skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, the article has nothing to do with the US. It's just that it got me thinking because I live in the US, that's all. Wherever you live, you take certain things for granted. Being an immigrant, I've been interested in finding things that I took for granted, and this article helped me find one, that is the moral education as a teaching subject in school.

And you are right, I take back the "political topics" part.

I also didn't know that "most schools in the US have something similar." This is from a parent of a 2nd grader in California --- I guess I better pay more attention on what my kid is learning, eh? What is this subject called in the US? I'd love to find out more about what that teaches and what that doesn't.

Wrt "not up to individual states", my understanding is that the states are responsible for the K-12 education curriculum, and so if there's moral education in K-12, I'd assume the state education board controls what goes in there. Am I wrong on this?
It seems to me that those trying to take it back now aren't the same ones that identified as (good) hackers 30 or so years ago (with a few exceptions I'm sure). The 20-somethings that are fighting for it now are too young to have known the original meaning. They are drawn to the word because of the power it has in our culture. But that power is tied to the negative meaning. It seems disingenuous to argue for its original meaning when the negative meaning is all you've ever known.
Mind-controlled quadcopter drone lifts off in China
Hypothesis: Yelp relies on blackmail.

Disprove it.
Tube with Hydrophobic inner surface. Liquid filled. Accelerated by solar energy, Storage solution is simply kinetic.

Liquid accelerates until the solar input meets equilibrium with the (extremely low) energy loss through friction with the surface.

Ride the flow dude!
Interview with Marci Harris co-founder of Popvox
Why forbid pigs, and not cows? Why catfish, not cod? Vulture, not chicken? Even within a framework, there are reasons for specific decisions.
> People who want to be pilots love flying. Nonetheless they're not allowed to fly more than a number of hours, because passion, motivation and whatever you want won't prevent you from messing up when you're tired.

Correct me if I'm wrong but quick googling shows that pilots are restricted to 100 hours of flight time per month by the FAA. That's 25 hours per week. Perhaps flight time is not exactly comparable to building cars time?

> So please stop bullshitting yourself.

I don't appreciate that.

I have friends who can eat twice the calories each meal that I have and don't gain a pound. Some of them sleep 5 hours per night and they're perfectly rested. Some of my friends spend 60 hours a week at work and still always feel behind.

Turns out that not everyone is built the same. I can't have a slice of pizza every day. I need at least 8.5 hours of sleep per night to function. I can accomplish as much work in 30 hours as some of my peers take 60 hours to do.

I can't sustain long work hours unless I'm working for myself, but not everyone is built the same.
What is the EPA doing about it right now? You'd be surprised to learn that many U.S. environmental laws were passed by Republican presidents. There's a "Nixon-goes-to-China" aspect to it. Indeed, Nixon created the EPA...
I saw you made the audio available for download. Good stuff, thanks a lot, I enjoyed it.
Not really. For large amounts of people to get worked up enough about a proposed government policy to bother protesting in public, it usually means the proposed policy is really bad. People don't get off their butts otherwise.

Good government policy involves enough stakeholders, and propose reasonable enough solutions, that there's no reason for protests. So while certainly not every large protest is 100% right, they usually do indicate a breakdown of effective processes for representative government, as applied to the policy area in question.
Oh just, you know, create a function... There's nothing more pointless than @staticmethod, unless it was used specifically to port code it should mark whoever used it for a whipping.
> my understanding is that the states are responsible for the K-12 education curriculum, and so if there's moral education in K-12, I'd assume the state education board controls what goes in there. Am I wrong on this?

Separation of church and state is a Constitutional matter, and therefore enforced by the federal government. Individual states don't get a say. If they refuse, the federal government will seize control.

This is what happened with racial desegregation of schools. After the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that "separate but equal" was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called in the Arkansas National Guard to physically block black students from entering the white school (which had already admitted them). President Eisenhower sent in Army troops and federalized the Arkansas National Guard, overriding Faubus's authority.
I'm open for suggestions on how to improve the wording. Quite tricky that languages are so overladen with all sorts of meanings. Especially challenging if it's not one's first language.
>But the company only showed off low-light shots, prohibiting any testing of the touted image stabilization for video. There’s only one thing to conclude from that: Nokia may have gotten the image-stabilization for video working in its testing, and it may well be ready when the phone launches, but it’s not working well enough yet. And if it’s not working well now, it’s not working.

Not exactly true, here's a live demo of the image stabilization:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlT8qk2ZoGM&feature=playe...

The Verge themselves tested the hardware in low light and here are comparison shots: http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/7/3299784/nokia-lumia-920-pur...

A live demo of low light pictures with other phones:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFhhBJ1URCg&feature=playe...!

