skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> By officially going to a public high school, students cede a

> large portion of their responsibility for their education to the school.

> In other words, if you aren’t learning much, it’s the school’s fault.

I'm a senior at a public high school, and I absolutely disagree. The onus to learn always falls on the individual. I refuse to believe that there is a student anywhere that really wants to learn but cannot. Libraries and the internet are always available, as are other people — all of these resources can be learned from.

The author seems unhappy with their high school experience. Public schooling may have its flaws, but to blame one's lack of an education on one's school would be misguided.

> For example, a good way of teaching Geometry is to have students write a graphics renderer.

No it wouldn't. Not everyone is interested in programming or computer games.
Microsoft Research's So.cl is now open to public
Glad to hear that Firefox is looking at providing a Metro Themed browser (even if it's just to get away from IE), but looking at the icon set from the pictures, I think they are missing the boat on the Metro style.
A few of us HN'ers got our start working in KC for Cerner about 10 years ago (pitdesi, ashbhoopathy, and myself among others).

Would love to hear one day how you guys got one of the stodgiest HealthCare IT companies in the midwest to build on top of an Open Source stack.
Keeping all the world's knowledge in the library at Alexandria worked so well the last time : /
ZX81 and the manual!
> I just wish people could forget the idea that Math is fun. It is not. It's interesting, but it's not fun and can be totally counter intuitive, thus there is no "fun" way to demonstrate it.

(Disclosure: I haven't read the OP, or the rest of your post really beyond this sentence. I skimmed.)

(Double disclosure: I too am in high school.)

An emphasis on "fun" is one of the most misleading concepts in trying to get people to pay attention. Some things can be gamified, others well...not so much. (See: Educational games: The bane of every elementary school kids existence.)

In a way it's almost profane. Trying to make things interesting by making them fun when the underlying concept is already interesting. It's just that you have to focus on it in a small picture, so it makes it hard to see the bigger concepts that it's a part of. (Objectively I know that if I read through mathematics texts long enough it gets non-trivial and interesting, but actually doing that is so painful as to be impossible. (Impossible in the "I see no way to do it." sense of the word.))

Objectively I also know that I'll be mediocre at any sort of CS effort until I take the plunge. Still not motivating. Other things are just too distracting. I almost feel I should just unplug my Ethernet cable and hide it until I emerge a hacker.
It's not about what is missing. It's about what is there. The monolithic web development 'MVC' platform thread is dead and gone. Mojito is a behind the curve also-ran, definitely not New Hotness.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"

This applies especially and probably mostly to the police and government.

Police indirectly get more money for more arrests. Therefore, arrest more people.

You should be glad when you get a driving ticket. It's a proxy for an arrest or two that could have happened instead.
Travis CI : Metrics, Monitoring, Infrastructure, oh my
1972 a pdp-8 running FOCAL-8 on an DEC LTE-01 (aka an ASR-33)
I'd say fun is a very individual thing and everyone does not see fun the same way as you do. Abstract doesn't mean less fun.

I find most math interesting and boring, but there's also some parts of math I find fun believe it or not. Even at a high level.
From reading the comments here, people seem to think I'm dropping out and don't plan on going to university. Let me clear that up.

I'm going to get a Certificate of Profiency (I'm currently waiting for the results). In California, it's legally required to be seen as the equivalent of a high school diploma. It's essentially a GED for people under 18.

I plan on going to a high-end university in 1-2 years.
Zen Coding — a new way of writing HTML and CSS code
What's next for HTTP
"... Christopher Hitchens’ expressing his disdain for religion ..."

First, Hitchens' arguments clearly aren't 'intended to offend, annoy or scare' and it's frankly a little disheartening lumping him in with Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter, two people who spew inflammatory rhetoric with the only goal being to gain listeners and page views.

Second, Hitchens' isn't going to be arrested any time soon.
This might be nitpicking, but them donating only $100k (even if its to each) still seems paltry in my opinion. You hit a billion, donate a full million bucks!
Better With Age: A History of Epic Games
What I find interesting about playing around with HiDPI mode is that there are a lot of apps that do not display text in HiDPI, or are mixed between scaled-up pixels and sharp text.

Whereas with the iPad transition most apps just needed to scale up their artwork, there are going to be a lot of apps that will have pixelated text on HiDPI Macs, at least at first. Sparrow, Reeder, etc.
The site is still raw but I decided to put it up to get feedback. It's a file marketplace mixed with a referral system. I think people should be rewarded for sharing.
Fair shout. Like I said, I bought my last laptop 18 months ago and back then I didn't think Dell had any good options; admittedly their website is a maze of twisty laptop models and brands and price points which I may well have missed something good in. Amusingly in this case I can't see any picture of their laptop and when I leave the tab via ctrl+shift+tab it pops something up saying '9'. Very professional.

