skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is that it's 99 percent luck. A game of monopoly is fairly straightforward:

1 hour of randomly acquiring properties.
30 seconds of trading between other players.
4 hours of randomly resolving the winner with odds established by the last steps.

If you could expand that (fun) 30 seconds of trading to the whole game, it would be a good game.
I don't agree that the article thinks teacher quality is the difference.

Here is what the article says about altering teacher quality:

Most education researchers, though, recognize that Rhee's simple vision of heroic teachers saving American education is a fantasy...

If the ability to fire bad teachers and pay great teachers more were the key missing ingredient in education reform, why haven't charter schools, 88% of which are nonunionized and have that flexibility, lit the education world on fire?

New York didn't get ahead by firing bad teachers.

On student quality:

Rhee knew that attracting more middle-class students of all races into public schools would strengthen the schools for all students. In one interview, she recounted Warren Buffett's advice to her that the nation's education problems would be solved if private schools were made illegal and students were randomly assigned.

In D.C., the goal of making all schools majority middle class is not immediately possible, given that 63 percent of the city's students are low-income, but Rhee could have made significant progress in many schools for three reasons.

I won't replace "student quality" with "student attitudes" because I don't know if the relevant factor is attitude.
Forked from flog:
http://www.manatee-combine.com/colour-clock/
http://github.com/ctoneal/colour-clock/
7 Keys to the Ideal Mental Age for an Entrepreneur
I freaking _love_ Monopoly. And yes, I've finished many games of it.

The reason that nobody ever finishes is that they're far too nice. You're supposed to be destroying everyone, not floating them loans to keep them in the game. Every time I play a 'casual' game, that kind of junk happens, and it's incredibly dumb.
Not in Safari. It doesn't have fullscreen.
if you don't spend time considering your options when it's not your turn, you waste other people's time when it is your turn.
The inherent unfairness of employee non-compete agreements
From drbrain in the comments:

1.7 will replace --no-rdoc and --no-ri with a single --[no-]document option (which should be automatically aliased to --[no-]doc by optparse) making this easier to do.

Not quite the same, if that was what was meant, and calling people who express a valid opinion on this "propellerheads" just seems unnecessarily insulting. There are 200+ comments because people feel strongly about this and not because they are trolling.
Played by the rules, Monopoly is a nice guys finish last game. But the payoff is that winning entails total victory.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PQ6335puOc&feature=relat...
I appreciate some greeting the behaviour of pragmatic conference attendance as suspicious. I'm not advocating talk as any substitute for credibility but if you have a good product and want attention you will have to get out there and in front of people.
iPhone app?
A multi-million dollar refuge made with your (my) money.
How about the park?
The problem isn't telling people about it---again, rebels have communicated with each other since there have been governments to rebel against. The exact means of communication is irrelevant (obviously, since revolutions have happened in the age of print, telegraph, telephony, television, and now the Internet). The problem is motivating ordinary people to actually take action, and that depends on socio-economic factors that have nothing to do with technology. What you're seeing in the Middle East is how business has been done there for thousands of years. It's how these countries change their government in the absence of any stable democratic traditions. Or rather, it is their democratic tradition to change regimes this way.
I also think that it's a bit excessive. Some people seem to get frothy at the mouth when they see 'dhh.'
Fyi, this is Kevin, the author :-)
I agree with you and @jrwoodruff that management also deserves blame; their focus on short term metrics stops them from negotiating reasonable contracts (if they don't strike this quarter I get my bonus, etc.)

As for the assemblers preventing innovation, its much harder to pump cash into R&D when your assembly costs are twice that of your competition.

And as for ford doing well relative to GM and Crysler, you're basically saying they're doing good compared to bankruptcy. I like ford (especially their current lineup), but they've fallen a long way from their massive dominance of a few decades back.

To be clear, I agree with you (this reply seems a little ranty), the entire auto industry is a mess; a large part of these inefficiencies I feel comes out of dealing with unions - and I see the same things happening with teachers.
Look at the stats on your local library. Maybe they used to serve the public, now they serve a loyal following of library nuts.

Look at the stats on your police station, or fire station, or post office (oops - maybe not so good). They pay their way.

Carnegie had it right, in the 1910's. But the world has changed, and the library model is (fast becoming) obsolete.
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I believe the fun-factor - or lack thereof :) - might have something to do with the fact that Monopoly's origins are supposedly as a warning of the perils of capitalism.

While the story is disappearing into time, and is perhaps an over-egged story of folk woman vs. corporate greed; there is a marked similarity between Elizabeth Maggie's "The Landlord Game" and what became Monopoly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlords_Game (it appears an apostrophe is parsed out... it should be The_Landlord's_Game).

