skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
About the Indian politician wanting to abolish English and Computer education, I had said.

"Believe you me, any action to make this a ground reality would cause a massive backlash,"

And behold, he is already under attack "from all quarters" and is backtracking,

From one of the leading newspapers in India (http://www.indianexpress.com/news/sp-defends-opposition-to-e...)

"Finding itself under attack from all quarters for its manifesto's "opposition" to English education and computers, the Samajwadi Party was on the backfoot on Sunday, at pains to underline that it was not against their use but that they should not be made compulsory.

"The SP is for a common education system that provides access to similar quality of education to all, irrespective of their caste, religion or income status. This means abolishing the dichotomy of expensive English-medium schools and affordable vernacular schools. This doesn't mean the SP is against the English language," SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav's son Akhilesh told The Indian Express over phone from Lucknow.

Mulayam himself clarified that he was not against education in English, when it was pointed out that his son had studied in a convent school. But he insisted that it "should not be compulsory in offices", whether government or private. "I am not against English but its use should not be a compulsion. It should not be compulsory in public life," he said in Lucknow. "
The story argues that if newspapers go under, Everyblock will have a hard time. This is a very weak point as EB's main selling point is all the non-newspaper info and data that it makes available. They could remove all the news and blogs tomorrow and the people I know who use it wouldn't notice.

Also, its a bit of a fine point, but Patch.com is the only real "hyperlocal" site mentioned in the article. The rest cover entire cities rather than specific neighborhoods or communities.
Looks like a great series, but goodness - $135 for Season 1 alone on DVD (from Amazon.) I can't imagine they're selling too many copies at that price.
Wwf - Google Search
It boggles my mind that lawyers make so much money.
The end of the games console?: Streaming on-demand.
Whenever I see an obviously insane proposal go forth, I start looking for the more subtle and insidious one which is the true objective.
Steven Levy on Boxee
Japan, South Korea, much of Europe, and a few other nations have had some success with teaching math skills by the revolutionary technique of teaching math skills, rather than hoping that math skills spontaneously emerge out of semi-structured attempts to explore poetry with a computer.
COBOL programmers make lots of money to deal with legacy systems, and those are 40 years old, and completely specified!

Imagine if you had to analyze specifications written in a notoriously imprecise language, every variable is global (remember "that depends on what the definition of 'is' is"?), and new definitions and analogies are coming in every day.
They're in high demand. Blame our complex judicial system and the people looking to abuse it.
What are the tech bloggers missing? Your (local scene) business
Agreed. Newspapers aren't generating the content that the 'hyperlocal' sites are focusing on; how often does a school board meeting story come off the AP wire? The 'trivial and irrelevant' blogs are what the sites are feeding off of (except everyblock of course, which the writer appears to entirely misunderstand).

How much of your traffic and content at windycitizen revolves around major news sources, Mr. Flora? Do you think that your community would be considerably less rich without them?

(Also, what was the address to that journalism startup aggregator that you built? I seem to have lost the link. Many thanks!)
Benjamin Franklin fits into the long line of American tinkerers, not a world-class intellect. Think of Ron Popeil.
Interesting. Makes complete sense, but I never knew it was done that way. Do you know if there are any publically available raw datasets to play with?
50-50 or else the project will never get done!
Underlining the links would be nice. The color of the links is similar to the color of some of the other text, plus it's close enough to black to mistake for bold text instead of a link.
I'd like to learn from some good, concrete, and practical cheatsheets; this one mostly enumerates what you'd already remember with no trouble. For example, a computing one for people who don't know computers might go: It's possible and valuable to build a computing machine that can simulate any other computing machine, given a coded description of it plus enough time and working memory. Here's a simple one: <very basic one-accumulator binary stored-program computer, logical design> Build it out of logic gates and flipflops, satisfying the digital abstraction (that errors in each device's input get reduced enough in the output to allow very long chains of operations with negligible error). <sketch of slow but workable bit-serial implementation of the above, using a few dozen gates, not counting main memory (Babbage's strategic mistake was to design big fancy hardware; point this out)> <hints for devices: rod logic, electric relays? I don't know this part> Point out selling points for historical customers: cryptology and numerical tables come to mind for a start. I'd love to squeeze in some theory too (cool algorithms, uncomputability, NP-completeness, Shannon coding theorem, core Scheme self-interpreter, algorithm design principles (invariants etc.), Hindley-Milner and Curry-Howard?), but we've already used up one sheet.
YouNoodle helps startups to connect
Confessions of a real estate agent
Employers with a significant number of employees working under stressful conditions should consider voluntary furlough programs, regardless of the state of the economy. Vacation, as it is currently implemented, can increase stress on these employees. If you're expected to clear the decks before you leave, possibly handle important issues that arise while you're out, and deal with a backlog when you return, vacation is very unattractive. A well-designed furlough program can allow the employer to plan for available staffing and let employees sanely decompress.

