skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exactly what I was thinking. Not sure how Bing and DuckDuckGo stack up but it might create an opening for a new player also - granted search is probably still the toughest game to get into.
How much failure would it take from the not-for-profit public education system before you'd consider the possibility that it is the very incentive system created by their non-profit status that has a huge hand in the failure?

We've created a system in which the reward for being an excellent teacher is... what, exactly? More paperwork? More friction from the ever-larger administration for not doing the same as everybody else? More frustration with not being allowed to be the good teacher because they have to teach ever harder to the test?

Until you fix the incentive system you're not going to get better teaching, and yeah, that's probably going to involve someone making some money, because it's beyond me how to fix the incentive system in the presence of an open-ended promise to keep the money hose opened and pointed at them no matter how much they fail. I suppose we could always try giving the same people even more money if they just promise to try really, really hard to do something else a couple of times until they give up.

And I am also pretty sure that true 21st century education isn't going to just a tweaked 20th century education. It's going to be something totally different, and the non-profit system simply won't get us there. Why would they? They don't get defunded for using decades-old totally outdated education systems. (In contrast to the decades-old non-outdated parts, which do exist, but are not 100% of the curriculum by any means.) We know that, because that's already the current situation. They've got no reason to move.
Well, I have 2 ipads and an iPhone which I use as a portable studio these days, jamming with my band .. and I use the iPads just like VST plugin hosts on my PC .. since I play keyboards in the band, its awesome! Plug in, fire up a few apps, and off we go .. a very, very versatile creativity machine. Beats the DAW by far!
I think you're mistaking stripe, which handles online payments, for square, which accepts mobile payments with an external device.
The idea is to write a wrapper that encapsulates all of the (related) data. This is useful in type-checked languages where changing the signature can have repercussions across multiple classes.

I actually do this in javascript, too. I'll pass in object (it's nice in js because you can just write them in json) and refer to the variable by object property

verifyID({idNum: 1234, surname: 'Himes', firstName: 'Dan'});

{where the signature is

verifyID(idObect)

}

This has the advantage of not requiring you to remember the order of parameters.
On teams I've had success with we've agreed on a style guide, peer reviewed code, participated discussion on a daily basis, and generally evolved the standards and practices as a group.

Agreeing on a style guide is important because it removes those issues from the daily discussion. We usually utilize an existing style guide that is agreed upon by the broader community as well. This doesn't close the door to "house rules", but provides a solid base line for discussing more important topics of design.

In matters of style, we also prefer to have some automated formatting when possible. I've know people to set up their own formatter for work, and run it through the "official" formatter to commit. Personally think that is crazy. I can adapt to almost any style, but if that is what somebody is passionate about, who am I to judge?
Getting to the point where the amount of energy it will require to get the panels out of Mars' gravity will be less than the energy delivered will take a long time. And what are you going to do when something breaks down?
World Lens is able to do this real-time on live video. But like many startups the big boy's "everything is free" philosophy is going to hurt their business model.
I'm talking about out-of-state tuition though, which from my understanding was not subsidized by the state government at all. The funny thing is, the university I went to was still cheaper and better than my in-state alternatives.
You should do a how-to measure yourself video like these guys: Bombay shirt company http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88bD0Udwswk
This is a good article on that phenomenon:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-you...
How to play Html 5 video
Building better software using principles from an industrial designer
Go - a super simple Sinatra URL shortener for use behind the firewall
> This is not true for all social levels of China.

I somewhat disagree.

That type of "reverse genocide" only works in East Asia. One of the reasons for the ongoing conflict in Xinjiang is that the local Uyghur, Kyrgyz, et al. don't look Chinese and don't pay any lip service to the "superiority" of Han culture.

> If your children do no look "Chinese", they will not be considered as chinese.

And this is the reason why.

Even though their mother is 100% Han, my own children easily pass as average WASPs. No matter how long they live in China, no matter how fluent they are in Mandarin, they will never be accepted as Chinese by anyone other than her relatives.
In the short term, there's just no way being a teacher in public education has any financial incentive.

Until you can pay a teacher the same salary as a silicon valley engineer, the best people will not be teachers.
And a ton of free Adidas kit, at least according to the Games Maker I know.
Given that neither system is working but both have evidence of having worked historically or in other countries, it would seem premature to assume sans evidence that education must be in the public sector.

Note that non-profit private institutions are not public schools and are highly effective research institutions.