And a real(ha! this time?!) demo video shot with this contraption.

http://cdn.wpcentral.com/sites/wpcentral.com/files/imagecach...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6...

So looks like they made a mistake with trying to make ad quality videos to depict image stabilization and photos but minus the standard disclaimer like you see in ads and the media won't give them a break, with articles like this insinuating that the feature doesn't work at all.
Also, it seems that smokers (at least in the US) are much more likely to go outside to smoke now, even when at their own home. Sorry, no data just personal recollections from childhood in the '80s.
Well, I guess that about makes thoughts of doing anything useful the rest of today pointless....This is way too fun.
I would highly recommend going native for building games. With HTML5 you won't get the performance you do from a native app primarily because OpenGL is hardware accelerated and performs very well on iDevices. Plus JavaScript executes fairly slowly in UIWebViews. If you spend a lot of time you can improve the performance, but it will still be much worse than native if you're shooting for a frame rate >30fps and plan to have many elements on the screen.

Shameless self plug: If you're looking to build an iPhone game check out our website (https://www.makegameswith.us), you'll learn how to build Angry Birds in no time then get started making your own game!
I sent request for approval and its pending for 9 days..don't think its for everyone.Anyways python support will create more interest.
>What is this subject called in the US? I'd love to find out more about what that teaches and what that doesn't.

It's not a specific subject, but usually something built into the overall curriculum. It's generally called character education: here's the relevant link for CA http://www.cde.ca.gov/eo/in/se/charactered.asp

Here's the relevant link for my state (Georgia).
https://www.georgiastandards.org/standards/GPS%20Support%20D...

>Wrt "not up to individual states", my understanding is that the states are responsible for the K-12 education curriculum, and so if there's moral education in K-12, I'd assume the state education board controls what goes in there. Am I wrong on this?

You are correct. However, if a state does something that clearly violates the Constitution, e.g. a state promoting a specific religion, it would eventually end up before the supreme court.
Sock Puppets. Tech Crunch: Completely Worthless or Only Mostly Worthless?

Seriously, though. Every source with a grain of salt.[1,2]

______________

[1] http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html: "If anyone is dishonest, it's...reporters. The main reason PR firms exist is that reporters are lazy. Or, to put it more nicely, overworked. Really they ought to be out there digging up stories for themselves. But it's so tempting to sit in their offices and let PR firms bring the stories to them."

[2] That's not a knock on this submission. If anything, just an application what we learned inside (ie,its principles). Or, as the author un-ironically notes, "Even the honest reviews are mostly written by people who are stupid...". That sounds fair and objective, right?
I climbed mountain passes that size with my infants carried in a pack. It was good clean fun and the babies loved it.

They play in the pine needles and the sand and get sap all over themselves and then snuggle up with you in the cold alpine nights. Everybody has a good time.

And I'm nowhere near as tough as Ms. Blum. (Annapurna I! Holy. Cow.)
Rackspace Cloud Servers are down
What's paying to keep the service running?
Im a 40yo grumpy middle aged man, who still clings on to some very old music. I have to say, I like what you've done there.
C and C++ are weakly typed because you can do things like

int x = 42;
printf("%c\n", *(char *) &x);

that is, access the underlying bits which represent a value as if they were of some completely different type. The results are deliberately not standardized and vary with your machine. Python doesn't provide any way to do this; at worst you get a TypeError for a conversion that isn't implemented, or AttributeError for a slot that an object doesn't have.

Implicitly parsing strings to produce numbers isn't weak typing, merely reckless and prone to mistakes. Weak typing can corrupt the state of your program so severely that even correct code begins to malfunction.
Binary format compatible with JSON (unlike BSON)
Please, do! The python community in web development is definitely a big one and we don't want to miss on the fun :).
Running is a skill to learn just like everything else. People with sedentary lifestyle start running, run out of steam after a minute, decide this is not for them and give up entirely.

So I tried an introductory level of running schedule to overcome this. Every other day you need to invest ~30 minutes. In fact, the very first day you shouldn't be running more than 8*1 minute with 2-minute pauses. It was terribly exhausting. After a few weeks, I was able to run for 15 minutes straight.

Metric apps like MeyerD's are good tools, but there's no substitute for well thought out training plans.
Another top-level comment wrote:

between this and the article about brain parasites in california, HN is scaring the crap out of me

And I guess that's why my all-time favorite external link to share here on Hacker News is "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation"

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

by Peter Norvig, Google's director of research. To resolve the issue of the safety trade-offs of not treating furniture with flame-retardant chemicals (the status quo when I was a child) and treating it (the status quo for quite a while now in the United States) will take careful examination of the actual risk ratios of any disease said to be correlated with the chemicals, the risk ratios of injuries and deaths from fires, the cost of other preventive measures for each kind of harm, and so on. Public policy is not easy. The best public policies have to be carefully examined in light of verifiable facts.

