skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
regions with no magnet/exam schools

Most regions of the United States (and perhaps of some other English-speaking countries) are regions without magnet or exam schools to concentrate able students for challenging programs. I had a lot of praise for my state's practice of allowing public school open enrollment in a recent HN comment,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3064665

but even at that there is NO middle school (as contrasted with an elementary school) in my state actively selects students for their demonstrated readiness to take on a challenging academic program. Meanwhile, the expectations for AVERAGE learners in several countries are higher than they are for gifted learners in most parts of the United States.

http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf

(See Exhibit 1.1 on pages 34 and 35 for an excellent data chart on academic achievement in different countries.)

I'm glad to hear that there are places where parents can find a suitable school just by moving their residence, but not everyone can move their residence, and those schools are nonexistent in whole states of the United States. And even at that, it's debatable whether those schools are really up to a world standard of academic performance.

After edit: Another comment under the submitted article here is quite correct that the core idiocy here is the idiocy of dividing up students into grades by age, which is actually a rather recent practice historically, and a practice that never had a favorable research base showing that it was effective for learning.

http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html

But my FAQ on this subject immediately above cites sources from a CENTURY ago, which are still widely ignored, about how idiotic it is to divide up students by age into school grades, and I'm still learning about sources from various eras that agree with that conclusion, all ignored by educational planners.
You're pretty much right. Apple renders their entire UI to OpenGL textures, and uses their nice GPU and scene manipulation to get the incredibly smooth feel. Android, up until Honeycomb, renders the UI in software, which ties up the UI thread with redraw events as well as input detection.

You'll see the limitations of Apple's model in mobile Safari: scrolling too fast gets you to unrendered sections of the page, which must be rendered and filled in software; as well as pinch zooming, where you get a blurry zoomed texture for a moment or two while the software re-renders the page and updates the texture.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone/en-us/howto/wp7/basics...

and Kinect voice commands are of equal sophistication.
I'm a 32GB 3GS owner on a lapsed ATT contract, and I'll be pre-ordering a Verizon 32GB 4S model on Friday. Two things bother me, but weren't deal-breakers:

1) It sucks that it still has the iPhone 4's flawed design, with glass going right up to the edge of the front and back, requiring a case so it can survive a fall. I've always preferred to keep my iPhones naked.

2) $400 for the 64GB model with two-year contract? Really? No storage capacity upgrade since last year's model (the entry level $200 model still ships with 16GB storage), with memory capacities ever-increasing and prices falling, feels like nickel-and-diming. I guess I didn't really need 64GB after all.

Other than that, the new Siri Voice Assistant looks sweet, the 8MP/1080p camera also looks nice, and I'm looking forward to the improved performance.
> They are toast.

Apple earns about 50% of the profit in mobile handsets, a share that is trending upwards.
LTE is still ridiculously power hungry in every device that has it. I'd like to see them avoid it until it gets a bit more under control
> This seems like a reasonable allocation of R&D dollars to me. I don't think the form factor has to change every year.

Even more so because their audience cycles with 2-years contract (or so they believe, at any rate), so it makes sense to keep designs for 2 years.
So we're setting the bar for new Apple products at "3D cell phone". Got it. :)
The HIV pandemic is a complex multi-institutional problem that affects millions of people world-wide. It's an extremely complex system with real-world consequences, and therefore it is fascinating. If you don't think the story belongs on HN, vote other stories up.

From the guidelines:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
Edison is no Tesla !!!

I believe he has no idea about War of Currents and who won it.
No, you are twisting the analogy, but that's irrelevant.

The problem here is that a "product business" in the online world is hardly sustainable, because enforcing artificial scarcity of your product is basically impossible. Which is why the entire software industry is quickly shifting to SaaS models and consulting as fast as they can. The music business should do the same and stop whining.
A copyright case with huge policy implications is set for oral argument tomorrow
First Free iPhone is a Ripoff
> Smart people generally learn easier and an hour of teaching them creates a bigger difference than an hour of teaching someone less smart.

While in principle I agree with this, I think there are many other factors that figure into a student's success in school that his "intelligence." Students may have different aptitudes for different subjects, care more about certain things than others, or have access to better resources.

> So, if we allocate the same resources to the smart and the less smart, we're creating inequality.

This assumes that both the smart and less smart students both pay attention diligently for the one hour session.In reality, when confronted with a topic that is trivial for them, a smart student will often learn the concept in twenty minutes and spend the next forty minutes sitting there bored. In contrast, the less smart student, assuming they care, will have the full hour to learn the material and ask any questions they have. In the end, they will both have learned the same amount. For this reason, education can be said to be equalizing.

> Is a smart person slighted by getting less attention in school? I would argue no.

I would argue that there's no moral distinction between paying more attention to a less smart person or slighting a smarter person. Are you punishing them for being born smart? Restraining the potential of smart kids in order to make society "more equal" seems quite unfair to me.

