skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
* Read the executive summary. Half of the subgroups did not have improved performance. Math performance did not improve. Reading scores did improve, but this specific improvement cannot be meaningfully be attributed to the public vs. private nature of the schools. And, the study does attempt to figure out if the reading improvements could be replicated within the public school system by copying the reading programs used in the private schools.

* In the third year, over 83% of the participating students were attending schools where they were forced to endure continuous daily religious indoctrination. This is completely unethical.

* No attempt was made to measure the performance of students that attended a school designed for religious indoctrination against the students who attended a school designed expressly for education.

* According to the study, many parents (19%) turned down the vouchers they received after their students were accepted to public charter schools. It seems like parents are showing a strong preference for charter schools over private schools. IMO, this warrants further investigation into the funding of public charter schools instead of public funding of private education.

* According to the study, many parents of special needs students were not able to use their vouchers because the private schools were not able to provide the necessary services. The public schools are bearing nearly all of the costs of caring for special needs students whereas private schools are mostly punting on the issue. Similarly, if you get kicked out of a public or private school for behavioral or criminal reasons then you will be sent to a public alternative high school. Cost comparisons need to be made using comparable student populations.

* All measurements in this study suffer heavily from selection bias. Much of the data comes from voluntary surveys that were filled out by parents. It was basically a competition between political groups to convince the most parents on their side to return the surveys. Parents and students who were not interested in their students' education and/or the political ramifications of the survey are likely severely under-represented.

It is silly to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of private schools vs. the effectiveness of public schools by Cato's summary or my summary of the study. A summary of a summary of a study can be easily spun however the writer wants to spin it. AFAICT, the study report itself has very little actionable information in it; at best, it points out areas that need more study before any conclusions can be drawn.
It's very interesting, but I dislike how the article refers to a "thinking machine". The computer is finding a best match algorithm from a search space in an experiment designed by people.
He makes some good points, and it's interesting that soldiers who operate drones remotely (from the US) suffer higher rates of PTSD than soldiers actually in Iraq...but I felt like there was also a bit of dramatization, perhaps because he doesn't (seem to) understand robotics/AI very well. For example, he says that robots see an eighty year old woman in a wheelchair the same way they see a T80 tank - just "zeroes and ones". But that's like saying that humans see them the same way - just stimulus on rods and cones. I cringed at that.
This is some good advice.

However, I would say you need to use something like YUI-Fonts (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/fonts) before you go mucking about with font sizing in browsers. This is because it varies across browsers.
Japan's population density is orders of magnitude greater than that of the United States.

Japan: 337/km2

United States: 31/km2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population...

Only one order of magnitude, it appears.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude

And Japan has quite a large land area as countries of the world go. It is larger in land area than most European countries, and is a mountainous archipelago rather than a continental plain. It's hard to say what cost difference between the United States and Japan might be "natural," and what cost difference results from policy differences.
And that is true even if some low-income customers shop with food stamps ("food vouchers").
FTA:

> "This is the opportunity of my lifetime," says Beal. "We are going to be a $30 billion bank without any help from the government." (A slight overstatement: He is quick to say he relies on federal deposit insurance.)

And he pays for it, too (premiums, y'know). That's not "help" as we usually mean the word; that's a purchased service. Now, as for the bailouts -- which Beal is not getting -- that is "help".
iChat, Skype, Swirrl, email
My brain just gitsploded. More like this, please.
FTA: "Consciousness requires the joint operation of the brain, the body and the world."

Well, yeah. Things occur in the the world, and then the brain interprets them, decides what to do, and has the body do it. I don't see how this interferes at all with the notion of brain-as-self.

I'm not upset by the idea that (as the later example in the article) the love I feel is a chemical reaction. As the interviewee says, it's all context. Me (that is, brain) interprets things based on context, and assigns value to them based on that context. I, for lack of a better word, like "love," whatever it is.

Of course the brain is consciousness. It's doesn't exist in isolation, sure, but I think that it is both necessary and sufficient for the human experience, as inklesspen says above.
What concerns me is the completely vacuous presentation, complete with mention of Zune, and hopeful talk that they won't commit war crimes, and maybe humans are the problem. If this is the quality of philosophical thinking going in to this problem, Nazism isn't far away.
That's a joke in Japan, South Korea and Escandinavian Nations
Of course there's a double standard! The ideal for a company is to charge everyone exactly what they'd be willing to pay. Companies usually do this with coupons and such -- if they have one buyer who is going to buy for X no matter what, and another buyer who would only pay .9X, they find a way to give the second one a coupon that the first one will ignore. Universities and used-car dealers are especially good at this.
You only want to use it if you want a more robust payment then a 'buy now' button. In other words it's a lot to deal with if you only need that level of functionality. My app has a subscription model, and will be expanding out to a market at some point in the future. FPS handles all of those models. They also provide some good guarantees. Given some of the recent complaints about about google payments, and my own personal experiences with paypal I'm beginning to value these guarantees very highly.

