skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>You must understand, high school kids are kids.

Okay, I agree with that, but...

>Teachers are adults and professional educators.

Where did you teach? I'll move there to raise my kids. Seriously - I grew up in a reasonably good school district (Livingston, NJ) and while there were some good teachers, many (I want to say most, but don't trust my memory to be undistorted) were atrocious. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livingston_Public_Schools

>I'm telling you that it's a metric ton of grading work -- and it's not fun like programming or problem-solving; it's grinding slow repetitive work that makes you miserable.

To be clear, when I say a proof class, I mean that I was grading 30 problem sets (8 TAs, 240 students - this was CS103) of 13-15 problems, around 10 of which were proofs, every week. And many of the students were learning how to write proofs in this class. Trust me, there's nothing as painful to grade as that.

>If it weren't for teacher's unions, then any time that administration wanted a teacher gone, they would be gone.

It wouldn't be perfect. But I prefer a situation with some false negatives to a situation with zero true negatives. That is, I'd rather have most bad teachers and a few good teachers get fired than have no teachers get fired. May be less fair to the teachers (if you're of the school of thought that would rather let 100 guilty men free than punish 1 innocent - depends how you define fair) but it would be far better for the students.

>Teaching any controversial subject that a parent decides to complain about? Gone.

It's not clear to me why this would follow from a lack of teachers' unions.

>I've got no idea what you mean by "rubber rooms".

Do you have no idea what I mean by "Google" either?

http://www.google.com/search?q=rubber+rooms
Bin Laden's wasn't all that dramatic. I'm more worried about Kim Jong-Il deciding he's had enough and launching a full-scale assault.
Yup that's pretty much how they do obits, interestingly the Nobel Prize was created as a result of this policy when Alfred Nobel's obit was prematurely printed by the French press after his brother's death.
Simple but common: http://google.com/codesearch?q=%22from+local_settings+import...
This is just another anecdotal datapoint, but I've found substantially less arrogance in my CS program than in some of the other bigger majors here (IR, Govt, Econ). I think it helps that some of the best and brightest students spend a vast majority of their time answering questions, debugging code, and filling in others with that obscure unix knowledge.

Nevertheless, we have very very few female majors.
You are implying that TSA etc. were established due to legitimate risk/benefit analysis, not blind fear. I don't think that's true.
This was also commented on in the Tao of Programming:

A manager asked a programmer how long it would take him to finish the program on which he was working. "It will be finished tomorrow," the programmer promptly replied.

"I think you are being unrealistic," said the manager, "Truthfully, how long will it take?"

The programmer thought for a moment. "I have some features that I wish to add. This will take at least two weeks," he finally said.

"Even that is too much to expect," insisted the manager, "I will be satisfied if you simply tell me when the program is complete."

The programmer agreed to this.

Several years later, the manager retired. On the way to his retirement luncheon, he discovered the programmer asleep at his terminal. He had been programming all night.

-- "The Tao of Programming", section 5.3
Well it's occurring overnight for Europe and a lot of US-East. That probably cuts the traffic in half.
Aj Jazeera being rebroadcast on CSPAN1 with analysis on this. Nice.
In what respects?
YC Interview Prep Flash Cards
I was really hoping this could avoid Hacker News.
Haha, I love that I'm getting downvoted for this.
Now let's repeal the Patriot Act and all the legislation passed under the rubric of fighting terrorism.
I believe they simply paid someone enough to give up the goods.
From wikipedia: "The city is well-known throughout Pakistan for its pleasant weather, high standard educational institutions and military establishments. It remains a major hub for tourism ...", "50 km from Islamabad"

Just amazing - harbored by friends in the Pakistani military for years while they received billions in aid from the US.

Edit: From the BBC - "Syed Riaz Hussain in Abbottabad, writes: "Last night, at around 0100, there was heavy gunfire about 300 metres from our house, which was followed by a huge blast. There was little in terms of military activity during the day to suggest something even remotely close to what happened. The exact spot where this incident took place, is a stone's throw from the Pakistan Military Academy, Pakistan's equivalent of West Point."
Eight years to the day, strangely enough.
This is just fantastic news! I stare at the rising Freedom Tower out my window as I write this, and there's a sense of closure to what was a rude awakening to a new century.

