skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From the Guardian:

Inevitably, Wednesday's headlines were all about Obama's skin colour and the historic milestone of the first black presidency. For the United States and the rest of the world, that is a fact of huge symbolic importance, but it is the least of Obama's true credentials. What America has succeeded in doing, against all the odds, and why we cried when it happened, is to elect the most intelligent, canny and imaginative candidate to the presidential office in modern times - someone who'll bring to the White House an extraordinary clarity of thought and temperate judgment.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/08/obama-ra...
A small percentage of people in each free-market society generate the jobs for everyone else. The people who create these jobs are solidly on The Fringe.
The Cybercafe Lives
The word you're looking for is circle jerk. :)
I have JavaScript enabled
go long, stay open (beware proprietary platforms)
You're not being persnickety. You're rushing to judgment because it gives you an excuse to put on a big show of pwning me-the-thoughtless-fanboy.

"X and Y are the same" is a lesson we all learned on Sesame Street, and isn't much worth discussing.

Rather than give some kind of credit to PG for anticipating NG, I wanted to point out how weird it is for the two of them to be agreeing. Gingrich is respectful of tradition and has a politician's instincts for rationalization and euphemism. Graham has said (along with everything else) that groups of people are inherently dumb and lazy, and is almost contemptuously truthful.

There's plenty of real intellectual content in there if you take the time to dig for it, and much of it is cool and subversive...
Durdn: just so you know, diffract.me has a typo:

At present we are not ready for public consuption, early early pre-alpha
Okay, I see where you're coming from.
There must be billions of lines of C++ in production systems. Backward compatibility is crucial.
You're not addressing the main argument. The harder it is to develop web software, the more people rely on Windows and Office. Making it harder for their small web apps division to get their work done is not a big deal, compared to the danger of cannibalizing Windows and Office sales.
Ask an intro to CS Teacher about that. Many would disagree.
How did Obama win over white, blue-collar Levittown? A writer returns after 7 mo
Parallel Programming in the Age of Big Data
There's more info about Chandrayaan on this blog with a nice picture of earth

http://onionesquereality.wordpress.com/2008/11/03/chandrayaa...
> Labor unions (in alliance with wealthy parents) pushed for stricter child labor laws to reduce competition for jobs. Aristocratic progressives wanted an institution to indoctrinate immigrants in the American way of live [sic]. The rise of credentialing laws made college a necessity for earning a decent income.

Please provide citations of serious studies of these trends you talk about; this analysis seems facile and frankly misleading, even as a first-order approximation, but I’m not an expert so I’d be glad to be convinced otherwise. In particular, “indoctrination” of immigrants is going to be hard to establish as a primary goal of the education system, and the benefits of credential laws and the technical training institutions that go along with them in fields such as medicine, engineering, and so forth are hard to overstate.
I think it's really sad that we've come to see teenagers as a liability, not an opportunity. It might be true that teenagers have no judgement, that we need to keep them occupied in "low-security prisons" and that they don't want more responsibility. But I think the way the System(tm) is organised has a lot to do with these behaviors.

Teenagerdom has come to be the no man's land of life, the purgatory.
I feel like many of the top comments here don't address the main point of the article:

the US education system needs to be made more efficient.

Instead there are

-arguments about semantics

-Republican VS Democrat

Only lower down, in the less pointed-to comments, is there any meat.
How much would it cost to build a little 1 BR house on your own? Any idea how to get started with something like that? How do you learn how to build a house? Is there a book?
Agreed. Though I just went and read the article, and it's pretty damn good. For somewhere else, not here.
Thanks. That really threw me in a loop.
If you need a fast object-oriented language that can interact with most C software and libraries and doesn't need a fancy GUI, C++ is great.
"Successful entrepreneurs intuitively know they will win. Losing is simply not an acceptable outcome."

False, false, false!

edit: Might be a fun and useful attitude to have until you fail (if you do), at which point you're just crushed ("OMG I knew I couldn't possibly fail but I did anyway! It's unacceptable!!!")
I read this headline as "Al Gore 2.0 Needs a Purpose". And the article was pretty much exactly what I expected.
I've got timerichmoneypoor.com if you want it you can have it at cost. As for income sources have a look at SnapTalent and JobSyndicate. I'm also currently working on a recruitment startup so if you want to chat about stuff feel free to send me an email.
Please don't use something this wasteful (paper) for production.
Yeah. Luckily, those come with a lot of computers by default. And the free fonts (Anivers and Fertigo and all the fonts by that developer) are great.
It's not about cushy seats in first-class, it's about hacking the system.

