skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a good question. We need to keep in mind that computers are never going to go backwards in innovation. Once a computer is capable of some calculation, students will never need to have to do it by themselves again. However, they will still need to know how to interact with that calculation and understand the variables/relationships in order to set up the calculation.

Where do you draw the line?

Instead of just one line, you have to draw two lines. One would be on the more elementary end of the spectrum. Students have to learn the rudimentary basic calculations (or memorization) in order to function well in everyday life and higher levels of education. Simple addition, subtract, division, multiplication, estimation, understanding of relationships would be necessary. As much as I adore algebra, it could be left to the computer. Therefore the first line would be drawn at a point where the material does not show up in everyday scenarios.

The next line would be drawn at the opposite end of the spectrum where humans need to come in and do the higher orders of thinking. Given the right software, students would be able to visualize and understand the basics of the calculations and their relationships without actually calculating them. They would therefore be able to use computers in more applied problems - ones that they would be confronted in their careers later on in life. A few experiments could be conducted to find exactly where this line would be drawn. It would be at the point where humans do the smallest amount of calculation work while still having a solid understanding. Computers may be able to work past this line, but they would end up assisting the students to the point where the students lose the understanding of the concepts.

If the US and other countries truly put the time, money, and effort into this reform, I'm sure they could be quite successful.

However, another tricky thing to think about would be transitioning into this new and reformed type of education...
Perhaps also reconsider the wisdom of deliberately slashing 19% off the user's preferred font-size (css font-size is set to 0.81em).

Well, readability bookmarklet to the rescue...
(defn japanjure [& e]
(reduce #(if (fn? %2)
(let [[l r & m]%]
(cons (%2 r l) m))
(cons %2 %))[]e))

(japanjure
4 5 +
3 *
print)
Any photos?
Mathalon Reach 1000K Visitors , What you Think?
From what I hear in the UK if you are something like a good heart surgeon you can pretty much name your conditions - if you are a mother with school age kids that might be to only work two days a week. And why not! I think if I was being operated on I might prefer a rested and unstressed surgeon to one who is working 80 hours a week...
I hate to take this bait, but I'm hoping maybe I'll get a recommendation here. This is not rhetorical. I'm not happy with the space I'm using up by having an Ubuntu in a VM on my SSD, so this question is very real, not just some Apple fanboy rant.

I would like to buy a second laptop to run Ubuntu, but I want something with incredible build quality. I'm an Apple user, so clearly I don't mind paying a premium (ta-dum tss).

The closest I've found is Lenovo, but their product still comes in a fully plastic enclosure containing a hundred screws and as many tacked on plastic panels as a Pontiac Aztek. I've read about their "roll cage", and I think that's a pretty cool idea, but it still doesn't hold up to Apple's unibody designs. I owned a T41 back around 2005 (best guestimate), so I'm not speaking entirely from ignorance of the product. I really don't feel it matches my MacBook Pro.

Now, you might say that I'm being unreasonable, but I have the money, and I'm willing to spend it. If anyone has a lead on a well-built laptop with the design simplicity of an Apple MacBook, I'm interested to hear about it.

I'm looking for:

Something in the 13" range. I don't need anything super-powerful (C2D and 2 GB of RAM should be fine). I do care about build quality. The primary use-case is sysadmin duty. I want something small and light to take on the road that still has a bash shell. I want to go Ubuntu, rather than a 13" MBP because I've been very impressed with the work coming out of the Ubuntu community lately, and I don't like to limit my world to Apple alone. All of our VPSs run Debian, which is similar enough to Ubuntu that I can bring over a lot of my dot-files and customizations.
1. the BS was also revolutionary, and obviously the arduino references it, but the BS did not evolve in the last 10 years.

2. you could say the same thing about computers, crystal radios and solar panels, this is a really weak argument. we are talking about a specific product area and a group, Arduino is a great improvement, hell even having cross-platform capability (one of many details) much less a simple IDE was a pipe-dream.

3. "in the grand scheme of things", nothing except photosynthesis has been very effective. if you have a scheme in mind, you should specify it. yes Microchip gives away a lot of PICs, but they give away PICs to EEs and companies. the 150K people here are -not- all EEs, they are mostly -other- kinds of people. they are not people making products. people who make products never ever use dev boards in the final design, but at least with Arduino its bare AVR so you can reuse the code on raw chips whereas with BS you are screwed.

4. the 555 did win and its here to stay; it is a mainstay of electrical engineering and is used in products all the time. the LM101, ironically, did not.
Although more about social values than education, the book "The Way We Never Were: American Families And The Nostalgia Trap" just came up in conversation recently, and it deals specifically with the way we view the past through rose colored glasses.

http://www.amazon.com/Way-We-Never-Were-Nostalgia/dp/0465090...
Sorry I should have included the <joke>tag</joke>.
George MacKerron: 'I can measure how happy you are – and why'
Factor really needs a book or large tutorial as it is one of the coolest languages out there but you still need to read a forth book or delve deep into the provided example problems to really get into it.
Close or View
Why Non-engineers Think Engineers Are Better Off Joining Startups
This is a great idea and I wish you success. It might be better to try a small change: don't do this during your annual review, but meet with your boss a month later and do it then.

