skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I was in HS I recognized it as a waste. I didn't really learn much. The people around me didn't care and it mostly felt like day care. It all was mostly busy work. The only way to get a "challenging" education was to jump through a bunch of hoops, such as joining Key Club, marching band, AP everything, extracurricular this and that, all of it just a way of padding a college resume. Now those are things you will never use in real life. I did not want any of that.

So I dropped out early and went straight to college. No one cares what you did in high school. No one ever asks.

I don't know what kind of HS teaches about Keats but It did not appear in my enriched English classes (between normal and honors); 5 paragraph essays did, though. The few highlights of high school were the calculus class I had to fight tooth and nail to get into and of course programming. But I didn't just want to learn more about programming I also wanted to learn more about automata, AI, security and so on.

I also do appreciate the finer arts. I went to New Mexico Tech and learned a great deal of engineering but also humanities. It was only then that it was presented in a rigorus manner. What do you think will appeal to "nerds" like us? Memorizing a list of kings and dates? Or learning about the strategics and logistics of geo-politics?

As for your "life is full of hardships" quip, as if that tells me anything, that's a great story. It really is.
No problem. For what it's worth, I realize that high school (especially public high school; I went to one, too) can be a brutally authoritarian place sometimes. I pretty much hated most of mine, for the same reason.

That said, there are parts of high school that I'd give money to experience just one more time. And of all of the people I know, I don't think anyone has ever said that they wished they'd paid less attention in school. Good luck with it.
Thanks for the comment, enjoy your blog.

Not looking to reinvent the wheel. Old dinosaurs like myself will remember that the term "web bugs" was in use long before "spyware" and "adware" became popular terms.
Do it in Haskell. The you can explain it to me. :-)
The "Toyota Way" is about process control in manufacturing. When will people learn that you don't manufacture code.
There is a whole ton of logic in there uses the current forecast, weather alerts, etc then determines based on keywords it finds what terms users might be talking about.

Unforunately weatherbug is struggling right now so it's not working as good as it should be. I'm switching to weather underground as we speak.
from the title - "the following is a fictionalized account of how Alan Greenspan, magically made America’s life savings disappear and diverted our attention from global warming"
really? so this is a fictional story about a real person and what they didn't do.
Alan Greenspan has taken some responsibility for the current market conditions, but I don't believe the bulk of the error rests with him.
This seems like somewhat of a reply to my comment, just more general.

I actually am very intellectual. I kind of want to drop out, but that doesn't meant I have any intentions of doing so. I know that learning to write and such will be useful once in awhile in my adult life. And more importantly, I know that good grades will get me into a good college (and hopefully also get me a good scholarship).

I'm #1 class rank at the 42nd-highest-ranked public HS in the US. So just because nerds like coding more than school and wish they could trade school for coding doesn't make us all unintellectual
I especially could not stand the EU vs. Microsoft case where those jackasses heaped on tons of fines to basically siphon a few billion dollars away from a US corporation.

As much as I know MS has their issues with anti-trust, boy did that piss me off.
Car Company Bailout Failure Spooks Foreign Buyers and Owners - Associated Content
Rands In Repose: A Signature Cadence
I tried it and I didn't like it. I appreciate what they are trying to do, but I am not looking to redesign my workflow around getsatisfaction but rather optimize my exisitng worflow (currently around gmail).
This sums it up well for me: http://plover.net/~bonds/asdf.html
I created Ghostery so I could see what trackers, analytics and widgets sites I visit use. Very different use case than the misnomer "spyware cookies".

Spyware cookies are something invented by Spyware software vendors to sell more software.

"Spyware cookies" miss the issue IMHO. It is the responsibility of the sites you visit to remain transparent; focusing on "cookies" incorrectly makes it a 3rd party service issue, i.e. tell me who allowed the cookie to be set in the first place not just that it exists.
Hi, i'm pretty interested in running our service on an affiliate network. Don't use AIM though. Would appreciate a chat over email --> zaki (at) timesvr.com
Is this the new Mac mini? Doubt it.
I'm looking for a few quality affiliates who can take my product in front of the right people. Couldn't find an email --> zaki (at) timesvr.com
Autism Support Network Launches
Need help with autism? The Autism Support Network connects families and individuals touched by ASD with each other, provides support and insight, and acts as a resource guide for treatments, strategies and therapies for autism.
> I'm (although this must sound naïve) certain that entrepreneurship and business is my passion and thus I set it as my focus

Be careful about deciding this too early, and clinging to that decision too long.

When I was in 11th grade, my passion was electric guitar, and I was sure I wanted to be a rock star when I grew up. I have completely the wrong temperament to be a rock star, no stage presence to speak of, and a shitty sense of rhythm. But I really liked playing guitar, and of course it was the cool thing to do. I ended up learning a bunch of licks and building my own electric guitar as a senior project, but I'm no rock star.