When things aren't working it's a good idea to rethink the base assumptions we are making on faith alone.
What is the most popular service?
OP mentions that we're reaching the limits of our inventiveness. Not true. We're just getting more accustomed to constant invention, constant change. When invention becomes the constant state, nothing is seen as invention. Invention is now normal.

It is just the name of the thing that has changed, not the thing itself.
"our side" is the pro-freedom, pro-copying, information-wants-to-be-free, consumer side. "their side" is the pro-restriction, pro-enforcement, pro-1984 content producer side.

> I support that side as little as I support SOPA-like bills.

Theire is no "undecided" side. Either you support copyright enforcement against people who want to freely share information without a north-korea-style censorship body over their shoulders, or you dont. There is no middle ground. You cant support "a little bit" of censorship.
Advanced Stock Screener
I wrote an app called Advanced Stock Screener. It is used to scan the stock indices and rate stocks based on strategies that the user can create. I've got a fair bit of development time in the app, and it has a good 4.5 star rating. I have about 850 active installs. The app is free to download and has ads. It has been showing about 500 ads a day and that often times results in about 1 or 2 clicks. So the money is pretty bad. Not at all worth all the effort I put into developing that app. I'm still working on improving the app. I'm hoping that more people will discover and use the app. I haven't really done any marketing, I'm sort of waiting until I "finish" the app. Its in a pretty good state now but there are more features that I would like to add.
I was one of the presenters at Startup Riot. Events like Startup Riot give early stage founders the opportunity to showcase their products and it is extremely important to keep this a safe place for newbies and encourage entrepreneurs to keep at it!

Two cents from a presenter at the event:
http://www.moonsovermyhammy.com/post/29112090592/if-youre-a-...
Tool-Assisted Gaming: What the Game Genie generation is up to now
I Say Movie, You Say Film ... Our Personal Clouds Can Still Work Together
Good point. I'd be interested to see what student debt is like as a proportion of income, across different social classes.
The article is about using one (of the many) methods to develop native apps for Windows 8. This is not like PhoneGap - you have full access to the resources available on the device. Don't mistake the composition technologies (CSS, HTML, JavaScript) as == non-native app.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/br21138...
Its simple: it just plain works. Pretty much, always. I plug in a MIDI keyboard and Controller, fire up a synth app, and off we go. Stable, sounds great (comparable by far with any PC plugin), and just plain works. I have two iPads and an iPhone in my studio rig now, plus a couple of Akai controllers (pads/keys/sliders/knobs), and as a portable action studio this configuration just rocks.

Plus, I don't have to have it sitting there, like I'm checking my email on stage. Hate that about laptop musicians, as if it is actually interesting to watch someone glow their face when I'm out at night and want to have fun, away from the office .. with the iPad form factor, at least, it lays flat and stays out of the way. And there is no QWERTY keyboard, so its not easy for someone to make the association "that guy must be writing an email onstage instead of making live music", and believe me that happens a lot with laptop musicians around my parts.
Mandarin is not totally unrelated to Manchu. There are a lot of loan words in Mandarin from Manchu, for example, 姑娘, 罗嗦, 邋遢, 马虎, 麻利, 别扭, and lots of other common phrases.
More importantly, Mandarin is heavily influenced by Manchu in other ways, for example, tones. Southern languages like Cantonese, Minnan have more tones (Cantonese 9, Minnan 8, vs Mandarin 5). Some Chinese believe Mandarin is a language polluted/reduced by Manchu, and they consider southern languages to be more elegant and culturally richer and purer.
Cantonese lost to Mandarin by a single vote during the selection of "official" language of China in 1912.[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yue_Chinese#Twentieth_century
Terrain, Part 1 - Twenty Sided
We've tried the "keep giving the system more money in the hope we get better teachers". We've been trying that for my entire life. If you want to pay teachers like SV engineers, you're only going to be able to do that in the general framework of a for-profit company.

