skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My wife and I were discussing tonight the hilarity of the Wisconsin teachers union situation, about how everyone involved (and screaming) seemingly misses the point.

If society wants public school, that is a school that is administered and funded by the government, then by definition you are choosing to have teachers' salaries decided by politicians and bureaucrats. In order to change salaries, legislation is required. In order to enact legislation, you have to form special interest groups (in this case unions) to represent large swaths of voters, as politicians only listen to votes.

Instead, consider the idea of eliminating public school. With all of the money back in the public's pockets instead of in government coffers, the public could choose to fund education in a manner that each individual sees fit. However, the common argument (and legitimate concern) is that poor people would be left out. Poor parents who don't have the money to send their kids to school, let alone GOOD school, are left raising uneducated kids who then end up poor. The idea that charity would solve this problem is not entirely unreasonable, but it seems to be a cop out.

This is where I think the Khan Academy has the potential to have a major impact. With individual teachers teaching small classes, you're required to have many hundreds of thousands of teachers across the country, leading to an extremely high production cost for education. If instead you have groups like the Khan Academy producing educational materials that are easy to consume, available across a huge breadth and depth of topics and easy to distribute, the production costs for education go way down.

The reason that poor people can't afford private school is because private schools are expensive. Using technology allows organizations like the Khan Academy to produce high quality education at a fraction of the cost. I'd love to see private schools set up to take advantage of this material and educate the public without government involvement and its requisite politician silliness.
There are three approaches to sync, and all have their pros and cons. The complexity in sync comes from conflicts, and the three approaches vary in how they handle conflicts, with varying implications for the end user.

Rule-based resolution,

Locking,

Merge

Rule based is something like last person wins, always accept this actor's changes, or pick the variation based on some simple criteria. This is easy to implement but it causes loss of (potentially unrelated) changes that one person made.

Locking (pessimistic and optimistic) tries to make the above better because it either prevents divergence or prevents changes from being lost by returning an error (refusing to commit the conflict-inducing change to one of the data stores.)

Merge is the hardest of all, and it is a series of trade-offs and compromises. From diff-match-patch to three way merge to operational transformation, vector clocks and so on, there are many ways to try and handle merging that all have their own ups and downs. (google the iterating bigrams in that sentence for more info.). You ultimately need to get your own application logic in the merge process -- for instance, "we want to disallow changes to the title After the PDF has been sent" is a business rule, but then your remote client had changed the title while disconnected and somebody else sent the PDF. There is no simple algo that will handle text merging, state machine guards, and varying merge strategies. Finally, different merge strategies have different amounts of data transfer required to perform the synch negotiation.
sure – https://www.googleapis.com/buzz/v1/people/wnorris@gmail.com/...

Note that this will only work for users that have activated Buzz
By crippling 3rd party software, Apple is hurting its platform the way Microsoft is hurting itself. Whether or not the hurting is intentional is beside the point.
My bad, it should have been in my profile, its there now.
Totally agree. I had a good laugh but that's not the kind of content I come to HN for.
Thank you. I wish it was simply a matter of karma.

EDIT Sorry city41! Apparently I can't read.

We need more experienced moderators on HN to start killing these asinine posts.
That's a pretty good counterpoint. I remember when I was a kid in the early 90s and every single movie had a one-liner that started with "A tough cop..."
Do you think it's possible to become a programmer at age 43? I've always loved computers and have written programs in BASIC, VB, WordBasic, and the like, but never got into C or OO programming.

Would anyone hire a freshly-minted 43-year-old developer? Or is this a fool's errand?
See DADT for how the military can easily be biased against people it doesn't like while only applying to the military...
I would think the people who designed the system would have had several layers of security as it relates to their database. I've only designed a few myself, but even I know all your users shouldn't have the same privileges. The more I read this story, the more I wonder why a private 1st class had full blown access to classified documents. It seems like security was an after thought, and now they're paying the price.
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poor fly
"[federal prosecutors] explained that they were unable to put Mr. Aleynikov on the “no-fly” list..."

I wonder why...? Seems like many manage to get on the NFL by accident, and the feds can't manage put a "flight risk" on it? Who can they put on it?
Liu: Bernanke suffering from "universal appreciation disease" - Chinahourly
I'm not the one that submitted the story, rather I'm the one complaining about it :)
Well, there is the matter of discretion. The collateral murder video put a lot of egg on a lot of people's faces and I bet some of those people were the one who declared him a "suicide risk" and put him in indefinite solitary.
Has anyone successfully used this for anything significant? As I post this there's only a couple of people posting about how either they tried but it didn't work out well enough, or they just played with it in school without any code.