The annual review isn't a discussion, it's where your boss has decided what to write in your review and tells you about it. At that point, you need to change someone's mind, rather than form their opinion. The performance review is too late.

Instead, consider it an information gathering exercise. Certainly discuss the details with your boss, and if any of his impressions or weightings seem off discuss why you think differently. But don't ask for any conclusions, and a raise is a conclusion.

Then, a month later, ask to see him. Now you're driving the conversation, and are much more likely to prevail. Don't worry if this isn't when annual raises are decided, those are for the "company driven" adjustment to your income. The "employee driven" ones come at any other time.

Good luck, and let us know how it works out!
Sorry I should have been more clear. These companies you mentioned are making hundreds of million in revenue. I'm certain Zuckerberg/Pincus would be considered "losers" if they sold their companies.

I'm thinking more along the lines of successful and likely profitable start-ups like Weebly, Justin.tv...but again, these companies already raised money.
If you've reached terminal velocity (which I agree, a human would) you aren't in free fall any more and your accelerometer will be reading 1g.
Is there less good work which needs to be done and can be done by not-super-brilliant people in science than there is in software engineerintg?

You nailed it. CRUD apps have considerable value. Low end theorems/experiments are almost worthless.
My favorite is "Crucial Conversations" -

http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-Conversations-Tools-Talking-St...

Then I've read like 10 more and they all kind of blend together... I'd recommend getting at least 4-5 that are rated highly on Amazon, just to give you some different perspectives.

For instance, there's a long running debate on whether it's better to make the first offer or not when negotiating. The "offer first" crowd says you get to set the general scope of negotiation. The "let them offer first" crowd says that their first offer becomes the absolute worst you could get, and you might do better... and they might well offer more than you were going to ask for.

You want to read at least a few different books, because one might take a dogmatic hardline stance "never offer first!" - which is clearly wrong some of the time. Good to hear different perspectives.

If I remember correctly, Roger Dawson's "Power Negotiation" was also good.

http://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Power-Negotiating-Roger-Dawson...

After that, they all kind of blur together in my memory... but really, it's a topic with massive ROI for anyone that touches money ever. You're not going to go wrong dropping 15 bucks and 5 hours fast-reading a book on negotiation. One good insight once pays for that many times over.
Zak mentioned Nemerle, which appears to have a very simple macro syntax. It actually reminds me of Lisp, although I'm sure Lispers will happily explain how its completely different. :-)

Have you taken a look at Nemerle? What there is broken compared to Lisp?
I guess it depends where you are in life and how valuable a potential learning experience with a good team might be for you.

My feeling is there is no greater motivator for learning than when the problems you face may have a direct bearing on your own financial well-being and the life or death of your own startup.
So says the Southern Poverty Law Center. Surely there's no connection between being criticized and criticizing back. If that's all you've got on them then I wouldn't be so quick to jump on the label wagon. It sounds more like their research and findings are just a little controversial and the people on the business end of those findings aren't too happy about it. I agree with you on your argument about fact checking though.
You don't need to compare all the bits in a word -- you just need to find the first place where two values differ.
Lisp conquers the (small) world (2005)
I understand the difference between programming on a device and programming for a device. For most embedded devices like cell phones, end users aren't allowed to do either one, at least without jailbreaking or paying for developer privileges. And most embedded devices are similarly restricted about what kind of software you are allowed to install and run on them. Should such devices really be treated as general purpose computers in the eyes of the law?
but it's ideas like this that make me happy that Apple is taking care what comes to the App Store and what not.

Yes, because obviously someone is holding a gun to your head, forcing you to install brain-dead apps just because they're in the App Store...
"We should stop talking about some golden age of schooling that never existed, and instead look for ways to create one."

As I posted on another thread, everyone should watch this video if they have the time: http://www.ted.com/talks/conrad_wolfram_teaching_kids_real_m...
I think the enthusiasm for Arduino (and previously the Basic Stamp) is the excitement that newbies have when they can get something happening on a small embedded system via a simple, spoon fed development environment. I personally have never wanted to program Microchip parts in anything other than assembler or Atmel parts in anything other than C. I find Arduino's dev tools to be an annoyance getting between me and the hardware, so it's the first thing I ignore- but that's just me.
It is if you get 30% of sales on that platform.
Teaching kids real math with computers
Actually, it's right in the wikipedia page:

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) called VDARE a hate group,[5] that was "once a relatively mainstream anti-immigration page," but by 2003 became "a meeting place for many on the radical right."[6] The group also criticized VDARE for publishing articles by white nationalists Jared Taylor and Sam Francis, along with other authors who deal with race and intelligence.

