skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think I disagree with pretty much everything you've written here. For one thing, the problem isn't money. Some of the worst school districts have the highest per-pupil spending. The DC school district may be the worst in the entire country, and yet it's right up at the top of list in outlays per student.

And the problem isn't unmotivated teachers. Young, idealistic teachers are made prematurely cynical by the thousands in bad urban school districts every year.

The problem is too many of the students and (more importantly) their families don't care. That's why charter schools work. That's why private schools work. And that's why suburban schools work. Because the students in those schools belong to families that consider education important and have made sacrifices to get their kids in a good school.

All the things schools used to do to maintain order are either illegal or carry a big financial penalty for the district. When I was in school our district had a reform school, and everyone knew if you acted out too much that's where you would end up. Kids got suspended and eventually expelled for too much disruptive behavior. That just doesn't happen today to any meaningful degree.

It's all well and good to rail about the unfairness of it all, but when the future of your own kids is on the line you make the sacrifices you have to make in order to keep them out of bad schools. Even the president, who is under a lot of political pressure to put his kids in DC public schools decided to send them to a private school instead.
"ubuntu" tells me the location of the countdown and not much more. It doesn't tell me what is going to happen in this new release, why they're making a fuss, why I should care.
There's no reference to this in "Tog on Interface" either, but he repeatedly references Fitt's law. I think that applies to the "escape angle" as well.
I use Aquamacs with Unity to develop games. Opening a script file into an Aquamacs buffer by just clicking on it in Unity is very useful to me.
To me this line of thinking lines up precisely with the notion of interest – they see it as something valuable for the future (and happen to be doing it now) – I'm not sure how all of that could lead to any conclusion other than Facebook having very real interest in tracking people.
Ergomaven  Work - Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics
It's a consequence of the social environment. In Europe, you are surrounded by different languages. In North America, you have English in the USA, English in Canada (with some French), and Spanish in Mexico.

You do have clusters of Spanish/Chinese/Japanese/Hindi/etc on the West Coast of the USA, but except for the large Hispanic populations, almost every one of them speaks English too.

In short, you can learn English and Spanish and be understood in 99.9999999% of North America. Learning any other language is largely a pursuit of fancy ("for fun" or for traveling abroad), unless you plan on moving out of the country.
But the passage I'm citing isn't about inequality increasing, as you're discussing. It's about people at lower levels getting less, in an absolute sense. Which is a fallacy.
In another life, I was a specialized type of accountant, for a while. I used to -- unofficially, at my own initiative -- save my pure accounting co-workers days of time and effort by e.g. taking 15 minutes two write up a quick bit of Excel formulation and/or scripting.

(Lest this sound dangerously hackish, I was a stickler for accuracy and often greatly decreased their error rate in the process including through describing how to better manage their task and errors.)

These were the front line workers; the people who actually "do stuff".

I was appreciated by management, to a point. Above that point, though, it became a matter of politics and connections.

At that level, people "bought what they had connections to". Which was subsequently foisted onto those "front line" workers. I remember, for example, interfacing an SAP system radically different from its predecessor, into our own systems. No one asked my opinion; the "new way" just came "thrown over the wall".

That's what you're up against. A great degree of not "what you have" but "who you know".

Those coworkers of mine lucked out, in a small way, because they knew me. The corporation was happy to leave them toiling at their "digital loom piece work", until it shipped their jobs off wholesale to elsewhere, because that looked better on the quarterly bottom line.

A lot of the "big" financial software I saw was similar. "The professionals" came up with "the way" (often rather bastardized, due to their own internal process) one should do things, and sold packages that purported to more or less do that. And you were stuck with that. There was great pressure to adapt your process to the purchased system, rather than vise versa.

On the "front end", people had to come up with work-arounds to make that system do enough to let them manage the reality on their desks.

