skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Consider these facts:

- the US has a government funded k-16 education system

- almost all political journalists rely on government press credentials to do their reporting

- most journalists rely on cultivating strong relationships with the permanent civil service in order to get the inside dirt on politicians.

Now consider these three outrageous claims:

- the New Deal was among the worst things to happen to America in the last 100 years

- forcing universal suffrage democracy on Zimbabwe was a tragic mistake

- the American revolution was accompanied by an incredible amount of mob violence on innocent colonists. It would have been better for everyone if the instigators had been caught and hung. Instead, they won and set up our current government, so we remember them as heroes.

No respectable person believes these last three claims. Indeed, the fact that I even posted such claims indicates that I may be a barbarian from Digg who somehow found his way onto Hacker News. There are two possible reasons why these claims seem so repellent: 1) these views really are crazy and wrong, or 2) believing these three things would undermine the legitimacy of our entire government, including its education system. Thus, via self-selection and overt-selection, no one in the education system or mainstream media defends these claims. We spend our entire life only hearing one side of the story. Americans views of FDR end up being as inaccurate as the Chinese view of Mao.

If you are willing to entertain the idea that #2 may be a possibility, Sydney George Fisher is a fine place to start. Take a look at Chapter 8 of his history of the American Revolution: http://books.google.com/books?id=YmFMcvSIwOEC&printsec=f...
Why are Monads considered difficult?
Go with C++. I learned C++ at 12 and learning every other language (except those based on the functional paradigm) has been a breeze. Starting with a more "difficult" language will give him a good foundation. And C++ really shouldn't be too difficult anyways if he is really interested in the material (sounds like he would be).
Their main homepage is also very useful for any Russian: local weather, TV program, ruble exchange rates etc.

"Ask Yandex" ad campaign was very successful: it made "to ask Yandex" in Russian mean the same as "to google" in English.
Or go with the PyGame API.
Students know how to prepare for "holistic criteria": put on an act during their four years of high school which is intellectually flattering to a certain liberal academic mindset.

Go to any high expectations high school in your state and attend a National Honor Society (Leadership AND Community Service (TM)) and ask them why they are there and what they think of the society.

Heck, I've helped Japanese students game the American systems, too. I read one essay by a trilingual student about how she was very challenged in a murderously difficult curriculum but persevered out of her driving determination to become a med school student. And you know how that essay would have been read? "Smart Asian. yawn Find me someone with a hook."

I told her to replace it with a woe-is-me story about the experience of Koreans in Japan. She looked at me like I was crazy. "But I thought that America didn't really discriminate against Koreans?" "Yeah, that's just the point. Its because America doesn't discriminate against you that $IVY is going to." "That makes no sense." "Believe me, I agree with you 100%. If you want to get judged for admissions without regard to your Korean ancestry, try applying to a Japanese school."

We were both silent for a moment. (The WTFness of that situation soured me more on American college admissions than I already naturally was.)

"But anyhow. Yeah. Sob stories of racial discrimination play REALLY well with $IVY. Ever been called an ethnic slur?" "Yeah, a couple of times." "PERFECT. Write how that never stopped you."
You might like http://yandex.ru/white.html

Yandex claims 10M unique IPs per month http://stat.yandex.ru/?Age=m&sort=3&SDay=0&FDay=...
Yeah. It's easy for a Nobel winner to say he doesn't like honors.
Guess WWII never happened.
In Venting, a Computer Visionary Educates
Indeed. Pygame is pretty simple and with only a bit of knowledge one can use it to produce awesome visuals.
as though it were some sacred canon from god.
Of course, the headline is misleading- It should read "14% of U.S. Adults Lack Basic Prose Literacy Skills"

Even then, I had a hard time finding meaningful info on exactly what constitutes "BPLS", beyond some vague statements in the article. If someone can find some sample questions from this "BPLS" test, please comment on this thread.

The little I could find out about BPLS on a brief Googling suggests that a person that can read given the conventional definition of "reading" can still fail a "BPLS" test relatively easily.
It's a shame SpaceX has so many employees. They're offering a 4x saving on a rocket trip, but I think it could be 10x by cutting out dead wood from mission control (eg, more automation) while it's still possible.
The tragedy of Zimbabwe is that a functioning, wealth-creating capitalist system that was evolving towards equal rights for blacks over time was sacrificed to satisfy the ego of a strong man, who proceeded to wipe out every trace of capitalism and rule of law, and replaced it with the law of the jungle. Zimbabwe's whites mostly left, so it is the black population that paid the biggest most terrible price. Naipaul has chronicled this process in his books very well.

As a member of an once "inferior" race, I can state with confidence that we were not inferior, we were just behind in adopting the institutions and cultural patterns of modernity. The whites were teaching us that - by example that we could watch and emulate every day. A gradual process of assimilating those values would have served us well. Kicking the whites out took that opportunity away.

