skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>As a nation, we spend more on education than the military

That's an incredibly misleading claim. Consider this graph:

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/edgraph.html

So we see that funding for public k-12 is roughly the same as defense, but let's consider the funding sources. IIRC, defense spending is funded solely by the federal government, whereas public school spending is sourced from federal, state, and local-- property taxes taking a big chunk out of it.

So if we compare apples to apples-- which is federal spending between the two, we see a very wide disparity. This of course is exacerbated by the military occupations currently taking place by the US gov't.

I could also argue how spending in education will have a better effect on GDP relative to defense spending, but I'm a little tired of googling things.

[edit] Here's a much clearer picture of the spending distribution: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_education_spending_20...

Compare edu to defense and you'll see my point.
Lane detection using Clojure and OpenCV
Startup Founder Q&A with "failed scientist" (YC S10)
On the Google Voice website there is a setting where you can disable receiving SMS on a certain phone.
I think the last thing that needs to happen is the dehumanization of the education system. What the Khan Academy seems to demonstrate so far is that the careful application of technology in the classroom has a positive effect on young students to understand and digest information. A middle ground should be sought, it should be complementary and help drive innovation in education - but definitely not replace humans.
I don't see the links you mentioned but I came across this one the other day: http://pubsub.io/

You can also build one using Socket.IO
To most people, teachers are authority figures first and employees second. Having worked on educational software for several years now I can tell you that, while most teachers are smart enough not to talk about it, they're all very aware of this fact.

So the worry probably isn't that teachers will be replaced by software. It's that availability of teaching software that's almost as good as some teachers will erode the social prestige held by all teachers.

That prestige has been a central feature of the American political landscape over the last few decades. From a survey I happend to have on my desktop, taken during the
Wisconsin Union Thing a few weeks ago [1] [2].

What's your overall opinion of:

Teachers 73% pos 10% neg
Teachers' Unions 47% pos 30% neg
Other Unions 38% pos 35% neg
Barack Obama 49% pos 35% neg

As a group, teachers enjoyed a 63-point spread between favorables and unfavorables during a coordinated attack in the national spotlight that went on for 3 weeks. Maybe a president enjoys that kind of popularity for a little while, right after winning a war, but not always.

If I were a teacher, I think a slogan like "[We] aim to make the world bad teacher-proof" would sound very ominous.

[1] http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Sections/NEWS/A_Politics/_...

[2] This is a good time to point out that I'm trying to make this post politically neutral, because politics is first in the official list of topics best avoided on HN:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
IPad 2 Review: To Guatemala and Back
It really depends on whether the cost is worth avoiding the effort to get the gift card and send it to your friend.

I don't see a lot of value add (as a giftcard replacement) for vendors who are already selling gift cards online.
> I don't think anybody is accusing YC of racism or any other discrimination.

Not yet, but what usually happens after the answer to "how many X are black?" comes back "not proportional to Y"?
Thats the advantage of geek clothing - you own several of each item based on how often you wear them, how many times you wear them without washing.

Hence:

1 suit

3 proper shirts

3 pairs of jeans

10 black t-shirts
But isnt there also experience to consider? I'm sure a smart person can pick up any language but it always takes time to learn the idioms, gotchas, apis and supporting tools, i believe
I thought that the ROC (Taiwan) government recently adopted pinyin as the official transcription of Chinese characters. All the other countries with Chinese as an official language have done so (Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia), so it seemed logical.

Do the local governments of Taiwan administrative division apply other transcription?
[PyPy] Controlling the Tracing of an Interpreter With Hints, Part 3
Thanks. It actually means a lot that you said 'hope you do too', it's nice to have someone out there who understands how this feels. Thanks for the link too :)
This is the aim of Locker: https://github.com/quartzjer/Locker
I have written web applications in Ruby on Rails, PHP and recently Clojure. While I absolutely love Clojure and what it offers, building web apps with it has proven painful, because the library ecosystem just isn't there yet. There is indeed the foundation, as the author mentioned - Ring, the equivalent of Ruby's Rack, and a few other frameworks such as Compojure. But these are very early stage projects, parts of them are still being rewritten and they are relatively poorly documented as of now. If you run into problems along the way "how do you do this?" you would have a hard time finding adequate info online, whereas the amount of information that exists out there for RoR, for example, is incredible (message boards, tutorials, blog posts).

But even if you go through the initial pains of figuring out how things fit together, many tools are still missing. An easy to use templating library, for example. (several exist already but they are still early stages /are being refactored). Also things like the gems and plugins ecosystem in RoR - where you can pretty much find gems for so many things out there. (e.g.: tagging, authentication, etc). There simply isn't a comparison.

