skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree completely. But also, they are not "adding new stuff" anymore. There's practically no new functionality in 10.7 or 10.8.

Instead, they are rewriting existing functionality, often in a way that breaks because it fails to take into account all accumulated knowledge. Joel Spolsky wrote about that here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html. Restarting from scratch is the worst idea you can have.

Here are things that were broken in OSX 10.7 or 10.8: Dual monitor support, resolution change, keyboard input, auto-correction, Save As, Suspend/Resume, Backups/Time Machine, Preview, Window manager (backing store), OpenGL (stereoscopy = kernel panic, very annoying for http://www.taodyne.com), Mail, Safari, RSS feeds, Windows networking. That's just off the top of my head, sure there are many others.

But things are only marginally better in Linux or Windows land. On Linux, the user interface in Ubuntu is a mixed bag. At least, I get a sense of purpose and direction. And Windows 8 is like "What were they thinking" (although I met a few users who think it's a good ideas, so YMMV).

And what about C++11, which added the kitchen sink but forgot introspection/reflection? What about Facebook which still has not found a business model, but keeps rewriting privacy rules? What about washing machines that break after 5.0001 years?

BTW, stuff that is not the way it should be is the primary topic of my own blog, Grenouille Bouillie, https://grenouillebouillie.wordpress.com. Sorry for the shameless plug, but it's really a topic close to my heart.
Note, I don't mean to be in any way negative towards you in any way at all, at all.

However, one could equally as well argue that we don't need average people to be able to read or do maths. They can learn it all from videos on Youtube et al anyway, right?

More seriously, the notion that most people can't produce wonderful things is the single most pernicious lie of our times. Everyone is born with more than enough potential to do great things, and the job of society is to give them the tools and encouragement they need to do this.

So, don't sell the species short. We may not need everyone to create new things, but hell, it couldn't hurt, right?
One thing that hasn't been articulated in the recent HN articles about Go: method sets can be defined for _any_ type, not just structs.
I'm reminded of the argument I heard from one kid that if eating junk food was "bad" it wouldn't satisfy their hunger and be so tasty.

The core of that argument, like this one, is that the fundamental assumptions about what the activity is providing are incorrect, and that leads to poor reasoning about the problem.

In my case the young man had made assumptions about signalling his body gave him with regard to being hungry or not as a signal of quality and/or acceptability. In the author's case the young man has conflated the value of education with the value of earning a living.

I agree with others here that if he is "that smart" he should be able to just finish up the high school curriculum and get that out of the way. I'd certainly consider home schooling him, since his business is so successful he should be able to hire himself an individual tutor, get the basics covered, get certified, and then get his degree. These folks typically deal with kids of movie stars or executives who are travelling a lot but they are out there.

If the kid is smart, and you want to reason with them, do it at the company level which he has so much of his identity invested in.

What is his gross margin? EIBTA? Net income? What are the strengths, weaknesse, opportunities, and threats for his business? What happens if Notch decides to cut off folks like him? What's the next step in his life? And the one after that. When he's dead what does his obituary say, "Man he ran the best Minecraft servers." ? He has shown that he can create a business, that is great, but does he have the stones to make bigger businesses? Or is he strictly small time, the 21st century equivalent of the guy who owns and runs the gas station on the corner his whole life? Who are his heroes? His anti-heroes?

Clearly he has had success in his goals, but he doesn't know what he doesn't know. The goal of an education is to give you the tools to attack the problem of developing knowledge when you are confronted with a lack and a need to know. Its artificial in the education system (do you really need to know about ancient history?) but the tools and techniques are widely applicable.
Ask HN: In LAMP, can we replace Apache?
I want to know, if in LAMP architecture, if its good to replace apache with a more non-general alternative for upward scale-ability of, say linked In size?
Graylisting is more or less this, but instead of a human receiving a challenge, the outbound server receives a "please try again later" (which is enough to stop a lot of spam already).
This guy needs a kickstarter campaign. He can send us some 2G soybeans from his farm if he wins the case and we can all plant them in our gardens.
Playing group politics is non-sensical here. That farmer will happily invoke the legal system on you for trespassing on his property, why should we be so sympathetic now that Monsanto has invoked the legal system for his trespassing on theirs?
The name of the fallacy you demonstrate for us all is "straw man".

New Jersey's Youth Challenge Academies have been remarkably successful at graduating children from at-risk environments, who go on to college and successful careers. They are NOT a general model for education, but for the children who get into them, they are a tremendously effective and advantageous educational experience that helps them overcome a background in poverty and gives them the opportunity to do much more meaningful things with their lives.
Oh I realize all too well - I lived and worked in Germany some time ago too, and only a few weeks into the job I was scolded for not putting dr and prof into the field on the signup page where people could enter how they wanted to be addressed. To be fair, the marketing guys were right on that one, me leaving it out was my youthful arrogance - the same disdain for honorifics that is being displayed in the article, actually.