You see, Gandhi is one of the most successful hackers - he hacked the first-class, then he learned from that and hacked the british empire.
I don't believe that a low birth rate says anything about when people grow up. If it did, teenage mothers would be the most responsible people in society.
I am quite happy that Obama won, but I have started flagging pretty much all of the articles with 'Obama' in the title. I don't want to talk about politics here.
The real purpose of education is to turn people into intellectuals

No, it isn't, unless you are talking about highly selective liberal arts colleges. And even then, the best you are going to get are 3rd generation photocopies of Susan Sontag.

It would seem to me that that IS the purpose of education, especially a technical one. To me the definition of intellectual is a person who is always seeking to learn new things and better themselves educationally. In a field like engineering where things are constantly changing, the intellectually minded will be on the cutting edge and will be the ones you want to surround yourself with.
any thoughts on this?
Lessons Learned: What is customer development?
Become a professional baseball player. I'm terrible at baseball, I don't even really like baseball. But if the top 5 players are pulling in 20+ million a year for playing a game (that doesn't even damage your body like football/hockey), hell I'll do it. Seems like 5 years in baseball at 20 million dollars a year beats working your ass off for a decade to build a company that you can hopefully sell and make $20 million one time.
I mention it as example of adults who have priorities traditionally associated with younger people - the low birth rate in places like Germany or Italy partly comes from adults preferring a certain lifestyle (a better car, exotic vacations, living in fashionable=expensive neighborhoods etc)

(I'm not judging this, btw, it's a valid choice.)
How Entrepreneurs Can Profit with Obama:

As consumer confidence in our government increases (as it always does in a new administration's honeymoon period), and as the policies of the current and future stimulus packages take effect, the economy will inevitably improve.

Despite the tax issues, if you thought John McCain's federal government spending freeze was a good idea during a recession, you don't know much about economics.

An improved economy means more funding and more customers. Forget the details, it is hard to make ANY money when the stock market is going down 40% in a few months and people are saving every penny because they are scared.
Lean Startup presentation for Maples Investments by Steve Blank and Eric Ries - SlideShare
What I am concerned about is the math I learned in high- school and college, is now after 19 years forgotten.
I am sure many people are in the same spot, wanting to relearn it. Where are all the websites for this?
This is the one I found, and not sure it is applicable?
relearnmathatmiddleage.com
Some of the work from home ads are for jobs as "Financial Officers" or "Package receiving" where the "job" is receiving stolen goods or fraudulent payments and shipping them out of the country.
I discarded this guy's argument once I read this paragraph:

And experiments such as the one my daughter, Jackie Cushman, is running in Atlanta—where poor children are paid the equivalent of working in a fast-food restaurant to study and do their homework—are examples of a more dynamic future.

How is being paid to study and do homework an example of early adulthood? One huge difference between adults and non-adults is adults tend to grab every opportunity to improve their skills, and understand that those don't come that often.

This article started with an interesting (if incendiary) premise, but then the author showed that he has poor logical skills. Perhaps he should go back to school himself.

In short, this article is a hodge-podge of potentially interesting half-ideas and downright nefarious illogical conclusions.
The suburbs are isolated because of the decline of the school system. Parents are unwilling to put their kids in schools will they will get harassed and bullied by lower class kids. "Public schooling" results in private communities. It used to be that the richest people in a city would live blocks away from the poor and the working class. That rarely happens anymore because of the association of location with schools.

As for universities - the top universities have a rainbow of skin colors, but the culture is overwhelmingly "Whiter Person" - http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/
You're right about the economic value. I think that the best way to make someone feel valuable is to pay him for his services. A donation made out of pity does not evoke the same feeling of self-respect and usefulness in the recipient. It is also preferable that the payment should be made freely. I think affirmative action is debasing in this sense. If a black-old-female-gay-or-otherwise-disadvantaged person for instance suspects that the only reason he has his job is because the law required his employer to fill a quota, he won't feel as valuable as when he knows that his employer was under no coercion to hire him, but hired him simply because the employer thought him worth it.

So I think "feeling" captures the idea of economic value, and it captures the idea of an individual's happiness which is also important when discussing public policy.

Economic law always functions of course. Even under an affirmative-action quota system, a person is only hired if it makes economic sense as a whole to the employer. However, the employee may not feel as valuable.

With respect to topic, I think much of the angst felt by adolescents comes from them feeling not useful. Allowing them to be useful, i.e., to get a job and support themselves, would help them feel useful.
I have done both.

Doing an MBA is so different than starting a business.

With an MBA, there is no risk, its a fun, intellectual 2 year experience. Even better if you have a business education background, chill out, enjoy the networking.

Starting a company on the other hand is a grind, ups and down everyday.

My MBA gave me the business confidence that I knew pretty much everything that is teachable in business. However, be aware, only 20% or so of business is teachable, much is not yet understood, or dangerously subjective to be applicable to a particular situation.
> the course that I'm in makes these classes absolutely mandatory.