So, while I really love Clojure and I believe the community around it is growing - in both size and its contributions, I would say that, let's face it, writing full web apps in it right now cannot be compared to the productivity you would get in say RoR, due to the immaturity of the tools.
That being said, I still see Clojure being immensely useful in other scenarios (for example: A.I. algorithms, high performance data processing, etc) and as such I would use it mostly in those settings, while integrating it with a more mature 'front-end' framework.
I hadn't read that quote though, thanks for pointing it out -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinsons_Law

the irony is that
Quote 1 - China
Quote 2 - USSR
I don't get your point. Why does it matter where the money comes from? It all comes from us. That we spend more on education that the military is still true, right?
> I suspect that YC would be wise to try and recruit diversity

Why?

Are you assuming that different races might have different strengths (on average)? If so, that assumption implies that, again on average, a purely merit based system will result in less diversity than the general population.

To the extent that race correlates with culture and culture has an effect on strengths, the same applies.

So, remind me why diversity is important?
Durham Startup Stampede Announces Participating Startups [pdf]
is it disqus polling?
Sure, most things are rewritten or replaced in the very long term. But Viaweb's code didn't even last a few years.
nice post, unfortunately SF payroll tax is 1.5% over $150,000 in payroll, not $250k in payroll as mentioned in your article :( It's a racket and is one of the reasons Twitter and Zynga are threatening to leave SF if the city doesn't give them a break on the tax. But it hurts the little guys more. If you have 4 employees making $40k each you have to pay 1.5% of 160k, which is $2400 (that amounts to almost 2 months of office rent or 75% of one employees monthly salary).
Clojure can utilize all libraries available for Java, and all invocations of those libraries will have the exact same speed any java application would have (Clojure itself isn't slow either, but that's a different topic).

I never attemped to actually use Mono, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but if I understood correctly, Mono has to duplicate all .NET frameworks, libraries and tools, which means Mono

a) is not complete (e.g. Silverlight, VisualStudio)

b) will hardly ever keep the pace of development of Microsofts implementation (simply due to resources).

Mono may be viable if you are happy with a subset of the .NET ecosystem, but I'd really feel more comfortable if I have access to all of Java with Clojure. Chances are you do need that library...
Wife Said No, Apple Said Yes
Yeah, but WEKA is a piece of Java bloatware. Waffles looks awesome, especially if they keep it lean and mean and truly try to adhere to the unix philosophy like they say. I'm excited.
you've got to be kidding me
Hop Off the Train at the Right Time
In web startup exits, timing is everything.
Nice link, thanks for posting it. I do think the "engineering vs liberal arts" is the wrong way to put it, though. I see great value in the liberal arts, but I think the real error is limiting your study to liberal arts. Because a typical university in the US requires lots of liberal arts study regardless of major, engineering and science students are far less likely to completely neglect he humanities than the other way around.

I agree with Mr. Wadhwa that society needs engineerings working "along side" musicians, artists, and so forth, but even better is engineers who are also musicians, artists, and so forth. That's going to produce the highest level of innovation.

I also think that the stats about the degree backgrounds of high tech CEOs and so forth should have included information about the actual composition of the workforce. He mentions that 37% hold Engineering or CS degrees, and "only 2%" majored in math. Ok, but I've read that fewer than 6% of all degrees awarded are in engineering, and I've got to figure math is a pretty small slice as well.
WP7 sdk has some major holes though. For one thing, no native way to store user data. You can either use a simple key/value thing (only good for settings data) or you can use files. What I wound up doing was creating XML files that I serialized and deserialized as needed to store data. Not exactly a good solution as the data scales.
I guess my point is that robots/tech are good at certain things, and people are good at other things. It's great for tech to take up the things that they're good at to free up people to focus on the things that they're good at, and that's what I understood TFA to be advocating, i.e. they want to augment teachers, not replace them.
in both cases you're thinking only about bottom line. Imagine it from the other end - what new opportunities would it open. How the military or educational powers (the US has benefited so far from being "super-" for both powers ) can be even more amplified, especially when other super-countries are emerging.

from your post above:

>and a 16% increase in efficiency (using 2007 numbers) would be sufficient to balance the federal budget deficit [1].

that means anywhere between cutting 16% of cost while maintaining the same educational result and increasing the educational result by 16% while maintaining the same cost. I'd argue that in modern world (i mean today and the next 30 years at least) increasing the educational result would be much more important than cutting the cost.
It creates a monopoly in the GSM space and an effective duopoly overall.

Pretty darn close.
Assuming you know the basics of the language, Effective Java by Joshua Bloch is very good: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321356683/
Agreed. There are likely cases where using a switch statement is not the optimal approah, but IMO saying that you should never use it over-generalizes.
I think that supports his point. PCs have better controls and (high end ones have) better graphics than consoles. Despite this, more games are sold for consoles, and developers target them.

The same effect can occur for iOS devices - and their graphics will get better each year (9 times faster this year...)
Louisgray.com: Joint App Brings Instant Messaging, Group Chat to Twitter
Great work and wish you all the best moving forward.

