skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Do you think public education can be fixed?
I recently shipped a crowdfunding non-profit that pays tuition to low-fee private schools in developing countries. It's been going well for the last two weeks, but I've hit a bit of a snag in our mission.

I was called a neo-liberal and yelled at for "trying to fix the wrong problem" at a recent edtech meetup. This gal believes that for-profit charter schools are horrible for primary education and I should be focused on helping public/government institutions.

My response was that I want to directly effect kids now, not spend years trying to make a change that is unlikely to happen. The schools we work with are held accountable for the quality of education they provide and are teaching students we funded today. A third-world public school system isn't going to change because of a few thousand dollars, but a 100 student charter school with a budget of $80k per year will.

What does HN think about the situation? Do you think educating a smaller amount of people now is better then relying on potentially changing the whole system in future years?
My mother once said to me that vacations aren't as much about relaxation as they are about doing different things than what you usually do. I've come to believe the same thing, and in that regard going to a different country is definitely an effective way to take a vacation from your normal life.
I argue that this is largely already done by the content editors.

Certainly for professional media outlets and therefore true of the mass market most summarizers are trying to hit. But just take most of the best stuff that reaches HN.. Personal blogs, GitHub repos, documentation. Really hard but potentially rewarding stuff to summarize. I currently do this by hand in the email newsletter space but am certainly interested in any advancements that'll save me time one day :-)
Just because the concept is meaningless in the real world doesn't mean it's not a concept who's definition is widely understood.

Should I have put "white person" in quotes? Should I had phrased it like "what would commonly be called a "white person"".

I felt that would be overly pedantic of me and besides you are missing the point: "white people" do exist, it's just wrong to assign any shared attributes to them other than "looks like a white person". And by the way, I don't mean "wrong" in any kind of moral sense, I mean wrong in terms of "factually incorrect".

If he had talked about ghosts instead of "white people" would I have sounded awfully silly if I had said "ghosts don't exist. Ghosts are frequently just photography artifacts or sleep paralysis hallucinations." because I used the word "ghosts" in the next sentence?

So you think that the pre-scientific idea of categorizing people by skin colour and nose and eye features is valid and that the scientific understanding from genetics is "nonsense" that I "want to believe"?

That's both ridiculously presumptuous and ... well, stupid.
Well, that is the idea at least. Unfortunately it almost seems as though the style arguments will be replaced with the "pro/against enforced style" arguments.

Hopefully this new topic has less staying power.
How come it doesn't return null here? I display an alert if WebGL isn't available.
Your comment has nothing to do with the article. In your own words: "Huh?"

He's essentially talking about directed, productive work versus undirected, creative work. You need to spend some of your time mastering new skills. Trying new techniques out. Otherwise, you're going to burn out.

It's kind of like work-life balance. You can't work every waking hour. Well, he's saying that he's one of those people who can't WORK every working hour. That when he pushes himself in linear, goal-oriented tasks, that it catches up with him eventually. (Hence the "debt" part of what he's trying to say.)

Google calls it 20% time. Time you're supposed to spend on things other than your assigned duties.

There are lots of reasons to do it.

And it pretty much has nothing to do with reducing technical debt. It's a poorly written article that doesn't even explain its terms very well, so it's understandable that you wouldn't understand.
I understand the precation.

One of the best trips I had was after getting laid off from a large dysfunctional corporation that was under going a re-org and having few years of accumulated salary in the bank due to never having a chance to take a "real" break from work in several years.

HR was shocked when they realized that I hadn't taken more than few days off in my tenure. I had over 6 months of "combined" time that had rolled over year after year.

But I was the chump that got things done, covered during the holidays, for installs, moves, covered Y2K, and when everyone else had a life and babies.

Never again.
Site is off =(

This Site44-hosted website has been temporarily suspended due to excessive usage.
Equally laughable.
MetroPCS shareholders approve sweetened takeover offer from T-Mobile USA
That only matters if you care about winning.

