skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/ has your answer. (Though it looks like his site is down right now--odd. Google "john gatto" and you'll find lots of other materials.) Gatto was NY State Teacher of the year in 1990, and worked miracles with kids for 30 years in New York City, before giving up in disgust with the whole system.

Compulsory public education was invented by social engineers who wanted to control and command the teeming masses and make them pliant workers in their mills and plants. The folks who backed early mass education were the robber barons. (This is well documented by Gatto.)

The real point of public education is to dumb everyone down to the same level and beat any initiative or intellectual curiosity out of them. (See "Dumbing Us Down" by Gatto.) Oddly, some kids escape, most of them by learning on their own (as you've done).

Taylor's main book on the subject, which is great on a whole bunch of levels, is:

http://www.amazon.com/Underground-History-American-Education...

(check some of the reviews for others' takes).

Also see some of Paul Graham's essays, which are strongly related:

http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html (What You'd Wish You'd Known)

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html (Why Nerds are Unpopular)
I was on IRC before 13; I found the existing IRC guides to be very helpful.
My first reaction was this is terrible, just giving someone the silent treatment, does nothing to clue them into what they did to deserve it. Assuming they are not a troll, who know what they're doing is wrong, the person may not understand, what they are doing is not acceptable, perhaps a cultural difference, perhaps social issues they have, ignorance whatever. Giving them the silent treatment will do nothing, they already have issues with socializing obviously, "getting the hint" probably isn't their strong point.

Then I started thinking about what was said, about this being "reality altering". Which I disagree with, if you are not good at socializing, annoying even, no one is going to want you to be involved in conversations, or participate in activities with you. Much like ratings/web hits, if people don't like you or what you have to say, you effectively get the silent treatment, or are completely ignored or worse. If you do have relevant things to say, and are socially well behaved, people aren't going to ignore you, and will want you to participate in their activities, because you have something to offer, and its in their best interest to let you participate. That is of course assuming they don't have some prior misconception about you, because of race, sex, jealously or other social failures on their own parts. They will accept you in instead of doing all those things that they do to try and give you the hint to "go away" like ignoring you, not telling you about social gatherings, or whatever. This is all very natural, and mimics the real world quite well.
>Because those axioms work, and are verifiable independently

Can you expand on what you mean by this. Are you saying, for example, that you've proven GR without axioms - you've verified independently that a specific constant c is a necessary condition based on other axioms (or somesuch)? I take it you're a foundationalist?

An attempt at an example: The Bible says excessive greed is wrong. One can argue that it is a simple consequence of other more elementary moral statements within. Lets assume here that it's an axiomatic moral statement anyhow (I don't think it matters for these purposes). It works; it's independently verifiable that excessive greed is destructive. In Biblical terms such destructiveness is wrong (another axiom) whilst clearly wrong is not a scientifically determinable position.

I don't understand your "hint" it sounds like an attempt at snarky humour from a position of petitio principii but I really can't unravel the intention inside the gag.
I don't think kids have a bullshit detector (but maybe you agree and that's why you are quoting that article - if you need to develop a bullshit detector, that implies you don't already have one). Kids are completely gullible, and trust anything you tell them about Santa Claus, ancient Assyria, the continent of Lemuria, chemistry, God, traffic laws, the Easter Bunny, poisons, Jesus etc.

That makes perfect sense, since they spend so much time being taught true things - they have a lot to learn (think about the infamous 'why' question, or the general progress of AI), they can't afford to disbelieve and question unless something seems really out of whack.

The listed examples seem more like exceptions proving the rule, possibly combined with a bit of naivete and 'beginner's mind'.
Dual N-Back Training for Intelligence
"you sell them more than work: you sell them peace of mind."

This is the key to freelancing in general, as my father always tells me.(freelance photographer in the Middle East for almost 40 years: http://gustavoferrari.com/).

Whether it's online or off, if you can convince your clients that you can get the job DONE, with no excuses or delays, they will come back again and again. They want to be able to send you work, and forget about it, confident that you will come through.
redmine + svn maybe?
Do remember that sometimes the "workaholic" is actually doing the jobs of other people or double checking that they got their stuff done because the "workaholic" is blamed for the failure of the system. It happens a lot and some organizations are not really good at finding where it all went south. It also happens more in bad economies (no other jobs) or highly political places (friends before truth).
Which paper was it?
For example what's the difference between "filter[queries][]" and "q" arguments for http://www.thriftdb.com/documentation/rest-api/search-api? The way I understand, q does a simple keyword matching on all fields while "filter[queries][]" is more like SQL "where" query. In that case, what operators are supported?
> COBOL is a language designed in an era where syntax was thought to be the difficult part of programming.