It strikes me as having the same problems as RDF storage; precisely because the model is so general, there's nothing for optimizations to grab on to and optimize on. Your database has to stand ready to do anything equally. The core of database optimization is, when you really get down to it, working out how to tell your database which things you really want and what you will never care about, as in "This table has twenty columns but I will only query on name and phone number". In practice, limitations aren't always just there because of a lack of imagination or insufficient computer science education (though that does happen), sometimes they're there because you can't get any performance without them.
So someone in the audience was using Firesheep. Horrors.

https://twitter.com FTW
It's $200 on the Xoom.
Is this new? It looks new? Yep! It is new!

This makes me smile to know that at one point this was actually cool! Even though I am not old enough to know what that time was...I have just heard stories!
Well nobody's forcing you to use his service to force users. So it's still all good!
Best possible music choice. Period.

Fascinating.
Did you even read the link?

Army Pvt. Bradley Manning, having watched Iraqi police abuses, and having read of similar and worse incidents in official messages, reportedly concluded, “I was actively involved in something that I was completely against.” Rather than simply go with the flow, Manning wrote: “I want people to see the truth … because without information you cannot make informed decisions as a public,” adding that he hoped to provoke worldwide discussion, debates, and reform.
Yes, I agree the strategy tax analogy is misplaced, in accordance with a since-deleted comment:

> Apple isn't facing a "strategy tax," per the Microsoft example; it's making a strategic mistake.

Except that a mistake is when the downsides outweigh the upsides. We don't yet know if Apple has made such a strategic mistake. So if we can say that Apple has incurred a strategy tax, then it seems like a strategy tax is merely the (omnipresent) downside of any strategic decision.

What is striking about the Microsoft example is (indeed) that the company is actively harming (read: hindering) itself. I'm not sure "tax" is the best descriptive term for this phenomenon, but I think the author intended the distinction. It is a tax in that you are redistributing (within the corpus, and hopefully profitably or at least equitably) the value of certain efforts (read: features).
I for one don't have a facebook and will never make one. I really welcome this change and will be using the google profiles.
A colleague of mine wrote a true coroutine library for JavaScript: https://github.com/dherman/jstask

It depends on generators, so it works only in Firefox, but it's a cool hack nonetheless, and might be useful if you're developing Firefox addons.
What would you consider to be fair for someone who (allegedly) copied a huge number of documents, which he KNEW contained information that would get hundreds of innocent people killed if it were ever released without redaction, and released it to third party, which he had good reason to know would in turn release the documents to the press?

Due to Manning, at least six outside organizations have copies of the documents, without redaction, including one newspaper outside the group that Wikileaks distributed them to for help with the redacting. This shows that Wikileaks is unable to control distribution of the full documents.
I found it a decent piece until he threw in the "finally" in the last paragraph. Pretty lame.
that's pretty incredible, I'm genuinely surprised.

I suppose it's possible when you start from scratch, there's no way they could do that on the Mac.
Interesting. I just learned about Google Profiles earlier today while reading up about WebFinger and OpenID. Google Profiles also support hCard, the microformat.

Google Profiles don't seem to have much practical use to me besides being useful for standards compliant stuff. I really wish Buzz became popular in place of Twitter, its a much better (and more open) platform in my opinion.
Ask HN:  Developer Speciality? 
Is it a good idea for entry level software developers to pick a certain area to focus on and become good technically, in those areas? (ie multicore processor programming skills)
oh, come on downvoter, you know it's true
The Real Story Behind Charlie Sheen Joining Twitter
how about this: go back to the difficult tests and puzzles they used to have. make it a pre-requisite to send in an application. that would reduce the number of apps and ensure applicants meet a high bar at the same time.

(also not sure how smart it is to charge $100 to people who are looking for jobs and consequently may not have the money to apply)
Pixel Perfect map of china
Several people have posited that Jobs should stay well back from the limelight, for just such a reason:

Why Steve Jobs Shouldn’t Return to Apple
http://db.tidbits.com/article/11981
The artificial scarcity on beta apps is understood but unavoidable, if that's the route the app makers are going.

Telling me to bother my friends before I can watch a video that I can get w/ a quick Google search or view-source is another matter.

(That said, nice little script you made. Pretty clever!)
Garden Path sentence?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence
ITA Software.
@anthonyb: no, I did not read the link. I assumed that the relevant part was the quote, and the link was just a citation to the source.
Actually, I would say this is more thanks to ScummVM (an open source re-implementation of many adventure game engines), as well as the people who ported it to iOS. The last three games listed probably use ScummVM without modification (citation needed), and I would be surprised if the Broken Sword and Monkey Island remakes were not heavily inspired by the efforts of ScummVM to revitalize interest in the games.
None of those appear to fit the malware definition.
No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. So sure, why not?
We use GigaSpaces (a commercial implementation of JavaSpaces that can also be used from a .NET environment) where I work, but we're underutilizing its capabilities terribly. The product itself apparently has a healthy niche in the financial services sector.
OpenPOI Project
It's impossible to feel sorry for this guy. How could you ever think this was a good idea?
A hundred thousand civilians have died in Iraq already, and I've yet to hear of anyone who's died as a direct result of the leaks.
People die every day.