However, my system is not fully implemented and deployed (hence no link yet), so I'm not ready to provide a full endorsement. I can only say that the experience so far on the development side has been very good, and the sandbox makes extensive testing before deployment very easy.

I will report back when I've deployed the system in production.
Really? We haven't slipped through a hole in the space-time continuum and been magically transported back to 2003?

There will be decent internet service. Anybody whose business model depends on internet access sucking forever needs to find a new source of income, fast.
Your StorageTek business ... I DRINK IT UP!

(sorry, couldn't resist.)
Skype, Redmine, Email
My comment is directed to the argument the author makes that working 60 hours a week is a horrible thing and, indeed, exploitative. I could not disagree more.

I have been a business owner for nearly a decade and, at its most, was responsible for leading a company of 110 employees. I am 36 and have never worked a mere 40 hour week in my life, and it's certainly not something I see my peers doing either (the successful one's anyway). If you wish such minimum time invested I suggest getting a job at the post office or DMV.

Building a company is, in large part, about building culture. When done correctly management does not need to demand that employees work extended hours, the effort is a by-product of the buy-in to goal and the various incentive plans that are offered.

Frankly, I believe it is dangerous to suggest in an entrepreneur forum like HN that working any less than necessary to win is, or should ever be, an option.
You mean we may get some investigative journalism going? That would be a nice change.

Instead of copying and pasting press releases, making your own news will get you noticed, bring you more traffic, and establish you as a rainmaker. Ever wonder how TechCrunch got started?

For all of you who complain about bland news, the VC walking dead is an easy area to investigate, with a lot of potential for juicy, visible stories, in line with the current national headlines about the economy.
I placed the artifact close to my hart. It looked at me with a puzzled expression, then shook its antlers side to side before bowing its head once again to chew on the blades of grass. I felt a sense of belonging.
I have tried the previous versions and I was a bit confused about it. It seems the extjs does not really care about no-javascript, because switching off javascript led to all sorts of issues. Its not so much that we expected people to have javascript turned off, but people are using mobile browser with limited capabilities and with using extjs the experience would degrade too much. At that time I was not impressed since I was looking for a non-obtrusive way of implementing javascript based interaction enhancements into our project and I expected (perhaps wrongly) the extjs framework to take this into consideration. Anyone have any experience with the new version and how it behaves now when javascript is either turned of or has limited capabilities?
Immense subsidies for biofuels have probably put marginal land into cultivation that otherwise would not be.
Yeah, I'm a believer in the concept of customer-owned broadband, but the ISPs are stuck in a model where they think they have to accept all the risk of upgrades.
A startup will motivate you to work much harder, but will you actually do better work?
I don't think the answer is obvious. High pressure situations can negatively impact the brain. Sure, you will work harder, but it doesn't mean that you will be a clear thinker.

It might be interesting to compare the performance of professors with tenure with those of similar education and ability but without tenure pursuing startups full time.
Gravity from Breaking of Local Lorentz Symmetry [hep-th/0904.0364]
That's part of the argument! That is: Parents who care to look into a selection of schools will be more involved in the schools they send their children to and will raise children who are better students. Involved parents will force schools, public and voucher backed, to compete producing better students and curriculum.

The idea that parents should be able to choose where their children go to school should be a given in America. I understand and accept everyone paying into the education system as a good idea, I don't understand or accept that people with school aged children have to pay into the school system even when they have chosen to send their children to private schools.
Redmine, Basecamp, Google Docs, IM, Email, Skype.
Lorentz violation and black-hole thermodynamics [hep-th/0811.0943]
yeah, but 10,000 people, is a lot. Probably one of the biggest tech layoffs at one time. And a lot of them will be in SV, and unfortunately it might affect some of my friends.
Isn't this sys-con.com site catching a lot of crap for rebranding content form other sites?

http://aralbalkan.com/2067

I can't find the original link for this post but I'm sure there is one.
Do Blind People Suffer from Seasonal Depression?
WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. Still the gold standard word processor. Alt- & Ctrl- keystroke macro libraries, and remapping any key as a macro:

http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/
Having just spent a week in Iceland, they may have fast local connections, but for actually using US based sites and services, I'd rather have 1.5 MBit DSL in the States (actually I have the Comcast 50/10 service at home). It was painful.
This was a horrible talk.

Some points were just false (war tech is not open source, china & india don't make US bots), lots of the visuals were misleading.