Such a program needn't be solely for saving money on payroll. (Obviously, a partial salary furlough is only really attractive to well-paid employees.) A good program would increase productivity and bring to the table fresher, better ideas.
Maybe they have better things to do (like work on the distro) then care about some nitpicks. The audience here isn't geeks. It shouldn't matter that much.
Pragmatic W3C Standards
http://www.jstartup.com is the aggregator. Click the 'startups' category to see the best collection of links to journalism startups.

To your question: A great deal of the links that people share on the Windy Citizen are from major news sources. 40-50% is quite possible, with the rest coming from obscure local blogs, youtube, flickr, craigslist and places like that. So yes, we'd be affected if the newspapers "went dark" tomorrow...though in the opposite way that people expect.
It is American kids choice to study "Women studies" vs. relatively much harder CS. Why immigrants should be blamed?
Wanstrath announced and demoed an integrated GitHub tracker a couple weeks ago at a Ruby meetup in SF. Not sure how long until they release it though.
It's pretty fast on the Safari beta... that being said, it is pretty slow if you try to zoom into the map via mousewheel, since it does an update even at high zoom levels. Maybe limit updates to every X zoom levels at the high level, and then update at every zoom for the finer ones.
I respectfully disagree with your comments re: third opinions.

Often the best way to 'win' an argument in a group context is to derail the current thread of conversation (in which both sides have their arguments clearly in mind) and change the term of the debate in a way that suit you. This will have the effect of throwing off would-be adversaries (by the time they have their shit together to counter your new argument, the conversation is long gone) and gaining followers of your new idea.
I think you're reading too much out of the story. She didn't learn math from the computer, but she developed her skills. The computer didn't teach; it augmented.
The whole H1B visa thing started with Y2K (obvious scam designed by US corporations to explain US public opinion why they out of the sudden need so many foreign born programmers). To cut cost. Why to have cheap slave labor abroad when you can have it here on a short leash of h1b visa requirements? And if worse comes to the worst - like current economic situation - you may just shut down h1b program completely.
I would think that the problem would not be your usage of date formats, but everybody else's.
Never fear, you have the internet! http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query...
I wonder what other forms of advertising meet the exact same bill?

For example, while the sign on a restaurant telling you the name would serve an additional (useful) purpose, the big window-sized add for a 99c cheeseburger would only be useful as advertising out a car window.
Your function crashes when passed an empty vector. Defensive programming please! :-)
It's also worth noting that at least around christmas of last year, it was brought to light that the Ruby 1.8 package in apt-get on ubuntu is TWICE as slow as building 1.8 from source.

make sure you build from source.

http://antoniocangiano.com/2008/12/09/the-great-ruby-shootou...
If you don't like these kinds of conversation, know that it is within your power to subvert the tone of the conversation, and to bring it to a place where you are comfortable. If you can quickly interject with an objection as to the terms of the debate, you'll be surprised how quickly people will adjust their attitudes and become more 'civil'. Requesting that people focus on a particular point of interest (for the group, not merely yourself) is one way of directing people's attention and serialising the flow of conversation.

You need to be strong about it, though. If you have trouble asserting yourself then you need to work on that part first.
My best luck with generating domain names has been sitting down with my cofounder at instantdomainsearch with us simultaneously brainstorming.

That didn't work for my most recent domain. Try http://www.bustaname.com/ or code your own for increased speed/flexibility.
Ah yeah, that might be an optimization worth making. Thanks for the feedback.
And don't get me started with passing by value! Okay, I'll stop being a dick.
That's fascinating. The partner at my former firm was from Skadden. He said it was a sweat shop. Sickening. It's good that they're doing something with a little work/life balance.

Like most lawyers, after a while he found that money wasn't everything. Even with his nice car, and house, he felt empty--he's now an entrepreneur and loving it.
Appending "get" to the front seems a popular alternative. getdropbox.com, getballpark.com, getclicky.com, etc. It is pretty easy to remember (I pulled three off the top of my head just now without thinking hard, and I don't use any of those services).
Private industry isn't fixing the problem.

"Private industry" has always been conflicted about piracy, because "industry" is not monolithic and piracy is solidly in the interests of many players.

Comcast might moan a bit about habitual downloaders, but piracy is pretty much broadband's killer app, and has been since Napster. Youtube's popular UGC is overwhelmingly pirated content. Apple has made a mint selling teenagers and twenty somethings hardware which could hold several years' salary worth of music purchased legitimately and is shocked, shocked that the overwhelming majority of music on their devices is pirated.