When I was in 12th grade, I was sure I wanted to be a theoretical physicist. I'd taken a couple college honors courses in high school and doubled the class average, so I thought it was only natural. But once I got up to thermodynamics and quantum mechanics and had to spend 20 hours a week in the lab, I found I didn't really have the passion for physics. Staying in the physics major once I'd realized that my passion was for computers was probably the worst mistake of my life.

If you'd told me any time in the past 10 years that I'd end up working for a company with 20,000 employees, I'd've laughed incredulously in your face. I've wanted to do startups since I was about 19, and the idea of working in corporateland has been anathema since I was about 13. Yet here I am, excited about starting at Google, and I figure I'll at least give it a chance and see how it is.

If you're really passionate about entrepreneurship now, do it - now. But try some other stuff in college, and don't be afraid to switch your focus to them if it looks like that's really where your passion lies. Even if it means abandoning significant skills in entrepreneurship. There's essentially no risk to trying things out in college.
You're talking to someone who not only went to a public high school (and not a particularly great one), but had to fight to take college courses, as well as the few AP classes the school offered. I was just as bored as you writing five-paragraph essays; I winced my way through such winning courses as "Home Economics" and "Typing", as well as a chemistry class where everything was taught as a fact to be memorized, without context or theory. When I went to college, I was convinced that I hated biology, because in high school it had been taught as a simple matter of memorizing nomenclature (I went on to get PhD in biochemistry, so I guess I was wrong about that).

So yeah, high school sucked for me sometimes, too. But I think the difference is this:

"The only way to get a "challenging" education was to jump through a bunch of hoops, such as joining Key Club, marching band, AP everything, extracurricular this and that, all of it just a way of padding a college resume."

Ya know what? I did a lot of that stuff because I enjoyed it. I didn't pad my resume by playing in the band; I absolutely loved to play (still do). And I took the AP classes because I learned more. I'll give you that Key Club kind of sucked, but then again, I never really joined -- I was too busy with the debate team and the newspaper. And my knowledge of Keats? Occasionally useful on trivia nights down at the bar.

You can see these things as hoops, or you can see them as opportunities. I'd rather know the guy who does the latter.
Why not? See Gutmann, Peter: "A Cost Analysis of Windows Content Protection":

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called “premium content”, typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista...

Even before Vista was released, this guy predicted that third-party hardware would exhibit persistent stability problems with Vista. And, lo, the reports from the field just keep coming in, even years later. (Though presumably the bugs have gradually been worked out by this point.)

(Note that I can't report any bad Vista experiences myself; I have not used it.)
Oh come on, Jim Davis at the bottom? Garfield may be terrible, but have you ever read Marmaduke?
I'm looking over your stuff at http://markbao.com/ ... it looks like you're more concerned with appearing to be an entrepeneur than with the work itself and product quality. These sites are simply fluff.

Also, I'm not sure how you can really create quality small business collaboration tools without having been in the working world. Just an observation.

Making $10B is not a very admirable life goal: http://markbao.com/lifegoals . Not to mention that $10B will be today's $200M in fifteen years.

Good luck with what you're doing, and be sure to focus.
Not HN material
I wish someone would give me a column even though I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. Greenspan had a role in the current financial crisis, but he was not the sole engineer, nor even the biggest one. For actual, sound info on this subject, check out the EconTalk podcast/blog.
Thanks for the feedback.

>These sites are simply fluff.

The sites on there are pretty old, which is why I linked a newer list (incl http://ramamia.com) The third isn't an open site, fourth and fifth just experiments.

>Also, I'm not sure how you can really create quality small business collaboration tools without having been in the working world. Just an observation.

You're right, though I'm not really saying AOD is the best in the world while there are many more. It was something I wanted to manage my work, and it worked for me. Hopefully it helps others. If it doesn't, then so be it.

>Making $10B is not a very admirable life goal: http://markbao.com/lifegoals . Not to mention that $10B will be today's $200M in fifteen years.

It's a goal and an aspiration, that I'd like to meet. Care to elaborate on why it's not an admirable goal?

Again, thanks.
Ok, perhaps there's a better term then. I hadn't given it much thought. I just feel like "web bug" is too confusing.
Er, what exactly is intellectual about 1300 hours of busy work? I fully support learning/reading/studying, but formal education only includes those things obliquely as an accidental side effect. High School is mostly about babysitting and obedience -- your success is measured by your willingness to jump through arbitrary hoops specified by authority figures. Sure, the ones who take an interest in the material will learn something, but that has a lot more to do with the individual than the school system.