This is a very striking comment and one that reshapes my criticism of languages in general. Often one says that COBOL "feels old" but it's difficult to pinpoint why; I think your comment gets to the heart of the matter and explains why languages such as lisp or smalltalk retain influence today. The problem they attempt to tackle is still difficult in modern programming environments, but the problem COBOL was designed to remedy has paled in comparison. Thus, it's similar to how AOL used to be the main method people used to access the internet -- e-mail, IRC, and the general web was difficult enough for a novice to master that a service like AOL was needed. Now the web has matured enough that the problem AOL was trying to solve has disappeared -- leaving it outdated by substance rather than outdated by style.
And if banks use Java to solve problems, then that's what you use.

No, it means you don't work for that bank.
Whenever I've turned on showdead, the only hellbanned comments I've seen were either patent nonsense or worse. Sometimes it was a user that alternates between legitimate comments and patent nonsense. Do you have an example to share?
Focusing on the Social, Minus the Media (Grubwithus)
Not a problem at all. I've been to the US (from the Netherlands) over a dozen times to participate in a scientific conference and have had no problem at all. Maybe some grumpiness, but that's about it.
What does "I had done some...Java" mean? You used servlets to write a web app? With our without JSPs? When? That elham are sfo many frameworks out there that comparing RoR to (generic) Java seems nonsensical to me.

Have you played with Stripes? Simple, efficient, fast, extensible--blows Struts out of the water, and is up and running in under five minutes.
Really no easier way to accomplish this pretty trivial task?
That and certified/proven compilers.
Dude, seriously? We are talking about the land of the free, and you continue to be astonished that people from first world countries just go to the US to do business and then leave again?

The Netherlands has had a visa waiver program with the US for a very long time. Since the author has entered the US a couple of times before to do very similar things, I don't blame him for just going.

I do blame the company for just paying him and expecting him to show up without checking whether that is legal.
While judging a science fair last year, I was talking to a student who had come to a definite conclusion about his hypothesis based on exactly three data points. I asked him if there was any other possible outcome from an experiment besides "I have proved my hypothesis" and "I have disproved my hypothesis", and he said those were the only two options. When I told him that "I can't conclude anything because I don't have enough information" is sometimes a perfectly valid conclusion, he didn't understand how or why.

Not sure if that's a personal misunderstanding about the philosophy of science or he was never taught it, but I sure hope that concept is not missing from school curriculum.
Bank of America is a symbol of everything that is wrong with corporate America. The world would be so much of a better place if they could just have disappeared in the financial crisis.
Interface improvement suggestions:

When the search results page comes up, the search box is active. This makes any keystrokes I type appear in the search box instead of being passed on to my browser to do things like scroll down the page of results.

This is pretty annoying, and makes me have to click outside the search box before I can use the keyboard to scroll down the page, etc.

So please make it so that the search box does not have focus when the search results are returned.

The other suggestion I have is to allow people to use their keyboards to go to the next page of search results. In Opera, I do this simply by hitting the space bar once I get to the bottom of the page.

This is how Google's interface works. In general, I think you can't go wrong by studying the design of their search interface carefully and copying it.
Not if issued by Bank of America, crooked liars. Worst institution on earth. Just a bunch of heartless greedy bastards that if society had some balls should be in the stockades.
WIKILEAKS: U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti for products to stay cheap
Exactly! Would love to get more feedback if you have a chance to try out ThriftDB (http://www.thriftdb.com).

We have a lot of experience scaling faceted search with solr. 15M docs might not sound like a lot if you're doing full-text search but faceted-search adds another level of complexity:

http://octopart.com/partsearch/#search/requestData&q=cap...

As far as scaling goes, most of the demand right now is for smaller indexes so that's not a problem. We know how to scale out though so we're pretty excited to get customers with >100M docs.

We're hosted on AWS but we're still iterating on the architecture. The indexes fit in RAM. Currently you can't control caches, tokenizers, stemming, etc. but that's in the pipeline.

