skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think better teachers is more likely than selection bias. Teachers who are rewarded on merit will always outperform those rewarded for their seniority.
It definitely does not take that long to become conversationally fluent, especially for related languages (english/spanish/italian/french, etc). In a few months of daily, hardcore practice with western languages, you can become definitely conversationally fluent (speaking and understanding w/out any problems). With eastern languages it might take longer---but it doesn't take as long as you think if you are sufficiently motivated.

I speak italian, portuguese, spanish, and english, and will be studying hindi later this year
I've tried to bring that up a lot - I honestly don't know what vote counts add to the conversation beyond bias on the part of the readers. That's the one thing that a site like Metafilter offers that Hacker News doesn't, and I feel like it's something that HN and Reddit and Digg before it all lack: the ability to speak your mind openly without any worries about karma and public downvoting.
Unless the service was in the habit of selling impossible domain names, it shouldn't matter ;)

I intentionally left out the hyphen because it isn't a very desirable character.
Ah, so you have an MBA? Which you earned while sleeping through that simplistic spiel? Please talk about your experiences so I can develop a similar distaste for an oversimplistic overhyped major, or else stop talking about things you have no personal experience with.
I think Attwood missed the point of Abrash's Dr. Dobb's article: CPUs are changing. They will certainly be multicore, and they will likely be heterogeneous multicores, like Larabee, Cell or AMD Fusion. Basically, they're going to be a CPU and a GPU on the same chip.

(If he did get this point, then he decided a different point was more interesting.)
It is really hard to start a startup if you are studying at the same time. That is why I have to put my school on hold for the next few semesters.
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Ext Core 3.0 Beta released under MIT license
Blithely asserted.

But suppose it is correct. Do you think parents might start caring more about managing their kids' educations if they could see that caring more actually made a difference?
You might find that The Fountainhead still has a lot to offer you.
Then you are slitting your wrists with Occam's razor. Nobody ought to do that.
It's better in terms of encapsulating her philosophy. However, it's a worse story, the characters are more shallow (and the more interesting ones, like Fred Kinnan, get lip service at most), and the writing is atrocious at points. It deserves the satires of it, because it's got a lot of weak points.
I feel that there is a need for feedback after undertaking an action. If you click a button, and nothing happens, you'll quit clicking the button. We do want people to vote.

So...

How about hiding the points until after you vote. That way, you're not influenced, but you still get feedback that is necessary to keep you voting.
Agh, really? Steinbeck in that novel comes across as incredibly shallow. I thought his style was painfully overwrought.
I would gladly pay the $100 to get my home upgraded. Doesn't it seem like individuals or even communities should be able to round up the money to pay for the upgrade themselves? It's basically like we are at the mercy of the cable/telcos until they decide it's cost effective for them to upgrade people. It's not like a hard drive where you can pay extra money to get something better, you have no options.
Wow I am stoked to read this. I grew up in the shadow of wordperfect/corel/novel and always imagined I would end up working for one of them. The first "hacking" I ever did was in jr high when I finally got to mess with computers all day - which had been donated by wordperfect and thus permanently shined with the blue of wp5. At 16 I got my CNA and landed a job at novel, however after starting to sign papers they informed me you had to be 18. Great. Changed my mind, traveled the world, lived in england, fell in love with programming, ended up back in utah valley 6 years later. Actually worked as a developer for a company that was in the first novel building down by geneva steel and later with another company at what was the wordperfect complex.

Now I realize the future I always imagined working for one of these companies is only going to come from creating it myself. It's interesting that his story starts with a recession forcing his hand into innovating.

I wouldn't normally make a long winded "personal" post on hn but I figured no one else is really going to care about word perfect history so I may as well give my two cents for posterity. Anyway back to building the dream - what else are weekends for?
IM, Skype, Google docs & spreadsheets, pbwiki (more organized docs than google), gmail
Perl, like other scripting and late-binding languages, is very flexible ("duct tape of the internet"). Amazon is reputedly a Perl shop and it gives them agility to quickly experiment with new retailing ideas. But the knowledge they gained, and the site they built, wasn't due to Perl - it was due to them working on problems they found.

Here's someone else who solves problems: http://blog.plover.com (and who wrote Higher Order Perl).

