skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who's seriously looking at homeschooling my kids, I'll give you my reasons (briefly, because obviously it's a complex issue)

I see a lot of similarity between the school system and having a regular, steady job. The risk is known, and the outcome is, with a high likelihood, going to fit between a fairly narrow band. It's safe, it's socially acceptable and everyone else is doing it.

Homeschooling is like leaving that regular 9-5 job (something I did 9 months ago now). It's higher risk, it's not socially acceptable (not amongst my friends anyway) and only nut-cases do it. But... there's the potential for much higher reward.

My kids have nice teachers, but they're not the sharpest tools in the shed and have almost no intellectual curiosity.

I want my kids to develop a love of learning, of discovering new things and of understanding. I want them to know that I don't know everything, that no one does. I want them to be curious, to question and to explore. I most certainly do not want them to spent the next 12 years of their life sitting at a desk.

A quick anecdote from only last week. One of my daughters is 8 and learning about the Solar System. She's loving it and reading everything she can find. They had an in-class test and one of the questions was "How many planets are there?" She answered 8-13, unsure if the teacher was after dwarf planets, and was marked wrong; the 'correct' answer was 9. When she tried to explain that there were 8 planets and 5 dwarf planets, the teacher didn't want to know.
I'm a serious student of Chinese. Would I pay for this? Maybe if it was cheap, but probably not. The stroke order thing is useful, and that is the only reason i'd use it. It just revealed to me the while I was writing the strokes for 我 in the right order I was writing the first stroke the wrong way, which was interesting I guess. However, your stroke order for 好 seems wrong (the woman radical upward vertical stroke, should come before the horizontal, according to Learning Chinese Characters Volume 1).

However now I'm not a absolute beginner any more so I have a reasonably good intuition about stroke order, but if I write them in the wrong order I guess I don't really care very much.There are already many good spaced repetition programs like Anki, which are free. I've implemented my own system based of Leitner flashcards for the Nintendo DS (I haven't released it), which is what I use.
java.util.Date, java.util.Calendar
I'm working from a functional spec and just getting used to the business at my new job. Because the spec sometimes isn't very clear I have plenty of opportunities to talk to my supervisors to ask them to clarify things.

Of course this is very different from shooting the breeze over a drink or lunch.
the dream career of most humanities grad students is being a tenured professor

Well that kinda sorta is the problem. The dream career of a science grad student is to make some great discovery and win a Nobel prize - academia is a means, not an end in itself. Academia for the sake of academia is fine in principle - but who's going to pay for it?
I suppose it's a duck-type thing. A strength of dynamic typing is that you don't need to anticipate all uses of your api. By allowing anything as input, you make things more flexible. For example, instead of assuming that a parameter should be a string, you should just treat it like a string and have the caller deal with the consequences if he passes something else. One positive effect of this is that validation/error handling code tends to be kept in a single place rather than scattered out over the model layer. I'm not sure if I completely buy in to this sentiment, but that's how I read it.
The last line of this article irks me:

"Spending less time selling ads on the front page and more time into creating better digital experiences offers their best hope for survival."

It's easy to speak buzz and say they need "a better digital experience," but what does this actually translate to, in terms of revenue streams? Every newspaper in the country has been employing their best experts to figure out how to improve their web presence to keep from going under. It's not that easy.

In fact, I would say that the Times, especially, has done an excellent job of "improving their digital experience" over the past few years. Remember how you used to have to register to read all the articles? And how they didn't have blogs on the site? Or a historical API? Or all those beautiful flash infographics? Or the Global Edition? NYTimes has broken major ground in web journalism lately, and the only reason they're not getting awards for it is because they still aren't profitable.
Nope, no relation. Just the first 3 letters of my last name.
Maybe this is true for some people. I can't really find myself in this article, though. I'm pretty sure I remember finding certain everyday social situations difficult when I was little and had never touched code. I'd have to say the same for a hacker friend who I've known since age 6 (!) - he "didn't quite fit in" from the start.

Programming hasn't made me awkward. Instead, I've taught myself how to deal with situations, making me much less awkward. (to the point of being pretty normal and hardly awkward at all)

And as the reverse of the article, I find hours of social interaction (mostly with people other than friends) extremely exhausting. Unlike the author, I don't warm up, I just feel drained and want some time to myself to regenerate.
Just to be clear, this would be illegal nowadays, no?
How to stop procrastination, step 1:

Watch a video on how to stop procrastination.

Oh, wait...
Why not network-side pre-fetching?
Yeah, strip everyone down to the basics, no pretences, no bullshit, and we're all basically the same. Well, that's not true. There are those who are willing to do this and those that aren't.
Our society needs diversity to thrive. If we have a society made up of only people that know 'useful' things (or what is considered useful today, as this changes through time), it becomes vulnerable, in the same way that a population with a narrow gene pool is vulnerable.