From Andrew Sullivan on Daily Beast:
"12.08 pm Can I say how deeply moving it is that a man named Barack Hussein Obama gave the order for the operation that killed Osama bin Laden?

The pre-eminent symbol of our the multicultural, multiracial society of the future defeated the pre-eminent symbol of the darkest, bleakest throwback to medieval religious fanaticism. Im not ashamed to use the following language: Good defeated evil. And hope rekindles again."
Now maybe we can invest the same amount of money in the real killers like disease and less so car crashes.
My experience stems from learning the language of the week for twenty years until getting serious about learning lisp, and coming to see that syntactic innovation at the language parser level is a waste of time. Syntactic innovation should occur through a macro facility that gives everyone, not just the parser-writing language gods, tools to build a language that suits their needs.

That is why CoffeeScript is ultimately uninteresting if perhaps useful to people who don't understand or are not in a position to use lisp.

In my experience, JavaScript's syntax has never encouraged people to think in a C-like way. In a Java-like way, perhaps, but not really even then. People seem to get, if they're remotely clueful, that JavaScript programming calls for a lispy approach. It's all the damn parens and (optional) semicolons and braces and no-win indenting scenarios that frustrate people who try to exploit JavaScript to its fullest.

Yes, CoffeeScript solves these problems and others, but through the introduction, as I said before, of yet a new set of rules that result in whitespace-sensitive line noise code that requires frequent contact to stay familiar with. And again, I'm a busy person: a new language wastes my time because I already need to write shell scripts, Clojure, and Python in a daily basis. I know JavaScript, even if I dislike it.

And if you're going to learn a language that doesn't help your resume with The Man, you may as well learn a language that can change your life. Like a lisp.
Can we at least be solemnly happy rather than giddy happy?
I am right there with you, i have written some amazing posts that rached 25k reads on my blog in the last month and not one comment or mention on Hacker news?

PG/YC talk about pushing the limits but like most groups, its all bullshit. If you don't march in their formation you get killed.
Seems like he screwed up royally then, seeing how the previous president's plan was to make sure the son of his business associates stayed alive.
Oil falls 1% on the news, stock futures up by 0.5%, dollar up also (expectation of reduction in war expenses?).
I (now) know that Red Dead was banned in the UAE, and pictures of the US military dead are banned by the Pentagon, but what is 'deadbanned' in this context?
He may be a little biased.
I'm sure Winston Churchill thought that too, in 1945, after showing tremendous leadership in WWII. But he lost re-election in a landslide.

Voters are fickle, and often vote for what they want in the future, not to reward past achievement. $6.00/gallon gas and high unemployment will likely have a bigger affect on Obama's chances.
Used Komori Printing Press Machines & Features
it seems I am not the only to not get the point of PSGI:

http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2011/03/why-psgiplack-matt...

It resumes quite well my opinion and concern regarding the doc.
Osama bin Laden dead
"People who plan the mass-murder of others around the world are completely irrational"

Clearly untrue. Perhaps it is easier for you to view an enemy as a lunatic monster bent on senseless destruction, but nearly every mass murdering organization in the world, whether it's a terrorist group like Al Qaeda or a military power like the US, has very concrete motivations and objectives for its actions, and is well versed in the logic of power. Realpolitik is deeply rooted in a rational worldview. You may disagree with the premises or the reasoning (I certainly do), but calling Al Qaeda 'completely irrational' is way off.
While "many" is very vague, I think the vast majority of Canadians don't have a clue about IP, anti-circumvention, DRM or the DMCA (I mostly know this as I've talked about these topics with non-technical people).

However it is a component of the general feeling that the conservatives are essentially Republicans-lite, basically using the Republican's "southern strategy" of media manipulation and fear, anti-crime propaganda, subtle racism and fear of the "other" to pander to a particular class of voters.

