skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What happens when you implement a dreadful, obvious, hacky solution? Do you find yourself compelled to change it? Or do you not even get that far?

It sounds like at least part of your problem may be perfectionism. I did a bit of research on this a while ago, and it turns out there's a lot of literature on perfectionism and how to manage it. A quick look on Amazon under "Perfectionism" should bring up a few interesting books.
Sorry, are you implying that there are kids out there who are drilling a list of dinosaur names every night without any interest in what those dinosaurs looked like, or sounded like, or ate?

Every kid who's ever wanted to tell me about all the X she knows hasn't been able to wait to tell me all kinds of facts and details about each X, and was eager to hear if I knew something interesting about X.

That's not rote recitation; that's knowledge.
It's pretty similar. I'd avoid Crockford's dogma for a while until it's clear to you naturally why you should follow those rules (and only loosely, he's pretty adamant about things that aren't useful or are counter productive in practice: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/jslint_com/message/3024).

Reading Flanagan's book is a good starting point. From there, as an experienced programmer, you might want more insight into the language and not just "how to do A, B, and C"s, so I'd recommend after working in JS for a bit to skim through the ES5 spec and read up on the future of JS to somewhat future-proof your knowledge (ES6/Harmony, and you can already use some of those features in Firefox/Chrome/Node.js to get used to them). You might want to bookmark the annotated version of the spec, as it's a nice reference to make JS feel less like a strange Twilight Zone (http://es5.github.com/).

Experience should tell you that what's important isn't usually the language, as you pick that up fairly quickly, but in the libraries and APIs that exist in various environments. Every web developer should learn the DOM for instance (among many other APIs, notably those introduced with HTML5) and should be somewhat familiar with the popular JS libraries, at least feature-wise. I'd recommend anyone new to JS read through Backbone.js's code as it's a great example of how to write quality, readable code in JS. Outside of reading and contributing to libraries, there are quite a few to learn, so experiment/play with them, watch webcasts and read blog posts about them to get a feel for what people are using them for.

That extends to more than just the browser environment, there's also Node.js, Rhino, and surely a few others. If you're a Java developer, Rhino might be a nice way to use existing knowledge of the Java API and do things server-side, and Node.js is a bit different to get started with but is rapidly catching up to other languages in availability and quality of libraries (both pure JS and bindings in other languages).
Who owns the IP of the program? (you, your friend, his
employer?) Does the program contain anyone else's IP?
Do you have a business model to extract revenue from
your program? Have you considered selling a service
rather than a license - something more like a newsletter
or other subscription-based process?
Password Policy: You Are Doing It Wrong (When 2^56 Becomes 2^42)
Ragel supports Go output. There's been some recent fixes according to the mailing list, so you may need to get a recent version straight from git: http://www.complang.org/pipermail/ragel-users/2013-February/...
i'm not sure what language you're talking about... the Mathematica Help docs are full of examples. check this Histogram page[1] and scroll down, check the Options section, Applications section, etc. that is a typical level of exemplification for a function like Histogram, and other functions are detailed as appropriate and the examples regularly showcase how to use various functions/functionality together.

i think what may have happened in your case is that you believed Mathematica was a math-specific tool (which it isn't) and so you didn't pay enough attention to the non-math aspects of the language, such as the basic API (for which there is replete documentation/examples in the Help docs, see for example [2]).

the most useful key in Mathematica is F1. click on anything, any symbol or function, and hit F1 to see the Help page for that item

[1] http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/Histogram.html

[2] http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/ListManipulat...
It makes me wonder why Berlin, in that case, is a relatively popular destination for American businesses when they want to set up shop in Europe. If the pervading attitude in Germany is as you've described, it seems as though Germany wouldn't be a good cultural fit.
"Want to revolutionize education?"

Yes

"Figure out a way to 1) reliably detect the optimum education environment for each student, and 2) give it to them."

tokenadult, If you wouldn't mind discussing some ideas myself and a friend have, my email is in my profile. We're in the fairly early stages, but the above seems to be the pervading idea and feedback would be great.
Yes. As glad as I am to see this farmer apparently have some chance of prevailing in this case, I would greatly prefer to see a Supreme Court test of the idea that a farmer whose crop was involuntarily contaminated by wind could then be sued for patent infringement. That's just nuts.
On Finding a Tech Co-Founder
In fairness to John Gatto, Horace Mann himself estimated the general level of literacy in Massachusetts to be quite high well before school attendance was first made compulsory in Massachusetts. (I read many back issues of Mann's Common School Journal back in the day when you and I were learning about homeschooling.) Mann desired compulsory public schools for reasons other than promoting literacy. I have many people in my direct ancestral line, whose books from centuries ago I have inherited, who learned to read without a public school system.
This is sad. If only people would take the Expression Problem[1] more seriously and realise that there is a good time to use ifs/pattern matching and a good time to use polymorphism/function arguments

[1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ExpressionProblem
The Best Science Online (Henry's List)
It is a shame, really, that Assange is such an attention whore. His being locked up in the Ecuadorian embassy is probably the best outcome that the US could have hoped for (aside from him being in a US jail). He has no one to blame but himself; power is the strongest aphrodisiac, and he let the power and attention get to him.

