skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I didn't say that only indoctrination about the supernatural is distasteful. Indoctrination--religious or otherwise--is unethical.

Here is a question for the voucher program. Are parent's forced to send their children to schools that is founded on a religion? Or do the parents voluntary send their children to these schools?

As I understand it, parents are the legal guardians of their children. It is up to them to teach the children their value system and the religion (or no religion) of their choice.

What alternative do you propose? State enforced atheism?

> The only way to rid religious schools of the indoctrination--for which they were created and which is one of their main selling points-

Again – were the parents forced to send their children to these schools?

I don't think that it is up to you (or the state) to determine to which school a child should be sent.

Also, bear in mind that as far as private tuition goes – in the university system private universities vastly outperformed public universities in quality. Also check how many of the truly great universities were found as religious schools/backed by religious groups. Would it have been better if the state did not allow private universities? (The following universities had a religious affiliation when it was founded; Harvard, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Columbia, Brown University, Dartmouth college).

As for your comments about educational quality: In my country there exist a private religious schooling group. In all metrics they performed better than public schools. They did this even though they received no money form the state. A few metrics such as pass rate, teacher to pupil ratio, distinctions, drop out rate, etc... is all better than public schools (which are a mess). Children in those school actually got individual attention and academics was the focus point (they sucked in sport though).

One problem they faced was this: their school fees was a little higher than government schools (since they did not have government support). Some parents who had children with learning problems or behavioural problems sent that child to the private school but kept their other child in the public school. It got so bad that they enacted a new policy – a parent must put all his children or none of them in the school.

> --is to close them or transfer them from religious organizations to secular organizations (which is something I fully support).

I suspect that your sentiments in private schools have nothing to do with the quality of the education and everything to do with your bigotry towards religion and religious people. You would have children learn what you feel is acceptable rather than their guardian/parent.
I can personally vouch for the awesomeness of 'git bisect', especially when combined with 'git rebase' to reconstruct trees minus troublesome commits.

Like many tools, I think git bisect's advantage comes from reducing the amount of thinking that you need to do to accomplish a task. Before git bisect I'd often stare at pieces of broken code or poke around in a debugger for hours on end. Now, ~1 hr or so with git bisect and friends, and the job is done...and I get to spend brain cycles thinking about something else.
Oh, burn!
JRuby is not a 1:1 mapping of a Ruby to Java bytecode -- there's significant additional book-keeping that must be done by JRuby's runtime (for example, maintaining the Ruby call frames).

In contrast, Scala maps to the JVM as closely as possible. Scala classes are Java classes -- Scala and Java are bidirectionally interoperable, and Scala's performance subsequently benefits.
Ask HN: MAC vs PC for a developer?
I don't wanna start a new flame war, but work is buying me a new computer and I can chose, but I really don't know what I should pick.

My criteria are:
most productive for web development
lowest possible maintenance

I mostly develop in python and also do a lot of HTML/CSS editing

what would you recommend and why? what software would you use on a mac?
what are the major disadvantages of a mac over pc?
no, my understanding is that 3.0 will let your server send a notification to your iPhone.If the user wishes to act on the notification, they can launch the app

That probably isn't going to be of much help in oomkiller's scenario since the scenario requires the opposite functionality (with the iPhone sending a notification once every 5-10 minutes ....since it isn't realistic to expect the user to look for notifications and relaunch the app every 5-10 min)
Portable Ubuntu: Run Ubuntu on Windows
Portable Ubuntu: Run Ubuntu on Windows
You bring up a core point and that is exactly why I am so against indoctrination. If a child is brainwashed into a religion, and then they grow up and send their kid to get brainwashed the same way, did they really choose to have their kid brainwashed? The whole point of brainwashing is to force people to act a certain way. Did the law force them? No. Did their religious leaders and upbringing force them? In many cases, yes.

Keep in mind that I am not against religious people. But, I believe everybody should have their right to choose their own religion. Indoctrination fights free choice of religion and that is why I am against it. And, public dollars should never go to religious organizations or anti-religious organizations. Otherwise, people are effectively forced to support financially religions that they oppose on moral grounds.

Again, I am not against religion but I am against someone imposing their religion on others--even their own children.
As I understand it he made some serious missteps in the recession. WP:

> Berkshire Hathaway acquired 10% perpetual preferred stock of Goldman Sachs at $123[40] only for it to fall to below $60. Furthermore some of Buffett's Index put options (European exercise at expiry only) that he wrote (sold) are currently running around $6.73 billion mark-to-market losses.

Warren Buffett tarnished as Main Street oracle
http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/604619

Buffett suffers big losses at Berkshire Hathaway
http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2009/02/28/buffet-suffers-big-...

(d Berkshire's net worth dropped a whopping $10.9 billion in the final three months of 2008.