I still think going to school and college is the right decision for well over 99% of students, but I think it's a big mistake to treat formal education as a one-size-fits-all panacea.
Lean is more of a operations philosophy than process control. There are elements that are perfectly applicable to software:

Kaizen: Floor-employees are encouraged, expected and empowered to make a Kaizen event when they observe that something can be done better.

Andon: Production-line employees are empowered to stop the line if they observe a quality problem.

A central pillar of lean is always to look at what you do, and figure our how to do it better, and to trace problems to the source and fix them there. It's easier to do in mass manufacturing, in no small part due to the fact that it's much easier to measure quality along a supply chain, than in anything custom built, including software.

It's basically about realizing that it's the people who do the actual work who are able to tell where, when and why your quality isn't good. At least every week there's a story on the daily WTF about a manager who "knows better" and overrules a developer with bad consequences.
Ah, I see you're the creator of Io. Do you know of any Io tools for Vim? Syntax and indent would be great if nothing else...Google didn't turn up anything.
This headline really threw me, as it sounds like some kind of sexual predator was using social media tools to research victims or something. Or am I the only one who read it like that?

The reality is that a company called "College Prowler" was using Facebook for guerrilla marketing. Whew!
It looks like the Chumby is a good open hackable alternative
Unfortunately, due to the unreliability of the weather bug api, i've had to switch to the weather underground api which makes this much more difficult. Currently working on this.
Photosharing sites like flickr have autogenerated email addresses for mobile upload and this doesn't seem to be an issue.

Also it looks like emails to this device goes to the 'messages' app for review first [is this correct?]
Is anyone using D? Is it a lot better than C++ or just a little?
The story didn't talk about anything that wasn't fiction. It didn't say that he pushed subprime mortgages or derivatives or any other economic thing that led to the disaster. Basically, the article said "he's responsible, but we don't know the reason".

So, for your enjoyment, the story of Obama's 2008 presidential victory:

As a young boy, Barak found a magic flower. This flower endowed him with super-human strength. When old man McCain came around, he was easily able to beat him up and all the voters cheered because they liked boxing and then he found the key to the White House under a doormat! The end!

Yeah, it's a story, but it doesn't say anything.
I sucked a lot of the time.

I guess then you are one of the few who liked things like debate team, key club, the school newspaper, or other clubs. I didn't. I would wager that a large number of people don't, either. Yet we're forced to sit through it and be told that if we don't like it we are being arrogant or that it is bad.

I'm sorry if I just can't see the value of spending hours and hours of my youth putting together the school newspaper that no one reads, or the joys of blowing on an instrument that no one likes listening to but if you do, that's fantastic. I don't think you're bad or different for liking them.

But I don't like them or cared to spend time on them. And that doesn't make me a bad arrogant person. It just means I had different goals.
Interesting account. But is this what passes for a miraculous escape these days?
I really wasn't targeting my comment toward you. This rant was a long time coming.
Looks really great. What are the physical dimensions of it? As compared to an iPhone or a netbook for example?
> I was an idiot. Back then, I didn't have the perspective to know what was important and what was unimportant...

And what makes you think the people designing your high school curriculum knew any better or that teaching you important things was even their goal?

I think with a little guidance from well educated people I could have spent my high school years learning a hell of a lot more important things than my school wanted me to.

I agree with your advice that dropping out of HS should be discouraged, but mostly just because it'd hurt you later if you didn't have a decent grasp of reading/writing/math and a diploma to get past the stigma of not having one.
that's what counts for "it's a miracle no one was killed" these days, I'd say.
I read the comments, and I didn't think that they were any more insightful than what you'd find on Reddit. In great part this is because this is a not a topic that can be resolved by hackers or entrepreneurs.
It would be better if you linked directly to the source(in this case, Seth Godin) than copy paste the entire text and drop a little "courtesy" note at the end of it.
It's me. On my second start-up now, and certainly learned a lot from the first one. Don't think you'd get that much from meeting me though - why not just start your own start-up, fail, then start again? Then you can have conversations with your ideal person-to-meet all day long for free!
the problem is that our school system wastes WAAAAY too much time. Why? Because they need to coddle to the slow and dimwitted, instead of hurting their feelings and sending them to remedial classes.

They could probably teach the K12 material in half the time if they tried.
One of the key reasons that the wii and the Flip are so successful is because they appeal to other generations than the tech savvy ones.
Yes, I consider it an accomplishment.

I consider it an accomplishment because we opened up a career for a bunch of people who were outside the system. We made dreams happen and we're going to be doing it again and again and again.

I think it's pretty cool that this twenty-something kid from South Carolina has now produced his first film that is dropping in 800 theaters. He went from working at a gas station to sitting on a set watching his idea be brought to life by a crew of people. That's fucking awesome no matter how you slice it.

I also think it's cool that 4 people got cast into roles that would have otherwise been years away from them.

