skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The primary problem is the economics of school and the perverse incentives of public funding / private benefit. People view schooling as an entitlement and when the price becomes 'free' more is demanded than can be supplied, since the essential product of schooling is a piece of paper the quality of inputs can be greatly reduced with out affecting the quality of the final product. Only once people learn to educate themselves will the problem be fixed. We need a much bigger focus on learning and education and much less focus on attempting to make schooling deliver education.

Schooling is not designed to educate, it's designed to prepare people for factory work, military service, and obedience to authority via nationalism. Just like startups the whole system works much better when fueled by productivity and bootstrapping (working through school) rather than large capital injections (loans, parents, etc). If you go to school with a mind to be educated you can learn a lot, if you go to school with a mind to graduate you've mostly already lost.
from the author's comments:
"It’s way faster. Like, way faster. Seriously, I didn’t try to benchmark because it will depend on your network, but it helped me with uploads that were going painfully slow (~12 hours -> ~3 hours, using 8 cores)."

:)
You can apply for faculty positions in math like this, see http://www.mathjobs.org/jobs.

It is great for applicants, but a little bit annoying for departments who want to hire -- it is now easy and common to simply apply for every job out there, so departments get tons of applications from people who are probably not actually interested.
Coffeescript is a different language though. It has different grammar, different keywords and so on. It shares the same object model, and it is usually used on compile form.

There are other alternatives as well[1], such as:

- LLVM languages: http://syntensity.blogspot.com/2011/04/emscripten-10.html

- HotRuby: http://hotruby.yukoba.jp/

- Smalltalk: http://clamato.net/

- Haxe: http://haxe.org/

- Mascara: http://www.mascaraengine.com/

And so on. Coffeescript is just closer to javascript than most alternatives. But it is a different language, and a nicer one in my humble opinion.

[1] https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang...
One of the many interesting bugs that Apache 2 has accumulated workarounds for is one that involves HTTP headers that end with a newline on the 256th or 257th characters.

http://hi.baidu.com/blog/blog/item/bd01213fd850dfe954e72300....
Doesn't work on my Vista machine. Apparently, sharing contexts is a thing which it is unable to do.
Thanks for the Whirlwind mention, that had gone below my radar!
"they just never made any improvements to their service"

I've observed the opposite. They constantly make improvements to their service.

They've got boatloads of features and they're getting better all the time.
It is cowardly, though. By refusing to associate with someone simply because they've been bullied, you have given your consent to the bullying and even (to a small degree) participated in it. By the way, no one was labeled a coward for failing to share his commitment; that part of your comment is a straw man. People were labeled as cowards for refusing to associate with him.
Very cool application of Twilio!

I'd feel more comfortable trying it if my SMSs weren't publicly displayed.

Although I did just upgrade my SMS plan to 1,000... Hmm.
Well there's a few problems with that example:

1) You've got a "global" named a and then a local variable (via the argument) inside the each function called "a"...so that really confuses things.

2) a[i] where a is a jQuery object returns an unwrapped DOM element...what you want is .index().

3) What you're doing is sort of roundabout...

Why not:

var d = $('div'),
a = $('a');

a.each(function(i, el){
d.text(d.text() +' '+ $(this).text() );
});

Or if you really want to do it your way:

var d = $('div'),
a = $('a');

a.each(function(i, el){
d.text(d.text() +' '+ a.index(i).text() );
});
I wouldn't entirely blame the school system. While I absolutely agree that there are lots of kids coming out of high school who aren't ready for a job in an office, you can't discount the availability of money for prospective college students.

Of course employers are using college as a filter now, "everybody" has a college education, which has driven the cost of labor low enough that they can afford to hire college graduates to answer phones.
I was confused about which were actual images taken of the star and black hole. The first one looks like an "artist's impression" - is it just the grainy picture at the end which actually captures it?
Programming patterns in sed: http://tech.bluesmoon.info/2008/09/programming-patterns-in-s...
There's some great advice here.

It amazes me how often apps built for toddlers make fundamental mistakes: interactions that little, fat 'starfishy' fingers can't manage; instructions in text rather than voice or picture.

Flash games are the worst for this: at least with an iOS game drag and drop is easy and intuitive for a toddler - but trying to drag and drop with a laggy mouse is hard. Toddler will accidentally scroll the containing browser window or switch apps, which is very distressing for them. A simple, locked full-screen browser would be a godsend for many parents (which is what an iPad is).

I have found young children cope fine with the one button. Once they learn not to touch it until they are finished they are fine - if they accidentally push it they know what happened.

It's also great to see quality, intelligent software appearing for small children: Balloonimals is a constant favourite, Ramp Champ should be rebranded for the under-5s as it has just enough gameplay for them.

