skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know that I can comment, though probably not for the reason you might think. I'm reasonably comfortable with the idea that current schooling isn't boy-optimal, but I don't think it's girl-optimal, either. I think we need many more studies done on a range of schooling techniques, gathering as much data about the students as possible, and subjecting the whole data set to a principal component analysis.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis , or freely substitute a technique more appropriate to the characteristics of whatever data would emerge, I'm sort of using this term in a generic sense, over Wikipedia's complaints about exactly that. :) )

Gender is just one division, but it may not actually be an interesting one. It may very well be that the relevant educational attributes that determine the optimal learning style happen to be highly correlated to gender, but you're still better off just ignoring the gender and going straight to the results of a profiling test. Actually, having typed that, the more I think about it the more likely it seems. But then, who knows; with performing the analysis you can't really know and the results are often quite counterintuitive.

This would help everyone, regardless of gender.

But alas, education is sacrosanct, set in stone, not to be touched except to do More of the Same, only Harder (TM)...
No, because that would break even more laws than social lending did in the first place.

These are donations apparently. I don't get it.
Off the top of my head, automatically setting file-sharing to share your public folder over their AFP protocol, but hiding the ability to share files with Windows computers in an arcane dialog box. To do Windows sharing, you have to click Options under Sharing, and understand that "SMB sharing" is actually secret code for Windows sharing.

And, even though any old Mac can connect to yours, it's impossible (AFAIK) to enable anonymous sharing over SMB, which causes problems with stuff like XBMC.
Hmm, I wonder if hosting ate up most of their money.

You guys could always get a slice at linode and save even more.
Interesting topic of conversation: Are there any good programmers here who would say that they do not think visually about their programs? If so, how do you think about them? I'm especially interested in the larger-scale; I don't know that I "visualize" a single function, but I can't understand the architecture without something like a visualization.

I can't answer this question. I'm definitely visual, but I'm intrigued at any alternatives anyone could try to explain.
I am a huge proponent of writing as little code as possible. To that end, making use of third-party libraries, frameworks, and so on are marks of a great programmer (to me). Even still, a product should speak for itself; it should not have to be justified by the amount of time it took to create it.
I've never heard anything good about Yahoo's ethics, but I've heard plenty of bad things from the tech press. Wikipedia is a pretty good place to start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!#Criticism_and_controvers.... I personally know developers that choose alternatives to Yahoo whenever possible for ethical reasons. I personally know people who refuse to work for Yahoo for ethical reasons. Are there a statistically significant number? I don't know. But, I've never heard anybody claim that Yahoo is on any kind of ethical high ground either.

Of course 99.9% of the people at Yahoo! are great people. But, historically, the company's top management has failed ethically in very important cases. And, their official policy (marketing message) on ethics is weak. Google's marketing message on ethics is much stronger.

Keep in mind that while I think Google is seen as a more ethical company, I am not saying that one company actually is better than the other. I'm only talking about perception and the marketing messages that each company has put out.
I have installed this version of W7 on a few machines and never encountered this message. Not to say it didn't happen, but it seems to be an exception and not the rule.

It seems to me that ruling out an OS because of a single, albeit lame, dialog box is serious hyperbole. Windows 7 is a serious advancement for Microsoft by any account.

This is a RC and it needs tuning. I'm not sure I know of an OS that "is the answer". I'm not looking for an identity in an OS. I'm looking for a useful tool. If you are looking for the answer in a computer operating system, you are going to be seriously disappointed.

Get your expectations in order and give it a fair shake.
Wow, that sounds horrible.
You still have to give Yahoo! complete control with that method. With XHR, Yahoo! has no control over your webpage.
Do you understand that an anecdote where you interpret a situation (possibly according to some bias or mistake), and a valid data point which can be a counter-example to a universal, are different things?
Mark Cuban:"This was my motivation book. It helped me get fired up..
This strategy is not counterintuitive, as the article says. In fact, I see it as a logical next step. What could possibly be better than having your service work on all conceivable electronic devices in thousands of fun, creative forms?
Seems like you could do this just with some AppleScript. Doesn't OS X support running a script when a file is added to a folder. There's a name for it too...
It's nice to see a concrete example of the "design-by-committee" that MS is accused of with windows.

In Windows, the node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root.

This is terrifying. It sounds like the Windows development process is about to collapse under its own complexity.
I've read some such research. Never found any that was valid, though. Do you have one cite that you're especially confident is correct?