> In this case, "advantaged people" doesn't mean economically advantaged, but intellectually advantaged

Except that there's a remarkably strong correlation between the two.
You seem to think that someone else got a break that you didn't get but then you describe a situation that sounds exactly like what everyone else has experienced.

I'm not sure why you have an expectation that any carrier would subsidize a new phone before you've effectively paid them for the previous phone. Obviously there is room to haggle on the margins of the contract but the entire business model of subsidized phones and 2-year contracts is designed around the idea that the 2-year contract is there to pay off the initial equipment subsidy. TANSTAAFL
Android was designed when mobile GPUs were an oddity and stylus input was the norm. As such, rendering is mostly done in software and both redraw events and input are handled by the CPU. Mango and iOS were designed with hardware acceleration in mind, and render everything to 3D textures so they can use the GPU to get that smooth feel.

The ICS reveal later this month will reveal whether Google has addressed this issue. Most of Honeycomb is already GPU-accelerated, but not all of the performance issues were fixed.
When I don't have cash on-hand, I use my debit card. I always use a debit transaction, rather than a credit card transaction, because I like changes in my balance to post immediately. It sometimes takes days for CC transactions to post, and while I keep immaculate transaction records myself, it bothers me all the same that CC purchases don't show up immediately when I visit my checking account online.
Putting aside the dated hardware (and hairstyles!), this technology is still a ways off. Yes, Siri is a good start, but it doesn't come anywhere near the type of conversational fluency and contextual awareness that the virtual assistant in this video does.

Honestly, I think we're still 10 or 20 years out from that.
You have your prices backwards. Tesla S is $50k(est) and the 911 Carerra is $79k.

Also, the S is a four-door sport sedan that seats up to 7, not a two-seat sports car.
Galaxy S II 8 MP camera is better than the iPhone 4 for one.
Well these people encouraged you to go to college, but their encouragement didn't add to the likelihood you'd be accepted.

You worked hard and were in a good program--that was the decider.

May I ask.... did your 10-20 closests friends apply to a state school and get rejected despite having grades better than you (its not enough that they're smarter than you, their grades have to show it)?

I may be speaking out of turn though... I'm from Virginia, and here state schools are practically guaranteed acceptance. If you can't make it to the university level initially, you can always make it into a community college and after 2 years of passing grades the state university is required to accept your transfer.
Joshua Davis Attempts to Identify Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto
This is a pretty hefty document but I highly encourage you to read the whole thing. You will learn a lot and will be much better off.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-online-marketin...
>requiring a case so it can survive a fall.
I never really understood this position. First off, I've dropped my phone several times, somehow it's not even scratched that I can find

Secondly, gorilla glass is considerably harder than most internal components. I can't imagine what you'd be doing to the inside of a plastic phone you're dropping that hard.
I interpreted the parent's comment as being about things like "great Greek restaurant in Cupertino", which are essentially instant search.

but yeah, the reminders stuff in particular is a cool new realm for voice control.
I think it's ok to drop out of college to grow a startup. But it's a terrible idea to drop out of college to start a startup.
I think it happens more frequently at lower grade levels, especially Kindergarten through 3rd. Usually, by the time they reach higher grade levels, they will have been placed at a class with which they can keep pace.
It's generally largely frowned upon nowadays -- largely for social reasons. I recall talking to some folks in Texas about this, and they said, if you could hold kids back for academics, a lot of parents of football playing boys would push to do that. You'd probably see a lot of 18 year old freshman QBs in high school.
I'm seeing two different WHOIS records (from AS6473 and AS1213), both look compromised. http://pastebin.com/UDWfZuTF http://pastebin.com/jEgvHt8j
I drop my iPhone onto hardwood floors at least once a week. I have a small visible scratch in the middle of the front and that's it.

I know the phones do shatter, and I've seen it happen, but I'm rough on mine and it has not been fragile.

The 64GB pricing is nickel-and-diming; storage is their pricing segmentation mechanism, so taking the highest storage option is never going to feel good; you're opting for the "I'm price insensitive" bucket.
Astronomy Picture of the Day: 2011 October 4 - QR Codes: Not for Human Eyes
Building OpenPhoto entirely using our API
The podcast also highlighted the importance of "failing fast," or figuring out what will or will not work as soon as possible, and adjusting accordingly. This iterative approach to finding success seems to pervade start-up culture, and in my instances, is very sound advice IMHO.
ActorKit
IPad vs. Kindle Fire: Early impressions and a few predictions
Marketing reasons?
Great way to put it, definitely not next generation but that wasn't to be expected. I don't know why it was a shock to many. I still plan to get it as i'd like to switch back to iOS.

