skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was home schooled or unschooled on and off through sixth grade, then completely unschooled after that.

My parents at one time or another had me enrolled in just about every structured education scheme you can imagine, from reputable urban public school to shitty urban public school to expensive Catholic school to quaint small-town school to rural one-room schoolhouse to formalized home-school curriculum. I found them all stifling, boring, and wasteful of my time.

Unschooling, on the other hand, was very liberating. I got to study whatever I wanted, however I wanted. I dabbled in chemistry, electronics, literature, even carpentry. Once we got our first computer when I was 13, I dove into computing and programming utterly.

It worked out wonderfully for me. I had a paying job as a programmer when I was 15, and haven't looked back.

I was always introverted, so school was not a positive socializing experience for me; in fact it was quite the opposite. Despite concerns to the contrary, I've socialized myself over time through professional and personal relationships with co-workers and friends.

The most appealing outcome of my unschooling experience is the autodidactic learning style it reinforced. This comes in very handy as a software engineer, where the ability to independently pick up a new language, tool, technology, or architecture quickly and completely is a real asset.

I am the oldest of five children. All of us were homeschooled to some extent, with the proportion of homeschooling to structured education declining from oldest to youngest. We are all fairly bright, but the difference between those of us with more homeschooling and those with less is striking. The home schoolers are more eloquent, more insightful, more responsible, more disciplined, and more politically active (although not politically homogeneous, which makes for tumultuous dinner conversation at family get-togethers).

There is no doubt in my mind that unschooling had a massively positive net impact on my life, and would encourage any parents able to make the necessary time commitment to try it as well.
Here's the print version: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=print...
Because the community here is largely composed of early adopters and tech people. People who have been part of other sites who we grew attached to and watched as they degraded around us.

Is it paranoia? I don't think so. I think it's a fervent and constant vigilance against such.

But even then, it's definition has changed. The acceptable topics has broadened. We held open forums through the political season to discuss whether we wanted political news, etc.

So even then our definition of quality submissions has changed.
This is great.

I am wondering if they are including searches in Spanish.
Probably not much; hardware 3D is pretty efficient.
I'm officially nicknaming http://news.ycombinator.com/noobs The Land Of The [dead]
If you are dissatisfied with the leadership, step up and lead.

What do you think that process would look like in its first few days, if not like this?
This article is really poorly written from this standpoint, because they claim to argue that peak performance is rooted in unconscious mental processes, but then it goes on to say this:

While the fMRI results of the Birmingham experiment were promising, they did not come from subjects who were actually exercising. Because fMRI requires subjects to keep their heads perfectly still, it’s not clear how the technique can be effectively applied to bodies in motion.

In this study of cyclists who are clearly still fighting the first barrier (mental), it notes that giving them an energy drink is a boost regardless of whats in it. All this reinforces is that athletic performance is truly mind over body until the body has nothing left to give.

In addition, the article interchanges "mind" and "brain" throughout, which only serves to confuse whether its talking about mental willpower or the brain as an organ (which is entirely physical) functioning to protect itself.
Yes, our API is live and documented here: http://www.backtype.com/developers/comments-connect

Also here's a great app that was built by a user of our API: http://convotrack.com/I1
New Stock platform
I have a new site that allows you to write stock trading applications and see how they would perform. Its in beta but I would love feedback.

http://tickmarkt.com/signup/hackernews09
Of course my rule is not universally applicable, but it does help me out in general.

Also, I do tend to stay away from rice and grains as they usually have a high glycemic index and I have a history of Type II diabetes in my family.
A different selection of 10 posted many days ago.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=554044

If I didn't know better I'd say there's a new Star Trek film coming out, and all the "journalists" are trying to find something new and different to say.
Maybe we'd get some flamewar thread depth transferred into breadth

Ah, but replies to existing comments track the original comment as it moves up and down the screen. Brand-new comments sink or swim on their own merit.

I'm thinking that Original Insight A might get upmodded, but Insulting Name For The Commenter's Mother B'' will not get upmodded and will sink out of sight.

Of course, that might not actually help. It will be a fun experiment.
White House Flickr stream is Creative Commons licensed for remixing w/ attribution
I'm just curious about this exponential delay :)

I've been a member since almost the very first day I think. I rarely post but occasionally comment and read a lot. This is a great site with very good content for programmers and entrepreneurs. I do hope it stays that way!
So the solution then is to eat less of the food that makes you crash and more of the food that keeps your mood on an even keel. It also doesn't help that caffeine from sugary sodas wears off around the same time as the sugar crash - double whammy of depressed.
My University provides free access to computers with Windows and Office, even they offer me Windows XP. Also they let me to use Linux on my laptop.