All learning is commendable, including learning from a language. But to think that knowledge comes only from existing languages is to constrain one's knowledge, and for oneself to be defined by one's tools. Languages aren't the source of intellectual nutrition; they are a conduit to it (or how could they be created in the first place?). The source is creating solutions to problems.
If you're handy with shell scripts, you can do:

git bisect run my_script

my_script should return 1 if tests failed, or 0 if they passed.
Git will then go off and find the commit that broke things.
A stateless url shortening service using a compression algorithm that is published (both the algorithm and the codebook used for compression) can mitigate almost all this problems:

* Browsers can decrypt the URL on the fly, just move the mouse pointer over the shortened URL and you'll see the full URL before to click.

* The DB can't get lost. There is no DB

* There is no single point of failure, everybody can run the service, the full information is inside the shortened URL.

* If this gets integrated into the major browsers, there is no a round more of lookups and there isn't possibility of DoS if the service(s) are attacked or offline. At max you can't create new shortened URLs. But remember? Everybody can run the same service.

It will not be possible to be as effective as stateful services, the URLs wil be a bit bigger, but the gain in reliability is huge.

Edit: and p.s. seriously SMS are not good for real message exchanging and will almost die in short time. This is not an issue, nobody really need URL shortening.
Campfire, GTalk, Windows Messenger, Crucible, JIRA
Or if your school's webfilter blocks tinypic and some of the other url shorteners. It's one of the most annoying things about trying to read tweets or reddit these days.
As I perhaps somewhat self-aggrandizingly consider myself one of the most knowledgable people regarding I/O in the Ruby world, I decided to peek around the Starling source and see what I discovered. What I found was a half-assed and pathetically underperforming reinvention of EventMachine, an event-based networking framework for Ruby which is the Ruby answer to the Twisted framework from Python.

The non-evented Starling was multi-threaded and used a thread pool to manage connections. I'm unclear on how that is a 'half-assed implementation of EventMachine' and not simply a multi-threaded network daemon.
Rather, school attendance is compulsory absent a government-approved alternative, but one can attend school throughout childhood without ever being educated.
The $100 is probably an amortized number, assuming that your whole neighborhood gets upgraded. e.g. It costs $50,000 to upgrade your cable node which serves 500 customers. If only 50 people round up the money to pay for the upgrade they'll need $1,000 each, which isn't as palatable.
Comcast recently rolled out (last month) 50 Mbps down / 5 Mbps up, they call it Extreme 50, it's $140/mo.
And I might note for the record that pg, the kind founder of this forum, appears to have quite a strong interest in education issues.

http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html

http://paulgraham.com/hs.html

http://paulgraham.com/college.html

http://paulgraham.com/wisdom.html

http://paulgraham.com/credentials.html
That's pretty cool; I always wondered how to use git bisect.
Must be dense today, but I don't really see what the arguing was about. That the environment conditions and affects consciousness? There's hardly a single neuroscientist who would object to that.

The analogy with car was really horrible, not to mention the point of it is unclear.

It is understandable however that many people would find the idea of consciousness as product of neural interaction uncomfortable. It strips human of certain degree of divinity. I haven't read the book, but from the article this seems to be author's major concern.
That's the other thing that's been proposed. I've always felt that doesn't seem like an elegant solution to me. The act of the button's disappearing once you've clicked is a response enough for me. It also serves as a visual cue of what you've read and what you haven't.

The question I'd ask you is what matters more, the discussion or the moderation? Shouldn't the attraction to the people commenting here be the quality of the conversation, rather than the ability to vote things up and down? The latter is important, but does it have to be seen?
Multiple monitors is really handy for GUI development. Particularly on Windows. Visual Studio eats up tons of space, so your program overlaps the code you are stepping through, leading to a lot of repaint messages that can make tracing through code tedious. Plus, windows can't be moved, resized, minimized, or otherwise interacted with until Windows can call their wndproc. Debugging an always-on-top window (like a menu) is a pain.

Multiple monitors is less effective on Linux. X can unmap, move, etc. windows without their permission, so virtual desktops still work when a program is being debugged (like when you need to look up documentation). Plus, emacs is pretty slim, visually, so you can often fit your program right next to it. 'Course, if you use eclipse, it sucks up extra space like VS.

