skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is definitely a ray of hope on the public side. A lot of the parents I know are extremely committed to staying in the city.

But you sure do need to be committed. The numbers just don't look good for SF. If you rely on private schools, you are looking at about $17K/yr for the K-8, followed by $25k/yr for the high schools. The numbers boggle the mind. I have one kid and another on the way. That means that tuition would run me between $34K-$50k a year. It's not tax deductible, so this actually translates into about $50-$70 in salary. I know some two income families that could swing it without too much pain, but unfortunately, I'm not in one of them.

But even if you can afford it, imagine if you moved to a good school district in the suburbs and invested that money instead. The education is "free" - and in a way, you make money on it. You have to pay taxes to support it, sure, but you'd have to pay them in SF anyway. And because houses in good school districts tend to hold value or appreciate more rapidly than others, the tax becomes, in a strange way, an investment (ie., you're essentially buying a share in a school district when you buy the house). Living in SF must be very important to these folks, because I wouldn't be surprised if they're walking away from well over a million in lost revenue over a lifetime.

Lastly, SF's school district is in particular trouble because of the deals it cut with the unions in more prosperous times. I read about this in the chronicle a couple of years ago (sorry, no link). Anyone who worked for five years for SF Unified (in almost any capacity) gets subsidized health care in retirement. In other words, someone who worked as a janitor from age 19-24 before moving on to other things is on the pension and health care plan.

Because it's a relatively old school district (newer suburbs simply don't have retirees to support, because they didn't exist 30 years ago), this problem is compounded. SF will spend a huge amount of its school budget simply supporting its pension and health plan obligations.

In a way, it's almost a relief that so many childless people live in SF - because of these obligations, we may need a much larger tax base to educate the same number of students as a suburban district.
Mozilla Labs calls for next generation concept browsers.  A few are also showcased.
How has it broken? Consider getting a MacBook pro or air... Slightly better build quality.

You won't find anything better from other manufacturers IMHO.
I'll put in another vote for the Thinkpads. Not only are they bulletproof, but nominally everything in them works under Linux, which is, even today, rare for a lot of laptops.
Based on casual observation, I'd say the reason student quality is dropping even as top colleges get much more competitive is probably because wealthy kids are less likely to get into top colleges, not more. It used to be that almost everyone who got into a top college was super wealthy, but now grades and SAT scores matter much more. These highly credentialed kids might get better college grades than kids merely from high-SES families, but they generally aren't as smart and don't have the same level of critical thinking skills. If you take classes over the summer you will notice the student quality is much higher, for mostly the reason that the students there are the ones with the most money instead of the best grades (since scholarships don't cover summer classes.)

/Things you can't say
if i understand you correctly, you want trendy architecture and stuff to happen in an area with cheap housing without rent control...?

is your city doing this, or do you have a plan for how that can be incorporated?
http://www.founderscoop.com/

http://www.techstars.org/

http://www.launchboxdigital.com/

http://seedcamp.com/

i know there's more, i just can't think of any others off the top of my head.
And that's exactly why you shouldn't be making Ticketstumbler, and they should.
NY Region Is Hot
"Is there a preschool version of the SAT?"

Yes, actually. There is a whole battery of standard cognitive tests, as well as common academic tests such as the Peabody Picture Test, which measures vocabulary. Wealthy NYC parents will pay coaches to get their kids ready for these exams. It can be much cheaper in the long run though if you can send your kids to a special public school (magnet or charter or special program) rather than spending 30k a year for private school.
While that's all true, it misses the fact that people want rules. We're classifiers by nature: our brains want to sort things into "good" and "bad" regardless of what the truth is. The only solution here is to educate everyone about all the subtleties of the issue and force them into using more fine-grained categories.

Which, if you read it, is kinda what this article is trying (vainly, maybe) to do.
One of the original articles: http://www.universetoday.com/2008/08/02/the-white-house-is-b...

