skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would have called it an educational example of what's wrong with textbooks :-) Good link though, this is a serious issue. As a european I'm horrified by most of what I see about the American school system; conservatives and liberals both seem intent on wrecking it in different ways. Examples like this make me wonder if the purpose of k-12 isn't so much to educate as to act as an obstacle course for the less fortunate. I also wonder about the price of textbooks here. I'm more familiar with college than k-12 books, but the prices here are a major scam. In Europe I can walk into a bookshop and pay about $30 for an (American) book that sells for >$100 here. Over there the academic books are almost always cheaper than the 'introduction to learning X in 24 hours for complete dummies'. In fact, I ended up owning a bunch of textbooks on subjects that interested because they were the affordable option. The first time I went looking for a CS book here in the US I nearly had a heart attack.

The problem is going to persist as long as education is a state matter but economics leads most states to play 'me-too' and go with whatever is selected in Texas. Kickbacks by academic publishers to selectors (which I hear sometimes takes place) should be prosecuted criminally. Textbooks should be certified by a panel of relevant academic associations, eg the AAAS or other well-established groups - not the 'Brand New Hisotrical Revisionism Society'. Those are just my superficial reactions, and not very good ones.

I was uncomfortably reminded of programming books by this article. There's a lot of junk out there...makes me think of how many programming books are built around things like administering a payroll system, which coincidentally involves nothing more complex than arithmetic and the most primitive kind of database. If you're a self-study sorta person like me, it's a real pain in the ass for find good tutorial material.
I think this problem is connected to the "teacher-proof curriculum".

School administrators don't trust teachers to actually make judgements based on their professional training and what's going on in their own classrooms, so they just hand them these kits that were chosen based on the buzzwords and slick marketing brochures. Of course this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the teachers who are best able to endure this kind of spoon-feeding are the ones who do not, in fact, have good judgement.
Anti-missile defence details found on secondhand computer
I did some experimenting with recursive regexes after reading this article. I hadn't heard of it before and it sounded like an interesting concept.

However, captures in the recursion can't be retrieved after it gets returned. This may not be surprising, but it does reduce the power of recursion somewhat.
Theora update for May 2009; quality has improved dramatically
My main problem is with taking an issue which is very complicated and offering a simple solution: just remove the copyright.

Most decisions in economy are taken in a very rational. A pharmaceutical company will decide how much to invest in researching and getting approved a certain drug based on the chance of success and the potential profits. The profits depend directly on the time it has exclusive rights on that product. If it's only until a competitor reverse engineers the product, then it could only be a few months. If it's 20 years, the profits are completely different. It will invest in both cases, just very different amounts. The length of the copyright should be computed to maximize overall benefits to society. A large enough investment, but not too long.

Another case is software patents. There is a very big difference between patenting ideas (usually considered a very bad idea) and patenting software (usually considered necessary). An interesting example: most people decide to use (and pay for) Windows, even when there are free alternatives. Why? Because it simply is better. All those money invested in developing it (based on the expectation of future profits) just make a difference.

Or collections of otherwise non-copyrighted data, like maps. Making a map is extremely expensive. Copying one on the other hand is extremely cheap. What incentive would a map maker have to do all this work?

All these are very different cases, and they have to be treated as such. Simply saying all IP laws are not necessary because RIAA is evil is not a solution.

My personal preference tends to be towards eliminating copyright for non-commercial purposes, with a broad definition of what is commercial. Listening to music at home would not be commercial, but in a restaurant (or any other public place) it would be. But I only consider this my _opinion_. I admit it's limited and with flaws, and I am aware that "the devil is in the details". And most of all, I firmly believe this is a complex problem, which does not have a simple solution.

I will take I look at the book you mentioned. I am curious how it treats some particular cases, like some of the above.
The learning curve will be less steep with the new standard, even if the hill is taller. Much of the work on the new standard is focused on making libraries easier to use, including giving better error messages.

This will facilitate the "Accelerated C++" approach, namely teaching the libraries first, and the base language later.

The other side of this is that it will likely also widen the gap between those who use C++ libraries, and those who write them.
How To Watch Videos in ASCII Art
Interesting fact that Texas, despite having lower taxes, spends more per child on public education than California.
I agree. The market is huge and if you can break into it it would be great. It's just insanely difficult as you said. My approach would be to target the smaller districts that can choose for themselves and focus on supplementary materials. After that I'd work my way up to the "core."

It just seems that when a state is making such a decision, it's difficult to compete as the little guy. The other publishers have a lot more money behind them and a probable lobbying effort.

You need parents to start reading the textbooks that kids have in order for changes to happen - otherwise the textbooks will just appeal to the "average."
Aye exactly, the linked post is great advice, but if you can't pay your company run rate (i.e. you can't pay your own rent!) then you have two options: raise money or get a job/other source of income and keep going part-time.