So, it's important that we have people who understand the causes of the second world war (history) or the difference between signifier and signified (semiotics) in the same way that it's important we have people who understand about the viscosity of fluids; our society is all the poorer without them.
You might want to check out open cv library. They have this thing called the haar classifier/training. You train it to recognize an object and then it can look for that object in other images. Here is one example how it was used to recognize sign language. http://sandarenu.blogspot.com/2008/06/opencv-computer-vision...
It'd be nice if he'd gone into a little detail on how to solve these issues rather than just listing problems. Interesting stuff nonetheless, some of which I've been aware, some are news to me. (I've got a project using git but originating from a svn repo that I work with on Windows, Linux and Mac, which required a couple of contortions initally)
* Why Warren Buffett is investing in Electric Car Company BYD * Because the electric car got backed by gordon brown and perhaps other governments. Tis a fascad, you don't get innovation from the expected.
I suspect it was illegal to pay people to transport others in unlicensed, private cars around back then too. If not, cab licensing would be almost pointless.
There have been a lot of stories slamming capitalism lately, assuming it's all about giant bonuses, Wall St, and what not. But this story is a reminder of how good economic solutions make life a lot more efficient (than the alternatives).
The lottery nature of the academic job market has been publicised for a while now; there is no longer any excuse for phds to grumble that they were lied to about a paradisial ivory tower.
Although I think the US phd system too much of a commitment in terms of time, there is much to be said for a fully-funded 3-4 year phd in the uk, especially if started when your in your early twenties. The flexibility of humanities phd schedules gives you more opportunities to learn a new skill than many jobs would, e.g. programming, or maybe to start a small company.
I knew about the 'doctoral pipeline leading to nowhere' before I started my phd, and this encouraged me to get involved in the enterprise culture during my postgrad studies.
Whilst the limited job opportunities for humanities phds are increasingly publicised, it should also be pointed out how difficult, isolating, and depressing the process of doing the phd can be, for many students. I believe there is ample justification for whining on that issue.
Sigh, yet another bogus (probable) patent obvious to a practitioner of the art (of power electronics/control systems). We brainstormed about this concept several years ago where I was working (unfortunately nothing formal, just as an interesting problem). It'd certainly require the right materials and engineering to create a practical realization (and perhaps there's some patentable details), but that doesn't mean the first to create a prototype should be able to claim the general concept of combining a combustion cylinder with a linear motor.

It will be interesting to see if the implementation is actually viable (and how efficient it can be), given the power levels required by a typical vehicle.
It looks like a great concept, but the Flash player keeps stuttering :(
Women never forget. It is unfathomable.
that's weird. what browser are you using?
Evolution Vs. drugs
This thread is a great case-in-point for me. I read comments to here (this is the top thread at this moment), and now am moving on. I won't bother to read the OP at all.
Case Sensitive Searches in SQL Server
Vitarium Consulting Solutions for Wellness plants - English version
Opera 9, Linux. I use the (experimental) Flash 10 64-bits plugin, so it's probably something to do with that (although I used to have similar problems and crashes to boot with Flash 9 voor 32-bits systems).

I'll try with Firefox just to be sure.
I'd be interested to read more about how much of the Special Forces difference they're born with and how much you can train.
Top 10 reasons to have a job
* the DNA of great entrepreneurs [is] a mix of three simple things: smarts, guts, and luck *

what is smarts, what are guts and what is luck? I personally think that smarts is experience, guts is I have no idea, I doubt it is any different from experience, and as for luck that is a mystical term used for trial and error. So the DNA of great entrepreneurship then is experience, or putting it in colourful language, getting down on dirt.

Agree? :P

seeing that he used three terms to describe one thing, I am assuming that the rest of the article is as my professor would put it: "verbal diarrhea" :P
The article is obviously a bit tongue-in-cheek, but there are some upsides to simply being employed. By the time my first startup was crashing, I was so happy that someone offered me a simple "Do this and you get money" option, I nearly gave them a hug after being hired.

Entrepreneurship is an emotional rollercoaster that's a blast to ride, but sometimes you need to step of in order to steady yourself for a bit.

