skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a parent of two who does NOT plan on putting his kids in public school because I think they won't be served well there (plan on "home schooling"). My 5yo uses Khan Academy and it seems to be great. Finally, I basically hate most aspects of public school.

That said, I get sick of everyone piling on public school whenever something like this comes up. Public school is set to the following task: "take everyone, everywhere, all across the country, and bring them to the same level of proficiency across the board, with tightly limited funding and regardless of outside factors." Someone comes along and finds a tool that works on a teeny tiny cohort then climbs on their pedestal and declares their system better than public schools.

Personally, I think public schools are being set to an (almost?) impossible task. What the reviewer said in that article about "slow them down please" is obviously abhorrent, but the "They have a monopoly! They're monopolists!" chatter is silly, in my opinion. First of all they don't have a monopoly (for those who can afford it: private charter homeschooling etc.). Secondly, they are just trying to do their best to meet their goals with what they have. It's selfish, yes, but having students at more or less the same level of competency makes it easier for them to do the task to which they've been set.

When I was in school, the teacher would often say "Sequoia, that's a great question, but it's a bit advanced and I've got 30 other students here. I can't spend a lot of time answering advanced questions when half the class is struggling with basic concepts." That was annoying and I'm not going to send my kids to public school in part because of it, but I didn't rail against the teacher for being a selfish monopolist. S/he was just doing his/her best given the circumstances and requirements: often times public schools are doing the same.

EDIT: an article that informs my thinking here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-ch... Great article, whether you've seen Waiting for Superman (hit piece "documentary" about why public schools suck and charter schools are the answer) or not.
You sure it's not the times that is loosing it's luster? Still embarrassing for Groupon
Norway is a very secular society. While majority of people do belong to the state church, they do not practice religion regurlarly. In 2005 poll only 32% said that they believe in existence of God.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Norway
Datasheets.com: A Resource for Engineers & Procurement
Maybe I'm just not understanding your comment fully, but how does this apply to his/her situation?

People need money to live (ESPECIALLY after college), which usually entails getting a job, and an internship can be a good way to get your foot in the door (it's how I did it). It's common knowledge that it can be at least a year before a startup reaches ramen-profitable. There are multiple companies that the founders were doing other work while hashing out the idea for the startup.

So, again, how does your comment apply?
Ultimate hack: LulzSec duped British authorities into arresting innocent man
McDonald's WiFi Guide with updates for Mac OS X Lion and Windows 7
Looks like a neat idea, thanks for pointing it out!
SEnuke – Great Addition To Your SEO Campaign
I think the big difference here is that we get the potential to put multiple disks on a single usb device. From the technicians perspective I'd like to rid myself of the big stack of cd's i have that i use to install windows, or run diagnostics, or any of those things. I remember thinking to myself last year, man if only someone made this. And low and behold here it is. I may have already talked my boss, (he's the owner, I'm the Technician Manager.) Into pledging for 5 32 GB models. (Something like 1,100 dollars ish.)
Anecdotally CalTRain ridership picks up at around $4.25/gal. more or less. So, it's possible they are on to something. Next car I get, I would like to get a hybrid --to insure [hedge] against future gas price increases, rather than a way to save now.
Oracle Announces Availability of Java SE 7
JRuby 1.6.3 Released
The iClone
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Thank you.
ok, I didn't think a payment processor would be using a cross domain xmlhttprequest, but I don't know a lot about it.
I don't understand why you think the Ruby code has better SNR. The python code is two lines shorter. In python, you have to type the (), but that's not really "noise". I do hat the : at the end of python control statements. I always forget them, and it seems like the parser could do it's job just as well without them.
The guy I was replying to said:

> Basically, women just aren't interested. I'm not sure it's an obstacle.

I was pointing out that even if they are interested in science or computers, the deck is stacked against them from the time they are born.
That was quite a rabbit hole, but a good read nonetheless.

I was pretty surprised at all the criticisms that Pump received yesterday (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2810373). The general response was defensive and critical just because it was trying to replace WSGI. However, it would seem that WSGI isn't perfect for all applications and indeed there is a place for Pump. My question is: how can we resume encouraging people to contribute? Quite honestly, if I had posted that thread and received the response it got, I would be utterly discouraged from contributing to the community in the future.
To all the people doubting the use of such a device, many OSs don't currently work "out of the box" with unetbootn and other such tools.

I've personally had problems with RHEL and Windows XP, and I can guarantee there are others.

With RHEL, you had to copy the rpm repo on the CD to another storage medium and manually set up the repo. This is because the default repo is set up to detect an optical drive, mount it, and use it as a repo. That's a pain.

Windows XP has problems with continuity between the restarts involved in the install process.