Followup:
http://www.universetoday.com/2008/08/05/perchlorate-on-mars-...
<tinfoil>Of course they'd say that...</tinfoil>
The site is nicely design, being a search hacker myself; I have to say this site pass the test of great relevancy search.

Your search model is as good as Intelliverb’s PageScale algorithm if not better, I think we should get in touch and share some tricks. : ) Nice Job guys!
Another big competitor are white label companies. When you buy direct from a (larger) venue/club/sports team/etc. they are using a white label solution.
Template:

The Most Valuable Lesson I Learned From X

Recall a really great mentor (professor, boss)

Confess your failings (dropped out of school, fired) b/c I was going to (start a business, go back to school, become a ninja)

Proceed to rationalize your life to show that it was all worth while
where do schools like mit and caltech fit in that continuum then?
But not specifying a font size is annoying to people with average resolution displays and good vision because the default size (16px) is too large.

But I understand now how makecheck could get annoyed: though pixels can be resized after page load, ems and percents take the browser's font size setting into account and are scaled appropriately the first time.
Why not add a 'search' link to the top navigation that just links to searchyc.com? Estimated implementation time: 1 to 5 minutes. Then, when HN's own search arrives, you could replace that link.
We don't fully understand what the best approach is. Yes, we can see that a lot of US education is poor but the US also generates a huge amount of creative output and invention and it isn't all from immigrants. It's also not clear that it would be good to penalize students so strongly (by not allowing them higher education) if they did poorly in school. There are a lot of developmental reasons why someone might do poorly in school and be successful later in life. One of the strengths of the US system is that a person can go onto higher education in one way or another or even go back to school when old. It's possible that the US (by accident) may be doing something right. Maybe it could be better but too much "better" may also cost something else. Comparisons of education system based on academic achievement risk leaving something out of their analysis.
The K2 disaster, seen through the lens of climbers' blogs
Twit has a different meaning in the UK. For a second there I though people needed twits for some nefarious purpose...
The problem is, there might be new comments even if you visited the thread.

But there's a remedy for it and it's simple: the link includes the number of comments in that discussion, so that your browser can change the color if the number of comments has changed since your last visit.

Edit: e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=268389&c=21
It's falling, but not that quickly. IE6 still has 25.3% market share: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
It's ironic that you were working on a script to solve writer's block, because this whole phenomenon of "immediately after I finished I saw the poor quality of my work and got depressed" you're talking about sounds an awful lot like writer's block.

I spent a couple of years in grad school before I decided to quit the field of computational biology. All that learning about DNA analysis was worthless, and I was sad about it. But in the years since then I frequently come back and draw analogies and use the things I learned. Just yesterday I was discussing the problem of developing a map from a large corpus of gps paths and realized, hey this is a lot like shotgun sequencing. A lot of stuff will end up being pretty useful.
I find not only the essay itself delightful but the fact that there are apparently many people around still (as the comments which have already come in show) who are still able and willing to argue sensibly, politely and in an informed manner over serious things! Many thanks, Paul. Mind if I link your blog to mine?
The power of the mysterious
$999.99 I Am Rich app hits the App Store
I always usually write things like that.

Yeah, no.
a true hacker. inspiring stuff.
The most valuable lesson:

"By recognizing the changes in the world around us, we can reason our way into industries that will be appealing in the long run."
ThinkPads are/were nice. I've been a bit concerned about reduced quality since Lenovo took over from IBM, though admittedly I haven't seen any problems with the newer Lenovo machines I've had to work with that would justify such concerns.
I'll probably be paying more for others to work on it, and I'll focus on writing reviews.

I need to take a week to regroup though, and figure out the strategy for this.

It looks like success hinges on two things (which in retrospect is obvious): (1) getting a really well organized (categorized) database of apps (2) creating momentum on review writing.
I knew about the boycotts and the USSR -- but not the large early domination of host country, Sweden's early strong showings, and that as late as 1964 the divided Germanies were still competing as one (which didn't return until 1992).

