skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Uh, it's not like "problem kids" are necessarily getting a good deal from the public system. Special ed kids are forced to learn "academic" style knowledge rather than the practical life skills they actually need... and behavior problem kids use way more resources than they deserve and harm all the other kids in the process.

Sadly, many kids in special ed programs and many behavior problem kids would not have problems in a different type of learning scenario... but the entrenched K-12 classroom, 30 students one teacher, hour long periods, boring books, exercises, silence, etc., is just a horrible fit for them.
"Let's honor Alan Turing with our code and with our conduct."
Who uses Opera and why?
Can we just start listing government costs debts, etc. on a per-capita basis? Aside from the fact that we can then compare differently sized governments, it just gives a better sense of scale. When you multiply by 300M just about all numbers are mindlessly big.
We're very aware of this kind of issue; don't worry. We're currently working on A) displaying information to let a user know what kind of format an answer requires (for the problem in question, we require a reduced fraction written as 'A/B') and B) providing more specific feedback than just 'wrong' or 'right' for cases like this when an answer can be mathematically correct but not accepted for the specific problem. Thanks for pointing this out and reminding us of its importance!
I think a lot of the reason drug discovery and development takes so long, and requires patents to maintain commercial viability, is the government/FDA imposed regulatory requirement. While the basic research isn't included, it's not really the kind of stuff a drug company copies from another drug company, either -- the more product-specific discovery and development happens over a shorter time window, then you get ~10 years of clinical trials. The biggest risk if there weren't IP protection would be someone copying you during the clinical trial phase -- before you can sell it, but after most of the risk is eliminated (and money has been spent).

If we think the FDA is overall worthwhile (I think some kind of testing is key, but it could be more done by insurers for efficacy with the FDA focusing on safety, but the current system isn't horrible), I'd be willing to allow patents in that specific case, to compensate for the regulation.

There is not anywhere near as much societal benefit to third-party audited testing of one click or business process, so trade secret remains possible for a lot longer (at least until the product is fielded), at which point first mover advantage and constant innovation should be at least partially effective in compensating the inventor.
Rather than requiring certain standards, the government would be more effective if it provided assessments of school quality to help consumers... but stayed out of the curriculum business.
Thanks for the links. Some ruby food for thought . . .

> x = nil || 5 #behaviorally equivalent to elvis?
> [nil,4,3].compact.map(&:to_s) #null-ignored scope
I was Google's 59th employee and first marketing director. Ask me anything.
Right, but you don't need an electric airplane to do that. With cars, electric is much more efficient for stop-and-go driving because regenerative braking becomes possible.
What you describe is a school in a low cost area with a 42% graduation rate that compensates its teachers just as well as the best high schools in America. Even with an average teacher salary of 85K, a cost of $23,000 per student seems high by a significant amount (an average of 85K for teachers usually comes in at under $20K student/year by a fair margin). Also towns with a median income in that range usually have far better graduation rates. I'd definitely be interested in learning more about that school, because those numbers seem far different than those I have experience with.
In my country, I made a replacement for cab payments with mobile payments. We had the cab payment people, and all the telcos on board. However, because of the telcos selling virtual goods, they were used to 30%-50%-70% or more of the transaction. Where as the cab people were getting 10% on the credit card payments. The telcos gave up massive real world markets in order to keep their tiny ring tone, and wall paper markets.

idiots
I'm curious if you would still think of token count as a useful metric if the Ruby version turns out to be twice the size of the equivalent code in J or K due to "redundant" "noise" tokens. Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
A few years back, Sergey and Larry were on NPR's Fresh Air. At one point in the interview, Terry Gross says "I tried searching for 'Google' by putting 'Google' into the search box and clicking I'm Feeling Lucky, but it didn't seem to do anything." Larry tries to explain what happened, but it seemed to go over Terry's head. At one point during the explanation I think Sergey mentioned recursion, and Terry asks "Recur-what?" To which Larry's reply was something like "Sergey is just geeking out, nevermind."

edit: maybe I'm misrembering the details a bit. From http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/17770.htm -

