skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It is indeed tragic to care for someone you know is sick while being stuck in multi-week delays waiting for a doctor who can actually help.

It's not even waiting that is the problem. The quality is down right shoddy at best. Doctors flat out lied to us. We had doctors recommending committing our son to a home because "you can get on with your life." At one point, we had our son get approved after waiting 6 months to get into a special program that would help him. That was a wonderful day.

That afternoon, I shit you not, we get a call again from the same place, and they say "Oh, I'm sorry, we can't take him. He has autism, and we don't take children with autism."

I understand their are problems with the US system. I'm not blind to the issues. But people like to prop up Canada's system as something that works.

It was child abuse. It's hard to explain. I firmly believe that Quebec should shut down it's autism support, and stop pretending to care. At least then parents will know they had better leave. Every day makes a difference. If I'd known earlier, if I hadn't waited...

Years. Years of waiting. A system that requires that is a failure, pitiful, evil system.
seems close: http://www.asetek.com/server/sealed-server.html
Google's Social Network Goes Pro
Not what I meant. I'm actually in favor of people working collaboratively on problems, I'm talking about computer-servers full of P-Set solns, essays, old tests, occasionally the sale of these for money, etc etc etc.
the point is this is a states rights issue. Massachusetts has every right to do this if they want. The federal government shouldn't be doing this.
If the students can't read the handouts given by the teachers then they probably shouldn't be at that grade level. They should probably hold back more students for starters.

But there is a limit to how much they can do that, so they would need to actually assess the real grade levels of their students and give them appropriate material.

I have a feeling that teachers feel that they are only allowed/supposed to provide curriculum for the particular grade level and are afraid that they will be sued or get in trouble if they provide remedial material. And so they just accept that the students will not be able to really learn the material or even understand the hand outs.

There is also probably quite a lot of racial tension involved. In other words, many of the white teachers probably generally resent many of the black student's attitudes, and many of the black students probably generally resent the white teachers. The teacher probably feel that the students need to do extra homework, but know that they do little or none, and also probably feel like they cannot meet with parents. In an environment like that, it may be very difficult to present a student and/or parent and/or principal with the harsh reality that the student is reading 3 years below grade level, and so they just don't address the fundamental problem.

Then the other problem is probably that the vast majority of families are struggling financially and so is the school.

Education needs to be tailored to the individual. There are always going to be several dramatically different levels of skills in each class. Technology can help to tailor learning, although its really not required. The problem is that the grade level business has a very strong tradition.
That's fair, and we deserve the criticism since we're still kinda stealth, in the sense that we're not publicly talking about what we're doing.

In person we've always been happy to give a full demo and share everything we know about our company. We've shown our product to a lot of people and nobody has left disappointed (and many told me they expected to be).
As far as I know, black-majority schools with black teachers (vs. white teachers) don't do any better. Even the ones with more funding than the white-majority schools.

Do you have any examples of such schools? And of comparative studies showing that they fail?

Because this claim looks like a convenient urban legend.
Wow, mostly terrible advice.
Just because the system is broken, doesn't mean we need socialism, and it doesn't mean that a software developer should support anything in particular. I personally, won't support anything that makes me pay for your health insurance. I pay plenty for mine, I have no desire to pay for yours. We can work to fix the broken system, but keeping everything the same and then taxing us more to have the government foot the bill WILL NOT FIX THE PROBLEM. The government getting involved isn't the solution.

Just think, emergency rooms that function with the efficiency of the DMV. Woo Hoo
13. Most programmers think they know what they're doing but actually are "incompetent". (There are Usenet posts going back to 80's documenting this fact.) How am I defining "incompetent"? In my definition it means writing software that any reasonably skilled hacker can cause to "malfunction", i.e. not perform as expected by the programmer, which depending on the program may or may not present a security risk. The number of "competent" programmers i.e. those whose programs are immune to the acts of reasonably skilled hackers, is very small. They are a rare commodity. In sum, there's lots of reasonably skilled hackers and very few competent pogrammers. There is no licensing body for programmers. Anyone can call themselves a "professional programmer".

Note: If a programmer only writes programs for her own use, "competency", as defined above, is all but irrelevent. Whatever works.

Controversial, but true.
Useful notes, thanks.
For which she was chased out of school rather than offered dialogue, so it sounds as though in this case she may have been partly right. And also, the teachers did not shoulder the blame here, they made sure that a 13 year old kid did for daring to criticise and judge them in an essay. And that is appalling.
I will echo that this thread works.

