skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Generally the Asians nearly totally fail to 'get it'. There is no chance that US (or Canadian) K-12 will go very far making the mistakes the Asians make.

That tests are fine does not mean that the Asian approach to rote learning is fine.

That some students cram for tests does not mean that tests are useless.

For being 'engaged', I gave a very long list of ways a third grade teacher might get her students engaged. So, I agree that being 'engaged' is important. But in the article the teacher was using being 'engaged' (A) in only a weak sense (my examples were much stronger) and (B) was using her weak results on 'engaged' to excuse paying less attention to good tests on the basic material.

But on being 'engaged' and actually learning well and retaining that knowledge, we've ignored the 2000 pound elephant in the room -- what the student gets at home.

Yes, the US could use some national tests of basic material during K-12: The US already has good tests at the end of K-12 (CEEB, SAT) and end of college (GRE, LSAT, GMAT). But for the rest, keep that local at the level of the family, teacher, school, and school board.
PSF Now Accepting Applications for Google Summer of Code Projects
Rethinking the Brick
Citizens' Nuclear Information Center is an anti-nuclear public interest organization dedicated to securing a safe, nuclear-free world. The Center was formed to provide reliable information and public education on all aspects of nuclear power to ultimately realize this goal.

Oh. Okay.
Kinda sad. It's the twelfth oldest .com. Registered on the 19th of mars 1986.
Yahoo! answers does not guarantee the integrity of their information. Most of the time (in my experience), the answers are uninformed and not very applicable. Are you interested in finding people's opinions when actually you are looking for a fact/answer? I am sure some of them are useful and maybe they could secure this by a Hacker News type voting (of course this could be abused, but...).
For me, it's not only the fact they're just dismissing the community which got them to where they are today, but that the statement just felt wrong.

It's contradictory - they want UI/UX consistency, but are encouraging non-core-client diversity, and they're complaining about user confusion when they're bragging about holding 90% client share. Plus the timing could have been better. Releasing the statement yesterday when there was nothing time sensitive to it probably wasn't the best approach for them (seen to be burying bad news).

Building your entire business on someone else's ecosystem is always a risky strategy, but when a company who has reached critical mass pretty much solely because of that ecosystem, to turn around and tell them they're no longer required is poor form.
It probably has more of an effect on starting and quitting than brand selection by current smokers.
The headline is sensational, but the interview is good.

I've always liked Joel's observation of Usenet nit-picking culture and how it's likely related to easy quoting.

I haven't followed discussion about StackExchange site creation and user acquisition models, but I think that Joel's practical, organic approach is good. Although there isn't StackExchange for medical professionals yet, if the growth rates are what they claim, it might be that in the near future there are enough doctors participating in cooking, photography and all the other SE sites, that medical SE site will emerge.
CEOs should be careful about their public statements. I am going to bookmark this page because I am sure some day another high-rising CEO will say "Nobody wants to find SO answers in their search results".
only the organic stuff sold in farmer's markets in San Fransisco - the mass produced stuff in wall mart comes in tankers
but that kind of hubristic "we can calculate the probabilities of all failure modes" thinking is one of the reasons I'm not a big fan of nuclear.

Would you be more comfortable with "we can't estimate the probabilities of all failure modes"? I am sure that all engineers involved in planning the failure-handling systems know that those "calculations of probabilities" are only estimates based on some assumptions.

I think nuclear often gets bad press because you can measure and calculate a lot of risks to a much higher precision than in other industries. Like "x amount of radiation released" where x is actually a very small number but the fact that you can measure it and make an estimate as to how many cancer cases will be caused by it makes it scary, while people don't care much about the risks of, say, coal-mining because thats harder to measure/estimate.
Maybe it's my own biased opinion, but I am referring to the large bankroll you need to prove to INS that you will not become a ward of the state for Chinese, whereas I have heard Europeans and Canadians can come as the please.
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I don't think this is just yahoo bashing, it succiently reflects user experience.
If you see a yahoo answers link in your search results, do you think "aha, I will click on this first because it probably answers my question"? I get happy when I see stackoverflow in my google results, because I suspect that I will actually get my question answered by clicking that link. A yahoo answers page may or may not be informative, about as often as a geocities page may or may not have useful information on it. Nothing about the site actually really encourages quality, so you end up very hit or miss.
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Comparison: iPad 2, GalaxyTab 10.1,TouchPad,G-Slate,PlayBook,Streak,Xoom,Pad 1
You asked:

If the tests are asking little enough, then why are the teachers complaining they have no time to do anything but "teach to the tests"?

I can only guess. It may be that the issue is some politically correct goal of some 'social justice': So, if no child is to be left behind, then in some schools the poor teacher will have to spend 90% of the effort on the bottom 10% of the students, Maybe she wants to get these students 'engaged' -- that's hopeless.