"Yah, it was a pretty interesting segment. Sergey talked about idempotence. :) The host (terry gross?) wondered why when you go to www.google.com and type in google and hit I'm Feeling Lucky, it went back to the main google page. Larry called it recursion. I could just imagine NPR listeners' heads shaking all across America. :)"
Flagged; this is a poor quality "article" and we already had this discussion yesterday.
Why Amazon Should Buy Hulu
Gadget2 open source cosmology simulation
To be honest, I have a hard time believing that Apple doesn't have an internal protocol spec for FaceTime and created the protocol willy nilly. Which makes me question how hard it could possibly be to submit an open draft to a standards body. Changing your mind is usually okay, but when you push being open as a big feature and then don't pursue it, people can't help but feel baited and switched.
I think most people on HN could have completed high school academics by age 12 or 13 with sufficient discipline and focus. This is not all that remarkable intellectually, but it's rare that a child that age has the will (or opportunity) to make it happen.
I think there will always need to be some kind of escape hatch at the top that connects you to a real person. The complete lack of such with Google's services is vexing.
What would be cool is if you guys integrated Mathematica into Khan Academy. There is that new document format they introduced. For math it would be super useful to have the ability to really play with formulas directly in Khan Academy.
Nosh.me 404 page
Tweet late, email early, and don’t forget about Saturday
I have heard that drug companies actually lobby for the government to make drug discovery that expensive, as it keeps competitors at bay. Might just be a rumor, but still...
Could Clang displace GCC generally? Part II: Performance of PostgreSQL binaries
Dont’t Use TempFile in RSpec Specs
What I heard on the Google/Honeycomb was that they released it earlier than intended. Part of it was the Xoom driving it, some was to compete with iPads, but it wasn't so much of a planned release. Google actually requires you to sign a license agreement if you want to release a 3.0 device, from which I've heard, requires for you to not change your hardware for X years. The next release, 3.1 Ice Cream Sandwich, is the planned release and will be open source.
Wow, now there's a genuinely interesting idea I haven't heard before. It would prevent against patent trolls biding their time until someone profitably introduced something.

It's kind of a "put your money where your mouth is" type solution, which actually helps the little guy, too. I like it!

It doesn't help against granting stupid patents in the first place (e.g. Amazon's one click checkout), but limits their impact, I suppose.
> This space is still being shaken out in terms of players and alliances.

The big players are never going to open up their NFC tag format so 1) the only app that will let you use your phone to act as your bank or credit account will be their official, locked down app and 2) the only app that will verify that the tag read constitutes a valid credit card is the official app (sorry, Square - unless they manage to partner with the big banks).

I do not think there will be open standards for letting indie developers into the purchase chain for NFC.
I was wondering how he had 3 B.S.'s and was a drop out. And then I saw the next line. He dropped out of the Ph.D. program. At 19.

...

Hats off.
Google’s Sundar Pichai: Mobile Is Driving Web Apps In The Enterprise
In case you're a non-native speaker and that's not just a typo (since you did it twice), "loose" should be "lose".
- Labeled as a “genius” from IQ testing at 6 years old

"I think genetics play a small role. I’m naturally smart and I have the ability to absorb information pretty quickly just by reading. But that only counts for a small part." - Andrew Hsu

I guess all the brainpower in the world can't magically cure arrogance or grant humility. I don't doubt that he'll be very successful in something, but he's so comically out of touch with the reality of public education that I doubt he'll ever have an impact there.
Distributed Cluster File System – The Lustre Option
Hope I never have to maintain pseudo-mathematical code like the one you were (thankfully) asked to revert.
I am curious to how many users of Ubuntu One are on Windows?

Dropbox has always worked well for me and it's cross-platform so I can use it on my laptop also which runs Linux. I like to try Ubuntu One when start to hear more positive things about it and the Windows client comes out of beta.
Ask HN: What is your experience with AngelList?
If you have tried using AngelList to raise capital, I would like to know about your experience good or bad. How did you present your company? What did you do that worked out? What didn't? What was the outcome from the experience (avalanche of checks pouring in in the mail or the sound of crickets!)
YC has a surprisingly large number of b2b startups which require real knowledge of a problem domain, using either the web or just computers/Internet as tools to solve the problem.

A smaller number of real infrastructure companies, but there are some.

As far as I know, not many non-computer/electronics tech (life sciences, cleantech, etc.).
Maybe.

The people that are most likely to 'suffer' now are the ones that downloaded a ~thing~ and said 'I want to protest against Paypal'. Okay, maybe they know that this is a grey area or technically nor legal, but.. Still. They are not 'bringing down' anything on their own.

I hope you don't compare it to a mob either - it seems far too 'peaceful' for that.

Regarding 'shut down a business': What do you call it if all employees go on a strike? What if activists block a train route to stop nuclear wastage: Are they not harming the business (both by blocking the rails for other trains and by causing immense costs for everyone involved)?

While I'm not even sure I agree with the way this group tries to make a point, I DO think you should grab some colors that are not black or white..
This is a really underappreciated distinction: the huge difference in capital investment required to develop new inventions in different technical areas. It isn't taken into account in patent law - which sort of makes sense historically because it's a modern phenomenon in both extremes, for software to allow new inventions to be created with so little capital expenditure, and for new inventions in modern pharmaceutical research to require such vast capital expenditure. Such sensitive dependence on technical area for required investment to invent just didn't exist for most of the history of patents. It's a more interesting basis for critical analysis of software patents than simply saying that many software patents cover software that was obvious. That is only an argument that the Patent Office didn't do a good job at fulfilling its proper role under current patent law.
I'm someone who didn't grow up in the Northeast. I worked and lived in Boston for a short time in 2005. I found Boston people to be awesome. Just very friendly and sincere.