Anyway, I wasn't so much saying that the article is wrong as that the snide tone of the remark came across as somewhat unbecoming of a purportedly 'serious' publication as the NYT.
Nice in theory but hard to put in practice in the more traditional 9-5 corporate environments.
Post about an idea how to motivate our team to share this post.
Formatting problems are due to many things, most of which are the fault of Amazon itself. The Previewer sucks and all of their products render books differently.
> Teachers talk endlessly about methods of engaging children and teenagers

Step 1: Force all children to go to a big building eight hours a day for twelve years "to learn".

Step 2: They aren't learning. Figure out a way to make the average child interested and engaged by this circumstance.

Step 3: Who knows?

I'm sure teachers are, by and large, intelligent, caring people who really want to help pupils to fulfil themselves. But that doesn't help much if (as is being proposed) the education system itself is founded on flawed principles.

> Some are curious in ways that are useless for education.

Can you give me an example of such a form of curiosity? As I define it curiosity means wanting to know more; I can't make that be not useful for education in my head.
I both agree and disagree with you there. I would agree that I myself have learned more from independent study than I have from formal education (and I've almost finished a PhD) but, I did learn a lot of things that I didn't realise I needed from college/university.

Granted given the recent changes to fees in the UK, I completely see where you're coming from. I suppose in your situation (as a (presumably bright) A level student in the UK) it would probably only make economic sense to attend a Russell Group University, preferably Oxbridge.

Then, the real returns from education are not (in my experience) economic. Mind you, money is nice, so don't completely ignore economics.
He made an app for that.
Also, a tip I received from a very skilled pixel artist[1] was to learn to draw - pixel art comes much easier if you improve your drawing skills.

As such, I recommend:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Drawing-Right-Side-Brain/dp/0007...

1: http://www.pixeljoint.com/files/icons/full/elk_dragon_final....
That was my first thought as well, replacing conditional evaluation with "choice."
They are not patenting specific modifications, they are patenting certain DNA sequences. These patents as completely bogus. Monsanto also has a patent for a certain DNA sequence found in hogs/pigs that causes them to produce more meat. The DNA sequence was naturally found in a certain breed/line of hogs/pigs in Germany and Monsanto has gone after the farmers that have these pigs, which have been raised naturally for generations, and sued them to make them pay for their pigs having a certain DNA sequence. It's ludicrous!

EDIT: One could say that those pigs could be considered prior art... even so, you have a multibillion multinational company vs several small family farmers. Who's going to pay the lawyers to defend the family farmers... even to show prior "art"? What realm of delusion and craziness do we have to go to stop arguing about this?

EDIT 2: "patenting specific modifications" tries to imply patenting a process, and fails. "patenting certain DNA sequences" implies patenting the end result of a process.

EDIT 3: I don't have a problem with them having a patent on a particular process to generate the DNA sequences so long as the process reliably results in the organism having the desired DNA sequence. Otherwise the patent would be for a generic process to modify DNA sequences. These patents restrict the use of the methods but not the end results. Monsanto wants to charge and claim ownership of any organism that has the desired DNA sequences. Monsantos business model is flawed and the patent system should not be used to protect Monsantos revenue streams.
Good point, but if you have centers of innovation and ownership, they will inevitably pull wealth out of the less successful places. This leads to inequality and a disharmonious nation-state (I sound like the Chinese government, don't I?). But really, there is a cost even to the "home of the borders" when their customer bases are slowly losing the ability to buy books.

Wal-Mart for example cannot survive without local economies providing people with enough to spend on their bread and butter. If we end up in a situation where most wal-mart towns are paid by welfare, then we're in a very inefficient system. It could get to be that way if everything gets centralized in commercial hubs.
Unrelated, but their mobile version of the page is utterly unusable on my iPad 1. Wished they just served up the non-mobile version.
I seem to get downvoted all the time here though. :-/
Thanks for the preliminary response. I am very tempted to do all of this "hacker" stuff to my Chromebook but I'm worried that's a slippery slope. As is I have no local files, no battery worries, so it's essentially a maintenance free machine. Once I start doing local work I'm going to want more and more until it's basically just a netbook. I think it's maybe good for me to have a machine where I can't constantly be tinkering.
Depends on where he's coming from.

I went to a few private schools (K-8, K-12) staffed with teachers like that, when I was younger.
I don't understand this comment. If you don't test someone's knowledge how do you know that they have learned? Good exams aren't "answer centric" they are "problem centric". If you have learned a subject, and someone presents you a problem in that subject, you can provide a solution based on that knowledge.

