skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"In time...six months; five years, perhaps...a change could easily begin to take place. He would become less and less satisfied with a kind of dumb, day-to-day shopwork. His creative intelligence, stifled by too much theory and too many grades in college, would now become reawakened by the boredom of the shop. Thousands of hours of frustrating mechanical problems would have made him more interested in machine design. He would like to design machinery himself. He'd think he could do a better job. He would try modifying a few engines, meet with success, look for more success, but feel blocked because he didn't have the theoretical information. He would discover that when before he felt stupid because of his lack of interest in theoretical information, he'd now find a brand of theoretical information which he'd have a lot of respect for, namely, mechanical engineering.

"So he would come back to our degreeless and gradeless school, but with a difference. He'd no longer be a grade-motivated person. He'd be a knowledge-motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. His push would come from inside. He'd be a free man. He wouldn't need a lot of discipline to shape him up. In fact, if the instructors assigned him were slacking on the job he would be likely to shape them up by asking rude questions. He'd be there to learn something, would be paying to learn something and they'd better come up with it.

"Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force, and in the gradeless, degreeless institution where our student would find himself, he wouldn't stop with rote engineering information. Physics and mathematics were going to come within his sphere of interest because he'd see he needed them. Metallurgy and electrical engineering would come up for attention. And, in the process of intellectual maturing that these abstract studies gave him, he would he likely to branch out into other theoretical areas that weren't directly related to machines but had become a part of a newer larger goal. This larger goal wouldn't be the imitation of education in Universities today, glossed over and concealed by grades and degrees that give the appearance of something happening when, in fact, almost nothing is going on. It would be the real thing."

-- Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Well, that was what the author of the article was trying to tell us, wasn't it? Don't give marks and they'll be intellectually curious.

Anecdote: I was really good at school at a young age, and I would get easy 80s in all my classes, so I never cared about marks, so that made me intellectually curious at a young age.
I think the flaw there is imagining that "everything" can be learned.
The customer usually has the choice of self-help against such bullshit, even without changing ISPs, via using alternate DNS servers, a VPN, or other techniques. Education remains a better solution than regulation.
type M-x polo
There is allready "network over power" adapters available to turn the power wiring of a building into a lan.
Grading is, psychologically, a special case of gamification.

There's a debate on this point, but many smart people believe that gamification should only be used to provide an extrinsic motivator for things that A) have no intrinsic motivation, or B) have a steep learning curve that is discouraging at first. In the latter case, the game mechanics should be removed once the difficult first step has been conquered so that the intrinsic motivation can supplant the extrinsic ones, leading to a naturally reinforcing cycle of growth (and flow). If it isn't removed—or if it shouldn't have been there in the first place—then the game mechanics can completely overwhelm the intrinsic motivators.

Here we see that learning is intrinsically motivating by itself; no external rewards necessary. As another commenter mentioned, the Montessori method acknowledges this.
"[...] but it doesn't have an -i or --info option that tells me how many pages a PDF file has"

You could use pdfinfo - in Debian / Ubuntu, it is in the same package as pdftotext (poppler-utils).

To extract (only) the number of pages of a PDF:

$ pdfinfo FILE.pdf | grep '^Pages' | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f 2
If 99% of the world doesn't know that the Sun revolved around the earth, and knowledge of that fact is scattered across a handful of monks in obscure monasteries, then yes that would indeed be a holier-than-thou attitude. And that's exactly what's going on with scaling knowledge.

I would even argue that the Ruby threading problems he's experiencing may not necessarily because Ruby threads don't scale, but possibly because he's using them wrong or because he's not using the right version of Ruby. Ruby 1.8 uses select() to schedule I/O between threads so the more threads and the more sockets you have, the slower things become because select() is linear time. The use of select() also results in a hard limit of about 1024 file descriptors per Ruby 1.8 process. Also, context switching in Ruby 1.8 requires copying the stack. Ruby 1.9 is much better in this regard since it uses native threads and no longer uses select() to schedule threads that are blocked on I/O. I'm running a multithreaded, multiprocess Ruby (1.8!) analytics daemon that generates 12 GB of data per day. It flies. VMWare CloudFoundry's router is written in Ruby + EventMachine. That thing has to process tons and tons of requests and they've found Ruby + EventMachine to be fast enough. To simply say "Ruby doesn't scale and is slow" is too simplistic, and ignoring the underlying more complex reasons would result in one bumping against the same problems in a different context. So no, it isn't so obvious from day 1 that using Ruby would be a problem.
I agree, but the OP's point is a false dichotomy: That investment in entrepreneurship is a net benefit, but any investment in public works is a net loss.