A lot of accountants make a glorious, tragic mess of Excel. I've seen it -- over and over and over, again. But the big systems are seldom a solution, in good part because rather than looking at those people's problems, they impose a top-down methodology that nobody really wants and that makes a lot of work in and of its own nature. Feed the beast, rather than taming it.
No comments on Chocolat? Seems very nice
Those of us who have been using Gnome 2 for years have already streamlined and optimized our work flow in that environment. Whenever the UI changes, it breaks existing patterns of behavior that we usually don't even think about anymore. That's why people don't like change: it makes them less productive, at least temporarily as they streamline a new work flow. People didn't like the MS Office ribbon interface, the KDE 4 interface, etc., either. Even when Ubuntu moved the window controls to the left side, I found myself automatically and subconsciously moving the pointer to the right and clicking on an empty space, which was wasted effort and time, until I relearned that behavior.

People who haven't used Linux / Gnome before don't have those expectations and optimizations, so it's not surprising that they will have a more positive view of Unity. Also, Canonical is trying to make Unity emulate OS X to some extent, so the interface meets some expectations of Mac users. They will probably respond more positively.
20 of the Best Shots of Roger Federer’s Career – Part 1
I like the idea, and the minimalist approach.
Since there is no registration, how do you deal with duplicate ids?

PS: Please commit to bitbucket!
I agree that Esc is clunky, but most people don't know that ctrl-c has the same behavior. If you remap your caps-lock key to ctrl, it's a very natural keystroke (at least for me) where you don't need to leave the home row.
No, I was more referring to how you have to override a bunch of environment variables in the build and do some edits to Makefile.in to prevent irritating warnings about non-existent directories when you build it yourself. There's nothing wrong at all about http://emacsformacosx.com.
I completely forgot the repo! I'll push any minute now. If the id in your profile is taken you'll get an error message.
... and this is why stock options should be automatically repriced when a dividend is paid. Any situation where option strike prices are not adjusted results in dividends effecting a wealth transfer.
Only You Can Decide to Change Your Life
No problem. Regarding the landing page, just keep it dead simple. The more stuff you add, the higher your bounce rate (people will leave). Just test some minimum feature. You can always follow up with an email with a link to a survey, which you can build on Survey Monkey or something (there may be better/cheaper tools).

For startup events, I would say just go and strike up some conversations. People are generally helpful and will share their experiences. It's a good way to learn. Speaking of, when I was first learning about startups I listened to the podcasts at the Stanford E- Corner basically non-stop: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/

I would consider studying Eric Ries and Steve Blank as well regarding "lean startups". "Four Steps to the Epiphany" and "The Lean Startup" are books worth spending the money on.

It's good that you're in NYC. There's a strong community there.

Cheers!
It would be useful to many of us to have the link to the abstract posted rather than (just) a direct link to the PDF. That way, we can get a brief overview before committing to the PDF.
The Kindle Fire really has nothing going for it except for the large screen and the price.
Is there a legal case in support of SexBnB, a marketplace to buy and sell sex?
Sorry for not having accepted your patches, but I explained the reasons in a comment on your pull request:

https://github.com/vog/beautify_git_hash/pull/1
Could I patent basic problem solving skills and then sue someone who uses them to solve problems? Where will this madness end?

I want to patent the process of using analogies to teach others. Everyone everywhere must cease thinking because they are infringing on my discoveries.
The Emacs Starter Kit, version 2
Something new this month, a Free iPad-Optimized PDF: http://hackermonthly.com/hackermonthly-issue17-ipad.pdf

Better-sized and larger fonts for your iPad viewing pleasure :)
Yes, the new alt-tab window switcher is horrid for the reasons you describe. I gave up on it after a day or so and switched back to the older window switcher via the CompizConfig Settings Manager.
Here are a couple of applications that can improve the Unity experience.
Superswitcher which is an awesome alt+tab alternative, Unity 2D for performance (no compiz) and gnome-do because It has features unavailable on unity app launcher.

