skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Alcoholism and anti-intellectualism put you right at home in both the old American elite and, actually, also the currently existing one. The only difference is that, in 1960, you actually had a good chance of launching into it from college. The sports are different based on geography and social class-- it wasn't not beer and football in 1960-era Harvard-- but the concepts haven't changed much.

The biggest problem with college, I think, is that happens at the wrong age, at least for a materially spoiled but culturally impoverished and extremely immature set of people-- the American middle class. People are in school not at the "right" ages but during the years in which society judges them to be economically useless.
To add to this point, I personally find the smaller the goal the better. The quicker I can get gratification the more willing I am to continue working at it.
> it's fueling demand for good exclusive secular schools

I went to programs for the "highly" gifted as part of LAUSD (the largest school district in the US), half of it under NCLB. I watched my high school's program's decline firsthand in the first years of NCLB, as teachers went from actually teaching and not restricting us to what we have to learn, to teaching to tests instead. It was pretty much gutted in the last several years due to lack of teachers and funding - and that was despite the ongoing donations made by parents and alumni to supplement the program (such as buying new textbooks and specialized equipment).

Keep in mind this was a program of maybe 350 students in a 4000+ student high poverty school.. at most a 10% that scored so highly on tests that we skewed the performance numbers for the entire school. National Merit Scholars and SAT 1600-ers (perfect score then) with full AP and beyond AP courseloads destined for Ivies mingled with some of the most impoverished students and low performers in the entire district for lunch.

The biggest alternative that I recall was a private school many of my friends ended up going to - Harvard Westlake, with a then $25k/year tuition now I think more like $35k/year. Admission to both my public program and that private school was very competitive, with waitlists and whatnot. I think there still are waitlists for my old program, even though it's a shadow of what it used to be. But really, it's just one among the many if not most gifted/magnet programs in LAUSD in the same situation.

Where is this incredible demand for good schools now? Where is the support to maintain existing good schools? Most importantly, where is all of this for the average American student instead of the few with resources that you can't even begin to imagine (read: ones that can afford $35k/year tuition and private tutors)? All I'm seeing now is a sea of mediocrity outside of a handful of teachers, programs, and schools that have prospered so far, and it's generally the community that's helping them more than the state or federal government. There is rarely a benefit to outperforming beyond measure when everyone is focused on the people that can't even meet minimums. :(
Average student loan for an undergraduate degree is 27,000 [1] so on average it would be payed off by that time.

I haven't lived in those cities but I would guess public transport is good enough that owning a car is not a requirement, its more like entertainment spending. (I know people who have lived in the GTA without needing a car. I don't know exactly what their rent costs were, possibly a little over $800 but not more than $1000).

Sure he will not be getting a home in the immediate future but unless something terrible happens his salary will only go up . In 5 years, when he probably will have a 2 person family judging by his eagerness for marriage, a small home will be within reach.

[1] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/the-cru...
towlie is the worst character ever! seriously, though, how do you play? i start with 3 each of alcohol and tobacco and seems like no matter the combination I just run out of them. great weekend project with html5!
Try and apply the S.M.A.R.T rule. Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time bound. Any learning objective should have most of not all of the SMART attributes. For example, if you want to learn a technology, figure out how you will measure whether you succeeded or not. How long ? Are you being realistic ? For example, "learn to code" is very abstract while "learn to code website in python in 6 months" is a lot more relevant.
I wouldn't confuse the interface with the engine. Under the hood, the advances have been significant over the years.

Best Practical isn't a web design shop, but you can certainly spend time making this pretty if that's a good use of your time.

As noted in a sibling comment, we do try new alternatives constantly. Haven't found anything else that comes close for the seamless email integration, ticket volume, and workflow flexibility we need.

Also as noted in sibling comments, much newer companies than us, tech stars you've heard of, have found RT useful quite recently.
Ask HN: What should I ask for in salary negotiations?
I'll be graduating in May and I've luckily been introduced to a company who is currently in need of a technical writer to support one of their software teams. The job entails documenting the company's APIs and is a pretty good gig for someone just starting out. I have some experience with software development though I'm not an expert and I'll be having my first phone interview in a couple of days and I know that if I do well enough I'll have to discuss salary which always makes me nervous. So, what sort of figure should I give so that I don't look arrogant but, also, so that I won't undervalue myself?
And the startups that are trying to find marketing help tend to get inundated with “squishy b-school marketing” types rather than marketers that can traverse the full marketing stack. This lack of full stack marketers likely explains why most startups are waiting to hire marketing help.