Emulating an optical drive would fix those problems and allow any ISO to run unmodified.

A final benefit is the multi-ISO support on one drive.
So how does the website get my browser to run a python script?

According to the article, this was supposed to work for normal users, not people hacking the server.
Please don't link to Murdoch's stuff. Thanks.
> their poor rendering engine

That's an rather misleading and ignorant thing to say.
Meet 3 Ratings Agencies That Have Already Downgraded the U.S.
It would probably come off of C++ and Perl. It did a pretty efficient job at replacing perl on the web.
Violence will most certainly not solve the issue and seems ironically to be a typical male response.

Where these men were truly snickering at the fact women were speaking? Correlation does not always mean causation.

I don't know what would be snicker-worthy of women speaking. I can think of several reasons why attendees might snicker at a speaker regardless of their sex.
I can't respect any chart that describes Java as an evolution and improvement of Objective-C.
Everything -> not bundled -> PHP
Perl -> too weird -> PHP

It's hard to explain to a novice that in Perl 4/5, $x[42] dereferences @x, not $x (which are completely separate, except when they're not, due to *x). And PHP has a much more typical object system. I think we agree that most all of PHP's distinctive and non-mainstream design decisions have been bad ones, though.
That's not perverse, it's a great idea. Ornithologists rely on crowdsourcing to conduct bird population surveys and track changes in bird populations from year to year. Let the volunteer surveyors sign up for twitter feeds for nearby detection of less common birds to go and confirm.
It's not that "women just don't like tech, so what?"

It's more likely that they learn not to like it from an early age due to sexist gender stereotyping.

http://www.7wonderlicious.com/2/post/2010/12/girls-stem-and-...

One of the most disgusting things I read when this conversation comes up are the remarks and arguments from the apologists. Their common thread is that "we shouldn't be offended." It's a completely asinine position to take and any reason they offer for why is equally laughable. The problem is that as these ideas persist, they reinforce gender stereotypes and contribute to the aforementioned problem of young girls having to choose between being stereotypical girls (and thus accepting all the baggage that entails) or being smart (and accepting all the baggage that entails).

Such a choice is a hard one to make. That it persists is one of the great injustices of the world that women suffer. And the great tradgedy is that ignorant male assholes who want to avoid being pegged as a sexist ignoramus will argue blindly that women are equal, that it's okay to objectify them, that everyone should relax, that maybe women just don't like tech otherwise there would be more of them in it.

Wake up.
Oh nice, I thought F/J got pushed into 8. Glad to see I was wrong.
Wow. I've been down-voted for asking a question.

EDIT: Please, keep going if you really feel that vindictive.
Bill Gates and billion dollar lessons
This is one of the few things that scares the hell out of me. On this path, we are all just one wrong piece of content/accusation away from persecution.

Call me a dreamer but what other solution is there than a completely de-centralized network ala P2P style. No backbones, no root DNS, no IP address authority. Just pure unadulterated internetworked chaos. There's got to be a way.
oh man, can't wait to use closures in my Java code
I don't think this is what you meant by signing, but it seems the easy fix for this is to have the merchant server post the transaction details to the processor, get a purchase order number, and redirect the customer to that. Why do processors rely on the customer to provide the details?
Hi there...experienced ruby guy here who is doing python work at the moment. The nice thing I find about python, even in its verbosity relative to ruby, is that I always for the most part know what it's doing. With ruby, the impulse to overload operators and create dsls mean that I have to learn a new language (potentially) with every new project or library I choose to use. It's not immediately clear what code is really doing. With python, it usually is. Just my (quick) two cents.
Has there been a well defined study, interviews of women in the industry as to what do they want? What do they think and go through and what would they like changed?
For clojure no, but jRuby and several similar languages are getting a huge boost.
Keep in mind this is JDK 7 (the JVM, libraries, tools), it's not only a Java The Language update.
College level state schools also have many different levels of classes. I think there are other differences at work.
That makes sense. It was worth the negative karma to solve the mystery. :)
It is monopolistic in the sense that you have to pay for it whether you use it or not. Private schools may only be attended by those who can afford to pay twice and even then, the establishment caste gets at least a full cut.

If I were to set the policy, I'd subsidize students rather than teachers and administrators, etc. I.e., demonstrate learning and we'll pay you $XX,XXX to cover your costs whether tutors or books or online courses or brick and mortar schools.
Without attribution of who made the original statement and the context, this is completely meaningless. The Wired article is good, but the Cato article is not HN worthy at all. Purely political propaganda.
>That said, the more appropriate comparison is OKC bombing, since both incidents involved domestic terrorism.

I'm not sure it is the most appropriate comparison.