So a great infographic -- visually interesting and informative.

It would be great to see other statistics animated the same way -- GDP and per capita GDP would be especially interesting, given the last ~30 years of 1.5 billion people moving out of poverty and the rise of China and India.
The last thread

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=197182

You can get used to pretty much anything, except Sony's. I, and friends have had reasonable experiences with Toshiba satellites. They score tolerably well on the 4 deal killers: display, keyboard, fan noise and heat. The best thing is that Costco and Target sell them with 90-day return policies (restocking fee at Target). Besides these criteria, i look for at least 4 or 5 intelligent reviews on amazon.

read the 5-star sony reviews on Amazon, many of them say: my Vaio's great, except for bloatware, and poor reliability, keyboard, battery life and customer support/service. Sony's customer service pretty much guarantees you'll never buy another sony if you have to contact them.

Computer repair people will tell you to stay away from vaios, Takes a ridiculous amount of work to replace e.g. harddrive, it's almost as if they're designed to be impossible to service/replace. Any other laptop, should take 45 seconds. i also had a horrible experience trying unsuccessfully to upgrade Windows on a Vaio a couple years back. You too when you have to resinstall O/S and can't find the media. Sony really pisses me off

I would caution to stay away from firs tproduction runs of a new generation of apple laptops. Witness people cooking eggs on the early 2006 MBP's, and MB airs throttled down to one core
Using Different Types of Websites - Part 1
Why Consumer Love..and Pay More for Macs
I think in general you get kids who have higher grades but less intellectual curiosity. I don't think MIT and Caltech are any different, but I think they seem different because we think of a good engineer as being someone who is good at rote memorization and not as someone who is intellectually curious. Whether this is true or not is another story.

(And there are actually studies that tie intellectual curiosity to SES. Hart & Risley's book Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children covers this very rigorously.)
One more vote for thinkpad ... I always wanted a macbook but when I saw the Thinkpad it was instantly like "Wow this is it ! How could I overlook it for so long ". Specially I liked the Thinkpad's keyboard much over thinkpad's
Not sure if I would call government employees "California's most productive workers" ;-)
Errata :
.... over macbook's.
This is true, but when there are amenities for families (playgrounds, green space in general, and schools) this is less likely happen, especially given that in Pittsburgh, at least, you can live in the city, within 5 miles of downtown, in a walkable neighborhood, for less money.
He tries to debunk the economy metaphor by pointing out that:

1) Lots of people use the metaphor poorly
2) If you take it literally, it doesn't work

Neither of those are particularly good. Maybe becoming hackneyed reduces the value of a metaphor in terms of communications, but really says nothing about it as an idea. And lots of metaphors don't work if you take them literally because, you know, they're metaphors!

I dislike how this happened to the word "paradigm." Awareness of one's mental models is quite valuable. And there are likely emergent effects akin to markets in web communities, despite the difficulty in quantifying them.
I can't believe they still haven't changed their name.
I think there's only one choice, and it's the one that the educational system is optimized around, for better or worse - Grad School. Of course they don't tell you up front that when you enter a pure science out of high school, you're signing up for a much-longer than 4 year process. Because an M.Sc. is really optimized for one purpose - to push you into a doctorate program. Then post-grad, then tenure track, and so on.

The $100K figure quoted in that article is really misleading because of that - it's not talking about people with a bachelor's - it's talking about people with tenure.
plus points for not naming it ticketstumblr..
FYI: Last time my powerbook logic board replaced (3 weeks ago, 2nd time in 4 months!) they told me to not flex the chassis / logic board. So i got a rigid case (Brenthaven) and try to only use it on tables now.

also, if it's the same thing failing over and over, talk to a manager at apple store about getting a replacement. They can look up repair history, verify that it's a looper.
What happened in 1904 ??
The US bubble says 78Gold, 82Silver and 79Bronze
the rest of the world, combining all medals totaled 41. O_o

Any history buffs want to fill me in? (sorry, working. Will make up for it after hours)
Five Questions With Jim Bullock
Sell your "problem solving skills". It's completely vague, but it's supposedly the essential skill you've learned (actually mathematical modeling, testing, and data analysis, hopefully).