I see from user danso's profile

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=danso

that he has a professional role in investigative journalism, and indeed I have enjoyed reading (and of course have upvoted) many of his comments here on HN over the past year. The piece submitted here mentions about its author that "Dashka Slater is the author of six books for children and adults. Her latest children’s book, 'Dangerously Ever After,' is out this month," which prompted me to look up other information about the author. Her personal website

http://www.dashkaslater.com/index.php/journalist

declares that she has written pieces for a variety of publications, many in the "alternative" market for periodical articles, and her LinkedIn profile

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dashkaslater

declares her educational background. There is some interesting reporting here, but as a regular reader of Mother Jones (one of the publications that most often publishes her work) and of other "alternative" publications, I would like to see more follow-up on this issue before writing to my elected representatives, as I sometimes do, asking for a change in current law. I do remember when newspaper and magazine articles in my childhood were all about the fearsome dangers of fires killing little children.

A recent submission to HN based on very reliable statistics pointed out that life expectancy in the United States at birth, at age 40, at age 60, at age 65, and even at age 80 has been steadily RISING

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...

since 1960, so new regulations introduced since then so far don't seem to have net harm for the population in balance with all other social and environmental changes since then. Perhaps the purported flame-retardant chemicals don't prevent as many fires as people suppose. But perhaps they also don't cause any serious human illness in actual use. Let's not rush to judgment on this issue, but let's do actual, verifiable science that with sound economic and policy analysis can help guide lawmakers to the best currently available trade-off in regulation.
There is no agreed-upon definition for the terms strong and weakly typed. Even then, your categorization are unconventional. Python is typically categorized as strongly typed since silent type coercion does not happen. Also I've never heard Java categorized as weak. You can cast, but there is still a runtime check that the cast is valid.
Are there any states that don't have a requirement of a current prescription to purchase glasses? I've had the same issue in Texas [1], which usually considers itself small-government.

[1] cf. http://www.tob.state.tx.us/tobrx.htm
just in case your couch is dangerous: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJkhSUSnek

10 seconds that can mushroom into a lot of wasted time, you've been warned.
The music classifying nightmare
I have to ask, what was the song? Can we have a link?
I never said that the left-wing wouldn't try to do such a thing. (in fact, the far-left routinely do, such as in the OP ;)
Not to mention fixture design and fabrication.

I am one of those rare engineers who is equally at home writing embedded software, web software, iOS software, workstation software, designing electronics hardware (from simple analog go GHz range FPGA's) as well as mechanical.

And, of course, as a total geek, I also jumped into the manufacturing processes for all of the above. I am equally at home in front of a SMT pick-and-place machine as I am in front of a VMC or a table-saw.

I have to tell you that some of the most gut-wrenching design work I've had to face sometimes wasn't how to design the thing but figuring out how to actually make it. From specialized fixtures to custom tooling or a weird manufacturing process.

Frankly, this is some of the most valuable knowledge that our country is loosing to other shores as manufacturing continues to be decimated. It's one thing to know how to use a VMC. It is an entirely different thing to know how to engineer, setup and execute on an end-to-end manufacturing process.
The last perambulation of an ancient arthropod
spite?
> Perhaps flight time is not exactly comparable to building cars time?

It's not comparable in the consequences of you messing up because you're tired (150 deaths vs a misaligned rubber joint that leaks). However the underlying principle remains; when people work too much, they get tired and they makes many more errors. So it Musk wants absolutely perfect cars, he must gives more time off to the workers. Basic common sense supported by experience and scientific studies.

> > So please stop bullshitting yourself.

I don't appreciate that.

Sorry for the formulation, it wasn't targeting you, but this quite US-specific mix of protestant and macho ethos of hard work pushed to the absurd. Many, many people are dead sure _they_ can work so much more than the next guy and stay efficient.

> I have friends who can eat twice the calories each meal that I have and don't gain a pound. Some of them sleep 5 hours per night and they're perfectly rested. Some of my friends spend 60 hours a week at work and still always feel behind.

Yes, and some people can drink a bottle of wine everyday and never get cirrhosis, etc. Of course we're all different, and there probably are people that can work 60 (or maybe 80) hours a week and don't be tired and inefficient.

However you can't count on that, thus it's not reasonable to build a business model betting that you'll only get absolutely exceptional people with nearly super-human abilities in your team. Particularly when the number of employees is in the thousands (from the article Tesla currently has 2800 employees).
simply superb!
I don't see the lack of faith thing as much as you. I see it as the features those projects have been working on don't rely on any Groovy 2.0 functionality, so they'll push it out sooner and give people more functionality in those projects now, and explore the impact on Groovy2 on their respective projects after it's release and shakes out.
Show HN: Pickmoto - an iOS app to track your football predictions
What does the "delay" option on my user page do?
Some friends and I have been working on this app for a few months. We wanted a way to track our football predictions throughout the entire season, and compete against each other on who makes better predictions. Let me know if you have any feedback: ryan@pickmoto.com. Thanks HN!
> the average number of people that access each tweet, which is probably more like 100+

I'm sorry. I really am. I know this isn't Reddit. But...

HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA

Yes. Yes, on average, a given tweet reaches ONE HUNDRED PEOPLE. Do any of you folks even listen to yourself? Even if you change that to "users" instead of "people," since so many twitter accounts are robots - even then, 100 users on average for every tweet is ABSURD.

> the polling that twitter applications do even when there are no new tweets

Polling with no new tweets is far easier to optimize than polling when there are tweets. So just discount this almost entirely in your roughshod analysis.

> spam filtering

Have you been on twitter? We all get spam and see fake accounts trying to get at us regularly. Try mentioning you're on a diet on twitter and see how many followers you rack up. If they're filtering spam, they're not filtering it well, so I hope they aren't burning too much cash on it.

> API servers

API servers are frontends that use dramatically fewer resources than the work the backends have to do. If Twitter's frontends are costing them much money, again, they're wasting money.
Hey, I'm not complaining. I think it needed to be done.

But my point still stands: if the sea-steaders thought they could escape into some "international law" zone, then they were sadly mistaken. It's more like a "we dont really care...until we do" zone.

IIRC Greenpeace found this out when commandos (French) boarded their ship.
This sucks, another web app comes out; tells the world use me & develop for me, now f* off.

Now they are punishing everyone because they can't figure out how to make money by magic or ads.

I'm not arguing that it is a smart move to create a company on top of someone else's single purpose platform, but now they are going after the users.

Try charging for a change. 172 million active users x 10c a day = $516,000,000 mo, that's 3 bucks a month, yes most won't pay, but you can't really expect to make more than 1/2 billion dollars a month with micro blogging. And you can also charge a fair fee for developers, per API usage, you could probably double up the revenue.

With this very basic math, you don't need to cripple the user experience to place ads customers don't want to see.

I hope app.net get’s it right, it’s unlikely but would be great. I’ve supported it.
Why does everyone emulate iOS appearance? I'm so tired of seeing it. It desperately needs a refresh.
Your response is a case in point. Your views on "stakeholders", your belief in "representative democracy", and your faith in the wisdom of the People are fully in line with the progressive orthodoxy that is the bedrock of Western public education. That doesn't necessarily make your views wrong, but it's unlikely that you were reasoned into them from a blank slate. It's more likely you came to them after a lifetime of exposure to a press and public educational system that almost uniformly espouses such views.

As a thought experiment, consider what a hoplite educated in a Spartan agoge would think of your views. What about an aristocrat educated in Antonine Rome, or in France under Louis XIV? Would they share your sanguine views on the wisdom of the People? If not, why not? How confident are you that you are right and they are wrong, and what is the basis of that confidence?

None of this is a defense of current Chinese government policy. My point is that using official education for brainwashing and political indoctrination is par for the course in a country founded on the principle of popular sovereignty. One consequence of this is that virtually every educated Westerner, including most readers of Hacker News and the New York Times, has been exposed to the same sort of brainwashing and political indoctrination decried by the protesters in the OP. One effect of this is a reflexive support of popular movements of all sorts without an appreciation of the potential costs of that support.

Louis XIV might even have been sanguine, but his descendant Louis XVI would know what I mean.
A Summer Inside a Fast Growing Edtech Startup
It lets you delay the visibility of comments for x minutes, so you can edit/reconsider.
nobody will care about this stuff when the phone launches. which isn't to say it will (or won't) be successful, but whether it is will have nothing to do with the launch event or what they did or didn't have ready then. the press and pundits put way too much stock in this sort of thing.
Wait, Why’s Pirate Bay Promoting An Indie Game? (McPixel Free Today)
I loathe the requirement of a current prescription for glasses. Corrupt bureaucracy at its usual tricks.

What I wonder: Is it illegal to make a bed out of flame-retardant free cotton balls?
That's where I think droithomme's comment comes into play. Where the downsides are so high, strong positive evidence should be provided and I'm not convinced it's there.
If the government doesn't want to play by the rules, what's the incentive for the common citizen?

The value of the "law abiding citizen" has been evaporating quickly over the last century. Unfortunate. There is no honor in abiding by the law when those entrusted with enforcing it couldn't give a damn about it.

You know where this is going? You'll reach a point where "law abiding citizen" = sucker. Want to know what that's like? Just look at any country where you have to bribe a dozen officials just to take a piss.
PayPal CEO writes personal response