Bear in mind that "genetically react differently to some stimuli" is not the same thing as "genetically has a gender role". The study would need to bridge that gap or it can't validly offer any conclusion about gender roles.
I went to an art school in brooklyn & learned 3d design as part of a formal spatial program. The big insight that was beat into us is to start by simply symbolizing an object - squint at it until the rest blurs away - and then gauge/adjust/repeat the relationships between the pieces you're left with. Persist until it's second nature and it'll be powerful magic for a designer in any field. Abstraction can be rather useful, in a conference room or a startup.

here's some background:

http://www.rowenafund.org/about/rrk_about_rowena.html

http://boxesandarrows.com/view/foundations-of
IPhone developers are gonna have to innovate more..
Foundations of Interaction Design
There's probably an overarching design requirement that their software not contact MS's servers for privacy reasons.

The buttons should be in a different order, and the wording should be changed, though.
Recent post by Mark Cuban on how to save newspapers:
http://blogmaverick.com/2009/04/26/1269/
I can hardly remember what I did 5 minutes ago. No programmer has a mind index of all of the libraries in PHP. If you have that kind of memory, consider an extended visit to Vegas.
> Do we make decisions for our users and then complaints for not offering options?

No. You make decisions for your users and then offer them options. Under "Options." Or "Control Panel," as you so bizarrely insist on calling it.

Oh, and you realize that for 90% of your users, "driver software" == Mario Kart.
HN:  Are you (esp. multilinguals) getting an ebook reader?  Which?  Why?
Hello,

There are a number of ebook readers out there, although the Kindle marketing campaign might have you thinking otherwise.

But hackers, my people, only here have people weighed the DRM, the text, the technology, and the longevity. Neither Ars nor Endgaget seem to have done a multi-row matrix comparison of the contenders so I'm asking you all.

The URL points to a primitive listing of my concerns. I'm looking to use an e-book reader to consolidate my dead-paper library as I contemplate moving to smaller environs. Any help here would be appreciated, either in comments here at HN or at the linked URL.

Thanks!
How the bums lost the class war
Make a non-idiot mode. When non-idiot mode is activated the following occurs:

#1 All folders show "name" "extension" "size" "date created" "date modified" and nothing else. All alterations made by the user are automatically filtered into the entire filesystem. Don't ever "guess" what a directory is for. Computers are shit at guessing things.

#2 When I try to change a .png extension to .jpg I don't want alerted that this will "make the file unusable". That is an insult to my intelligence.

#3 When I try to delete a file that another process has a lock on you TELL ME WHAT GODDAMNED PROCESS HAS A LOCK ON IT so I can kill it.

#4 The GUI should look like windows 2000, no fussing with silly transparent windows or Mac wanna-be bullshit. I avoid macs for the same reason I avoid the Candyland.

#5 All files are assumed to be text files unless otherwise associated with other applications. That is, if I click on phat.properties, load it into whatever phat.txt would have been loaded into, most likely notepad.

#6 I use notepad more than almost any other application. It's time to start giving it more features. I'll bet there are 100 hackers at microsoft who would love to make notepad into a new emacs.

#7 Port every popular unix utility (grep, locate, sed, whatever) to windows and let me run them from the command prompt.

#8 Switch backslashes to forward slashes.

#9 Bring back qbasic gorilla.
But you hear bad things about nearly everything from the tech press. That's their job: to hold your attention so they can sell advertising space. Negative news grabs your attention more than positive news, so that's what the press reports. And indignant moral outrage over the latest nefarious corporate goings-on sells more papers(/banner ads) than anything else, so that's what they report on.

In basically every organization I've worked for/with/in (except the financial industry), the truth is basically 10-100x more benign than the media reports it as. So unless you have personal experience with people in Yahoo or Google that make you not trust them, don't believe everything you read in the media.
Coding less is key. But, for the code you do have to write, and for deciding exactly how to code less, the underlying talent has to do with managing risk by decomposing your problem into small chunks.

Once you have your "problem" pared down to the minimum needed, if you can decompose your system into lots of small parts that you can analyze easily and make darn sure are correct, then you can code without having to backtrack and do costly debugging. You'll also find that writing the code also goes more quickly once you do this. "Knowing where to start" also becomes much easier if you do this.
If you paid tax on gross income only this could work. But because the government can't know your deductions it would only work if you disallowed deductions for expenses etc. Businesses might not like that. There are also a lot of decisions to be made on how you handle specific situations, like standard deduction or actual expenses for your auto.
> How is what Noscript is doing any other than other spammers?

The whole reason we're even talking about this is because the situation is different than a normal spammer. NoScript is an extension and thus is doing things spammers can't do, and all on the end user's machines.

That's why it makes me sad that Adblock didn't play this more responsibly from the outset. I'm even more sad that everyone else is content in believing that Adblock was doing the right thing by escalating. What they did was less bad than NoScript, but it's still wild west gunslinging without exhausting more civilized options.

We need discussion/diplomacy between developers before people start fighting/warring using their customers' resources.
Ask HN: Programming and Shaping Minds?
Forgive me if this topic has been covered before. I have a friend with a young kid (age 8) who has a fascination with computers (daddy uses OS X, mommy uses Windows).

