skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's far more than that though, your democracy is becoming beholden to it, the rich can lobby while the middle and lower classes can't.

Indeed, much of this is predicted by public choice theory,

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html

http://perspicuity.net/sd/pub-choice.html

http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/publicchoice.htm

which predicts that interest groups who have money to gain from a particular policy will fight harder to get their way on that policy than will voters in general who might gain more from a different policy.

In education policy, there is HUGE access to the legislative process (especially at the state level, where most education policy is made) for the schoolteacher labor unions. The general public doesn't get the same kind of place at the table, by far. But politicians are not embarrassed by that. They call special access for special interest groups "taking care to consider the point of view of stakeholders," and don't think about policy in terms of what's right in the abstract, but rather in terms of what's expedient for staying out of political trouble. A quiet majority of inadequately educated Americans struggling to find time for political participation while making ends meet has less voice in the process than a vocal minority of wealthy people whining about "class warfare," and also less voice than a minority of people employed by publicly funded schools who are not held accountable for results.
And just as importantly, stuck in classes with each other. There's an amplifier effect as a result.
"Unfortunately, I am not at liberty to share the results, nor do I think it would be constructive to this discussion."

- I don't understand this mindset. Forgive me for being naive, but if we're to "toast to the challenges and all become stronger, more proficient, and more successful as a result," then why don't we share these edge cases and fix them?
Ask HN: Is it unethical for an app to tweet and follow?
So I started using an app on my phone that connects to twitter, gmail, facebook, etc, in order to learn my typing style (SwiftKey X) and offer suggestions. After a successful 30 day trial, I decided to go ahead an buy the full version, a whooping $3.50.

After installing and setting it up though, I was appalled to notice that, not only had the app had tweeted on my behalf without asking or even telling me, it had automatically followed the app company's official twitter account!

Do you think this is acceptable behavior for any software developer? What would be an appropriate reaction to this behavior, according to you?
Education isn't a race. If rich children perform better that doesn't worsen the plight of poor children. Rather, a better educated populace increases the wealth of society enabling us to spend more on programs for the poor.

Furthermore, the game may be rigged against poor students, but it isn't rigged by the rich. It's rigged by the teachers unions. Some schools that serve poor children have the highest per-student budgets in the nation (see: DC). But they still perform abysmally. Rich parents have the free time to browbeat administrators of low-performing schools until things change. Poor parents are too busy trying to make ends meet. Their children are stuck with whatever the bureaucracy gives them.

This is why school choice programs have displayed promising performance in many low-income areas. They allow students to escape quagmires of union-driven mediocrity. It's interesting that you would want to get rid of the best chance for poor children to get a good education! The DC opportunity scholarship fund increased high school graduation rates by 20% by sending poor kids to private schools. That's a big deal - having a high school diploma substantially increases lifetime earnings.

True to form, the unions killed the DC Opportunity Scholarship fund after only a few years of operation. It's hard to make change for the benefit of the poor! But fortunately, the house Republicans brought the program back with their electoral sweep in 2010, so we will get to continue to monitor its results.
> I'm glad to see the return of the genre->artist->album browser that was trashed from iTunes some years ago.

Huh? It never went away. Cmd+B brings it up, or go to View -> Column Browser -> Show Column Browser in the menu.
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That's why Archaeologists are so keen on garbage dumps.

(And to anyone worrying that our digital artefacts are much shorter lived than clay tables: We are producing more garbage than almost any society before. They'll be plenty to piece together.)
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Agreed...I just have my doubts about how well one can really understand macro without a firm grasp of micro. Some people reflexively dismiss economics in general as just so much dogma, and it's hard to make the case for economics as a discipline when micro is so poorly understood.
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There is nothing that can force landlords who are too technophobic or just too lazy to post relevant photos, an exact address, and complete information to change their ways. Ver 2.0 of the apartment hunt may be coming, but not until Gen 2.0 are managing buildings.
I am a fan of the idea of working smarter, rather than harder. Sure, when you are starting out in an endeavor, shit work is pretty much where you cut your teeth. For example, as a programmer, cleaning up other peoples' messes. It's also good experience in that it lets you see other peoples' mistakes and gives you an opportunity to see how to avoid them.

But I've watched a lot of people do shit work, and even work hard doing shit work. Working hard may be necessary but it falls far short of sufficient. Those who have merit approach the shit work as a way of looking for problems to fix, as a way of finding what can be done to reduce the level of shit, and so forth. Those who do not just keep shovelling away.

