skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Sure it is, obviously you don't take any small amount of blocks as a signal.

You do realize spammers are extremely good generating large amounts of things, right?

> By getting a significant amount though and looking at each persons block list to normalize there blocks I think it would be useful.

Spammers are also very good (though not great) at adding innocuous data alongside their spam to look like real users.

You don't realize it, but your solution has just exploded in complexity.
I always wonder when reading these just how much the author is rationalizing their choice to leave. If( and I'm assuming here) they were in grad school for CS and left , most of those problems really don't apply.

There isn't the glut of adjuncts and postdocs one sees in e.g Micro biology because industry absorbs most of them. Tech transfer isn't nearly as big a problem (though may still be a problem). And reproducibility and data fraud are not nearly as pervasive for the simple reason that a lot of CS work is not experimental in that sense.

This reads like someone's grab back generic issues with academia that don't all apply to any given field.
So, one of the big reasons homeschooling isn't more prevalent is that increasingly both parents have to work. Maybe a new, not before seen alternative is some sort of a quasi-daycare institution which has authority figures not teaching but just making sure the kids are focusing on their online courses and not horsing around! And only so occasionally answering questions the kids ask. Because you're still in an environment with other similar-aged peers, you can still have recesses to bond and mingle and have chances for having healthy socializing practices.
I worked for a short time at a gas station, while having unemployment. The job paid minimum wage, and had no benefits or perks.

The first thing: when reporting wages, you had to report the untaxed amount to unemployment, even though I never saw that. I only received 87% of what I was paid.

Second: I now have wonderful costs, like driving to work, wear and tear, and other costs associated to working. This lowers my effective 87% even lower.

Third, I was on foodstamps. The moment I touched a job, which reduced my benefit by amount before taxes, I also had deducted from my foodstamp balance. I'm now down, by 2:1.

So, I did what many do in my situation: dump the job and go to school. I have less of a problem with myself with taking public assistance if I better myself.
cool stuff. how are you grouping data startups within the funding categories section?

i'd be interested to see the breakdown in recent years of startups that offer a data product, i.e. data infrastructure, ad optimization, user tracking, etc
It might seem better to us but I doubt kids see it like that. Most kids enjoy being in a school environment with their friends. You lose the very important social aspect of school with homeschooling/online courses.

>> À la carte education sounds much more useful than a buffet of stuff selected by someone else for you.

With online courses parents would most likely select what the child learns, it will still be "a buffet of stuff selected by someone else for you". The reason being if given the choice I would be a majority of kids would decide against doing a Maths or English course.
Sometimes I think it might be even more benign than this. Some hiring managers are already so ingrained into their work culture that it's already become transparent to them.

"Don't ask the fish about the water," and all that.
I never read this book as a child but I have read it many times with my nine year old daughter and I really like it. It is wonderfully imaginative and the artwork is quite nice.

I also want to mention that Crockett Johnson also did a comic strip called Barnaby, which Fantagraphics will be republishing in May.
Remember folks, mentioning the YC association is only relevant in the title if it's positive news.
> We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes. You can find out more about BBC Worldwide and its digital activities at www.bbcworldwide.com.

WTF BBC, just treat me like anyone else for the /future/ site; show me ads if you're showing them ads.

(Not sure if they're legally allowed to do that, or if they show ads in other parts of the world.)
I beg to differ on the whiteboard part. Asking someone to code on a whiteboard is a perfectly legitimate way of seeing if they can code a few lines (with minor mistakes if need be) without needing a compiler to guide them through each step.
Yahoo and hacked passwords
I'm not sure if this the appropriate website to ask this but ...

Over the past year, at least ten friends and family members have called me because their email was hacked. In every case, it was a Yahoo account. It happened to two of them this week.

I've researched the problem and all I find from Yahoo is: "Yeah, we did have a problem but we fixed it"

Can someone explain what is going on?
The comments for this article are loading on top of the article itself. It's completely unreadable. Anyone else seeing this?
Really? HN Search reveals the history of a link's title? That doesn't come up for me.
In what "domain" is your product idea? (without revealing too much, obviously). For example: a collaboration tool. Or an e-commerce subscription site. Etc...

I would go for Python + Django. Avoid Google App Engine. There are big gotchas with using Django and GAE. You essentially have to throw out the Django ORM because Google places restrictions on what SQL queries you can use (for scalability reasons, none of which are your concern for an MVP or even a moderately sized startup). You can avoid this using Google Cloud SQL, but then you have to use MySQL. PostgreSQL is recommended by most of the Django community. You are better off using something like Heroku (which has great documentation). You can either use Twitter Bootstrap (maybe tweak the defaults with something like Jetstrap), or use a template off themeforest or woothemes. If you use a theme, you'll have to tweak the HTML to make them work with Django's templating.