Apply to any and all entry level engineering type jobs and just try to convince them that you are able to learn what they need as a physicist.

Better yet, go back to UW and get an MS in medical physics. They apparently only need a master's and make decent money.
If you want a more advanced palette maker, try: http://www.colourlovers.com/copaso/ColorPaletteSoftware
I resell a fair amount of tickets, and I rarely make a sale through StubHub and my prices are always lower than market. I sell 95% of the tickets I have through Craigslist. So here's a challenge for you: incorporate Craigslist ticket listings.
You're right, organization and management are important.

It's just that there are so few good managers; at all the large companies where I worked, it was an open secret who was contributing and who was just taking up space.

The majority was in the latter category.
Your coworker's 'top may not have had the discrete GPU mine had; I've heard that the integrated chip works great.
are you familiar with capitalism?
App owners have incentive to add themselves to the database. Maybe an email announcing yourself to App owners would be less work than going through and adding them all yourself. It also is a sort of secondary press release and will get people talking about you.
I saw exactly the opposite.

A recent issue of Harvard's alum magazine talks about how about 35% of their undergrads going into 'finance'. I can't imagine anything less intellectual curious -- especially at the entry level.

Just because something is more easily measurable (ie, a math or engineering exam) does not mean it is less intellectually interesting. http://www.xkcd.com/451/
There's a lot of them but as a percentage of total primary ticket revenue it's less than 1 percent.
Ryan runs icontact.com -- I've heard they've been interested in going public for a while. It is interesting to hear what Ryan had to say about the process.

Perhaps their biggest competitor, Constant Contact, went public last year.
I picked up my Dell XPS M1330 on sale for $500 (with 3gb of RAM, nVidia video card, etc). Definitely can't complain.
Dell announces it is now 100% carbon neutral, 5 months ahead of schedule
Craigslist doesn't have buyer guarantees or anything that holds the seller accountable. All the ticket providers we list do.

The guys who consulted with us sell over $1,000,000 (one million - not a typo) of tickets per year on Stubhub. Not sure why you're having problems.
I find it unlikely that any advantages conferred by these schools have lasting value.

Instead, I think that they are a salve for the guilt-ridden parents who don't have time to spend on and with their kids because they're off being Masters of the Universe. So they make up for it with money.

I say this as a parent who's cranking away at a startup and have a kid at a day camp. I'd much rather be spending the afternoon boiling a cabbage for his invisible ink experiment.
Email is in my profile - definitely contact us.
http://www.google.com/insights/search/
Rethinking cookie cutter websites
ok didn't know exacrly how it worked but "search YC" is actually awesome, why not just integrate their service?
Stackoverflow Beta: A Review
The price difference between Macs and PCs widens
so . . . we plan to move to DC next summer. Would my wife want to sign up for this now that it's been sold?
Google sells Performics search marketing to French company Publicis
Gearing up your Site for Web 2.0 Marketing
And I've babied mine for the last six months. Now the top case is breaking off in pieces and the trackpad button sticks. As always seems to be the case with hardware: YMMV.
A Cupcake On Your iPhone (virtual goods startups)
Or, see it explained in the first chapter of SICP: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-11.html...
The Cost of Growing Food
"I think in general you get kids who have higher grades but less intellectual curiosity."

I meant at all top colleges, not just at MIT and Caltech. I agree with you about Harvard.
I went through the same search recently. Had it narrowed to a Thinkpad (T or X), M1330, and a Latitude D630. I did lots of reading and hands on comparisons, and I ended up going with the D630. Could not be happier. It is extremely rugged, on par with a Thinkpad, and the battery life is unparalleled.
Would something like this be possible? It's my understanding that Craigslist is very restrictive with their TOS.
I've been running a Dell Inspiron 6400. If you buy it with a warranty, second LCD, etc.. and know how to talk to the salespeople, you can get it loaded up with all kinds of hardware upgrades for cheap, ESPECIALLY if you buy the 3 year warranty, and it will still be cheaper than a Macbook Pro.

