skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I intend to defend the position that these 10,000 of practice should be worked through as quickly as possible and as early as possible; alike how the Chinese high school system works. I think this is a reasonable position to take.

That's actually the part I have a problem with...

I was a physics major for most of college. There were 3 of us (Rachel, Nathaniel, and myself) in my entering class that entered with a full year of AP credits, i.e. we had studied & practiced a lot beforehand and came in with good skills. We all had big ambitions: Rachel wanted to be a researcher for NASA at JPL, Nathaniel and I wanted to be hotshot theoretical physicists that made fundamental contributions to knowledge.

Rachel dropped the major at the beginning of her sophomore year. She graduated with a geology/music double major, wanted to work for USGS for a while, actually worked there and discovered it wasn't all that great, and is now happily doing a Ph.D in geology.

I dropped the major midway through sophomore year, picked it up again junior year, and dropped it for good in my last semester. I graduated with a degree in CS, worked for a startup, founded a startup, and am now happily working for Google.

Nathaniel finished the major, went to grad school, took a sabbatical from grad school where he worked in a bakery, and is now back in grad school. He plans to finish his physics Ph.D, but now wants to be a baker after receiving it.

Meanwhile, the folks who are successfully doing physics Ph.Ds often came in with no prior experience.

The problem with the Chinese system is it leaves no room for being wrong about your direction. When I was 18, I was certain I wanted to be a theoretical physicist. When I was 24, I was certain I wanted to do startups. In neither case would I have guessed that I'd end up at a gigantic software company.
It looks more-or-less the same, except that I'm not kidding when I condone.
I'm not sure that anybody will buy this, especially if it costs more than an ordinary pizza box. It simply doesn't add that much value.

You might be able to build a market out of eco-guilt in the bay area, maybe.
What do companies want?
Vint Cerf: Despite its age, Internet still filled with problems
But generally you choose a Lisp not to use libraries but to create a program that's in a class by itself.

Boy, am I glad to see that somebody else figured this out.

The lack of libraries which is the objection du jour against Lisp is actually connected to its strengths. First, there's less of a need for many libraries because it's so easy to write your own things. Second, Lisp's value goes up (and libraries' goes down) the more you get into problems that aren't well understood. But then a lot of problems get more open-ended, when you're working in a medium that encourages exploration.
I don't think so, keeping that money in the bank is purchasing your peace of mind, it's no different than purchasing any other experience.
On paying legal fees in frivolous cases:

I completely agree this would help in many situations. It isn't easy, though, to determine what constitutes as a baseless claim. Are all claims that seem to be just aggressive litigation deserving of costs? Or just ones from "patent trolls"? If so, what defines a "patent troll"? It isn't always easy to tell who deserves to be punished.

On "Use It Or Lose It":

This is not as easy at it seems. Right now, there are many incentives to file for a patent as soon as the invention has been reduced to practice. In fact, if the invention becomes disclosed, the inventor only has a year in order to secure his patent. This results in patents for technologies which are frequently at the prototype stage. This is a good thing - now, the technology has been described in a publication that is publicly accessible.

Imagine if there was a requirement to "use it" after it was patented... In many cases, that would be impossible: just because something is patented, does not mean it is manufacturable. Furthermore, it may not have a use in a commercial product right after it is patented... Although five years later, it could be an integral part of a product.

In short, requiring the invention to immediately "used" may appear to solve problems, but will probably open up a whole new set of problems.
Anybody having any views on Primer? I watched it after reading about it on Kottke. Around the sametime a few days earlier I had watched Memento. And the contrast was as clear as heaven and earth.

Memento was v.intellectually stimulating and if you watched it closely (maybe twice) everything was there in the movie itself to figure out the 'mindfuck' elements. The very minute details which you may still miss were clearly explained in some article online, so all in all it was a comprehensive experience. It made you feel good at the end of it because everything had an explanation.

Whereas Primer just seemed like a bad movie and maybe partially because it was low budget. Throughout the movie I just thought I couldn't clearly see what was there in the scene. Many scenes felt like there was no proper light or sound.(youtubeish). And the storyline seemed so out of whack, and I remember watching it thrice, and lurking on the official movie forums trying to figure out the timeline and 'mindfuck'ness of the movie, but it just seemed like the whole movie could sort of come together only if you could imagine that half the movie was not shown. There were so many timelines in forums, and all of them seemed to miss out on major plotlines, which they would explain with a handwave as "director is v.smart and intended it to be so and you could feel that's what he wanted to portray... it was just not shown on screen...blah blah". The director himself lurked out on forums and gave conflicting and deliberately confusing interviews at the time on indie media sites and honestly he never seemed to explain wtf was going on.