Something interesting: as my kids (6 & 8) have grown up playing iPhone games with tilt control they get very frustrated when they play games with button-only control. They naturally try to tilt the device. It shows that the next generation of gamers have no need for physical buttons - something that we were told was essential for gamers.

I've been meaning to write a blog post about this subject for years.
I don't totally agree with the "almost nothing". I was already using them for all my project and it was just enough for me. The second you have labels, you can mostly do any arbitrary complex structures.. But yeah, for medium to big project, that would not have been enough. Now with the new issues system, it might work.
I'm not convinced. It may not be a popular sentiment, but I don't think that there is a moral imperative to risk life and liberty to extinguish injustice. We can certainly applaud those who do, without condemning those who don't. Not everyone has the moral fortitude and strength of character to be an Oskar Schindler. We could wish the world were otherwise, but I don't think recognizing the virtue of those such as Schindler necessitates condemning his neighbour who only wanted to protect and provide for his family.
Remember the "Insecure by Design" Dropbox article? [I] automate[d] the process
I have similar experiences with Linux in the last couple of month. And I think I understand, why they are not adressed. Excuse the boldness, but Linux install is simply broken. Is it that all the volunteer developers are to busy with other small projects? And the big guys like google invest in their little app-api's (Java and stuff ...) to work around those limitations, instead of support the "real Linux"?

My experiences come from Suse11.4, because Ubuntu does not install on 512MB RAM anymore, but I don't expect big differences.

People complain about crapware on windows, but Linux is much worse. Install a Linux from the shelf, and your drive get's loaded with useless applications. The difference is, on windows they are installed for commercial reasons, on linux, they are preinstalled, because to install them yourself is close to impossible. So all the Linux distributions ship them. Yes, OpenOffice, or whatever you are called these days, I'm looking at you too.
It's all about this illusion, you can do all this stuff with it "out of the box".

I installed Skype, and it did not install Qt4 with it, and Chrome did not install libpng. You had to invoke them via terminal to find out. All these "dependency-checks". I guess Linux want's to share a lib with all applications. After I installed VLC, I have conflicts all over the place, so I just click them away.
And the kicker ... I had to compile a webcam diver myself.

Looking back, a normal user could use such an OS as long as he does not install anything new, and it does not matter if via web or "install-center".

A few days ago there was this "ubuntu-test-drive a new application" feature. My reaction ... what a waste of time and energy.

Looks like this turned into a rant, but so was the OP.
I understand. Nobody wants to do testing in their sparetime, instead they want to work on the next big thing ...
La Reina del Sur Capitulo 31
The gov has enough influence in mainstream media, via corporate ownership and operative staff members, that they can mostly control the public narrative: so I'd also guess "no". If they ever lose control of the narrative, and your story maintains steam, they will likely attempt to discredit you via smear tactics.
I built this a few months ago on twilio as well, and spent a massive amount of time trying to dispel the "chatroulette for ____" angle :)

my initial testers all got nailed with $30+ cell phone bill increases because Twilio only has american numbers. and canadians can't text american numbers for free anymore.

if anybody wants the code, it's built in django and I own www.texted.in with it (currently down since djangy is going away)
would be cool if it supported mms.
Well, they could always be going on the internet to learn new tips/practices ;)
"Be aware that all mail deliveries in Norway (who you send the mail to, and receive the mail from) will be surveilled and available to law enforcement by court order."

If you think your email won't be surveilled just because your email service provider is not in the US, you could have a big surprise in store for you.

Email can be snooped anywhere between its source and its destination. That can include many hops (some even through the US, depending on where it's going).

If you're really concerned about privacy, you should be using encryption and maybe even anonymous remailers.
This is a hugely overlooked point. There's a huge variety of simple blogging tools, but Tumblr's difference is the simplicity combined with the community.

The ability to reblog with simplicity is a huge part of their success.
On part 2 I will be discussing the actual mechanics of the "R-T-L platform". But basically if you know a "trade" (ie: you're a designer, programmer, marketing guru) you can apply to join the startup and in return for your services you will own a percentage of the startup. In other words, you're one of the owners. You will work for your own benefit.
Line-based processing is still important! This work reminds me of an article I wrote 11 years ago covering Sean McGrath's work on PYX—a line-based format for XML—see http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/03/15/feature/index.html.

That work derived from that of Charles Goldfarb on SGML, dating from 1989 on ESIS, ISO 8879.

We'll always be downsampling to something we can use with sed, grep and awk. They're too handy not to.
Nice theory... but, sometimes the old stuff is pretty OK.

How about time limited GPL instead? Transition to public domain after 5 or 10 years.