I felt the iPod's didn't fit in at all, they could have just released those on the site without a launch another time or innovate some more and do a proper announcement but i'm sure it's good for some. Agree on the apps.
In Canada, people don't use Visa or Mastercard Debit cards. They use Interac, a Canadian financial network that only charges a flat fee of ~0.25 per debit card transaction. You can't use them for online purchasing although. Most Canadian's are surprised when you can use a debit card like a credit card for online purchases.
While it may survive drops on relatively soft surfaces like wood or carpet, I can only assume that materials such as ceramic or concrete will win over glass. I say that as someone who has worked with glass, albeit not with Corning Gorilla Glass in particular.

My naked original iPhone and 3GS phones have been dropped many times on hard surfaces (like concrete), and have only had minor dents and cracks in the plastic and metal, which I'm totally fine with. Having the glass shatter is not OK, hence the need for it to be recessed behind a protective rim, or failing that, the entire phone enclosed in a protective case, which adds to the device thickness and makes it ugly.
As far as I'm aware, they do. GIL means that even using threads, they still need 8 processes to utilize 8 cores.

There are more languages than those 3, though, and if those 3 are the languages that you're considering, evented vs blocking i/o is way beside the point when it comes to performance. A super-simple thread-per-connection program with blocking i/o calls from C or Java will demolish the most sophisticated evented system you could ever design in a scripting language. That was my "barely even moves" vs "spinning roundhouse kick" comparison.
A5, iOS5, why not iPhone5??? Huge marketing miss. Everything else being perfect.
Apple doesn’t do that (all that often). If they like a design they are willing to stick to it.

MacBook Pro. Mac Pro.
No doubt this upgrade will get bad press for lacking "wow" factor. Buy the phone, sell the shares.

But really, do people care so much about a redesign? Near field what? 3D?! Come on... For 3GS owners like me this is an enormous upgrade, for 4 owners it will still be very noticeable. When you add the iOS 5 improvements & cloud mobile life will be much smoother. Very much like when the 3GS came out.
as someone who works a lot with speech recognition: speech recognition demos differently from how it works in the field. the demoer gets to remove all of the semantic noise from the system (people who aren't Phil Schiller or their wife, choosing "Greek restaurants" instead of a phrase easily confusable with another), leaving only signal.

if it works the way it says on the box -- and remember, Apple already released Voice Control, which has a less-than-stellar reputation -- then it could be revolutionary. voice recognition often doesn't.
TODO: write a follow up to this...
"why i dropped out of college years ago to grow a startup, made a nice chunk of money, and then eventually went back to college".
I won't argue with people who think I am crazy. That's a completely understandable deduction. What frustrates me are people who think I did it for the wrong reasons (i.e. $$$).
Wood is softer than glass, and it's normal that the glass doesn't shatter in that case.
mailing list discussion: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/56247
I went to a selective school, where it was like this for everybody. They put all the smart kids into one school, but didn't actually give us work that was any more challenging than you'd get at another school. Too much brains plus not enough challenge equals a culture of laziness. Competitive laziness. It was okay, at my school, to do well, provided that you didn't actually put any work into it.
They managed to make a mobile phone a status symbol, but that is more a branding achievement than a technical one.
Today i saw a garbage collector (really) with an iPhone, and both of my parents have one. The status symbol fades when everyone has one.

This number is just relevant for apples wallet, but what matters in the long term are market share and being technical superior.

Nokia and RIM had also very neat numbers some years ago.
I find this really interesting as well. I'd really appreciate a longer account of your thinking and the details, if you wouldn't mind. I've mulled over a similar idea, but done nothing with it.
Read upthread.

I have no expectations about subsidized pricing. I am not price sensitive. Someone said something, I expressed surprise. That's all.
For most apps and servers, migrating the IP state is not enough. The app server's connection state cannot be easily migrated. E.g. The MySQL connection of a failed MySQL server will be gone. Migrating the IP connection to a new MySQL server won't do anything.

Carp is good for firewall server redundancy because IP state is all that firewall is maintaining.
Windows guys (in general) just can't seem to grok any other OS or command line tools

I have to take exception to that -- or at least the specific phrasing.

It's certainly true that most MS-platform guys don't grok other platforms. But I strongly disagree that they cannot do so, given a brief period to learn.
Apple Special Event October 2011
I don't understand your point. Siri is going to fail because Apple is a walled-garden? That makes sense for iMessage, but none for Siri. Are you saying it is going to fail because it doesn't support all languages?

Your edit ends with "They are toast". Seems like obvious flamebait, and is only going to attract more downvotes.
It's possible I overestimate it. And I don't mean to say that it's their driving motivation or anything. I do think it's some significant part of the calculation.

Laptops are a different market. You have your phone on you all the time so it works much better as a signaling device, and it's only ~$200 to upgrade.

The 3GS sells well at least in part because it's less expensive. The ones you're targeting with design obsolescence are the high end who will pay again for the high end.