I did find them to be a little more no-nonsense or cynical than average. That might explain some of this.
Canada's Green Party leader wages war on wi-fi
You should really listen to last week's This American Life, available on podcast.

You'd be horrified to learn that not only are overbroad patents being awarded to people, but also regularly being awarded to multiple people/business entities. Multiple groups holding patents for the same things.
Maybe is really just a special case of Either, where it optimizes for the situation where the second return type is "failure." The type of Either is necessary because proper type theory requires a container type to wrap two types. This is immediately obvious if you try to write the type signature for any function which has a return arity of one.
How is 1983 for you?

http://www.zappa.com/whatsnew/news/FZ-Proposal/index.html
The cache-and-optimize-offline strategy that Google Page Speed is using is fraught with problems for dynamic sites. We tried this at first with some CloudFlare optimizations and it was a disaster. We rewrote the system from scratch to do on-the-fly optimization so it works even with dynamic sites. Here's a blog post about it from some time ago:

http://blog.cloudflare.com/an-all-new-and-improved-autominif...
This can be said of almost every single video implementation ever. Nearly every single one utilizes H.323, SIP, RTP, H.2XX codecs, NAT traversal (ICE, STUN, etc), SDP, ISDN, etc.

Each one of those protocols has many optional characteristics and properties that don't operate together unless they're planned or someone has created the super-stack which is fully compliant with every deviation from the specification. Even then, many of the specifications aren't truly specifications (SIP), and even some of the specifications have portions for customization (SIP) that don't require adherence to specification (recommendation).

This literally means nothing other than you could probably reverse engineer it and create something that would work with it. Until they change it.
I'm curious how much of it was "SFBA >>> Cambridge" vs. "we'd like to focus on a single place". There's a lot of benefit to being focused on a single location (not the least of which in personal life).
Infiltrate
As the article points out, software is also protected by copyright, and the article doesn't mention that it's covered by trade secret protection as well. The key difference is that patent protection applies to people who independently create something, whereas the other two protection methods don't.

So when I hear engineers say they like patents, first of all I assume that they've never worked for a company that's been sued for patent infringement (and that they optimistically assume it only happens to other people), but then I try to find out why they don't think copyright protection is enough. Someone still can't legally steal your code without patent protection, because it'll be protected by copyright and trade secret protections. Even if they didn't copy your code, but they looked at it prior to implementing their own version, that would violate trade secret protections.

In that respect, software is protected the same way that authors and musicians are protected. Authors invent characters, plots, worlds, objects, even words, but they don't get to patent them. And yet they're still protected from theft by copyright protections; you also can't just go and make a movie out of someone else's book without permission, though you can certainly make one that's similar. If it's good enough for authors and musicians, why isn't that good enough for software developers?

So to sum that up: software development involves a creative act that deserves protection, but that's different than saying that the creative act deserves patent protection, which legally enjoins anyone else from independently developing the same thing, and which gives person A the legal right to take away the work that person B has done completely independently (or at least take away any money they've made from it and prevent them from selling it in the future). To justify taking away someone's work like that, you have to either be sure that the work is a copy or derivation of the original, which is almost never the case with software patent lawsuits, or you have to argue that even though it's unfair to deprive people of their work like that, that the benefits of the overall system are positive to society. That's an easier argument to make if 1% of patent lawsuits deprive people of the product of their independent work, but it's a pretty hard argument to make when 99% of them do.
Incase the result gets changed, here is the search result page (Bing is #1)

http://i.imgscalr.com/kmPbJfLoV.png
Brain Metaphors
Interesting! If they can really get it ticking this time, it would be really interesting to see how a microkernel plays out in 'popular' use.

It's sort of funny how the major kernels are primarily monolithic (please correct me if I'm wrong wrt recent versions of Windows), but academic research says microkernels are better. Worse is better? First-mover advantage?
You are welcome. The second line is the essential notion of Maybe monad as a restriction of the Sequence monad (Some of x works like [x] and None works like [], using ruby's [] notation for lists).
Which is just as damning. "This software is so bad we won't show you the source code."
Explain to me machine, assembly and high level programming like I'm five
This is the difference between engineers and fashion conscious newbs. Some of us are trying to get stuff done, some are wanting to be cool.