Or tie it to media copyright terms - If company X wants Y to be public domain, they have to lobby for shorter copyrights on movies. :)
Ex-intern on the Facebook ads team here.

Facebook's role in the marketing funnel is not to get from interested customers to buy from the company. Its role is at the level of TV advertisements and display ads: Build awareness.

RWW is going about it the wrong way. I don't think Facebook is trying to be the #1 in terms of direct sales driver (for the 7%, they're probably like Zynga or on-Facebook apps). Facebook is unlikely to become more effective than search in that regard, but that's because the latter is intentions-driven.

How can they tell whether the awareness being built contributed to sales? Surely they can run randomized (controlled) tests and see if it makes a difference (I think Neilson does research in this field). But it appears from the article that RWW (nor the companies it interviewed) did not do that level of research.

If you want to use Facebook to get from unaware visitor to paid customer, it's going to be harder than using AdWords.
I refer upvoters to my previous comment on this phenomenon:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2178493

The tl;dr version is that fill-in-the-blank linkbait titles are a bit tedious.
Two surprising companies that have made these mistakes with their childrens' flash games: BBC & Sesame Street.

Having put so much research and effort into getting their programming right it's sad that they could be so slap-dash with their online content.
This road can lead only to an increase in the presence of penises in MMS messages.
I sense a lot of idealism in you. MySpace was a Microsoft platform in the end and dropped Coldfusion, and there were far more variables related to its failure than its technology stack (contrary to what Scoble would like you to believe). I work for a company that uses Coldfusion extensively, and we succeed just fine, so your grand painting of Coldfusion as a bad decision is flawed with my sample size of 1.

> Take, for example, the ability of their platform to support user-specified data models instead of simply posts, pages and comments. This was an ability that many users were requesting or implementing themselves (or working around) for many versions. It was only implemented in version 3.0, not even a year ago.

Yeah, I'd rush to commit development to that too. It sounds pretty useless except for people who are molding Wordpress into something it wasn't envisioned to be.

Far be it from me to defend Wordpress's code quality, but they have two things going for them: (1) word-of-mouth and (2) install base. They got there using the code base they had, and it didn't get in their way. With a large install base comes responsibility. Rewriting your system and disrupting a significant plugin install base comes with a list of cons that grows and grows.

Proper code is a misnomer. There is no such thing as proper. Also, MVC doesn't apply to all use cases, and it certainly isn't a prerequisite to "proper" or "well-designed" as you imply (even when MVC is a perfect fit, there are alternative approaches). Wordpress went to market with what they had and they dominate the market.

> From all this and more, I conclude that WP is vulnerable to disruption by a technologically superior product.

Technologically superior products exist. Wordpress continues to dominate. Why is that, you think?
You can just as easily get a domain to point to a wordpress.com blog.
As I said, the refusal to risk the harassment he endures comes not from cowardice, but from having other, competing goals that are more personally important. If I, as a 20-something man saw a woman getting raped, I would feel compelled to intervene, at non-zero risk to myself. Would I take the same risk if I had a wife at home with our newborn child? Likely not.

The willingness to expose oneself to the kind of harassment Applebaum endures is derived from one's commitment to the cause. I can certainly applaud those who risk being ostracized by associating with someone being bullied, without condemning those who don't. The bullying is morally wrong, but the reaction of others is neutral.
I wish I could bet you that media coverage would cause a quick change, but I fear it'd only make most of the current people dig in deeper and faster. It will, hopefully, eventually do something...

I think the only thing that's going to change this is getting the right people in the right room to have the right quiet conversation to understand that they're inhibiting research and academic freedom with this nonsense. Unfortunately those types of conversations haven't happened much in the last three decades. The system is broken.

Everytime I read about you coming home on your twitter I'm sad and angry. The types of things that happen to you aren't supposed to be how our country works, which happens sometimes, but shouldn't be happening here. Whenever I mention you around people who work for the government it is a conversation killer. It is rare to find someone who is given enough responsibility where they feel they can be anything but helpless even if they wanted to. (Which how could they not? I don't understand it. There has to be a hell of a classified file on you that paints a nice smear job so that these normally reasonable people can sleep at night.) The worst part is so few of the individuals in this mess are evil, it is the system that we've created that does the evil and the responsibility for this is widely distributed.

You're getting screwed. I hope that changes. In the meantime... I hope they have a light touch in Texas.
"...realisticly all you've done is had the students skip highschool and go straight to college."

I regret not doing this. I have talked to a couple people who have done it by taking community college classes part-time and transferring into state full-time.

I think the rest of the world's model is better than what we do. Separate those that will learn to work with their hands and those that will work with their mind and train them respectively in high-school.
I'm not sure I agree with the premise of your comment, in particular that this is all "existing technology". The problem is that once something is productionized and available to the masses, of course it's "existing technology". That does not make it any less innovative when developed.