The problem with Wordpress is that unless you're doing a plain vanilla ecommerce site or some other limited choices, there are many kinds of MVPs you would not be able to build with it. Not to mention that you would be rewriting everything eventually if you use Wordpress.

Using meteor and node.js cover different product use cases (real-time apps or apps with a lot of connections). So it depends on your product. Keep in mind that meteor is not mature yet.
Thank you.

It never ceases to amaze me how much of the "criticism" aimed at copyright depends on massive distortion of otherwise well-defined words.

Refusing to pay your rent to a property management company on the grounds that they're a rent-seeking cartel exercising monopolistic control over "your" apartment is not astute economic analysis. Rather, it's the mark of a (soon to be evicted) idiot. Lambasting the creator and owner of an intellectual property for running a commercial operation to recover his costs and produce a profit is the same thing.

And before anyone insists that "copies are different" and "making isn't taking", it's worth remembering that the bone of contention isn't in the copies. It's in the money that's not changing hands after the copy has been made. Economically speaking, digital media may be a special case in that units have zero marginal cost. But we don't throw up our hands and say "oh well, that's the end of professionally produced media." Instead, we recognize the inability of free markets to meet all our needs, realize that laws also play a vital role in advanced societies, and create exclusive and legally protected terms and conditions under which creators can safely exploit their work.

And while it's true that major publishers routinely display cartel-like behavior in their negotiations with artists, it's ridiculous to say that they maintain any kind of industry-wide monopoly with regard to the general public. Indeed, anyone working in these businesses can tell you how fiercely you need to compete to win public favor. It's no OPEC, that's for sure.
Surely with homeschooling kids are going to get even more inconsistent results due to radically varying teaching abilities and knowledge of parents?

Not to mention severely biased curricular, I'm sure HN kids would all know haskell by the time they were 9 but what about poetry , sports and history?
Apply for junior developer positions at companies that interest you. If you can code, in this market you can get a job. With a strong mathematical background you will likely be snapped up. Seriously, apply to some junior developer jobs. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to get a job if you can actually write code.

If you're not confident enough that you can write code well yet, then practice. Build side projects. Contribute to open source. Although a CS degree is informative, useful and enjoyable, it's absolutely not required currently.
there's probably a lot of examples of knowledge in animals that is passed from generation to generation, like say the knowledge of how to crack open nuts with rocks

we definitely have something most animals don't, but that something may be more of a degree thing than a kind thing
Yes, but Safari Reader saved the day for me.
Home schooling doesn't have any quality control. That's only great if the parent makes it great. And it is often the case that parents don't make it great. A lot of parents are lazy and happy to do the minimum or less - they only home school, or pretend to, enough to keep the state off their back, and may prefer that kids do work for them. In addition, there is a strong tendency for home-schooling parents to be very ideological, so that kids who are otherwise smart and can read, write and do arithmetic end up with huge holes in areas like history, mythology and biology.

I wish we wouldn't so often reduce this issue to "public school is bad in every way, so it's better if there are no common public educational services for anyone".
Linus talking about politics is... still politics, even if one happens to agree with him.
Sorry, someone else mentioned this. It's working on mine, but I'll get a fix in later.
The problem with intrinsic motivation is that people use it as an excuse to exploit other people.
Where does Krugman state that Big corp is evil? Are you talking about banks?

Krugman doesn't state that Google is a monopoly and he certainly isn't disingenuous here. He's just using the Google Reader situation and an article by Ryan Avent as a hook to make an interesting economic argument about monopoly markets with a certain cost and consumer demand structure.

BTW, building a competitive search engine is arguably associated with relatively high fixed costs, and any social site is hugely affected by network effects. These are both traits that can lead to natural monopolies.
Who said it was a suicide pact? I think this is a false problem.
Already is. I noticed the Google Blocklist was broken explicitly because I was trying to remove Quora from my results. Quora is another example of a company/site imploding.
My blocked sites list only had one entry: experts-exchange.com
Two things:

1. Parents can choose what is best for their children, instead of a "democratically" chosen buffet.

2. The social aspect can be addressed by having physical activity clubs/gatherings/groups/centers. I don't know if schools already do this, but being able to choose Skiing as a Phy Ed since grade 1, or whatever tickles your child's fancy just sounds like a much better opportunity to perhaps become a professional athlete in that field.

The burden will fall to the parents to decide how well rounded or specialized they want their children to be in certain aspects - mental or physical.