And I think it's an accomplishment that a plucky web designer was able to design a poster and have their work show up in theaters and on DVD covers.

As a bonus, it's an accomplishment that we were able to put a community around the process and do something really far outside of the system.

The end result is in the hands of many more people beyond those that worked on it through the site, so the process of getting there is much more important than the final destination.

I mean, dude, we made a movie with PHP. Who the fuck has done that?

So yeah, thanks, I think we did a fantastic job.
xkcd was great back when it was http://xkcd.com/144/ or http://xkcd.com/123/

But no good things last forever.
Dude. Little harsh there...
> Care to elaborate on why it's not an admirable goal?

It smells like rank materialism when put in those terms.
Did We Forget People are Dying of Starvation Due to Commodity Speculation?
Biblical Mythology
Ah, okay. That's what I thought you were getting at. It's not a hard-set goal. I'd like to make money, but it's not the only thing I'm concerned about. The same page has other things not as materialistic.
Flash from Adobe will never be in the official Fedora repository. It isn't Open Source, and Fedora is a pure FOSS distro. Flash 9 on Fedora 9 also has to come from Adobe. And there are Flash 10 binaries from Adobe for Fedora....I'm running 10r12, as I mentioned.
"And what makes you think the people designing your high school curriculum knew any better or that teaching you important things was even their goal?"

I don't think they knew for sure, but they had a hell of a lot better idea about what was important than I did, at the time. And in retrospect, they weren't too far off.

Most people who teach and design high school curricula are incredibly dedicated people, who want you to learn. They certainly aren't doing it for the money and fame.
A website is not a startup. A startup company can have its main business revolve around a website, but you seem to have confused the issue. You have played coder with some websites, but where is the revenue? the marketing? all the non-fun things?

p.s. Poolify -- you have to change the name. Poo-la-fi is how I read it.
Ask HN: What's the best way to learn Java/J2ME to build mobile applications?
In the near future I plan on developing mobile applications (primarily for Blackberry) that are an extension of my rails applications. I am currently using mobile optimized in-browser versions of the applications but that limits the capabilities and benefits of a native mobile application (GPS, offline capabilities, speed).

I'm looking for some recommendations on the the best books/sites/strategies to begin learning the basics of Java and building J2ME apps?

I'm coming from a web dev background (ruby,php,perl etc).
so who is the one?

is s/he yourself?
I know it wasn't specifically at me. Just saying that it seemed to apply to comments like mine.
I pretty much finished AOD before I figured out that it wasn't revolutionary or anything (and in that area, pretty much have to revolutionize to win.)

Poolify was an experiment.

It's a process, still figuring things out. My newest does have plans for the aforementioned.
This isn't an action movie.
You fail to account for ironic value.
You extract a lot of fresh wealth somehow - from finding a giant pile of gold under Kansas to producing objects the entire world wants to buy.

Or.. you sell or give a lot of stuff to the people who you're indebted to. In this case, that's already begun somewhat by all of the purchases China's making in the US - factories, etc.
I can clearly articulate why I don't like vista:

1. Its most annoying feature in my opinion (and its activated by default) is that it caches all your most recently most programs into memory every time your computer starts. Not only do I think this is a stupid feature, it takes ages to complete, hordes the memory, makes your hdd go nuts, and most of all I had no idea wtf was happening with my new computer.

2. file-indexing is activated by default - Microsoft didn't seem to realize this in conjunction with feature #1 makes your computer go crazy every time you start Vista. And it took me a while to figure out what was going on. My new computer which i bought 2 month ago was thus brought to a crawl every time I started up.

3. Interface is pretty but not intuitive, a lot of stuff is moved around for no apparent reason, eg you now have to wade through 3 or 4 links just go get to your network connection properties, which is something that should be more readily accessible to the average user.

I know these are all options which can be modified, but hell it took me a good few hours to figure out, and it annoyed me like crazy. Windows XP in comparison just seems faster, simpler and gets the job done quicker.
The business cycle offers a pretty good compromise: alternating periods of easy and hard.

The easy phase expands the search space, the hard phase prunes the less promising branches.
Why is it that self-professed "nerds" are always so blatantly anti-intellectual?

Anti-intellectual is the wrong term. Anti-system or anti-academia would be better. The nerds you refer to generally believe strongly in learning and becoming smarter (indeed, knowledge and intelligence are measures by which many nerds brag) but not so strongly in the system of academia, "qualifications" and systems of education.
>It's a goal and an aspiration, that I'd like to meet.

I see nothing wrong with this aspiration. I wish the best.
I definitely agree with the point that some drudgery (with benefits that aren't immediately obvious) is necessary in schools, but the state of public education in the US is pretty bad, and in many cases this cartoon is spot on.