skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have met a number, but my experiences are more mixed.

There are some great outcomes, but mostly from children who were homeschooled because they had parents who were quite passionate about education. In many cases the parents were big on constructivist learning theory and able to set up a good environment that cultivates this kind of self-directed learning. My own parents were pretty into that, but rather than home-schooling me, sent me to a Montessori school when I was young, and then regular public schools when older, supplemented with some extracurricular stuff like museums and computers on weekends (in the '80s, Logo tied in very explicitly to constructivist education). That worked out ok, and I feel I benefited from having both the school and the home environments. But I can certainly believe homeschooling would've turned out ok, too.

Another large group (in the U.S.) and with a very different profile are kids who are homeschooled because their parents are very passionate about politics and/or religion. This could be any kind of politics (e.g. homeschooling anarchists), but in practice the largest group are conservative Christians convinced that the public schools are indoctrinating their kids with liberal secularism. That does not turn out as well, and often produces extremely sheltered kids who live in an odd kind of parallel universe where they read only things written specifically for Christian homeschoolers (there is an entire niche industry supporting this). They go to social events, too, but generally social events with other Christian homeschoolers. I've met a few of them, and they have pretty negative views on homeschooling, and many think it shouldn't have been legal. Admittedly I met mostly the ones who broke free of it around college by refusing to attend a Christian college (which would be the expected next step).

So I have pretty mixed opinions; I think homeschooling can work if the parents are quite open-minded, and actively encourage the kids to explore lots of new ideas, not necessarily only ideas the parents themselves like. But I think it can be quite unhealthy for kids not to have an outlet a few hours a day away from their parents, in the case where the parents are more controlling. A public school assigning something provides a nice excuse for students to read things their parents don't like because hey, it's for school.

I'm not sure how it would turn out if it were neither of those two cases, but just parents who felt they had to do it because the local schools sucked too much, rather than out of any special passion for homeschooling.
" What would happen if teachers were not unionized and had to compete for their jobs? What would happen if teachers lived in a true meritocracy without a sure protections?"

Incidentally, practically every teacher in Finland belongs to an union, and it's unheard of to fire teachers on the basis of bad job performance. A true rationalist looks at the empirical evidence regardless of ideological opinions. You may not "like" the fact that teacher's unions are widespread in many countries which outrank the USA in education. Sometimes the American way of firing people is not the correct fix.

" What would happen if teachers had to have advanced degrees and even some real world experience before being able to teach?"

Now that's something I agree with. Teachers in Finland have Master's degrees, and all teachers have real-world experience by teaching in real schools ("normaalikoulut") during their studies.

"Why do we have a system that disallows rapid goals-oriented experiments with realistic measurable metrics and a goal to weed out those who are not serving our children?"

The problem is that you can't measure learning very well. Measuring test scores means that the teachers will teach the kids to do well on tests instead of learning.
I'm still having problems pushing/pulling as well.
Hmm, I think the problem is slightly different.

The job of a tenured professor in 1980 was pretty sweet. Upper middle class salary, great job security, a soap box from which to influence impressionable minds, freedom to pursue intellectual interests, etc. Naturally, as with any career track that looks pretty sweet, people rush to enter the field. Thus the great numbers of grad students.

There are basically three ways a guild profession can react to an influx of new demand: a) lower the salary and benefits of the master guildsmen to make the profession less desirable and to allow more overall hiring, until supply and demand balance out. b) make the entrance requirements more and more onerous in order to restrict entry c) use a lottery system.

Option a) is out of the question because it hurts the powerful senior professors who run the existing system.

Option b) is the path the universities took. Earning tenture requires more years in grad school, more years as a junior professor, and more risk of never reaching the goal. And the actual research requires mastering extremely esoteric readings and/or mathematical techniques that have virtually no use for actually doing productive research. But requiring mastery of these techniques simply became the default filter. When you have too many grad students, the default is to make the tests harder until you have sufficiently reduced the number who can pass. They then become the new professors, and thus have an inordinate love and respect for the esoteric test material that allowed them to get their current job. The result is the death spiral you describe - burnt out professors who are out of touch with reality.

Option c) a lottery, is the route academia probably should have taken. Set some sort of bar for admittance into grad school - great GRE's, great grades, and great recommendations, and then simply lottery off the spots. Keep the spots few enough so that there is a clear path to a tenured professorship.

But the real underlying problem is that academia is not accountable. Academia is suffering from the problems that plague any self-selected priesthood - over time its practices grow more esoteric and out of touch with reality. There are a few good departments out there, but most departments neither do good teaching nor good research.

Unfortunately, the body that has the lawful right to regulate academy (Congress and State legislatures) are too dumb and too fickle to do the job well. What "reform" happens takes the form of temper tantrums that do little to fix the system.

