skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had an interesting debate with some friends after sharing this Tom Waits quote: "This is what's wrong with the world. Everything is explained now. We live in an age when you say casually to somebody 'What's the story on that?' and they can run to the computer and tell you within five seconds. That's fine, but sometimes I'd just as soon continue wondering. We have a deficit of wonder right now."

Via http://www.bnox.be/2009/11/tom-waits-and-deficit-of-wonder.h...

I tend to agree that there can be some value in the gap between wondering about something and actually finding out (or never finding out). Letting your mind chew on a question means you have an opportunity to imagine your own answer or your own story. When you tighten that gap those creative mental wonderings get clipped short.

I don't think he is saying a world where you can never look things up in 5 seconds is preferrable, but noting the effect this has on the underappreciated benefits of wonder.
Here's an apt analogy. Let's assume that customers preferred paperback books to hardback books, possibly because paperback books are lighter, take up less shelf space, and are easier to hold in one hand. They are, obviously, less expensive to make. It seems to me almost a given that these same customers complaining would be giving one-star reviews to the publisher for charging more for the paperback version. Under a utility model this wouldn't happen.
Best in terms of what?

University reputations are built more around research than undergraduate or graduate education. The notion that the USA has the most reputable universities says more about the quality of research than education.
Yes, you're right. My preceding comment ignores the shift from dumb to smartphones.

But seriously, read what I wrote in the post. This internal shift of mix between smartphones and dumbphones, or the rise of many Android manufacturers who aren't in the top 5 (e.g. HTC) is exactly the point. I wonder whether the intent of the "switchers" from dumbphone to smartphones all have the same intent to run apps.

I also noted and amplified the rapid Android share growth using the same "mathematical trick" you mention.
Teaching 180 18 year olds math in the same room, at the same time?

How much does that cost?
The Myth of Classlessness in Apple’s “Get a Mac” Campaign
Only the elite ones, many of the community colleges are pretty bad. And at all levels they end up putting many freshmen through remedial courses to catch them up to where they should be.
When I use jQuery (MooTools is my lib of choice) I find myself using it in ways that is very unlike the majority of jQuery that is seen around the web.

I absolutely hate the plugin system simply because you cannot easily get the instance of the plugin an refer to it later. To answer this I use function constructors with the module pattern (its easy and doesnt require an extra lib to get going) to create my plugins. Another thing that I do is when I query for a collection of objects, create an array that represents every item in that collection already wrapped with the jQuery object. This may not seem like a big deal, but there is a difference between

var collection = jQuery('a');
collection.each(function(i, l){
var link = jQuery(l);
link.bind('click', function(){//do suff});
});

and

var collection = jQuery('a'),
collected = (function(){
var c = [];
$.each(collection, function(i, item){
c.push(jQuery(item));
});
return c;
})();

this second way allows you to select an item from collected without having to rewrap it with the jquery object. I dont have any data on it, but it seems like rerunning jQuery() with every mouseover/mouseleave/event etc seems like a waste of processing.

Anyway, that is just a few ways that I use jQuery to make javascript a bit easier. These little tricks have the people that I work with thinking that I'm some sort of genius.
An even bigger problem is speed. It only runs at ~10% of native speed.

This is definitely cool, but I think something like Google's Native Client is needed to make C/C++ work on the web. Maybe Emscripten could be used as a fallback for browsers without NaCl support.
Why Minimalist Brochure Design Works
And at the end of Highschool (Gymnasium) you have one that goes from 00 to 15. 15 being the best. It is strange.
Edge Coloring via Quaternion of Complex Colors
I've got some Aussie notes from my last trip in my drawer here. They are indeed plastic. They even have a little clear window in them you can see right through. I'd never really thought about it until now. I don't know if they last longer or not because already some of the ink/paint is rubbing off the 2009 vintage $50 where it gets folded.