My favorite superswitcher features is that I can change to an opened window by typing its name. Switching windows this way is very fast and has improved my work flow greatly.
http://code.google.com/p/superswitcher/
I have superswitcher set to capslock key since I don't usually use capslock.

I also use and like unity super+NUMBER key launchers.
Don't get me wrong, I know why it's happening. But it's still amusing.
I would suspect that the number of North Americans who speak a second language is comparable to the number of Europeans who speak non-European languages.
Nike Air Jordan Spizike Grapes
Fair enough, I switched to elementary which has been ubuntu without unity for me. How hard was it to switch to Arch from Ubuntu?
Seth Godin: the Internet has ended mass marketing and revived tribes [TED]
Seth asserts that mass marketers are spammers that tries to hypnotize everyone into buying an idea. And talks about the concept of tribes: leading and connecting people and ideas.
Link is fixed now
Out of any given day I'd say there's < 5% that anybody might be interested in seeing, and far less that I'd be interested in sharing. An app like this might be well suited for people whose friends spend their lives going from one AirBNB apartment to another, but the odds that the moment someone requests a peek into my world lines up nicely with something I'd willing to share is virtually nil. Maybe I'm old and "kids-these-days" will gravitate more towards this kind of thing ... but it's not even close to something I'd be interested in.
Speaking of RepRap does anyone have a list of things that are either impossible or incredibly expensive/difficult to manufacture in traditional ways, but with a 3d printer are easy?
Hemroid Symptoms - Learn The Symptoms And What You Can Do To Alleviate Them
About the un-clickable program name in the menu bar. I agree that it'd be nice, like OS X, to have that as a menu. OS X, or probably Apple, forces control over what items go into different menus. Linux is a lot more free. So, a "preferences" menu item could go in 'file' or 'edit' or 'view' or 'tools'; or maybe only some of the preferences are there and the rest are in a config file. It took me some getting used to.
It does both if you password your streams.
Is doing a startup foolish? If you're doing it as a way to earn a better living, it certainly is!

It's all about thresholds. With anything between a decent and really good salary (say 75k to 200k), your life is pretty much the same except for the level of luxury in what you own. You still have a mortgage to pay and if you lose your job, you need to find a new one very soon or you'll be draining your savings and defaulting on debt payments within a few months.

If someone offers to buy your startup and that would get you over a major threshold (eg. clear the mortgage and debts, enough cash left to carry on current rate of spending for a couple years), it would be foolish not to take it, especially if you have kids. Get a bit of rest and aim for the higher thresholds on your next startup.
Best Lead Generation Strategies
The reason I switched from TextMate to Vim was simple: portability. I can keep my environments at work (Windows) and home (OSX) the same. Editors naturally prompt a deep investment in studying, plug-in finding, and muscle memory if you really want to use them to their fullest. I didn't want to split my investment between TextMate and <some Windows editor>, so I started the long process of getting familiar with Vim. I do miss some of the native flavor of TextMate, but the comfort of having my entire suite of plug-ins and shortcuts apply virtually anywhere (e.g. logged into some VPS) is really helpful.

If I was mostly in OSX it would be a different story, but for the cross-platform developer, I really think the Vim and Emacs options are the way to go.
tl;dr Facebook not caught lying.
I'm pretty impressed that somebody would actually admit to writing for the digital rag known as Mashable. You are a brave soul, brotha!
PassMyWill Is A Will For Your Online Assets And Passwords
Ask HN: A kid-proof desk that accommodates a laptop and 2nd screen?
I've got a work-from-home programming gig, and I'm looking for a good desk that can accommodate my laptop (15" MacBook) and an LCD screen that I'll be using as a second monitor (size TBD, although bigger is better).<p>Only thing is, my living room is my "office," and I've got two small kids who are very curious.<p>Ideally, I'd like to get an armoire or something else that closes up, so the kids can't touch the laptop or the LCD screen (or the printer, which I'm hoping to also store inside).<p>Any recommendations?
Tagebuch: Sonntag, 02. Oktober 2011
On the subject of radio four - any opportunity to post the In Our Time archives:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/in-our-time/podcasts/

Like a warm bath in university juice.

