skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've said nothing about education beyond "children are complex", that we need a variety of educational methods, and most crucially, we need to identify what the best variant is for any child--that's currently the great failing. You're the one handing out an absolute truth about education--like Cushman, you're indulging in a myth of the noble savage.
A one thousand year long musical composition
This is a rather superficial objection. Using square brackets for function application frees up juxtaposition for multiplication (without introducing ambiguity like in standard mathematical notation), so that's just a tradeoff. The use of capitals is consistent and helps distinguish builtin functions from user-defined functions and variables. These particular conventions are really things you get used to quickly, unless you're deliberately trying to be annoyed by them.
I think societal pressures would prevent a 4 hour workday even if it was more productive for many classes of worker.

A great many jobs are not fundamentally about productivity, for example a store checkout worker, a hotel receptionist and some IT operations work. In such cases the work is more about being available to cover certain hours and respond to various situations.

For such jobs it would become a hassle to swap workers around every 4 hours for no real benefit. Thus this sets a certain expectation for working hours.

If some types of workers were thus given significantly shorter hours within the same organisation there would be envy and shaming and accusations that those workers were not working as hard as anybody else.
When Is the Best Time to Create Advisory Boards or Bring in Advisors?
After decades of new products always selling out quickly, you'd think they'd be able to get their supply chain in order, but alas, the next iPhone and iPad will both be "sold out" within days.

It's a very clever and effective marketing strategy, even when people know they are doing it. We want (and talk about!) what we can't have, even if the reason we can't have it is artificial. Just like a movie or TV show we can't see but which was completed months ago.
Then let us cry tears for those poor, oppressed corporations in agriculture, medicine, bioenergy, chemicals, and biomaterials. It's getting hard to even clear a billion on the ledgers annually.

Truly, these institutions of capital and ~=SCIENCE=~ are more worthy of our aid than the starving, the poor, and the destitute humans across the world.

EDIT: Do you support software patents? All this seems to be doing is reprogramming a living organism, no?
It's my understanding that in large agriculture, Monsanto produces a new Roundup "recipe" every year and matching "Roundup Ready" seeds. Of course, I can't find a source on this right now, so I may be way off.
Boeing 787 Battery System Revamp May Take Months, IAG Says
What about using BCC? The email will reach multiple recipients, but none will know about the others.
You don't know any teachers, do you?
Also reminds me of http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~sabry/papers/rational.pdf
Tim Cook never wanted to sue Samsung
Show HN: jquery-select-box
> After all, if A & B are correlated, then one of these statements must be true: "A causes B", "B causes A" or "there is something else, C, which causes A and B".

You missed "it's purely coincidence", which is an entirely valid option.
It's like an experimental study that removes a confounding factor!
The end state could be a map[string]struct{}, since it is only used to test the presence of the string. The bool value is unused, and an empty struct takes no memory, so it would be an admittedly tiny optimization.

Related: Rob Pikes' lexical scanning talk (state machines in Go): http://blog.golang.org/2011/09/two-go-talks-lexical-scanning...
This is a way prettyprint could have been written without branching:

def prettyprint(a, b):
fmt_string = {True:'%d is less than %d',False:'%d is higher than %d'}[a < b]
return fmt_string % (a, b)

Or even (and this is cheating by using the int constructor):

def prettyprint(a, b):
fmt_string = '%d ' + ['is higher than', 'is less than'][int(a < b)] ' %d'
return fmt_string % (a, b)

I think a good way to get acquainted with FP is to replace conditionals with lookup tables and lambda functions. But it is easy to overdo it, sometimes plain old if-statements are the most readable alternative.
> If you allow farmers to replant seeds then Monsanto doesn't exist anymore.

Like I mentioned in another post, their seed division is over 100 years old. I don't think they are going to disappear overnight because a patent they recently acquired, relatively speaking, went away.

Their biggest sell is that they are able improve the yields on the crops year over year. Replanting the seed you grew last year will leave you falling behind the competition, and probably out of business after a few years. Just one bushel per acre difference means tens of thousands of dollars for the average farm. With razor thin margins, you cannot afford to miss that.

Also, Monsanto is a huge business. The thing they seem to be most excited about right now is their precision agriculture division. (i.e. applying electronics and software to grow better crops) Given the nature of this site, I'm sure you can see the potential there alone.
that ACTUALLY benefit me, such as programming

You don't know what you don't know. You can have a fine career in programming without math -- but with math you can have many great careers.

Keep taking math and working hard at it. Stop when it gets too hard.

Two of my three favorite classes in college were math classes -- combinatorics and algorithms.
Yes, patenting any modification to an organism should be banned.