I'm dual booting XP (for my music stuff) and Hardy on it (for my programming stuff) without a hitch, it has 1680x1050 resolution (screen real estate that the macbooks just can't compete with), swanky compiz effects to rival osx's and if anything on my machine goes wrong within the 3 years after purchasing, dell will fix it within 5 days. ANYTHING. (Used it once. Got my laptop back 3 days after I mailed it in!) The warranty alone is the main selling point for these machines.

I can't think of a better price/quality ratio than the Dells
Frankly, I don't believe you. No offense, but on this issue, I don't think you know what the fuck you're talking about. Why would you suspect that SES is more predictive of "student quality" than academic accomplishment?

Let's consider IQ, for example, on which there's ample data. IQ is more highly correlated to academic accomplishment (~0.5) than economic/occupational success (~0.4). SES is the success of the parents, which has got to be less predictive of IQ than success of the individual. While IQ is clearly not the right definition of "student quality", the non-IQ components are traits like creativity, ambition, and willingness to work hard. Creativity is probably independent of SES, and the latter two traits, in aggregate, favor working-class students over the rich.

If you take classes over the summer you will notice the student quality is much higher, for mostly the reason that the students there are the ones with the most money instead of the best grades (since scholarships don't cover summer classes.)

If you're talking about high school summer programs, I can speak from experience on this one. I've attended CTY, Mathcamp, and MO(S)P. The first two are probably not affordable to most working-class families (MOP is free to those who qualify). The students at these programs are indeed, as a group, better than elite college students, but this is because these sorts of summer programs are actually a lot more selective than Ivy League undergraduate programs, not because many of them are expensive.
yuck! classic "loved by designers, hated by users" stuff

all of these concepts put TOO MUCH information on the page

its at the level of NOISE

i want less information - i want the information when i need it, not in an unending stream. my best "default" ui - a blank screen. i haven't signalled that i need infomation yet, so don't give me any. when i request data, give me only what i ask for

classic abuse of these examples - weather data. who the hell actually runs these weather widgets that show you the weather on your desktop??? wow, its 78 and sunny, just like it was two minutes ago! this is the type of data people ACTUALLY check once a day or less. putting it in my face is just giving me more pointless noise to distract me
Empty quantum channels greater than the sum of their parts
Have you taken it in to get the trackpad replaced?
I love a good voting discussion. It's the most broken system (along with it's cousin, recommendation engines) on the web today.

Two comments:

1) What if, instead of quantitative information, we gather qualitative information? Slashdot doesn't ask you to vote up, it asks you to categorize the material. I like this much better.

2) Wouldn't it be fun to create an elitist site constructed solely around debating/discussing hot issues? You'd have to channel the ability of the audience to respond emotionally, but I bet you could come up with something like "Pop Wars" and it'd be a hoot. You could have ranking (special titles), virtual goods (rewards, do-dads, etc), and better yet, the system would drive to the top the most emotionally engaging and reasoned discussion of the hour. Something to pull you in and make you think (and participate). Not just a yes/no hot/cold POS. More like a battle where the audience categorizes the arguments, not approves or dissaproves of the contents of them. Email me if you'd like to discuss further.
And there are actually studies that tie intellectual curiosity to SES.

There are differences in how kids are raised. Working-class kids are raised to respect rules and follow orders, hence adornments like "the bell" in high school. Upper-middle- and upper-class kids are encouraged, in school, to be creative and critical thinkers.

I think whatever difference this engenders fades in the mid-teens, when the types of people who attend elite colleges tend to develop independent minds regardless of how they were raised.
Next Generation Video Sharing for iPhone