If you imagine a really competent teacher sitting next to an engineer with the Khan Academy and intensely working with them and the statistics to produce a high-quality course, that's definitely the sort of thing that will command an SV engineer salary. There will be fewer such positions, but the immense societal gain of having these high-quality curricula propagated far and wide for cheap will far outweigh the fact there are fewer teaching jobs.
As with regular politics, it always depends on the project, and the independents know best.
Submitter here. Probably needs a better title. Found the whole site, and the tool-assisted gaming communities to be fascinating and clearly full of amazing hackers.
Never thought of this before.
This $49 Quadcopter Flips, Dips, And Floats
The difficulty that I have with his linear generalization is that I strongly agree with some points on both sides - sometimes feeling oppositely strongly about two halfs of the same sentence. Another commenter linked to http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2010/05/types-la-chart.html which makes the statement that "the design space is very highly dimensioned, perhaps infinitely so". I suspect that the programmer opinion space is similarly highly dimensioned, and more particularly, that the specific single dimensional analogue that Steve Yegge draws in his post obscures critical features of this topology. If I can come down hard all over the line, then he does not have a good enough mapping from the higher dimensional space. As an aside, using the labels "liberal" and "conservative" inappropriately juxtaposes rather strong emotions in the mix. Hopefully the emotional/visceral reaction was not his intention as a means of ideological persuasion.
>Imagine a world where you can retrain yourself on the order of months, not years, and take on little or no debt to do it. How would that impact unemployment or underemployment?

It would have very little effect on un- or underemployment, since un- and underemployment are driven by demand, not supply.

There is zero evidence that unemployment in the United States today is driven by a mismatch between skills-employers-want and skills-workers-have, for instance.

Paul Krugman discusses this in a few of his columns.
I trust Paypal more than most websites. They take steps like using SSL site-wide (with HSTS) and X-Frame-Options, for example, which a lot of e-commerce websites don't. Of course, this is negated if the user doesn't trust Paypal, or doesn't understand what it does.

Website owners probably dislike the loss in branding when using Paypal, which makes them look less professional.
Seems like unsuccessful projects get burried. Cancelled ones are quietly swept away. Case in point is glospex. One day the project was there, the next day it was not. No word...maybe kickstarter is too tiny to have a customer service department...maybe they want the unsuccessful projects to remain unseen.
> But these guidelines would suggest that if you are going to call methods on the id object, it's best, if possible, to put the methods in the id object itself.

But that would violate the Law of Demeter, as I understand it: E.g., you shouldn't fetch an Id object from a Db object, and then call a method on the Id object. I.e., you should only talk directly to the Db object.

Not that the Law of Demeter is necessarily the best way to do everything, but it has its merits in terms of decoupling.

I'm not sure where the code snippet that I provided wasn't clear. It looks up someone by Social Security Number in a database and gets back an ID. It thens prints out the ID.

I'm also not clear on just what you are asserting: That my understanding here of the Law of Demeter is incorrect? Or that I shouldn't be following The Law of Demeter here.
This is wrong. Google should aim to provide the best possible result for the search. If that is an copyrighted videostream on a non-authorized site (e.g. a stream of all of the episodes of the series i'm googling for), this should be exactly the first result. And not a lame but authorized preview of 30 seconds.

Already found myself using duckduckgo in such cases, imagining the results were better.
are you sure this isn't an Orwell excerpt?
Also, Google outright rejects some dmca requests and Google also releases data about the actions of copyright owners and DMCA activity on http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/. So even if not all abuses were caught they would at least be published for public scrutiny.
> cross-platform should be on the list of every programmer's requirements for a text editor

As a member of the set of "every programmer", I have to disagree with this. I develop on the same machine every day. I don't care if my editor is cross-platform. I just want a good editor. It being performant and feeling "nice" for my purposes is way more important to me than being able to use it on machines where I won't ever use it.
I just graduated with my CS degree this May, and I only took on a total of 20k debt and lived on campus, and that 20k was just the stafford loans that 3 of my scholarships mandated I take in order to qualify. Note, now that I graduated, I already paid off over half that on just reserve funds from summer jobs that I have had dating back to High School.

While I was there, only about 1 in 5 students actually had a full financial aid package. Most of them didn't fill out FAFSAs, or didn't even use subsidized stafford loans - they had direct bank loans from their parents for upwards of $60k a year.

In my opinion, the people of the 22ed century will look back and think we were hilariously dumb. We have instantanous communication of ideas and knowledge via the internet, and our internet speeds are only getting better. If you want to learn something, it is easier than ever to find a community of fellow learners for a subject, find tons of free learning materials on that subject, and buckle down without the financial obligations and classroom environment (which doesn't work for everyone, and you inherently have less engagement there because one teacher can not effectively engage with even just 10 people all the time).

Like the article said, the degree is the problem. But I don't think thats the real problem - moreso the problem than that is the inability for individuals to have ideas and persue them in business ventures, because upstart small business will demand much less degree knowledge from employees (even if they are very skilled) since they draw from a local pool.