(Hope the links work outisde the UK)
I got the Firefox 7.0 update through the regular update channels a few days after it was on the Mozilla FTP servers. So actually, the update was even before the official release. I have no idea why there was no update available for OP.
In my case I have these blocked out with NoScript. But if you click on these and are not logged in you are most likely redirected to Facebook, right? So it would just open these in the separate FB environment (i.e. proxy&clean browser).
Please stop promoting this nonsense that our current level of taxation is needed because of infrastructure needs. Transportation accounts for a measly 4% of the federal budget. Most of our tax dollars go towards military and paying for the old people in society, both of which are politically-charged budget items that politicians refuse to address.

http://www.investorguide.com/taxtrackr/
Thanks for the links. I've just finished reading "Trifles", and I understand some of the points that were made. The first example clearly makes little sense. The second and third example, I'll admit I didn't see the errors till I read them a few times further. It's only recently I have decided to try my hand more at writing, and for many years I have been developing the skills of scanning to attain information as opposed to reading every word fully.

I read every word, every character closely when I'm programming, checking code for bugs or errors, but when reading an article written by someone else, I scan. This is probably why I didn't notice the errors in the examples. If I can understand something, I don't tend to read it more than once or twice. What are your thoughts?
This designer used a process similar to the one detailed in the Art of Innovation by Tom Kelly - a book that provides a fascinating and informative glimpse into the innovation process. I highly recommend that book, and I think lots of hackers would both identify with the material and learn new ways of generating both the intuitive and counter-intuitive insights they need to design a superior user experience.
On the contrary, as someone with my own firsthand experience, I think positive, empowering, live-affirming articles are needed alongside the concerned frowns and furrowed brows of often-helpless friends, family, and psychiatrists.

A brilliant, introspective mind given hope that they have some power within themselves to help their condition will discover that diet, regulation of sleep and social contact, healthy life structure and goals, sources of self-esteem, etc. are a big part of dealing with a mood disorder long-term. It is certainly possible to achieve change that lasts, with or without medication, though medication is a powerful and useful tool.
Learning a 2nd language as a monolingual adult (or teenager) isn't an easy thing. I can say this from personal experience. After thousands of hours, my language skills are still clearly non-native.

If you know a 2nd language because it's been in your environment since childhood, then it's not so "super".
Nice point! I come from Europe and you are right from my experience.
Your certainty is impressive. If only the natural world were so.
I have a Nexus S running Blandroid. Apps:

The usual google stuff (Talk, Voice, Gmail, Maps, Translate)
Twitter, Facebook, G+

Foursquare
GroupMe (Can now be used for one-on-one messages too instead of SMS.)
OneBusAway
FareBot (My app. Check the balace of your Clipper/ORCA card. Requires NFC.)
TripIt
Shazam
Chrome to Phone
ROM Manager
Catch Notes
HotelTonight (awful awful app, but I got a good last-minute hotel deal with it)
Uber
This is what color.com looks like to me (Chrome 14 with adblock):

http://cl.ly/3G1T0I2K0k3m2u3D2Z1I

Not made for people with adblockers, I guess.
Selling Out Your Dream for $140 a Week
Ouch, your country sucks.
Pretty interesting idea. Took me <2 min to get a page up for myself:

http://driverdan.hackerhub.org/blog

Are IDs first come, first serve?
Fair enough. I'll try to do a little better next time. But in all fairness it was just an anecdotal G+ post.
Every time you make a change it scrolls the preview window back up to the top, making the live preview kind of useless.
> Are IDs first come, first serve?

exactly
"My greatest concern was that I’d have to do a lot of installing and configuring before I could get anything meaningful done. All I wanted was a standard setup, and to not derail focus from my work."