In my opinion (Canadian currently in the US).
SEEKING WORK

I'm a successful blogger looking for companies that need someone to manage their presence online. I have written the shownotes for This Week in iPad, and I run the curator page one Myspace for the iPad, where I've built a community of more than 300,000 friends. My email info is in my profile. I look forward to speaking with you.
Hitler was confirmed dead 66 years ago today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1
I agree. He is the commander in chief of the US military.
Indian Rummy Online
Play Indian Rummy online for free as well as play rummy for cash and win loads of cash prizes free
According to Al Jazeera, Abbottabad is a garrison town requiring multiple military checkpoints to gain entrance and say it seems more than likely that the Pakistani military knew where Bin Laden was and were harboring him.
Looks like he could even brush up on his hockey and golf skills. Apparently that's a good place to hide out if you need to.

Next up, Zawahiri (edited.) Considering that Osama was in a mansion outside of Islamabad, I would expect Zawahiri (edited) to be in a beach house outside of Karachi.

Edit: Imagine being the guy who pulled the trigger. I will never cheer anyone's death, but Osama would likely not allowed himself to be taken alive. Buy a beer / coke / shot (whatever he prefers) for the shooter. These guys are military hackers, maybe they read this as well.

Edit: Whoops, got wrong name of #2. blush
You must be a mind-reader to know what GWB was thinking of when he made that comment? (This is not an ad-hominem attack).

All we have to go by is GWB's actions and words. The actions at Tora Bora alone are a strong datapoint; but over the years, I remember reading several articles from people actively involved, claiming that insufficient resources were being tasked for hunting Bin Laden. This particular quote from his news conference fits very well with everything else that we saw was going on, hence it is very believable. There was also one Whitehouse Correspondents' Dinner, where GWB joked about looking under the sofa in the WH for Bin Laden. I myself remember asking myself (and in discussions) countless times, "why aren't we making Bin Laden priority #1, and not Saddam?". Do you remember how we hunted Saddam? Do you remember anything comparable for Bin Laden after the first couple of years?

If you would like to counter this statement of GWB, you are welcome to provide evidence (news articles, etc.) to buttress your claim. All I know is: I was frustrated with us not putting sufficient resources into tracking OBL, and when Obama forcefully said that we'd be making him enemy #1 again, I was delighted.
Osama Bin Laden's Compound on Google Maps
Osama Bin Laden News: Twitter for the Win
Kim Jong-Il is the current most likely way that everyone reading this dies. More specifically, when he dies things are going to get very nasty as the various potential successors fight for what's left of the republic.

If you don't think this is a credible position, feel free to let me know why the US military is on high alert nearby?
by reading this HN post...
its somewhere near PMA Kakul Road in Abbottabad http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...

update: here it is. add your review. http://bit.ly/kP0DCq
Does Al Jazeera English broadcast 24/7? I dont have cable but have wished/hoped for a CNN that streams 24/7 on the net. Maybe Al Jazeera is this Internet news channel I've hoped for?
Kim Jong-Il is the current most likely way that everyone reading this dies.

That's a bit much.
Kim Jong-Il leads a very good life. He has no desire to risk it. Look to Iran, if anything.
>It shouldn't be "they kill us and dance in their streets, we kill them and dance in ours".

This is an invalid equivocation. Their 'dancing in the streets' is after killing civilians, and being glad that bin Laden is dead is not even close to that.
I agree. Every post like this is pushing HN closer to being like Reddit. What has become of this community
That doesn't mean its the place for it.
Given that this was clearly months in the making, the timing (just as reelection campaigning is about to start) is, uh, auspicious.

That said, good riddance.
You can always go to Reddit to discuss something like this. HN is not the place.
South Jordan, Utah

Looking for Kernel Developers, Linux Systems Developers, PHP/UX Developers and a GD/UX Lead.

www.soleranetworks.com
Another obvious conclusion brought to us by Wikileaks. Have any of the leaks brought us anything productive? It's apparent that they are using information as a weapon and are only using it to attack the US Government.