Meeting hundreds of random strangers and labeling those as "friends" is basically asking for it.
Boston doesn't have the same level of self-congratulation. Which to my mind, is a good thing.
Defending Against Attackes with Rails
Advice from HN: I'm about to be fired because I declared prior IP months ago.
Quick backstory:
I'm very interested in a particular niche of the tech sector. I studied it in school. Did research on it. Have a very promising (but unlaunched) side-project in the field.

I'm also recently employed by a prominent company in the field. Talking about my experience in the field is what got me the job.

Several months ago, when I signed on, I got the standard "list your prior IP" form. I listed my side-project IP. I got the "I'll have to clear this with some people..." response from HR, then heard nothing. 3+ months pass, until this week. Seems we have a problem.

From what I've heard, there are two issues:

1. Due diligence of an acquiring company would find the simple act of me having this IP "too risky." IDK why, as I'm not claiming any of the company IP and the contract stipulates that if I inject my IP into their business they are granted a perpetual non-exclusive license. Seems fine to me to simply list it.

2. If I were to develop this product, it could theoretically compete with the company's product. It would only do this under the broadest sense of the field we're in. I can kind of understand this. They are still worried though, regardless of if I actually develop the product, that my simply having the IP makes this too risky. Seems as if they WILL NOT have me with the IP listed, regardless of non-compete clauses or whatever.

So, my options or potential outcomes as I see them:

Don't list my prior IP on the paper, keep my job. (This isn't the company's stance, but I assume I would retain claim to the IP via my papertrail of work from well before I started the job if I really need to prove it eventually).

List the prior IP, they "don't hire me" (despite me having worked there for months) and I'm de facto fired/quit.

List the IP, pitch them in the meeting, and have them acquire the IP. Work for the company to develop the product. (This would be an extremely unlikely scenario, don't even want to think about terms right now).

Somehow convince them that the product is far enough away from their product that it isn't a conflict. It sounds as if this will be unlikely as well.

Eff, this sucks. How do any companies expect to acquire domain experts without some prior IP baggage they've picked up along the way?

Someone talk me through it. Like I said, I love the field. I love the company. I love my side-project. Can't I just keep doing it all? :(
Flagging this because too many people are downvoting people they politically disagree with, meaning this is going to become a worthless discussion.
So go read it already.
A Year with a SSD
Doesn't seem like the updated the old URLs for profiles.

http://www.google.com/profiles/<username>; is showing the old style profile while https://profiles.google.com/<username>; is in the new style.

Bummer because, when editing my profile in the new style, it tells me that the correct URL is the first.
I contacted Peter and he got back to me. He seems to have settled well with how the cards fell and didn't seem worried about being compensated for things long past.

However, if any of you figure out some grand gesture to show appreciation please count me in. To me, he helped the web get started... An unsung hero. :)
I disagree. Legend Entertainment managed to make some great "text & graphics" adventure games: Companions of Xanth, Deathgate, Shannara, and Callahan's Crosstime Saloon spring to mind. Perhaps it helped that they were all based on novels.
I built a tuple space implementation a few years ago. I came to the conclusion that the filter predicates were functionally equivalent to delayed RPC, aka task queues, and occasionally even publish/subscribe. It's at that point that I got bored and left the code to (essentially) rot.

I now use task queues on a daily basis to process countless non-realtime tasks. It's a much more straightforward metaphor for what you actually want to do, and without altering the paradigm, allows you to do practically useful things (prioritizing, deadlines, retries, etc.)

It is a useful conceptual model, but mostly as a way to pull people away from the MPI/PVM/threads/processes lock-step/locking parallel concurrency models.
I did a post-grad project using JavaSpaces and prolog to do automated refactoring in Java back in the late 90's. The JavaSpaces implementation was so terrible that it was hard to get anything done. Great idea, but poor execution in Java probably killed Jini and JavaSpaces (and any hope of it going mainstream).
Old Man Murray Deleted from Wikipedia
Shouldn't this article be more accurately titled as: Innovations in Human Interface Devices? It doesn't seem particularly relevant to UI design, other than that they affect UI design.
The "Switzerland of NoSQL" Joins Basho
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Yeah, it seemed like quite a stretch. It was like one of those Simpsons episodes from recent years where they paste two plots together that have nothing to do with each other, because neither one can sustain a complete episode.
My New Year's Resolution in 1995. And crack.
It's the same issue to, in addition to interdepartmental sharing the belief was that overly restricting information inside organizations could keep it out of the hands of the one analyst that would put "plot x" together.