(Vista might be able to move windows without their permission, since the contents are redirected to a buffer. I don't have vista to try.)
One would hope that when they walked in and saw 100,000 servers, law enforcement would think twice before saying "seize it all!"
This is also indicated by the fact that those who were offered vouchers but didn't use them seem to have had similar increases in reading scores, compared to the applicants who were not offered vouchers. Sounds like voodoo science to me (or some variation of the Westinghouse effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westinghouse_effect#Westinghous... )
These guys seriously need to stop messing with their licenses!

Their ExtJS library switched to GPL in their 2.0 -> 2.1 upgrade ( http://www.alittlemadness.com/2008/04/24/ext-discovers-step-... ); for me this meant we had to remove ExtJS from our product.

There were 2 concerns: obviously the fact that it was GPL and we'd then be locked in to paying licensing costs or be forced to open source everything; but more importantly that this meant that the switch would hurt the project going forwards, and we'd be investing in a dying framework.

After the way they handled their switch to GPL, this feels like an attempt at confusing people into thinking that ExtJS is MIT licensed, rather than trying to be a better community player. Unless they're going to commit to putting ExtJS under the MIT license of course...

And don't even get me started on the background to their 'Ext GWT' product...
High spending on education is a a feature, not a bug. It buys the support of public teachers unions, which will support the reelection of politicians whose sole idea for school reform is "more money".

Another factoid that Cato likes to throw out is that public education spending has doubled on an inflation adjusted basis since the early '80s, yet scores on certain standardized tests have stayed constant. Still, listen to any presidential debate. Every candidate calls for more money for schools, more teachers, more computers, etc. It doesn't occur to them that the system is broken when scaling up the input produces no additional output.

http://www.heritage.org/research/Education/images/b2179_char...
The Banker Who Said No
The meaning in the article is different; it's more like "really clever code that only the smartest programmers can understand".
Public education is politicized because, being public, it is controlled by political institutions. Contrast this with a private service or commodity, like grocery stores. Nobody lobbies for which food items will be carried in grocery stores, rather the stores respond to the will of their customers.
While it is impossible to isolate variables in social data, each new study does add a drop to the ocean of evidence in support of school choice initiatives. I thought this overview of available evidence was also illuminating:

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/03/17/american-prospect-...

When you add that a priori economic reasoning is firmly on the side of school choice over public monopoly - well I'm convinced. I'm a little surprised popular wisdom isn't on my side.
"The other was a curious query, as it trasmitted events(used generic names so I dont know what each stood for), a unique ID, and interestingly enough a variable called “rep”, presumably implying a user reputation level."

It is very unlikely they would store reputation on the client side. I can only applaud the author for healthy amount of justified paranoia, but here he most likely off the mark.
Vouchers are a public education. It is just the delivery mechanism that is private.
Read the article:

"The evaluation is based on a randomized controlled trial design that compares the outcomes
of eligible applicants randomly assigned to receive (treatment group) or not receive (control group) a
scholarship through a series of lotteries."

Now, given lottery status parents might help their kids with HW or otherwise (b/c they don't want to waste an opportunity). I am still reading on how they control for that, but I suspect they have a TON of observables on the parents, income, location, etc. School voucher studies these days -- particularly those read and "approved" by those in the list of acknowledgements -- will go nowhere without either randomization or a suitable instrumental variable that correlates with the voucher, but not with educational outcomes. No need to throw around econometric criticisms until you read at least part of the article.
In Ruby can you connect to the running web application and debug it on the fly via a REPL? You can do this with Common Lisp and Clojure (PLT Scheme?). It definitely helps with "getting stuff done."
It is the author's fault for not realizing the real-world skills he'd need. You're not a good programmer unless you know multiple paradigms -- that's like saying you're a mechanic but only being able to change the tires. And true, knowing Lisp gives insight on the flaws of Java ... but knowing Java gives insight on the flaws of Lisp.
There seems to be many ways that this could work. One is asking the company if their information can be passed on to the corporate development department. Another is simply telling the department a very limited amount of information, e.g., "I think you might want to look into acquiring newTechStartup.com", and no more.
This is partly very good advice, but think again before trying what it says about blockquotes, emphasis, and good rag.

Blockquotes: because there are no guarantees about fonts and sizes, the pixel outdent you find may be annoyingly wrong for the reader. (Also, blockquotes shouldn’t be quoted.)

Emphasis: use em or i. Specializing span like that will give you unwanted italics whenever people (correctly) use span to carry things like classes.