Some of his points were overly emotional and would better fit a middle school debate than TED.
Abrash's Dr. Dobbs article is much more interesting: http://www.ddj.com/article/printableArticle.jhtml;jsessionid...
It is a good read and he obviously is a "good" banker for not overextending his bank. But to say he doesn't rely on government help makes it sound like he runs a normal corporation. Banks are not normal corporations. Mine can't loan out money at 26 times my deposits. Can yours? Of course not, your not a bank. This is the rub with banks. They want to behave like private entities, but they leverage government backed currency which normal corps cannot do.

I think we need a new class of corporation for banks and possibly insurance companies. A class that recognized they are hybrid entities, and not the same as a typical private company. It turns out we sort of do have this class (there are lots of hoops to jump through to become a bank). But this class is built on top of the normal rights and privileges of the standard corporate entity.
How to design effective virtual world applications
Confluence, Jira, Campfire, SVN, Email, IM
Ask HN: Hate the new Alexa design
Am I the only one who hates the new design?
FPS provides a robust set of interface tools to the amazon payments system. It enables a number of payment models that other services don't offer such as, subscription, aggregate (i.e. micropayment), marketplace/3 party (i.e. user to user transactions with optional commission), and the prices are competitive. You can even do user to user transfers with no fees. They also offer fraud protection.

It is not trivial to implement in an application but does seem to be very concise for the features it provides. The con for this flexibility naturally is increased complexity. They do offer a 'Simple Pay' solution if you don't need the extra features, but I've not used that.

During development you can tie you application to the FPS 'sandbox' which simulates the complete user experience as well as virtual payments and fees so that you can see exactly how things will work in production from various points of view with out actually moving money around.

I needed subscriptions, so I could not use the other popular solutions (when the decision was made), and therefore can't compare. However, I refuse to use paypal because they put 100% of the risk on the account holder, while at the same time not disclosing information about the purchaser to allow for fraud investigation, this is flat out unacceptable.
New metal hydride storage system design brings hydrogen cars closer to reality
how is the Comcast 50? I am considering getting it, but I'm worried because they advertise it as "up to" 50. What speeds are you getting from it?
Honestly, I think that IBM's interest is limited to Java, and not much else. So much of their own stuff depends on Java, that it would only make sense to own the "controlling share" of Java's directors/direction. This might also explain some of the recent news of a semi-pull-back by Sun on the whole "Java is open source" piece.

If IBM acquires Sun, I see them incorporating a lot of the Java pieces, killing off the hardware pieces, potentially selling the OS pieces to Oracle, and possibly selling the ZFS IP to Apple...but that's just my random guess...
Advertisers brace for online viral marketing curbs
Native Google Chrome on Mac OS X: First Impressions
Skype, CentralDesktop, DabbleBoard
I'm sorry, but there are too many exceptions to the rule this author is trying to prove for me to buy into his point. He contends that "Real" (i.e. overtly macho) programmers don't maintain code and don't accept the "wisdom" of static typing because they don't care about the mundane and boring tasks of ensuring code works
---but---
they do write unit tests because that, somehow, shows that they are manly and daring and not that they care about the mundane and boring tasks of ensuring code works?

Huh? This is the second blatantly anti-Ruby post from this blog in less than a week. If I didn't know any better, I'd say they had an axe to grind...
Not to mention that the "72 virgins" joke [1] was distasteful beyond belief.

[1] I assume it was meant as a joke because I find it hard to believe that someone who gives a talk at TED could be that ignorant.
Switzerland as tech hub
It's great to see this makes its way onto Hacker News! I'd love to know what the community thinks of the approaches talked about in the article for finding new business (i.e. actively reaching out to tweeters using the search.twitter.com).

Disclosure: I'm the Chris featured in the article. ;)
ExtJS, being one of the most UI-focused libraries, seems to regard javascript-less browsers as a non-target. I don't blame them -- Ext focuses on window design and emulating desktop functionality rather than use as a page enhancement.

Though I stopped looking at them with all of the licensing crap issues from earlier. Not sure what this new license will entail for them.
"But the view that the self and consciousness can be explained in terms of the brain, that the real us is found inside our skulls, isn't just misleading and wrong, it's ugly. <snip> I find this a very sad and ugly picture of our circumstance. Now contrast that view with a sense of ourselves as engaged in the flow, responsive to the things going on around us, part of the world. It's a very different picture."