In the end, I think fixing academia is thus a "regime change complete" problem - ie. not possible in the American political system as it currently exists.
I was hired as a technical community manager/evangelist. I've chosen to take on neither of those titles in the few months that I've been in this position. I've been a dev since high school and still consider myself to be one (although sometimes it can be a while in between chances to write code).

I put "Vim Wielder / Cat Herder" on my business card. Turns out the cats I herd tend more often to be executives than developers. Developers are great: you show them a great product and help them to use it and they're on your side. Helping executives understand how tech community works can be difficult at times.

I can't comment on what particular brand of developer evangelist Adria Richards was, but there are many kinds. I'd hope that she was one who writes code and who contributes to thte community rather than just selling to it.
As I said, it's doable with scripts and whatnot, but transparent and built into git would be awesome. I see it as something you just set up on a remote repository server. No need to make N developers aware of it, or aware of the script, or resolving the script breaking, or having a ton of implementations of said script across different teams and companies.

Doesn't help if you use GitHub for issues, of course, but hey!
Games often require special platforms. They're not web pages in the strict sense.
Wow! Huge thanks, this actually works (for those of you still having trouble)
I'm not sure if I'm disappointed or impressed that the 1st comment on this post wasn't "first!".
This is an odd question. For Python there are several implementations that provide better speed. Some of them are tools used with C Python, and others are total reimplementations like Jython, IronPython and Pypy.

Ruby is a newer language and therefore has not had as many implementations but there are definitely faster implementations that the standard one built by Matz. One of those runs on the JVM.

You need to do a little googling and you will easily find out more about these. Or just look in Wikipedia for godness sake. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language)
I don't think it is a fluke, it was just a tactic to extract a guaranteed baseline real value from intellectuals where they could jump from research project to research project for years without a return.

Which is perhaps the greatest bane of capitalism - that which has poor returns in the immediate time frame is always passed over for instant results. It hurts our long run dearly to be so inefficient.
AFAIK word provides it's own diff tools which can be hooked by version control systems.
nice! congrats to fernando & brian & min for an awesome concept & execution.
'No Compilation' and why Eclipse rocks
I'm Brazilian, and yes it's very very funny.

Also, check out http://www.habbo.com/, which means the same thing (ass crack).
DrawPath
DrawPath is a strategy puzzle game.
Ultratron works fine with a controller. Droid Assault is most definitely not a twin-stick shooter.

We deliberately make our games easy because they sell more. The easier they are, the more they sell. Simple formula.

The target audience is me. I am a child of the 70s, grew up in the arcades and playing on C64s. The games of that era are shit. They weren't shit then, but they are now. What I do is take old game ideas and make them not shit, and I think I do pretty well at that. One of the biggest components of not-shitness is making sure that most players can see most of the game before it gets too hard for them.

FWIW I've never completed any of my own games, I'm that rubbish.
Show HN: my weekend project - Bookmarks made serviceable
Like a good trolling, link bait has have a slight semblance of plausibility to work effectively.
Go ahead and skip to the postlude, if you're grossed out by the part in front. And yes, the first few sections are really gross.

> is it possible that San Francisco is not so bad because it has a lot of geeks and marrieds and gays and male cougars, but because it has so many of us.

My take on this is that above all, in a land of opportunity, you have to keep your options open. This is from my experience, not from reading the article. You meet someone, and neither person is really interested in investing in the relationship. If the other person isn't interested, then that's that. If the other person is interested, then you can probably do better. And it's ten times worse if you meet someone through a dating website.

You'll meet someone, and the relationship has everything going for it. You like each other. But there's a voice in the back of your head telling you that this is just one potential relationship out of thousands of eligible singles in the area.
I have only been using github for a brief period of time so I am not sure about their track record. Is this a common thing? Seems to be happening fairly frequently... I don't keep commercial products on Github but still a little annoying. If it is a DDos, I must ask why? Who would want to do that? A competitor is the only answer I can think of.
Did you read the postlude?
>"it makes me sad to think about it."

I think this is the best way to sum up my original message. I wrote this blog post out of frustration.
Search engines have to solve this problem, that the results listed higher garner more clicks, and thus using clicks to rank is biased. They can separate the position of the result from its relevance through something called a click model. They make some of the assumptions you list in your article, which you call "examples". Click models are mathematically rigorous and can be quite optimal for solving the upvote bias, and obviously you would replace "clicks" with "upvotes" in your implementation. Here are some well-known click models:

Cascade Model (one of the original click models):
http://www.wsdm2009.org/wsdm2008.org/WSDM2008-papers/p87.pdf

Dynamic bayesian network model (a more generalizable Cascade Model):
http://www2009.eprints.org/1/1/p1.pdf

DBN model with scroll and hover interactions (kind of like your example 2):
http://jeffhuang.com/Final_CursorModel_SIGIR12.pdf
And what is the engineering cost for Reader vs YouTube?
Google has killed APIs before. Examples include Google Translate and private weather API.
Age 30 is meaningless.