WikiLeaks should try to just distance themselves from him and try to continue the work of being a conduit for safely exposing corruption and lies.
Is there any reason you couldn't keep an offline copy of the environment in the browser by using http://bellard.org/jslinux/? It takes a while to boot, but if you saved the RAM to local storage then it should resume instantly.

You'd have to sync the state of the VM when they come online again, but that could be done efficiently from within the VM in a manner similar to dropbox syncing.
Your only option now is home schooling or private tutoring.
I can remember many of my middle and high school teachers, both good and bad, with "bad" being a majority.

The best teacher I had was a middle school math teacher who realized that my problem was not a lack of understanding, and that expecting discipline from a 12 year old boy was folly. She knew that my boredom was turning me in a distraction for the other boys in the class. Her solution was brilliant: she taught me material beyond what we were learning, and let me have at it. I will never forget learning the square root algorithm from her, because it kept me occupied for weeks (my notebooks are filled with pages where I computed square roots of various numbers in various bases).

Sadly, she was a rare exception, not even remotely approaching the norm. Most of my math teachers said that I should prove my talent by doing my homework, and told me that getting perfect marks on exams or otherwise demonstrating a well-developed understanding of the material was irrelevant if my homework was not being done. My teachers were vehemently opposed to the idea of grades reflecting aptitude; it was unfair to students who needed to do their homework to understand the material, and it would be equally unfair to give one student more interesting homework instead of the standard "busy work." If a bored student cuts class, and thus refrains from distracting other students, that is not acceptable either: attendance is part of the grade and to be fair to everyone no exceptions can be made. The only acceptable solution to a student who distracts others is compliance -- the student must be forced to obey and just be like everyone else.

I only barely got through the school system, despite having standardized math, reading, and writing scores of "PHS" -- post high-school. I was once forced to attend summer school because of an "F" I received in an English class, where the teacher basically said that he thought I deserved to be there as punishment (but ultimately allowed me to skip his class to attend a summer science program, but only as long as I wrote a pair of $n page essays). I was once threatened with being transferred to a high school with a violence problem if I did not start following orders.

So despite the fact that I come from a long line of teachers, I have difficulty believing that most teachers want to encourage creativity or curiosity among their students. In my experience, teachers want to encourage compliance, and only accept creativity when it leads to specific results and behavior. Curiosity seems to only be permissible after all instructions have been executed, and the teacher is free to give such a long list of instructions to follow that no compliant student could have time for creativity.
Our time is finite after all, and reading or answering email from people we don't know is not necessarily a good use of it

If this were true, the solution would be dead simple - stop reading email.

The problem is that not all email is created equally. There are some emails that are incredibly important and most that are not. The problem is that it's impossible to sort it ahead of time.
Sorry about that. Here it is:

CentOS/Apache/cPanel/PHP/MYSQL
After reading "This Machine Kills Secrets" [1] I have to agree with the sentiment in this blog post (although maybe not the tone): https://eeqj.com/20110113/wikileaks/

Assange should have followed the philosophy of the cypherpunk mailing list he spent so much time on in the 1990s that was all about with protecting your identity, using cryptography, being anonymous and affecting change through technology.

Wikileaks used that methodology well for their whistleblowers but Assange did the opposite by being so public... and I'm not sure it was all for the best.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/This-Machine-Kills-Secrets-WikiLeakers...
"Would you rather record yourself in front of a computer or yourself walking outside experiencing life?"

I wouldn't feel too guilty about recording one-second screenshots. I get a lot of enjoyment out of writing, designing, programming and working on other creative online projects.

Having a balanced life, which includes outdoor activities, is definitely important, but I wouldn't discount the value of learning, creating and communicating in a digital space.
Random walk illustrated with D3
I know the OP was interested in unix tools, but I've been wondering could you build a lightweight IDE or dev toolset in chrome itself? It looks like action.io and cloud9 have been some nice browser based tools, but what about building something using google native client that runs locally in chrome?
What else do you enjoy? Do you derive satisfaction from solving problems for users? Maybe you're trying to perfect something that's less interesting to you than another problem on your plate.