There could be suggested coursework by companies/industries that would help parents choose what their child needs to learn to be successful in a certain industry.

Let's say my kid shows interest in becoming an Astronaut. I look up Space Company X's suggested education outline and roughly follow it instead of having my kid learn everything until they're in the later teens when they finally choose what they want to spend 8+ hours a day on.
"Measuring labor-saving devices by how much labor they save is a great idea."

This is called the "labor theory of value" [1], and dates back to Aristotle. It was useful for agrarian economies but misses some crucial points, and so modern economists generally don't consider it all that useful. Adam Smith's work (which later became classical economics) was largely in reaction to shortcomings in the labor theory of value.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value
Ruby/Rails - How to write this syntax? - Stack Overflow
I think you're touching on a really interesting subject, which namank elaborated on in his comment. It's too early to tell, but it seems education is heading in a more 'intrinsic' direction, with less structure and more exploration. On the issues of publishing and funding scientific work, these are kind of the same problems facing all creators now. The rate of creation has gone up tremendously quickly, and we are still developing the tools to improve efficiency.
I agree that our K-12 sucks, but why is our university system considered good? For instance, Berkeley, Stanford, MIT/FSF, Carnegie-Mellon, UIUC, etc, have made valuable contributions to Computer Science (this is becoming less true as commercial and open-source have overtaken academia in many respects).

Is it possible that our K-12 system is broken is the reason that our kids are capable of pursuing their own interests instead of the rigor of rote learning? As a kid, I remember the easiness of school homework allowed me to spend many afternoons in IRC and learning programming on my own.

E.g, with too much free time on your hands, are you capable of thinking different instead of answering challenging homework? Not defending our K-12, just wondering how bringing in a Confucian system like Asia and Europe would affect the outside-the-box thinking.
> Home schooling doesn't have any quality control.

Neither do public schools.
I can't find the original story I heard a couple of weeks ago (on the radio), but another egregious sign of the state of public education in the US -- people are jailed for lying about their address in hopes of getting their child into a better school.

The story I recall hearing a couple of weeks ago was about a woman who was periodically homeless and used the address of her baby sitter (or something like that) to get her child into a better school. Now she faces jail time.

Searching google for lying about address to get into a better school resulting in jail time shows that this is not an isolated phenomena.
No one can predict ahead of time what will be a success, and what won't. That's the beauty of making lots of bets, and having the fittest survive. There's no formula for success, no matter how many business gurus write articles saying otherwise. You try an experiment, you collect data, you iterate. You climb lots of mountains, sometimes you climb the wrong ones.

Google perceives itself as a technology company. Hire smart people, try lots of things, most of them will fail. Some will stick. What people are bashing Google over is what collectively, angels and venture capitals do every day, only this time, the venture capitalist is Google, and they are investing in oodles of their own internal projects.

Why do this? To avoid the Innovators Dilemma.

IMHO, the best thing we can do to guard against the downsides of disruption is to ensure transparency of data. You should expect products to die every couple of years. Reader outlasted most at 8 years. How long will Pinterest be around? Or Vine? Path?

The problem today is that most companies are not transparent, they are building siloed clouds, and so when they die, content dies with them.

Worse is non-textual data, like books, music, and film. Not only do you have siloed clouds, you have heavy use of DRM, which means purchases are non-transferrable, often even if the company themselves wants it to be.

The lesson is, invest your energy in supporting services with data transparency. Demand it. Not just from Google, but from Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, et al.
Well, OK, I agree, for the most part.

But I have seen CVs of people "outside." Heck, I've accidentally become an expert at fixing people's broken code, or porting crap code from one platform to another. I've SEEN how bad it gets. (And as I type this, I'm procrastinating from porting some code from one platform to another that I'm surprised works at all -- oh wait, it actually crashes All The Time. Sigh.)

And I know that even THAT work is filtered so that I only see the code written by people who eventually got something to run at all.

Oh, I know how bad it gets. In part it's why I've gone the consulting route; there's no way I'd be adequately compensated working as an employee anywhere. By at least a factor (divisor?) of two.

But you have to figure that all of those people who suck are still developers. Professionally. And some of them have been for 20+ years. So someone must hire them. At least sometimes. And that means there's a market for them. And in that market, I continue to assert, is a buyer's market.

Now it's a market I have no interest in shopping in. I assume all of these people end up in huge companies that can afford to have people who barely know what they're doing. But someone must hire people from that crowd or they'd give up and take blue collar jobs. Everyone has to eat, right?

But yes, you and I and a large fraction (at least) of the HN crowd live in the Seller's Market.
Pifflesnort - can't argue with the fact that economies of scale make mass-produced furniture cheaper to produce and therefore cheaper to buy. Obviously for some people, cost will always be the primary factor when it comes to deciding what they purchase.