"Raise money" can include selling, but if you're still developing the product, what do you sell? Not everyone can conjure weeks' or even months' worth of living expenses out of the air while the product gets done.
App Store submissions now being reviewed on iPhone OS 3.0
E-mail from Apple to all iPhone developers:

All apps must be compatible with iPhone OS 3.0
Millions of iPhone and iPod touch customers will move to iPhone OS 3.0 this summer. Beginning today, all submissions to the App Store will be reviewed on the latest beta of iPhone OS 3.0. If your app submission is not compatible with iPhone OS 3.0, it will not be approved.

Existing apps in the App Store should already run on iPhone OS 3.0 without modification, but you should test your existing apps with iPhone OS 3.0 to ensure there are no compatibility issues. After iPhone OS 3.0 becomes available to customers, any app that is incompatible with iPhone OS 3.0 may be removed from the App Store.
Has Joel Spolsky Jumped the Shark?
That's one reason why the excellent Primary Mathematics Series developed in Singapore

http://www.singaporemath.com/Primary_Math_s/21.htm

is not used in more United States schools. Even though there is a United States version of that series, most school districts that have considered adopting it have rejected it, as not having built-in scripted lessons for the teachers to present. I personally find it EXTREMELY easy and intuitive to teach lessons out of that series, to very good effect, but I'm not the kind of person who goes into elementary school teaching in a government-operated school in the United States. I do teach elementary-age pupils mathematics--that is my current occupation--but I teach them subjects that would be deemed "prealgebra" and "algebra" in terms of the United States curriculum.
Link to the Part 1 discussion...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=597919
Why, that sounds awfully ambitious!
And yet I was pleasantly surprised. I'm quite used to finding "advanced" articles on various programmic topics and finding that everything said in them is so basic that I can't learn even the smallest piece of information from it.

This one still had some quite interesting pieces of information that I hadn't heard of or hadn't studied in detail yet.
I'm currently trying to build an RGB Arduinome[1] using an arduino board, and it's my first interaction with µ-controllers. I am loving it. As simple as it is, seeing an LED blink a pattern you just programmed into it is very rewarding. Reminds me of the first time I drew a few circles with BASIC when I was nine.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduinome
I also do not like to waste as I have actually seen people in some parts of the world who are malnourished and always hungry... I can't leave food on my plate for that reason and I wish many restaurants would just server me less food. I'd still pay the same price.
Do we need books, as such? Or, do we always need educational material to be in book form? I love books, they were my best friends in childhood. And I am a bit of a traditionalist about education - snooty about handwriting, spelling, grammar and numeracy (educated in Ireland, where the education system was design by priests).

But for learning, we are grossly underusing computers. Much educational software just looks stupid. And while India and other places are trying to focus on the idea of one laptop per child, the US is awash in expensive and bad textbooks. this points to a further slide in our future economic competitiveness.
Newspaper Narcissism: Walter Pincus on the purpose and future of journalism
I was surprised by the difference in obesity rates between the US and Canada. Both have similar eating time values, and I generally consider them culturally and economically pretty similar. But still Canada's obesity rates are much lower than in the US.
I wouldn't start with the k-12 sector at first. I'd start with areas where you can impact at a more individual level to build up momentum:
- Non state colleges
- Tutoring programs
- Abroad
- Home schooling
I'm genuinely curious about that as well. I'm hoping it isn't. How would you prevent spam from bringing down your site's usefulness? How would you prevent that swearing overtakes an otherwise family friendly site?
Starting today, all app store submissions must run under iPhone OS 3.0
An email from Apple today indicates that all submissions, starting today, must run correctly under iPhone OS 3.0. I can't find a public article to link to, but I would say this is a good sign that things are on-schedule.
I'm not a lawyer, and that guy is, but I disagree with him. Facebook is not "intercepting" messages, it's simply preventing you from sending them. It would be like your boss standing over you as you write a letter and saying, "no, we can't send that, shred that now." and then shredding the letter. That's not tampering with mail, as it never became mail, it's just a piece of paper on some guy's desk.

In this case, Facebook is refusing to let you submit a form, just like when you omit a required field. If you want to talk "wiretapping" or "intercepting", what about corporate spam filters and false positives? That is literally sitting between you and a legitimate sender and is throwing away data some algorithm doesn't want you to see. Sounds like this guy's definition of "wiretapping" to me, but we all know that email would be dead without spam filters.