Berkshire's shares have fallen 44% since the end of February 2008.
)

etc...
I'm not sure where the commentator got the figure that special ed is 25% of the budget. Numbers I've seen indicate that special ed students cost perhaps 3 times what regular ed students cost per year, but there are a lot fewer special ed kids in most districts.

I am an atheist, fyi, but the reason I don't have a problem with parochial schools is this: Suppose an atheist like me has a kid and gets a voucher and must choose between a parochial school and a public school. I may rationally conclude that the hour spent each day on theological subjects is a worthwhile sacrifice to make in exchange for an overall superior academic environment. Yes, the hour is (in my opinion) time wasted, but in my mind it's equivalent to an hour wasted in, say, a poorly taught chemistry class. If anything, should my child be the sort of person likely to become an atheist, having to sit through a boring class about theology would likely only reinforce his atheism. I certainly don't think he'd come home from school one day and start trying to convert me.
Senator introduces bill to allow president to shutdown or limit internet
Public schools can't guarantee admission to everyone either. Admissions are restricted to people in a certain geographic area. To go to a nice public school, instead of tuition, you pay the premium for a house in an area with good schools.
If a parent can home school a kid and spend 2/3 of the day reading the bible, how can you even think that a voucher that may optionally be spent at an established parochial school even registers on the radar screen?

If a parent can have a child's genitals mutilated just after birth (for religious or secular reasons), how can you say that allocating voucher money to a parochial school (a school which the parent is free to send the kid to w/o the voucher) even remotely registers on the radar screen for children's rights?

I don't disagree with your points, but I think you are picking the wrong battle. The best antidote for religion is critical thinking, and an educational system with more choice will only help to engender such mental functioning on the part of students. Vouchers will also result in an influx of less faithful people to parochial schools and will create a wave of secularization, turning private schools less into religious orgs and making them more like regular businesses.

Think about it this way, at present only the most faithful are willing to scrimp and save to send their kid to the parochial school, while with vouchers there would be a lot more secularists attending simply to get a better education.
Luxim LIFI plasma light bulb more efficient than LED/CFL
Why freedom of speech must include the right to “defame” religions
Agreed and I pay for .Mac so the bookmark synchronization across multiple Macs and my iPhone is pretty glorious.

Looking forward to a more stable Safari 4 tho, mine freezes at least 3 times a day where as 3 was pretty stable, aside from the rare script crashing it.
was I the only one hoping this article was going to be about a Galt's Gulch scenario?
Gartner explores reality of x86 parallelism
4) Don't call it a hacker group if you want any support from the school ;-)
However, the system you object to actually exists in the real world, in the country of the Netherlands, and several of the worries you have about that system don't seem to appear. In the Netherlands, by that country's constitution for the last century, schools are funded on a per-capita basis, and they can be wholly secular, religiously affiliated (with several different religions well represented by large numbers of schools), or affiliated with specialized approaches to educational philosophy (e.g., Montessori or Waldorf). Grown-up Dutch people seem every bit as able to make up their own minds about what to believe as grown-up American people. In view of this empirical reality, it wouldn't worry me if willing learners obtained funding for education on a basis of all schooling providers being on an equal footing, with parents free to choose for their minor children which educational program was the best fit for the child. See Choice of Schools in Six Nations

http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordD...

for history and current data on schools in the Netherlands in other countries.
How do you measure merit?

I would let the learners have power to shop, and we will know soon enough which teachers are doing a good job.
I was an avid Firefox user for years, but one thing which always annoyed me is it becomes a complete resource hog. So I ended up switching to Safari upon the first beta of 4. I hated it at first, I love it now — nice and light, fast as hell, and has Webkit awesomeness!

I can't wait for a decent build of Chrome on OSX though, should be fun; <3 the idea of one process for each tab!
I am completely against home schooling for exactly that reason. And, I am against circumcision when it isn't done for medical reasons.

I agree with having choice in schools. I support vouchers and I support private schools. But, I don't support religious schools and I particular am against giving vouchers and other public money to religious schools.

By the way, many (most) parochial schools already have their own financial aid systems. For example, my sister went to a Catholic high school for a year where she only paid $1,500 or so, whereas the wealthy students were paying many times that much in order to subsidize the less wealthy. Sometimes church funds go towards those scholarships too. That is why I am against public funding of religious schools; they effectively increase the church's general fund. Everybody should be free to contribute to their own church but nobody should be forced to pay even a penny to a church they oppose.
Impractical Not to Rely on Servers? Nah
why is there none with a 3 letter domain http://a.aa ?

I wonder how easy it'd be too run a CNAME or something on any or all of these services with a 3 letter domain, then add to it digg.com functionality (http://a.aa/ add url here to be shortened here) and then tie it automatically or user-select to any of these services, switching to another, (even reproducing for historic links) if one goes down?