...That said, I'm loving it this time around, and making sure I won't have to stop.
I've heard all sorts of arguments for and against, but in the end it only matters that you consistently choose only tabs or spaces, and that you use whatever header-settings your IDE provides to enforce the decision across all the coders, e.g. for emacs:

#!/usr/bin/ruby -w
#-*- standard-indent: 2; indent-tabs-mode: nil; -*-

[...]
that sounds like the culprit. thanks for the additional info.
Yes, it's just what I thought using the web. I like the idea and that I can start reading the articles without clicking but having to go back here to see the comments (which are almost as important, or even more, as the link) make the site much less usable.
SmartFoxServer - the MMO engine for indies?
What does younoodle actually measure?
I think this post raises an important more general point: that countries are often held to different standards when it comes to human rights abuses.

Take Dubai as an example. It's clear that very serious human rights offenses are going on in the country and that specific classes of foreign workers are treated unfairly.

But do we really hold Congo to the same standards, where 45,000 are killed in warfare every month? Certainly, the same offenses are going on in many countries around the world. People in Europe have been talking about an embargo on Israel similar to the South African apartheid embargo. But are countries that are committing similar offenses and worse held to the same standards?
Most of them have a good reason for being around; after all, clarity in communication is a good thing. A virtue, even.

I think that sentence would sound nicer like this: Most of them have a good reason for being around. After all, clarity in communication is a good thing, a virtue even.

As for the rules, I think I read it in the King's English or perhaps in an essay by Bernard that rules are made to be broken, but you must know what they are so that you can break them, otherwise most likely you are wrong.
Firstly, it's basic DRY principles. Rather than have code dotted around your system dealing with data integrity issues, put it in one place and make your business logic more readable and easier to maintain. When trying to understand a subroutine or Class I should not have to wade through all the lines of code that try to make sure the input is 'safe.'

Secondly, something I've noticed about defensive programming is that generally it creates a culture of "meta rules" that only exist in the system architect's head. When someone else reuses one of their models, then the danger is they don't know all these different rules because they are scattered around different controllers or scripts. This has been a particularly vicious source of bugs in our legacy systems. Domain experience becomes critical.

Lastly, defensive programming by its nature is also traditionally a big red warning sign that says "there is no data integrity strategy in place for this system." It doesn't matter if that data is coming from a CRUD form, a relational database or a file... there should be some validation layer that ensures the data is 'correct' before making it 'safe' to reuse across the rest of the system.

I've found that defensive programming is particularly rife in systems powered by MySQL databases. MySQL has traditionally lacked the data integrity mechanisms of Oracle or other Enterprisey systems and thus has created a whole bunch of MySQL 'experts' that actually don't know anything about data integrity. A system I'm working with this very minute has a function where the first 20 lines of code (out of 28 total) is compensating for potential orphan entries in the database. The reason? The admin tool for removing entries does not do cascading deletes. Rather than fix the root of the problem, we have this 20 line check everywhere that we need to access the data safely.

I could go on and on, but in short: defensive programming is one of the major 'code smells.'
Chicago Chemical Testing Analytical lab
Chicago chemical testing by Grace Analytical Lab, Inc, an MBE, WBE, DBE, PCE & SDB NELAC-accredited laboratory
“Imagine” that
They is plural, sometimes you need to use the singular third person pronoun. For example

An individual is free to do what (they, he, she, or one) wishes?
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Expect Trouble When China Has More Say At The IMF
Please note that the subtitle for this blog is 'Understanding global events and their security implications for America'.
I really hate other people's style-guides.
Most of it is common-sense, but there's always some aspect or another that really grates against my preferences, e.g. "Keep lines fewer than 80 characters" is a pet hate; when did we return to Green-screen terminals??
My current company enforces this, and it often creates worse multi-line dischord cf. adding an extra 10 to 20 char's to the current line.

And "Read other style guides and apply the parts that don't dissent with this list" is a little too arrogant for any coder in the entire world -- perhaps should be "Replace any parts of this list that don't conform to your style".
Regulation is what made [the internet] work
This is explicitly disallowed within some companies...
Because rejections are always honest?
Programming makes weird because even though I'm not coding, I'm thinking about my code all the time and as a result of that, I rather live in my own head than interact with people around me.