I'd suggest that finding the right connections is often a matter of demonstrating to the right people that you fit in the former category.
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Rackspace releases "reference architecture" for OpenStack
Sorry to hear that he is still missing. :(
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Ask HN: How are we doing at flagging political posts?
Our only defense against threads about politics is to flag them as they are submitted. After receiving advice from other participants on how to make Hacker News a better online community, I have been looking at the new submissions page regularly to flag posts that are mostly about politics rather than about the main topics of Hacker News. How are we doing? Is enough of the political content here being flagged before it reaches the front page? Where is the line between "politics" and other subjects where flagging should begin?

Not all users can flag (one must accumulate karma to gain the privilege) but flagging helps the moderation team focus on the worst posts, and I think it autokills posts if they are flagged enough without a certain number of comments from HN users. Cleaning up the new page regularly should help us enjoy more on-topic articles together.
How is a CEO being paid $10M per year and running the company into the ground different from an employee being paid $6/hour and alienating 10 customers?

In both cases the shareholders were harmed. In both cases, the company made a bad hiring decision.

If a CEO has the market power to demand a golden parachute and happens to be paid after she's fired, that's a byproduct of her initial market power, not corruption.

Unless you idealize a world in which all employees have equal market power then some employees are going to be able to extract better perks, severance, etc.
Have to add my endorsement here. I spent far too long setting up postfix and working on some test code with lamson. In the end, I decided to try out Mailgun -- 2 hours later I had a working solution for parsing email responses. Good stuff.
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Unicode Character Recognition
Furthermore, it's typical for large companies to have people specifically to "engage in social" - which mostly means simulating actual humans interacting on social sites with the brand in order to lower the guard that most people would have against doing the same.
Is there any non-theoretical reason to believe KIPP doesn't work? I.e., do KIPP students underperform in some way?

Forget the theory. The theory might tell me why some measurable effect occurs and generate a complicated model of how it occurs. But without delving into theory, you can certainly tell me what the measurable effect will be. E.g., "KIPP students will have 10% lower math scores in year 2-4 of college," or something like that.
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I disagree because you want to test photographs from a human holding it, not a tripod holding it. Perhaps you could take dozens of shots with each phone and compare.
I'm fine with that, but I like the idea of transactions which bypass the banking system. If I can avoid giving my money to financial middlemen, then why not?
"How can we measure the 'soul' of a lesson, and what happens when a lesson lacks 'soul'?"

A good proxy would be just looking at whether something was made by an artist, or a committee. E.g. Feynman's lectures were those of an artist, whereas most textbooks are created by a committee. (And then they get someone with a PhD to add their name as the author after the fact.) It's clear to me that Kahn's lessons are more in the style of the typical textbook, rather than in the style of someone like Feynman. You can't measure it, that's the point. If you could measure it then that's the first sign that something is wrong.

"But I guess since they are the highest castes, they are the ones who's mysticism we should adopt."

I'm not advocating the hindu model per se, only using them as an example of a society where schooling is framed in terms of a larger model... In their case one that includes work, marriage, wisdom seeking, preparation for death, etc. It's not clear to me that this is the right approach for western society, but I do think it's worth looking at for inspiration.
Not everyone is cut out for a high-paying white collar job. Some people are passionate about doing construction work, driving a truck across the country, or even waiting tables. Or maybe one of these profession is most in line with their physical and intellectual abilities.
These people believe (and rightly so I think) that if you put in your 40-50 hours of hard work per week in a blue-collar job, you should earn enough to afford a decent place to live, food, health care, child care, to send your kids to college and to retire once you're 65.
The problem is today that this is less and less the case. This is what people are complaining about. They're not envious of the "Top 1%" making a lot more money than they do, instead, they are noticing that the "ruling class" is actively pushing blue collar wages down, either directly or indirectly by outsourcing, dismantling entitlement programs, slashing union rights and so on, with the help of politicians they bought. Of course, the money saved goes back into the pockets of the upper class, for example in the form of tax cuts, bonuses, or dividends, and at the same time they claim that these are hard times and everyone has to tighten their belts.
It's not a tyranny of the meritocracy, it's a tyranny of the power elite.
They'll probably try to make it so that WiFi must always be on. Then again, it'll have to be locked on the device, so it wouldn't be very hard to get pass it once the phone was rooted (the devices will run Android [according to the article]).

Then, they would probably check to see who was using the majority of minutes/data on Sprint, and then have a talk with them (or throttle their data).

I'm curious as to what they would do with people who sign up and don't live in cities. If you live in rural areas, it's doubtful you'll have WiFi the majority of places you go. They would probably end up losing money on rural subscribers, then try to make profits from urban subscribers.