Kids? Health issues? Financial stability? Peace of mind? Quality of your idea? Research and Preparation? Co-founder?

Those are factors that might be more relevant.
DrawPath is a strategy puzzle game.
The vast, vast majority of the animals that Americans and Western Europeans eat are treated cruelly from birth until premature death. Some estimates have it as high as 99% in the US [1]. If you go to your average grocery store, like most people do, that's kind of meat you'll find. I've yet to personally meet a meat-eater who actually buys local, grass-fed, truly free-range meat. In some ways, it's more ethical, in my opinion, to eat local, "humane" meat than it is to eat factory-farm produced eggs and dairy.

I can't speak for michaelvanham, but a lot of veg*ns do vote with their dollars... It's pretty easy to find locally grown produce, plant-based non-animal-tested cleaning and hygiene products, etc. No way to be perfect, but easy to try :)

[1] http://www.farmforward.com/farming-forward/factory-farming
(Good) corporate services wouldn't have had slow VPN provisioning.

This has nothing to do with Github, other than the fact that Github would let you end-run all rules about data protection, backups, centralized administration of user access, and everything else that you don't individually have to worry about, but the management and IT at the company you work for does.
People can pipe content into FB and Twitter using APIs. The only service you can't pipe content into is G+, which has no input API.
That is how it has to be. Determining at compile-time whether a given program will invoke undefined behaviour at runtime is equivalent to solving the halting problem, which we know is impossible.
What would be the closest analogue of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District for home schooling?
San Diego Tech Founders
It's cute but once you outfit the thing you might as well buy a Mac Mini.. you'll get a better CPU.
Mostly harmless, but not always. This was a rather large humdinger on the part of Debian:

http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1571
I think this is a bad idea. Specifically:

> In the two examples above: When you upvote a comment, the computer thinks that the other comments you have read (the blue ones) but did not upvote, are not terribly interesting.

If you upvote a comment as interesting and the not the ones leading up to it, then you are punishing that comment because you're punishing its predecessors in the threaded chain, so it will be less-seen because you upvoted it.

Any other assumptions of which comments are read will probably not end well. Some people may skip to comments to get someone's personal opinion, other people may only read shorter comments.

~~~

It's worth noting that HN has an interesting algorithm that does not exactly sort by comment score. I have a very high average karma, and when I post on a topic, even if the topic already have 60 comments, my comment begins at the top and stays there even if I'm not upvoted. I suspect that the sorting algorithm is doing something like implicitly adding average karma to the karma of each post when determining order. Therefore it doesn't sort by "best", but by "well regarded".

This is good and bad. It's good because if a person who usually makes high quality comments comes along late to the game, their voice will be heard. It's bad because it creates its own rich-get-richer problem.

I think a better solution to the problem is to simply:

1) Hide upvote numbers like HN is already doing[1]

2) Dither the comments between "new" and "well regarded". First comment is the newest, second is the most well regarded, third comment is the next newest, etc. Perhaps randomize which category comes first.

~~~

[1] Of course hiding upvote numbers has its own major problem because sometimes the hard number of "I agree" upvotes is important. When you want to "Ask HN", say, what particular frameworks people can vouch for, you have no real way of evaluating the comment responses in terms of people that agree. Since they aren't even sorted from best to worst, the information you have is somewhat dim. This could be remedied by giving submitters the ability to turn on comment scores for only their thread. (Or the ability for mods to do it)
CMS_Admin, my open source cms
I don't think this would solve the problem as stated as the first comments will still see more votes having been there longer.
Why don't you just find two mid-points based on the last and current positions and use bezier? It should be absurdly faster.

Example:
x = (p1.x + p2.x) * 0.5;
y = (p1.y + p2.y) * 0.5;

Implementation (easily portable to html5):

https://github.com/eduardordm/wireframeapp/blob/master/wiref...
It is a much more systemically flawed situation, because it is a positive feedback loop - and it isn't even really about money.

Good teachers want to teach students that want to learn, and they don't want to be bogged down by the failures of less popular schools (we are holding off on income for a bit here). They end up moving where schools are doing a better job, mainly because the culture of the region has parents and children who value their education. They get paid more, because the school wants to retain these better teachers, who do good jobs, rather than the assembly line college graduates who ended up in education as the "default" and just want the job security.