In the end instead of a real mindfuck movie (like Memento), to me it just felt like a bad movie, where nothing could be explained and everything was left half-finished. I am still open to be convinced otherwise though it seems unlikely.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=481063
That's not a good strategy since the questions are different.
Thanks for your support cesther!
I'd like to know, too. We use CentOS 5 for servers, and I hate it because anytime I want to do anything interesting, we have to compile stuff from source to get anything recent enough. (Ruby, Git, etc...)
Well, what do you mean? What 'options' would I want?
Nobody will change their Pizza purchasing habits for a perforated box ERGO pizza stores will not pay a premium for a perforated box ERGO great idea, but it will never see the light of day BECAUSE it has a patent.

If anything this is a good example of patent laws gone wrong. It has little to do with protecting and rewarding innovation, only protecting and rewarding corporations and other well healed individuals with patent lawyers.
Surprising uses of corporate data mining
Are Academics Different?
Oh it isn't just look and feel. They are re-discovering everything. Just a week ago they were discussing how to solve the "string" problem. They realize they need a common cross platform string class.

For most C++ developers stuff like this has been solved for a very long time. Even WebKit itself includes a free string class. Why wasn't it used from the start? All this re-solving of old issues is puzzling.

Google talks about how they try to sell their products internally first (says Jeff Huber, the company’s senior vice president of engineering),

"For many ideas, Google’s first and most important audience is its employees, and it typically tries products internally before releasing them."

Why wasn't Chrome used internally? Google presents itself as a Linux shop, but why didn't Linux developers internally help on Chrome with their 20% time? Chrome isn't a new application, it is two a half years old. That should have been more then enough time to at least discover these basic issues. Why did Ben Goodger allow Chrome to create its interface code in a very non portable and Windows only way? As the "lead Chrome UI developer" he should have brought up these problem years ago.
Awesome find! I can now ignore the submissions that will arise over the course of a year when no less than 20 bloggers pick their 10 favorites, and post their blog entries to Reddit.

Much like the gold of "best-of" craigslist, you've identified the source and that's perfect.
A smart startup would have low licensing fees to make it affordable. Maybe a few cents per box. Once one big company uses the idea to get new customers, chances are others will have to follow at the expense of not being a "green" company.
Does the phrase "plug and chug" mean anything to you?
What Would the Macroeconomy on the 100% Gold Standard Look Like?
All About Key West Florida
Been planning a trip to Key West. Really good reference site. Lots of good information.
Krugman Rattled On C-Span
If nobody would buy it anyway, then how is the patent holding anyone back? It's just saving them from failure.

If somebody would buy it, then this scrappy little startup has a chance.

I'm not sure I agree with your first principle here though. The interesting thing about this box is that it has utility. Beyond being a "greener" option (I quote that because having your pizza delivered and then worrying about the environmental cost of paper plates seems to be like cutting off your toes and then worrying if you need to buy smaller shoes) it obviates the necessity of paper plates. And simply perforating a box may add very, very little extra cost.
Issuu has the ugliest hover-over title bar I've ever seen. I should not see the entire page sink down based on a hover. A click, maybe: not a hover.

I'm not impressed. It's not tight at all. The page feels loose and sloppy.
You really have no clue. This poor kid probably doesn't have the money for a train trip to Shanghai much less to explore the world. He has no ability to work other places inside China and nobody would hire him where he'd make any money where he is. He is trapped and a Chinese university degree is the only way out.
just like the guy that sold mini plastic tables to keep the box sturdy...
Be right back, I'm going to patent using a yogurt container to store food other than yogurt...
Most college pizza parties did not have plates, we just ripped apart the boxes if we cared about not making a mess. Noone cared because they were stuffing their faces.
I'm a westerner working in China for years and hiring computer science graduates from the top tier universities. The quality of their education is shockingly poor. The Chinese education system is destructive and collectivist, promoting conformity of thought and narrowness of vision. Students graduate in to a world where connections, wealth, accident of birth and not talent determine your success in life.

You should be glad you didn't grow up in such a system. Be happy you have a shot at participating in something of a meritocracy, be it academic or corporate.
>who won? China, as usual.