Because I'm a friend and developer, this young kid's mom has asked me if I could recommend some programming curriculum for her child. I haven't really thought about this much but it seems like a great opportunity to get a hacker started at a good young age.

I was hopping some fellow HN fans could recommend a curriculum or just a path for this young kid to begin with.

So where would you start if this was your own kid, who has a predilection for computers (nothing forced here, the kid genuinely wants to learn)?
Development environment. Get auto complete and api lookup in your dev environment.

Keep it simple. Most php you need to do can be done with a few commands (function, str_replace, mysql_query, while(mysql_fetch_array), includes and logic statements)
ITunes now funnels iPhone crash reports to developers
My understanding of type III was that it was "Right for the wrong reasons." I suppose it might not be a standard term ;-)
Anyone running a small business (well over 10,000,000 people in the USA) will be deducting business expenses. It would be silly (nuts?) to fill out Schedule C but not deduct business expenses.

I suspect an even larger number of people currently itemize deductions. Medical expenses are one of about a million possible deduction types. And if you're keeping records you can often beat the standard deduction.

If you can't solve these two cases and can only solve the simplest cases what's the point really? People with such simple tax situations can do them in an hour or two anyway. The burden it would place on government and industry just does not seem justified.

The "complex" returns still need to be "amended", processed, audited, etc. The very cases which consume the most time and effort today would still be consuming the most time and effort with no savings given a piecemeal simple-case-only automation effort.
I had an advisor once tell me something similar. The classes that are core for a university should be utilized by engineers because we are taught to think one way if you learn another way there will always be a place where you may be able to apply that new way of thinking; be it psychology, philosophy, a minor in another unrelated discipline.

I would have to agree that if you don't get anything out of a class not related other than learning how to think for that class you gained something very useful.
I wonder how many of us will immediately try to feed a gate back on itself... (Firefox Hung when Flash came face-to-face with infinity, I had to kill -9 it, so be careful)

Very cool little App. Has a nice feel for a simple little Logic Gate simulator to play with. Would be nice to see it integrated into:
http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/
When a goat can build a house he can stay in one. I'm all for treating animals well and not keeping them caged in small areas and abusing them but to be honest PETA seems so over the top to me all the time and then they go out and release horrific videos in order to gain backing.
Occam's razor says to me that if they didn't take the time to make one-way hashes, they're not doing anything especially clever with the storage. Certainly no dual-machine way of handling them because that's surely more complicated than using SHA1 or MD5.
Boy or girl? I think the assumption is going to be "boy" unless you specify otherwise, but I'd recommend different things for different sexes...

For boys, I'd probably start with games. Maybe Python and PyGame? I've heard pretty good things about it. JavaScript makes a good first language as well, since all you need is a web browser to make it run.

For girls, I'd do something webby with a social component. If you could write a server, maybe set up some sort of framework where she and all her friends could send things to each other, sorta like real-time Pownce? Actually, now that I mention it, I kinda wanna try implementing this, since it could be kinda cool.

For both sexes, maybe take a look at Alice from Carnegie Mellon? http://www.alice.org/
Yep. You wouldn't believe how much trouble I had with that concept when I came here.

"Oh God, boss, I saw on the train taxes were due yesterday."

"Yeah."

"I didn't file!!!"

"Of course you didn't."

"Aren't I going to get thrown in jail and probably deported!?"

"Patrick, are you feeling alright? This is taxes, not something to get worried over."
the fountainhead? how does that fire him up?
disclaimer: I run xp-dev.com and am probably in direct competition with devjavu

The whole hosted project/version control business is tough. For starters the market is crowded. Additionally, a lot of people do want it all for free. To top it off, it's uber resource (space + bandwidth) intensive.

There are some really good folks out there who provide a great service and devjavu's one of them. Its sad to see it shutting down, and I can empathize with Jeff on his decision to terminate the service.
That is a rather interesting premise. More anecdotal evidence inbound!

When I undertook an IQ test a couple of years ago, I scored significantly higher in spatial ability to the majority of the other abilities tested. I'm also a self-taught programmer, and I do reasonably well, I'd like to think.
$1100+/month + $700 in setup fees? Probably. EngineYard is friggin expensive. I would have gone with something like Linode if you're starting out and need to be frugal.
It doesn't reduce the capital cost of transmission lines: you still need thick enough wire to power everyone's house when the wind isn't blowing.

If you're talking about the power loss in wires, it's only a few percent. Losses may be higher with power generated at the leaf nodes, because when my house is idle during the day it has to send power into the grid through the relatively inefficient local network while a wind farm is plugged right into the grid.
Years ago, I enjoyed reading books about how to do arithmetic mentally and quickly (there are several of them - one good one is "Math Magic" by Scott Flansburg). There did not seem to be anything equivalent for more abstract math, i.e. algebra and calculus. For some reason, I cared so much that I actually took the trouble to write a couple of books about it (http://hilomath.com/).

