skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When presented with '1 + 1 = 2', some people will be interested enough to ask why, and others won't give a fuck. Same goes for 'Hitler invaded Poland'. It doesn't mean one person is better or worse than the other, they're just different.

The real problem will arise when people stop being interested. And when that happens it won't be the fault of the Khan Academy or wikipedia or the Internet or TV or video games or religion or <insert favoured target here>.
Work: 20 miles northeast. Girlfriend: 40 miles south. Not rural.

I do try to cruise under the speeds where aerodynamic drag outweighs other factors, when I can. I wish the aftermarket for aerodynamic improvements to passenger vehicles were much larger (as in, existed at all--cosmetic facades that slightly increase downforce are about all you can buy).
PNY and Asetek Deliver Sealed-Loop Water Cooling for CPUs and GPUs
What do you suggest? My river of ideas is pretty dry lately. I figured it would be a great starting point.
Rails 3.1.0.rc2 has been released
Many people consider Java to be C++--
...it seems to me that non-religious people keep trying to simultaneously claim that the universe is merely a semi-random collection of atoms and energy, AND that we can find transcendent meaning in it. You can't have it both ways.

Yes, yes I can. As a human I can find meaning in literally anything. By no means is this any more or less silly then walking on water, turning water into wine, etc.
Not sure I buy it. The advice implies that Twitter is a broadcast medium - which is only true to a point. Twitter is way more useful as a conversation medium where everyone can eavesdrop. So yeah, talking about lunch isn't always the most productive use of twitter, but neither is standing on a chair yelling at your followers.
PHP's boolean operators return booleans instead of values :(.
It may not invalidate, but it puts them into perspective. Most of his rant seems to be about how in Khan's quick summary of WW2, the UHmericans aren't portrayed as the morally superior righteous warriors / soldiers that defeated the evil Hitler and stopped his wrongdoings. And the Bolsheviks shouldn't have been mentioned without the required nuances that would teach present-day students that communism is evil. Or maybe I'm just speculating, but that's how it got to me.
As an iOS user, I understand that Android's always been cloud-centric, but I'm curious (and a bit skeptical) if this has really entailed everything that Apple just unveiled:

Does Android automatically sync photos (both with the cloud and the PC)?

Does stock Android do a full backup (including application data) to the cloud? When I synced my iPhone 4 to iTunes for the first time, I instantly got voice notes, text files and PDF's I've had since my first iPhone. I've always wondered if an Android user picking up a new phone could expect the equivalent.

Is the Google Docs experience (ie Google's answer to the "document syncing" problem) better on Android than it is on iOS devices? I've wanted to use Google Docs exclusively for years, but editing is practically unusable on an iPhone. I'm shocked at how slow they've moved to make documents mobile.
Well, there are a couple different possibilities here. One would be for him to buy things for himself--this would shift consumption to luxury goods. Another would be to give them to his workers, which shifts consumption to everyday essentials (and, increasingly, middle class goods).

What he's done is shift money toward capital investment, which shifts consumption C from the present to (1+x)C consumption sometime in the future. I'm not sure that's a bad thing--it's all about the time discount rate you're using in evaluating the value of economic decisions.

Whose consumption is also relevant here, but a century from now the benefits of his forsaking consumption will be fairly diffused.
Exactly. I recommend reading Resonate by Nancy Duarte (from the company that did Al Gore's slides).
Why would my email and contacts be locked into iCloud? Don't the majority of users already have an email address (With Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail, in that order) that is already "cloud enabled". Why incentive is there to switch to a .me email address, which has less reach?
Yandex.Factory is not a fund, actually. It is investment program.
Smoking in China isn't a consequence of "not being able to afford the time to take care of your health." Admittedly that's no reason not to exercise.

There are plenty of honorable things about this guy. Why pick out the one negative thing?
Ask HN: Marketing for hacks that doesn't suck?
I have two concerns here:

1) I have been collecting screenshots of clever stunts and UX details in web apps and wanted to make it available for everyone: Here goes the site:

URI: http://blog.thegodfounder.com

Do you have any feedback, improvements, suggestions?

2) What are some of the methods you use or find interesting to get a project out there?

Edit: could an admin move this to ask for me?
The guy's only 67 and actively involved in growing new businesses and philanthropy. Perhaps he sees personal extravagance as inefficient/no value and loves having as much financial leverage as possible to get done what he wants to get done.
Khan's physics videos are no better. Excerpts below from my series taking a critical view of Khan Academy: http://bit.ly/khancritic ...

Ironically, Khan's TED talk is in stark contrast to two previous TED talks:

* Dan Meyer - Math Curriculum Makeover http://bit.ly/DanMeyerTED
* Sir Ken Robinson - Do Schools Kill Creativity? http://bit.ly/SirKenTED

According to Dan, today’s math curriculum is teaching students to expect (and excel at) paint-by-numbers classwork, robbing kids of a skill more important than solving problems: formulating them. How does Khan Academy foster problem posing and creativity?

