skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acceptance_and_Commitment_Thera...

The term therapy here might seem a bit off-putting, but the approach of being a mindful observer of ones thoughts, accepting them and then taking action in accordance with your values seems like it might be of help in getting you over the inertia you are dealing with.
The unripened word
Upvoted. The problem is not that this article is not interesting: it is. But this is a site for a different kind of news. But there are many places (reddit, digg, slashdot to name a few) where you can read about this, and very few places dedicated to "hacker news". Not only that, but the proportion of hacker/non-hacker new is heavy on the side of non-hacker. So in order to keep this site useful it's very important to keep it on topic. Otherwise it would become a good site, but no longer unique.

Edit: also flagged btw. Complaining is ok, but it's good to remember from time to time there is a button for this kind of thing.
Pycha (PYthon CHArts) is pretty good. It use the Cairo vector graphics library.

http://www.lorenzogil.com/projects/pycha/
I think he was refering to the paragraph further down that started: "I decided to settle this question once and for all. Therefore, I put two multiple choice questions on my Physics 111 test, after the study of elementary mechanics and gravity."
"we now lag the rest of the world when it comes to broadband Net access." You don't lag the nightmare that is Canada.
Don't forget the embarassment of ridiculously high prices for public wireless (at airport, cafes etc).

$5.00 for two hours!? What!?
Celebrating Aggregation
Crunchy - Python Tutorials in the Browser
Tracking browser behavior without any tools (security breach in most browsers)
New Scientist: NanoTouch (Microsoft Research, Hasso Plattner Institute)
The annoyance: this will be fixed. I'll add it to the list. :)
If you're pulling "patterns" directly out of GoF and trying to use them in Ruby code, you're probably doing it wrong. Put your hands in the air, step away from the UML diagram, and read: http://norvig.com/design-patterns/
There are so many examples of how a ridiculously small change can make education so much better. And yet so few, really almost none of them are widely applied. This is also very much country-independent. Among HN readers, is there a country whose educational system would accept a non-conservative idea like this?
It sounds as if you're no longer talking about race but ancestral nationality.
What I'd appreciate seeing is the YC shareholder's agreement. It will be time for us to incorporate soon, but we've been putting it off because we don't know how to handle setting up things like a dispute resolution mechanism, vesting, terms in case one of the founders wants to sell to a third-party, etc.
Tila Tequila resimleri - Forumdas.Net
That's not only an American issue.

1 hour of wifi access from "the cloud" is £4.50 (approx $6.60) - http://www.thecloud.net/pay-as-you-go
I thought we were supposed to be afraid of Bird Flu, not Pig Flu. Can someone please make up their mind on what I'm supposed to panic about, I'm getting quite bored with all the changes.
Roche Holding says it can deliver 3 million doses of Tamiflu for swine flu
Like other abused buzzwords, the term "Attention Economy" got a little played out. But I think the economics of attention is exactly why aggregation services do provide value. When there's an abundance of information, attention become a scarce resource.

Like Fred (author of post above), I have heard people accuse aggregation sites of being parasites. Sure there are bad ones, but there are extremely clever ones, too. It takes work make a rule that presents a story cluster, or karma, and just because they aren't creating content, doesn't mean they are creative, or creating value. They are creating filters, they are creating a picture of popularity (Hypem), they are creating a picture of relationships (techmeme).

If there's anything I'm hungry for, it's not more content sites, it's even more and better aggregator sites. Obviously we are, too. Every few weeks there's a new post that asks a variation of "What other sites like Hacker News do you visit?"
He was also using 1996 as his reference year. Clinton was also one of Appalachia/Ozarkia's own in a way that neither Obama nor Kerry were.
The first question I'll ask WA is:

"What is the answer to life, the universe and everything"

Don't disappoint me...
Your boss wants your success to serve his agenda.

Try being successful in a way that makes your boss look bad, and you'll discover he isn't the least bit interested in your "success".
Great post. I agree that you often need a radical to create enough noise around a real issue that deserves attention. Richard Stallman is a perfect example. A little extreme, but brings the conversation to a needed place.

The tough part here is the 'how'. Maybe we could start at the top and work down: University undergrad programs in North America could become a lot more like grad school, encouraging original thought from the get go.
Swine Flu Attack Likely A Beta Test?
True. Both scenarios are bad. But most people probably don't realize how bad academia is.
I disagree. My boss' idea of "succeed" is not the same as my idea. And I don't particularly believe that my boss' idea of success is good for the company in the long run either. My boss wants to look good to his bosses.