Good rag: again, you simply do not know how text will be rendered on the other end. It will vary with font selection, font size preference, UI scale, window size, rendering engine, text rendering engine ... this kind of pixel-tuning is wasted effort in CSS. If it really matters, use PDF, Flash, TeX, or paper.
We (Linode) announced a public beta of our new backup service in our NJ facility yesterday and hope to have it rolled out to all four locations shortly: http://tinyurl.com/db8tlf
Solar panels you can hang out on your veranda
The whole A is A thing is about reality and confronting it, very much like Nietzsche.
This argument is complete BS.

Running fiber lines between large cities is cheap; there's far more bandwidth there than anyone could possibly need at the moment. The main cost is the last mile of connection.

And the last mile of connection is going to cost you pretty much the exact same thing in New York City as in Tokyo. There is absolutely no technical justification of any sort for the United States' backwards internet situation, at least in regards to urban areas.
Their enemy isn't biofuels, it's cash crops. If it wasn't palm trees for fuel, it'd be sugarcane or tobacco or something else. Of course, that doesn't have the same shock factor, that sensation of calling out the sacred cow.

Hopefully in ten years or so there will be more people, especially in the professional media calling out trolls. I think it would be good to do more public analysis of news stories, where they come from, why they look the way they do. (Slate.com does that on a semi-regular basis, which I enjoy)
This is because cable companies are worried that streaming video will put their VOD services out of business. Hence many companies trying to add caps to their bandwidth. When they tell you it's because of 1% of users using the most bandwidth, they're lying; it's because they want users paying for VOD content.

This is understandable, as VOD is by far their most profitable business segment on a %-basis (I work for an IPTV company). Thus, they are scared to death by the concept of decent internet service--it'll reduce their profit margins.
Google Seen As Being Likely To Partner With, Not Buy, Twitter
Very true -- I should have said compulsory attendance.
Amortize that $1000 over two years, though, and the upgrade costs less than $50/mo, which starts to sound reasonable again. If all 500 customers paid, it only takes a price increase of $5/month to pay off the upgrade in two years.
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not sure how long ago that was, but I'd be happy to look into it. service at linode.com
codebase, gmail, google sites.
Something that implements a chat voice and screen sharing in order to hack together on the same source code? It's basically Mac OS X "screen sharing", but I need something that runs on Linux. Btw Mac's screen sharing is an impressive tool to work together.
I'd rather they get it right. This 3.0 release is a clean start hopefully. The Core will be MIT license, so there's no confusion over what you can do and what you can't do with it. I've got no problem with them building great commercial frameworks on the open source core, especially if it means some of that commercial stuff might eventually migrate down the chain to the open source version. Of course, people were burned on the previous license switch so they lost some developers there.

Aside from the licensing issues, I think the ExtJS developers (Jack Slocum et al) are great javascript hackers. ExtJS is a great javascript framework, particularly the data grid component.

There's also the upcoming Ext 3.0 Designer, which reminds me of the 280North Atlas GUI designer.
http://extjs.com/forum/showthread.php?t=52258
Tweet Quality
A money quote, from your first link:

Here's what I did. For a set of problems, of increasing difficulty, I would write a solution procedure, using the notation of A Programming Language I would then ask the graduate student assigned to me to:

program the procedure in any programming language he chose,

execute the procedure for a representative set of data values

give me his program and answers so that I could compare them with the specifications I had written and the answers I had previously calculated.

The result, which I still find surprising and impressive, was:
In every case, what was programmed was exactly what I specified.
Aren't some games today (such as the Halo series) breaking all sorts of records for revenue? It seems the blockbuster model just arrived to video games.
Beware of shady companies in redmond using fake blogs to spread fud about their competitors.

For some time I've been reading about how evil google is about privacy and user data.

If you don't like it don't use it.
Perhaps it's not prominent on the site, but:

Bandwidth is pooled between all of your nodes (and it doesn't matter which data center you place them in).

We offer prepayment discounts: 10% for 12 months and 15% for 24 months. We also prorate all billing to the day (you only pay for what you use).

There is an API for the DNS Manager, with more to come.
Socialcast, Campfire, and Google Docs.
Perfect, that's what everybody should do, just replace the unreadable cryptic shortener with "link" and follow the url so hovering will show it on the status bar.

I hate not knowing where a link will take me.