What is unfair at my girlfriend University is that you MUST use Windows. You are simply not allowed to use other OS on your computer.
My hypothesis: it has better rhythm -- the repetition of 'i' at the beginning of each piece of the for loop makes it nice and easy to remember. I bet people would tend to learn this when they were first learning how to code and then never change because it never caused them any problems.
I think you have encountered the conflict between Apps Hungarian and Systems Hungarian:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation#Systems_vs._...
this is actually pretty cool. do i sense a new model where founders talk directly to customers via justin.tv and the like? being able to actually ask "the people who know" whatever you want and hear what they say real-time is such a win. definitely would sway me to try their products.
I have nothing personal against using Windows if this is what you want. However I don't like to be forced to use an OS (any OS), and also I don't like to be practically forced to buy a laptop from the University.
Just because you don't need to write your own sorting algorithms don't mean you don't have to know how to write one. First of all it is a good introduction to algorithms, analysis and construction and you still have to know the complexity of each to choose the correct one in some cases.
am i reading this right? that there's too many VC's wanting to invest and not enough places to invest it?

how many "companies" does YC and Techstars etc turn down each session?

if the situation is how i'm supposing it's not a problem of too much capital and not enough startups, it's not enough programs nurturing new starts and/or poor communication between the two factions
I think I'm going to sue Apple because the of the "I'm a Mac" ads. Do you know how difficult life has become for short, chubby people since that ad campaign came out? It's horrible.
It says on their site the regular price is $2.99 and "now for a limited time" $0.99. I wonder if it was $2.99 during most of those 700k sales, netting them nearly $1.5M after Apple's cut.
No, I don't miss them, but I'm sure glad I had to suffer through them. It has helped me to understand "what's happening under the hood" when I make a call with one line of code.

I used to screen programmers by having them code a bubble sort in 20 minutes. After about 1000 of these, I think the results were:

Pct Result
----- ---------------------------------------
50.0 Why would anyone ever want to to that?
25.0 Tried but couldn't do it
24.9 Did it in 2 loops
.1 Did it in 1 loop (Yes, I hired him.)
The one day timer for /noobs should start ticking when they make their first submission, not when they create their account. Otherwise spammers can just wait a day before submitting anything.
Please let me know what you think of the site. Its currently in stealth and I wanted to share it with the community.
Amazon Buys Maker of iPhone E-Book Reader Stanza
No. It hasn't.
Google Flu Trends: Mexico
Ask YC: Cheap alternatives to Aeron chairs?
Graduating from college soon, so I won't be able to make use of the chairs/desks at the library for long coding sessions. That said, I don't want to pay $400 for a used Aeron. What other alternatives are there?
Duh. Usually the latest Web 2.0 phenomenon is a waste of time. If you want to be productive, let the early adopters weed that stuff out for you.
Tcl's starkits are a very nice way of packaging stuff up. You get Tcl, Tk, and some other stuff in a binary package that will run without any other junk. And they're relatively small, too, just a few megs, IIRC. I guess that doesn't help much with Perl, but you could always give it a go:-)

Starkits: http://www.equi4.com/starkit/
We Are All Pufferfish
The EPRI heavy-duty exercise ball http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0016L8Q3A works pretty well, and is only $40 or so. It keeps you moving slightly (bouncing, rolling), which is good for us autistic types who'd otherwise be jiggling a knee, etc.
Well, the point of binary trees and linked lists is also more of what gaius said.

Yes, it definitely helps to be able to visualize how things are structured, but I think the biggest thing you learn comes from understanding the asymptotic performance of various operations on those data structures.

Without understanding these structures, the fact that one provides much faster lookup, but slower deletes seems totally arbitrary and magical.

(Not sure I'm so much disagreeing with you as elaborating here.)
Ask HN: How to get a decent paying job, as a college student in Mexico?
Any recommendation on how to make money as a mexican college student? The only work I have managed to get is at an electronics manufacturing line at $10/day.
In the US, all packaged foods required labels with nutritional info. OP describes how those labels are purposefully misleading. I'm suggesting eating fresh produce and never worrying about labels again.
Definitely. This sort of real time interaction with customers/users is going to be big ;)
Social experiment Tjetter, created in 48 hours.
We built this site using off-the-shelf technology in under a day (because we thought it would be fun). Spent another day to add some weird/strange/uncanny features. Now it needs some people to take it for a spin! Comments appreciated.
And the winner is… the Apache License
Another neat way to checkout reddit: add your sub-reddits as blocks and view them on a single page >

http://www.redditall.com/
With YQL Execute, the Internet becomes your database
Awesome. I hope some day I have the courage to do something live like this!

Are they doing this just this time or are they planning to do it (semi-)regularly?
OK, I'll bite. How do you do it in one loop?
Ask HN: where are your favorite places?
If someone happened to be visiting your town, where would you recommend they visit?