TF2 also has a huge accessibility problem which contributes to an overabundance of support class players, but also makes it a brilliant game. As opposed to the Battlefield series, where seeing the enemy first is most of the battle, it's actually difficult to inflict any damage at all in TF2. For instance, I'm at about the 200 hour mark and when I play demo I can only hit ground-based targets with pipes maybe 20-30% of the time - and that's quite good! For beginners, the only playable frontline classes are pyro and heavy. Spy and sniper are also popular because it's easier to survive when playing them, and maybe sneak a few insta-kills. Medic is easy to play, but can be very boring.

tl;dr: Don't hate the player, hate the game. And don't hate the game, because you'd be hating what makes TF2 such a wonderful game to play. Even at professional levels getting an airshot is a remarkable feat.
Los Angeles. There are plenty of places with low CoL (Culver City, the Valley, West LA, Mid-Wilshire) located right next to high CoL locales (i.e., Santa Monica, Marina Del Rey).
Thanks but I'm not going to build it myself, I think it's better for me if I leave that up to the package maintainers ^^
You're missing the joke I think.
If this happens (and it's really cliffing, meaning 85% or more of a vesting period, not half-way) -- and assuming your options or stock would have significant value -- hire a compensation lawyer. You might get something; without a lawyer on your side you will get zip for sure.
Show HN: Lapis – A web framework for MoonScript and OpenResty
I'm not really sure what I would do with a vacation. Travelling doesn't particularly interest me, and I would get bored fast if I stayed at home to watch TV all day long. I get paid to do my hobbies, so that would technically qualify as work.
"I realize complaining about the lack of documentation in some open source projects is like complaining that there is no foie gras at a friend’s free dinner party"

Actually, it's more like not having chairs at a dinner party. It's a significant discomfort, not a lack of a luxury.

"The Spring Security documentation says it best…

It is much easier to debug your application or to work out where a problem lies if you don’t treat the external code you are working with as a black box which you never look inside. The first thing you should do when an exception you don’t understand is thrown from an open source library is jump to the class and line number and take a look to figure out what the code was doing there. Otherwise you’re missing out on much of the benefit of using open source code."

Sorry, but it's a lot easier to debug your application if you have documentation that tells you under what conditions the library throws a particular exception.

Having to understand the source code of a library to be able to figure out its behavior eradicates much of the benefit of using a library in the first place. And the average product these days relies on so much open source software that you can't possibly have the time to dig through the sources to solve every little problem. Would the author of this statement be happy if he had to dig through Linux kernel code, or Apache web server code, or the code of the dozens of Java libraries that Spring is dependent on? I don't think so.
Clickable: http://www.nkoso.org
The remarkable thing here is how elaborate his Kickstarter page is. He's a famous actor/director, he could have just phoned it in, but instead he put the time and effort into making a great page. It shows the type of person that spends the effort to make great movies spends the effort to make all their projects great - including making a kickstarter page.
This isn't exactly right. First, the demo starts with a really tiny cloth and then scales it up until your system starts slowing down. Second, he's comparing the same dimensions with asm.js and non-asm.js code, and they should be equivalent in browsers without asm.js (in fact, that style of code is usually a tiny bit faster because it's hitting all the optimized parts of javascript).
> "Brooke Allen has worked for 30 years in the securities industry as a proprietary trader and hedge fund manager."

Let me translate:

"Brooke Allen has worked for thirty years in a industry dedicated to fleecing the stupid rich. Hedge funds uniformly deliver lower-than-average returns with high volatility, but high payouts to the staff involved sucking from other people's money. Mr. Allen believes that working in an extremely-well-paid industry where he managed to get extremely-well-paid makes him a good salary negotiator."
Didn't Paypal start out as a Palm Pilot app that transmitted money using cryptography? I think it's interesting that bitcoin is kind of the 21st century version of that.
Just created a community carpool tool - when should I approach bloggers?
Hey Hackers News,

Long time reader but first actual post. I'm an outdoor camping meetup organizer and I created a community carpooling tool to do a way with all those spreadsheets floating around. I'm not sure if I want this to be a super viable business or if its just a hobby, but I do think it's going to rock other trip organizers socks off once they see it.