Using roads as an example for public works not providing a net gain isn't very convincing... considering our entire society is now predicated on their existence.
Isn't a very large proportion of American labor unskilled? Real unemployment is always worse than the figure they give (when you account for people who stopped looking).
It is the difference between

> My opponent is an idiot and believes X to be true, therefore X is false. (ad hominem)

and

> X is false. My opponent believes X to be true, therefore they are an idiot. (Not ad hominem.)
With sales, in the very beginning you can just work in whichever way makes the most sense and test many different things out, not worrying too much about process. Mark Suster calls this "evangelical sales" http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/10/12/startup-sales-...

Though as a sales team scales, a sales team need to become more process driven so that the company can keep better track of everything that is going on and make sure that everything can be kept track of and organized.
The man in the video, Kelly Thomas, was beaten so severely by police that he went into a coma. The pictures are heart-wrenching ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Thomas_(beating_victim) )

He died three days later from the beating. Even after he was handcuffed, the officers beat him repeatedly with flashlights and the butt of their tasers. Just tragic.
There is no evidence that lowering tax rates creates jobs.
In a funny way, that's like graduate school: the good parts of it, at least.

It's just you, and striving to learn something, in depth, with understanding. You have access to immense knowledge in the form of the University library and the faculty. You can learn, really learn, in a way that isn't sneaking it or being the disruptive one. It's okay to learn.

(Yeah, there's also advisors, other students, student loans, classes, the U bureaucratic world, and the rest of the bad parts.)
My thinking is the we've been talking about the information age since Toffler circa 1980 (thirty years ago) -- the next revolution will be in micro-manufacturing. Right now we're mass producing things in China because right now that's the cheapest place to do it. But what happens when you can produce custom goods which are assembled by robots? A primitive example is the ability to order a mousepad over the net with your photo on it -- what happens when you can do that with clothing or cars? To me that's a post-industrial revolution -- and that's where the action will be. The old days of everyone having the same stuff will be over.
you can't magic a billion people into the middle class lifestyle, but you can use a gun to keep them away from it.

i have no doubt those field workers in China would prefer the wages available to field workers in America, and if they could move to take advantage of that, they would.
Start developing for OS X in just 68 easy steps
For those interested in this subject, Alfie Kohn is a good author to read.
хули тут думать, webtea прожект .. и web и teapot и в поиске норм ..
I have moved away from Google Apps for Domains without canceling, and I could still manage the account from https://www.google.com/a/domain-name.example/

So if this is still true, a user could set up for the new domain name and carry on.

Of course if there is a warrant to seize the name, there may also be a warrant to seize control of associated services.
I love everything but the name.
Unluckily, this is the truth. This develops even further. The aim become how to optimize to get good grades and not actually learn to get them. This develops even further: You don't want to learn unless you get rewarded for it. The result is the decline in the quality of work you do.

This might explain the current economics: The smart always (most of the time) find a job or a way to live. Those who care only to take a job are the jobless (because they create less value and also there are many of them).
Wait. Performance decreases are not worth the useless Mission Control.
After the five reviews, Aaron asked for my phone number
and said he’d call me the next day with a meeting place.
It has now been three days and I have yet to hear from
him. He’s also stopped responding to my emails, including
one in which I asked him, “Is this really a scam?” Which
means, obviously, I’ve been duped.

I think you're right, the email looks like it was sent after the intended meeting time.

I still think that a waiting time and a 'missed' appointment could've been a part of the scam. After all, when you've been on hold with customer service for 10 minutes, do you really want to hang up at that point?
I think the point is with, say, wifi, it is broadcasted in all directions, where LiFi would be pointed directly at the destination, which makes it much harder to intercept.
Interesting that the image is of a user called Emma J, smiling and saluting to the camera. Is the implication that this is /the/ EJ?

Just a random name choice?
MyBitcoin Incident Report - August 4th 2011
>>The smart always (most of the time) find a job or a way to live.<<

You're talking about expedience not intelligence.
Three things stand out in my mind as to what's making job recovery so challenging in the wake of the 2008 crisis:

1. Unlike e.g. the tech crash of 2000, 2008 was a crisis of credit, the lifeblood of all other industries. Their cautiousness in beginning to lend again will make recovery and therefore jobs growth extra long.

2. The 2008 crisis forced companies to find new efficiencies. Whole layers of middle management were eliminated in many cases without any downside and remaining employees were fine working harder to keep their jobs. Those 'unnecessary' excess positions take a long time to come back. It will require companies to feel flush and to get lax on this again.

3. I think most importantly, our economy largely comes down to consumer spending and the housing bubble didn't just drive inflated housing prices; it also enabled home equity lines of credit to buy boats, etc. Coupled with loose credit card lending standards, our economy was built upon unsustainable growth in consumer credit. I don't know when such a consumer credit environment will come back, but again, it will have to be preceded by a sort of boom in the economy.