It's fun an games when we laugh about the patent wars between Google/Samsung and Apple. But our food supply? I'll be the first to grab a torch and a pitchfork. Fark Monsanto.
This message is very well known and understood.

The interesting question is 'why do foolish managers continue to treat their employers in poor ways that are known to decrease productivity?' In terms of productivity, it's a total lose-lose situation.

I'm 37, and I'm pretty sure that I have worked out the answer. Most corporations are run by people (the managerial class) who are more interested in power than results. They hire sycophants who kiss upwards and amplify pressure downwards. Competence is irrelevant; after all, any competent manager would resist managing their employees in ways that management science have proven to be unproductive.

I have been in a couple of these companies, and they absolutely rot from the head down.

At least in tech. we have the option of getting out, because such companies are generally not entrenched and are on track to fail. Unfortunately, in other parts of the economy, such companies are unassailably entrenched, so their workers have no choice but to work for stupid, evil, toxic organisations, or to change career.

The result of these organisations is that much of the US now has a toxic culture of 'if you're not stressed, you're not working'.

A friend also suggested to me that it's possible for groups of people to become 'addicted' to stress; it would be interesting to see more on this.
The Nature of Ambition
I think if you're selectively leaking and editorializing things, it makes sense to question whether your agenda is good or bad.
One of my friends from school wrote a paper on a procedural terrain generation method that allowed simple user inputs to control the generation process.

Here's the link: http://larc.unt.edu/ian/research/terrain/
This is my position exactly. And skeumorphism wasn't even in my vocabulary (until now, thanks!). The example I tend to compare email to is the general design of early electric lights: so many of them simply looked like gas lamps into which an electric bulb had been jammed. Like these: http://goo.gl/808F6 Sure they're pretty, but over time, we've designed much better electric lights by moving away from the restrictions imposed by an open flame. Email, on the other hand, hasn't evolved much at all since its birth in 1982 (!), and better filters simply don't impress me anymore.

And the cost in bandwidth and wasted time email and its spam problem impose on us cannot be understated. We really do need something new.
"Rent seeking" doesn't mean what you seem to think it does. Rent seeking means to try and extract rents from a process that would have happened without you. Rent seeking would be if the farmer had, through traditional agricultural processes, come up with a seed that had glyophosphate resistance, and Monsanto had sued him on the theory that they owned the patent to glyophosphate resistant seeds.

But that's not what happened. Without Monsanto, the glyophosphate resistant seeds in question would not exist. The farmer in question was free to use regular old soybean seeds and get regular old soybeans. Nobody forced him to use Monsanto's seeds--he did so because he got a benefit from them, a benefit that was the result of Monsanto's invention and its investment in R&D.
This is a great idea, I'd love to do that too. But how would one actually go about this?

Does he just film everything with a camera or his phone? He must spend a lot of time manually going through all the footage to find the second that best represents that day. And surely he has to do this everyday too whilst all the memories are fresh in his mind so he can find the most important second? And then he manually strings them all into a video?

Sounds like a lot of work (although the results certainly seem worth it). Or am I missing something here? How would you guys go about it?
And they've made it so that it is annoying to get, in bulk, seed which they cannot claim copyright or patents over.

You get to support that farmers are violating Monsanto's rights by replanting 2G seeds, or you get to claim that Monsanto has moved the world forward by making better plants for everyone--these claims are mutually exclusive if you are optimizing for "The most seeds and plants for everyone."
True and False are 1 and 0 in Python too, so no int constructor needed. (Try 3 + True == 4)
Conversely, if we had Wikileaks in 1940, it would have made Hitler's career much longer.

Let's just name some of the allied secrets that were instrumental in defeating the Axis: the fact that the Allies had broken the Enigma code, air patrol schedules and radar locations in Britain, Allied radar technology, the fact that the Allies had broken the Japanese codes and Midway was a trap, the fact that the bulk of the Allied landings in northern France were indeed Normandy rather than across the straits of Dover, the fact that the landings would occur on June 6, 1944, the identities of and means of communications with members of the French Resistance, and last but not least, the secret of how to make an atomic bomb.