We work with a lot of recruiters and by far the most qualified candidates come from HN. We've hired 25% (i.e. 1 person) of our team so far from HN and I'd expect that number to increase to 50% over time.
>There is room for a language that generates HTML by default, compiles every library anyone could ever need into the core, and puts it all in the default namespace.

When I have time for side projects again, I'm going to make this happen for CoffeeScript running under v8cgi or node. The code for the "HTML by default" is trivial enough that I could write it in fifteen minutes. The code for the global namespace (I'd prefer a short namespace actually) stuff is a bit more tedious, and the parts with making it run a server under node and automatically parse and cache the files are the boring details that I might get stuck on and cause the project to languish. Ideally, I'd want to make it flexible regarding frontends, so that if you could get it running in any environment that accepted JS code and could wrap the built in module behavior.

The frustrating thing is that until we see more widespread support for server-side JS on reasonably cheap hosts, or at least some well-implemented JS transpilers/interpreters for commonly installed languages like Python and PHP, making this work for Joe Everydev is going to be virtually impossible.

I'd be interested in doing something similar for Python (mod_python supports something close in PSP, but nobody seems to use mod_python anymore), but while I'm capable with Python, I've never really been interested in learning the ins and outs of the "Pythonic" style, and that makes me reluctant to put any code out where the Python community can see it.
Oh boy... as a D1 runner, I have heard far more about this guy than I care to. If you want to read more, this topic has been discussed extensively at Letsrun: http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=3863010
I don't agree with many of the points, but having taught a lot of beginners while loops, they are often very confusing to people.

I usually end up explaining them like a repeat...until, which usually makes more sense to non-programmers.
If this were a movie, I would expect his twin brother to be revealed.
In Australia, at a private hospital, it's around $800 a night from memory.
Firstly, not everyone pays PAYE. Having an accountant and structuring your finances in a tax efficient manner is not the preserve of the super rich.

What you describe is a perpetual tax. Cash exchanged for goods of value or other financial instruments still have intrinsic value. Anything classed as an asset would be taxed in perpetuity. I'm sorry, right now I think your proposal is absolutely absurd.

If you earn and invest in the same tax year would you be taxed twice? How does your model handle depreciation? What about property? Can debt finance, e.g. a mortgage, be offset from your taxable assets?

There are so many unanswered questions (and these are what popped into mind with 5 seconds thought) I have to ask, is it you who is kidding?
I do sort of agree with the try/catch criticism. I know what it achieves and why we need it but I don't agree that it's the best or even most intuitive error handling mechanism. I personally prefer returning error messages in place of or alongside expected data structure outputs, such as the common paradigm in JavaScript where async functions return error info (or null) as the first parameter in the supplied callback before returning the actual data (if no error) in the subsequent parameters.

I do somewhat agree with the OOP criticism as well. I find the best programming achievable is by mixing strategies and not adhering strictly to any one philosophy. Java's OOP is so inflexible and limiting that it takes a significant amount more effort to get basic work done. It may lead to a somewhat more manageable codebase at first, but I feel experience in your language of choice can bridge the gap between such a strict static-typed language vs a more elegant but potentially messier dynamic-typed language in this respect.

Finally I do agree that C should be taught before you learn any other programming language...but not to such a degree that you need to be able to build the best Javascript engine in the world from scratch before you move onto another programming language. The goal of programming is to build software that saves you time, after all - you aren't saving much time with as high a barrier to entry as mastering the fundamentals of C. It is important for theory discussion as well as learning the best way to code a lot of logic in many other languages, but I feel an abstracted language has failed if it hasn't done enough of the work for you to refactor your code properly in the first place. Loop unrolling, seriously? I like that I learned why it's important...but I shouldn't ever have to do that in any decently programmed higher level language.
How about ornithopters? Naively I'd guess they'd come in between planes and quadcopters in both efficiency and agility. Since seagulls can land without a runway, a tacothopter ought to be able to, too.
You are right. I don't know how expansive the Supreme Court might interpret things. Can the power to extend copyright and patent protection also extend to specific moral rights? How far can that clause go? I guess the US passed the Visual Artists Rights Act, so it seems possible.

In Feist v. Rural, the supreme court said that copyright requires a creative action. It can be minimal, but it can't be a "sweat of the brow". Previous district court were divided over that. Compare to the UK, where the amount of work which goes into collecting or verifying a database is enough to establish a copyright.

I interpret this to say that there are certain copyright-like and patent-like actions which Congress cannot do, because it isn't a power granted to it. Yet on the other hand, trademarks are not based in the Constitution but are part of federal law. Which makes me wonder why copyright and patents are in the Constitution if they could have been done by other means.... except that perhaps it's the "for a limited time" clause which is important, as otherwise Congress could grant perpetual copyrights?