Why not just build a new service? - well you can keep you're existing account/s and have theses nice extra features. (only the services with the shortest url lengths used, fastest creation times, and ones that don't monetize)
> And, public dollars should never go to religious organizations or anti-religious organizations.

You are acting as if these children's parents did not pay tax. They only get their own tax money back to spend it on their children's education as they see fit.

What you propose is that we remove money from parents (through taxation) and force them to sent their children to school that you (or whoever) approved.

> Again, I am not against religion but I am against someone imposing their religion on others--even their own children.

You use the word indoctrination rather funny. It looks like to you, indoctrination is any teaching of anything which is not approved by you.

A parent should have the full authority to teach his child whatever values and beliefs it is he wants the child to believe. It is not the responsibility of the state or you or anyone else to determine what a parent should teach his child.

You are against a religious person teaching his beliefs onto his children. Yet you are for imposing your beliefs onto the children of other people.

If you want to educate children in your beliefs then you can get your own children or adopt some – but do not try to force other parents what to do.
Obama to call for nuclear weapon-free world
Do you see his point if you substitute 'digital blob' for 'ones and zeros'? Sure we see 'blobs' also, but we see the 'meaning' of the granny just about inextricably too; a computer won't.
Actually, the preferred stock in Goldman is an option. He has the option to buy the stock at $123 indefinitely, meaning if it ever goes above that amount he can then choose to buy it and sell it for a profit.

And like I said, the stock went down with the market. Yes, at one point his stock was down 44%, but so was everything else. And if you look at the fundamentals, they have a small leverage ratio, close to zero actually if I remember correctly, lots of cash, and are one of a handful of companies still rated AAA.

The guy in the article keeps saying if only he had access to more cash he would be making piles more money. Well Buffett has the cash, and he's going to rake it in when the market rebounds.
People are so used to buying press coverage (what pg called the "submarine") that anything else sounds unusual. Sad.
I used weeit.com once and now it's dead.

http://qurl.co.uk is one of the originals and is super-fast - except for the domain name length, a good benchmark for speed, simplicity and contraction.

Also: h3o.de and digg.com
get whatever you use at home
On the teacher thing, I was under the impression that private schools could hire and fire credentialed teachers as they saw fit, plus could generally afford to pay better to attract better teachers, whereas public schools are handicapped by powerful teachers unions. Granted, my knowledge of the subject is pretty much limited to this paragraph :)

On the curriculum thing, it sounds like they just have to offer instruction in the same branches of study, which I'm assuming is things like Math, Reading, Science, etc. Not sure how that equates to the "same curriculum".
> or affiliated with specialized approaches to educational philosophy (e.g., Montessori or Waldorf).

That is true. Private schools can sidestep disastrous education philosophies that the government introduces through the public school system.

A good example is my country's experiments in [Outcome Based Education](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcome-based_education#OBE_aro...) (South Africa).

It destroyed a fairly good (under the circumstances) education system in less than 5 years. People who now receive matriculation cannot spell, construct sentences or even do basic mathematics.

I was involved in engineering education in 2007. The standards were dropped and even then the failure rates were astonishing (60%+ for single subjects). It is incredibly sad that a country's future was gambled on a failed education philosophy (which was chosen because it is politically acceptable).
No, substituting "digital blob" doesn't help at all. Have you ever heard of computer vision? I don't see any reason why a computer shouldn't be able to distinguish a tank from an old woman.
So AT&T and Verizon can call up the Feds and get them to collect their debts for them? Nice.
skype, campfire, github, redmine, email, yugma (for screensharing)
The Sudden Charm of Public School
I'd like responses to my news.yc comments to show up in growl.
Bank of North Dakota. A government run one..
The Rise and Fall of Thinking Machines Corporation (1995)
I tried Joel's salary scale method, and the results were... mixed.
Ron Garret’s (ex)-Google Story
Mac, most definitely.

For one, Mac OS X comes with a Python version installed. It also comes with a whole toolbox of Unix utilities, including a number of text editors. (There are many other 3rd party text editors for the Mac, too. Though I stick with "vim" or Xcode myself, both of which are included.)

You can't understate the value of being able to pop down to the Unix layer when needed. There are lots of times where a simple "grep" or "cp" or "mv" is exactly what you need, and I love that this is just built in to the Mac. If you aren't that familiar with Unix commands, I think it's knowledge well worth having; most of the basic ones are really not that hard to use.