There might be a problem with a strategy like that though, because it doesn't seem their profit margins would be too high. I'm not sure how much it costs them to buy data in bulk from Sprint, but doing unlimited data for $19 isn't going to result in amazing profit margins. I'm also assuming that they won't be buying voice minutes, because if these devices can use multiple networks, the only way to keep a single phone number would be using VoIP. Of course, there's no way they would be buying text messages, because text messages can easily be sent over e-mail.
you missed the point. the point was that designers need to do more than just "freelance" and startups should embrace them more as co-founders. not sure why you brought up stiqr, that is just something else entirely.
In a lot of cases the Python standard libraries are just a wrapper that allows you to use a protocol without the need for socket-level programming, but not much above that in terms of abstraction.

It makes sense though. This allows several third parties to develop different interfaces that can iterate faster than something in the standard library can by providing them with a stable base.
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Would it then not be better to fix the URLs instead of investing in QR-schemes?
I think this site is targeting the youtube generation--nothing wrong with that. I personally would prefer to see higher caliber technical books enter the market. However, it seems the acclaim here concerns more the site design than the service itself.
Codecademy adds jQuery lessons and scratchpad
The funny thing is that you seem to think you've achieved something significant with your work. Even if it was 3x, 270k, it's small potatoes. Value accrues most to those who can insert themselves at a nexus where a lot of money flows, where siphoning off a small percentage adds up to a large absolute gain. Typically, it's through getting other people to work for you, or owning a lot of capital, or selling large quantities of something that has low marginal costs.

TL;DR: the way you crack the 1% or 0.01% is not by working hard, but by getting other people to work hard. Which may or may not be hard work. Whatever the case may be, merit has little to do with it; it's all about scarce resources in high demand, which is a metric free of moral values.
Long ago, I think I actually read the study on Sweden vs. U.S. mobility. Alas, only the first page is available now without the requisite JSTOR tolls:

http://www.jstor.org/pss/2951338

My recollection is that the authors looked at the predictive power of a father's earnings on his son's earnings, but rather than measure changes in absolute (or inflation-adjusted) earnings, they measured earnings relative to the society (Sweden or the U.S.) as a whole. In other words, if my father was in the 50th percentile for earnings, I could use their "mobility" estimate to determine my odds of making it to the 75th percentile (or down to the 25th percentile).

That doesn't seem like a useful statistic on which to make qualitative comparisons when you're talking about societies with two very differently shaped income distributions (as the authors acknowledge is very much the case with Sweden and the U.S. on the freebie first page).

Suppose the middle 60% of Swedish males earn between $25,000 and $35,000 annually. A jump from the 20th to the 80th percentile (or vice versa) in absolute terms isn't that impressive. If the income curve gets narrow enough, any impact your parents have will get lost in the noise and you'll have a "perfectly mobile" society in which everyone makes almost exactly the same amount of money. But how is that mobility?

In contrast, if the earnings difference between the 20th percentile and the 80th percentile is, as in the U.S., a factor of four+, then moving from the 20th to the 80th percentile represents dramatically more "mobility" than in the Swedish case. AFAIR, the 1997 study would treat those movements equivalently.
To expand on this, hiring the CEO and giving them a golden parachute might still be a good thing.

Suppose Nokia's chances of survival were 10% without Stephen Elop and 20% with him. That means he is worth 0.1 x value of Nokia if Nokia survives.

If you pay Elop based directly on the performance of Nokia (i.e., he only gets paid if Nokia does well), he'll stay at Microsoft. Why leave MS for an 80% chance of getting paid nothing? Obviously Elop demands some cash up front, a golden parachute, or something of that nature, and a rational board of directors will give it to him.

In 80% of situations like this, the CEO gets paid well for running the company into the ground. But that's a better situation than the alternative, i.e. 90% of similarly situated companies crashing and burning.
The toolbar works for multiple areas on the page. After clicking on "Test It Out" you can focus on and edit the "Mercury is a full featured HTML5 ...." and "Core Features ...." page sections.
A markup language, by definition, cannot define behaviour. You can do design, layout and animations with markup, but you simply cannot do any kind of processing or behaviour (when I say behaviour, I mean things like authentication, processing, manipulating data, etc). So if your webapp needs to be behaviour-rich (which I don't know how you can call it a webapp if it isn't) then you're going to need a scripting language to define those behaviours.

HTML + CSS + JavaScript are complex tools, it would be great if we could unify them into a single language. I think that jQuery's success is in part due to this unification, but I certainly don't think jQuery is the answer.
Sprint bought Virgin out of Virgin Mobile USA a couple of years ago, so more than using Sprint, Virgin Mobile is simply a Sprint brand.

The "Sprint" Sprint brand has better coverage than the Virgin Mobile Sprint brand, presumably because of roaming agreements with Verizon.
Self-modifying code for debug tracing in quasi-C
>It's not because of some drive created through scarcity that encourages you to get up and be productive, its to gain social status (as communicated through wealth) to attract women.