I agree that 'technology efficiency' etc. are not helping, but the heart of it are 1, 2 & 3 above.
Really? When I introduce myself people often ask if it is actually my real name with a lot of doubt in their voice, and my name is a lot less crazy than "swizec".
The post provides a great anecdote but I am just saying that more research should be done on the issue.

Yeah, I think not giving grades is a great potential way to encourage intellectual curiosity. Has there been any controlled experiments on this issue? Also is this practical during primary and secondary education? I don't know.

I think some students without marks would become more intellectually curious while other students might just not do the work and just play video games instead. It's a tricky topic.
Layout peeve, the vertical fit on your home page is not good on a 1200px high monitor when the browser is spanning the available area. One possible fix - the section with the apply button could afford to scale down a bit and "learn build solve" could afford to scale down a bit further.

Endorsement text is problematic; does not specifically refer to CA. Also "could've, would've" phrasing is maybe not the best pitch. You're not selling to people who have regrets about how hard they had it back in the day. You're selling to people who haven't learned it yet.

It is not immediately apparent that this is an on-site thing in Chicago. My assumption was that it was another online paid tutorial site. Yes, it says "Downtown Chicago" above the "Apply now" button. No, it is not perceptually visible, and it needs to be since this is a critical constraint. The book "Designing with the Mind in Mind" gives a great overview of some of these issues.
Agreed, I'm holding off on installing Lion.
It's already being taught. It's called maneuver warfare and the marines practice it. Read MCDP-1.

Further reading is a guy named John Boyd who developed this stuff (along with the f15, f16, f18, a10 and first iraq invasion) from the 60's through the 90's.

People, ideas, hardware. In that order.
But that isn't too surprising. Seventy-five years ago, we had "factory worker", "foreman", and "manager". Compare that to any large company today and see the variety of jobs being done.

Jobs, and therefore people, have specialized more, that's all.
Same here.

Title should be: How to kill the drive to learn - give grades
Who thought you would have to backup money?
http://railwayjs.com
We should teach the hacker mentality to everyone.
It's much the same as writing anything, really. Figure out your core message. List supporting points that you want to make. Draft and revise.

Options at that point include "post it" and "hire a professional copyeditor to take over from your notes."
One possibility is that previous technological advancements facilitated dispersion of labor, while the current crop facilitates the concentration of it.

Advances in ocean-faring ships led to colonialism. Train travel led to a rapid westward expansion of the United States. New farms get established, and new towns crop up to serve them, needing homes and markets to be built, a local newspaper, a local grocer, a local bank, eventually local radio and television stations. Similar basic economic structures get replicated in many diverse geographic locations. Once one place gets saturated, people move and start up another franchise of the town model.

Skipping ahead fifty years or so, the web means I don't have as great a need for the local bookstore, the local newspaper, the local television or radio station, the local bank, etc. There are plenty of businesses that I still need locally, but they in turn don't have as great a need for the local advertising agency, the local newspaper's classifieds section, the local accountant, the local lawyer, the local travel agent - assuming there's still a local owner, with a local HR department, local management structure, etc.

Of the startups you see, how many are going to end up with a business whose operations need to be replicated in many geographic locations? How many are ever going to be more than an office in the Valley or NYC and maybe a few sales outposts? How many pitches are you getting that require large marginal outlays on labor in order to scale, and how would that requirement affect your investment decision?
We have lots of fun. In fact, in many ways, processes like these allow for our team to focus on innovating and doing cool things instead of just "winging it" every time.
Make sure you also know about cd - (go to previous directory) and cd foo bar in zsh (go to ${PWD/foo/bar}).
Don't bother with a press release. Better to just use social channels and the web to do your own PR.
Configure your shell to report nonzero exit statuses.

joey@gnu:~>true
joey@gnu:~>false
zsh: exit 1

In zsh this is done by "setopt print_exit_value". It's a pity shells don't do it by default.
I can't say how many workers have less than a HS degree. A trip to bls.gov would help, but I'm on an iPhone.

I imagine the majority of American workers have a HS degree, at least.
I bet there was a lot of gnashing going on in the 19th and early 20th centuries, too. People don't like to change, yet technology forces them to.
There will be a lot of smaller revolutions bound together by the speed and access to information we have today. It's easier to find, customize, and order your micromanufactured products now, and even easier to resell.

There's a huge leap between the chirping modems of the '80s and '90s and having the world at your fingertips anywhere in that world. We're living in the information revolution people have been talking about, and all the cool stuff we couldn't do 30 years ago is about to happen.