Its intent was to demonstrate how monopolies grow, and how once they exist they are hard to overcome. I.e. not fun. Which might explain something about Monopoly today :)

There's more at http://www.antimonopoly.com/original_boardgame.html
The unions are basically assemblers -- how does the assembly line create engineering problems?

Work rules.

Anyway, if you want to look at excessive compensation and benefits in the auto industry, look a little higher.

$3 million + worthless stock options ($15M at the time of issue) is not that high.

http://www.mlive.com/business/index.ssf/2009/03/gm_ceos_2008...

Lets compare that to what some Google employees earn:

http://www.oochoo.com/2010/11/google-offers-3-5-million-doll...
maybe they literally encode 9:27:40 as #092740

edit: definitely not, but I think there's a gradient overlay, which is causing the colors to appear brighter in the center.
Obligatory board game link: http://boardgamegeek.com

For those that don't know.
$99 iPad rival NoteSlate: Not quite real, not quite fake
about.com's content has noticeably improved in the last year or two.

I remember them being an absolutely scuzzy site, just no useful content at all. Lately that has definitely changed, and definitely for the better.
Yes, for an ADD family, its Far cheaper to buy them than "borrow" them. And then ... you own them! And can loan them out yourself! And re-read them. And talk about them, and go find quotes in them...

I went to my library to read science fiction, years ago. A few months after I started, the collection started shrinking? The library was having "book sales"! Selling off their collection! To buy more videos, and romance novels, and popular literature. I gave up.
Did Pablo Picasso help inspire the Mac Finder icon?
Forex trading signals
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Usually I don't like the "mee too" posts, they always appear childish to me. But this time I'd also like to "subscribe to your newsletter".
It's not that uncommon, it's in what people look at as 'salary'. In Europe, salary is not just what you get (net pay), it's not even your gross salary (as it is on your pay slip), it also includes the taxes your company pays on your salary, too; plus any pension benefits, health care/SS contributions (including those paid by the employer), etc.

Once you count those, European 'salaries' come much closer to US equivalents (discounted for regional differences etc, of course). The 'US salary' is much more 'what it costs the employer' than the 'EU salary'.
http://www.overcompensating.com/posts/20100412.html
I know at least two guys who are getting paid closer to £1000 a day to work in London for a bank. The money is pretty much insane imho, and the guys tells me the 'talent' is just like anywhere else - ie most people are meerly compentent (but still getting paid £500 plus a day). Even graduates with zero experience are taken on at £300 a day or more.

He seems to better than competent, and so has managed to negotiate a much higher rate.
Startup Weekend Delhi is in full swing. We've got the founders of Naukri.com, Seedfund and The Morpheus speaking and mentoring the teams as well as other really awesome people mentoring, speaking and building awesome startups!
When It Comes to Twitter, Don’t Be Too Informal
My first web startup cost me 10x more than my third web startup because I was an inexperienced entrepreneur at the time and spent money on foolish things.
Harvard restores early admissions after 4-year halt
The "fundamentally new" system for defining relevance is the social graph. It's why Facebook and Twitter are so hot.
Does this same logic apply to, say, a control module in a space craft, or the software behind an MRI machine?
25 Plastic Business Cards for Design Inspiration
Ugh. The first thing I'd do is write a preprocessor so I never have to see anything like that. Why not

UserData: Base64("dbName=$WordPressDBName\ndbUser=$WordPressUser\n...")

I'll give Amazon the benefit of the doubt and assume they just didn't want to impose a syntax, not that they think humans should be writing JSON like that.
Audio slideshow: Beautiful science
Slightly related, where are these conferences and meetups in Europe? Are there just much less and are they smaller, or am I looking in the wrong places? Where should I look?
North Korean Central News Agency finally gets a website
English http://www.kcna.kp/eng/
Planning, Cheating and Faking Your Way Through JavaScript Tests
I think a lot of people have problems with teachers unions because they think of teaching like any other job. It's not - here are the important differences:

Pay raises. It's a fantastic idea for a company to increase the pay of individuals based on performance. If individuals do well, the company does well and makes more money, and can therefore afford to pay the employees more, so this reward system is great.

In schools, there is no profit. So if teachers do better, their students perform better, and the teachers should get paid more. But they don't, since this has not brought any more money into the school. In fact, if schools are doing well they are less likely to have their budgets increased, since people will see no need to increase the budget of something that is functioning well.

This fixed-budget kind of thing is the root of the difference between the education system and private enterprise. In a business, if you are not making enough money (that is, if you have a spending problem), you cut back on things: often you may lay off employees. You will have fewer employees now, but since your business isn't doing well you probably have less work to do, so it can even out. Or, if it doesn't even out, your business closes down.

Neither of these is true of education. Except for rare cases, it is unthinkable to close down a school. Obviously closing would bad for students and education in general, so it is avoided.

