skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Second paragraph:

"The results showed that several Asian countries continue to greatly outperform the United States in science and math, subjects that are key to economic competitiveness and research."

Gasp! What's that, Watson? Greenspung actually might have warrant to complain about our education relative to other countries!?
The problem of the delete/backspace dichotomy on character terminals is older than both our ages put together.
Having been to The French Laundry in Napa Valley on a few occasions (admittedly none in the last few years), I can attest that they did not require jackets. They certainly did not in January 1998 when three friends and I dined there without knowing anything about it other than having a recommendation from someone at the St. Jean winery, a place that we had stopped at earlier that same day. A kind woman associated with the winery made reservations for our group and told us how to find the non-labeled house. I probably wore blue jeans to one of the best meals of my life... -Loren
when I clicked on an ingredient it showed me 3 other teas with that ingredient but it was titled "3 other ingredients" instead of "3 other teas/recipes" as I would have expected.
Notes on Amazon S3 Price Calculation
I'm from Browns territory, sorry.
IWF backs down on Wikipedia censorship
So there's this Ruby tool called RDoc that will introspect your project and tell you all about what's inside. Problem solved?

Here, look at RDoc's features (from the RDoc website):

--Generates structured HTML documentation from Ruby source.
--Authomatically extracts class, module, method, and attribute definitions. These can be annonated using inline comments.
--Analyzes method visibility.
--Handles aliasing.
--Uses non-intrusive and implicit markup in the comments.
--Readers of the original source needn't know that it is marked up at all.

Or to come at this from a slightly different angle, don't Ruby's introspection powers provide a release valve for the problems the author is talking about?

Anyway, this is just another occasion to state the old adage, "With great power comes great responsibility." You don't have to crapify your Ruby projects if you don't want to. If you need to enforce clarity at all times, I see no better alternative than Python (which I think makes it a better candidate for scientific or math-intensive projects, MRI slowness aside [although I am curious about the implications of genetic algorithms + Ruby introspection]).

I do speculate that if you take two programmers of equal skill levels and give one Python and the other Ruby, the Rubyist can gain a productivity advantage over the Pythonista via judicious use of Ruby hackery. But this comes at a cost: it does require more thoughtfulness before execution. Maybe you don't want to think that hard, and that's a totally legitimate and respectable position. In the end, which of the two languages you choose will probably have more to do with personal workflow preferences or project management ideologies.

In the case of Rails, yes, it hacks in a DSL and extends Ruby classes, but Rails relies heavily on conventions and things being put in designated areas. It's therefore hard to get lost in a Rails project unless you really have no respect for the conventions (in which case, it doesn't matter what language or framework you're using).
I wonder how much of the monkey patching is really necessary? Recently I have looked at Rails again, and in prototype (Javascript) "function" is monkey patched to have a bind method, so you can write function.bind(object). In Mochikit you have a method bind(function, object). It is not even longer to type. Mochikit is not monkey patched - although admittedly "bind" is in the global scope. Mochikit can prevent the global scope optionally, though.

That is just one example, but I suppose it is more attitude than necessity that makes the difference here...
Good point, I didn't even realize that. I'll get that fixed to avoid confusion.
The way mentioned in the article, might be slightly easier but as I am a vim user and have the vi mode enabled in bash,my command chain for this action is:

^[ k I sudo

Esc (^[ = Esc) exits to command mode, k goes to the previous command, shift-i moves the cursor to the beginning of the line and sudo is well sudo.

Slightly more complex but it is reflex from all of the other programs I use.
Perhaps the UAW can do for American higher education what it's done for the auto industry.
On Why Auto-Scaling in the Cloud Rocks
He invoked Occam's Razor. But most of the other stuff he only mentioned.
If this is new to anyone here, I strongly recommend reading the BASH man page. There's a whole lot of time saving features there.
AT&T Now Supporting Rubinius Development
It's a nice comment. But: He invoked Occam's Razor. Most of the other stuff he only mentioned.
When I went to college a few year ago I got my first Mac -- a Powerbook G4. I had only owned PCs before then but used Macs in the computer labs at school. I loved the Powerbook and didn't look back.

Of course, at work I have to use a PC so I can't speak too much to web development on the Mac. In general, though, I have to deal with a lot less of "trying to get things to work" on OS X and a lot more "working with things".
fonts: the letters are sticking to each other in my firefox view. Look at YC news fonts. the letters never stick to each other. Try to fix this. This is very important when the overall feel is concerned. Eg.I would choose another site just because of the font, but many people would too - just that they wont identify what pushed them away.
"Its not information overload, its filter failure"
The Next Generation of Web Development
What do you all think of where "Content Management" will be in the future given the "Cloud" and the need for content to be: (a) separate from the back-end and (b) separate from the template
Striking out with FB (for w/o auth). It is supremely annoying FB doesn't include the # on their public pages, e.g. http://www.facebook.com/people/Gabriel-Weinberg/700754
Dear god in heaven, that's ugly.