Let me know if any of the following could be of any help to your startup; will be happy to do what we can:

http://www.usrestaurantguide.info/

http://www.recipeavenue.com/

(BTW, the Dinner Planner banners you can see running at both the sites above are of another startup announced here on HN about a month ago; we're running these as a courtesy.)
In South Africa, teaching quality and outcomes remain extremely uneven despite the huge sums of money thrown at education by the state (lazy incompetent unionised teachers being the primary reason [I won't go into the historical reasons for these teachers' chronic incompetence, since there are Apartheid apologists on HN, and I don't want to detract from the main point]).

To deal with this problem, the sort of instruction provided by the Khan Acdemy has been around in South Africa for more than 20 years. The per topic videos, as well as call in tv shows provided by these organisations are extremely important to thousands of students.

The pioneers of this sort of learning in South Africa were the Learning Channel (http://learn.co.za/LC/index.php), and a newer competitor called Mindset(http://www.mindset.co.za/learn/).

Mindset uses Creative Commons licensing, but downloading their content or viewing online seems impossible, while the excellent (in my opinion superior) Learning Channel charges large fees for their content on DVD (although some used to be broadcast for free on state television).

My friends and I used Learning Channel VHS tapes to pass our school-leaving exams 13 years ago, as we didn't have teachers for many of our subjects. Unfortunately, because of the price, I could only purchase a limited number of topics.

It is a pity that massive repositories of Learning Channel content (some of it probably unused because of South Africa's recent ill-advised, and soon to be reversed curriculum changes) are hidden behind a 20th century paywall.

South Africa, despite expensive and limited bandwidth, has a long tradition of students actively using this sort of instruction (via vhs/dvd and tv broadcasts). Distributing Khan Academy videos and Mindset Learn, and especially freeing and distributing Learning Channel videos could make a huge difference to education here. If someone has a philanthropic need to save millions of children in a third world country from chronic unemployability, those would be the first easy steps to take.
I wonder if you could get somewhere by exploiting the middle ground between "naturally stylish, enjoys shopping" and "hates shopping, same ratty t-shirt," namely "kinda enjoys successful shopping, but is terrible at it."

I'd think of it as being like those services where people go and put together a couple weeks' worth of meals: those people don't hate cooking, they hate the results when they fail at cooking. Personally, I enjoy when I find something that fits right and looks good, I just have no idea how to go about making that happen reproducibly.
Browse Artifacts of Geek History in Jay Walker's Library
True for debates on Governance, but it can't be completely true for specifics and tactical matters. Matter of fact its pretty much the only way you can bring intelligence, experience, vision and ability to bear. True, some things are not clear cut, at which point you can debate.

Besides, even what you said is a sensible start, yet most of America seems far from having a sensible debate about Governance. From outside, every thing that happens is twisted into some sort of attack vector for ... I don't know what.
Knowing what you're going to commit doesn't tell you anything about what the other negotiator is willing to commit.
We originally built this so we'd be able to send our friends in other cities a gift card to the restaurant or bar where they'd be celebrating their birthday.
I'm not blaming ICANN for failed business models. I'm blaming ICANN for turning what ought to be a matter of public interest (i.e. the governance of the Internet) and turning it into a situation where you can turn up with a half-baked idea and a big pile of cash and be able to start churning out new domain names.
How does one trace money through "connections"?
That is a goal yes, but these are the defaults that work for us, and we hope they work for everyone else (and we do look for suggestions to improve these), but if it does not work for you, we actively advocate choosing the defaults that do.

The reasons for each of the choices we made is all within the comments of the source file, so it is easier to choose what to keep and what to change.
Clickable:

http://123exchanges.com/default.aspx

Didn't you post this here some weeks ago? If memory serves me right, you've made some (significant?) changes to the home page payout since then - I think it is much better now.

All the best.
>"not enough sex going on here"

I actually thought he meant it in a Darwinian/Dawkinsian(?) sense. That would have been a pretty neat turn of phrase. But yes you're right, he clearly means sexy. Stupid word.
Despite all of the criticism I'm seeing, I think this is a great idea. All they're doing here is applying a suggestion algorithm to clothes shopping. Not a big leap. Plenty of people buy their clothes online; all this does is tailor (no pun intended) suggestions to your tastes.
Video of the birth of the hotels hipmunk (time-lapse)
Why is it misleading to look at total cost or total government cost rather than simply federal government cost? What makes the federal government special?

Now, as for my numbers: 2007, $972B total, the government portion of it was $809B. If you restrict to K-12, it is indeed slightly less than the military ($493B vs $653B). Government expenditures on education are still $150B more than the military as of 2007, the year I originally cited (including higher education and "education not definable by level").