Ask yourself: if all Google products, in their current incarnations, were still a research project at Stanford that nobody was using, and we all still used AltaVista to search, and Hotmail for webmail, and MapQuest for maps, and then suddenly the Google project was unveiled to the public and commercialized by another company (let's call it "Gapple"), would the accomplishment be any less than how we view Xerox PARC today?

As Steve Jobs says, "real artists ship".
I think sage_jock said it best here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2430567
In response to some of the comments from our post in Feb (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2221579), we've updated our Terms and released local build instructions: http://www.getinpulse.com/guide/local/.
I have observed a sneaky problem with 64-bit windows on some machines. What happens if you copy avbin.dll to c:\windows\sysWOW64\ ?

Sorry for the trouble. 1 week isn't a lot of time to develop a good game AND make sure it works for everybody.
I'm sorry you have to go through that bullshit, and I support your work making sure that people have the tech infrastructure they need to communicate privately and publish anonymously. So thank you.

I just wanted to throw in there... I feel for you with the issues dating.. but in my experience it's not worth dating someone long-term who doesn't have the highest degree of respect for who you are. And for someone who really respects you, that conversation would only deepen their connection to you.

They may be few and far between, but anyone else isn't worth your time.
Ask HN: How do Independent Contractors handle "company benefits"
This probably applies to both Independent Contractors as well as founders, essentially anyone who isn't tied to a large company. Most large companies offer benefits like Health insurance, 401-K matching, Social Security deductions, etc., all of which are done pre-tax. I'm guessing that most independent contractors need to take care of these things themselves. If you do, would you mind sharing your experiences?

In particular, which of these do you consider necessary? Does what you consider necessary change with age? How do you go about making the necessary investments? How does it show up when you file your tax returns?

My interest is US based, but I'd love to hear about how people in other countries handle the same, so in your response, please state which country this applies to.

Thanks.
Well, yeah, but you might as well say that JavaScript is just an alternative syntax for writing assembly language or machine code.
Interesting. For faster flattening of nested structures into paths -- and the inverse operation, unflattening -- you could use this Python C extension:

https://github.com/acg/python-flattery

Full disclosure, I'm the author. ;) It uses "." as the path separator, but would be easy to allow "/".
Definitely convenient!
Wordpress, like Microsoft, are bound by the golden anchor of backwards-compatability. One of their big selling points -- the multitude of themes and plugins -- is also what prevents them from making any radical architectural improvements.
As far as I can tell, this is an argument for sending children to vocational schools instead of to colleges. Not an argument for replacing college with more intensive highschooling.
The problem is, "this isn't pretty" is pretty much all we've got. There is very little information on how to organize javascript apps, or how to write javascript at all. Nobody knows the solution yet.

Most of the stuff on javascript programming is bullshit. "Javascript, The Good Parts" from Douglas Crockford is good. But it is only a start, we need more of that. The majority of books is trying to apply OOP design patterns or plainly translate GoF. I'm sure we can do better now.
Guest login: username => hnguest; password => goodolyc

This isn't working for me. Has it changed, or am I somehow boning it?
Federated authentication: security that makes you money
Seems to me that if a node can have multiple edges pointing to it, and an edge can point to multiple nodes, nodes and edges are effectively the same thing, or at the very least have identical properties. Am I missing something? I suppose it's a useful convention to still partition a hypergraph into nodes and edges.
I was hoping to read about psychology on this subject, why people often conform to these kinds of stereotype once old enough to think for themselves.

A lot can be explained away by their upbringing and social pressure, if everyone you know thinks it would be weird for you to wear a dress, have pink shoes and play with a barbie doll instead of a gun, then you learn not to want to do those things.

In adults, is it still just an extension of this, or are preference differences between sexes created by more than just society? For example, movie genre preferences.

And.. what about LGBT preferences? That won't be a case of upbringing, so why are gay men thought to be more likely to like the colour pink than straight men? I actually do like it, and have a few pink shirts / tshirts, and I'm certainly not aware of doing that in an attempt to be seen as gay, but am I doing that subconsciously, or is there something else at play? Or is it just a complete coincidence?
Personally I think that nanoblogging will change everything. I'm going to launch a site where the interface consists only of a selection of emoticons.
Message received from 479-XXX-XXXX at Sun Apr 10 2011 22:26:23 GMT+0000 (UTC)
I'm from England!
Reply received from 626-XXX-XXXX at Sun Apr 10 2011 22:29:32 GMT+0000 (UTC)
I am fasting, but it's not going very well.

If only Twilio would support international messaging by default so I could have got that reply, and had a message to reply to.