They can only afford to pay the squishy b-school marketing types. Good marketers are worth thousands of dollars per week of work. A really really good one with a good work history can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

There is not a lack of good marketers. They sure are less good marketers than good programmers. But the only lack here is in one thing: startups tend to think that they can underpay a marketer. Listen, there is no way you should try and hustle someone who knows how much they are worth. You will only get ignored. Plus you want to hire someone who will call out your obvious product flaws. Do you really want to underpay the person who will be in charge of making you money?

They wait to hire a marketer because most startups begin by first creating a product and then thinking of ways to sell it. I've learned that its simpler and more profitable to just sell it and then build it.

Also, its marketers who have the power in the startup/marketer relationship. I can find new clients to work with tomorrow morning, but you cannot find good marketers to hire. The same power programmers have over business guys is had over them by marketers.
Browsing the Web Will Become More Like Using an App
Why the hell would you need to conduct in-depth research into 100+ companies?
I almost thought nobody would make a PHP sucks blah blah comment. Almost...

Maybe someday I'll read a thread without one.
Exactly, it can be a rough transition period from the first realization to getting to appreciating it in the way you said. I forgot to elaborate on that part.
Why we don't use a Rails template
I just graduated with my CS BS last year, but I agree whole heartedly that public education is awful.

But it isn't hard to see why. By being compulsory, and children living in a culture of school being a hardship and burden rather than a means to create an educated society rather than sending them to work in a coal mine at age 10, you breed indifference and hostility. The system itself being the most bogged down bureaucracy in the nation doesn't help placate that feeling.

I think the most important take away is this: it will be slow. It will take decades, not months, to fix the absolutely broken public education system in the US. It is entrenched, and has a lot of powerful figures perpetuating its execution in its current form. But one day, we will have to realize that the best way to "teach" is to let the students themselves find passion and pursue it, and that if you accentuate those passions with supplemental factual and rigorous training and teaching, you get the best education you can.

The only successful education is when you produce someone who wants to learn, has passion, and can interact with society to a similar degree of intellectual prowess. Memorizing the periodic table or knowing how to derive the Sine function don't contribute to that at all (unless of course the students want to be Chemists/Pharmacists/etc or Mathematicians / Musicians / Acoustic Engineers/etc).

But yeah, assembly line education is awful for everyone involved.
Here is a better version as Gist.

For mac: https://gist.github.com/lucasfais/1207002

and Windows: https://gist.github.com/hileon/1311735
The overall division really did lose $4 billion that year. In 2011 they made $1.3 billion. Overall, I think they're about at break-even for the program since inception.
what you describe ("if you aren't big and selling enough games, there aren't enough of you to pay the bills") is exactly the thinking I used to see inside Microsoft, not just around xBox, but around various development tools. it is a really really weird mindset today, though I think for xBox in the early days, when you really needed some low-level hardware tools to get the best juice out of the GPU, it still held a bit of whater. but that was then, and now game engines and GPU programming are much much easier. both Apple's XCode and Android development tools are basically free and there is a vast quantity of good quality graphics and physics and GLSL open source to draw on. they need to change their thinking about tools and access. they have to believe that developers will come and make great games and will be willing to give you a cut if you give them distribution, promotion, and access to your huge installed base of consoles.
HTML_CodeSniffer
See, I don't agree with this unless the developer is grossly misrepresenting the app. You're basically entering an agreement with the seller but then breaking it to suit your purposes. If you're unhappy with someone's terms of sale then you should take your business somewhere else.

I don't think it applies to the app store but there is usually a chargeback fee to a merchant when a customer charges back an item so you're taking money out of the software developer's pocket if you decide to use your credit card chargeback mechanism to get a free software trial.

I do agree that it's really dumb for a developer not to offer a free trial. Personally, I will never buy software without trying it first.
Thought it was an interesting way to combat flies without flimsy fly-swatters or lick-me-when-you-are-drunk electric swatters.
Normally, I very much try to temper my thoughts on what the "general population" wants. I realize that I'm probably an outlier (as is nearly any person considered in isolation).

However, I just do not see the never ending thirst for apps that people act like exists. What I do see is people enjoying well produced, well adapted, easily distributed pieces of software that do what they need, whether that's in the form of a web application, a mobile app, or a desktop program.

I don't see people just flat-out demanding apps. No one says "I'd prefer to type all my documents on my 9 inch touch screen device" when there's a nice, light, ultrabook with a keyboard right next to it (and the same office suite on both devices).