Jullian Assange is "obsessed with power"[1] and is using the information leaking selectively and with very purposeful timing. I'm not surprised that those in the government are calling for his assassination. What I don't understand is why the IT press is still painting a neutral to positive picture of the organization and not demanding that he leak all the information that he has. What ever happened to the proposed bank leak, presumably about Citibank?

[1] http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2011/02/09/wikileaks-f...
One of the great things about Stanford CS program is that it tries very hard not to have the "sink or swim" mentality, especially for the first 2 classes. For those classes, you have a large lecture, but then you have 10-person sections once a week, 6 hours a night where you can come and have section leaders help you with assignments, and "interactive grading" with your section leader where you spend 10-15 min going over your assignment and hearing what you did well and where you can improve.

This has been hugely successful; on the order of half of undergrads take the first class, and gender balance is pretty good in them.
I haven't seen any new footage of Osama for at least 8 years. Unless I see the body I'm not going to believe that they killed him.

Also, I want the body checked for marks of being frozen for a long period of time.
That's a reasonable first approximation.

However, I would add that attempts are a poor indicator because there is a wide range of methods with poor success rates. EX: An increasing in attempts can relate to people choosing low success rate methods and failing.

Also younger people are far more likely to commit suicide than the elderly or vary young. However, generally employed people tend to have lower suicide rates. There is also a significant gender bias in suicide attempts and different bias in rates of suicide. Men are more likely to die on their first attempt in large part due to their chosen methods etc.

Also, suicides rates tend to cluster more than expected, both in the short and long term.
Wow that is a big stack spread.
Yes, in that part of the world this is a well known fact, it is actually a love triangle and includes the CIA. It's the innocents who pay the price on both sides.
I think russnewcomer was implying that if he was in a mansion, the Pakastani government must have known more about his whereabouts than they said they did. Which would potentially affect US-Pakastani diplomatic relations.
"Rule 34" is a great title.
I'm a big fan of FreeBSD/OpenBSD as server OS's. I've put OpenBSD/pf to great use as firewall machines, as they're VERY easy to configure, and the docs are most everything you need. FreeBSD has been great for general-purpose workloads.

For some time OpenBSD has been regarded as "slow", in big part because it couldn't use large amounts of RAM, and it scaled across multiple cores poorly. I'm not sure if this is still the case.
Bin Laden's death should be celebrated as justice should be celebrated. However, I cannot help but be unsettled by the fear that these cheering crowds and retweets may be proceeded by a retaliatory strike by Al Qaeda and its sympathisers. If that happens, I wonder if this was worth it.
You bought a domain from me! (thisorth.at)

Good luck in your endeavors!
It's a military town, in that part of the world it is a well known fact that OBL, Pk military, and the CIA are in bed...
> Look at the RSA algorithm for example. As pure a mathematical beast as there ever was.

The RSA patent wasn't on the math. It was on using that math to do something specific.

The RSA patent didn't apply to other uses of that math.
One of the very early tweets was from...The Rock.

Which almost makes sense.

http://twitter.com/#!/TheRock/status/64877987341938688
Because someone wanted to? Folks are using it. Isn't that enough for you? On top of that, it's quite a nice little language. Comprehensions are very convenient along with regular iteration. And you get most of the jslint passing stuff for free. Plus, if you don't like it, don't use it.
Are you suggesting Arabs are lowly scum of the earth who dance for the death of civilians?
NYC

ZocDoc - http://www.zocdoc.com/

We are hiring in all operational areas, especially engineering.
...which is a problem with a crystal clear cause: if you allow purely democratic voting, then you'll end up with really popular crap reaching the top of the pile fairly often. Imagine how useless Pagerank would be as an algorithm if it considered links from every drooler with a domain name to count for the same amount as those coming from the frontpage of Yahoo - that's essentially what you're doing when you tally up votes on a site The only reason it's not worse than it currently is is that there's no real incentive for people to game the system, so we don't end up with massive comment spammers. But we still have douchebags, fools, and all other sorts of sheeple, and in large enough numbers they end up diluting the votes that should count the most.