I sincerely hope that people voted that up out of a deep appreciation for dark, ironic humor.
Oh I'm not a Bengals fan - just never heard that clever team name before. Well played!
I don't think we had much choice.

However, a few years back they did renegotiate the TA contracts through a strike mostly to just adjust them for inflation. So I feel pretty torn because the university system I am a part of does seem to take advantage of the TA labor, but I don't want to request things that are unsustainable.
If it's a great deal, and the option-holder's only problem is liquidity, loan him the money at an interest rate that's attractive to you and should be easy for him to pay if the shares ever have the expected value. Make the principal and interest due if the shares are ever sold (or when dividends are paid).
Not this Britisher. The only way I can stand to drink tea is the Indian way, stewed and with half a ton of sugar in.
No, its not an endless war. Use Python.
oh wait...
Err... I think that headline isn't quite accurate.
is this just straight adsense for revenue? (though I guess you could obviously sell tea...)
My guess is that you had no choice but to join the union when you took the job.
Is this legal? How can someone force you to join a union against your will?
I think the days of "native desktop" widgets are waning. One the web, there is no "standard" and people are getting used to it. I'm a fan of "native", don't get me wrong. But I'm seeing more of this every day.
I am a long time mac user, not a new switcher, but I am a web developer on a mac. If you are going to heavily rely on VMware to run all of you windows apps you might want to grab a pro or the top of the line macbook, the bare minimum is to juice up the RAM. I have an older white macbook and I love VMWare, but just for running on operating system at once, I usually have a ubuntu server going and when I try using a winxp system it does get a little sluggish on the computer.

In terms of mac version of the software they are equally good, MS Office for mac is usually pretty responsive and doesn't crash. In my experience massive excel files sometime bomb out excel, I'd say the PC version was a little more stable. People have also said the newer version of Adobe CS seem to run better on PC then mac. I have not really had a problem, though. I never heard of mac version of UltraEdit, SQLYog, WinSCP, Camtasia Studio, Although for Camtasia there are some decent mac screencast recorders, but not to my knowledge ones as feature rich as camtasia.

I know a few people who have asked for my advice for buying a computer and being a good apple fanboy, i've recommended macs, once they got the hang of it and the little differences they've really liked it.

I know for me having access to the unix underpinning/programs is a great thing that has help me as well as being able to install pure linux programs, pending dependencies and all that. I've gone the VMWare route for running my windows things and not using boot camp. If I wanted to use the windows side of things for longer periods of time I would use that setup.

All that said, with more market share that macs are gaining it's great using one because most of the system is well thought out and can be pretty powerful when you need it to be. I can develop sites on my system like I am developing on the linux box I am going to deploy to, test sites with in safari, firefox, ie6, ie7 and have a generally secure computer that I can kill any process or program that is freezing up on me.

Just my thoughts
I think in terms of international competitiveness, our schools are doing a little better than our cars. The article says that American math scores were on average comparable to German scores. If only American cars were comparable to German cars....
As of right now yes, but as answerly mentioned going the affiliate route for tea-specific things would probably be a much better way to go.
Mass. students outperform peers on international exam
Unions are a power structure. When they are weak, they are good, because they in fact help workers who are getting screwed. When they become powerful, they become bad, because their leadership acts as all leadership does, and seeks to entrench its power and privilege. You are kind of screwed, because you are caught between two power structures who both can punish you in various ways.
Is there a tool here, begging to be written? Why can't I point to a Ruby object and ask it "Hey, where did that method come from? Which file/method/object defined that? Which were the last three files/methods/objects to redefine that?"

Obviously, you wouldn't want to enable this feature on a production server. But it might be a useful debugging tool. Worth a try, anyway.

Such a thing would only help in tracking down problems. It wouldn't resolve the larger problems of, e.g., namespace collision. ("Oops, library foo and library bar both tried to define an Object.stupify() method!"), though it might make such issues easier to detect. And it would be quite easy to write perverse programs that would defeat my proposed debugger thingy, or even cause it to melt. ("My program uses singletons to dynamically redefine methods on other singletons.") But you could perhaps mitigate the latter by restricting this tool to monitoring Ruby's built in classes, and/or whatever classes the user specifically chooses to aim it at. Moreover, if a piece of Ruby code did cause the metaprogramming-tracker to dump core, that fact might serve as a valuable code smell of its own.
Emperor's New Mind, anyone?
For me, I made the switch because I think Macs are cheaper after about one year of use. If my time equals money, and I value my time at $50/hr (which, yes, is a bit arbitrary), and I assume that I will spend less time configuring, defragging, cleaning, or anti-virusing my Mac than my PC, then it gets to be a real simple equation.