I can guarantee you that SPLC is not the only organization that considers VDARE a hate group. They may have been a more "legitimate" anti-immigration group in the past, but they've taken a hard right turn in the past decade or so.
The article doesn't mention MIT, but it does mention other efforts such as Mathletics. What makes Khan Academy and Mathletics stand out from MIT is that they are MUCH more than just a collection of videos. Khan and Mathletics increasingly represent entire ecosystems with points systems, competitions, tracking of your performance, and so on. That is why Khan exemplifies the future of education vs simple collections of videos like MIT.
well i do consider singapore, but really, its not as fast as CA. i will post again maybe with my CV :) thanks btw.
Canadian cities have the same problem most cities in the US have: lack of angels.
That too much emphasis is put on manual computation is obvious. But taking the opposite tack is an overcorrection. Computing and solving by hand is a font of endless insight in mathematics at any level and should not be left to computers.

Take an elementary matter such as convergence of infinite series. If you've never hand-computed a truncated power series for e^x term by term and noted its rapid convergence rate for positive x, I dare say your understanding of basic calculus is impoverished. Once you've seen the convergence first hand for particular values of x, the proof of its general convergence immediately suggests itself. But if you've only seen the abstract proof, you would probably never have realized that the e^x power series has extremely initial poor convergence for negative x. (Try it for x = -10 to see what I mean. Poor convergence and massive cancellation. That's why numerical analysts always evaluate e^x as 1/e^(-x) for negative x.)
No, it isn't, and if you wish to assert that it is, then the burden is on you to provide proof other than the assertion to that effect by a notoriously biased organization like the SPLC.
That is true I find that it rarely gets used. 99% of my time debugging in VS has been using the watch variables or just exploring my local object hierarchy. Same goes for webkit inspector/firebug which have these kind of functionalities. And its still just as effective to have Console.printlns or something to that effect.

This is all opinion of course.
> What's Blocking Innovation in America? My Answer: IP Laws

My answer: hundreds of startups, all working on Ruby on Rails projects, all hoping for funding, all to be deployed on Heroku, all to be thrown on the Web 2.0 pile, maybe tryin' some node.js on the side, and solving NO real problems...

(Downvote freely, lest you actually have to hear something you don't like)...
While some of the article just seems like nostalgic yearning, I agree that it's not necessarily the best place to start a company. My wife and I were making a very good income at Google but still found ourselves wondering how we would ever afford to a buy house, raise a family and other medium to long-term goals. The idea of starting a company while having to pay $3000+ in rent was laughable.

We lived in the Bay Area for the last 5 years and wound up moving to Charlotte, NC in order to bootstrap my business. While the tech/startup community here is obviously much smaller, it's thriving. I've been completely surprised by the level of diverse technical talent here and now that I'm outside of the Silicon Valley bubble I see that Charlotte's not alone. There are thriving startup communities all over the country and at the end of the day, it's easy enough to hop on a plane to SF to visit investors. I'd rather focus on building my business than constantly worry about how I'm going to afford housing.
AppsPal • Something cool is coming...
FTA:

where does the currency come from? What creates the currency? How much currency is flowing through the system? How do you monitor that and regulate it? How do you prevent it from being inflated? How do you keep people from fraudulently creating currency? How do you keep someone from, if they have some, from reusing the same currency? All of that has been solved with this system in some very clever and very new ways.

(...)

in the same way that the abbreviation for U.S. dollars is USD, and euros is EUR, BitCoin's abbreviation is BTC

(...)

imagine that there are, among all these peers, there are people exchanging value. They're exchanging bitcoins. A bitcoin exchange is somebody wants to send somebody else some bitcoinage. So the whole system works with an asymmetric key system, a public key system where they have both a public key and a private key. They take some amount of bitcoinage and put their public key, sort of associate or include their public key in the transaction, also the public key of the person it is being sent to. And then they sign it with their private key.

So what that creates is, that creates a transaction that only they could have originated because they're the only ones who have their private key, which they keep secret.

(...)

Now Google "bitcoin miner," as in a gold miner. What's happened is that there are people on the 'Net that have built bitcoin-creating boxes with as many graphics processing units as they can get, with fans cooling them, they're overclocked, they're pouring Freon over them. These things are running 24/7.

(...)

There will never, ever, ever be more than 21 million bitcoins created.
1endraqshexyzzzzzzhrwrgttwweojaohfojjvjkvjvjr0 b vxjcgbcvchgchcgixurfosouf0e b odj ujwi oiendidej4uie uwuwu2 uy
Getting to Yes - Fisher and Ury

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion - Cialdini

How to Win Friends & Influence People - Carnegie
A timeline visualization of a history of revolutions around the world. I was playing with the Raphael JS library for graphing/mapping.