The history of Google is essentially the history of "Officially, we love and respect IP. Unofficially, our users want yours for free, we want to give it to them, and we're going to take the liberty of doing that. We can index your IP a lot more efficiently than you can sue us. We will become the largest power on the Internet, and after that we will treat your complaints with the attention they deserve, and cut off the traffic tap which we monopolized by being the most efficient way to access your IP. The time for you to object to this was, oh, about fifteen years ago, because if our behavior was arguably illegal then it is Industry Standard Practice now, and if you don't like it well then I guess you're just an irrelevant dinosaur. Isn't that right, Internet?"
The name of the site is "lang pop". When the page loads the title bar says "Programming Language Popularity". The content of the page states:

"We have attempted to collect a variety of data about the relative popularity of programming languages, mostly out of curiousity."

Those are claims that what they are measuring is a proxy for language popularity.

My point is that those claims are not valid.
Best PyCon Evar
Five minutes at PyCon change everything
Cannot upvote this enough. Gentoo is a fools game on servers. If you want to dick around several hours every time you update your system on your desktop machine, have at it. But, if you're inviting that kind of chaos into your life on your production server that provides your livelihood, you deserve no pity (and you're unlikely to get any from anyone who has enough experience to be managing a server).

I have a vested interest in being pretty much OS agnostic; our products support tons of systems and versions, and you can easily get me to say nice things about all sorts of operating systems. But, I simply can't have no opinion about Gentoo. It's just such a poor choice for a server that I'd feel guilty not using the strongest possible language to discourage folks from using it.
Technology behind new Gmail could challenge Apple's control over third-party applications.
Obama's open data era 'coming soon'
Malcolm Gladwell: Ron Popeil, Infomercial King (2000)
but I have always been made to understand that BSD's (namely FreeBSD) handle high traffic better than linux

For the past several years, and up until FreeBSD 7 you've always been seriously misled. FreeBSD has historically had dramatically worse performance in most concurrent server applications (certainly in multi-process SMP workloads). As of FreeBSD 7, it generally is the equal or slight better of Linux. It is not better in enough categories or by a large enough margin for anyone to say with confidence that a particular workload will perform better on FreeBSD or Linux. One would always have to benchmark the actual application, and the differences would be minimal in most cases...and with every new kernel release, you'd have to benchmark again, because things change and performance advantages might flip from one release to the next.

And, tptacek is correct, none of the other BSDs has inherited these dramatic performance improvements found in FreeBSD 7, so they are very unlikely to provide better performance than any modern Linux version on modern multi-core hardware.
It's slightly better than a one time pad, in that a finite-length key (namely, a time offset) could transmit an infinite-length message.

Of course, the assumptions required are still completely unrealistic.
Except about 80% of the time I send mail to someone at dropbox, I send it to whoever@dropbox.com first.

There are always good names available. You don't need to stick get on the front, or use a .net name, or pull a del.icio.us. Just fire up instantdomainsearch and find another name.
I heard a few other good reasons for following standards including accessibility and ease of maintenance. I left those out because they really don't matter so much for hackers. My intentions are to inform how following standards can save time building applications.

A lot of the "softer" justifications for building standards compliance websites, like accessibility, are just positive side-effects of following standards for more pragmatic reasons.
Having a cup of coffee in zero G [video]
I doubt it, necessity is the mother of invention and that magical thinking you mentioned

otherwise we might riot like the Greek teenagers :P
We've noticed that several VPS providers are only offering 64-bit OS installs...which makes no sense. I kinda suspect it is simply a way to force people to pay for more memory down the road. The memory usage of dynamic languages (Ruby included) is dramatically higher in 64 bit builds...more than 50% in many cases.

If you don't have more than 4GB of RAM, it makes absolutely no sense to have a 64 bit OS install.
“If you put 200 VCRs in your garage and start making and selling copies of films, you will get a visit from the police,” he said. “If you do it from a Web site, everybody says, ‘Hey, freedom of information’ ”.

Not that I support piracy, but torrent tracker sites do not sell the films. As a matter of fact, they don't even host the actual files.
Maruti SX4 Diesel Variant To Be Launched in India by Mid 2010
Last data update: Sat Apr 04 23:17:06 +0200 2009
There's a difference between caring about -- or knowing -- one's IQ, and boasting about it.
LG KU990 Viewty Red 3G, 5MP CAMERA, TOUCH SCREEN
Lg has upped the ante with the KU990, a phone that features the tried and true design of the Prada phone but adds substantial aspects that the most jaded cell phone user will appreciate. The Prada phone’s sleek form is untouchable.
Shoes and stars: interesting facts.
I think you're reading too much out of the story.

I believe I have correctly identified the thesis of the story. My evidence for believing this is the following:

1) The laptop is analogized to the condom balloons, which were an instructional technique to "open [students'] minds to a subject they previously wouldn't let in". One way we can see the author is analogizing computers to condoms is the title: "Computers as Condoms", which is a simile.