Yes, none of this politically correct. That doesn't make any of it wrong either. Yes, there are white racists. Fuck them - they could not have stopped us from learning. Only we could have, and we did.
Let's be cynical and assume it's impossible to avoid students 'gaming' the system.

What's the better game, the one that keeps students shunted in book-studies for 10 years, or one that prods them to take an active role in the community, get involved in extra-curricular activities, entrepreneurial endeavors, etc.? (even if for the 'wrong reasons')
Why not tell him of several languages and let him ask you questions and decide for himself what to learn? Those who accomplish the most are those who strike their own path.
Ha...I'm already implicitly wrong on one of my points, since Palm just announced the Pre, so they did change their strategy. So let me rephrase that: BlackBerry will stagnate unless it does a Palm.
While public schools may have been "assimilation engines" back in 1950, my experience was that they are staunchly opposed to the "melting pot" and far more partial to the multicultural mindset. Since main stream public schools are essentially not allowed to teach subjects like ethical reasoning, they are implicitly teaching relativism AKA "tolerance." Public schools also tend to teach academic subjects in a scripted and mechanical way.

I think that this is the phenomenon that the folks in the article are responding to. Hopefully in realizing that there is no catch-all "best" way to educate, I think these charter schools will unlock previously untapped potential.
Space is incredibly dangerous. We need to put computers in space not people.
In Soviet Russia, Yandex dumps you.
They are difficult because the concept is very unfamiliar and abstract. It's also not very easy to see the motivation at first.
I thought Rand put that physicist there to show how a society with what were in her view the wrong priorities misappropriated talent.
Wow, they even link to the Google, Yahoo, ... search results in the footer of their own search results. Now that's open :)
The Hype Machine 2008 Music Blog Zeitgeist
There's a lesson to be learnt here. Printing money = Inflation. I know it seems obvious, but the Federal Reserve has printed about 800 billion dollars so far, and if our government ends up with a 2 trillion dollar deficit in the next few years, we're going to be seeing the same phenomenon.

It wasn't that long ago (1970s) where inflation in US was 10-15%. Our population has short memories, and we seem doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past (vast government spending relative to revenue).
Haha, it's ok, it was a joke.

Thanks for doing the math though :).
Yes, I agree that stack-based VMs are more common than register-based VMs, and it was an unusual decision on the part of the Lua folks to choose a register-based VM, particularly given their emphasis on implementation simplicity. And it appears to have paid off, which is pretty cool!

I'm glad you've enjoyed the various links.

I meant the way it behaves as both a dict and a table

You mean, a dict and an array?

I'm not sure I agree with their decision to unify those structures, but it does seem not to have cost them much implementation complexity or performance.
Meh.

Air travel should be dangerous by all rights, but there is something north of 50,000 people in flight over the US at any given time.
Ask HN: 5-7 months of living expenses left; terrified. Advice?
In April, I left my job at a hedge fund. This was, admittedly, not the best time to leave a job in New York, but I needed out because the lack of purpose in my work was starting to affect my health.

Even though we didn't "technically" know ourselves to be in a recession, I knew something bizarre was going on that summer. I had some really surprising rejections. I never find rejection to be shocking, because even if you're really good, you might not be a fit... but I got turned down for in-person interviews at companies that would have been slam-dunks (for in-person interview) in mid-2007.

Anyway, I found my way to a really cool startup and began working there, the only downside being that pay would be deferred until we had funding. I was told that we'd probably have funding by November. I figured January - March was more likely, since PG's essays have educated me on the fact that funding matters are always a lot worse than expected, but I had enough savings from the hedge fund days to hold out that far.

It's January. I enjoy the work a lot more than I have at prior companies. The problem is that I have no control over the funding situation, and it's started to scare the shit out of me the minute we crossed into 2009. I only have 5-7 months of living expenses now (fuck New York's ridiculous housing costs). I honestly have no idea what I'll do if this doesn't pan out. I don't want to go back to Wall Street and might not be able to (there may not be a Wall Street). With an imploded economy, even a traditional job search is going to be risky and time-consuming. I don't have any contacts that could lead into consulting projects, and taking a typical software job (Java to implement some business guy's lame vision) is about as palatable as selling out and getting an MBA. I want to stay in technology, but working on cool projects and using decent languages (e.g. Lisp, ML, Haskell... or Python/Ruby at the very least).

If the startup gets funding, and it probably will, I'm fine. However, I'm worried about that 1-in-20 (?) chance that we don't manage to line up funding in time, in which I need to do a crash job search in an imploded economy and on shaky ground (and I don't want to do any job search, because I really like the startup and the projects I am working on). It's getting to the point where I hate spending money and I'm delaying necessary expenditures.