I would also observe that I'm wasting money on an operating system I don't really want on the Dell as well, although it would likely be somewhat more useful to me than OSX.

I guess that it does look like a really nice machine. I think it says something though about Dell's image as a company that I find it hard to believe they've genuinely created something that good at this point (and yes, I have owned Dell machines before; that's part of why). I guess I should probably cut them some slack...
(Rewritten in an attempt to be less grouchy.)

As far as I can tell, when people complain about being downvoted for expressing an unpopular view, that's usually not what happened. Usually it's that their comment was rude. Occasionally it was just mediocre. Most of the time their position per se wasn't particularly unpopular.

What one ought to do is take one's lumps like everybody else and figure out how to make better comments. The worst thing to do is complain about it. That is guaranteed to earn downvotes, as it should on any site optimizing for signal/noise ratio.

Genuinely unconventional or unpopular comments tend to get downvoted by some and upvoted by others until they come out close to even. The reason for this is that many users, me included, make a point of giving a compensating upvote to posts they feel were treated unfairly, irrespective of whether they agree. Only posts with negative votes attract this kind of fixup, so they end up about even. A corollary is that if your comment stays downvoted, odds are that a fair-minded jury of your peers found it to be rude or be poorly expressed. Another corollary is that genuinely unconventional comments are often easy to overlook, because they're indistinguishable (in rank) from bland ones.

The conclusions are: when downvoted, resist complaining; ask yourself how your comment was rude or could have been better expressed; and when certain that everyone else is wrong, bite your tongue anyway. Just remember what they say about wasting your time and irritating the pig.
TL;DR: There's a time and place for everything learned in someone's education.

This is probably a terrible explanation, but I'm giving it my best shot.

Point #1: Math is fun while you are learning it and figuring it out. After that, it isn't so much fun as it becomes exactly what it was meant to be: a tool. It's just useful at that point. "I know how to do X and it's useful in this case." To the point that there isn't a fun way to demonstrate it, I disagree. One of the best examples I can think of was when I took a science class and we were learning about velocity, vectors, and acceleration. The teacher had us build model rockets and launch them, guessing how high they would go based on calculations. That same teacher went to a different school and did the same thing, except on a bigger scale. All the students worked on one rocket with a goal to break the sound barrier. They put a few electronics in the rocket to measure acceleration and g-forces (IIRC). When the students calculated the altitude the rocket would reach, they were pretty close. Not terribly advanced, but advanced enough with actual application of the concept being learned. It wasn't entirely out of reach for the students to achieve, but a teacher needed to guide them there. The teacher needs to figure out how to present the information in an engaging way to draw students in. But, at the same time, the student needs to be willing to fish for the answer and occasionally accept the I-don't-know answer.

Point #2: While I understand the student's sentiment, I agree with your point. Unless a student realizes they could be FIRED over the fact that something is late at a real job, it won't sink in. It's a good thing to have deadlines, otherwise someone would be spending all their time on reddit/HN. A better approach would be to give the student an assignment that's a little tight on the schedule. That forces the student to concentrate on the material if they want to get a decent grade. I think it would be better if a student was kicked out of the class if they repeatedly turned things in late, and in a sense, be fired from the class.

Point #3: You don't need to learn the theory right away. There's no point in drowning a student in theory when they have nothing concrete to anchor it to. If I started talking about Optimization without giving a student an example of a slow program and a fast program that do they exact same thing with the only difference being optimization, they wouldn't have much of a reference point. If you look at a big program that's had execution analytics run against it and realize that a slightly less optimal solution is slowing the program down by a fact of 5, you then have a solid reference point to learn algorithms/data structures and optimization. You then understand the why behind needing to know something, rather than someone standing in front of a whiteboard saying, "Hey, this is important, you need to know this."
To be fair, he did qualify it as a design in progress.

That said, I think standing out from the pack is far from the worst thing they could do. I love the live tiles idea, but the rigid design language gives everything a very "samey" look that I think could impact the usability of Start screens with lots of applications. How many one color icons will it take before they all start to look alike?
Methods are referred to as being attached to objects, even though they are multimethods. This appears to imply asymmetric multimethods. Again, huh? What a strange design decision to make!

Method dispatching is done symmetrically on the arguments in Cecil.
I reckon that's a good question to ask. In my personal experience - very rarely, only in cases when building reusable components or working directly with hardware.

The truth is the answer will depend entirely upon which field of programming you are working in.

Most programmers are building stuff for clients (like websites, software etc.) wherein programming is just a minor part of the process.