Java is still an excellent tool for getting stuff done EVEN if it isn't cool anymore. Which of these is more important to you says a lot about where your head is at as a developer.
You can, but it was a huge pain in the ass the last time I tried. It looks like things have moved on since then: http://u3-tool.sourceforge.net/
I know that US regulations for cars have required ethanol-resistant materials for fuel for quite a long time, like several decades IIRC. Do you know if motorcycles are exempt from those regulations? If not, it seems the issue should be the same as with (ie no more serious than) old cars.
"The biggest risk if there weren't IP protection would be someone copying you during the clinical trial phase"

I think the biggest risk be other drug companies just waiting to see which drug was effective, and sold well, and then just copying the drugs that were effective/sold well.
You either lied or failed at your commitments, which are effectiveley the same thing when addressing the public, in a professional capacity, on behalf of a large corporation.
I suppose that's what $2.6 billion in annual operating losses buys you.
Oh sweet jesus finally collection literals. Why did it take more than 10 years to decide to bring in something so convenient? One reason I sometimes find Java repulsive is the fact that it takes so much redundant code to do something so simple. Why do they hold back on such syntactic sugar?
H.264 at 10mbit/s looks OK to me. I can wait for it to buffer — it's still faster than getting getting it by snail mail.
I don't think this is really right for Dr Chrono -- they're very iPad focused, although there is a lot of hidden complexity on the server side.

There are plenty of free EHRs and SaaS EHRs which are web based -- Practice Fusion (Salesforce) is the big SaaS one, and . They all kind of suck from a UI/UX perspective.

The big EHRs are really mostly proprietary (e.g. the Vista system used mainly at the Veterans' Administration, MC4/TC2/etc. used in the Army, whatever Kaiser uses...).

There's also a long tail of utter crapware out there -- systems with 0-100 installations built with foxbase, hypercard (!!!), ms access, filemaker pro, ... .

Dr Chrono has the best UI/UX of any of them (a lot of which is "free" because the iPad is so great compared to alternatives, but part of it is the quality of the Dr Chrono app, and the benefit of being a later entrant vs. a legacy app).
It is common knowledge, that Internet Explorer Versions to 6.0 to 8.0 are highly incompatible with modern web
standards. In order to make websites work properly on these browsers, web developers have to spend a lot of
unnecessary effort. This results in an extra financial strain on web projects, and has over the last decade cost
millions of man-hours to IT companies

So, dumb people keep IT employed.
Amusing, but it's kind of a truism. Changing your browser requires cognitive capacity. Those who change it the fastest have the highest cognitive capacity. Even without other explanations, that explains variations of version within a single browser, and to some extent Chrome and Firefox.

The really surprising thing for me was Opera. You can't explain that with mere willingness to update or try something new.
If the stuff is efficient enough as a source for gasoline replacement generation to be worth making gasoline from, subsidies shouldn't be necessary to ensure a sufficient stock. If it requires subsidies, that indicates a big problem with that plan. Unless the main goal is to reduce foreign oil independence. But I'm skeptical that that goal is remotely feasible with biofuels without making serious compromises in food-generating land. We should be spending this effort and funding on improving battery tech and creating business models that make electric vehicles appealing (swappable leased batteries, for example), as well as improving nuclear power tech to feed those vehicles.

EDIT: Algae seems like it could be promising, assuming we could find a way to mass farm it without disturbing ocean food cycles.
Thanks for the reply. If you can get my 2010 MacBook Pro to boot Windows and Linux using Isostick, you already have my money :) - lack of that functionality has caused me lot of pain.
It kind of scares me that altavista.com still exists. It scares me even more that hotbot.com still exists.
A proposal for a system to replace ordinary record merchandising
You don't multiply packet size by interval, you divide (or multiply by the inverse). And baud is measured in bits. But the numbers come out close anyway. 3678 / (2.5 * 3600) * 1500 * 8 = 4904.
"Checks and balances" isn't synonymous with "one branch of government isn't doing what I want, so a different branch of government should do it." It isn't SCOTUS's job to legislate from the bench, even if the outcome would be a net win for society. Checks and balances only comes into play here if Congress has passed a clearly unconstitutional law. In this situation that is very difficult because it has to be proven that software patents are hindering the progress of science. Perhaps that seems self evident to us techies, but a lawyer has to walk into the Supreme Court and prove it to the tune of 5 Justices. I'd rather Congress just pass a law.
NASA prepares rover for trip to Mars
For Supposed Journalists, a Sense of Repulsed Detachment
More Government Data with U.S. Department of Labor API
The Man Without a Facebook
Well, like I said above, eating industrial corn was not what I was referring to. Corn->chicken still relies on corn, so even if the loss is less than for corn->beef (corned beef? ;-) it will be no better than eating corn. And you just quoted the areal intensity, not the energy intensity which is what matters.
A lot of the money for drug research comes from federal grants (e.g., from the NIH).
I used Altavista right up until I first heard of Google. Before Altavista I used Webcrawler (http://thinkpink.com/bp/WebCrawler/History.html).
Same with Lycos.
This ACME education and its origins is very well discussed on this famous RSA video "Changing Education Paradigms ": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
I think the real one for PL/I is "not invented by IBM" but maybe I'm too cynical.