I'll need to hear more details than that; China is the largest country in the world.
The Future of Reading - In Web Age, Library Job Gets Update
Most of us recognize the value of having such detailed data, and also the consequences of it (like in this article). I would prefer not to have to "trust" the company storing the data, and I think leaks like this make it clear this can't be the approach in the future. So how can this problem be solved from a technology perspective?

I'm aware of k-anonymization, where you change the data to make it mathematically impossible to identify an individual data point more specifically than among k entries. So for example

Age Weight Disease
18 150 Cancer
45 203 Diabetes
37 197 Heart Disease

becomes

Age Weight Disease
* * Cancer
[36-45] [195-210] Diabetes
[36-45] [195-210] Heart Disease

for k=2, and it's now impossible to know for sure the disease of the 45-year-old, whereas you could deduce that information from the earlier records.

Another approach, used by some major search engines for ad-targeting, is to insert random noise into the data.

What other solutions are there? If you build software that captures sensitive data, how do you deal with it?
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Could Silicon Valley Become the Next Detroit?
The argument is that Silicon Valley isn't doing enough pure research and will therefore be eclipsed by outfits in other countries where pure research has better funding.

The data is pretty anecdotal -- an Indian PhD who says India now offers a better chance at success for his children than the US and a $5MM grant to a research program in China to fund nanotechnology research -- but it's interesting food for though.
> I'm just wondering if they lost a few who could be Nobels along the way.

I don't think studying for an olympiad impedes this. Terrence Tao (Australian, to be clear), dominated math olympiads, went on to make fundamental contributions to math and won a Fields medal.
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http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23blackout

http://twitter.com/terrencewood/statuses/1214564779 - Our ISPs all have.

Please support us, I don't want to live with that law :S
You can't generate passion and creativity by squeezing 10,000 hours of [forced] practice into someone (especially really young kids). It also leaves little time to explore ('find what you love'). Passion, creativity AND skills (in a lot of cases the first two lead to skills anyway) is what drives people to do amazing things. I'm glad you found your passion, I think most of us here did; but without it we couldn't do [so well] what we're doing now.
I don't know where you could get something like that these days.

However, TI used to make a real portable terminal:

http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/ti-tymshare-100/...

That one is considerably larger than the smallest models. The smallest onse were about the size of an eeepc, but thicker, had a built in modem instead of an acoustic coupler, and a thermal printer so you could print out a transcript of your session on receipt style paper.

I am not old of enough to have ever used one, but I once saw a couple of the smaller ones made for sale at the Austin Goodwill Computer Works.

For your purposes, I would get an old, small laptop such as a Compaq Aero and install a simple, text-only linux on it.
With all due respect, your views and analysis are only relevant to the urban experience.

"anyone who is slightly not retarded" does NOT land up a job in non-metros.

Just visit a tier 2 city like Nashik (I am not even talking about proper rural areas) and see the employment opportunities there. At such places success stories abound of sons and daughters of lower middle class workers who cracked some competitive exam or another have landed, and naturally students are inspired to work harder.

Go little deeper and in the rural areas, the socio-economic conditions there are such that kids who can attend schools and colleges consider themselves privileged. And these people do uplift the economic situation of the entire family.

The point I am trying to drive here is that the parents are generally right to emphasize the importance of education to their children. Of course, obsessive behavior as demonstrated in this article is wrong.

The inherent problem which leads to this is two fold: lack of seats and unscientific content in education.

Lack of Seats
There is an utter shortage of seats in all educational centers in India. This leads to higher "cut off" grades leading to obsessive competition. The very idea that grades are the blanket deciding factor to deem a student fit to attend a certain school is very poor and it needs scrutiny urgently.

Unscientific content
The Indian education, in its current form, discourages creativity, emphasizes solely on memorization capabilities (I have some friends who are now managers at Big Four IT companies who memorized essays for English exam and sums for Math exams and got super grades) and is highly politicized. It is geared to train students to be doers and not thinkers, it does not light the burning curiosity that I feel is very important to really learn anything (be it math, sciences, even history, etc)

IMHO, there is an need to modernize the educational system which should solve many a problems.

It is a mammoth task; grading system, content, creativity, the "tuition problem" to name a few obstacles. We can start out by accepting the problems.