Keep in mind Manning was an intelligence analyst, and the documents he distributed were of low classification levels.
These detractors seem to be on to something since Mahalo just laid off 10% of its workforce right after Google acted against content farmers.

That does say something about the content that Mahalo produces, doesn't it?
The other thing that people tend to have a hard time imagining as their independence has been slowly-but-surely squeezed out of them is that this does not have to mean that the only other schooling option is a kid alone in front of their tablet watching Khan's videos at home. Khan's videos are a tool that can be applied in many ways. Five families can band together to trade off on who is watching what on what days and share questions and answers, or a day care organization can use it to bootstrap themselves into an affordable private school. Online companies can bootstrap into having banks of problems, using that as the content. And of course it doesn't just have to be Khan doing this, anybody can.

This doesn't just enable one thing, this and all the things that will happen enable an amazing multiplicity of ways to approach the problem of teaching. (And I started to say "teaching children" but even that is being too specific.)

(This is just one example, there's a lot of others. Too often people think the choice is "government run service" or "people scrabbling for scraps in the street as the wolves howl in the distance", but that's not how it works. Government-run services may not always be a bad idea but they do have a strong tendency to freeze in The One True Approach for decades after they are no longer optimal. 19th-century-style schooling's days are numbered, no matter how much the unions protest in the early 21st.)
Yes, that's it. Maybe he can make a talk of this for the next conference. "Observing the Installation of Every Version of Windows".
Agreed.

Seems like anything with "Manning" in it here is a guaranteed flame war.
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Craig Hockenberry: "Two reasons Steve did the keynote today: 1) To tell his competitors to fuck off. 2) To tell those speculating about his health to fuck off."

http://twitter.com/chockenberry/status/43030854980730881
Laughing at the source code. Also, the hit counter does some shady SEO stuff, neat.
This site pissed me off, because of the way I browse. I middle-clicked it to a new tab, waiting for me to get to it in a few minutes, part of a small list of tabs similarly spawned from HN.

When it finished loading (and it must have taken 20 seconds, whatever that says) I was confronted with some kind of "Dallas" TV show blast.

I was startled (but I'm older so you can probably just ignore this reply), and I was pissed that I had created this noise to disturb the people around me.

It's the exact same reaction I have when I queue up a site on another tab, and an advertisement does what this site did to me.

I'll live.
California Prisons, in Pictures
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I am. Common Lisp gig preferred. Python/Django a not-too-distant second choice.
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Nice! I love little glimpses like this to hacking and the web and the culture around it all in the 90's.

I used to read this during finals, when not sleeping enough and needing some motivation:
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html

Finals are in full swing again, time to re-read it.
Microsoft irate over Facebook staff poaching
I was taken aback when I tested this for myself as my initial reading of the PHP docs lead me to a very different conclusion. You are indeed correct, and in my opinion that is very broken. Touché.
End to end crypto is great, but I generally use a VPN whenever logging in from a public network for all traffic, just to avoid this -- anyone sniffing my Gig-E uplink at the colo, or the backbone, or the site, will hopefully only see SSL traffic to sites, but just in case, I'd rather put an extra barrier up for the easy coffeeshop wireless sniffing attacker.
Right here http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/
Water. Alternatively, stocks in desalination companies.
> or manufacturing buggy whips

This reminded me of Other People's Money speech by Danny DeVito: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfL7STmWZ1c
There's a blog run by Raymond Chen, one of the engineers on the backwards compat team, which is about backwards compat and other arcane aspects of Windows:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/
What's the point? Is there more going on in Silicon Valley than here in Boston? Yes, of course. Does that mean nothing interesting happens in Boston? No, of course not.

For my money MIT is singularly the most interesting place on the planet (and I didn't even go there). Spend a half hour walking around the Media Lab and tell me Boston sucks. I dare you.
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Ubuntu loses the edge to Android
What's the deal with the negative comments? You basically get this feature as a gift. If you don't use it, you won't be affected by it in any way. If you do, you get to enjoy the author's labor for free. Where's the problem here?

Any idiot can write a snarky comment about PHP. Very few get to write code that has anywhere near the impact it had.
I enjoyed Machinarium, but I have a hard time calling an adventure game without dialog brilliant. It's pretty and whimsical, and fun at times, but I just don't see what's so great about it.
It's very much like those flash "room games" with high production values, and those aren't very good most of the time.