I took a look and just sort of estimated how much maintenance time I put into my PC over the course of a year. I estimated it to be at about 2 hrs per month (which I think was, actually, not enough to keep it secure), or $1200, so the total cost to me, of ownership is whatever the price is of a PC plus $1200.

I find that that maintenance time on my mac is significantly less right now than it was or ever has been on my PC.

So in the end, my answer is: yes-- get a Mac. At the end of the day, they're cheaper.
No way JVM starts in under a second: it's more like 2 full seconds on his hardware.

My machine has lower hardware specs than what the article mentions. This is what i get.

$ java -version

java version "1.6.0_10"

Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_10-b33)

Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 11.0-b15, mixed mode)

$ uname -a

Linux lneves-t61p 2.6.27-9-generic #1 SMP Thu Nov 20 22:15:32 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux

$ echo "public class Test{public static void main(String[] args) {System.out.println(\"Hello World\");}}" > Test.java

$ javac Test.java

$ time java Test

Hello World

real	0m0.174s

user	0m0.068s

sys	0m0.016s

It seems that you are wrong.

More likely he had some of JVM in the filesystem cache. Vista/OSX will pre-fetch JVM modules even after you reboot (not sure about Linux) if you run Java software and especially if you have 8GB of RAM...

Do you mean Class Data Sharing?

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/vm/class-data-shar...

Lets disable it:

$ time java -Xshare:off Test

Hello World

real	0m0.165s

user	0m0.060s

sys	0m0.040s

Not much of a difference.
Will you be doing ANY mac work?

If you're just going to be running everything in Windows anyways, you can get more machine for your dollar by buying another Dell or a Thinkpad.

I use Mac, Linux & Windows at home; most of the development I do is Windows based though, so I use a Vista / Ubuntu dual boot laptop (Thinkpad T61P. I LOVE it.) for when I need to go on-site.
OSX + VirtualBox + XP is a far better Unix/Windows hybrid than XP + Cygwin.
Peer pressure. That's really about it.
Marketing/coercion

My wife's part of the teacher's union only b/c they give you 1M in legal protection if you get sued.
Anyone still using 'M$' (the abbreviation, not the company's products) cannot be taken seriously. (edited for clarity)
I think it's common in sports.

You aren't quite forced to join the union. It's just a condition of taking the job. You can find another job instead. Sucks, but I think it's legal.
For teachers, they argue that nonunion members get the same benefits as union members, so can be forced to pay union dues. Effectively, being forced into the union.
"She lost her teaching credentials instead of 40 years in prison."

It stuns me that 40 years was even a possibility. And it makes me wonder: have there been cases like this that we've never heard of, with similar vengeful prosecutors and similar ignorant, bewildered, defendants, who now cry themselves to sleep every night over what happened to their life?

I wouldn't doubt it.
I remember being asked to "criticize" papers in college. These papers were always classics in the field, in many cases standing up for decades. It always made me uncomfortable, though I eventually settled into a rhythm of simply automatically and mindlessly "criticizing" that "they should have done more". Dress that up in three paragraphs and you're done.

And this is the same thing. Criticizing that somebody should have done more is a null criticism. What needs to happen in any environment where you have limited resources (limited pages the journal will publish, limited time with the children) is that if you're going to say somebody needed to do "more", you need to also criticize what should be removed to make room for this "more".

By that standard, I doubt this teacher could have done much better. There's a balance to reacting to the kids, but you also need to get through the curriculum, which ultimately is there for a reason. (Most of us would probably agree there's too much emphasis on curriculum today, but the solution is not to completely ignore it.) Reacting endlessly to the students comes with its own problems.

I should have been nailed for my formulaic criticisms. But then... students "criticizing" the top 0.01% of papers shouldn't be expected to produce useful results anyhow, any more than this criticism of the teacher does. There's only so many pages and so much time.
I'm pretty sure this is why we as TAs join the union as a rule. Getting sued is a pretty scary thing. My buddy here said that is why he is part of the union.
In general, beyond AppStore, there is no good download platform on the leading OSes. With this product, you still have to know how to drag the app into the App's folder and then you need to know how to dig around your Applications to find it.

If you can get past the AIR app install, it automatically launches it for you.

I don't know which would be easier for grandma to do.
As a developer I like running software that is similar to my production environment. OS X is close enough to Linux that most applications work the same. This makes me more productive and makes development easier.

When I switched it was frustrating. It took me 2 weeks before I felt comfortable navigating the OS.

After that 2 weeks things began to feel comfortable. I feel much more productive on my Mac now than I ever did on a Windows box.
I must admit the part about those people criticizing the videos really doesn't sit well with me. Do they assume there is one perfect way to teach? Are they working towards establishing the "fascist" school of perfect teaching, that all future teachers will have to rigidly adhere to?