As another example of why I claim you're wrong, let me give an example of a company I worked at for far too long. It was a small family run business that sold and serviced automobile radios. At that time, car manufacturers contracted that service out to hundreds of smaller repair shops. This was one of them.

As part of their service program, a dealership could call up and request a radio to take care of a customer's problem. The radio would get shipped, the customer would get a call from the dealership to come by and swap it out. This way, there would be no hole in the dash, as most drivers would go insane if they didn't have some sort of radio (or CD or cassette) playing in their car. At least one dealership figured out how to game the system this company used (we figured that they ordered the top of the line radios to use as upgrades for the sales department). Consequently, they were stealing more than $1k/month of product from the company. Mostly it was due to crappy paperwork that ended up in a filing cabinet, never to be seen again. I came up with a simple VB/Access application that used a barcode reader and a barcode printer. I also made the mistake of using my own money to buy a PDA with built-in barcode reader (specifically, a Symbol SPT1500) and writing an app to track paperwork for the employees.

The boss hated it because his wife hated it. She hated it because it would make her have to do things slightly differently. Furthermore, the boss also hated it because it showed a flaw in his business system, and he treated it as if it were a bad mark on himself: he looked bad, therefore he was a bad person (that was his psychological take on the matter).

Between bad customers (the service department at that dealer wasn't the only crooked one), bad employees (at least one went into business for himself filling his garage with inventory before quitting), and a bad workflow system, he was losing between $50k and $150k per year that I could figure out.

Anything that involves more than 1 human will involve politics. And academia isn't any better or worse than any other business when it comes to the stupid nonsense that humans do to each other.
Really, this should be "The embarrassment of broadband in the English speaking world."

I don't think Canada, Australia or the UK have terribly good broadband options either.
I think the degree of supportiveness among peers varies considerably across disciplines. Peers in some fields are extremely competitive and hyper-critical of each other, despite being capable researchers, and they unwittingly undermine the reputation of their entire field. Peers in some other fields support each other, giving constructive comments when reviewing papers and grant proposals, ... always searching for the silver lining in a cloudy submission. These fields prosper.

It is an interesting question in Game Theory, what strategy is optimal for academic peers.
Gravity probably works exactly the same throughout the entire universe.
I was home schooled for grade 2 and 3 and private schooled the rest. Throughout that whole period my best years of learning were grades 11 and 12.

The reason for this was that during all other private school years I was forced to sit and trod through material that was far too easy. I never did the homework because I could still pull of 70s and didn't see the value in having a higher grade. I was invited to province wide math contests, but was only scoring 72% in math. Finally my math teacher in grade 11 asked me how this could be. (He also happened to be the vice principal) I told him clearly: I hate class and I hate homework. They are not challenging, so I refuse to put effort into them.

He suggested the exact same thing that article advocated. The change was immediate. By grade 12 I was scoring 97 in calculus, 95 in linear algebra and 92 in finite math. All because I could move at my own pace. When I had exhausted the course material my teacher gave me books like Aristotle's mathematical proofs. These changed my life.

Imagine if this type of freedom had been available my whole life. My parents tried when I was young (via homeschooling) but my social development suffered too much and I wasn't getting the passion for the subjects that teachers can impart.

If I were to raise children now I would insist on a school that used the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori style. It might not be the best for everyone, but for even slightly gifted children I think it will drastically improve their mental growth.
At the risk of contravening the guidelines...

The latest bioterrorism attack by the New World Order is likely a beta test. Yes, it is a bioterrorism attack. It was a hybrid strain created from human, swine, and bird flu from North America, Europe, and Asia. It was created in a laboratory. This doesn’t happen in nature.

This is false and absolute trash. I have placed a floating piece of cloth attached to a little pole on top of this article.
Design Fiction
My parents tried to home school me in the late 80's, early 90's (they were very religious). It turned into unschooling, because I was able to plow through the "curriculum" in very little time, and then spent all the rest of my time online. My dad worked for IBM so we had computers around, but when I found out that computers could talk to each other, I fell in love.

This drove my parents nuts, they kept telling me I was throwing my life away, blah blah.

Well, it's obvious how that all turned out.

Let kids follow their passions, and they will LOVE learning, which is the most important life skill anyone can learn.
I enjoy the ridiculously fat pipe at my American university: 90mb/s down, 52mb/s up (actual, not theoretical) [1]. I can download that 4.6GB Bond movie in a little under nine minutes.

Yes, I realize the story is as much about penetration as it is raw speed. But really, once you have felt ~100mbits, it's just painful to hear people talking about 256k as 'Broadband'.