I have to use Windows at work, and I have to say I'm amazed with how little it comes with. While it is possible to work productively on Windows, I have found this is only true after a large setup cost. So if you don't mind downloading stuff for hours, you can eventually get the right tools. Still, I have never found Windows tools to be as "integrated" as Unix utilities are; every Windows program wants its own scripting language, its own hackish way of doing things (in my experience, that is; YMMV). Microsoft's command prompt is also pretty lousy; it really doesn't compare to a Unix shell, and the idea that you could only get that level of power by installing all of Cygwin, is a turn-off to me.
I think the point you keep missing here is that all education is indoctrination. Even teaching kids to think rationally is indoctrination in the rational method. It's fine to say, "I think we should indoctrinate kids only in rationality," but most people will disagree with you. There is a sort of truce in our society: people don't hate each other for holding different viewpoints (as long as those viewpoints are societally acceptable, which varies from place to place.) Part of this truce is that people are allowed to shape the beliefs of their own children.

You can't say "we should never indoctrinate kids." That would be the same as saying "we should never educate kids." You can say "we should only tell kids the truth," but then, whose truth do we tell? The problem is not so simple. It's dishonest to say "no indoctrination" when what you mean is "indoctrination should be more along my lines."
You're right, lawyers use WordPerfect like nobody's business. I've met many lawyers that don't even know Microsoft Word exists.
Right, I think that is called "evidence" rather than irony. :)
Just a slight quibble. It's 1M net worth or 200k/year. You make it sound like it's "and."
A PC can run *nix too, it's not limited to Windows. In fact, it can run OS X too :)
Has Your Bank Failed? Probably Not.
Better to get whatever matches most closely your deployment environment.
I doubt that everyone in Japan can get Internet that's this fast. I assume that "Japan" in the article means Tokyo or Osaka.
The only disadvantage of picking a Mac is that (unless they spring for a Mac Pro) you can't stuff it to the gills with RAM.

Until the latest generation of consumer Macs the limit was 4gb, though now if you spend $500 you can get 2x4gb DDR3 for an iMac or Macbook (though the Macbooks can only address 6gb). In the PC world, you can get 4x4gb DDR2 for a desktop Core2 motherboard for $350, or 6x2gb DDR3 for a new Nehalem motherboard for $240.
my only other options are horrible DSL that has a 25GB cap

I don't think this is true. If you can get a loop to your house, you can get some sort of business DSL plan, which definitely won't have a cap. I use Speakeasy for this. Expensive, but worth it because I have an unlimited pipe that I can use for whatever I want, and they have actual people (who are native speakers of English) that I can call when something goes wrong.

Anyway, you aren't looking hard enough, or you aren't willing to pay for more than 40G a month.
A "destroyed career" after he made a tidy living at NASA, joined Google and got paid well, and is now doing VC?

I wish my career were similarly "destroyed".
I don't buy this argument. I can easily stream HD video with "only" a 6M DSL connection. (Note that it's re-compressed h264, not mpeg2... but who cares, the quality is great.)
Very good article. This should be right up there with famous articles such as "How to disagree" and many others. I think this should be required reading for many of the technology blogger equivalents of political bobbleheads out there.
"When fed information on the mass of the apple and its velocity as it falls, the machine would be able to work out the equation."

Isn't it plain regression or other prediction tasks. More important that finding out relations is the ability to look at the right places for data. If you feed data to any prediction algorithm (ANN, GP, Regression, etc.), it is sure to come up with an equation.
Sure, just that the way you phrased it ("in the shadow of") suggests that Corel was in Utah.
Wow. Scary. I'd hate to think that my children would end up in the same school as all of those other schmucks paying $5500/month for rent. Thank goodness we can move to the $6500/month place and get in a better district.

sheesh
linux, duh
The 72 virgins joke was a metaphor for all of the preposterous religious motivations behind suicide bombings.

Although it is true that there are almost always secular motivations as well, the metaphor is not dishonest and the joke is funny.
It is not true that they "only get their own tax money back". A tax rebate would have that effect. I am not opposed to refunding people's tax money; I am opposed to giving them somebody else's tax money to support their religion. The voucher program is not a tax rebate because the people that stand to benefit most from the voucher program do not pay enough property taxes to cover the cost of private schools if they those property tax payments were refunded to them.

I never suggested that we force people to do anything. My whole argument is that we shouldn't force people to pay for religions they don't subscribe to.

I never said that the state should force parents to raise their kids secularly. What I said is that we shouldn't give them money to raise them religiously. I am not trying to impose my beliefs on anybody, and I am not asking anybody for money to help me impose my beliefs.

You keep trying to reframe my argument as anti-choise and anti-religion. It isn't the case. My argument is that the law should ensure that people should be able to choose NOT to support religious organizations they aren't members of, and we shouldn't take people's tax money and give it to religious organizations they oppose.

(I do believe that parents should give their kids a serious means of choosing their own religion. But, I didn't say the state should force them to do so.)