As pointed out in comments above:

* The percentage of people killed in the Norway attacks was larger than the percentage killed in 9/11 (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2816569)

* The homicide rate in Norway is astronomically low; these attacks accounted for two years worth of homicides (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2816911)

Arguably, our post-9/11 actions occurred as a response to 9/11. Thus, if we are discussing Norway's response, we should compare to a terrorist attack on the same relative scale; and, as above, it looks like 9/11 may be a good benchmark after all.
May not be exactly what you say you want, but it's gotta be pretty close:

http://www.phonegap.com/
Interesting! The single page view is at http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=278114,00.asp?h...
Why aren't we just as concerned
that there are far fewer male hairdressers than female?

CS jobs are held in higher esteem in society than hair dressing jobs. They pay more and require more experience.
Why aren't we just as concerned that there are far fewer male hairdressers than female

CS jobs are held in higher esteem than hair dressing jobs. They pay more and require more experience.
I didn't actually make a point about policy. I was just defending teachers.

He's saying that because of the incentives, most teachers will drift into becoming lazy SOBs who don't fundamentally care about education and will only work to the extent that they're whipped into doing it.

I'm saying that there's something else going on, in most cases. Professional pride, believing in education.
You seem to be picturing "ACME Education" creating schools in the model of factories under some scary privatization scheme.

In fact, the current "public" model of centralized control, standardized curriculum, and cookie-cutter learning objectives is based on an antiquated understanding of human development, social systems, and motivation. In fact, by forcing a child to endure hours of boredom and conformity it prepares its inmates for a life of work in a factory.

If market forces were allowed to act on K-12 education we'd see something quite unpredictable but very much unlike what you seem to be imagining... unless, that is, large companies obtained a monopoly on education in the same way that public schools have thusfar.

Without a monopoly, we'd see innovations like Khan Academy all the time (let's face it, what Khan created is trivial and obvious and it's only remarkable b/c most teachers and curricula are so utterly bad).

You are also overlooking the fact that humans have a natural hunger for knowledge, and any notion that there is a lack of demand for top quality k-12 education is an artifact of our current corrupt system.
I'm guessing a lot of people haven't worked in other industries. Like on a mfg floor, or at a lumber mill, or on a fishing boat. Or as part of a custodial staff.

The sexist creep ratio in the SW industry is lower than most. The SW Industry appears much more sensitive to the issue, however.
Wow... incentives for making the doctors life easier? What a deal. Just what the medical industry needs... more breaks.
Javascript was not created to "fix Java's 'scary syntax'"!! Java applets were self-contained features embedded in a webpage whereas javascript– argh! Why are we having this discussion!? :p
A million times yes, there needs to be more awareness of how ridiculous corn ethanol is.

Corn ethanol is more an indirect way of converting coal to something your car can run on. There are many other more efficient plant sources that do not require large doses of fertilizer and herbicides, usually drawn from coal energy.
Ask HN: Startup house with spare rooms? Palo Alto/Mountain View
Hello, I am this guy: http://www.facebook.com/bahadir.balban
and this is my startup: http://b-labs.com. In essence, we do mobile virtualization - we developed a hypervisor for mobile devices.

I am moving to Mountain View/Palo Alto area next week, and would like to live in a house shared with other founders/hackers.

If you have a suitable place, please contact me at bbalban@b-labs.com

Thank you! Bahadir
>Without the tax holiday, the companies would have to pay a hefty tax to use the money in the U.S. to invest in hiring or to pay shareholder dividends and stock buybacks.

At the end of the day, the big problem here is that it's beneficial for these companies to leave their money outside the US. That money doesn't get spent inside the US and therefor ultimately doesn't help our economy.

Sadly, congress will probably enact some draconian measure that will cause even more harm then good to "solve" this problem. To them the problem is lost tax revenue, when the real problem is lost domestic prosperity.

Change the law to tax their oversea's profit like states tax income. For example, let's say MA is 5%, CT is 6% and you earn salary in MA, but live in CT then you essentially pay MA 5% and CT 1%.
IntelliJ IDEA strongly suggests to turn those Strings into constants. And then to turn those constants into an Enum. Oh wait, we could also switch() on Enum values!

I'm sure this is useful in some cases though :-)
First, if Apple is suing Samsung over their alleged knockoffs, then they are good knockoffs, not bad ones. Apple loves bad knockoffs. Bad knockoffs enhance the reputation of their products by emphasizing how special and hard to copy they really are. Why would they even dream of shutting down the kind wonderful advertising that money can't buy?

Second, of course Apple is resource-constrained. Every company is resource-constrained, but the resources they are constrained by are not always the same.