Maybe pulling out the letter V would have distracted too much from the letter C, or whatever. I am afraid such people are just parasites to society, somehow they managed to tap into tax payer money and get paid for just sitting on their ass all day talking bullshit. Probably standing in front of a class directly they would be miserable failures. Sorry for sounding so harsh, but my spouse is a teacher, so I guess I am a little too emotionally involved...
If you're asking about whether or not to leave grad school for something that pays, I'd say this: excluding medical school and elite law/business programs, don't go into debt for graduate school, ever. You're much better off in the long run if you can get a decent job (which may not be easy right now).

This is just a matter of general principle. You should do graduate school only if you can do so with savings-neutral compensation at a reasonable (low, but comfortable) lifestyle. Otherwise, you're getting a harsh signal from the market. If you can't get a university to pay you ~$15k as a grad student, you have no hope of getting them to cough up $70k for you as a tenure-track professor.

$1000/month with 1/3 going to tuition? You're getting screwed. TAs simply should not be paying tuition. Professors' kids don't.
I went from Windows at home, Linux for work to using my Macbook both at home and the office. (At the office, it's hooked up to an external keyboard, mouse and monitor.)

Most of my work involves programming, but I ssh into another machine and do everything from the command line. My workflow has changed very little - it's just prettier and behaves much better. I think of OSX as being the prettiest Unix has ever been; it is everything I wanted Linux to be.

I'm not sure how this maps to you. Eclipse supposedly works on Mac, http://developer.apple.com/tools/eclipse.html, but you might want to look at Xcode.
It's nice that they bundle the runtime. With fat hard-drives and blazing fast connections, it would be nice to put an end to the days where installing has been a serious headache for end-users.
I think I am actually a little less productive on a Mac than I was on Linux. However, if you are developing web applications that will be hosted on a *nix server, OS X is much better than Windows.
Well done, sir. (P.S. I'm not my fucking khakis. :-)
5 min introduction to Emacs (magit, textmate bundle etc)  (vid)
I do a fair bit of coding on Mac, Windows and Linux (usually ubuntu) If you switch, be prepared that it will take you a bit of an adjustment, as many of the basic actions that you do without even thinking about it will change.

However, I think over time you'll find that it is not a change you'll regret. I find that in general, you'll get things done faster, and learn new things quicker. It's definitely the platform that I have tended to gravitate to for most of my work.

Plus, the new macbooks are solid.
So, if you're not sure how you feel about unions what have you done as an individual to improve your pay and how has it worked out? If they're saying no to the union, I'm guessing either you've done nothing or if you did ask for more money yourself, they simply laughed at you.

Given that, if you choose to cross the picket line, what you're saying to your employer is that you're happy with your pay which you say is not the case. You're also making the statement that you either think your co-workers who will be striking are either malcontents or greedy, unless you know they're getting significantly less money that you for the same job.

Your decision is simply whether or not you believe your and co-worker's current compensation is fair, or if the deal the union is proposing better represents your market value.
If people would just stop caring about meaningless numbers displayed next to your username, the world would be a better place. Specifically, the world of community-moderated sites wouldn't have to put up with crap submissions that exist solely to gather up-votes.
From what I can tell, this union is generally pretty weak. Its not like if we stop working, the university grinds to a halt. A few students don't get a precalculus lecture (or in my case, some calculus review). Maybe the professor has to grade exams or something. its more a pain in the ass if anything.

Its definitely an interesting dilemma to be in. I thought a post here would give some interesting perspective on how others feel about my situation.
You can't pin the failure of the US auto industry on benefits and pay given to US autoworkers. Japan doesn't beat us in this area because they shortchange workers out of benefits or pay them poorly (they don't); they beat us because they make fuel-efficient cars-- that more people want to buy-- and run more efficient factories.
Why was this "deaded"?
Such karma across many platforms and that is verified by trusted contacts(your friends) will prove in general to be extremely powerful for semantic/social services!

For example an idea of mine is to create a Rotten Tomatoes meets Twitter. Instead of indexing/compiling trusted press/bloggers I want a web-service/site that reads, understands and compiles all the reviews on Twitter about each movie. Right now I have to search tons and tons of Twitter search pages, as opposed to a web-service doing this automatically and presenting it in a simple UI. This same idea can be applied to tons of topics..restuarants, hotels, etc, etc....

One issue with this idea is it can be gamed easily, but not if this service only reads, understands and compiles from trusted/verified sources (karma being a good way to achieve this).

Might be abstract, but 1st time writing this idea/thought out!
Important point here: you WILL have an adjustment period.

You'll have to learn the quirks of the OS. (Where's the damn menu bar!)

You'll have to find similar apps to the ones you've used in Windows. (Assuming you don't want to VM everything -- and if you do -- maybe you should question why you're moving to Mac.)
A lot of graduate student unions will have "grading strikes" wherein they continue to teach but refuse to grade papers or report grades.