If positive user feedback 'gets you off,' as it were, try releasing something that isn't as perfect as you'd like it to be and see if there's any measurable difference in sentiment. I bet there won't be. Do it a couple more times and hopefully it'll break the pattern.

For the other case, try time boxing yourself so you can get back to the more interesting challenge. Make that other thing 'perfect' if you won't.
Previously submitted here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5196859

It's been deleted from there, no doubt because of the highly sensationalist, link-bait title, and the fact that that site is basically a tabloid rag.

tptacek commented:

By "target" they mean "subject of FLIR cameras",
because the drones aren't armed. I'm not sure why
I'm meant to believe that drone cameras are more
insidious than the thousands of closed-circuit
cameras that watch the streets in the UK.

-- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5197288
There's a less cynical answer: it's that managers are subject to the same principle, of insufficient R&R resulting in tunnel vision, and so they're exhausted and hence tend to think short-term (beat this unrealistic deadline now!) instead of long-term (we'll cut the least important features or slip the deadline so we can get it done). The only way to break the cycle is to realize that a good portion of what you do doesn't need to be done, and ruthlessly cull out nonessential tasks so that nobody does them.
When you're talking about solving this problem, please please please consider the role that poverty plays in education. Many of these discussions occur in a vacuum, absent any considerations about how various externalities affect education. At a minimum, consider examples like school lunches raising test scores because students aren't too hungry to concentrate.

Every problem a child has outside of school, shows up in the classroom as a barrier to learning. If you want to revolutionize education, understanding that is a very good starting point.
Kind of sounds like procrastination to me. You should have a clear goal, and work towards it, allowing no or few of these side-distractions to take you off the path. A real life deadline helps immensively as well.
Clash of the Titans: Google vs. Microsoft
Do more Germans have Diplom degrees per capita than North Americans have undergraduate degrees? I was under the impression that more North Americans have undergraduate degrees than Germans Diploms, mainly because the Abitur is the bottleneck. In Canada now it seems everyone and their dog goes to university now.
Yes, there are several apache alternatives like nginx and lighttpd.
I think at this point nginx has become the standard for larger websites.

Take a look at http://www.whisperdale.net/11-nginx-vs-cherokee-vs-apache-vs...
It's hard to generalize. I think the amount of perfection I demand in a solution is proportional to some combination of its importance and my interest in it. I have no trouble putting in place simple, hacky solutions with the intent of changing them later, and then actually changing them later.

My side projects, in particular, are where I allow myself to roam freely, and I often end up prioritizing unimportant (but interesting) work that is only tangential to the core idea. When I am only accountable to myself, then it becomes too easy to get unfocused.

Perhaps the original question should be rephrased as "how do I keep myself focused when working on side projects, since I'm only accountable to myself."
The bit that I struggled with in high school a bit was gaining an understanding of where certain areas of maths were useful. If an area of maths isn't immediately useful at least some explanation of why we should appreciate it and how it relates to other math concepts would be useful.
I don't know what specifically what releases the article is referring to do but I assume it is those caused by John Ball (a Guardian newspaper liaison) when he knowingly released the encryption keys for the insurance file. Please correct me if I am wrong.

That said there is always a risk in news reporting that you put someone in harm's way. The goal is to minimize that risk while still being able to report the news.
The first step is admitting that you can't optimize for every direction. Facebook has a motto, "Done is better than perfect," which I used to think was cheesy, but realized is quite brilliant. "Perfect" leads to satisfaction, but "done" leads to revenue.

Say you want to try alternative payment processing methods on your site. Your site it tightly integrated with PayPal, and you want to add Stripe. You could (A) spend 1 day to bolt on Stripe with a hack in the HTML, (B) spend 4 days and add enough views to the frontend to make Strip work in a non-disgusting manner, or (C) spend two weeks and refactor the entire backend with a generic interface that will handle an infinite number of payment solutions.

All three lead to success, but you can't optimize for both time and perfection. Set a time budget. Leave breadcrumbs for the next programmer. Instill a culture that says, "Our code isn't perfect, we know this, but we do what we can with what we have." Done is better than perfect.
> The problem with Step 1 is "all". The whole point of my initial post is that children vary, and the methods by which they're educated need to vary as well. "All children will be lead into the forest by an experienced guide who will let their curiosity guide them in a journey of self-exploration" is just as wrong.

It's not just as wrong, and I think that's the friction we're having. The original premise is, "Our one-size-fits-all approach is obviously not working, we need education to be more self-directed." I hear you saying, "Some people might not be able to learn in a self-directed way, we need some other director." That may well be true, but it still leaves our current system undirected which is definitely worse.