More importantly, workload doesn't flex as easily in schools. That is, if you run into budget problems and have to cut teachers, the other teachers must work harder to pick up their slack, since the student body population remains unchanged. Thus it is in the interest of both the teachers and the students to keep budgetary layoffs to an absolute minimum.

So what do you do with a tight budget? Who knows? Removing teachers decreases the effectiveness of education severely. So does the numerous other things I've seen schools do - stop providing textbooks, make the quality of food go down, shorten the school day, remove planning time of teachers, stop giving teachers their own offices, stop plowing the parking lot, etc. In other words, make schools suck in every way possible.

I don't have a good solution for this, beyond the obvious "spend more on education". Personally, I think this is our best bet, but that money would have to come from somewhere else, and people are not willing to pay more taxes for it.
In addition, they would need to be licensed as private investigators in their home state.
Whilst I agree with statement concerning the recent events in Egypt and Libya, there are still some things to consider:

1. For any country to harness the social media offered, they should have access to knowledge and technology (computer literacy, access to internet).

2. Residents of a country should realize that it is still up to their resolve to act and stand against tyranny and oppression. No amount of technology can move the motivation of being freed from an evil regime.
I'm pretty sure I've read somewhere that they where using F# for some parts.
Anyone got any good tips for attending a technical conference as a regular developer rather than someone looking for business networking?
Monopoly is like poker. It's a winner take all game with a simple set of rules where luck of the draw helps, but people reading skills, the ability to calculate odds, and manage your cash greatly increase one's chances of winning. The theme of real-estate development is a good match for the way in which it balances ruthlessness and cooperation.

I recently played a few games of U-Build Monopoly which despite its abundance of board gimmicks is a great improvement because of the abundance of complex strategic options at every turn and the flexibility of sound short game options.

http://www.amazon.com/Hasbro-18361-U-Build-Monopoly/dp/B0036...
Http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&pub=toutapprendre
We looked into this a while back, we're in a niche electronics market. Similar situation.

Basically, if they're using a trademarked term in their ad, then you'll have grounds for protest. Using your company name in the ad that is displayed is generally against the rules.

If they simply have an ad for their company show up for a keyword search for your company name, then that's generally OK, they're not displaying your trademark.

Examples:

You: WidgetCo
Them: WidgetsRUS

keyword: widgetco

OK Ad by them: We make the best widgets ever! Try us today!
Bad ad by them: WidgetCO sucks, WidgetsRUS are way better!
And here's some stats on Alaska public libraries:
http://library.state.ak.us/dev/plstats/plstats.html#annual_s...

What does it show? That Internet access accounts for 1/3 of visits. Do you think that is going up, or going down?

Let's cut to the chase: replace the library with public access Internet stations, and stop pretending.

Ok, look at it this way. Does your kid go down to the library to research a school report? Or just Google it? Do they even know how to use the index to periodicals? Why?
Why Your Idea And Execution Aren’t As Important As You – with Tomer Yogev
It's a new system that does a ridiculously difficult thing on a scale that makes it nearly impossible to test completely.
That's partly true, but given the way that the social graph is used today, I don't think it can satisfy the entire need.

The social graph is essentially a personal thing, not professional. Assuming that we see a need to partition our professional and personal lives (and that should be true, in order to protect both sides), then the professional side isn't going to be reflected well in the personal graph.

So long as our networking tools don't recognize this split, they are going to be (relatively) starved for content that is strongly oriented towards the professional world. For example, I wouldn't expect my wife to be able to find deep information about Medicare reimbursement if we relied on mining social sites.
What this article is really stating is to spend most of your time on marketing and business ideas rather than building the product yourself. Coding like you don't care will not help matters unless you are painfully slow at coding with care.
My favorite part about it was the agonizingly slow & painful death of my opponent. (my little brother) Thirty minutes of my brothers despair was totally worth the 1.5 hr build up. I love Monopoly and had a blast playing it as a kid.

But then again, I don't play it anymore and I don't know any adults/kids that play it anymore. It's clear that times have changed, and the entertainment expectations are drastically different than they were 100 years ago.

Hasbro does not need gimmicks to make monopoly fun, they need to make monopoly fun for this generation. You can spend $60 on a video game with great graphics that sucks, or $10 on a game, that might have lower production value, that will keep you entertained for hours. At the end of the day fun is fun.

They need to offer kids what this video game generation is truly looking for, which is instant gratification.
Lobby of the Ace Hotel
I find conferences through others in the same industry: http://plancast.com http://lanyrd.com Mostly it is just through the grapevine http://twitter.com and http://meetup.com, knowing lots of people within the industry helps.
We wish.
Why go to college if you're not going to attend classes (aka being lazy), study, or attempt to get good grades?