Again, all due respect to your views. I can relate with them and probably would have completely supported them had I not had the opportunity to visit what some call the "real India" :)
Lawmakers don't care about protests unless they make them look bad, so don't waste your time. Now blackmail on the other hand... (handy hint, it will have no effect unless it is illegal or require a ridiculously high number of people)
Facebook: "We can do anything we want with your content. Forever"
Polyvore - Fashion freaks rejoice, you're a part of the web too
Debian is not just slow, but slow and irregular with their releases. There's nothing that says "about every 2 years" or "let's try for once every 18 months" or something like that. It happens when it happens. That can be kind of maddening. With Ubuntu you have the choice to either grab on to the every-six-months version, or use the long term support version.

The "just use unstable/experimental" thing is fine if you have no memory of really big transitions... libc5 -> glibc6, for instance, caused a lot of breakage. There are no guarantees that that kind of thing won't happen again. Using unstable is fine if you're a hacker and don't mind helping out when something goes awry - I'm glad people do that, and did it myself at one time. But if you're not in a position to drop what you're doing to go chase down some obscure bug in a package, then perhaps unstable should be approached with caution.

Ubuntu and Debian really aren't that different - file layouts, tools... pretty much everything is the same. Which is good... it makes Ubuntu Debian + money for usability improvements + a more unified vision + a regular release schedule.

Oh, another thing I like with Ubuntu is that I can run exactly the same code on my laptop and server, which has proved to be quite convenient more than once.

Debian is fantastic though... if Ubuntu ever falters, I will go back without a second thought. They get a ton of things right and do great work.
Fireball over Texas
Followup post: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/02/15/te...
Ask HN: Tool like Google Analytics to track keyword search ranking over time
Hi hackers,

We currently use Rank Checker toolbar (http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/) to track the search rankings for our site for certain keywords...

This works great, but is a manual process every time. Is there free tool that does the same but over time, eg graphing rankings each day, ala Google Analytics?

This would help us tons see how our SEO efforts are paying off (or not)

Thx..
Ask HN: Best cheap hosting for a low traffic local business?
I've been building some websites lately for small local businesses that want an internet presence. For simplicity, I have the clients register the domain and pay for the hosting themselves. Where should I direct them to buy the hosting?

Thanks all.
Nick
Why not Weebly?
Polyvore impressed when they launched a while back because they have a very simple, clean and functional interface.

Actually their functions weren't and still aren't as advanced as other online scrapbook / graphic sites, but their UI has let them grow to be very popular...

I guess a good lesson for rest of us newbies out there building consumer web apps.
I usually just check weekly. Progress is not always a straight line upwards. Add Google analytics to see how many people visited the keyword in question. This is probably most effective.
No sign of it so far. Last cycle YC had a record number of applications for funding. Now several times more investors want to come to AngelConf than we have room for. So both cylinders of the engine are still firing fine as of now.
well, yodle and reachlocal, amongst others, are trying to answer that question

In general, though, it's hard to do well. Problems include the fact that many people don't turn to google first thing for pizza, that google still doesn't do a good job looking up businesses by name, that even with geo-targeting food delivery is hyper local and very competitive, that even yelp and seamlessweb have interesting penetration in only a tiny handful of cities, etc. Frankly, I don't really think the internet is the wave of the future for a lot of restaurants -- I'll find out about them from word of mouth or from walking around my neighborhood. Plus, adwords is expensive, and irrational competitors can drive keyword prices sky high.
I believe they have an ex-google employee working with them...

Maybe that would explain something?? lol
I believe you meant fixed "width"
Forgot about weebly, I've been on the site before but didn't think about it because I associated it amateur sites. Can you paste your own html?
I open a set of links on a dedicated Chrome window, read one article at a time, come back to the listing page and vote!
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It wasn't so much that no European ruler could afford to be so foolish as Europe could afford to have foolish rulers. There were definitely bits of Europe that were screwed at various times in this period, but breakage tended to be contained by national borders.
As a Portuguese citizen I feel obliged to point out that it's actually written "Portugal".
Richard East On Marketing
Pay attention to Richard East about the ultimate system in lead generation and avoid Your Competition from Robbing You BLIND...
I haven't done a lot of submitting myself.. I usually just do "Ask HN" type stuff. Hacker News doesn't automatically tell you that the URL you're submitting has already been submitted? Or was the URL slightly different?
One of my favorite FF features: You can middle click links to open them in a new tab.
"if Bush was an emperor, and held power for a few generations, it isn't far fetched to see a dark age of bio research."

The total federal research and development budget increased under Bush. The objection that some people have is his moratorium on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.

This is a small part of all bio research that is morally contentious. I doubt your assertion of seeing a "dark age of bio research" is warranted.
Firing Squad Problem