You get the degree because you will be applying to massive companies with huge HR that don't want to try to interpret you as a person but want to get a quick diagnostic of if you are capable or not from a one word answer to a 3 word question: Got a degree? If hiring was more based on individual accomplishment and demonstratable knowledge rather than paper, we would all be better off for it by getting off the degree treadmill.
How much failure would it take from the not-for-profit public education system before you'd consider the possibility that it is the very incentive system created by their non-profit status that has a huge hand in the failure?

That is part of the failure, and I am deeply affected by it right now. I am a pretty good teacher, and I watch terrible teachers get paid more than me because they've been at it longer. I can't pay off my family's student loans, and I can't afford anything more than a small condo.

But I still don't think privatizing education is the answer. There is always the possibility of taking education back from the politicians, and setting up a system that does incentivize good teaching. It's not as simple as paying teachers more if their students pass tests.

One fix that would go a long way is restructuring our approach to tuition in service sectors. If you take away my student loans, I would be a happy, hard working teacher the rest of my life. I will get some portion of my loans forgiven for teaching in a high-need area, but that won't go a long way. The same goes for other service sectors, where a reasonable job will leave you paying off student loans until you are past retirement age.

There are bureaucratic fixes. You can give more professional freedoms to highly-effective teachers. Measuring effective teaching is difficult, but not impossible.

As soon as you give up on public education and only see privatization as the answer, you give up on addressing the education gap between different socioeconomic groups.
Great idea Dave, I considered using String+"" but didn't know how standard it was, so I discarded it.

The slice & isNaN trick is brilliant!
Pinterest Has Been Opened For All, No More Invite Only Policy
While I strongly support educational reform, I should point out that it is not just higher education, it's also high school, middle school, elementary school, kindergarten, and daycare. Every single aspect of the entire educational system down to the time spent on kids when they're too young to speak properly is broken. Consequently, fixing this is not as simple as having an online university, but I agree that the solution is very likely to be some sort of private, for-profit company, simply because that's the only feasible catalyst.
That would be really interesting. I'd like to see specific categories that are more successful now than they previously were, for example. Or correlate that success of specific projects based on how long ago they were.
While I agree with you, the Mac (also the Amiga, and in a broader sense, the personal computer) enabled a lot of new professions too: graphical designers, video producers, photographers, musicians, anyone relying on CAD (engineers, architects), etc. Suddenly, all those people had a powerful tool to work with at a more affordable price. I believe that's what Murray was referring to, and I would say they were successful at that.
In regards to relevant education, I think Amazon's career choice program is a good example of targeting the right industries.

From Jeff Bezos letter:
"We’re offering to pre-pay 95% of the cost of courses such as aircraft mechanics, computer-aided design, machine tool technologies, medical lab technologies, nursing, and many other fields.

The program is unusual. Unlike traditional tuition reimbursement programs, we exclusively fund education only in areas that are well-paying and in high demand according to sources like the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and we fund those areas regardless of whether those skills are relevant to a career at Amazon."
I was just about to write and say the same thing. Establishing and adhering to conventions is tedious and often diverts focus from the problem at hand.

Go is fun, and things like gofmt and the fast compile speed do make it a productive language.
Thank you for articulating this.

The US government can't sustainably provide a safety net that provides basic needs (whether this is because of finances or because of ideology is a debate I'm not getting into).

And getting rid of the free market is not an option for us either.

So if we are not going to let people starve in the snow every time the raw forces of economics kill a market or shift all production somewhere else, they should have some help to find new footing.
It's not a financial problem (well it is), it's a cultural problem. American culture just doesn't value education and learning in general.

Isaac Asimov articulated this very well:

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge'.
Please look up the lobbying organizations for Head Start and some of the higher education institutions which also have lobbying organizations for individual federal programs that benefit the public universities. My giving was rather less than organic.
That's what I thought as well. Silicon is basically.... well, sand, isn't it?
read the FAQ for the site (or the "Whats included" box on overview page).

"The data below consists of the copyright removal requests we've received through our web form for Google Search. It is a partial historical record that includes more than 95% of the copyright removal requests that we have received for Google Search since July 2011."

In other words youtube data is not included. This is only for websearch
It's been quite surprising actually. We had originally thought that it would be Instagram or direct uploads but it's quite different.

Top Services

1. Twitter
2. Facebook
3. Direct Uploads / New Avatars

Most surprisingly, the largest number of avatars are served via mobile - by a HUGE margin.
I don't agree. There is plenty of middle ground, and I think most people tend to fall around the center of the spectrum. I for one don't support SOPA, yet support the notion of copyright.
Mapliv.com - another housing site with Craigslist data