In Apple's case, the resource that I suspect is most constrained is the time and attention of their top, strategic managers. That's why I find the Samsung lawsuit so telling. Unlike most of Apple's other lawsuits (e.g. HTC, Motorola), the Samsung lawsuit / situation drains a lot of that top-level time and attention. What are the drains?

We can start with the huge supplier relationship. What do you keep sourcing from Samsung? What do you transition? What are your contingency plans if Samsung pulls together a piece of technology you want (e.g. an iPad-size "Retina Display") before the supplier you are transitioning to does? And think of all of the negotiations, planning and so on that go on around this. These are all particularly important because one of Apple's key advantages over its competitors is how it manages and captures key parts of its supply chain.

Next, Samsung is a large, diverse technology company with a robust, complex patent portfolio of its own. You can staff out the analysis of the countersuits, but deciding what to do based on that analysis is a different kettle of fish. If there are problematic patents, how hard are they to work around technically and operationally? What sorts of unexpected legal developments affect not just the legal strategy but Apple's technical and/or business strategies as well (and what do you do about them)? What about depositions and testimony (see Larry Page and Oracle)? And by the way, Apple and Samsung don't just have a simple US legal battle going on, they are lawsuits going in something like 10 countries on 3 continents. The sheer number of moving parts in this mess is a problem by itself.

The more I look at the Samsung lawsuit, the more I see Apple spending a large chunk of their most constrained resource on it. I've drawn my own conclusions about what that means.
I do some of my shopping in the corner store, and some in the nearby business cluster that has, among others, 4 supermarkets. I'd guess real estate, loyalty programs and product offerings outweigh proximity, in the case of foodstuffs.
That's not the problem it's trying to solve. AFAICT, if you can't boot from USB, you're still out of luck.
Does anyone know if this this an actual feature implemented in Heroku or is it an open vulnerability? I'm not finding any documentation on this command.
Apple is still the gatekeeper in Lion: there are a ton of hooks that auto-install Apple Java via Software Update when it feels you need Java, like running into an applet or invoking the java command line binary.

In the future, they plan on placing Oracle in that role, I guess, but it hasn't happened yet. All Lion does is change it from shipped with the OS to not.
There's a know issue with kde network applet and it's been known for some time, kde team is working on fixing it. Meanwhile use gnome-network-manager instead -- remove applet, install gnome-network-manager though apt, then create a symlink to it rhough ~/.kde/Autostart
Open source mobile application for mumbai local train
Have you not noticed that the "enhanced" version doesn't have an arrow between the two? You're still arguing about PG's original ...

<grin>
> The community splintered, the language and platform really lost any ability to maintain momentum.

This is the mindset I've never understood.

Do you stop using a hammer to bang in nails because the hammer "community" has splintered, or the development of hammers has stagnated? No, you still use it to fulfill a job it solves.
Whoo-hoo! Time for the Perl port.
> a program to take the most promising research projects in American university laboratories and turn them into startups

I don't think any additional incentives are needed for this.
Furthermore: I think there's enough variance among private schools, and among public schools, that we still can't even draw generalizations about "public schools" and "private schools" as homogenous sets. It alwyas irks me to see education-policy discussions turn into political debates about the merits of public vs. private sectors.
Why is saying you can disable it doesn't count?

OSX comes with Spotlight, but first thing I do is install Quicksilver. I don't expect someone to ship an OSX-light without Spotlight.

(I use KDE with all those things disabled on my desktop, OSX on my MBP.)
Smart way to get it picked up. Use an app and get paid what some people earn in a year? Amazing strategy.
Nintendo Just Devalued 3D
I think it feels normal. A lot of people have a problem with indecisiveness when it comes to deciding where to eat and a large reason for this attribute is money. Since Munch On Me provides not only deals to awesome restaurants in your local city but also deals for each restaurants' most popular dishes, you'll discover new eateries and you won't need to worry about deciding between all the delicious menu entrees.
I wonder why the initial response was "They won’t reimburse her for damages"?

Does this mean that as soon as Brian & co are not involved in day to day operation the service AirBnB offers will deteriorate?
No. This is useful for stupid OS-es that don't like being on a USB stick.
Spotify Sued For Patent Infringement Just Weeks After Entering US Market
Visiting Hanoï Towers with Scala and Akka
Hi-Tec-C Pen Metal Case Kickstar campaign goes big
Um.

You can be taking freshman-level courses your senior year.

Or, if you are up to the challenging, junior level courses your freshmen year.
COBOL -> not funny -> INTERCAL
Except that this is _exactly_ what happens at public colleges as well. In fact, my public high school saw that I was fast at math and got me into college classes early, so it even occurs there to some degree.