And yet he had the time to document the whole experience at the same time?
@pspeter3 - how has been your experience with Elementary -
especially your transition from Ubuntu? Things like package management (any apt-get changes), multimonitor support, wifi/sound drivers, etc. ?

They are doing really cool (and actually usable stuff) with features like Switchboard+Plugs, Synapse, Pantheon, etc. so am really interested in switching.
Only if you actually want to rebase! While rebasing is great, it rewrites history and should not be done lightly.
No, it isn't formal documentation. However, unlike other forms of documentation, it can be proven to be correct. If you want to know how the element being tested is to be used, unit tests are a great way of discovering that. It also tells you what it's supposed to do. Finally, it can tell you all this quickly and efficiently.

So, essentially, it gives you what the code does, as well as how to do it using the code. It doesn't tell you how it does this beneath the API, or why it does what it does, but it doesn't have to.
Indeed, there are some comments in the config files... :)

Vim and BBEdit have the best documentation:

http://www.barebones.com/support/bbedit/manual.html

http://www.truth.sk/vim/vimbook-OPL.pdf

TextMate's manual isn't too bad:

http://manual.macromates.com/en/all_pages.html
Long live the demoscene.
That depends on the definition of "non-European" languages. More Europeans than North Americans speak Brazilian, Argentinian, Mexican, and DRCongolese.
>One reason Google is so selective is we take employment seriously. Leaks and criminal offences notwithstanding, it's actually pretty hard to get fired from Google and those decisions are not made lightly. That may have some negative side effects but overall I think it's a good thing that engineers aren't constantly worried about being fired.

There are employees who place a very high value on job stability. In the general case, these people are more 'loyal' in that they are less likely to jump for better pay or what have you a few years down the road.

But depending on how you run your company, it may be rational to select for the sort of person who does not expect job stability. I'm in this second class, personally. Yeah, I'll jump if I get an offer that is 20% better, but on the other hand, I maintain 'how to fire me' documentation, and I expect that if I go through a long productivity slump, that you will fire me, and I won't hold it against you. I expect and try to give absolute honesty, but as far as I am concerned, loyalty is a lie. (I know that for other people, loyalty is important and not a lie. But if I claimed loyalty, I mean, beyond honesty, I would be lying, and if a company offers me loyalty, I am, ah, suspicious.)

I'm not saying one approach is better than the other... Both approaches are valid, and they both get you different sorts of employees. In fact, the optimal solution may be to use a different approach for different types of employees; this is traditionally done by having full-time employees and contractors (now, the way most companies hire contractors is hugely inefficient; the body shop eats so much value that this is probably a bad idea. But if you could have some other way of setting the loyalty vs. no loyalty expectation, a company could benefit having both family and mercenaries. We are good at different things.)
This is really cool. Really quick to get started. It would be awesome to have an option for custom DNS ! This looks like a cool way to have a bootstrapped front-end for a few things I have in mind.
All posts by this user are blogspam. Flag and move on, or submit it in the original content.

Check out his submissions: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=nicktarazonamd
Give them proper education
Cool concept and nifty execution. It is still only pseudo-anonymous, because you need a personal URL for the repo-file. Open-source it, add some basic federation, and you have what Diaspora should have been from the start.
http://www.losethos.com/code/AudioMath.html

You want to keep it continuous when changing frequencies. Come to think of it, I think I just kept it at the same phase position in the waveforms.

Oh well.

http://www.losethos.com/code/SndFile.html

I looked for an uncompressed audio file format. Found ".SND". A minor annoyance is it's big-endian, but a more serious problem is 8kHz is the limit.
Facebook apparently knows that "these people used the same computer". This is not evidence of cookie-based tracking, though: they could just be using the IP address.
The abuse of Occam's razor in this discussion warrants that level of sarcasm.

And speaking of obscured points, what are you trying to say? Are you saying Facebook is _not_ working on an ad network that does cross domain tracking of users and displays ads based on social graph data, and this is simply a defensive patent? Or are you saying they are developing this feature, but we should trust your company to not abuse it?