Anyway, this is an issue for facebook and its users. If its users are willing to be censored in exchange for being able to share low-res pictures of their friends smoking pot, then so be it, that is what their customers want.
Like a lot of other folks here, I was vastly underchallenged in jr/high school. I always figured that if I ever had kids I'd do my best to home school them, and this article reinforces that desire.
I'd offer only commission on sales (perhaps add in profit sharing if he'll do other work in addition to sales -- you don't want to penalize him for those parts of his job which do not involve selling), that way his performance will be rewarded directly. It's your company and the equity is yours. 100% It doesn't belong to someone you pay to work for you.

He might have been "very helpful", but he's not risking everything to build a business. He may have put in a few extra hours on the side here and there (and pay him for those if you'd like), but it really doesn't compare to the time and money you yourself have invested in the enterprise.

It's your company. You built it.

This fellow's blog (and particularly this post) may be helpful for your situation:

http://nukemanbill.blogspot.com/2008_05_01_archive.html
This is exactly why I don't use Facebook. They are so busy trying to get advertisers that they are making their site worthless. All so you can see more ads.

No thanks.
I'd prefer to code and maybe chat during breaks. That being said, I usually hang out at one of the many coffee shops in the city. Often Jitters in the afternoon and take your pick in the evening or night (though usually Shadyside or Squirrel Hill, occassionally the South Side).
"The Paxos algorithm, when presented in plain English, is very simple."

The abstract of 'Paxos Made Simple'. You have to appreciate the humor =)
I think the ultimate problem with the textbook industry is that the quality of teachers varies quite a lot and the screening process for ensuring teacher quality is, from the textbook publishers' point of view, unreliable. The textbooks are the teachers' tools and as such have to strive to be idiot-proof, because they will certainly be blamed for any shortcomings that arise[1]. Combine this with the fact that, if I read the author correctly, they are essentially in a winner-take-all game.

The solution as I see it is to work to ensure that all teachers have access to the best practices of education in their particular specialty. A huge obtacle exists, though: There is so much faddishness that it's preposterous, and these fads can attain the status of canon law among their followers (it happens in every field). They start as instruction designed by people who have the insight and talent to correct a bad classroom situation if things go wrong. But many of the people who use them do not.

[1]There is another way to look at this: Many teachers rely on the publishers' textbooks (and ancillary material) as much as the students. They are not subject experts.
William Hewlett had 40% and David Packard had 60%, Packard was clearly the "senior partner" when they started, and yet they built an enduring partnership and a company that has acted as a model for many to come after. 50-50 can be a recipe for deadlock in the early stages of a startup.

This checklist concentrates too much on financing and not enough on customer and market (I cannot determine if item 5 is about customer demand: it's phrased more as a trend analysis). Raising money is not an accomplishment: it just means you have a high paying job working for one or more VC's for a few years. Finding paying customers you can satisfy at a profit is the key to survival.
Why aren't you striving to be a leader in your field?
I think it would be enlightening if you could provide the textbooks you buy. How big is the selection for textbooks for a certain subject/level. Are there a lot of smaller, independent publishers?
Absolutely. That's what Linux tends to not get: the last little details that piss off new users to no end because the last inch of the journey isn't properly implemented.

Powerpoint presentations that load in OOo but don't look quite the same. Web pages that look like shit because the fonts used are the wrong size and don't render right. Files on FAT USB sticks that are in all CAPS appear as all small case. The list goes on and on and on..
i believe the grievance is from a lack of 'commons.' there used to be a lot more space that was considered owned by the public, which is an idea that doesn't have much space in our contemporary society.

some wiki info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_space and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_land
I understand that home-schoolers love it, though.
I mentioned this once or twice elsewhere today, but I actually just launched a twitter link aggregator (that does index and analyze), would love some feedback: http://tweetlinx.com

(using it via a twitter bot to aggregate / preview hacker news here: http://tweetlinx.com/hackernewslinx)
Ants fitted with radio transmitters for scientific study
Ask HN: Online Biz Collaboration Software Too Crowded?
Hey,

Been looking at developing a commercial business-focused web application and general collaboration and file sharing seems to be the only useful thing that comes to mind. It seems the space is extremely crowded a number of big players already, providing some nearly impossible to beat software.

As crowded as the field is, it also seems to be relatively untapped as an overwhelming majority of businesses use in-house software, prefer not to use anything, or simply don't even know what the internet offers yet.

Any thoughts on the current market for business web applications as well as trying to jump into a well-established market such as this one?

Thanks as always..
That's actually a great idea for a simple, low-tech affiliate scheme
For undergrads, certainly - I chose anecdotes from science majors because the story is about science majors. My liberal arts major friends are significantly worse off - many are unemployed or bouncing from temp job to temp job.