In any case, it's not "as opposed to the states", as states can also also grant rights. One such is the California Art Preservation Act. Federal law may preempt part of that state law. I think you should use "in addition to the states."
it's good :-) music is good too
Russia unveils own 'almost Android' system
If you go through the answers on Stack Overflow, the point that "most programmers are incompetent" was made quite frequently. Those that made an effort to support their opinion were highly upvoted (so not that controversial), but many others didn't so they just sat at 0-1 upvotes.
One that really stood out to me:

6. The use of try/catch exception handling is worse than the use of simple return codes and associated common messaging structures to ferry useful error messages.

I think this really depends on the language. In erlang I absolutely hate exceptions because they don't really make sense in a functional language (which let's say erlang is for the sake of this argument). Threads run functions with only the function's parameters as state. It doesn't make sense to have to worry about a function stopping half way through, especially when most functions already pass up tuples looking like {error,E} or {success,S}. If you have to worry about exceptions as well, now you have to handle the error tuple and the exception case, and usually both cases are getting the same code so you have to go make a new function to call for that case. This gets messy. If a thread crashes it crashes, otherwise it should be passing up the error tuple; there's no reason for exceptions.

On the other hand I think exceptions make a lot of sense in python, and I think the python community has incorporated them in a standard way which makes sense, so that handling exceptions in python is actually easier then passing back different error codes and what-not (no atoms in python).
Going in the other direction, you have a country full of vegetarians, India, which is probably the best place for growing things on Earth (at least, India is filled with arable land), and meat probably looks less appealing in that context (less grazing land). Globalization is still not an answer in most of the third world, where they don't have much to trade for food from, for example, the Ukraine or USA bread basket regions; they have to eat local!

There is another interesting story about Coptic Christians in Egypt, pigs, and organic waste collection. The Copts were collecting trash to feed their pigs, but Egypt being mostly Muslim and all told them to kill all their pigs (they were also worried about disease, which could be a valid reason). Anyways, they stopped collecting garbage because no pigs to feed, and the government couldn't supply the garbage collection capacity to fill in the gaps so Cario started smelling very bad. Ah, ecosystems are so fragile and interesting!
It's hard to take comments like this seriously when the private American health care system has worse outcomes and more than double the cost of numerous socialized systems.

You can blindly chant "government isn't the solution" all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that it undeniably is the solution in a large number of countries with functional health systems.
I think it's uninteresting because it's easily dismissed and it cheapens the discussion about the problems in public education.
Too many inaccuracies in that graphic to be credible :-(
The flight map over South Asia, China, and most of South America looks to be very incomplete.
Good time, much better than that of some other "accomplished runner", http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/09/paul-ryan-supe...
hipmunk is not over 30 years old, though, and is not far older than the USA's originally agreed upon reasonably limited lifetime of copyright protection, before Disney lobbying created the never-ending copyright extension in the 20th century. So there's that distinction.
I like how the author of that completely did not understand how heat conduction works:

Just submersing your components in a liquid doesn't do you much good as the liquid will be room temperature and your CPU will burn up just as fast as if it were in the open.

Well no, because see, the thermal conductivity of air is about 0.026 W/mK and the thermal conductivity of mineral oil is at least 0.1 W/mK and oh god I'm trying to argue with someone 11 years in the past.
official ghost AI: http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html
Some koans have the goal of exhausting this kind of reserve through trying to deeply explore and attempt to solve a paradox. I think the intent is to gain experience of this kind of depletion to better understand its impacts (at least from my experience of it).
I vote for a title revision: "13 year old writes an essay better than most incoming college freshman; everyone focuses on race."
One would still pay tax on any physical asset acquired with the money. The wealth tax is essentially a perpetual tax on possessions.
Probably the time of day, I notice many more planes in Europe.
You should check out http://www.imgix.com
Wait, but two post above you said that government involvement is bad because it will turn emergency rooms to DMV. I thought state of Massachusetts runs the DMV, and hence they would be utterly unqualified to give health care? Am I getting something wrong?
It's interesting if you think about how easy is is to get food. The drives that cause us to eat probably evolved in the long period of human evolution where we had to work really hard, like every other animal, to find food. Hunger might cause stress, and rightly so. The search for food, for any animal, is always a top priority. But it's so ridiculously easy for people to feed themselves now. The search for food, driven by hunger, is "trivial". You could even eat just for the fun of eating. It's fun. It's also not very healthy. But how many fun things are also healthy?
I digress.