However, its also during these times ( not in front of computer ) that I often think of the most brilliant re-factoring, algorithms and ideas for my code. So strange as it sounds, socializing helps me to code.
David Attenborough wants to lower the global population
I wonder if Kellogg's success during the Depression had something to do with psychology. For example, when times are tough people might want to "stick" with a brand that appears more fit compared to others.
I was knocked off my chair the first read through, hence the blog post. This is just something programmers don't talk about. You just assume everyone is stressed, you never look into the neurological systems, but that's precisely what a good programmer would have done!
Oh, I wouldn't make that mistake. The OP is lots of fun, even if you aren't someone who would use it as their primary HN interface.
Browser storage: What is the correct API? SQL? JSON?
There is a lament by an ancient philosopher (Platon?) about the advent of writing destroying memory.
How do you know who he follows?
There's a lot more to this post than semantic arguments. Get past the first three paragraphs and read about the profound connection between hacking and liberty. It's tied to our past, our present and our future innovations.
Cool visualization. I wish it had some more information accompanying it though.
New radiation therapy promises relief for overheating laptops
I've heard stories before specifically about the bioinformatics academic circles... biotech researchers who think writing code is trivial so they never even bother to have a software engineer look at it, until it's too late.
Being a developer gives you an endless source of learning, there's always something new to experiment with. For me that meant that in my late teens I was often messing about with code and reading books whilst my friends were calling saying they were bored, as a result they'd look to social interaction to solve their boredom, including going out to parties etc.

I think that's the start of the divide. When you do eventually pop your head up from your laptop, your friends have all developed superior social skills than you, so you're instantly out of place and on the back foot in highly social situations such as parties and nights out.

I recognise that I lack certain social skills required to flourish in big crowds and groups, but I think its just a matter of forcing myself to attend events, be more open with people and it'll improve. If you do something all the time, providing you're a good learner - it should get easier.
Yet the article itself is about India.
Random observations:

This needs to be cloned by someone who is willing to at least link to the HN comment threads. I know that Giles regards such things as deadly dangerous OMG-someone-is-wrong-on-the-Internet time-wasting poison -- and he's got a point -- but some of us have an odd love of the medium and primarily read HN for the comments.

Some headlines just work better in giant Newspaper Type than others. In his example, Giles has picked right up on "Bill Gates Applies for Patent on Electromagnetic Engine", which reads like a steampunk April fool's joke when you print it on a newspaper page. It's great.

This project is doomed [1] because the average article on the web is miserably structured for being teased on a newspaper page. My favorite example is up there right now:

HOWTO: Stop procrastination (Dan Ariely)

We're sorry, but something went wrong. We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly.

That's so perfect it's like poetry. On the other hand, "Ruby Style Guide" reads like the Associated Press conception of a modern online newspaper:

This repository is private. All pages are served over SSL and all pushing and pulling is done over SSH. No one may fork, clone, or view it unless they are added as a member . Every repository with this icon () is private.

That's art, but it isn't exactly in the spirit of the actual Ruby Style Guide.

But, seriously, there's a reason why newspaper writing has traditionally been in inverted-pyramid form, with the most important sentence at the top and very little preliminary throat-clearing: Newspaper articles have to make sense when you chop off the first one or two lines and blow them up huge, or isolate them on the front page. Web links do not. And they don't.

You can't replicate the awesomeness of a well-designed newspaper with AI-mediated typography alone. The prose and the priority of the stories must also be carefully designed by humans.

The reason why HN is a big flat pile of headlines is that such a display accurately reflects the output of its ranking algorithm: Most likely the top N stories include a certain number of interesting stories, but the algorithm doesn't know which specific ones they are. You don't want to blow up some stories bigger than others unless they really are bigger stories, and who is making that call? Some Python or Ruby script? Please.

---

[1] But maybe not for long. Add a human editor tweaking the headlines and the teasers and I believe you might have something.
-1 for the annoying javascript overlay that prompts me to subscribe to his newsletter.
Voice Over IP Phone System Security
It doesn't play for me. I guess I'll have to get work done now...
I've experimented a bit. Interesting enough I couldn't get Firefox to work with Flash at all. Silly.

I've "downgraded" to the 32-bit version of Flash 10 (the one installed by the Ubuntu package), it had the same results for both Firefox and Opera. The stuttering seems to happen mostly because my browser is busy or something. If I put it in a background tab, it stutters more. If I use my browser it stutters more.

Anyway, it seems to be a Flash problem, so I don't think it's anything you can solve :-(
StumbleUpon, A Case Study In The Efficient Allocation Of Resources
I mentioned this because the article is clearly written from a western/American security perspective; this is quite obvious from the article, which claims that China would use its vote in supra-national organisations to further its own foreign policy agenda. This would mainly affect western countries (which seem to view China's rise with apprehension), even though the article mentions India.

Does stating that deserve downvoting?
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200303/rauch
If I hide all of my money on my front lawn in a bag, I can't really be that surprised when it gets stolen.
Caring for your introvert
sudo renice -19 `pgrep operapluginwrap` helps a bit. Still isn't completely gone though.
>Once you change it to the old-style theme, remove the nag screens, and delete the junk that comes pre-installed on most comps, Vista is actually quite decent.

But decent compared to what? Windows 2000?
I'd take him a bit more seriously on this if he flew a little less. But like Al Gore, austerity is for other people.