So, I'm staring down a 1-in-10 or 1-in-20 risk of utter disaster and now that it's 2009 I'm starting to get scared. Has anyone here been through disaster before? How did it pan out?
Don't misunderstand me...I'm not saying that this is the way it should be, just that this is the way it is.

There are two paths to space: governments and private sector. The government path doesn't seem to have made a huge dent in the colonization goal over the last fifty years. It's almost as if we've lost ground since the Apollo program ended. And the reality of the "golden age" of space exploration is that the funding of the program was driven more by the need to beat the USSR than it was by the vision of space exploration as a worthy goal for humanity.

As for the private sector, the issue there is that huge profits could be made, but the risks are way too high and the timeline is way too long. The handful of companies that could afford it are already making huge profits here on earth in things they understand and their shareholders are apt to take a dim view of those companies risking billions of dollars with little hope of return within the next couple decades.

Sadly, the best hope for space colonization is either a) breakthrough developments in a tangential technical field that enable cheap access to space (read: nanotech enables construction of space elevator) and/or b) we trash our planet to the point that our survival requires governments to commit everything they have to space colonization.
And they have good tutorials and documentation.
More information here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States

A five-year, $14 million study of U.S. adult literacy involving lengthy interviews of U.S. adults, the most comprehensive study of literacy ever commissioned by the U.S. government, was released in September 1993. It involved lengthy interviews of over 26,700 adults statistically balanced for age, gender, ethnicity, education level, and location (urban, suburban, or rural) in 12 states across the U.S. and was designed to represent the U.S. population as a whole. This government study showed that 21% to 23% of adult Americans were not "able to locate information in text", could not "make low-level inferences using printed materials", and were unable to "integrate easily identifiable pieces of information."
Dear HN, what are some applications of supercomputers/massive clusters?
Are they just built as a cool way to show off? I know some are used for scientific simulations, but I've never heard any details (I'd love to hear them if you have) and I don't know how many applications would need that power. Are there commercial applications? Industrial ones? Are there any cool open source projects build around supercomputing/cluster computing? Do tell!
Perhaps I am too tainted.

Monads can be motivated as a generalization of a lot of stuff that follows similar rules (the Monad laws). E.g. Lists, Haskell's Maybe (representing success/failure), sequential computation.
Cheap food - the perfect counter-cyclical business model. For more of these, I recommend Marginal Revolution's "Countercyclical Asset" series (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&domains=www.marginalr...)

Also along the same lines, a link within that series is from September 28th, which states, "The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index fell 8.4 percent, the most since Oct. 26, 1987, as only Campbell Soup Co. gained."
"Extract from internal document produced by Nanning city authority, Guangxi province"

This is one of the most common mistakes made by foreign press. The quote is possibly correct. The article extrapolates from this to assume that there is some great puppet-master in Beijing.

China is run at the local level for most things. There may well be paid commenters but having them organized from the top-down is next to impossible.
The Lie Behind the Lie Detector pdf (referenced in the write-up) is also a good read.

https://antipolygraph.org/lie-behind-the-lie-detector.pdf
Since you're young, and you're already a hacker, you might want to look at going to a place where there's an entirely different sort of student body. This would help "balance" things out a bit for you, and would give you a more interesting life. If you take the time to understand and collaborate with your newfound peers, you will also end up with a bunch of great friends whose perspectives are entirely different from your own; this is good for your brain and will keep you from becoming one of those ignorant, boring people.

For example, arts school in another country would be interesting. Oh, and believe it or not, the girls would find it kinda alluring that you're not like the rest of the guys at their school. Probably has to do with our natural desire for genetic diversity...
Sarcastic answer: Ask Daniel Barenboim.

Long answer: If you are asking others for objectivity, please be objective yourself. The issue here is that nowadays a lot of people in Europe tend to be on the side of the underdog, which in this case would be the Palestinian population. This is not a pro-Hamas demonstration. Nobody likes fanatics here.

If Israel were in the weaker position, I can assure you that the same people would stop the trains for Israelis.
Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches
Yes, and I wish it upon no youth to suffer such a perversion of what programming is again. Better to start them off in m68k assembly, at least they will learn something useful in terms of how a computer works.
I can hardly speak for everybody, but I know for sure: 1) life is too short just to work for nothing 2) shit happens 3) may be your business model need to be concentrated on profit now, less on investment
She does, yes, and it's said that it's a waste of talent for Galt, but the job itself is not considered offensive. Galt doesn't get shown much because he's in hiding, but the philosopher gets a few paragraphs describing how relieving it is, his ability to make good food. It's a sign that there are still people who take delight in what they do.
I can find the societal value-add from 10 years of book studies pretty freaking easily.

Can you identify the societal value-add from my rewrite of that girl's essay?

Ethnic minorities at Japanese high schools graduate literate and capable of doing calculus. Ethnic minorities at American high schools are done a tremendous disservice. Oh, heck, let's strip that of the euphemism -- black and Hispanic students at American high schools are done a tremendous disservice. (Use of the passive voice should not imply that that disservice is wholly the fault of external actors.)