Edit: Here you go: they are polypropylene polymer. Wild

http://www.travel-australia.org/money.html
Perhaps an apprenticeship-system might be worth a try? Let them work together with adults---that might put some sense into them.
Put a price tag on nature? I am not liking this idea.
FBI Releases Document Confirming Roswell UFO
Is there any way for IBM to notify someone of potential infringement that you wouldn't call a threat?
I always thought TOS fans are usually called "trekkies" and TNG "trekkers"

Oh dear gosh I hope my wife doesn't know I know that.
JXTA/JXSE 2.7 is out (and Oracle ranting)
$0.25 says the author thinks Mr. Khan should go through a (worthless, IMO) teacher training program.
As a student, I'm particular interested in learning the basics of any given domain. With the basics, I'm given enough knowledge to go out and explore that particular domain - this is how I learn and Khan Academy is AWESOME for this method.
McDonald’s Wage For Nuclear Job Shows Some Japan Towns May Fade
So when the fed sells a security does the money destroyed exactly equal the money it originally created when it bought the security? Not if the bank that bought the security lent out the money from the fed. The magic of the fractional reserve banking system multiplied the money from the original security multiple times over. I don't think this article addresses this fact.
I know that it is extremely simply to write spaghetti code in just about any language, using any supporting library, but I'd say check out some of the stuff that the MooTools guys are doing. I come back simply amazed at some of the things that they're doing. Check Company http://code.keetology.com/company/ its a different approach to solving the same problem(s) as backbone
An unidentified person made the CLAIM to the FBI that they recovered circular crafts.

This confirms nothing. Anonymous claims can be made by anyone and mean nothing without evidence.
I read somewhere recently that replacing the dollar bill with a dollar coin would save about $5 billion over something like 30 years.

The trick is no one actually wants a dollar coin.
I see where you are coming from. I agree with you that e.g. phoning his employer would be an overreaction; and I agree with you that my earlier message was very unclear in that respect, although I wouldn't have posted it if he did, in fact, try to get the alleged thief fired.

Right now, though, "company X" does not seem to be heavily involved - the text in the original is in an image and not indexed. Don't you think that the actual damage is likely to be small?
Are you sure about this? Velocity got rolled into "AppFabric" and then Azure did something with the same name. But it's totally different. What you want is Windows Server AppFabric:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/ee695849

Not to be confused with Windows Azure AppFabric.

I'm not sure Velocity really included any interesting research or novel ideas, though.
People who say our k-12 education system is in need of desperate help are unaware of the facts.

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-well-do-above-...

It's ridiculously overpriced, but the value added is very good.
If our colleges were better, would we need high school?
I like the Airblade, too. It does dry your hands quite fast. And I've never had my hands knocked to the site by it.

(I can't say anything about the economy or hygiene, but it's one of the hand driers I actually use. I am much to impatient for the conventional ones.)
I'd be more interested to hear how they prevent theft by employees of the money to be destroyed. How hard is it to steal money that nobody will ever be looking for again?
I think the article misses the big point of Kahn's enterprise - finding an alternative model for delivering education which can scale well.

It isn't meant to replace a top quality teacher at a highly selective institution teaching an elite group of students. It's intended to make decent education available on a large scale and accessible to learners in highly diverse and non-traditional situations, e.g. home schoolers, adult learners, and intellectually gifted individuals.

It still suffers from many of the issues that the factory model has because it is still the factory model - just different and hopefully improved.
Six (or very long ago five) is usually the worst number.
Doesn't travel well, though.
I've been using Fuel for a number of weeks now, and I'm generally really liking it. I agree with the Twig recommendation though, and did drop Twig in almost immediately.

To answer your question specifically: it would be smart to use Twig by default, rather than developing your own custom Fuel template engine, because you would need to spend a significant amount of time to get something with the same feature-set, build quality and documentation coverage. Would this time not be better spent elsewhere?