If your philosophy of education is sit-and-get, i.e., teaching is telling and learning is listening, then Khan Academy (and flipping) are more efficient than in-classroom lecturing.

But why lecture at all? TRUE progressive educators, TRUE education visionaries and revolutionaries don’t want to do these things better. We want to DO BETTER THINGS.

Rather than instructing students with Khan’s videos, teachers should be inspiring them to figure things out on their own and learn how to create their own knowledge by working together. For example, instead of relying on lectures and textbooks, Modeling Instruction in Physics emphasizes active student construction of conceptual and mathematical models in an interactive learning community. Students are engaged with simple scenarios to learn to model the physical world. In comparison to traditional instruction, Modeling is extremely effective — under expert modeling instruction high school students average more than two standard deviations higher on a standard instrument for assessing conceptual understanding of physics.

Watch one Modeling class in action: http://bit.ly/ModelingPhysics . In the clip, the teacher says, “I don’t lecture at all. Instead, I create experiences for the students either in the lab or puzzles and problems for them to solve and it’s up to them to try to figure that out.” I’ve often wondered why this type of teaching hasn’t gotten more attention in the media. Maybe because the teacher is using simple things like whiteboards and bowling balls rather than shiny iPads and SmartBoards?

While Khan argues that his videos now eliminate "one-size-fits-all" education, his videos are exactly that. I tried finding Khan Academy videos for my students to use as references for studying, or to use as a tutorial when there’s a substitute teacher, but the physics ones aren't very good. They don’t use a lot of the multiple representations that are so fundamental to learning. Concept development is minimal, and he unknowingly plays into student misconceptions. His videos do not align with proper Physics Education Research. Teachers improve via reading up on pedagogy and getting feedback from mentors & students. Where is Sal's feedback? Where's the pedagogy?

The research that Khan chooses to ignore is summarized in this one book, now available as a free PDF: "How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom" http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10126
As a Ruby developer, it is important for me to have options on deployment and also support for using large C/C++ libraries (e.g., Redland RDF) or large Java libraries (e.g., machine learning, Sesame RDF, etc., etc.)

Great to have MRI C, Rubinius, and JRuby.
I believe it's still a very good way to get students to actually read a book. In 15 minutes, Khan does a great job, and the author of the article... well, he fails to get that.

The idea behind it is getting children interested in history enough that they would pick up a book. It's not, as I understand it, the only account of history they're expected to have. And to think otherwise is to think stupid.
> how come not all great programmers are great writers?

I imagine most programmers are great writers from a structural point of view. The rest is emotion. Programmers know how to appeal to machines, but often are not able to connect with people in the same way; something that extends beyond writing, if stereotypes are any indication.
It crossed $31 earlier today.
Semantinet Graphs Almost All Human Knowledge, Provides API
it's not a language at all. it's a library for writing server-side code in javascript. it's event driven, like python's twisted. in fact, it's hard (if you assume people are rational [edit: and have perfect access to information]) to see why people find nodejs so cool, yet have been ignoring twisted for years.
Tracking Down Twitter's Best Rumor Spreaders
Our knowledge of the past is like memory - we don't actually remember what it was like when we were 3 - we remember remembering what it was like when we were 3.

It's filtered through secondary sources that are never completely reliable, and there is information lost because people die without telling anyone what they saw or did, or there's confusion, or, in war, the winner's perspective is presented as the only facts.

In the US, the obvious example is the history of the west, and the natives of North America. It was once viewed as the bringing of civilization to savages for their own good. Now its viewed as genocide. Because its being viewed from a different perspective.
Can anyone explain how this differs at all from resets? The only difference I see on the page is:

> Preserves useful defaults

and I don't know what a "user default" is.
So this is actually an Android/phone issue, not really your mistake.
The thing the developers will all have to learn in time, is that absolutely nothing is granted with Android. Until now, this usually only meant hardware features, since Google (supposedly) verifies it's OS on all phone models before granting them access to GApps (market, gmail, maps, etc...).
This is because there was one IPv6 address in the DNS reply. Search for "happy eyeballs" for the overall description of why. In short - If your IPv6 went dead and you'd have more than one IPv6 addr in the reply, you'd get bored until you reach the IPv4 addresses.
Meh, to me that's just band-aiding the problem. The core issue here is that they anticipate getting the log from each user approximately once every day or two (that's on average when people plug in their phones to charge). I would just keep track of the timestamp of the previous log upload, and simply ignore the Intent if it's within a certain threshold (say, less than 12 hours ago).
Video of Steve Jobs' presentation to the Cupertino City Council
Have a look at knime.

http://www.knime.org/
Chrome 12 Gets Malware Warnings
when a user has a different default font and/or size selected in their browser?
Yes and no, I've spent the last two weeks building and launching a node.js project and it's really really fast.