People with professional degrees are an odd case, because they often end up with so much debt that they have to go into their chosen field. I know a couple law grads that really would rather be doing something more rewarding than corporate law, but can't because they're $200K in debt and that's the only thing that pays well enough to pay it off. 'Course, they can make boatloads of money and pay it off in 3-4 years, but then they get the Stockholm Syndrome effect and can't imagine not being a lawyer, after all they've put into it.
You don't have to reflect the threaded nature of the discussion in your database. Just give every comment a foreign key to the original post or forum topic, and whenever you're displaying anything about that original post, fetch all comments about it from the database, and then after the DB part is done, then worry about which comments you actually want to display. A single DB call to fetch at most a few thousand comments should be faster than a DB call for each comment.
"Lights Out" is a badly-written, breathless, and confusing book on the conflict between our evolutionary capabilities and post/industrial environment, from living conditions to diet. It's absolutely awful...but well-sourced, and broad in scope. I hate recommending it but if you can make it through the cringeworthy tabloid prose the second half of the book contains a decent academic bibliography.

Edit: two writers, one academic and one popular. bad combo.
Please note who wrote the article:

Stuart Blackman is a science writer and co-editor of the Climate Resistance blog.

My impression of the blog is they want to continue the debate on climate-change and delay whatever action should be taken because they believe the environmental movement is a crazy cult. This interview serves their purpose.

They also believe that:
4. The scientific consensus on climate change as widely reported inaccurately reflects the true state of scientific knowledge.
This is a familiar charge from people who deny human-caused climate change.
Little out of date no?

That discussion was huge in 2006, but at this point I don't think there is anything left to be say about the topic from any viewpoint.
This has some screenshots:

http://liquidweather.net/howto/index.php?id=74
It's more like intercepting spam and replacing it with a haiku
These two books are essential reading for people with back problems and should be reasonably accessible to anyone with both an athletic background and an advanced high school understanding of anatomy and physiology.

http://www.amazon.com/Low-Back-Disorders-Evidence-based-Reha...

http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Fitness-Performance-Stuart-Mc...
Btw, if anyone's interested and passionate about this sector. Well, moreso the disruption of it, feel free to drop me an email: j@jasonlbaptiste.com . Would love to continue the conversation.
I thought it was actually pretty insightful.

Instead of stakeholders crafting requirements and coders trying to meet them, the process involves the developer in the product design stage, using their input on what's easy/hard together with the other stakeholders' input on what's high/low priority to determine what to build.

It's similar to agile vs waterfall, where the process is extended to product level rather than just the code. Sounds obvious yet rarely executed.
The east coast Internet entrepreneurial road vs the west coast. The latter is much tougher!
Do we really need to pay attention/concern ourselves with Joel? Is he still relevant?

Was he ever?
Really, any people who like math, homeschooling or "afterschooling," could use it with their own families to good effect. Another favorite math series I learned about from homeschoolers, which I use with my own children in combination with the Singapore Primary Mathematics series, is Miquon Math.

http://www.keypress.com/x6252.xml

It's a shame that lousy textbooks crowd good textbooks out of the market at present.
I've observed that homeschooling is an excellent option, especially for kids in either tail of the "bell curve."
Great advice. Don't let the headline prevent you from reading the actual blog entry. It walks you through a real-life dialogue. You can't escape its mechanical precision: you will be forced down the path of thinking "what an idiot I am of going after VCs now".

This blog post is the difference between teaching the theory ("I understand the argument") and experiencing it ("now I get it").
It has been suggested that I talk up the startup. Very well then! Langolab.com is a site where people can watch videos in a foreign language. The videos have captions and all kinds of tools surrounding the captions, like one-click dictionary lookup, flash cards, and notes. Our goal is for people to be able to watch compelling, addictive video content in a foreign language and immediately get exactly the help they want whenever they hear something they don't understand. We think it's an extremely cool idea, and we think we have an edge because of our crazy ambition and technical expertise.

On the content side, our dream is to make the site truly magical by licensing really cool video content, like Family Guy in Spanish. On the functionality side, we want to make the site truly magical by giving users exactly the help they need when they're struggling with a video caption. We would be especially helped by anyone with a background or strong interest in natural language processing.

We talk to people all over the world who learn English by watching subtitled movies. Over a billion people worldwide are learning English right now. On a web page, we can give all kinds of help that can't be provided in movie subtitles. This is a really awesome idea. Please call!
From personal experience, I can say that the compulsion (to have sex) remains but the pleasure doesn't, resulting in a lot of frustration. I prefer the mood swings. I'm pretty skeptical of this as a therapeutic option for p.e..
Steve had added another item to a the list of things customers don't ask:
"Can I see you business plan?"
"Can I see your college grades/transcript?"
"Is this patented? How many patents do you have?"

Much of the advice entrepreneurs get for fund raising is at best orthogonal if not antithetical to actually getting customers.
The only non-dilutive financing is customer revenue.