[1]http://www.speedtest.net/result/445903195.png
A: Superpower
I remember the years I spent in high school and college just to pass the courses. It was boring and useless. All the time I waited for the course to finish to that I can go to home and do whatever I wanted to do. What a waste of time.
Agreed. I take ibuprofen when I've got a head ache or a pulled muscle, but Wyeth makes a major profit off of me when I buy advil. However I'd much rather pay my money, like anyone else on the planet, to not feel like crap.

I worked construction, I know how painful a ripped muscle is. With ibuprofen I can continue working, because it prevents the inflammation from being more painful than my actual injury. What would anyone rather pay, 3-4 days wages while your muscle gets back to strength naturally or 3-4 hours of wages while your muscle gets back to strength with an anti-inflammatory.

I believe it's my right to pay as little as possible for the same quality of medicines and such, however if I want to pay $100 (or whatever) for a vaccination for the H1N1 virus, which has a very low death rate, then that's my prerogative. I'd be buying a service, which is called 'Peace of Mind', and the person selling it expects payments.

People have recovered from cancers without the necessary medical treatments. However, everyone here would pay every penny they have to be cured of a cancer, why? Because rational humans don't count on miracles happening, we count on disasters happening.
Ask HN: sound - electricity?
I was thinking about doing a little wind power project, and thought it would be cool to not use a turbine... so, what's a cheap and easy way to generate electric power from sound? (Maybe using those little piezoelectric buzzers?)
In defense of common English
Here's my theory on the "How."

Similar to yours, but starting even a bit more removed:

Innovation will happen (and is happening) first in non-accredited adult (and maybe even non-accredited child) learning environments. Crazy theatrical lectures, Spanish classes disguised as video games, etc. People will have really positive experiences with this stuff, and it will trickle down.

It's probably too scary for some people to just hand over the keys to their kids' "real" education at first. Once people see how comfortable and successful changing stuff up is outside of schools, and it will feel less risky inside of schools.

I see the edge of this already happening on the Internet, with sites like edufire, for example.
Here Comes Twitter Spam And How To Fight It
Absolutely agreed. Make a conscious decision about what you're doing wrong. I found that I was spending too much of my time on aggregators like digg and reddit, and getting little to nothing in return.

Both sites, among others, are now banned via my /etc/hosts file - this is a very good technique I find. It's not permanent, but having to sudo to get to it puts in a conscience filter.

HN is now the only aggregator I follow regularly, and even then I've become more disciplined about how much time I spend on here.

Become more conscious about what you're doing. When you find yourself idling surfing Wikipedia or whatever, catch yourself and ask yourself if there's something else you ought to be doing right now. Catch yourself enough and you will be surprised at how much more productive you become.
Once again, a title shouts "Panic at the economy" while the actual meat of the article says something completely different.
Why didn't I ever see that before? It's pretty cool.
I have a standard 7mbs/1mbs connection from Rogers in Canada.

I paid an extra $14, for a total of about $80 last month, because I downloaded an extra 7GB over my 60GB monthly cap.

Mmm nothing like markets with zero competition.
The making of Playstation
Wow am I ever not OK with browser security demonstrations that crash my browser.

From the JS, It looks like this is just this old trick:

http://ha.ckers.org/weird/CSS-history-hack.html
GeoCities = MySpace = newspapers
Nah, I disagree. It's not that bad. I'm in 10th grade right now, and here's the way I see it: I spend a few hours in school every day, where most of the time is wasted, come home, and spend the remaining 6-8 hours of free time I have learning whatever I want.

I used to be pretty annoyed about school in general, but once I realised how much free time I really have, it's amazing how much I started getting done in that same time.

(As for the actually interesting or difficult classes, which sometimes do exist, you can do the same thing; for instance, in the first few months of my calculus class, I bought a textbook and finished learning the material until the end of the year. Now that class is just as relaxing and as much of a breeze as any other.)
I'm surprised no one has yet mentioned pg's essay on very similar issues from 2005, submitted a while ago to HN:

http://paulgraham.com/hs.html
The interesting point for me here is NPR's revenue model. They're supported by tasteful sponsorships and donations, and they give their content away. They're more successful at this model than any website that I can think of.

They are the one traditional news outlet that isn't damaged by changes in distribution methods. The only change might be that they need to spread their pledge drives out more broadly so that it's harder to skip or tune out.
For that there's leechblock : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476
It's analogous to noprocrast.
A flat out blacklist of prisonplanet would be just fine with me. I've spent some time with Alex. He is not someone you want to get your news from.
> I've spent some time with Alex

Do tell.
I second this. Graphing libs fall into 2 camps:

- Flash and JS charts. Those are interactive and most of the processing takes place on the client side, but they cannot be embedded into email reports or PDF documents or anything else, and are very difficult for the average end-user to archive.