You should try harder to get around this. I've never had a problem getting "mandatory" requirements waived.

If you don't manage to waive the classes, but are indeed hot shit, you should be able to crank out a semester's work in a day or two sometime early on. Professor might be more impressed/willing to waive when you turn in every problem, solved, on day one.
Finally an explanation that someone on the outside might be able to understand.
Big Apple starting to crumble
Ask HN: What's a good book to learn electronics?
I want to start doing things like building a rep-rap, making an RFID cloner, maybe even some robotics. What's a good book to teach me the basics of electronics, e.g., why do circuits need resistors, when do I use a capacitor, etc?
What The Web Can't Help You Do
if you have the choice of what to start in...but how many people have that? Am I going to suddenly start a wind farm company just because Obama will invest money into them? Its not like the small time entrepreneurs have a lot of hope getting government contracts. Most of that money will go to the established players in those industries who can afford to pay lobbyists
Maybe we don't need so much credit
Reality for Startups: Bye bye buyers?
In my book:

sneak into == not paying

The best story is the one that is not explanatory. The whole point is to take the focus off you. So I would usually start with asking the person how his job is going, or if the band found fix their PA, or just borrow a cigarette, etc.

If he asks directly "who are you", depend on who this person is, I'd tell him I'm with the band, with the stage crew, with the press, or a promoter.

But really, if you do it right you shouldn't need to explain anything to anyone.
Don't be silly. If you are going to be making $300.000 in profits anytime soon, you will have enough money to hire a tax adviser who will tell you how to hide this money.
& 'celestial'
If the child has gone through all the effort of completing high school at 13, why - under your model - is the parent deciding what he/she should do after that? Shouldn't the child determine which area of study they would like to pursue?
Actually, injecting 3 trillion dollars of gold in the market is just going to drive the price of gold way down. It's almost the same thing as printing cash, really, since the value of gold is mostly figurative.
How Many of Me - How many people share your name?
Unfortunately a lot of this came from books and articles I read years ago. "Indoctrination" is a bit of a loaded word, perhaps I should have said "assimilation" or "acculturation". But it was definitely a major factor. I remember reading a long paper about the movement establishing universal high school in New Haven in the early 1900's. It all revolved around dealing with the massive flows of immigrants who had no grounding in American civic culture.

As for credentialing laws, pretty much all professions rely on some level of book knowledge plus on the job training. The book knowledge can be provided for by reading books and passing an exam. You don't need to attend three years of law school in person to become a great lawyer. Nor do you need four years of university to be a great engineer. The architecture profession seems to have been much better off without any degree requirements. Just compare the architecture of the 1800's to that of the past few decades.

30% of jobs in the U.S. economy now have legal credentialing requirements. That includes everything from hair dresser to interior designer. Even jobs like parole officer now require a four year college degree. We're essentially recreating the old guild system, which stifles economic growth. I don't think it's any accident that the most dynamic sectors of the economy - software, consumer electronics, movies - have virtually no licensing requirements.
Barack Obama: The 50 facts you might not know  - Telegraph
A lot of this points out why I just don't understand "right-leaning" folk. Unless you are a huge, faceless corporation you really shouldn't be paying your workers minimum wage or giving them crappy health benefits, so I don't see how your expenses in those areas are going to increase or that "It's going to be good times for workers. Not such great times for employers." Oh no, you might have to start treating them slightly more like human beings!

A lot of this advice is just that "smart people will find loopholes in the new tax codes and avoid paying it like they have been for decades", bordering on tax fraud. He indirectly admits he makes over $250,000 a year, and I hate to voice a knee-jerk reaction, but he should really be counting his blessings he's not been on the short end of the stick (living paycheck-to-paycheck working said minimum wage jobs, for example). Instead, he gets spooked that he might have to give more of his precious precious money away.
Microsoft Hiring Puzzle
C++ does fancy GUIs just fine. See Qt.
But they are not good enough, they did not succeed in quelling adolescent behavior.
No, TeX is not intended to allow anyone to easily create documents. It is intended to allow Donald Knuth to make beautiful books out of TAOCP. That it has allowed (by this point) a generation of mathematicians, scientists, and increasingly tens of thousands (at least) of others writing structured documents, particularly academics, to also create beautiful books and journal articles, and is the backbone of mathematical publishing these days, is incidental.

If corporate documents are mostly created with Microsoft products, it is certainly not about the ease with which those products can be used to create structured documents (hint: it's nearly impossible to use them for that), but rather about market-share network effects, highly effective monopolistic tactics on Microsoft's part, and (a wrong) general perception about the relative merits of different methods.