As a pretty content Fuel user, I should also mention that your tone doesn't benefit the project.
The report leaves hope for certain types of businesses, who it says may be in a better position to make money from their Facebook presence. Among them are what they call "small pure plays", small businesses for whom "Facebook is the 2011 version of Yahoo Merchant Solutions or eBay ProStores."

Can Facebook process payments for third-parties?
I don't see it mentioned very often, but google's closure-library has some really phenomenal patterns for building maintainable javascript. Its worth checking out Michael Bolin's book, Closure: The Definitive Guide, which goes in depth of the Component and Control frameworks.

I've been using the library for 2 or 3 years now, and I am always surprised to see it has such a small community.
They are actually somewhat independent. The Roche limit depends on both body's mass and volume, where the event horizon relates to a single body mass and volume.

EX: Cold Brown dwarfs can orbit closer together than a brown dwarf and a earth like planet.

PS: Some real satellites, both natural and artificial, can orbit within their Roche limits because they are held together by forces other than gravitation. Jupiter's moon Metis and Saturn's moon Pan are examples of such satellites, which hold together because of their tensile strength.
The Rails team used PHP for their Rails website for a number of years if I remember correctly.
This something sounds like cash to me.
Nice idea. Only (minor) remark: I don't particularly like the handwriting font, would have gone for a slicker design. Other than that, thumbs up for the smooth and simple implementation!
I didn't say the solution had to be a credit card. There are a few options. I bet most people have cell phones.
A quick Google says around 17 million people don't have a checking account. You could sell pre-paid cash cards too.
Our actions often put an implicit price tag on nature. Rejecting the idea often just leads to a lower implicit price tag.

One anecdote, I heard from a co-worker [0]: There was a elementary school that had some asbestos in its walls. A consultant did some maths and presented his report, starting with "Suppose the live of a child is worth 40,000 Pounds" and went on to conclude that the replacement would probably avoid enough future deaths / illnesses to justify their rather great costs.

The council that received the report rejected it outright, "We can't put a price tag on children." In the end they never replaced the walls.

Moral of the story, the consultant shouldn't have started with the price tag, but just concluded: If you don't do the replacements, you are valuing our children's lives at less than x thousand GBP. And you wouldn't put such a low value on them, would you?

[0] I can ask him for the source, if you are interested.
La Reina Del Sur Capitulo 31
What about radiation?
Http://www.protothema.gr/health-and-life/article/?aid=115509
Perhaps you could cram a liberal arts or business education into a highschool format, but there is no way in hell that you're ever going to be churning out physics or mathematics PhDs from anything that can be realisticly called a "high school".
The recent increase in reliance on college as a prerequisite for many office and knowledge worker jobs is more of an indication of the failure of the public K-12 education system than of the beneficial qualities of college. It's no longer feasible to assume that the holder of a high school diploma possesses a basic level of proficiency with the English language (written and verbal), mathematics, reasoning skills, and basic computer systems (use of the internet, email, word processors, etc.). Thus many jobs have increasingly found it beneficial to use the filter of a college degree in order to avoid a flood of unsuitable applicants, even to entry level jobs.
Is it illegal to wager real dollars?
Yes. Colleges aren't free and a lot of people don't have the money to pay for them. Public education is important.
Call me paranoid, but I don't like the idea of all my money transactions being traceable. It's less that I worry about my bank or government but about, for instance, super-market chains linking my buying-behavior to my bank account or card number.
Using RDFa for server- and client-side templating with Node.js
It's good to see 3D printing in the news all the time now, but in reality the bigger story is that all manufacturing methods are becoming more and more accessible. With open hardware, digital manufacturing, and the burgeoning maker scene - hardware is becoming the new software.

Wired's article delved a little deeper into the "New Industrial Revolution": http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_newrevolution/all/1
My experience has been that nobody wants to spend dollar coins -- they just collect and hoard them (same with $2 bills).
The dangers of editorializing titles. The linked article never suggested better high schools as a replacement for college.
I am convinced that most of these are mistakes that can't be properly decoded.
Why is nobody questioning the "need" for college.