Several solutions are probably obvious to everyone here and I won't go into them, but the point is, you'd have to be willing to throw fairness aside in order to fix the problem - if a brand new account's vote is worth the same amount as mine, which is worth the same as tptacek's, then something is wrong.
I'm not saying that I'm not glad(1) Bin Laden is dead. I was just disheartened to see the video of Americans dancing in front of the Whitehouse waving the flag. It just seemed too much like what happened after the 9/11 attacks. Remember, to those celebrating American deaths, there really is no such thing as "civilian". If we act like they act in victory, they can feel like they have our attention and are in a "real war"(2).

It is not (I think) as demoralizing to this enemy to see Americans dancing and celebrating this event as it would be to see Americans shrug their shoulders in a "well it had to be done" kind of way and get back to business with nothing more than a blurb on page 3 in the newspaper the next day.

(1) In the same way I'm glad my pantry doesn't have rats because my traps worked, not the jubilant "I hate the bastard and everything he stood for" way we're going to see a lot of in the next few days.

(2) I fully accept that we made it one and think that we shouldn't have. Its all part of the same course of error.
After Linux and the BSDs, are the other major offshoots of *nix? Solaris?
Sounds like it was written by a young kid who learned to program with Java or Ruby.(Checks about page) Yup, 19 year old college student who probably thinks that computer science started with HTML and JavaScript.
In Stephen Harper (Canada's current prime minister)'s statement, he said that 'Canada receives this news with sober satisfaction.'
I'm suggesting that some of them are. Are you suggesting otherwise? My suggestion is backed up by video footage.
> It seems to me that a fully decentralized payment system would be of huge value to buyers and sellers.

You seem to believe that "huge value" is somehow decisive.

It isn't.

> that no system like this can prevail because of government

And you're dismissive of that factor because ?

Govts require taxes. You want a system that makes it trivial to avoid taxes. Guess which one is going to win?
It might not be as 'hard' conceptually to use, but it just has some dirty areas that are sort of make it unpleasant to use so it leaves a bad taste in some programmers mouths.

* 0 == '' is true, really? what about 0 == '0', also true!

* What is 'this'? Well it depends on where you are and there is a long article someone posted somewhere. To figure it all out...

* Brace block != new scope.

* No nested namespaces -- all is in a global scope.

And there are others. Again. Not hard just kind of unpleasant, therefore CS.
Anyone try this yet? I haven't used ST (are people calling it that?) enough yet to consider switching from vim, but I'm always looking to try new things…
So you are saying Apple does use something like the MPAA ratings...

* Posted from my iPad...
Just read the transcript; thank you for posting it.
News app on a tablet
Get the Best Flat Screen TV Installation
If you are looking for TV Installation? Here to answer all your questions about Home Theater Installations etc. We offer many different types of installation services!
There is a type of censorship where other people cannot see your posts, but you can. Perhaps you cannot even read my comments because I have a negative score.
A relative used to do transcription so while in the worst case it may take 4x as long (bad audio + intelligible speaker) he often worked at about twice real time. So that 15$ / could be anywhere from 4$/hour to 30$ an hour.

PS: At those exchange rates 66,400 Shillings = 800$/month rent which seem really high. I know people in the US paying under 600$ / month rent for fairly reasonable apartments near major city's.
Hmmm, sounds like a made up story, his services were no longer needed. Ask any journalist or citizen of Pak. Pakistan is represented in the US media either by its military or the political party in power, and both live off US aid hence never go of the script. OBL was just a scarecrow.
I'm sure many will try to follow the old AQ and some will try to lead the new AQ. Probably someone claiming to be AQ will claim responsibility for some acts of terrorism.

But how will the bottom- and middle-tier guys they know they're taking orders from Bin Laden's designated successor and not agents of some country's (you name it) intelligence services?

It takes a nontrivial amount of planning, preparation, money, and coordination to pull off the kind of simultaneous suicide operation we saw in Sept 2001.