For 'engaged', I gave lots of examples, but for the examples I gave I doubt that a significant fraction of K-12 teachers accomplish much of such 'engagement'.

In the end, the yelling and screaming about US K-12 education is (A) use the failure of the bottom 10% as a way to say that the system needs to do better and (B) use that need 'to do better' to spend much more on K-12 education and maybe double real estate taxes. US K-12 can do better but not by worrying much more about the bottom 10%.
I would speculate what they're really doing is making sure that 10% doesn't jump to, say, 90% after they start jamming their own client full of ads.
A serious question: if the FDA is hostile towards electronic cigarettes, why are they widely available, with nicotine juice sold in every corner store?
Not surprisingly, the web version sucks.
Bachmann Mangles Revolutionary History In N.H.
For programming tasks, I am happy to see SO. But for other life inquiries, such as "why does my dog sleep at my feet", I get decent answers from Yahoo. In fact, I never viewed SO as a Yahoo! competitor, but a good complement - their audiences are different, and SO fills a nice niche that Yahoo's demographic is usually not capable of filling
> The problem is we'd be way less productive and we'd be much poorer.

There is no proof that the current ridiculous state of the matter, where everyone in the US constantly moves oneself together with 3 tons of steel for 2 to 3 hours a day is particularly productive either. If mobility was somewhat less easy, maybe we'd find another productivity hilltop which could be higher than the current one. In fact, we'll have to find such an alternative, less mobile way of life sooner of later.
Don't forget that speculation works both ways. It can also bring down prices very quickly and consumers benefit from that. What speculation really does, in my view, is to insert a component of future expectations in addition to the current supply and demand effects.

It is not entirely clear to me that adding this expectations component is always bad. It can get out of control when it becomes self feeding, but it can also convey valuable information that allows us to react early to fundamental supply and demand issues. We clearly have fundamental supply issues in crude oil and in agricultural products. The blog post is totally wrong on that one. Pointing to falling US demand of crude oil makes no sense in a world where the marginal buyer is in Asia.
Pollution from coal is estimated to kill 24,000 people every year in the U.S. alone. Nuclear is way safer than that, and probably the only power source that can replace coal anytime soon.
Yea, let's not listen to the people that know what they're talking about. Let's spread fear, uncertainty and doubt. That always improves the situation.

Give me one example of when the government, the plant operator, the plant designer knowingly lied about the situation.

Give me one example of someone who was harmed by Three Mile Island which had a full meltdown with containment. (Chernobyl is irrelevant, it did not have containment.)
Just last night I used search to ask a question (where to go to watch planes take off and land at SFO) and found the answer on a Yahoo Answers page.
It's true that none of yahoo's answers are fact, but I would like to point out that almost everything on the internet should be taken with a grain of salt (ahem, wikipedia). That said, your skeptic meter should be higher with yahoo than with SO but that can also be attributed to the fact that SO deals with programming (either it works or it doesn't), so bad answers are going to be discriminated against much more quickly and more correctly.
Since the stuff I work with is generally software, this is quite easy: either read the source code, or ask the person who wrote it on IRC.

Admittedly, this approach has the downside of not producing something that others encountering the same issue can find by Googling. Unless I blog it, of course.
I voted you up for being strictly true, but thought someone should point out the strong tech component inherent in SXSW Interactive:

"SXSW Interactive has attracted a strong following among web creators and entrepreneurs. Its focus on emerging technology has earned the festival a reputation as a breeding ground for new ideas and creative technologies."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sxsw
How Flaws Undid Obama’s Hope for High-Speed Rail in Florida
The past year and half, Twitter has given me the distinct impression of being the dog that chased a car and actually got the car, now it does not know what to do with the car.

For a more reasonable analogy, Twitter is the equivalent of a telco. They are the plumbing and the dumb pipe of the 140 character web at the moment. That alone does not guarantee enough returns to justify the billion-plus dollar valuation. Sadly, they don't have any other choice than to stifle the same community that built the tooling which led them to be the success story they are today.
Python Tools for Visual Studio
Larry Kudlow Devalues Human Life With Japan Earthquake Freudian Slip
Heresy & Heretical on Open Source, Good and Evil and JSMin (video)
Mz, thanks again for spotting that and taking the time to let us know. Just fixed it on the website. You rock!
Spoken like a true geek. Normal people don't want to know that such things even exist. Let machines with radiation detectors track them down in the dumpsters.
The idea of free software. It's a vision the Open Source community has that all software should be free.
A micro Sievert is equivalent to .1 millirem, according to wikipedia. So we're looking at about 100 millirem.

According to the book Physics for Future Presidents, you can calculate the odds of getting cancer from radiation by dividing the exposure by 2500 rems. 100 millirem gives you a 1 in 25,000 chance of developing cancer. Or to put it another way, your chance of getting cancer has gone from 20 percent to 20.004 percent.