HOWEVER: of course people want their devices to be able to do lots of cool things. However, that's only if you can do LOTS of really cool things and do them well.

Everybody, even your grandmother, snickers at the shoes equipped with a Twitter reader. There are limits, and developers would do well to take a good hard look at those limits.
I've never looked, I don't know. It's an interesting thought though. Googling 'california llc' gives me the impression that there are plenty of commercial providers who will fill the forms for you. I doubt there's an open source version of these webapps.
You realise that's an opinion piece written by one person right? PG has a very specific angle on the start-up world.
Newest Social Network: NextDoor
"...that is exactly the point of school right? To prepare students for life -- both by teaching the skills needed to survive, and by teaching students to abide by the rules of the system they will be expected to live in."

Yes indeed. Part of school is socialization. You say it like it's a bad thing.

"if doing homework coincides with learning, that's good, but there is no requirement of that or even any consideration of the possibility that the homework might have no educational value."

Do you really believe that the teachers aren't trying to make the homework useful? That they are just trying to waste kids' time? Do you know any teachers as an adult?
I am roughly the same age as this person, and as kids we were told that all we had to do was work hard in school and high incomes would come our way. And so we, generally speaking, did – well over 50% of the Canadian population have achieved an education level higher than high school, and is considered one of the most educated nations.

Of course that idea is impossible. High earnings are not an absolute value, only a value greater than a typical income. If we all received high incomes, that income would just become typical, leaving a small group with an even higher income to strive towards.

This person is making an average income, which is where you would expect the average person growing up in our generation to be. We cannot all be above average. It is a logical impossibility.
And instead of drawing its inspiration from a toy line or popular movie (like other pioneers in the afternoon animated-syndication market), DuckTales drew its inspiration from a series of comic books that weren’t terribly well-known in the United States.

I think the author suffers a bit from US-centric short-sightedness here. If the goals was world-wide syndication, then the Carl Barks stories were the most logical option, as they have always been Disney's most popular comics internationally speaking.
You actually can use USB keyboards on PS3. I'm fairly sure it works in any OS-provided text fields, but I'm not sure about support in games and other apps.
Anonymously complain about her to someone higher up in the school hierarchy. Keep climbing until you see some change.
Alexia called it 'infamous' in the TC post, I think rm999 is referring to that.
"Congratulations! You've now started your brand new project with technical debt."

Love it.

The tl;dr here is that almost all of the decisions that an app template makes are decisions the team should be discussing. Otherwise, the homogeny of an app template creates a "you're doing it wrong" cargo-culting attitude.

Great post. Glad I read this.
Running OpenStack locally on your linux machine and interacting with it via an API may help with some of the networking complexities you're running into.

Is your project open source? I'd be interested to chat about how you're approaching the multi-node support in your stuff.

Please shoot me an email or send a tweet: jake@markupisart.com / @jakedahn on twitter
Bitcoin's fiscal policy is only one part of the whole bitcoin idea. It is possible to change the fiscal policy while keeping the rest of the crypto-based system.

The fiscal policy is controlled by two numbers which are chosen by 'consensus' among bitcoin users: The reward for mining a block, and the 'difficulty' of mining a block. You can always mine blocks in violation this consensus (eg reward yourself too much), it's just that no one will listen to you, and no one will accept the bitcoins you 'mined'. However, If everyone agreed to change how we choose these numbers, we could change the policy.

I'm pretty sure you could set up a 'bitcoin-2' network which would honor transactions from the original bitcoin network into the new network, yet have different algorithms for reward and difficulty. For now though, it doesn't matter since the current 'fiscal policy' is quite expansionary.
Hmm, by this logic will we see fines for speeding rise? Or is there a strong, well-tread argument for proportionality that can be raised here?
mootools documentation is fine. It's just different and therefore "harder". Has nothing to do with your ability to "ship" it's you're lack of knowledge of the library that's the problem. Not the library.