Sure, I agree that college is over-rated and not for everyone. However, you are in college, and don't seem to be making any effort to learn or be productive. If you're going to college on taxpayer dollars or your parents money, then you are just wasting someones hard earned money. IF you stay in school, at least attend classes.
Case in point WRT #1, it's not having much of an impact in North Korea.
To borrow, you must usually have a library card. Which isn't free. So you're actually leasing the books. Kinda like NetFlix, right?

So only "individuals with money" are getting borrower priviledges.

For the homeless that leaves, what, loitering? Viewing Internet porn in front of the kiddies? Meeting babes?
And this somehow affects only 12% of searches?
Mobile Boilerplate Beta released
Something is incorrect in the last few steps. How did the guy get 0,6,10,14 in the example vs. what he says in the"what you do". Unless it should be "second row" instead of "second column", but I still don't see how it is done.
Judging by the URLs, they searched for e.g. [how to make bingo cards] and found an eHow page. In an ideal world, I'd rank higher for that than eHow, but I cannot make a page for each of sixty ways to phrase that without essentially copying their farming methods.
You can with Pidgin.
Does city size make income inequality worse?
Rails was certainly the killer app for Ruby in the English speaking world. Without that, it's chief fame would be as Perl-with-better-syntax utility goo in Japan.
I remember the stories coming out of Rowanda, Bosnia, and more recently Darfur were well publicized without much intervention. While I think facebook and twitter are tools of political change, I sadly don't think we've seen the end of genocide.

I very much hope I'm wrong.
I don't know about your community, but in everywhere I've lived, library cards are free. I'm pretty sure anywhere they aren't free, the fees are pretty nominal (i.e. $2-$10 every few years or if you lose your card).

Anyone can look at books inside of the library, though, regardless of citizenship or being able to afford the zero to ten bucks every few years they need to pay to take books home. For the homeless, this isn't even much of an issue, because the library is probably the best place they could read.
Very similar to the Chromo http://prote.in/chromo colour clock, which has been around for a few years.
> A well-designed game has rules simple enough for everyone to follow without arguments, keeps everyone engaged to the end, and encourages positive rather than negative social interaction. Such games exist.

Could anyone name a few?
> An example where it's done differently is Dominion

Dominion is great--I got introduced to it recently, found it online (http://www.brettspielwelt.de/) and now purchased my first base & expansion set. :)

Highly recommend checking it out if you haven't seen it already.
Let's not overplay this. Twitter and Facebook played a part in what happened, but in both countries the internet was either shut down or heavily restricted during the key phases of the uprising.

The thing which stopped the worst abuses of power against the people was the presence of the global media in countries where the west had significant financial and political interests.

The broad sweep of technology available these days (from reporters with satellite phones to twitter, to the ability anyone has to send photos across the world in seconds) may present future genocides, but Twitter and Facebook are just one small part of the picture.

But does anyone believe that Twitter would have stopped Darfur? People know what's happening there and it's still happening so I'm dubious as to how a communication tool would have changed that.
> I think you're probably reading to much into this. It's just a game. I don't think it's particularly promoting anything.

The original game was purposefully designed to be anti-capitalist and in particular an attack on landlords who exploited tenants. I think it was called The Landlord's Game and the game mechanic was deliberate.

Monopoly changed a few elements but it's game mechanic is essentially the same.
North Korea is a lost case. We can't liberate it because it would destroy Seoul and the people are either too brainwashed or just plain too hungry to help.
They also have tweaked pricing to keep rooms filled. The same room at MB is going for $70 on 3/13 (Sunday) vs. $270 on 3/16 (Wed). (To be honest, sophisticated enough that I don't even really understand that. Usually it is the weekends that have the prices jacked.)
The biggest bottle neck is quality applicants, if I remember correctly. I believe PG mentioned that Y-Combinator could triple in size and not be severely affected, though.
Don't be Google's bitch - but building on Facebook is just fine?
Photon: high performance PHP/Mongrel2/ZeroMQ micro framework
> (or to be born in India and move to the US)
This chart is be religion, and not everyone born in India is Hindu.
But are they aware that there are things they don't know they don't know?
Ubisoft appears to be blocking this video for US citizens. here's an alternate link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9gQzFHt8cE&feature=relat...
I have some good memories of playing monopoly with the family as a kid of about 10. I think it appeals to a kid that age; much younger and they don't really have the attention span or maturity to understand what is going on, and much older and it's just boring. As an adult, I find it to be a pretty tedious game, but like me, my son went through a period of about a year where he really enjoyed playing it.
An hour to acquire? The only properties that matter are closest to Free Parking or on the sides touching Free Parking. In the first few circles of the board, whoever gets a set there (or closest to it) has essentially won.