When your just starting out its harder, you can't say "explain the impact of European colonization on the Americas" you have to say "When did Columbus discover America?" and yes, poor educators sometimes try to give multiple choice exams because it is easier for them, but that doesn't say anything about the need to measure the effectiveness of the child at learning the material.
We need a new symbol to represent air quotes.
What's the problem that you're trying to solve?
Can we please get this website hell-banned?

Every single article posted by techdog is an article from this blog, and every single one of these articles is factually and demonstrably wrong, written by someone who has very little understanding of statistical analysis or any of the specific topics the article purport to address.
Only a Ph.D./M.D. is, because it counts as part of your actual name.
I don't understand how does it relate to the point that I made.
It just seems to me that it should be possible to design a really good laptop that costs less than $1000, if specs are secondary. I think that would be the best way for a PC manufacturer to finally beat Apple. The problem, however, is that such a computer might not run Windows very well. (but Linux would run quite nicely!)
Try reading through the Backbone.js source, it's quite approachable.
> Wikileaks redacts the names of people who may be in imminent danger.

Not always. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503543_162-20011886-503543/wikil...
I second that. As javaists are concerned, Play 2.x is not a good thing : bigger, slower, more rigid and with a lot scala dependencies/idioms you don't care about.

Forking Play 1.2.x could be a solution (and maybe remove the python console. After all that's a java framework)

Or.

Or one may use the extensibility of Play 2.x to remove the scala parts javaists don't want.
It shouldn't too hard.

Here's a thread on the official forum about it : https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/play-fra...
Why have you lunk to comment 116? Why have you not submitted a link to the article itself? Am I missing something?
I love Mathematica and use it nearly every day.

However, I would not recommend it as general purpose language because of its proprietary nature.

The $295 barrier to entry is way too high. Unless there are better interpreters than Mathics (which as someone mentioned is great, but is just a subset) around, I don't see the point.
I've actually always had comments on, but recently switched to a CMS I wrote myself. I haven't had time to implement comments yet, but it's on the todo list. :)
Interesting hypothetical question. Are you suggesting Monsanto is benefiting humanity?
> Can you give me an example of such a form of curiosity?

Boys like learning lists of names and stats. You'll have met boys who can give you a very long list of dinosaur names or pokemon or supercars. But that's just rote recitation of facts; there's nothing in there about why things are how they are. Feynmann gives an interesting anecdote about his father talking about birds and trees. He'd rarely give just the name, but he would talk about why the tree had broad leaves or such.
Fuduntu 2013.1 review - Fedora done right + awesome
Give HN: Memoires.me & MadeInKitchen.com
Memoires.me is going to expire on the 25th of february.

MadeInKitchen.com is going to expire on the 20th of february.

I simply don't have time to develop the ideas I had for these domains.

Reply if you have any use for these domains, please include what you'd use it for. Best idea get the domain.
This startup out of NYC is doing something similar: www.smallknot.com (I saw a rep give a talk at a TechStars-hosted local business event).

This is the kind of thing that's hard to do on a nationwide basis so there's plenty of opportunity to do something similar in other markets, I'm sure!

Local business tech is hard: inherently more human sales required per dollar of revenue generally. But clearly it's the way to create lots of small-medium sized businesses with local specialties.
Linux Foundation Secure Boot support released - what does it mean?
Exactly this! See my comment made above (or below) pertaining to their patent on pigs/hogs.
You can't do serious science, capital-intensive Big Science, with prizes and contests.
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.

Be careful here--this is not an airtight statement. Many of the innovations are arguably simply correcting earlier innovations...mass insulin production is a great feat, but how much of that is used to fix diabetes caused by overconsumption of bad food? How much agriculture research is spent making poorly-processed food more palatable, or making crops resistant to synthetic pesticides?

A lot of innovation may simply be correcting problems that didn't exist before some other innovation happened.

They work in fields where scientific innovation is very expensive, and keep working because there is a potential return on their investment.

Perhaps we should find ways of driving the cost of innovation down? Like, say, loosening patent and licensing burdens to make equipment more easily attainable?

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.

Agreed, but I do not see the necessary harm in this--again, having a strong brand and good distribution networks and quality products is how they can protect themselves against such a thing. In an optimized market, profit margins are indeed slim--and I suggest that for food production we want an optimized market.
Another way of looking at it: There are millions of businesses trying to target local businesses, and they're all calling many times a day. If you're a small business you have so many pitches coming your way, you have to say "enough's enough" at a point and focus on your core business.
I wonder... if you simply don't use Roundup, the entire process shouldn't be claimed as fair use?.

You are not gaining a profit on the Monsanto work,
Those seeds are not provided by Monsanto
and as you can not avoid to use genetically contaminated, and identical to other seeds otherwise, you should not face a trial for this.
I'm not familiar with the VM implementation on Linux, so I don't know if it has changed significantly. I expect it has.