However, as far as I understand it, low cost isn't really the USP here. Maybe someone will correct me on this, but i'd say that the more important factors are a) the environmental benefits of local production, and b) the potential for customisation.

I think there's definitely a market for locally manufactured, non-air freighted furniture. People are willing to pay slightly more than they would at a supermarket in order to buy locally produced vegetables at a farmers' market, and the same group of people might well be attracted to the idea of buying locally produced furniture, even if they have to pay slightly more for it than they would do at IKEA - particularly if what they end up with is a unique piece of furniture that exactly fits the dimensions of the space they want to put it in.
Why foreign startups will never take off in Argentina
This is total nonsense. Most western legal systems already require websites to be compliant with accessibility guidelines.

The Equality Act in the UK has much tougher provisions, and has for a long time under the Disability Discrimination Act before it. British business has not collapsed under the weight of supporting it yet.

If you're really struggling to make your website compliant then you can go on the government website and it even tells you the appropriate guidelines. In addition, the W3C publish their own sets of guidelines for you to follow.

For Add-Ons, you have Fangs to show you how a screen reader sees your page. There are simple tools that will tell you if there is sufficient colour contrast between your text and background.
I know there is a demo somewhere... I have no idea how to find it.
Yes, but not all animals eat one another. And we are not, like tigers and lions, obligate carnivores. We can survive and thrive without meat. Our bodies are capable of surprising dietary adaptation.

If you don't need to kill/keep captive animals for food to live healthily, why do it? That's just my personal philosophy.
Reminds me of:
http://video.pbs.org/video/2296683172/
If you read the Economist article again, I think you'll see that you may have come to a personal conclusion with regard to identifying the source of the problem. This is especially apparent, because neither of them even mentioned the possibility of variable pricing, as it was only brought up in my comment.

Both focus on the value of the community itself, the public good that emerges from the physical infrastructure that is privately built, that its value increases with size, that growth is influenced by size, and that early adopters are likely influenced by guesses about longevity.

The analysis could be wrong over the long term, but there is a growing consensus summed up in another front page post[1] right now, that describes how Google has caused some damage to its brand. Some of which is likely being felt right now in the chilled enthusiasm around the release of Google Keep—a product that relies on network effects more than Google Reader does.

[1]http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/03/finale...
Fernando Pérez of IPython fame wins the Free Software Foundation Award
I wouldn't really call it a "mantra" and I think it's a legitimate concern.

[1] Google already built a product similar to Keep, it was called "Notebook" and it was shut down after five years.

[2] If you really believe Google and think that declining traffic is a legitimate reason for closing Reader, then surely Google+ should have been on the chopping block much earlier than Reader.

The Economist does a much better job than I could of explaining why we should be worried about Google's willingness to close products as beloved as Reader: http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/03/utilitie...

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/mar/22/google-keep...

[2] http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/google-reader-still-sends-...
"But it can only give you an upper limit on the value of the innovation, since if it paid to do it the labor intensive way, that would have been happening. It needs improvement."
Of course, a Python program can also smoke a V8 JS program, this happens too. And it is not realistic to compare Python to JS while excluding any commonly used optimization strategy for the former, whether that be C or PyPy or using different language constructs.
Only responding to a small part of your argument: For every univ. that is good, there is a Univ. of Phoenix. But, for every univ. that is good you also have Bronx High school of NY... which produced 8 Nobel prize laureates, you have Stuyvesant, which produced 5 Nobel prize laureates. America is much a place of extremes -- you'll often find the best and worst from nearly every category.
I think your general reaction is correct. The successful sites for freelancers are engaged in a race to the bottom since they are open to and often overwhelmed with offshore developers.

There is plenty of opportunity for new sites to solve this problem in various ways. Specialized skill sets, the ability to do onsite work, training+coding, all provide angles that I believe could be effective, potentially each as the basis for standalone services.

I've contemplated the idea of a marketing site to promote a very specific service:
- 2 Days Onsite: 1 Day Training, 1 Day Hacking with Your Team
- 3 Topics to choose from:
* High Performance Rails,
* Customized ElasticSearch, OR
* Ember.JS-enable your App

No offshore firm could provide this service, and few freelancers tout their most specialized skills effectively.
Jerry Pournelle: How to Get to Space (2000)
The gp commenter just said something about the company's motivations for patenting. I expanded it by pointing out the implications for society in general when all companies do that. (Kantian imperative)

Yet another way to think about it: It turns IP into a zero-sum game, where it should be a positive-sum game.