- Server-side generated images. Those are not interactive, but obviously can be embeded into anything and easily archived, so tend to be more flexible and require no extra dependencies, such as a fast JS engine or a plugin.

I've been working with both types for way too long, and I eventually settled on PyCha. I wrote a presets package for my apps that allow me to very quickly change every aspect of charts in bulk, and I was floored when I ran my charting benchmarks. It's also one of the few libraries that scale to a very high number of datapoints (provided you remove the line shadow).
"The Grade 12 final examinations in those days were set and marked by a province-wide board, so universities could judge who the best students were without having to consider differences between schools."

United States college admission does not work in the same way, and that is one of the reasons that few schools in the United States would try quite the same experiment. The experiment I've been trying, after years of advocating a "learn in freedom"

http://learninfreedom.org/

approach to education, is negotiating with my oldest son about which distance learning courses and local brick-and-mortar courses make a coherent, college-preparatory program to fit HIS personal goals, and then letting him take on challenges that no other high school in town would let him take on. It will be interesting to see what a college admission committee will make of the experiment. In the United States, the college admission process is enough of a black box that applicants have to cast a wide net to make sure they have a decent, affordable college choice. High test scores alone

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/377882-how...

don't do the whole job of guaranteeing admission to a strong college program at an affordable price.
There's an idea I've been rolling around in my head for a while, wherein some portion of the day (say an hour) for each class would be dedicated to each student of one grade teaching one of the next younger grade (so two hours per day total per student, one teaching, one being taught). The idea has a lot of potential, both because it helps the educational system scale and provides much-needed individual attention. Individual attention is useful even if it comes from poor teachers. It's much too radical to be implemented in a modern public education system (too much politics there).

The reason I found this interesting is that it gives something to do with class size disparity: have the "best" students in the oversized class work in an independent study format for that hour. It's so simple.
This is misleading, they lost 1,600 full-time (or equivalent) workers. This could mean a lot of their part-time workers getting extra hours could no longer get extra hours, it doesn't mean they 'axed' 1,600 full-time positions, they likely cut the hours of 1,600 part-time employees.

Then there's the whole, it was the Christmas season. I bet if you look back at records for the past decade there's either been a decline in employees in Q2 as apposed to Q1 or that their growth rate stalls in the Q2 as they no longer need new workers. Then I bet if you look at Q4, there's a big employment spike for the Christmas season.

There's too many variables here to say Apple predicted the recession. Maybe they did, however there's much more practical reasons why this decision would have been made.

The best reason I can think of is that when the economy started to falter, they reduced part-time workers hours. I don't know about Apples statistics, but most retail companies tend to have double (or more) the number of part-time workers as full-time (usually due to paying less in benefits). This likely means Apple has 28,000 part-time employees, 1,600 of which could have been working extra at Christmas to, you know, pay for Christmas.
>He felt the sores on his body dry up and start to slough off. He was hungry enough that he actually caught himself peeling off the scabby cornflakes and eating them. It grossed him out, but he was hungry.

:)
I don't necessarily want to start a flame war, but it is inaccurate to say "God said so in that holy book." People have added up the number of years that are mentioned in the Bible and claimed that the earth is only that old. A decent amount of Genesis can be looked at not as literal history, but a summary. This is done even by some very conservative scholars who believe that God is the creator and also believe that the earth really is as old as science says it is.
Looking to Hire an Engineer? 3 Reasons to Forgo the Phone Screening
How about "People who generically object to statistics KNOW their own position can't be rationally supported."
Interesting point, but I think this post is attacking a certain kind of phone screening, rather than all phone screening.

If you get a (people-friendly) geek to do the phone screening instead, with a single question: "would you like to have a further 30 minute chat with this person?", I would hope you get better results.

I'll agree that getting HR to do your phone screening for technical people is pretty disastrous though.
I used to do a bit of work at cable access in Austin in the 90's. Alex was around quite a bit and always interested in talking about conspiracy theories, the new world order, etc. He just radiated mania and paranoia. His online/on-air personality is really not a act -- he was dead serious about everything he said.
Yes, why did he choose 1996? 2004 is the more obvious choice.
The English speaking world includes parts of Asia, including Singapore and Hong Kong. It also includes parts of Central and South America and Africa, and large parts of India and parts of the Middle East.

The sun never sets on the British Empire, remember all that crap they used to say before it set on them for good?

Sigh.