Maybe someone in the UK can comment on what it was like during WWII when there was a severe shortage of food. I have heard some say people were actually quite healthy because they were not eating "too much" as it is so easy to do under normal conditions. I don't know. Maybe some from the UK can comment.

In sum, given that we are still animals with animal drives like hunger, finding food and eating is way too easy. Maybe our evolution has not caught up.
Maybe it's just my screen, but I find that shade of grey to be incredibly difficult to read.

I do like the trend towards technological openness though, hopefully we'll be seeing more of this sort of thing.
Of course it's not. You're working for Microsoft.
Naturally, homebrewers have already started reformulating as an all-grain recipe:

http://hopville.com/recipe/1645107
There can only be controversy when either the truth isn't clear, or it doesn't matter. If we knew the answer, and it mattered, everyone would do it that way (and those who didn't would lose to those who did). e.g. religious wars:

vi vs emacs
OO vs fp
This thread has a lot of socialism vs free-market talk, but the real problem with American health care is the lack of transparency, and the middle-man, be it government or insurance doesn't change that. We have so many pointless things done, and the prices are not known ahead of time. Unless we are talking about life and death, the cost of the procedure you are doing to me should be known before I decide whether I want it or not. The number on the bill also isn't ever really the bill. The insurance company or government negotiating says no I won't pay that amount, this is the real amount you should be charging so we are going to pay this. Doctors and hospitals charge X because that is what insurance companies and government decided they would pay.

If you were negotiating this care for yourself, you could almost certainly get it cheaper (as you have a much bigger vested interest in your savings account than the government etc does), and we would not get nearly as many unneeded procedures done. Most of the time it's not even a question, and it should be. They don't say, we think maybe you should have this done and this is why. They say, we're going to do a X. Maybe they tell you why, if you ask them, otherwise it's just assumed that since I'm sick I should do what they say.

I broke my arm a few years ago playing softball. I had an extra 90 degree angle in my arm. People in the bleachers heard it snap. It was 100% broken no question about it. The hospital wouldn't give me any pain killers until they had an x-ray to see if it was broken or not. Now I suspect getting an x-ray is useful for the guy doing the surgery to fix it, and he did several as well, but there was 0 reason for the x-ray in the emergency room. It cost me (and the insurance company) money, it wasted valuable time for the nurses/doctors who could have been onto the next patient sooner, and most important it made me absolutely miserable for another hour waiting on it when all i needed was some pain killers and nice splint until I could have the surgery.

Socialism doesn't solve this problem. It just makes you pay for my x-ray.
Thanks for your feedback, I don't personally have a steak in the game, I just know the guy who made it, and have seen him work on it for the last 2 years.

From playing it, I personally find the lack of a personified character refreshing, the game is extremely addictive yet relaxing to play.

But hey, everyone looks for something different in a new game.
Why are people still using phone gap? What's the point? Might as well just build a web app. PhoneGap is the Dreamweaver of mobile.
Knuth's code has bugs. NASA's code has bugs. I don't think our species has produced even one nontrivial correct program, much less a programmer who's competent (which I take to mean a large portion of their work is 100% correct). Our profession is passing through the mercury-and-leeches phase medicine once went through. Someday our descendants will look back from their error monad formal proofs or something and cringe at everything we did.
I never said that they should, just that they can based on our constitution.
> They changed the implementation of objects

You're implying it was an implementation detail. They fundamentally changed how objects worked, the semantics, that made it completely impossible to move any of my PHP4 code over in a reasonable way.

It is possible to make code, that uses objects, work in both PHP4 and PHP5 but you have to restrict yourself to a subset of both versions.
I see 1 lb of honey in both recipes, at the end of the fermentables. Putting the honey in later in the boil (like in the honey ale recipe) would probably preserve more of the honey flavor.
Isn't PhoneGap just the interpreter for an HTML5 web app - the wrapper to get it on the phone as an ipa?

Unless it's changed a lot since 1.0 I don't believe it's some kind of WYSIWIG iPhone maker that creates bloated, terrible, code.
I hate writing what I just wrote because I know it might offend some people. I'm OK with the "incompetence" (I'm sure I qualify myself), but it's the fact that many of these programmers think they know what they're doing that bugs me. And they are writing software that will be used by other people.

They don't want to admit their mistakes or that someone else might understand things they don't. They actually think they are being smart when they are really being stupid.

Certainly not looking for "votes" with this one. Although I did get an upvote immediately, then a downvote from, who would have guessed, a closed source developer.

I'm not a fan of StackOverflow. There is a lot of stupidity and herd mentality there. It's not where I would look for "competent programmers". Like finding a needle in a haystack.