Blazingly so.

I've got a PHP project at http://fstr.net and its pageloads take about 4 to 5 seconds under normal load. With my other project pageloads are less than a second most of the time (though there seems to be some variability when dealing with the first connection).

Both projects do essentially the same thing (query database, present list). It's really shocking just how much faster node.js is.

Another nice aspect of NODE with a MongoDB solution is that I can scale it very easily. On AWS I can send all traffic into a load balancer, then as the server's load increases I can just fire up additional (CLONE) instances and add them to the load balancer.

A reserved Amazon micro instance costs ~$5 per month or a 'high CPU' instance comes in at $17. Scaling node is really as easy as turning on another machine (or running multiple instances of the application on a machine with multiple cores).
... and the kids appreciate that we now actually pay their allowances EVERY WEEK instead of every month and a half...
"""And what happens once all our data is in that iCloud, is there any easy way to get it back out? Nope. It’s in there forever and we are captive customers — trapped more completely than Microsoft ever imagined."""

I don't agree with this: Google certainly makes it really easy to get data out of Google Docs, GMail, etc. Isn't it reasonable to also expect Apple to provide local backup facilities?
That alone doesn't tell us anything though.

Public transportation tends to be much cheaper for riders than private transportation is for drivers. A year-long ticket for Munich is around $1000. At current prices, that won't even buy you 10k miles worth of gas in a compact car, to say nothing of the price of the car itself, insurance and repairs.

I say that to say this, if people have more money in their pocket, they will tend to spend more money, so the difference could easily be made up in sales tax on all the newly-freed-up disposable income.
nicely done. always enjoyed playing with Wordle.
> we will all be able to read programs when they can be written in English and not in code.

Anyone thinking along those lines needs to read Dijkstra: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EW... (and maybe tack this on too: http://www.hxa.name/notes/note-hxa7241-20101218T2158Z.html ).
It's not particularly difficult to find local milk share groups.
Questioning your own behavior can lead to positive changes in your behavior. Questioning the behavior of somebody else who chose to buy an SUV can lead to angry ranting and even less safe driving.
How do you write NFC tags using a Nexus S?
I have a Gingerbread 2.3.4 powered Nexus S and I recently got some writable NFC tags. So far I can read them as blank tags, but I couldn't find a way to write data to them.
All my research has lead me to this article: [Writing tags with Nexus S](http://gibraltarsf.com/blog/?p=13) from January (_before 2.3.4 release_).

Has anyone been successful in writing NFC tags with their Nexus S? Any pointers?
I have an oven that's about four feet wide that I hardly ever use for anything larger than a 12 inch cake.

And I have more than one bathroom even though it's really rare that more than one person has to use the bathroom at the same time.

I have a mountain bike that I only occasionally take up a mountain.

My car can brake in a ridiculously short distance, even though I've only used that feature to save my life once.

I wear a seatbelt all the time, even though I've never been in an accident where it would have made a difference.

Edge cases matter. A lot. The Smart car covers the "every possible travel condition that a college student can think of" case very well, but it's not versatile enough for most people.
> and I don't know what a "user default" is.

https://github.com/necolas/normalize.css/blob/master/normali...

There's nothing earth shattering, but some things have non-zero margins, sub/sup have offsets, etc. CSS resets basically strip all default formatting, while this strips most of it.
Not user defaults, useful defaults.

Some css resets strip out bullet styles for lists, or focus styles on selected text boxes. I assume this keeps things like that intact instead of nuking everything.
This appears to normalize everything (make the default css consistent across all browsers) instead of removing the defaults altogether.
I like the author's premise. It's hard to find good writing that hasn't been rewritten.. a lot. That seems true to me about code as well. Perhaps we're seeing a lot of "rough draft" code being pushed to production. Novels never get published like that (hopefully!).
I'm Oliver Roup, the CEO of VigLink and the guy interviewed in the article.

The interstate commerce clause of the constitution and subsequent case law establishes that one state may not tax the businesses of another unless it has a physical presence ("a nexus") in it's state.

California and a number of other states are attempting to redefine nexus more broadly in an attempt to be able to force eg Amazon to collect sales tax from it's residents. Amazon has established that they would rather stop doing business with CA affiliates than (effectively) raise prices.

This should matter to you because affiliates are just the tip of the iceberg. One of the California proposals already contemplates that having subsidiaries, servers or _vendors_ in CA would establish a nexus. So let's say you're the entrepreneurs behind CloudKick (to use an already exited example from Y Combinator.) If these proposals had been law when they were looking for customers, they would have found many customers concerned that using CloudKick would obligate them to collect sales tax from their customers in California. Collecting the taxes would of course only be part of the issue - computing when and how much to collect in accordance with the latest version of the law in every state would be a significant burden.