For 2009 (the last year for which full data is available), the gap between government spending on the military and education is $50B (in favor of education).

Regardless of whether spending on education is better for GDP than defense spending, it would be better still to provide the same education for less money. When you spend this much money, small gains multiplied systemwide yield huge gains. A 1% increase in efficiency saves you $8.5B in gov spending and $9.7B in total spending.

Or, to put it another way, every teacher we replace saves $50-150k/year directly and removes a massive unfunded liability (their pension/future health care costs) from the government balance sheet. If Khan Academy isn't ambitious enough to try to do this, hopefully someone will step up and do so.
"Pretty much everything we do is some form of expression of who we are. This is even true of things like programming language choice."

The real question is whether there is a correlation between clothes and programming language choice. Do lisp users wear highly functional clothing that's really ugly to look at? :)
Show HN: Ranking content by social engagement
Discovering content that others have found to be engaging (real-time) is difficult. I typically bounce from site to site browsing the "front page" hoping to see the most recent, top stories. I recently set out to create a single destination that sources content from hundreds of websites and ranks it based on social engagement data. I am hoping to add many more content and engagement sources.

URL: http://www.trendn.com

What do you think? Thanks HN!
Bootstrapped Publishing Platforms | The Startup Cafe
The perks are a lovely set of golden handcuffs designed to keep workers at work as much as possible. Some of the ones I know work so much they use their badge to go in to the bank.
Personally, I'd be willing to take a 1.5% paycut to work in SF instead of the Valley, because I can't stand suburban commutes. But that kind of reasoning is probably why I'm in NYC instead of out west to begin with.

EDIT: Also, I'd suspect that the "1.5% on payrolls over 150k" only applies to the amount in overage, because that's the way most graduated taxes work. So it'd be 150 bucks on the 10k of overage in your 160k example.
I stopped reading at, "I don't put too much weight in Apple's iPad app advantage."

Sadly, that was in the last paragraph.
How does this affect MMS messages? The one annoying thing about google voice since I switched to completely using it is that I don't receive MMS messages and people that send them to me don't know that I didn't get it.
Salaries are hard. We are in a somewhat identical situation, seed funded 6 month old, and were grappling with salaries after we closed our seed round.

We went with something slightly different but probably more appropriate for a Scandinavian or European country. Basically each founder has a fixed sum that they can cost the company each month. It's up to each founder to decide how they split that sum between salary, benefits and mandatory retirement schemes. The salary itself can vary by as much as 30-40% depending on how you compose your package.

From my point of view, as the keeper of the cash, this makes burn rate planning manageable. All of us feel that the system is fair and we also feel we can optimize it for our own particular lifestyle. As for the actual sums we agreed on an equal split, with a slightly higher amount for the founder who had kids (that would be me).
far easier said than done. Have you hired a lot of people? What form does their track record come in? A list of projects on their resume?
A very good post by @asmartbear on the same subject : http://blog.asmartbear.com/death-clock.html
But receiving the SMS is what tells Google Voice to poll for messages.
Clickable: http://gomunchery.com/via/yc
How to Make Bing Your Default Search Engine
Well, in NYC you have a 1.5% income tax, rather than corporate tax, which is almost worse in a way.
So don't buy the "everything unlimited" plan? They have other ones.
Yeah, I remember an old boss of mine (then teaching robotics at WPI) complaining about how the number of "sports medicine" majors was 3-4x the number of CS & Robotics majors. The world does not need that many sports physiologists!

I suspect a lot of it is because very few high school students have an understanding of how the real economy works. A lot of them want money as an adult, and they hear that business is about making money, and so they major in business, not realizing that an undergraduate business degree is virtually useless in actually doing things that will make you lots of money. Heck, I went to a liberal arts college, thinking that I wanted to learn things from lots of different skillsets because that's what an entrepreneur needs, and not realizing that basically all those skillsets are useless for entrepreneurship. (Well, except the scientific method. And math. And computer programming. And writing. Hmm, maybe I didn't do too badly.)

I wonder what it'd take to better educate children about how the working world actually operates, so that they can make informed decisions in the future. Ones with high-powered professional parents probably get it at home, but this just increases the income divide. People whose parents work at middle-class, unionized jobs - the ones who really need the guidance to compete in today's economy - are way behind the 8-ball in terms of cultural capital.
Great writeup! As I read it, it also reminded me of this poem "Dulce Et Decorum Est" - http://www.english.emory.edu/LostPoets/Dulce.html
Ask HN: Did you apply to incubators other than YC as well? Which ones?
For all of us hoping to get into S11, did you apply to other programs as well? Which ones and why/why not?
I've been using & following the development of this boilerplate since its release & have only continued to be impressed. Thanks for making such a helpful & useful tool.
To be fair, Jane Street probably is helped in this regard by being able to pay great 6 figure salaries and 6 figure bonuses to their developers.