Good luck with your new Norwegian cannery owners! I hear you on hosted search. We're trying our best to create a headache-free hosted solution.
Misleading headline. The article merely states what has already been widely reported, which is that Microsoft has an exclusive deal with nVidia allowing Microsoft to match any third-party offer to buy out nVidia.

The article says not a word to indicate that Microsoft is actually going to buy nVidia.

Please don't rename articles (in most circumstances), especially if your new title is not only unhelpful, but actively misleading.
I love my "job" too. Although there's nothing I love so much to do it 10 hours a day on a regular basis. Not sleep, eat, sex, listen to music, read, watch Tv, play XBox, nor work. Nothing.

If I can't regularly do what I need to do in 9 hours day, for virtually anything, then I'm doing something wrong.
If someone comes in and brazenly violates the rules and values of a community, they can't turn around and expect to benefit from those rules and values later on. They've broken the social contract. Hellbanning is perfectly transparent to everyone in the community except people who are hellbanned.
Some of your complaints are definitely right. A lot of factory-mill certified Java programmers go crazy with XML, factory-pattern, and other enterprisey stuff.

But there are two things I can't let slide:

1) Maven fixes a lot of the project-setup, build configuration, and package management issues. It's not perfect, but it makes a lot of things much, much easier.

2) "That most Java libraries don't seem to be able to provide a simple example." Oh, please. Sinatra and some of the other gems do have amazing examples. But half of Ruby's stdlib has no documentation at all. Hell, things like rss use so much fanciness that there aren't even methods!
I'm not sure how I feel about this suggestion but it seems worth pondering: If you have an advertising-supported site and advertising is what is supporting the community then it seems reasonable to show more or less advertising based on the contribution of individual members of the community.

The most valuable contributors would see little (or possibly no) advertising in exchange for the value they are contributing with their time. People who are disruptive have a cost and the compensation for that would be to gradually increase the level of advertising shown to them.

Clearly, this isn't perfect, but no system is and there is at least a rationale for it.
Flipped curried operator? You mean like this:

(defn flip-arguments
[func]

(fn [& args]
(apply func (reverse args))))

(prn (partition-by (partial (flip-arguments <) 60) [49 58 76 82 88 90]))

I noticed Haskell does automatic currying. You can easily create that or basically any other language feature using Lisp macros:

(defn currify
[f n]

(fn [arg]
(if (= n 1)
(f arg)
(currify (partial f arg) (dec n)))))

(defmacro currying-function
[arg-names & code-args]

`(currify (fn ~arg-names ~@code-args) ~(count arg-names)))

(def gt (currying-function [a b] (> a b)))

Once you experience the power of Lisp macros it is hard to go back to non-homoiconic languages such as Haskell that hide the underlying structure of the code.

I am not impressed by the Haskell code shown here, flipping and currying are feature Lisps had back in the 1980s or earlier, before Haskell was born.

Actually, I find the Haskell code rather revolting. First of all because of the horrid camel-case names (isInfixOf, parseXMLDoc, curlGetString, etc) then there is the very confusing syntactic constructs, like $ and <$>, and hard to interpret names like map, fmap, mapM_, foldl, and foldl1.
Microsoft research feels a lot like this, only with a more academic bent.
It's more of an antecedent-consequent relationship than redirection, in my opinion.

Anyway, while your examples are instructive (I hadn't even heard of the latter three), they get right to the heart of my complaint: I simply don't worry about how to write individual web applications (though I wish some people would think about it a bit more... cough - quora - cough).

My immediate response to something like coffeescript, though, is to wonder what about how the grammar is defined. Could they do the same thing with antlr or xtext? are they already? how about python-lepl? and, finally, what are the core heuristics that all developers can take from a discussion of the above? I'm not at all interested in thinking about their 'square' function example - I'm sure it's plenty useful in some context.

Worry about what cognitively-tiny (that's not a pejorative - mk is powerful because it's tiny) framework to adopt, and reinforcement of one's choice through pervasive 'messaging' within the developer community, seem to go hand-in-hand. Conversely, since I don't worry about the former, I don't generally take part in the latter.

...

By the way - all this has started to sound overly stern to me - I'm really just sitting on my porch, doing a little good natured ranting about things I can't control.

Cheers :)
I would be thoroughly miffed if all there was to my life was my work. I love this industry and what I do - but I would have some severe regrets if I died and that was my only major accomplishment.