The fact is, Wikileaks is always going to collect and reveal more secrets from relatively democratic and transparent societies than it could ever do to entrenched dictatorships. If we had Wikileaks in 1936, it would have had just as much to say about Hitler as Wikileaks of 2013 has to say about North Korea.
NT derived from Mica, DEC's microkernel OS project for their research RISC architecture PRISM. When DEC cancelled Mica along with PRISM — flirting briefly with MIPS before finishing Alpha — project lead Dave Cutler and some of his team took it to Microsoft. (The eventual settlement had MS support NT on Alpha until DEC collapsed from mismanagement.)
Iterations: SnapChat’s Success Challenges Many Silicon Valley Assumptions
I can also relate, studying for my A-Levels (AS) this year.
The biggest part of the problem is that everything is too academical, I'm trying to not take into account the fact that I can learn a lot without the rigid structure of school. Mathematics only teach you how to solve problems, it does not in any way encompass the other parts of mathematics which are important (e.g. how do you model a problem). Sciences are stuck in the 80's (I've been studying Physics with a text book that is way older than me). Why cant we talk a bit about the 'cool' new stuff in class (mentioning things such as quad-copters, 3d printers and cryptography would certainly get a lot of kids interested). I can't relate to the more language based subjects but I hear that it is problematic too.

Finally, I'm also preparing for the SAT, and that, that is a horrible test. It tests you're ability to adapt to a new system/test, I really don't see how it is a good indicator for college applications. It is awful on so many levels and yet it remains the primary test for college admission in the US.
I for one would support a Constitutional amendment to replace the Supreme Court with a process wherein we simply e-mail jacquesm for his opinion on how we should handle any given situation.
"Figure out a way to 1) reliably detect the optimum education environment for each student, and 2) give it to them."

This fits quite well into the "if you can measure it, you can change it" paradigm.

Shameless self-promotion: My startup, Geddit, is seeking to do exactly that, and empower students to take more control over their learning experience. http://letsgeddit.com

We're pretty basic at the moment but the feedback tool has got a good reception from both teachers and students in the classrooms we're live in - the next step is delivering the data mining and analytics.
A blog is a mini-startup
And for another example: I wrote a terrain generator for the Abyss in Dungeon Crawl. Since the player is trapped in a hellish Lovecraftian place, the requirements for coherence are much more lax than Minecraft for example.

The algorithm defines some regular (columns, etc) and irregular (random walls) building blocks and then switches between them with Worley noise.

The code is available here: https://gitorious.org/crawl/crawl/blobs/master/crawl-ref/sou...
Lots of schooling is built around making it easier to manage groups of kids. If this guy starts getting exceptions, the teacher is afraid that the next 10 kids in the class will also want exceptions, and pretty soon it's dogs sleeping with cats.
The US Defense Department has the right to confiscate your patent under eminent domain, and use it without providing you any compensation: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2005/09/68894

Why? Because its critical for national security. Is food security any different?
Steve Jobs Said He Wanted Apple To Eventually Make A Car
You are wrong. "Some kids really do want, and thrive in, extremely structured, rote learning environments" < here

Some kids do want structured, rote enviroments, but there is no meaning in such environments. There's no use of structured, rote math. There's no problems to solve with structured, rote physics. This kind of education is worthless.

Now, you are saying to us, "Some students only excel at pointless activity. Therefore we should teach pointless activity".
But what's the value of such education? Better no education at all, which would free the time to something marginally productive.
My script wrote an individual email to every recipient in my list; so none of them knew about the others anyway. I speculate that the email servers that received them, particularly the larger service providers, might have seen multiple copies going to different addresses, noticed that the emails were identical, and assumed they were spam. Usually, a pretty good rule for a filter. But in my case, not so much.
Reminds me of Prolog
The answer you're looking for is in category theory. For a long time people ad hoc recognized that "products" and "sums" exist in many different domains, but there wasn't a universal method to construct them.

Category theory does just that by treating all of these things as special kinds of categories and reading off universal properties which link rings, algebraic data types, logic, sets, topological spaces, etc. etc.
She will still have a honorary doctorate of 4 universities, so technically she is still Dr.h.c.mult.
Can't we meet in the middle somehow?

I think that there is merit to rote learning. When I practice piano, most of the time I practice scales. Not creative at all - mind numbing, really, but fundamentally important. When I play a piece, it in theory the rote learning (ie. scales) gives me the dexterity and muscle memory to be creative within the piece of music.

I believe that this translates into education as well. I think it's important that people can do mental math quickly. I think that it's important that a computer scientist can implement merge sort or a min heap without having to resort to Wikipedia. They should be able to explain it too, naturally, but I think that the baseline of knowledge is required to be creative with more difficult problems.

I think that the important thing though, which music gets quite well yet academics mostly don't, is to separate the two. You practice scales, and mechanical exercises, so that you have the ability to be creative when playing the pieces. If they were more clearly separated, I think that it might be better, instead of confusing the two constantly. This is where I think the fear of failure comes from. With the mechanical side, failure is almost always bad. If you are not able to play the scale correctly, you haven't practiced enough - this is your own failing. With the creative side, failure is not necessarily bad, and success is not necessarily good. It's an experiment, an expression, and if it falls flat, you get knowledge from it, and if you're always succeeding, you're not pushing your limits. When the technical and creative get blurred, I think that it becomes natural to mistake the creative side as the technical side, and assume that failure is always bad.