So now money can factor in, and these better teachers with proper facilities are being paid more, and have better maintained institutions to keep them hired, and since the region already has a pro-education culture in advance, it has wealthy people who pay higher property taxes to keep the school all the more well off.

And just equalizing the money doesn't kill off one half of the feedback loop - it just renders one neutral. Good teachers would still go where parents culturally want their children to learn and promote their educations rather than places where the parents, and by extension children, predominately don't like the education system and are hostile to it.

Fundamentally, the solution is that every child needs to simultaneously want to learn, more importantly learn something they can be passionate about and pursue as a career (besides basic human interaction like arithmetic, grammar, essential history, and things not taught in school like how to calculate taxes, essential law code, etc) while at the same time they are paired with educators who give them the one on one engagement to keep them on track, who value their role as the builders of a future generation more than their guaranteed paychecks, and getting those two to pervasively penetrate culture is a much bigger problem than moving money around.
Does the file exist?

I've never heard of dropboxd doing anything like that. My inclination would be to nuke the box.
Sexism and Public Shaming
Might be relevant: How Not To Sort By Average Rating

http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating....
As a fellow vegan, I have to ask -- why be vegan if you have no objection to people eating animals, if they are raised/slaughtered "humanely"? Why not just buy local meat/dairy/eggs? At least where I live, it's pretty easy to meet farmers at a farmer's market and talk to them about how their animals are treated.
Ha! Unintentional, but I think I like it anyway. That comment is full of typos thanks to writing them on my phone.
FYI I think all comments begin at the top. My comments also start at the top and then fairly quickly move down into upvote order, my karma is well below the top of the leaderboard.
That's pretty sweet. So if you run the r.js optimizer, you'll be serving minified, precompiled templates to the client.
Feedburner has (had) an option to CNAME your own domain name to a google domain and to use that as the feed URL. If you did that then all you need todo is change where the CNAME points to.
Introducing OX Text
> Option b) is the path the universities took

You're sort of right, but we aren't deliberately weeding out people.

This year, I was on the hiring committee for a tenure-track mathematics hire in my academic department. The job market is extraordinarily competitive this year, and sucks rocks for candidates. It follows that we were able to hire somebody truly outstanding.
What's your point? It's not useful because you don't have one?
Even then, doing without "add -p", "rebase -i", "commit --amend", inplace branches, and various other git features is going to cost you.
One seemingly obvious problem to this (at least the way you describe it, maybe not the way it's actually proposed - I didn't read it) is that this would disincentivize spending, and incentivize saving. So it would seem[1] that this would cause the economy to take a big hit.

I just remember a few years back when the economy was at the worst we've seen in a while, the government seemed to really push spending and investing in stocks over saving. So if there was no penalty for earning money, only spending it, we'd be back in the same boat.

[1] Disclaimer: I'm certainly not an expert in economics.
One could argue that making users manually select "spam sites" is unfriendly, too. If I were the PM for Google Search, I'd want to make a product that "just worked" without requiring the user to screw around with bells and whistles. A work of art is done when there's nothing left to remove, not when there's nothing more to add.

Providing an extension for power users to tweak the bells and whistles sounds like a fine gap-filler while perfection is achieved, however.
It's hardly a fluke that the creation and dispersion of knowledge are tied together. The reason research universities exist is because undergrad were willing to pay money to learn from people at the forefront of knowledge. The problem isn't having (most) of those researchers teaching, it's that our society now wants to send 50% of people to college rather than the historical norm of order 1%. The researchers are spread too thin, and the mixed bag of lecturers must necessarily pick up the slack.

If you correct for the fact that the best researchers have zero incentive to teach (i.e. by just selecting those researchers and lecturers who are internally motivated to teach regardless of incentives) the researchers are way better on average.

There's a place for great researchers who suck at teaching or are so great at research that teaching is a waste, e.g. the institute for advanced study. (And frankly, most of the researchers at the institute should probably be teaching the best grad students.) But, as someone who was a grad student after going to a fancy undergrad school, I think it's clear that having most researchers teach is a fantastic Good Thing.
You don't need to learn elisp to learn emacs. I've been using emacs since 1990, 23 years now, and haven't done anything in elisp. Mostly you can copy and paste configuration information so it's really not necessary to learn it.

I learned emacs after using vi for a short time, about a year and have never looked back. Nothing about vi/vim impresses me, emacs can pretty much do anything vi/vim can do.
Just wanted to share a side project that I have been working on for the last couple of months. Hard to put the time in with a full time web development job, but still wanted to share. There is a bunch of cleanup to do since I spit this out pretty quickly... If anyone wants to help, feel free to let me know.