Life is far too grand, far too complex, to be spent just coding.
Logs are critical for this tracing to work, without them the trail ends. I was looking over Bitcoin Faucet and it does appear that, at least, they log all ip address. Then I made my way to http://blockexplorer.com and was able to trace all those block.

In the end, BitCoin is only as anonymous as you make it.

https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/recent_sends
If this does happen, I wonder what the future of nVid drivers for Linux will be. Grim, I suspect.
Do you mind sharing the name of some of these agencies?
While it might be more successful to have 8500 (fairly large) seed investments, Microsoft is not a venture capital firm. If one were an investor in MS, I'd would wonder why they were using my capital for other companies and why I shouldn't just invest in them myself?

Companies that have their own VC arms tend to be very focused on a vertical where synergy can exist (ie. Intel). For MS to make 8500 investments they'd have to spread their money so wide that there would be no focus in the portfolio.

Whereas with purchasing Skype, they can roll it into existing platforms and conceivable increase the value of it.
Do you require a relocation to vietnam if you hire someone from the SF area?
Summer Internships in the Bay Area (June)
Who is looking for interns in the Bay Area this Summer?
Please post in the following format:

Company Name:

Company Size (number of people employed):

Company URL:

Position:

Contact Email:

Skills Needed:

(I posted one of these in April, and it's closer to summer now so I thought I'd make another)
I believe you can do this via the eNom reseller API.

http://www.enom.com/download/DomainsQuickStartENom.pdf
I think the other way around might actually be better. Newer, lower-karma users tend to be influenced by the comments they see; older, higher-karma users tend to be better about upholding the old HN values. If you make problematic users invisible to the old guard, newer users will grow to accept certain forms of behavior and even upvote it. If you make problematic users visible only to the old guard, they'll get better feedback.
Seems like the solution is to be paid to prepare the course (in your own country), and then come to the US and give the course for free.

How do conferences like OSCON deal with paying the speakers they fly in from other countries?
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_M...
Looks like it's been changed. Points seems to be always null through the API now.

edit: just removed from the search. still here:
http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/2619811-02e34...

expect to be gone soon.
Rejecting schema.org
I suspect you are not one of the reasons why it exists.

I would guess that the point is that if you give parents the choice (and it is probably up to the parents for most of the time) then the parents who decide to forgo schooling are the ones whose children need it the most.

It's one of those greater good things. Societies who have mandatory schooling do better than those that don't (regardless of your experience) so societies choose mandatory schooling as soon as they can afford it.

I sympathise with the need to play the game in schooling. It is a game, with scores, and refusal to play by the "rules" (social norms, accepting teachers as better) is not well received. However, many find the game worth playing, and high scores to be useful later in life. Some don't, and it sounds like you are one.
What has that got to with web application development again? Are Java applets popular again?
Crossing the street against the light is a punishable offense. Giving a friend an MP3 is a punishable offense.

The rules are meant to be ignored.
How does the US correlate the two files if you change your name in your home country?
> the idea of canning someone for working too hard seems pretty silly

I think you're taking the article too literally. It seemed to me that he was taking the (decidedly silly) polar opposite position to emphasize the extremity of Jason's suggestion, and that there are perfectly legitimate reasons not to follow it, to the extent that the exact opposite could be argued. I don't think he actually expects anyone to fire someone for working overtime, just recognize that expecting overtime has negative effects.
It's probably a good idea to back a bold assertion like this with a citation of some sort.
Basically correct, except std::sort uses assignment, not copy construction.

It's also likely that the optimizer will have GetABunchOfThings construct its result once in the caller's "things". Lambdas are C++0x, so maybe move constructors (another C++0x feature) will be employed instead.
See "School is a prison" on Youtube
If anyone is looking for an open source python version that doesn't require silverlight:

http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/
The `q` argument is used to perform a full-text search across all fields. One benefit to using `q` is that you can rank results based on field matches (using the `weights` argument).

The `filter` arguments are used to cut the data before performing a full-text query:

`filter[fields][fieldname]` can be used to filter on fieldnames:

http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?filte...

`filter[queries][]` can be used to add arbitrary filters:

http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?filte...

http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?filte...

The syntax for filter queries is the same as solr:

http://wiki.apache.org/solr/CommonQueryParameters#fq