The average American is exposed to 200 millirems of radiation each year from natural sources.

Of course it's not over yet and could get worse.
What Happened to Nokia?
I made hi-res cutouts of each person. The plan is just to shrink everyone slightly and add the new people to the left and right. I'm not sure how it will look, but that's the idea at least.

Also, at first I was worried about matching the lighting in the new photos, but these cutouts are all from different photos and the lighting was quite a bit different between each shot already. I'm no expert, but I just played with the levels in PhotoShop until things looked right. I think it came out looking pretty good.
How anyone can be surprised by this is beyond me.

If your business is built entirely on someone else's ecosystem there are two possible outcomes:

1. You fail or have meager success;

2. You're very successful at which point the ecosystem provider will probably judge what you do important enough to acquire you (or one of your competitors!) or compete with you and have the home advantage.

The fact that some convinced themselves that Twitter was "different" might want to refer to the Peanuts theme of Lucy and the football.
Becoming a TED Speaker
I agree, I like having yahoo answers in my search result and I can't remember any-day when I was disappointed by answers. Even their answers is peer reviewed and voted for.

Teenage chat? Seriously?
I actually don't mind Yahoo Answers in my search results... I know when to click there based on what I search for.
Doesn't seem to extend beyond energy production. For instance, tell people all about the dangers in chicken mcnuggets, or smoking, or a sedentery lifestyle, and they don't get very excited at all. Even if you quote statistics.

Certainly they never go as far as voting against chicken farms.

Its got to be the theoretical nature of nuclear power generation that has something to do with it. Its invisible, unfathomable and secretive, so folks distrust it?
An Emacs color theme that integrates well with Ubuntu's Radiance
A-2 System: The first open source project
Adobe's proposal specification for CSS Regions
At least according to Douglas Crockford (minute ~45 on http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Heretical-Open-Source)
Note: That wall o' text makes it hard to pick out your key points.

> The "speculator" was placed into the mix with a limited role for providing liquidity

This makes no sense. Who did the placing? Every market has speculators, and even end-user-buyers base their decisions in some part on speculation.

The speculator has no altruistic diktat to provide liquidity. The speculator is there to make money, and providing liquidity is a side-effect. i.e. the speculator wants to take on a position, but can only do this if someone else wants to exit a position -- thus making a trade. The seller's interests are served just as much as the buyer's.

Now, there is a clear issue with cornering the market. However, there is a natural check to this behavior, in that taking delivery of millions of barrels of oil is expensive. And if you have no intrinsic need to consume a commodity, then it is very expensive to sit on. If supply is indeed artificially constricted by hoarding speculators, they will need to sell off their supply at some point.
Facebook Flaw Can Trick You To "Like" An IFrame that Follows the Mouse
A Facebook flaw can trick you to force-"Like" a page with a floating iframe that follows your mouse cursor in a page.

FailMania.com features viral YouTube Videos, and uses a trick that forces users to click the Facebook "Like" button for their page.

A fake video image is on the center of the page. When you hover the mouse on the video, notice a 2px by 2px floating iframe that follows the mouse. That iframe contains the Facebook Like Social Plugin.

Therefore, when you click the fake image of the video, you also like the FailMania page, and the page link automatically appears on the News Feed of friends.

After that, the real embedded YouTube video is shown on the screen, and gets played.

When you go back to Facebook and view your profile, you'll see that you "Liked" that FailMania.com page.

Here's a sample page: http://www.failmania.com/schlange-beisst-in-brust/
His comments on Yahoo Answers' traffic coming from users migrating from Myspace struck me as way off. No one "hangs out" on Yahoo Answers because their tired the lack of anonymity on Myspace. The masses didn't leave Myspace because of any form of stalking.

Interesting interview overall I guess but his comments on this subject really annoyed me for some reason.
Why are people even assuming that the only possible use for this site is for men looking to pick up women? Most women tend to be very social creatures and I can well imagine this having a totally platonic, social use for women looking for other women to hang with so they don't feel so out of place in a (presumably) male dominated venue.
Thanks for the correction. I am letting my incorrect post stand to provide the context for your correction.
Don't be blinded by the web. The world is actually stagnating
Quora assumes a world full of absolutes. It's not.
I was aware of the idea, but thanks for such a viscerally relevant example.
Study on the The Anatomy of a Home Network - Includes prizes for those who help
My problem with Yahoo answers is the number of times I've come across answers that are out right wrong (sometimes to the point of being dangerous) and supported by a number other people, with no right answer in sight. For this reason I completely avoid Yahoo answer regarding any topic I'm ignorant of.
Lean Startup Stage At SXSW
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Yup, we put no restrictions to what content can be linked to.

We just ask that the comments and opinions are made in Spanish.
People didn't believe in 07/08 that much of the price movement was due to the devaluation of the dollar. Perhaps the real bump in prices is due to the devaluation and perceived future devaluation of developed economy currencies. QE/helicoptering money/printing money to stave off deflation ain't free.