Also, most of the programmers I've spoken to rarely use any computer science theory because of the state of RAD - mostly everything is already implemented, tested and optimized.

Sounds to me like you would be more suited towards the engineering side of things rather than traditional 'software' development.

I'd say you'd be pretty well suited to game development which usually involves a lot of math and physics as well as optimizing. Anything hardware related should probably fit your aforementioned requirements.
What's going to change at the university? I mean sure they have more variety but aren't they incentivizing a credential? Are the teachers there magically more fun or interested in teaching you?
I've used it, and had no problems at all. It's missing a few features before I can whole-heartedly recommended it over Opacity[1], which is what I use for the same purpose right now. Right now I'd need to make separate on/off state, for example, for each button. Opacity's factories & variables make that much easier.

That said, Opacity's development has slowed to a crawl. If the gentleperson(s) behind PaintCode keep it up, they will surely surpass it very soon.

[1]: http://likethought.com/opacity/
Looks like slightly themed version of current Firefox Mobile running on a tablet:

http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Fire...
"I'm really looking forward to future biofeedback tech. It'd be interesting to know my blood sugar level and heart rate at all times."

http://youtube.com/watch?v=bt-lv6IJPxc (animation of a hypothetical, nanotech-based, dermal display)

P.S. I have a reply to your McLuhan comment, but I've been too busy/lazy to have typed it out yet.
Both of those are covered under "our causal intuitions have come detached from their immediate objects." ;-)
I am working on a start up in my spare time myself. My partner and I know very well that we need to launch and iterate. For me, there's a fear that if we launch too early, there may be too many issues that will turn users away. When we will finally be "ready" (as much as we could be), those users will not want to come back and try our service. It's all about first impressions.
Having said that, I STILL believe in launching early. I interpret it, though, as stripping as many parts of the product as possible and then gradually adding them in
Built a Ruby-based web app skeleton for Heroku [1] and then built another for Python [2].

Followed that up by making a ticket sales web app using the SeatGeek affiliate API and my Python app skeleton [3]. I also demoed [2] and [3] to the Memphis Python user group [4].

I apologize for the javascript failure on Tickets of Memphis, it seems the SeatGeek API has stopped accepting my jQuery JSONP requests so I have a ticket in.

[1] https://github.com/dpritchett/wwebsite

[2] https://github.com/dpritchett/wwebsite-python

[3] http://ticketsofmemphis.com

[4] http://www.slideshare.net/dpritchett/quick-and-dirty-heroku-...
Your example is really reaching far in order to prove some "nefarious" effect, as you put it. In order to make the case for some weird "ad-based discrimination" you've put yourself in the role of the ad-space owner AND the ad buyer which really doesn't make any sense. It's in the interest of ad buyers to show their ads on websites that relate to their product, plain and simple. I'd say that the initial assessment of you being a "confused user who isn't really sure how privacy works" is proving to be quite accurate.
Well of course. I don't really care about the Karma. If I got spammed to death I'd just make a new account. I was just wondering because it seems like an odd design decision. I wanted to know the rationale behind it.
Yes, I see that. But that middle part irked me too much.
Mozilla Showers JSConf Attendees With Free Boot To Gecko Smartphones
Those numbers aren't comparable.

While FOSS was a key component that allowed Red Hat to make those profits, it wasn't the only one. It wouldn't happen without RH's employees, expertise, marketing/brand, etc.

It's not like RH took the enormous value of FOSS and given only little of it back.

They took that value and created even more value on top of that.
The design work hasn't even started; this prototype is built with the same front-end code and theme as Firefox for Android. (Actually it's using a mish-mash of two different Android themes, because of a quirk in the way the prototype is built.)

The icons in the prototype were all designed for Android, and all will be replaced by real Windows/Metro icons in the final product.

[Usual discosure: I am a mobile Firefox developer.]
If you haven't already, I highly recommend you reading Derek Sivers' "There's no Speed Limit" post: http://sivers.org/kimo
Smart Sand Can Clone Objects, Says MIT
Drafts session timeouts: How long is too long?
Absolutely that's the provenance of the saying. Eliot just wasn't saying what the saying says =).
1985 or so, on the CPC6128 produced by Amstrad, and in Germany sold by Schneider Elektronik. I programmed it in Locomotive BASIC. It also had Logo, with the turtle graphics feature. It was meant for kids, but it also felt like that too much as well, so I didn't bother using it too much.

The machine had a 3" (sic) diskette drive. Unfortunately, the 3.5" diskette made the race and became predominate. 3" was prohibitively expensive within short order.
Greppin in the GNU World
"git status" 1.6 times faster in WebKit repo due to re-organizing ignores
The price for free Android apps may be your privacy
s/browsers/platforms/. Don't lump all browser versions into one pile.