2) The student was identified as both hating math and having no substantial skills prior to the computer intervention.

3) The computer intervention "led her to allow herself to think about these previously horrible things".

4) After the computer intervention, she was described as having marked objective improvement in scores.

The above points, taken together, do not support the conclusion that the article is claiming "the computer merely augmented an existing understanding of mathematics". They do support the conclusion that the student had no demonstrable understanding of mathematics, and that through using the computer, she gained a demonstrable understanding of mathematics.

I don't want to rant too much here about pedagogy, but the above exercise in "identify the thesis and then support your identification with textual evidence" is another crucial skill which can be effectively taught by, well, teaching it.

There are some pedagogical theories that focus instead on something closer to "Hey, how does this text make you feel?" For example, you hypothetically may feel that the author thinks laptops are a nice extra to have in support of a traditional mathematics curricula. If you hypothetically feel this way, you are wrong. Your conclusion is not supported by the text.

The phrase "you are wrong" is highly controversial is many pedagogical schools these days. That is a shame.

[Edit: I apologize for sounding like a lecturing English teacher. It may be related to me having taught English.]
But what does it do? I get that it lets me create and share a profile, but then what? How do people view/save it on their phones — Do you just send a text message with a blob of information to pick through? What to they do with my profile beyond receiving it? Why do they need to create their own profile?
I propose muslims to review, refine and rewrite QURAN, if required.
Because,

* Christians have corrected BIBLE on Slavery.

* Hindus have corrected VEDAS on Untouchability.
Definitely Red Hat for anything serious that's worth the support costs. Else you can settle for CentOS, which is Red Hat minus the support.
"We might have a job opening for you, but only if you submit your business profile IN THE NEXT THIRTY SECONDS."

No, just kidding, I like the site. It has a nice minimalism feel like most good sites..
Super Halong Oriental Sails Promotion 2days -75USD/pp
One other thing, make sure you build everything from the source.

I was right there with you until this bit of crazy.

Do not build everything from source. You're just asking for trouble when you do. You lose so many really important features of modern Linux distros when you do this, that I can't believe people are still suggesting it as a sane practice for production servers.

If you install from source you won't be able to update quickly and easily via apt-get or yum when a security update comes out...you'll have to rebuild. But, you probably won't even know a security update exists until it's too late. If you don't keep copious and specific notes about what your custom build does, and why you did it that way, you will forget a flag or overwrite or lose a config file, and it will break something next time you roll out a new version.

The performance benefits are probably negligible, and in my many years experience cleaning up amateur maintained systems, it is just as likely to be negative as it is positive. You probably know dramatically less about the package you're building than the maintainer of the OS package, and you're more likely to make mistakes than they are. Those mistakes could have security implications, performance implications, or stability implications.

Certainly, if you are the maintainer of some piece of software, you might want to replace it. I've never run a system without at least a few custom builds...but the custom pieces are usually software that I am one of the core maintainers of, and I know it better than just about anybody. And, when I do run custom software, I tend to build an RPM or deb of it, and setup a local yum or apt-get repo, so that when I need to replicate my production machine, I can do it quickly and consistently.
Hiring is extremely random and for most part very hard to do fairly. Bet even if someone like bill gates or the google founders applied to some of the bigger companies - chances are they will get turned down from a few of them.

Though, I think there is almost zero correlation of landing a position and having done a startup. Also, in real terms failed/successfull startups dont really matter much because often there is a very fine line (often described as luck) between failed and successfull startups. You might have learned a lot more in a failed one than having lucked out in a succesfull one. (for eg. jobs might have been considered a lesser success when apple mostly did the mac compared to say the youtube guys. Even though we now know otherwise because of the ipod, the fact is that it was plain market conditions that led to youtube being a bigger hit than the Mac).

A friend of mine got turned down with one of the biggest private enterprise software firms in the US. They hired the best of the lot - stanford, mit etc. He went on to join a smaller firm, and then did a startup which is about to run a million in revenues this year. The private software firm has since lost its mojo and is laying off right left and center. The friend, who is now CEO, is hiring right left and center. The very people who thought he was unfit to join their 'ranks' would now be very happy to be on his payroll.

In any case the lesson is that treat a job as independent from doing a startup - it takes a different set of skills to land one and its not fair, so just try to find what is required to land a job and not assume it to mean anything more than that.
yeah its called yahoo groups. there are thousands of little neighborhood groups out there using yahoo groups, google groups, etc. you don't need a dedicated site, all most people really want is a mailing list with a web ui
Did anyone else read the headline as a request for spousal advice?
When I was at SAP there was a program where you could set aside part of your salary for 6 months of paid leave after 5 years. Unfortunately you had to be over 30 to claim it.