If you can't work a saw it doesn't mean the saw sucks and scissors work better. It means you can't work a saw.

that was probably a bad analogy but I can't think of any better one atm.
Finally, something that I'm an expert in. I've had Tinnitus in one of my ears for about 12 years. When it started out, it was at a very high frequency but as time has passed the frequency has gotten lower and the sound louder which leads me to believe that it's getting worse. The only way I've found to cope with Tinnitus is to try not to think about it. At night, I've found that it helps to have a sound machine or fan running to help mask the sound. As for Melatonin, I've taken it off and on for about a decade and have never found that it's reduced my Tinnitus. I'm hoping that medical researchers will begin working harder to find some way to alleviate or even cure the condition since so many veterans are coming home with Tinnitus. There are a few so-call treatments such as Tinnitus Retraining Therapy and Neuromonics but I'm skeptical about their effectiveness since they don't seem to have any scientific studies to back back them up. There is a new device at TinnitusHearing.com that claims to mask the sound. To me, this at least seems plausible since all sounds are just sound waves. I would think we could create a device that is tuned to have a frequency that's inverse to your Tinnitus's frequency that would help mask it. I could see this being very helpful at night when you're trying to sleep. Hope this helps, and good luck!
Looked at OpenStack locally but decided against it, can't remember precisely why but probably something to do with not wanting to use paravirtualization. Project is not open source but might be in future ... no time. Sent you an email.
To use the same analogy used in the article: A random person would not be qualified to participate in the discussion about medical procedures used in an emergency room, sure. But if I had worked in an emergency room for 12 years, even without a medical degree, I would feel like I had at least something to contribute to the discussion.

I agree with the article that we should value the teacher’s input to the debate and that it’s way easier to tell teachers they are doing their job wrong than to do it better yourself, but that doesn’t mean other people cannot have a valid, meaningful opinion on schooling.
The Decision to Move On
> I'm always amazed at the quantity of people that show up on these to piss all over what is a pretty amazing project.

Well, I'm not here to piss all over the project (which is amazing). However. There are about four or five things I need a spreadsheet to do, which OpenOffice does not do and which MS Office does do (one example off the top of my head is generating polynomial regression lines on charts--I specifically need to generate quadratic fits). I've found that many people are in a similar situation, but the things they need are slightly different from the ones I need.

So when someone posts a story about how OpenOffice is "just as good" as MS Office--or at least strongly implies that by claiming the value of a copy of OpenOffice is the same as MS Office retail--those people (like me) tend to come out of the woodwork and tell the other people (like you) the following: Although OpenOffice is a fantastic project, it just doesn't do what I need it to do. Which means that I am going to continue to forking over $90 to MS to get a spreadsheet (and word processor and presentation software) that does what I need it to do.
Can I Take My Bike On BART [right now]
American Express is so completely unlike the other providers when it comes to engendering customer loyalty (cardholder since the 80s), it makes me think there has to be room for a Visa/MasterCard provider to distinguish themselves through customer support.

And agreed for Amazon as well. Their support is good enough it changes my shopping choice. I'll choose Prime even if the item is a bit more to be sure to ship from their warehouse and have their service.
Show HN: Open Letter Explaining our Frozen Campaign
Background: CentUp's Indiegogo campaign reached its goal of 15k raised (from 500+ donors) with ten days to spare. On the same day our campaign was frozen due to a complaint from someone alleging we were infringing on their patent (we're not). It is policy of Indiegogo to freeze any campaign until the matter is resolved. Anyways, this is the letter we shared on our site. I'm curious to get feedback on tone, transparency, and clarity. Thoughts? Letter is up at centup.org
The same thing can be achieved by displaying a simple warning that lets users bypass it ("oh, I was warned it might not work in my browser, and indeed it doesn't, I will take a look in Chrome").
Google sucks at customer support, news at 11.

Honestly reading this, nothing surprised me. We all know Google is incapable of decent customer support, and even if we do pay money for something like a phone, the very corporate nature that reigns in this company still sees us as products of free services. Here's a thought, instead of hiring outsourced help for their Nexus sales crew, why not use their AdWords support staff? Those people are obviously the only ones trained to deal with humans.
I've also been yelling this to my friends for some time. I actually can't figure out why Apple hasn't yet released an Apple TV with a more powerful graphics and some active cooling, plus a controller.

Allow iOS games and you have a serious, serious competition crushing game platform with a TON of existing games and content. Instantly.
That's exactly what DataNitro offers - the entire Excel api in (C)Python.

Oh, and it's free for non-commercial use (educational etc.)
Total sales figures are somewhat misleading here, Sony and Nintendo both in much much worse positions today than they were 5 years ago.
One other option might have been making the phone call from inside Gmail via your computer.

http://www.google.com/chat/voice/

I've personally learned the hard reality that most people currently alive cannot use email correctly and therefore demand that everyone they do business with provide phone support. Because of this, the path of least resistance is to just be like them and get used to calling when you need something resolved. (And the reality is, it's faster for the people at the other end, which is why it persists.)