A lot of the speculation on comm is because monied people believe that US monetary policy will end with uncontrolled inflation rather than the soft landing the fed is hoping for. To my understanding this is a greater picture case of supply and demand. It's just that the product isn't crude it's insurance.
OPEC also has an interest in keeping oil prices low over time. When oil prices are higher, people start investing in more efficient technology, reducing their overall need for oil, and consequently, OPEC's potential for political pressure.
I love the compact notation for pitch and transforms. Question: there are two other aspects of music that would be wonderful to encode in your approach: note duration and loudness.

Do you have ideas on how to achieve this while continuuing the readability of your syntax?
Yes, smokers smoke despite knowing full well how bad it is for them, more or less. Gross pictures won't make them stop for the most part. It might make a kid think twice - IIRC it mostly made poeple want to collect them all. Plenty of people bought certain brands just because of how the pack looks - it's branding and packaging like anything else.

The primary goal in anti-smoking campaigns is to stop young people from starting in the first place - over time that's the best money spent.

Take a look at the British Columbia anti-smoking campaigns - lowest rate of new smokers in north america (IIRC).

Tobacco can't sponsor events. No more Benson & Hedges symphony of fire fireworks competition in Vancouver - now it's sponsored by a bank or something.

Stores that sell cigarettes (grocery stores, corner stores, 7-11, etc) can't have them visible to the customers in any way, and can't advertise the fact that they sell them.
Basically their marketing was nipped in the bud. They can sell them, but no advertising of any kind)

And you know what? it works.

Then you reach a critical mass where there are enough people NOT smoking that it's just not cool to smoke....

that was after no smoking in bars, restaurants, any indoor public places, within X feet of the door of any store, etc......
i have just read the approach to comments and i think i should remove this post but i cant figure out how. if anyone would like to have a shot at it reply and i will give you the website and the gmail to go with it.
How To Use Your Browser’s Information On Fly (Sync Chrome Bookmarks)
Formula of the day: Jeans length
> the banks are not in the actual business of using oil to produce goods and services of economic value, but in fact have exclusivity to deal in these contracts

Can you talk more about the exclusivity here? That seems like a regulatory mistake.
And just because it needs saying somewhere, and is also symptomatic of corporate ego problems:

Dear Twitter, if I follow a link to your one of your feeds, then hit the back button, I expect to be back where I started, not at some portal function for further twittiness.
I think we are in violent agreement - by "weakly enforced property rights" I was referring to the fact that you are likely to be robbed of your your house (or perhaps the $500 you saved up when you are halfway done).

The hidden advantage of building codes you describe only applies when everyone can afford that $1000 house.
how do I short commodities?
On a "blogspot: blog, where does it go? Or can you get google to make it appear on all blogs for a period of time ?
Good enough for me. Now there's a record of it, and I thank you for your honesty.
Their move motivates the discussion of the merits of the premise that developers really are a commodity, and what is important and fundamental is the ecosystem. Developing facebook apps is a nightmare of constantly having to hit a moving target, and constantly updating and maintaining old code. I've left and abandoned that area, but companies like zynga clearly have stayed and have even begun breaking out of that ecosystem. This is not just an online or social media phenomenon but also extends to brick and mortar stores, malls, mail order catalogs, etc.

I feel like there are three groups of people, the people that have always realized that it's twitter's prerogative to act in it's own economic best interest and never trusted the idea of building a business on that, the second group that knows that to be true, but thought 'oh twitter is an exception' and the third that simply heard twitter's initial press releases that 'we don't care about monetization' and we're different.

Premise: Everyone's going to target the ecosystem that has people on it, before it was search and look at all of the SEO spam, currently it's twitter and facebook, and the goal is to engage users via that customer acquisition platform, and eventually build your own community and continue the cycle.
Study: Diet May Help ADHD Kids More Than Drugs
I would like to point out the well-known at this time. This has turned out not to be a scare-mongering media-frenzy at all:

http://www.businessinsider.com/fukushima-nuclear-plant-2011-...

FTA: (Naoto Sekimura, a professor at Tokyo University, told NHK, Japan’s public broadcaster, that “only a small portion of the fuel has been melted. But the plant is shut down already, and being cooled down. Most of the fuel is contained in the plant case, so I would like to ask people to be calm.”)

Therefore, there has already been a partial meltdown. Your folks' anti-FUD was appreciated, but ultimately this is quite a bad accident after all, and at especially the Business Insider site article, not overblown or using incorrect verbage.
In the typical node pattern, errors should be sent as part of the callback for asynchronous IO. For exceptions, a "throw" statement will not be automatically propagated to the other client, best practice is to catch the errors and call a client side function in that case. Exception handling will be improved in the future.