> My friend's son is endlessly curious about dinosaurs, so much so that he refuses to invest any time in math homework. In general, curiosity leads to specialization, which is great only to the extent that it doesn't preclude some time being exposed to other subjects. Curiosity is like having a favourite food: Children need to learn a balanced diet, lest they die of malnutrition for eating nothing but candy.

Sorry, that just sounds like speculation to me. If you can demonstrate somehow that forcing everyone to study arithmetic is necessary for us to have a happy, productive society, I'll accept that; as it stands, I know a lot of people who were forced to study arithmetic for many years and still struggle with basic math. Is it possible that we just wasted a bunch of their time?
I find the argument about fostering more investment in smaller companies compelling. There is a distributed systems aspect to it, which might enable higher overall returns because of increased network effect (e.g. a business not only benefits from a direct investment, but also from investment in other business in the same ecosystem)? Is there something here that bigger funds are missing, or is there data/evidence against it? Maybe it just becomes to complicated expensive to manage a ton of small investments vs a few large ones in
a centralized manner? Maybe I'm missing something?
"Currently, schools try to optimize for maximum average knowledge"

From where I sit, schools try to optimize for minimum average independent thought, with knowledge being a secondary goal. A student who receives perfect scores on their exams can still receive a D- in a class; a student who does all their homework, even if they do not get everything right, will likely receive no less than an A-. Schools reward compliance over understanding, and often punish curiosity, creativity, and independence.
Wind tops U.S. sources of new electricity generation in 2012
I agree that this is a really poor article, but the point underneath is that the OTP really is provably unbreakable given infinite resources. That can't be said of any of the others you mention.

I think your level of scorn is justified, but the target is misplaced, and your tone is unconstructive.
Android tablets: It's the browser
Do these machines have traction in the dev community? Aside from a couple of blog posts like this, I haven't really seen much.

AFAIK, most sales are still to schools and a few enterprise installations:
http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/03/maybe-those-chromebooks-wer...

"Still, with over 2,000 schools now using Chromebooks, the real market for these devices sure seems to be in the education space. Over the last year or so, I’ve heard from a number of educators that they prefer to use Chromebooks with their students than an iPad (their students probably think the exact opposite…). Not only are they obviously cheaper and come with service contracts and management consoles for administrators, but having a full keyboard and larger screen clearly make them attractive devices in the view of many teachers and school administrators. The fact that the devices auto-update regularly and are pretty much safe from viruses also makes for an attractive selling point when compared to traditional laptops. For Google, of course, this also means many of these kids will grow up in the Google ecosystem of Gmail and Google Drive, which surely isn’t going to hurt it once these students go on to college or get jobs."
Chef 11 released
I hope it's not another "walled garden". Are there only "Approved Windows Apps"? Will it run any old windows program? There's too much lockdown with Apple and Google tablets. Microsoft got its start supporting the essentially open IBM PC. It'd be nice seeing them return to their roots now that they're facing serious competitioin.

I wonder if I can install Mint/Ubuntu/Debian on it ?

Specs are here : http://www.microsoft.com/Surface/en-US/surface-with-windows-...

It does have intel CPU and 4GB ram.
It does have USB port so I guess some one can install a real keyboard. That keyboard looks like fashion designers modified a security control panel. It does not look friendly to people that have to pound on the the qwerty all day.
No, you're being ridiculous. I'm pointing out the reality that this view is unrealistic in multiple ways, it is no proxy. It speaks for itself, really. We have not had any technology as reliable as is claimed so I think it's a little naive of a view, especialy in any time frame remotely related to "changes are coming." As well, the issue of how this is going to get paid for is a real issue for the reality based community. :)
True and False are not 1 and 0 in Python.

>>> (1 is True) or (True is 1)
False
>>> (0 is False) or (False is 0)
False

>>> isinstance(0, bool) or isinstance(1, bool)
False
>>> isinstance(False, bool) and isinstance(True, bool)
True

Indexing with boolean expressions is bad style to begin with, but if you are going to do it then a bool cast shows explicitly what you are trying to do.
Do you think Google really violated emails' privacy policies?
Microsoft accuses google of reading your mails and providing you with targeted ads. I think this is only for gmail users benefit. There is no harm in this.
Read MZ's comment above for why I dismiss Gatto as a crank. I not only consider new ideas, I'm familiar with a variety that work in various circumstances and not others, and my point remains that children vary, so should educational options, and that the primary problem is finding the right option, once options are available.

Gatto would have us all homeschooling. Read up on New Jersey Youth Challenge Academies for a very on-point counterexample.