In the UK I would recommend Quarry Bank Mill near Manchester, and the Falkirk Wheel north of Glasgow. In Paris, the Musee de l'Air (Bourget) and Musee D'Orsay, In Sweden the Vasa Museum near Stockholm, and in Australia, the gold mining town of Ballarat and the Fairy Penguins at Phillip Island.

I've left out hundreds, but those are my immediate highlights.

Where would you recommend?
If nothing else it proves that this Quality is sustainable, even if the cost is eternal vigilance (which isn't so bad, and I imagine not outside the nature of the sort who frequent this site).
I had a similar experience several years ago, though not vacation related. I was testing a script I was writing, and had a critical typo, which ended up wiping out (rm -fr) all my website code (it wasn't a business thing yet, so I wasn't taking backups in any reliable manner).

After my heart skipping a beat realizing I didn't have any decently recent backups, I unmounted the partition, whipped out perl and scanned the device for instances of "<?" and grabbing the following 5000 bytes, dumping the results to a collection of incrementally named files.

I had to manually go through the files, clean them up, and remember what their filename was based on the code, but that wasn't as bad as it sounds. The hardest part was the conflicting versions, since there were lots and lots of remnants from old replaced files there. But about 8 hours later, I had everything recovered.

Backups went on a cronjob after that.
Dude, I dare you to get your sitzfleisch on for 12 hours at a time with an exercise ball. Get real.
How about a week from this Thursday? 8 days from now? As for location, I'd prefer north side but I'm crap as far as knowing about good spots.
I own a CyKey (in a cupboard, little used) and briefly owned its predecessor the AgendA.

Chording is a nice idea, could be brilliant if wrapped around the edge of a phone/PDA (e.g. http://www.xaphoon.com/dataegg/ ) but is too slow to be an everyday desktop keyboard replacement. Less comfortable than normal typing, as you use many fingers per character instead of just one. Even if you're one handed it's probably still faster to type on a normal keyboard.

As the CyKey goes, it has a bit of a classic Spectrum rubber keyboard feel, not much feedback.

Don't splash out just to try the idea, I've just cobbled together some Python/TKinter that you can play with here:

http://pastebin.com/fbb84a75

It's a text box and you can chord using the right arrow key along with the numeric keypad keys 4/6/8/enter (I find them a pretty good fit for my fingers).

The chords are here: http://megasharp.com/cykey.asp (plus "thumb" on its own for space).

There are many more in the CyKey system for numbers, punctuation, shifting, control keys and so on, but a) I don't know what they are, and b) it's freaking patented/copyrighted so I oughtn't even use these few.
C++ copies values differently (or at all) for different types under prefix increment vs. postfix increment? Seriously?
I'm not a professional stock picker, but I found the interface confusing. After I made an account and logged in I was not sure what I should be doing or where I should go.

I managed to click around and find google, but then accidentally clicked a trade button and now I have an open trade for 3 shares of google at 100.17! I have no idea how that happened or what it means.

Your site is also a bit slow, but I'm assuming that is because you are under provisioned and this is an alpha.

Good luck.
Like I said: Ride what you like; like what you ride. I can definitely see why some people would like Linux better as a development environment. I can see why some people would like OS X better. Believe it or not, I can even see why some people would like Windows better (but I have to stretch really hard :).

However, your central argument seemed to be "if you've used Linux since 1994, you would never find OS X better than Linux." I wanted to provide a counter-point that, in fact, it was possible to use Linux since before 1994 and still prefer OS X.

I'm still hoping for the day that I can have the same experience on Linux that I get on OS X. One interesting observation is that I seemed to be able to handle it better when the experience was 75% than when it is 90%.

Perhaps it is like human robots: the closer they get to being human, the creepier they get. :) Perhaps the closer Linux gets (without being there), the more I notice what's not right about it.

For anybody who isn't sure whether to go OS X or Linux, I'd certainly try Linux first.
Reminds me of a joke used by a couple of musicians I respect:

"This one starts out slow, then sorta tapers off from there..."
ha ha, I am sitting on an Aeron chair while I am reading this. Eat your heart out! (sorry)

(edit) Wow! You guys can be very sensitive sometimes. Can't we mix a little humour with out tech talk?

How about a "used" Aeron chair at a low price? They are guaranteed for an insane time, ... something like 12 years. Seriously, find someone who is upgrading to the latest generation of Aeron and pick up a classic that is only 5 yrs old and still great!
Pr0n on the Couch
"I found the interface confusing"

That's my experience as well. I'm not sure what the site is trying to do. I had to sign in just to find out.

Care to explain the site for us? I'm not a trader, so I might be missing something.
What if readers could vote on the exponent? Maybe add a "flamewar" button that raises the exponent, which starts out at something innocuous like 1.1.
I didn't expect any surprises here but a few of the items referenced (clang, cool!) were particularly useful for some problems I'm currently working on.