This is a huge problem too, the idea that college is needed.
There can be different objectives of informing someone of potential infringement:

1) making someone aware but saying right away that it's fine (that's what IBM as a self-declared friend and protector of open source should have done in this context)

2) making someone aware and offering a license deal on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms; that would have made sense in this case, too, since TurboHercules stated in its first letter that it wanted to reach an agreement with IBM on such terms

3) making someone aware while simultaneously pursuing exclusionary, anticompetitive objectives

I like the first possibility, I can accept the second one if the offered terms are truly FRAND, but I despise the third option.
Not a single mention of Reprap. I find this extremely disappointing.
What's a better estimate, or how much do you think I'm off by? Why so?
I know dropping newly-learnt and vaguely-understood words loosely is generally a bad habit for people on Hacker News, but also consider the concept of pseudoteaching[1].

[1]: https://fnoschese.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/khan-academy-and-...
Which seems a bit unusual to us outsiders, seeing as a lot of other major currencies with value roughly comparable to USD do just fine with coins for 1 and 2 denominations (EUR, GBP, AUD, CAD, NZD).
As videos on the internet, Khan is actually fine. The videos are largely informative, and I like watching them. But classroom implementations are a whole different ballgame.

If you want to actually improve the education kids are getting, there are a huge number of moving parts you have to address. In this sense, as a classroom implementation tool, Khan is just getting started. There's nothing to judge yet!

I've spoken with them a bit, and they're still trying to decide on the direction they want to take, how much they want to get involved in what they call "change management" in the classroom, i.e. making sure the tool gets used effectively. In my opinion, this is essential, but it takes manpower, and that's not something they can offer for free.

Of course, that requires having an understanding of how such a tool should be used, and as has been said, they're not teachers. The importance of them not having any classroom educational expertise is that they don't actually have a clear idea of how the tool would be used effectively. I work as an on-site PD specialist for Reasoning Mind, my job is to help teachers use this kind of technology. Khan learned a lot from their pilot in Los Altos, but they weren't being used as the primary curriculum there.

They're looking to be a full curriculum, what they call a "textbook replacement system". Doing that kind of thing effectively in communities that aren't as well-off (economically and teacher-quality-wise) as Los Altos is really, really hard. It takes a huge amount of work on the "change mgmt" side, high quality material, a ton of training for the teachers in the new classroom paradigm. This isn't the first foray into 100% differentiated classrooms, it's just the first one to go viral.

In sum, take a step back guys. Give them a chance to grow into a mature organization.
Real-life example: The EU allows vegetable oil (instead of cocoa butter) in chocolate. In Germany, nearly all chocolates still contain no vegetable oil.
"Of the 24 companies interviewed, only 7% cited social networking as one of their most effective sources of customers."

That's 1.68 companies. Oops.
Ahh yes, but wondering something, running to the computer and finding out that its very likely that nobody else knows either is a rare pleasure unavailable in times past.
I found the lifespan of each note interesting too. The rest of it was far oversimplified for my taste. But hey, I'm not everyone! :)
Don't take this as any legit comparison, but from my perspective: Fuel is at 1.0 RC1 as of right now, although it has only been started a few months ago. Lithium has been in development for ages (since 2009) and it seems like it hasn't seen a lot of action lately, the last blog post on http://lithify.me/ being from November 2010 and the last packaged download being 0.9.9 from December 2010. (Didn't check the activity on the repos.)

That doesn't tell you a lot about the quality or reliability of the framework and what's to come but personally I prefer the "let's get this out there" approach over borderline vapourware.

Besides that, browsing the FuelPHP forum it looks like people are already busy adding functionality through plugins and the team seems to be helpful and embracing it. So they've definitely got 'momentum'.

Also the 'docs' on FuelPHP seem to be pretty 'complete' at first glance, also giving me the impression that they are totally up-to-date while I can't even figure out where the proper 'docs' for Lithium are. They don't seem to have things arranged for 'being in the spotlight' yet.