My favourite course in school was computer graphics. The final assignment, worth 20% of your grade if I recall correctly, was this: "Make something awesome with what you learned. You'll have 10-15 minutes to demo it to the professor. You have 3 weeks." So you had better be darn comfortable with perspective transforms and normals and writing shaders, which you are, because you've built up that knowledge over the rest of the course. Now with it, you are given a platform to be creative. We were tested on the rote learning stuff - the exams required us to transform vectors and decompose matrices and write down lighting equations, but this was a test of ones creative ability. I think it's almost perfect in this regard, in getting a lot out of both worlds in a way that is focused and guided but not on rails.

I had friends who wouldn't take this course with me in school because they were worried that the courses would hurt their GPA.
I don't even know what you're talking about besides a plug for a homeschooling crank. If you think "reliably detect the optimum training environment" is what we do now, you know little about the education system.
I don't believe you can be denied entry to your home country. You might be arrested once you're admitted but I believe that at least a US citizen can't be denied entry to the USA.
All these companies in agriculture, medicine, bioenergy, chemicals, and biomaterials have made the world a dramatically better place as a result of their capital investment into science. They work in fields where scientific innovation is very expensive, and keep working because there is a potential return on their investment. Their inventions benefit everyone--the patent system simply lets them capture some of that benefit to justify their investment.

Without Monsanto, the hardy seeds in this case wouldn't even exist. The patent here isn't just protecting Monsanto from poor destitute farmers (and suing farmers is a terrible PR move for Monsanto here). What it's really protecting Monsanto from the inevitable copycat company that would come along, buy a bag of Monsanto seeds, and cultivate them, undercutting Monsanto on price because they didn't have to put in any capital investment.
the bad habits that school somehow implanted in me

School might be a mechanism, but I doubt that's the driving force. Losing a sense of curiosity and play is an ancient phenomenon that predates modern education. When I became a man, I put away childish things was written 10^3 years ago.

If schools are doing X, Y, and Z and students are losing curiosity, stopping X Y and Z might not do any good unless it's part of a broader cultural problem. More importantly, the question of whether schools are the best place to prod cultural forces remains open. If we do decide to curate curiosity in schools, it might be beneficial to understand why curiosity is dying in the first place.

I'm curious if anyone has any insight into what these forces might be and why they're so universal. Unless losing your sense of wonder is a relatively recent transformation, why did humans evolve in such a way that wonder isn't conserved across development?
Ideas are everything. Execution is everything. You get one wrong, you get everything wrong

That's pretty much my take on the whole "ideas vs execution" debate, with a nuanced caveat or two. Neither a good idea nor great execution is sufficient to build a great startup, and I'd argue that both are necessary depending on how you define "good idea".

IOW:

bad idea, poorly executed: FAIL

bad idea, well executed: FAIL

good idea, poorly executed: FAIL

good idea, well executed: MAYBE

I say it depends a bit on how you define "good idea" though, because I strongly believe that a "good idea" does not (necessarily) need to be something earth-shattering, brand new, never-seen-before, etc. Sometimes your "good idea" can actually be something that already exists, and you plan to win by simply executing better than the competition.

All of that said, I agree very much with gweinberg on the point about ideas within the context of execution mattering. In fact, reading that just sparked a couple of actionable ideas on my part. Those are the articles I love reading on HN.. the ones where I walk away with a new TODO (other than "read this later").
"The education system failing one student doesn't mean its failing all students."

Except that the education system is failing all students, at least here in America. Some countries expect high school graduates to be able to do basic calculus; in the US, we barely expect high school graduates to be able to do basic algebra. The average literacy in the USA is middle school level.

"Most people aren't tinkerers. Lots of people aren't curious"

I would say that the education system shares some of the blame for that. American schools punish curiosity and creativity. We live in a country where a student who finds the correct answer using a logically sound approach may still get marks off because they used a technique they did not learn in class. Not only are curious and creative students harmed by that, but all the other students who see curiosity being punished learn not to act on whatever curiosity they possess. By the time a student is in high school, they have been subjected to years of training to suppress their independence, curiosity, and creativity.

When a student shows aptitude, they should be praised and given more challenging assignments, rather than punished.
One other explanation I can think of for higher lung cancer rates is that people are living longer, so more likely to succumb to cancer in the end.

But like someone else said, the idea that these trends have not been examined and explained to death by better-informed people is risible.