Raphael says it supports IE 6.0 and up, but the attempts I tried to confirm if this worked via a terminal server or screen test sites, it appears it does not.

Can somebody confirm if it does indeed work on IE? I only have a Mac and won't have access to a Windows machine until work tomorrow
Relevant: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
From a strategic standpoint I think HTC and Samsung will be in favor of this deal. Nokia still has dominance in a lot of places around the world. This deal locks Nokia into WP7 and with that being true other manufacturers can enter Nokia dominant markets as the only Android alternatives.

Given these are companies that have bet their business on Android I suspect they think it's superior and welcome a chance to neutralize Nokia.

So while this deal with Microsoft may give Nokia a little of the other carriers money I'd think it will be well worth it .
I removed the part of my comment that mentioned citations from Wikipedia about the "white supremacists" (white nationalists in the article). Not because there actually are citations but because it wasn't core to the argument. It doesn't actually prove that just because it's in the Wikipedia article as it really isn't cited anywhere. I would have to do research outside of the WP article to confirm that.

As far as I can tell you seem to know more about them than Wikipedia.

To add to this: Does anyone know if white nationalist is even the same as a supremacist? That guy Jared's picture on WP is him shaking hands with Jesse Jackson. Also, the citations that were included in the quote you added from the article are from the group I mentioned above, which is why I wasn't personally convinced.

To edit further: I'm coming to the conclusion that white nationalist is a position whose mission is to do things "for white people." Not unlike whatever it is Jesse Jackson does with his time for black people. Although I don't see evidence that the guy is a racist, I'm not particularly a fan of any kind of single-race oriented groups. White or otherwise.
Ask HN: Feedback on my latest project, Byte Box
http://apps.facebook.com/bytebox/

I'm a junior in High School that loves to program, especially in Python. I get a group project for school every few weeks. It can be an essay, poster, presentation or something else. I previously found it extremely frustrating to collaborate with my group members. A surprising amount of high schoolers have a computer and can make a word doc or power point, but are incompetent about any way to share those files, besides email or a flash drive. Email has, for whatever reason, become despised by the younger generation. This has led to most of my group having to meet in a computer lab or at someones house to work on a project. We almost 100% of the time communicate through Facebook so I thought that we should be able to share through Facebook. This led to the creation of Byte Box, a Facebook application.

Byte Box is my first real programming project that I have deployed for public use. It lets you upload any file that you want and share it with any of your Facebook friends. It uses Amazon S3 for the file storage and the Pyramid python framework for everything else. There is currently a limit of 750mb per file because I can't afford much more at this point. If it grows in the future I will raise it. Some more features I am working on include multiple file upload and folders.

So I am posting here looking for feedback on how to improve Byte Box and some advice for my first project. I am especially looking for feedback on how to make it simpler to use. I'd really appreciate both. The link to my project is at the top of this post.
"the godfathers of a hacking subculture"

The "hacking subculture" had it's roots way before Gates and Allen, and in completely different social circles. The effect of the comment is to mis-attributed something that was much bigger than them.
Is it not a little off to claim tl;dr and then call her lazy?
iPhones can do amazing things.
I think the angst is not so much because of a perceived temporal decline; rather because of an unstated expectation that the U.S. should be first.

This is possibly aggravated by the fact that nobody knows for sure why the test scores are low, but everyone can have a theory.
What's the license? :-)
The benefit is that you don't have to own a MS license, whereas you would if you were creating your own VM.
We’re Live In Barcelona For Mobile World Congress 2011
Ask HN: What do you think of HuffingtonPost.com?
For one of the top websites on the Internet, you'd think I'd have been on its homepage more often. The truth is that I just visited the Huffington Post's homepage for the first time. As it's been in the news lately, I wanted to see what it was like.

And wow, the homepage design is hideous. On top of that, the content quality is terrible. So what do you all think of the design and content? Does anyone here ever regularly use the website?
Clickable: http://apps.facebook.com/bytebox/
Probably not the best advice for me--weighing in at 105 lbs I'd be a little short on options
Configuring Resque and resque-web for a production Rails app
No, you shouldn't have. I understood the sarcasm. Some people here take things way too literally and seriously.
Stuxnet didn't really do anything to actively thwart reverse engineering. See here: http://rdist.root.org/2011/01/17/stuxnet-is-embarrassing-not...

Truly obfuscated code will just plain cause the Hex-Rays decompiler to crash, producing absolutely no output at all.
AppsPal - Mac App Store Video Previews...
Latin has that structure.

Take a look at Lingua::Romana::Perligata, a Perl module that gives Perl a latin-style grammar: http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Lingua::Romana::Perligata

Damian Conway, its author, wrote a paper about it as well: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata....
What Egypt Can Teach America