I've already seen comments around here to the effect of: "Hm, just an internal spec refresh. Guess I can wait until the iPhone 5."
NodeJS builds on some C async framework, so pretty much every language build on C could go the Node route - but it would be a lot of work. Personally I wish somebody would adapt it for Arc - or maybe not, so that if I ever apply to YC again I can do that for bonus points :-)

EventMachine is OK, I suppose, but I have heard that it has some warts. Are there any good web frameworks that build on EventMachine? Though I suppose the basic Sinatra-Style framework would not be that hard to build...
I think you mean "enunciate"?
More information please. What does 'let me upgrade' mean?

You can always upgrade it is just a matter of how much of a subsidy you want. Near the end of your contract you'll get the full subsidy on the new phone. One month into your contract you won't get any subsidy on the new phone.

There seems to be some people here who think there is a super secret way to purchased phones at subsidized prices without fulfilling (or nearly fulfilling) the contract on their previous subsidized phone. I don't think so. TANSTAFAAL
I agree that LibreOffice has a long way to go. It is the only software I use that crashes regularly.
3d is a fad that will most likely never be a differentiating feature in a cell phone.

How many people at the Sprint store are seriously going to pick up the HTC Evo 3D and say "screw the iPhone 4S, I'm buying this thing because it's 3D!"
Patrick, this is almost a tautology. The statement is true about pretty much any commodity, in the absence of rationing.
Do note the difference between "giving someone less free stuff" and "punishing someone". Schools do not prevent students from seeking other educators.

Any mass-production or limited-resource system will be relatively more beneficial to someone than someone else, and there are many incompatible but defensible ways to measure benefit.
Oh please, Apple isn't toast. Michael Dell said something similar, and look how that turned out. What good is market share when you are making no money because of it? Apple has it right, they're making way more money than all the other handset companies and are constantly voted #1 in handset satisfaction. What's so wrong with that?

When Android return[1] rates[2] drop below 10%, then we'll talk.

1. http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/26/androids-dirty-secret-shipp...

2. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20030211-37.html
For your friend who is handicapped it looks like http://www.vlingo.com/apps/android Vlingo for Android might be able to help him a little bit more.
The incar demo has talkback and voice confirmation.
http://www.vlingo.com/demo/videos
Yeah, I realize they are available in most other countries, just not historically the U.S. Which is why I was super excited when they finally started selling unlocked iPhone 4's in the U.S. this past summer. I seriously hope they don't go back to only selling locked phones again. Thankfully, it does look like an unlocked version will be available. If you go to the Apple Store Online, then to the iPhone 4 page, on the right hand side you see a section titled "Get answers before you buy," and below that "About the unlocked iPhone." Clicking on that gets you to this page: http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_iphone/family/iph... which reads: "The unlocked iPhone includes all the features of iPhone but without a contract commitment. You can activate and use it on the supported GSM wireless network of your choice, such as AT&T in the United States.* The unlocked iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S will not work with CDMA-based carriers such as Verizon Wireless or Sprint."
School is a social experience as well. Children get along best with children of their own age, and sticking precocious six-year-olds and dumb-as-dishwater thirteen-year-olds in the same classroom is just asking for trouble.

We should arrange by age and then by ability. Split each year into three streams: 10% "smart", 70% "normal" and 20% "dumb". The smart kids get whatever they need. The normal kids get a good solid education. The dumb kids get ponderously taught the basics of life, to make sure they can read, do basic mathematics, and avoid vastly stupid life decisions.
Really? I've built a MySQL HA cluster using that setup plus DRDB and it work beautifully. Have couple unplanned failure in couple years and they all failed over and came up correctly.
Google launches Our Mobile Planet, Analytical Charts
Looks like Ipsos and Mobile Marketing Association were involved in gathering the data.

Methodology:

http://www.ourmobileplanet.com/omp/omp_about
I would bet against this actually occurring, at least from the standpoint of anecdotal experience.

When I was 17 I started my first company, then shortly thereafter, signed on to a dot com startup. At the time I swore to myself that I would eventually return to college.

Over a decade later, I've experienced both success and failure at the enterprise of enterprise, and at this point going back to school is near the very bottom of my list, far below "getting attacked by angry badgers".
No it is not considered fair use[1] from the CEO of Atlassian[2].

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3068576

[2] Unconfirmed by me. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3067107
I'm with you-The last quarter was my last. I've had a few startups and businesses, only now to focus my energy upon them to grow. I find that anything that intrigues you, can be self taught and learned through enjoying your curiosity. Schools are lame, the education system is slow, and you pay for a piece of paper. If you notice School is in the way of your real education, then its about time to drop that.
How about windows phone then? Better UI than android more capabilities than iPhone. Comparable low return rates.

Its another thing that People don't know about it because of Microsoft's poor image and marketing.