careful, reasonable or balanced they are, they'll get misinterpreted.

However, I'll try once more. There's a tl;dr at the end.

Of course I'm not advocating letting these kids continue to rot in these hellholes. I'd love to see the money being spent on schools like this, and others, to give them decent rooms, decent equipment, and more teachers. And that's an essential part of any complete plan to tackle the problems that such schools, such kids and such teachers face.

But it's not the only thing. More cash, decent buildings, and better equipment won't fix the problem that some of the kids see thieving as the only way to get money. More cash, decent buildings, and better equipment won't fix the problem that some of the kids are in gangs that thrive on violence. More cash, decent buildings, and better equipment won't fix the problem that some of the kids have a bad attitude toward learning that has been inculcated in them since birth.

These kids need more. And yes, providing more will take money, but it won't be money spent in the schools. It will be money spent elsewhere in programs to catch them earlier, provide a balance to their lives, to let them see the opportunities that education can provide.

Of course all this takes money. And yes, spending money in the schools is one step among many. Perhaps it's the first step. Perhaps it's the step that will, in fact, provide the greatest value.

But there are problems that spending cash in the schools won't fix.

I could represent your position by saying that all we need to do to fix all the problems for all the kids in all the world is to provide shiny, well lit, well provisioned classrooms with great teachers. Clearly that would solve all the problems, and all the kids would then be engaged, enthusiastic, and eager to learn. But that position seems so ludicrous I can't believe you would hold it.

On the other hand, maybe you do.

But I suspect that we are none of us that far apart. I suspect that we all want to see facilities and opportunities provided that give the kids a real chance to make something of themselves, and to pursue a better life. But I also suspect that we all know that spending money on the buildings and the equipment is only part of the answer. An important part, perhaps the first part, but only part.

I'd love to see it tried, I know it will solve some of the problems. But I'm also pretty sure it won't solve them all, and those that it won't solve also need attention and time.

And money.

ADDED IN EDIT:

And lest anyone be in any doubt, let me try to make it clear with a TL;DR

IT WON'T SOLVE ALL THE PROBLEMS, BUT I'M IN FAVOR
OF SPENDING MORE MONEY IN SCHOOLS TO GIVE THE KIDS
DECENT CLASSROOMS AND USEFUL FACILITIES.
IETester has always been convenient and sufficient for all my practical purposes. I think it's good to let people know about it.
From the comments:

"What you SHOULD be talking about is how, if smartphones are classified as computers, the Patriot act DEFINITELY ALLOWS warrant-less search and seizure of your smartphone at international borders."

If you care, you should definitely be carrying a "travel phone" on your trips.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCourseWare
I see google deleted the whole group. Is there an archive of the group anywhere? It doesn't seem useful now, but future historians may appreciate being able to browse through the messages.
I see there's a bunch of replies, some with more and more commands through a pipe.

Seriously, if you are going to be using a shell, you will be typing a ' char all the time, so probably better to just get used to it rather than go through all those convolutions with tr and cut.
Hertfordshire Escorts
Hertfordshire Escort Agency where you can find a variety of beautiful Escorts availlable in Hertfordshire.
No one is saying that there are no good cities! That was the whole point of my other post, the article wrongly extrapolates some miserable cities to a miserable state, which is obviously an incorrect conclusion. But there are a lot of really crappy towns in California as well and they've gotten worse the last 20 years.
The picture in the article is absolutely unrelated.
FYI, the bell-labs link seems to be broken.
Positions available in Finland:

Engineering Operations & Management (7)

Enterprise (5)

Marketing and Communications (1)

Sales (6)

Hardly work for the thousands.
I really liked being able to see what the other person was typing in wave, made having a conversation quicker as I could beging typing a response while they were still typing, like a real conversation.
It is very unlikely that they have the source (judging by the article). Rather, they have a copy of the virus executable. Still, the same probably applies.
It's not even certain that this mission would add much in terms of know-how or capital investment into economically sustainable (instead of subsidized) space colonization.

Sure, but it would almost certainly provide a crucible in which to drive & accelerate R&D.

If you look at history, you'll notice much of humanity's periods of rapid development are centered around a driving need, rather than a future goal. IMHO, we just don't work as well when we're preparing for something that hasn't happened yet.
Email storms are pretty common on any mailing list with wide enough distribution; I kind of doubt there was anything particularly unique about this one, but it is kind of impressive that it hit several hundred messages in the space of 20 minutes at around 1-4am depending on where in the US you live.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_storm
This is a really good point. Going back a mere 20,000 years there was an ice age, glaciers covered much of north america, and you could walk on land from China to Australia. Burying stuff with a half life of 25,000 years means that in 25,000 years there's going to be 1/2 as much, not none. After 150,000 years there will be 1.5% left. For super radioactive stuff that you have piles and piles of that's still a huge threat! It is absolutely impossible to build something that can protect this waste as long as it is dangerous because we are talking about time scales over which a lot of geological change occurs. There might even be comet strikes. The only responsible thing to do is to process it into waste with shorter half lifes, which is something we know how to do. Building a monument and pretending it is safe is just a fantasy we tell ourselves to sleep at night while we are poisoning the future.
Well, they also have a heritage of liking to troll people and organizations, and this seems like an opportunity in that regard.