So...is he arguing that brain-as-self is wrong because it's untrue, or wrong because it's depressing? I've always understood myself as a being within a brain, using my body for I/O. I agree that on its face it's a somewhat alienating concept, and I'd love to believe otherwise, but Noë did nothing to convince me it's untrue. Another example:

"The dominant view in neuroscience today represents us as if we were strangers in an alien environment. It says that we go about gathering information, building up representations, performing calculations and making choices based on that data. But in reality, when we get up in the morning we put our feet on the floor and start to walk. We take the floor for granted and the world supports us, houses us, facilitates us and enables us to carry on whatever our tasks might be. That kind of fluency, that kind of flow, is, I think, a fundamental feature of our lives. Our fitting into the world is not an illusion created by our brains, it's a fundamental truth about our nature. That's what I mean by home sweet home."

I don't understand how he can assert that the process he describes has no part in the way we start our day. We may not consciously decide whether the floor is something we should walk on every day, but that doesn't mean it's not a subconscious or instinctual decision that takes place within the brain. It seems to me all he's advocating is a change in perspective, suggesting that we are comfortable beings in a familiar "home," but this does nothing to shed light on the nature of consciousness. Of course consciousness is an emergent process that rises out of mind, body, and environment, but if it doesn't take place within the brain, then where is it?
I read this book twice, and I highly recommend it for everyone in software business. It's incredibly interesting and useful.
Lets Go Deep - Meet The C List For The All American Home Run Derby
Well, I think that based on the context of this forum (YCombinator is a seed stage incubator fund) we can assume most people here are interested in either starting a company themselves, or getting involved with one. So, is making a "successful company" the be all, end all? No. However, TechStars is attempting to open a door here, and many people are slamming it shut.
Why is this us vs. them? Starting a successful company requires a balanced, capable team, a ton of luck, and long hours. If this is your attitude, I would not want to hire you regardless of your self-proclaimed technical prowess.
"any more than the road is involved in my driving on it."

The road is absolutely involved in you driving on it. If it was not there, you certainly would not be driving on it.
It won't become ubiquitous. Most people don't care ("I don't have anything to hide"). If the tend continues, encryption will not be allowed 20 years from now.
Yes, writing Facebook api is easy but keeping up with it is hard. Facebook constantly makes little changes to the site and monitoring that while doing everything else is hard. I use MS tools to try and save time. That's why I pay for their software and that's how they market their software.

If MS didn't agree then why did they make the API in the first place? A main part of my issue is that MS got the project started (never mind how half assed), people depended on the library and then it was just abandoned.

It's not like it wasn't being used either. It's a popular toolkit. Like you said, it's not difficult to poke a server so why do they abandon a project people depend on?
You sound like the type of person that does not belong on any start up team. You have to learn to get along with people (even businesspeople), especially because you will be working with them for 18 hours per day.
Brushed metal? The background looks like a bad 90s photoshop tutorial.
"Of course consciousness is an emergent process that rises out of mind, body, and environment,"

This, I think, is his point.

"but if it doesn't take place within the brain, then where is it?"

My guess is he might say asking "where" consciousness takes place is a meaningless question.
> Mine can't loan out money at 26 times my deposits. Can yours? Of course not, your not a bank.

Does your corporation have to abide by all of the banking rules? Of course not, you're a regular corporation. If you want to be a bank, start one. It's a pain in the ass but can be lucrative.
"That the environment conditions and affects consciousness?"

That the environment is an integral part of consciousness.
How about we build a standard communication mechanism for websites that shorten urls and builders of sites that allow people to use them. Here's what I propose

From the builder of the shortners' perspective, they need to provide an API that can be used by the builders to extract more information about the link.

So, if you paste http://short/letters into this window, pg could go to the url http://short/letters/fullurl and that would return a string that contains the full url corresponding to that short url.

There could be a list of other options that could follow along like that and provide more information about all urls managed by the short urls. There could be screen shots of the site behind it. If you hover over it, you could pop up a tool tip with details about the url, who created it, when, what the title of the page is, the keywords and descriptions.

In a way we are replicating how the human brain stores information. Each nucleas of the nerve cell stores information about how it was built in the form of DNA, that's the code we write. There are long fibers that extend from the nucleas out to other networks of neurons. They supply electricty, pulses of light, and arrangements of magnets on little spinning disks and wafers of silicon.
The IT department is dead, author argues(2008)
Without second guessing them, it remains a fun curiosity that at their size and failure rate they continue to reject vendor expertise in this space. If Starling and Kestrel reinvent little, what can we learn about this counter intuitive behavior, especially re management and investors?
Sony wins a battle but loses two wars
To prepare bids he locked himself in his office to write a computer program with 50 variables (now 250), ranging from home price changes by neighborhood to interest rates to origination dates.

Yep, he's a hacker.
pivotal tracker,email,gchat
Am I the only one who doesn't give a shit? Alexa is useless.
Developer banned from Andriod's open marketplace. "Open" platform?