Very nice to find these all in the same place, and succinct as well, excellent post.
I think he might be referring to the existence of labels on food products. Some countries might not have labels listing ingredients on processed food products.
Pioneers get arrows in their backs
> I find it utterly annoying when any fanboy makes broad claims such as "Developers are Switching to Mac"

OK, people who make broad claims based on anecdotes and hand-waving are annoying, I agr--

> Macs are the best computers for a lot of people, but not for software developers.

Goddammit.
If you're interested in all of the different classifications that Acxiom came up with, I documented them last year in a blog post:

http://seanmountcastle.com/2008/01/01/whats-your-segment/
As well as before Python got cyclic GC, while we're at it.
You need to have examples for the backtester and screener ASAP... I can't even figure out what language these should be written in... are they written in Javascript?

Also, it was difficult to figure out how to create a new application... Put a box around the "Create New" button to make it more obvious that that is a button.

Overall, the concept has merit... You need to make clear that this is a PROGRAMMABLE stock tracking website, since that seems to be the innovation here. Might be something I would use, once it's more polished.

Note that you app somewhat limits users to "programmers who are also stock traders", which could be a smallish niche... The barrier to adoption of your tool are high as well- Steep learning curve. Also, many such folks may not trust you enough to store their trading strategies on your site.

...You're going to have to create a _fantastic_ implementation of your idea before a critical mass of people will spend the time to learn the system- Long way to go.

But I can see what your trying to do and I think there is potential in this direction.
IKEA has the Markus at USD 199

They work fairly well.

http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/00103102
The Quest for Computable Knowledge -- A Short Timeline
The big part of this site is the backtester and screener. Its basically the place that you can write applications against our data. http://tickmarkt.com/app/documentation tells you the apis for both. Hope this helps a bit.
Practice and dress rehearsals are usually longer and more effort than the real thing so that you learn how to do it.

This sounds more like going to one of those career day things where you watch people pretending it's one of their normal days.
Is such a distinction even useful if the "second wall" is what prevents the body from sustaining severe or permanent injury or worse? I mean, sure the brain may be limiting performance, but if all you end up with my removing the limit is a small performance gain at the expense of death then the "mental" limit is hardly distinguishable from an actual physical one.
Has anyone found any more recent work on this? It kind of looks like the project is dead.
pg asked about it a while ago, and I wrote up a fairly extensive list of things to see in the Veneto region of Italy:

http://padovachronicles.welton.it/2008/09/05/visiting-italy-...
North side says "Hopleaf" to me, but I'm open-minded. I can make the date work.
It is javascript...thanks for your feedback
The only major switch I remember making is adopting GNU tools and conventions, and that's because they had a few big things going for them: they were ported to all the OSes I was using, they fixed bugs in the equivalent native tools, they added consistency, they were open, and they were similar to what I was using before.

Microsoft isn't really offering enough of these things. And it is never as simple as knowing how to replace a particular command; people have years of well-tested scripts written to leverage Unix. (Not to mention what comes naturally at the command line.)

So my question is, why would I ever want to translate my Unix command background to PowerShell? I end up with more work (porting every script I have), less capability, much more verbosity, less portability, unwanted ties to Microsoft, and tools that are not nearly as well tried as the multi-decade-old Unix utilities that they'd be replacing.

Facing this kind of investment, people are better off ignoring Microsoft's "technology", and spending their time porting scripts to Python or Perl. At least then, you end up with something that really is portable, tested, open, etc. and could be a step forward from basic Unix.
You wouldn't hear about it if the Rails Core and Rails Activist team members would address the issue rather than simply defend themselves and insult everyone else.
If the university offers to give you licenses for this software then fair enough - this is one way to rule out compatibility issues for the IT department.

Surprised that they check if the software is legal however, what happens in the case that you've put cracked software on? Also do they not allow the laptop on campus if it hasn't been checked, or do they just not provide support if it hasn't been tested by them? This would go with my first point.

I assume they're not imposing something silly like "you must only use Windows on your laptop" (ruling out dual-booting or something).
Gmail Runs Faster In Google Chrome?
Computers with humanlike capacity to remember
What I learned building [Pulitzer winning] PolitiFact
hmm they even look like they would be. Also my comment was somewhat about reddit, but I'll take the karma hit out of principle
I need to be less wordy.

My central argument was supposed to be that when you've spent the time to develop the skills necessary to use Linux as a platform to the point where the advantages of the OS X platform are invisible and the deficiencies are glaringly apparent, you're not going to prefer OS X, despite the fact that it's still perfectly fine for a whole ton of people.
What separates good thinking/writing from a mediocre noise is that it remains relevant and interesting to read even in 10 years, despite missing rounded corners and lack of randomly chosen photos that are supposed to help us to understand his point.
Yes. When overloading prefix and postfix increment, there are two functions to write, and the postfix version returns a copy of what you've incremented. It's impossible for a compiler to optimize this away in the general situation.