Isn't this exactly the same thing? The love of women is the scarce resource that drives me to exceed. I don't understand your point here.

>This drive will be ever present in a society where basic needs are free.

It already is. It's called sexual selection. Males protrude themselves and women choose. This is exactly my point.

>The only difference is that one will have to be more creative and intelligent to stand out and attract a mate.

You (and the OP) are making some huge assumptions here. Like that creativity and intelligence has any merit without social skill and boldness. Another assumption is that through creativity and intelligence one gains power instead of just through the skill of manipulating other people. Just look at the current situation. Are the ones with the most money and power currently adept at making great technology and art themselves, or is it instead the most daring and the most merciless? The ones who can exploit other peoples skill to the fullest.
Security researcher Charlie Miller booted from Apple Developer Program
I think this is a bit of a misnomer. The problem is not meritocracy. The problem is concentration of control within a fake meritocracy. This is the same problem that doomed the Soviet Union, and it exists to a lesser, but still serious extent, here in the United States.

As Hilaire Belloc wrote, control over the production of wealth is the control of life itself. When we give the rich control over the production of wealth because they are rich and can afford to fund capital, we disempower the majority. The answer is not socialism or communism, which try to solve the problems associated with such concentration through further concentrating that control. The answer is to back off and recognize that the division between capital and labor which has developed is an unhealthy one, that laborers should own their own means of production not collectively but individually and that the role for big capital should be as restrained as possible. As Chesterton said, "Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few."

And as I say "In these economic woes, jobs are the problem, not the solution."

One reason Open Source rocks is that it gives economic ownership to the means of production to every willing programmer and user. This is a value that cannot be measured economically. And open source works often according to a real meritocracy, where those who contribute the most and the best rise to the top, absent corporate control and marketing.

So it is my hope that we recognize it is not meritocracy that is the problem but rather the level of concentration of resources and control that has been achieved that is the problem. These are good reasons to support small businesses, bank with credit unions, become self-employed, and encourage others to do the same.
fantastic, fresh, informative
You're right on the high end.

On the low end, I went into a store 8 months ago and compared time to photo-snap from finger-press as well as blur on non-steady targets and none of the sub 500 dollar digitals stood up well. My iPhone 3g consistently captures better images than our 2 year old Cannon Powershot.
same here and my speeds are excellent. I rarely have any complaints. I use GrooveIP for free GV voip, and the phones have great dev communities around them. I'm running cm 7.1 on my phone and for $100 phone it performs better than my old 3GS.

my biggest concerns would be-

Would loading custom roms effect their application/script?

Is it compatible with google voice?
We had quite a few, but since the announcement of the API 2.0 we're working on a new set of samples.

If you're interested in writing webhook handlers (for events or/and incoming messages) there is nothing new to learn: use http://postbin.org for debugging and from there it's mostly about the PHP itself and its frameworks.

If you're interested in using our HTTP API, we can send you some samples and perhaps collect some feedback. Please contact me: ev@mailgun.net
I'm pretty sure you gave it permission to tweet on your behalf (twitter oauth). But yeah, unethical for sure - they should have at least asked you.
> Suppose Nokia's chances of survival were 10% without Stephen Elop and 20% with him. That means he is worth 0.1 x value of Nokia if Nokia survives.

With respect, this is complete nonsense. It would only be true if there were no replacement for Elop who could not produce similar returns for a lower cost.

Supply and demand, not intrinsic value.
It's definitely unethical, and also against Twitter's TOS (https://dev.twitter.com/terms/api-terms) which state:

II) 1) B) Get users' permission before:
- sending Tweets or other messages on their behalf. A user authenticating through your application does not constitute consent to send a message.

I'd disable their access to your account and report the app to Twitter: http://support.twitter.com/groups/33-report-a-violation
As the author of the post, maybe I can try and clear that up: my point was that while we have all failed to some extent -- by not supporting WikiLeaks and protesting things like the PayPal blockade and Amazon deletion and the government's dubious case -- the New York Times has failed by not using its national media platform to protest those things and their impact on free speech and freedom of the press. And my argument about why they didn't do that is in part that the NYT sees WikiLeaks as competition. Hope that helps.
The myth that the web would be better with strict XML parsing is convincingly debunked here: http://web.archive.org/web/20110514122249/http://diveintomar...

Web pages (unlike Android layout files) are complicated composites of multiple data sources that are generated on-the-fly, and are combined in complicated (but sometimes low-tech) ways like string manipulation. Under such circumstances, it is simply too hard to create perfect XML every time.