Next up will be the transport revolution where you can walk down the street, identify a need, create the solution, and take a suborbital shuttle to the factory where the new product is being built a few hours after identifying the need.

Like Star Trek with capitalism.
my bad. I meant "content of significance to the general public"; i assume your family could tell who you are just from your picture, the issue here is whether you should use your identity outside the social network when you create such "content of significance". It's very rare that you find original content inside social networks, they are mostly amplifiers for content found elsewhere.
Maybe Swizec just sounds so outlandish that people simply assume finding out my real name is out of the question?

Or it might be that when they hear my foreign accent they think it's a standard name for Slovenia.

Perhaps a combination of both ...
So there's more than one way to not grade.
OpenDNS returns ad pages for not-found domains, if you are using their free service. Or is that what you mean by "the same?"
Business in the UK vs. Business in Bulgaria
The solution is to have force redundancy and to make each individual element completely disposable (and detonatable).
I'm not sure what you claim is so trivially obvious; sometimes a decision to restrict peoples choices ends up being good for the company simply because it is good for the user experience.

Consider how facebook never allowed too much freedom over pages, no background images or changing the font or auto playing music. These were all hotly requested features, and why should facebook care if someone put a tiled image background or had a different font? They cared because in reality people often don't make the best decisions and for anything social, other people being morons and using red comic sans over tiled lolcats causes the value of the service to decrease.

I'm not sure if the same is true about Google+, but I did think it was jarring that people named things like "Texans for Marijuana Legalization" started following me on Google+. If there was people named anything close to the average xbox handle, it would definitely make me less likely to use the service (things like vagblaster77 or dankbluntz4lyfe)
Random. I swapped out the image on the blog post so there is no confusion.
I'm clueless - and teasing. But..

If 'The Elder Scrolls' leads to problems if someone uses 'Scrolls', what about the other parts? 'Elder'? 'The'? If the latter is too ridiculous, what is the difference between them?

And - _why_ can you go for single words? I mean - I understand the reasoning if they are stopping notch from creating 'The Elder's Scrolls' or something. But - right now, it looks like a farce to me..

The 'will consumers be confused' part is imho completely weird and not applicable unless the artwork is shared. You don't buy a game as a string of text, you look at reviews, a cover (if you buy physical..) and game design. I don't conflate my SNES 'Super Mario Brothers' with 'Super Metroid' or 'Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30' on a PC, just because they share a word..
>I wouldn't be too quick to write all cops off as bad. There are definitely a good number of "good" cops.

the system easy makes bad even out of the good ones:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

"Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority."
I wonder if it sounds ridiculous even to them, or they actually believe their own claims.
This is a very interesting point, if anyone has any links to any resources or experiments that talk about stuff like this please do share :)
Dropbox close to choosing investors — Round could put valuation at $10 Billion
To be fair, as best I understand it an airplane cruising at altitude is not very hard to pilot. Nothing to run into, nobody merging into your airstream- nothing much more complicated than "steady as she goes"

I believe takeoff, ascent, landing and descent is still done by pilots.

Additionally, trouble with cars is, they have evolved for 100 years around sight as the primary navigation function. Planes almost never had that luxury, so they have relied on instruments for a long time. Computers are good at instruments, not so good at sight.
In Australia, continuous assessment is the fad. Shudder.

I see it as a vicious cycle. One teacher (or lecturer) sets lots of highly weighted assignments. Students work hard in their class, and ignore the ones that "don't matter". So the other teachers (or lecturers) have to also ramp up, or no-one will study for their classes. It's a tragedy of the commons, and the students are the commons.
Now if only everyone's mom understood the concept of a linear set operation... :)

A good example that would also help someone appreciate the power of map/reduce might be something like "how many times does each letter of the alphabet appear in the library?" For the map step I take shelf 1 and you take shelf 2, but now for each book we'll have to write down something like "a:300,b:50,c:90,..." and so on. But now there are more things to "reduce" than there are books (since we now have a value for the number of occurrences of each letter in the alphabet for every book). Well, there's nothing stopping us from splitting up the reduce step as well - we could split it up by shelf again (where you add the totals for each letter on your shelf and I'll do mine, then we'll do one final reduce of at the end), or you can add up letters a-m and I'll do n-z.
When you dig beneath the surface of the education systems, you find a host of alternative and progressive models that successfully cultivate and maintain intellectual curiosity.

The issue isn't really a lack of research; it's a lack of interest. Pundits like to claim to be "for the children" or whatever, but they are generally more interested in tangential agendas that can leverage fear from threats to children rather than a sober analysis.

I'd suggest starting by looking up who Alfie Kohn is. He is not a scientist, but he acts as a good aggregator.
Twitter to open source streaming data analyzer