The states of course are perfectly entitled to seek new revenue, especially in times of economic distress. However we believe lawmakers should stick to strategies that work. Historically these laws have resulted in _reduced_ tax revenue and job flight. (the merchants cut ties with affiliates in those states and the affiliates either move or cease operation.) They also make investment in these kinds of business models more challenging. For a state as dependent as California on innovation, we think this is just bad public policy. (Also the Performance Marketing Association has filed suit against the state of Illinois arguing that it's affiliate tax law is unconstitutional.) The correct place for this to be taken up is at the federal level since the federal government actually does have the right to impose taxes on interstate commerce. Senator Durbin of Illinois has announced he intends to introduce legislation to address this federally in the fall.

If you're still reading and you're motivated to do something, check out http://25000businessesatrisk.com/ for California or http://performancemarketingassociation.com/nexus-tax for the rest of the country.

Oliver Roup
Founder / CEO, VigLink
Because investing the time to create a secure, usable voting system takes time, energy, and financial resources.

Few people are willing to do that much work for no financial reward.
Why? Write your CSS. Test it in browsers. If something doesn't look right, fix it. Resets are bloat.
History is not comprised of a set of value-neutral facts. History is a narrative constructed out of fact and interpretations, and every history has a viewpoint.

Without question, one changes history by deciding to view it differently. If it didn't work that way, we'd only need one history book and we'd be done.
Perhaps.

And yet few historically literate people understand the intimate workings of the alliance system prior to WW1[1] - but it is a vital piece of background information that explains a lot about what happened.

In my view, "the great powers had alliances and went to war to support one another" sums it up reasonably well, despite ignoring viral things like the 1839 Treaty of London[2], etc.

For someone studying post-Vietnam US history (say), I think the Kahn summary might be a reasonable background. Probably not sufficient in itself, but reasonable.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_I#Web_of_al...
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_London,_1839
Yeah, I was just thinking that C# sounds a lot like his ideal language. It kind of feels like he's one of those people who thinks that C# == java. It doesn't hit all his points, but it hits a few.
IANAL, but I would suspect that the construction company has a mediocre/inexperienced lawyer. Maybe this could be covered by check forgery statutes or something that works by analogy. Back in the last century a friend of mine won a case in CA where he was actually negligent himself. He was remoddeling his house and set up an account that the contractor could draw on. The contractor took the money and ran. My friend sued the bank for negligence. He won because the contractor had pulled the same scam before at the same bank.

Maybe this guy sued in the wrong court. US District court vs Maine state court.
It's not about "you understand" xor "you don't understand". It's about level of detail.

The idea of 'overview' I have in mind is similar to how mipmapping and LOD works in video games/computer graphics.
I agree, the STL is a great resource and I miss it in other languages. However, the long type declarations clutter up code. Type inference would make STL code much, much, much, much, much easier to read. Mentioning a container's type once improves readability. It is nice to know that you're dealing with a vector<map<string, set<int> > > if someone has written some crazy code that uses one. Having to repeat the type over and over again, for example, needing to declare that your iterator variable is of type vector<map<string, set<int> > >::const_iterator, makes STL code unnecessarily painful to write and to read. The STL's consistency and feature set certainly makes other language's collection libraries look amateurish by comparison, but the lack of type inference in C++ makes the STL a mixed blessing.
Have you never heard the phrase "History is written by the victors"?

The problem is trying to determine what is objective fact - you often end up relying on witness statements, some of which will be lies or misremembered. And then you have to decide which facts are "most important", which events were the prime causes of a second event.

Unfortunately there is an unquestionably large amount of perspective and subjectiveness in history.
Perhaps, there is a correllation between good writing and good coding. If so, it might be a clue for hiring.
The author's complaint seems to be that the Khan Academy's history lectures give an overly simplified view of history and that this, along with their availability, will make them more attractive to students who, the author fears, will watch Khan Academy videos in lieu of studying the topics in depth. This, he fears, will lead to a cultural forgetfulness of what the author considers to be the important moral lessons of WWII.

It's an important objection. There is a real tendency towards laziness among human begins and an easy availability of a simplified history could discourage people from deeper study. A simplified history from only one viewpoint is even worse. But I think he's pointing the finger in the wrong direction. Wikipedia is already a far greater threat on that matter and their are plenty of simplified versions of history available, some even taught in schools. Sal is only example of this (and possibly a product as the author alludes.) The proper solution would be more, and more in depth videos from other perspectives. I know some people who might be willing to do just that...
In 15 minutes, Khan does a great job

A great job of what, exactly?
Peer To Patent: opens the patent examination process to public participation
> You will naturally learn your countries history albeit not to the point where you can become a history professor

How? Through video game blockbusters like Call of Duty or summer movie hits like Saving Private Ryan?