To figure out what to write, I actually sat down with an old algebra text book, and while solving the problems in my head, very carefully observed what I did and how... then wrote down how it all worked, using words and images. This process was about a hundred times harder than it sounds; had I any clue how hard it would have been, I probably never would have started.

Anyway, for doing abstract/symbolic math mentally, the method I came up with defines three levels of fundamental mental skills that are learned in succession, and build on each other:

* visualization
* representations
* mental algorithms

Visualization is just the ability to see things in your mind's eye - precise and conscious command of imagination, really. I never met a good engineer who didn't have this ability very well developed, but believe it or not, many people in the world don't. Anyway, IMO it is something that can be cultivated, so the first part of the first book is focused on doing that.

What I called "representations" has to do how we encode information mentally. To give a programming example, how do you visualize a linked list data structure? Well, probably most of us (I'm assuming you're a hacker/math hat here) have a visual model in which there is some repeated symbol representing the nodes, and some aspect of the symbol that represents a pointer to another node, with these nodes arranged in a line (as opposed to a 2D grid, or random cluster, etc.). Perhaps you even visualize lines connecting the node-symbols (i.e. pointers to the next node). There are infinite possible variants, and maybe you do it differently. Importantly, your visual model will omit encoding much information that happens to not be immediately relevant (such as the endianness of the data stored, etc.)

Bringing it back to math, consider the equation (x+3)/(2x+4)=1. Let's assume you can solve that in your head. (If not, you need to read my book :) Maybe try it right now, and notice how you visualize the equation and its symbols, and how you move or manipulate the symbols as you solve it. An obvious first step is to bring the denominator on the left over to the right side. Mentally, you probably see this as the movement of the expression "2x+4" as a whole unit. You chunk it as a single object, then break it up into smaller objects later when that's needed.

The next level is what I'm calling mental algorithms, which I won't describe here - for most of the people reading this, it's just what it sounds like.
Anthropology: Stack Overflow and The Art of Building a Successful Social Site
The "ridiculous reason" scheme works, and Cialdini would probably agree, because people are always looking for the easiest route to a decision. If there's a situation in which they can legitimately turn their brain off because they can defer to a pre-established rule or convention, they'll do so.

A non-human analogy given by Cialdini (see http://www.bainvestor.com/Influence.html) is the mother turkey who simply responds to the cheep-cheep of its young to determine what nearby moving objects needs to be taken care of. The turkey, of course, can be tricked (by human researchers, usually) into responding the same way to an inappropriate animate object by spoofing the sound.

BUT - and this is where Scott Adams's analogy goes awry - in humans, this automatic response to "because X" generally only applies to inconsequential situations.

The marked contrast between the situations he compares (restaurant conundrums and territorial conflicts) is what gives away the flaw in his argument. If the outcome of a bad decision is just a cold bowl of soup, you can risk making a thoughtless choice. If the risk is continued territorial angst and loss of life, a decision is likely to demand a little more scrutiny.

He's either making a poor attempt at humor (which is very possible, since he probably feels compelled to try to write something at least mildly funny every day), or he's not aware that he's coming across as very disingenuous.
Here's one I found on google:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Obviously there are genetic differences between men and women. It seems like you're saying these differences are purely physical, but that's a meaningless statement to those of us who don't believe in dualism.
The fastest way for me to code is to unplug from the internet completely. Get all your necessary documentation available in offline documents so that when you code, you don't get distracted by Hacker News :-).

Plus, your memory tends to improve since you'll actually be able to figure stuff out on your own than googling every little thing.
Personally I think this is one more "why lose a chance to bad mouth MS" kind of post.

Like pedalpete points, its a design choice: Windows seems to dump more decisions to the user whereas Mac is on the other extreme.

Of course the dialogs like that are silly but why judge Win7 based on that. I am using Win7 since beta and my Toshiba tecra has never been faster. The setup took less than 20 mins and no crash since I installed in Jan. No driver availability issues like with Vista.

If you are a Windows guy, I do think Win7 is the answer.
For clarification: the kid is a boy. I would like for him to learn from the bottom-up (start at the beginning and work up from there). I will play a big role in his learning (scary, but I am a developer so I feel sort of qualified).
Don't worry about too much power. A 5' diameter turbine (quite a project to install) might generate 600 watts in a stiff 35 mph wind.
You could also have a parachute at top that would open in case the engine and fuel exploded, so long as the waste casing could withstand the forces. Also, launching on a remote island could be beneficial, but it'd increase the cost. Also, there could be smaller more frequent rockets than larger ones.