I'll agree with you that TeX (or even LaTeX or ConTeXT) is no walk in the park, but to suggest that it has a particularly high barrier to entry, especially compared to the knowledge required to, e.g., write out a high-level mathematical formula longhand and have any clue what it's saying, is so overblown it becomes absurd.

The market for document preparation systems is brutal, and TeX has never had effective evangelism or much real attempt to make it "newbie-friendly". But so what? The world is a big place, with plenty of space for different approaches. I use (La)TeX for math, InDesign for political science papers, and Text Edit for reading letters sent to me in .doc format by my uncle. All of them work well for these purposes; again, so what?

Also, PDF resumes, whether created with TeX or anything else, are accepted nearly universally in many fields.
Lallysingh, I totally agree with what you are saying, but you need to balance the "wastefulness" with the environmental benefits:

Lower embodied energy - With personal fabrication machines more products can be produced locally. This reduces the need for transportation, warehousing, returns, and a great deal of scrap.

Solid Waste Management - There is a raging debate in environmental circles regarding the use of paper vs. plastic grocery bags. It turns out paper bags have a number of problems. Their recyclability and biodegradability work in their favor though. These things could be composted or recycled. Plastic items for similar purposes will be in landfills for more than 10,000 years.
1+ Billion Reasons Why China Will Choose Commerce Over Citizen Control
If this is the story I am thinking of, then Gandhi didn't even know he wasn't allowed to be in the first class.

(The different links to the negotiation book don't seem to work, so what I am talking about is the story linked to by sfk, which I also read in the autobiography and also figures prominently in the film).
When is the push-notification service that Apple talked about coming online? They'd have to go through Apple (and I don't know if they'll be charging), but it could work.
Each mongrel in my cluster was only 75mb, last time I checked.
The app does not cost money.

I don't know what Loopt's business model is but I would imagine a location-aware mobile ad platform would be pretty valuable.
I don't know whats happened recently but I grew up with Forest M Mim's books. They were written on engineers/graph paper and handwritten but overall very informative. I bought them at RadioShack back in the day, but you can probably find them online for very cheap.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forrest_Mims
All very good points. Is there a way to do this without the rest of those sheets of paper going to garbage? Maybe if it glues small rectangles together across instead of a large sheet of paper?

Some of this reminds me of some of Stephenson's earlier work with raw material feeds being distributed as we do water, with local fabrication at home in a microwave-sized device.
Your comment points out why I don't understand "left-leaning" folk. Mentioning he makes over $250,000 doesn't need to be "admitted". He should be proud of it. It's not that his money is precious, it's a direct result of his contribution to the economy.

And the money isn't whats important, the work that produced that money is what's important. Whenever someone in the country works hard and produces something, it benefits every person in the US, including you and me. However when we decide that the only important thing is that he made more money then us, then people like him will decide to either produce less (it's not hard if you are already well off to take a well earned vacation), or just produce more overseas to avoid our confiscation attempts.
I'd like to point out that the current administration's (no matter who they are) focus tends to manifest itself in various small business programs.

Notably, SBIR/STTR: http://www.sba.gov/SBIR/indexwhatwedo.html
Java will never, ever replace c++. Because there will always be a need for stuff that "really compiles" rather than "compiles with respect to the JVM" for both performance, and reliability issues.

In my personal opinion, Java is a fad for children. However, that may be a bit harsh. Perhaps Java too has its place. But just as sport cars, loved by teenagers, won't ever replace the need for a reliable sedan in one's more mature years, similarly, there will always be grownup applications that need the speed and reliability of c/c++, even if they are not as "easy to program" (read: rely on plug-in libs) or are not as "flashy" in terms of the ui. Just as I personally no longer fancy swing sets, I really haven't a need for SWING either. :-)

(Oh, one other thing I almost forgot: Java doesn't have pointers. No programming language without pointers should be taken seriously by people who have reached age 21. It's kind of like having a car without a combustion engine. It's just nonsense.)
"This guy" is Newt Gingrich, btw.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=317376

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=111798

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=149317

http://searchyc.com/ask+electronic
For some things (e.g. the hair dressing you mentioned), I concede that licensing requirements are unnecessary, and their use should be reexamined. For others (public defenders, surgeons, structural engineers, etc.) such licensing and formal training is in my opinion critically important. To construe it as purely anti-competitive is pretty misleading.

What proportion of top-level architects don't have architecture degrees?

Finally, do you think that teaching citizens about civic culture and American political institutions is a mis-use of public education?
Two of my favorite war/peace songs
Being 4th for questions on stackoverflow (as the article mentions) could mean a lot of things... could mean it's popular, could also mean that people using it have more questions.
When you're ready for a bit of theory, the Art of Electronics is good stuff, with broad coverage.