Rather than acknowledging this painful fact, and seeking to improve it, we cover it by emphasizing "holistic evaluation" where we hold them to scandalously lower standards and then declare success because they are admitted into college. Where they wash out in scandalously high numbers. And schools protect those numbers with more diligence than the CIA protects its list of operatives because the public can't be allowed to know the strength of the preferences regime or the extent of the utter failure at education occurring in some schools.

KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN.

OK, I feel better now.
I don't really see a huge problem with government hiring people to sell its side of a story in itself. For better or worse, there are highly-paid lobbyists on both sides of every policy issue these days.

I think the issue is that the Chinese government does more than "spin." It is acceptable for one party to advocate for a policy by putting it in the best possible light. Its unacceptable to change facts, control information etc. Admittedly, this is a murky line in many cases...

Perhaps what more scary is that most Chinese students I've met know that they don't get the "full truth" in China and don't really care. They seem to be more concerned with China becoming an economic superpower than whether China creates a "good" society.
But it's soulless business people with their eyes firmly on the bottom line rather than on trading off that heritage that have killed it off and condemned our city to what feels like a future of minimum wage jobs in nail distribution warehouses and mobile phone call centres.

Oh boy, another rant about how "soulless" business people who worship the almighty dollar have killed off something beautiful and magical in the world because of their greed.

Please. Most manufacturing in the western hemisphere has been offshored because they simply can't compete with overseas firms who have dramatically lower costs. It's for survival, not higher profits.

I suspect that the demand for expensive and "uniquely British" pottery is no longer big enough to support those companies, forcing them to compete in a lower market. If the demand was there, someone would be starting a factory and hiring all those experts in your area to supply that demand. And if you think the demand is there, go raise some cash and do it yourself :-)
1)LET s =10 imparts no further understanding than s=10.

2) Numbering lines for programs is nonsensical.

3) Gotos are bad practice.

4) Most programs consist of more than 1 file.

5) Hello world is just as easy in any other (more useful) language.

Can't think of any more off the head right now, time to eat.
Thanks for the reply. You mentioned that OCaml was one of your first languages and I guess I assumed that you learned it at a similar age which is not necessarily the case... but that's why I suggested Haskell. Also, I can appreciate that teaching Haskell to a 13 year old can seem a daunting task (for the teacher) but I really do think that under the right tutelage I smart kid could get it (you can get a lot of mileage by just treating it as sort of a SQL dialect). It's also pretty well integrated with at least one Linux distro as far as systems programming goes (http://urchin.earth.li/pipermail/debian-haskell/2006-May/000...).

Good luck with whatever you decide though, he's fortunate to have a brother that's taking the job seriously :)
It would be simpler just to switch to a log scale.
It might be fun to start with a specialized language like processing, which makes it easy to create interactive animations. Here is what the creators of processing say:

'Processing was never intended as the ultimate language for programming visuals; instead, we set out to make something that was:

* A sketchbook for our own work, simplifying the majority of tasks that we undertake.
* A programming environment suitable for teaching programming to a non-traditional audience.
* A stepping stone from scripting languages to more complicated or difficult languages such as full-blown Java or C++.

At the intersection of these points is a tradeoff between speed and simplicity of use. If we didn't care about speed, it might make sense to use Python, Ruby, or many other scripting languages. This is especially true for the education side. If we didn't care about making a transition to more advanced languages, we'd probably avoid a C++ or Java-style syntax. But Java makes a nice starting point for a sketching language because it's far more forgiving than C/C++ and also allows users to export sketches for distribution via the web.'

(quote taken from http://www.processing.org/learning/gettingstarted/)
Excellent! jQuery's what I've been using already. Thanks a ton!
I did, and got nothing useful back. Oh well, maybe next time.
Every government has some form of a propaganda team behind it. Some directly in the government, many behind the parties/companies in power. Really anyone who benefits from the way the government operates has a reason to push propaganda at some level.

However, suppressing the opposing view is the problem. If the viewpoints are both expressed, one can expect some level of truthiness(tm) to come out. And frankly, someone's got to defend what the government's doing, b/c sometimes their actions aren't completely corrupt or nefarious.

As for the US, I'm hoping the Net will eventually dissolve the b.s. legitimacy of the old press core, who've got too much to lose to rock the boat very much.
Smooth scrolling meaning there's no jump, right? Or meaning it accelerates/decelerates?
One thing you could start doing now is lining up potential alternative jobs. You could even start working part-time somewhere else. One good thing about startups is that they can be flexible about things like that. And the founders who recruited you can hardly blame you.
By the way, Yandex used to promote Firefox on their home page for a year or even more probably (they promoted a build with yandex's toolbar, naturally)