I can grasp what you're referring to. Bleeding-edge features are tough to support in large part because of Internet Explorer's slow release cycle.

However, the decision has still been made to jump onto a runaway train. All users should be treated the same. Choose an approach that doesn't pick favorites.
I'm not really using my mac much, so not for me. Interesting though - I've thought it would be neat to have something that's similar though different.

Imagine a keyboard which was itself a mini computer. You could program macros into the keyboard itself, and then have them issued to the computer. Instead of the keyboard being a dumb entry into the computer, it becomes more like of an input client.

From seeing your product I realise - you could do something similar to this with the keyboard driver, and then have all the benefit of a high quality off-the-shelf keyboard.
TFA says that the prototype is based on the Fennec (Firefox Mobile) XUL code. But since it's so early and so ugly, I expect the styling to become more Metro-y as development progresses.
10 Years in, Time to Reinvent Axosoft and OnTime
New "copyright center" ready to fire on pirates
So developers run Chromium instead. No big deal.
My comment was more on the actual nav bar and the icons contained within.

Especially for a browser, I really don't think that the nav bar is where you want to be standing out. Look and feel the way the user expects and get out of the way. Where the browser should be differentiating itself, is displaying web content as fast and as well as possible.

In terms of the look of the tile, I'm not entirely sure I agree with you, however I certainly don't feel strongly enough about it to argue.
I, for one, agree with the author in large part. I’m in my fourth year of college, about to graduate, and I can say that the majority of my school experience has been an utter waste.

I love learning, and that’s why I’ve never been a great student. In middle school and high school, I spent my free time learning about things that interested me—especially programming. In that time I learned about everything I could because school wasn’t enough. Dynamics and kinematics, geometry, optics, digital signal processing, splines, vector and matrix math, programming language design, lambda calculus, type systems—things no student my age was expected to know or care about.

I got high grades whenever I bothered to put in the busywork, but I had little reason to. Points and grades aren’t worth anything.

Pretending that grades have intrinsic value is toxic to learning and innovative thinking. You get what the teacher explains straight away, and want to move on? Not allowed: you have to go at everyone else’s pace. You want to know more about a related topic? Too bad: you have to follow the curriculum. You want to do projects with real-world value? As if! You have to do homework and memorise information—sadly, the kind of information that might have deep meaning to you if it were framed in another way.

I do think losing points for late assignments is fair, though. It inconveniences the person doing the grading, and in the real world, lateness isn’t tolerable. Besides, if you don’t follow the (meaningless) directions, you should expect (meaningless) punishment.

But here’s the thing: would I have bothered to learn on my own if I hadn’t had the insufficient school system to piss me off? Somehow, I think not.
The passive voice is a hoax $100 if you can find a journal that requires it.
Try it. I have (not that exact combo, but the same ballpark). Or find one of the many people who eat terribly but not excessively and are thin.

I didn't say it was in any way a good idea - just a retort to the OP's position that short term weight loss is not about calories.
Pal-V one: a commercially viable flying car within existing regulations
> He suggested to use what teachers ask as a starting point

You need to do this whatever you're doing. Learning at school? Learn more than you need for the test. Learning at university / college? Learn more than you get in lectures. Reading a newspaper? Learn more than they tell you. Reading reports of research? Learn more about the research used.

> but ithe project actively shows students, “Here’s a concrete application of what I’m teaching that you can benefit from.”

BAH! Knowledge for knowledge's sake is a good thing. Clever exploration of unknowns is an important driver for science. The most well known example of this is Feynman. If you haven't read his books I thoroughly recommend them. He sees something, and wonders why it happens, and then goes off to try to understand it. He was a genius, and so his observations and explorations were usually of interesting things that involved high level science, often unknown at that time. But it's a useful principle.

> Following directions has no intrinsic value: it’s a means to an end. For example, why do students lose points for late homework? In what way is homework less valuable the day after it was due, besides a rule that just says so?

Unfortunately a lot of your school colleagues are going to end up in the kind of jobs where "following directions" is all that's required. Here is an important lesson: Sometimes you will have an idiot for a boss. That boss will tell you to do something. S/he will tell you to do it in a certain way. You will know, and have facts and evidence to support you that you're being asked to do something stupid, or in a stupid way. You might even be able to put a monetary figure on it - "doing this will cost us $X every month!". It is very frustrating, but sometimes NO ONE CARES. All they care about is the fact that you did what you were asked.

Also, getting work done early is usually a good thing. Learning to plan and prioritise work is an important life lesson, so learning to hand it in on time (with gentle penalties for lateness) is important. Often late doesn't mean "minus one point" it means "tough shit you blew it".

Good luck though, you sound motivated and committed.