However, a lot of the article seems to be around swapping to disk. We have enough physical memory now that swapping to disk shouldn't regularly happen.

Other things which affect VM design and/or performance on modern systems, but were not much of a concern in 2004: ubiquity of multi-core CPUs, virtualization, use of large pages, 64 bit machines. However, I'm more familiar with academic research than with the state of the mainline kernel.

Edit: Linux is regularly used on lots of non-x86 architectures nowadays, so the VM design might not be so x86-centric anymore.
"if there's a big public repository of prebuilt binary packages for the latest (9.1) release, I am not aware of it"

FreeBSD had a security breach shortly before 9.1.. so some of their hardware was offline. So packages were not available at release. They expect to make them available at some point. Then you can install out of date packages (since packages are frozen at release), and rebuild half of them to fix security or serious bugs.

"I have heard good things about PC-BSD"

I have also heard good things about PC-BSD. I've played with it a bit, and it seems promising. I haven't used it enough to recommend it.. but it seems like it's worth a try if you need a FBSD desktop. Definitely more promising than the other BSD desktop efforts I've seen over the years (all of which are dead AFAIK).
"Teachers talk endlessly about methods of engaging children"

Unless they are faced with a child who spent all of their time learning instead of doing mind-numbing homework assignments. Then you'll hear teachers talk about how they have a student who is wasting his talent and how shameful it is that someone who can handle more advanced material is getting failing grades (even though they are the ones giving the grades). Teachers may talk about trying to get students to think "outside the box," but when a student actually does so they are punished for it.

Our education philosophy is based on attacking independence and ensuring compliance, and our teachers show it. Rigid structures are enforced everywhere in school, explicitly and implicitly. Assignments are rigidly structured. Classrooms are rigidly structured. Daily schedules are rigidly structured. Grades, which become the purpose of school for many students, reflect how well students follow instructions more than how well they understand the material.

"This sort of Prussian, militarized school setting is a dystopian fantasy."

Well, maybe so, but in dystopian fiction the hero is typically one a small group of people who can recognize that anything is wrong with the system; everyone else believes they live in a utopia. Perhaps school truly is dystopian, and only a minority of people can actually recognize the existence of a problem.
We have an economy that is structured such that we need average people to be able to read and do basic arithmetic. We do not have an economy that requires them to do more than that. Indeed, I'd argue that we have over-educated the average person--too many people with college educations working basically the same jobs they could have gotten 50 years ago with just a high school education.
You should do enough experiments to be able to state with statistical confidence that it's not a coincidence.
How ARTHR & ERNIE work: Backbone.js, Rails, Cocoa, and more.
Dear Congressman Gutierrez, Please Lift Your Hold On Silicon Valley
I described the silly assumption I had made that Onenote might have a mode for transcribing handwritten notes as-you-write and she laughed at me.

OneNote, or more accurately, Office, does have this feature. I used it quite a bit in law school on my HP TouchSmart tm2 (a tablet/laptop hybrid that comes with a stylus and which predates the iPad). It's enabled in the Office Language Settings bar/menu.

OneNote also has an OCR function which can convert images into text (but not in realtime). It's only as good as the legibility of the image to be converted.
Snow: A Guice based modern and minimalistic "Web Injection" framework (300KB)
http://www.osho.com/en/highlights-of-oshos-world/relaxation/
It depends on what you need, but I'd say yes, as long as they natively support whatever language and database you're using. I usually use Lighttpd for specific (non-general) projects requiring lighter implementations. Actually, I think that the more specific your requirement is you may switch to more tailored solutions. One examples are WAF's like Rails or Play!, they use non-LAMP components like SQLite, Ruby or Java in addition to using their own webservers.
"(I had to go and investigate what the Economic Policy Institute was. Apparently it's funded by a consortium of labor unions. Odd that they would bother about this, since few to none of the jobs involved are union jobs.)"

Labor unions are trying to prolong their existence by moving upstream into hi-tech jobs, since their traditional base is disappearing. This is part of a long term strategy to unionize programmers, engineers, scientists, etc. It's really sad to compare the good unions did in the US in the early 20th century to their raison d'etre today.
> Perhaps we should find ways of driving the cost of innovation down? Like, say, loosening patent and licensing burdens to make equipment more easily attainable?

A very small portion of R&D budgets go to patent licensing. At the end of the day, what's expensive is that hundreds of PhD's expect to make six figure salaries even if their work is benefitting mankind.

> Agreed, but I do not see the necessary harm in this--again, having a strong brand and good distribution networks and quality products is how they can protect themselves against such a thing

Well now you're trading one kind of IP (patents) for another (Trademark). And what if the other company that swoops in is Con Agra?
The Pirate Bay AFK documentary is available free on youtube