And I can't comment on what's going on under the hood really, as I am more interested in 'libraries' that are not depending on any framework these days.

But as far as I can see, FuelPHP is sitting there for you along with current docs and a dedicated team to try out and give it a shot.
MIT 150th Year Convocation Live Stream
Good idea, but:

(!) You should invite more people. I can't figure out why you wouldn't want as many as possible

(2) You should change the name. Not only is it not good to label yourself as a "reject," there may also be people who have independent funding (I'm a contractor and make good money that way) that don't need YC money but would still be regular participants. What about "Indie YC" or something like that (perhaps related to a different math theorm)?

(3) Why do you want people to fill out the YC app again?

(4) And why does only one person (yourself) get to decide who gets in or not? There would need to be considerably more trust involved before people are just going to just let you make all the decisions. I tend to think it is better to say, "My co-founder and I will be at this place at this time every week with our laptops and free food." Once you have 3 or so committed startups you probably have traction enough to continue.

That said, I'm moving to the Bay area next month to work on solo ventures. I'm in if something is going on.
This entire post makes no sense. It's like the author says that Khan Academy is bad, because it doesn't copy the usual lecture format completely. It's different, boo.

And then there's the part where he doesn't realize that Khan Academy is supplemental, and not a replacement.
Isn't that second code snippet actually creating a jQuery object for each "a" - even if it is never clicked on? Isn't that rather more of a "waste of processing" than the first, where a jQuery object is created in the event handler?

Why wouldn't you write the first one as:

$("a").click(function() { // do stuff });
Concurrency, Parallelism and D
Rockstar programmers: do you ever cheat/bluff for your reputation?
Obligatory comment about quicksort being excessively popular because of its catchy name, and all-too-often delivering inferior performance on large datasets due to partial orderings & bad pivot choices.

Obligatory comment about how sorting algorithm speed is far more important when dealing with incredibly large datasets, spanning across multiple machines. Uninsightful (and perhaps glib) point about how Machines Are So Fast These Days that even Bubble Sort appears fast for medium-sized datasets.

Cleverly-worded comment about how Merge Sort is not the sort of sort to let you down in a jam, and how it is particularly suited to distributed computation (where the overhead of allocation is rendered meaningless by the I/O requirements).
Metrics Metrics Everywhere. Making better decisions by using numbers [pdf]
Totally did that. My friend in the US would fill an 8 hour tape, disassemble the tape and send just the one tape spool to me in Germany. I'd reassemble the tape, load it into the precious NTSC player and Trek my brains out.
ASK PG/HN: Questions before interview for S11 batch: Part 2
How do you decide how much equity you would expect for YC's investment? I was on wompt and conovore the other day when all of this was going down and people were sharing their startups and many seemed very far along.

They way I see it YC adds the following value:

1. Operational Help (incorporation, UX, UI etc)

2. Strategic Advise (PG/JL/HT and others)

3. Cohort Batch

4. Alumni Network

5. Demo Day and Access to Investors

Anything I am missing? Thanks.
Seriously just curious, what are 'all new frameworks that support PHP5.3+' that are complying to that? And even with namespaces, I guess there are still a couple of ways on how to do this in the file system and handle autoloading. What's the 'standard' then?
I believe our cases strikes a counter-intuitive point about what constitutes 'rest': despite the fact a distractive teaching job or marathon training can be taxing mentally and/or physically, they have shown to be good type of 'rest' for the entrepreneur. Strange creatures we are.
What blew my mind about the ST monad is that despite its promise of single-threading, it still allows for recursive division of labor.

I was like, "Wait. Wait. Waaaiiiitt. How does it do that?"
Comments: the great deceivers.

To paraphrase: Some people write tricky code and say, "Ah! I will use a comment to make this clear." Now they have two problems.
Adding a jit to the web stack
Because for some products, that's most of the profit margin gone.