I believe contacting bloggers is a great way of getting the word out. When do you think I should start contacting bloggers? Right away? Once I get a marketing page up? .. or should I just wait for them to come to me!?
Review of Gothelf, Lean UX
Or, Reddit.
> the vast majority of founders do try to do right by their employees.

Absolutely. But, barring the true home-run success stories, the vast majority of founders lose effective control of the financial dealings of the company by the time they sign the Series A.
2 weeks in 2010 (my first time)
2 days in 2011
2 hours in 2012

let's break the record and make it 2min in 2013 :)
India's biometric ID
Amazon Said to Plan TV Set-Top Box for Streaming Video
Yes but if the T-shirt award level had tens of thousands of backers, they can hire a large company like threadless to print and distribute the T-shirts (Even complicated Threadless t-shirts are mostly $20 with a nice profit margin, with free shipping on orders over $50). At these scales $25 is quite profitable.
I've been using fireworks for 10 years. That's an amazing peace of software indeed.
This one is much slower than the Javascript one for me (using latest Chrome stable).
Welcome to HN. People call out sensational titles all the time.

Replace "Steve Jobs" with "Bill Gates", and you'd have a dozen people mocking the title and no discussion on the post.
Is it enough of a problem to burn the rest of your life on a pyre in service of that goal?
Next Gen Xbox on May 21 Confirmed
Yeah, we realize that. As for the US version - the template is applicable to any country as long as the game rules stay unchained. Of course, we would need to check that.
Some time ago I heard an 82-year-old lady talk about how her parents' marriage had been a happy one. She said that the whole time she was growing up, her mother kept a newspaper clipping on the family icebox that described marriage as a process by which "two stones are by friction made smooth". It was only later that she saw this as a sign that her parents did have their difficulties, and that her mother must have kept it there as a reminder.

The point is, these insights are proverbial.
Blah, blah, blah. It was a cool story; the man clearly had some important insight into the world and the making of a successful product. Can't we just try to take something from it instead of nit-picking?
Just recompile, and live switch to the new version. It's comparable hassle to editing the apache config file and sighupping it.
Aaron Swartz Documentary – The Internet's Own Boy
The idea that Jobs is reacting against is essentially the "Great Man" theory of history as applied to business:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory

This idea states that it is the "great men" who are responsible for making the world we see today, through their force of will, powerful ideas and charisma.

And as it happens, that's how the public sees Steve Jobs today. So it's good to hear him tell a story that reminds us that he had a very different perspective on this idea.
Indeed. I am all for paying salespeople paltry salary or draw, and very generous commissions.
Can't upvote this enough. Facebook in NYC does this also, and it's just plain creepy.

Mostly because it would take them no effort at all to advance this policy in advance. But they don't -- they just ambush you with it when you get there. And they know damn well that no one's going sit down and read (let alone think about the implications of) what they're signing. That's the creepy part.
Hold on, the original Garden State cost only 3.5 million to produce. You're telling me Braff doesn't have 3.5 million to finance this thing or get a loan from a traditional outlet/rich friends/George Harrison's Estate?

It sounds like this is his pet project, with him starring, and him getting most of the profits, but he wants his fans to take all the risk? Seems off to me. Granted, he may not want to personally take on the risk, which is understandable, but its a personal vanity project no one is demanding. Just bankroll it, Zach.

Kickstarter being used by well funded celebrities who just want to minimize their risk to zero seems wrong to me. It should be for startups and good ideas that can't get funding elsewhere.
I understand that this is how kickstarter works, but don't really understand why everyone is OK with it.

Kickstarter is like a bake sale, where you pay more than the fair market value for things as a form of charity to support some activity. But projects like this remind me more of a bake sale to support your local major league baseball team (e.g. profits are used for the enrichment of a corporation/person(s)).

I would be much more likely to contribute to this project if, in the situation where the movie makes money, $2M (less the true cost of the rewards) were donated to something other than the bottom line of the real investors.
Visited link coloring work on my Mac Safari 5.1.7. You can easily try it on your own browser by going to google.com and clicking a search result there. The link changes color.

Here's a good explanation what the exploit is and how it was prevented in Firefox: http://blog.mozilla.org/security/2010/03/31/plugging-the-css...
Blend.io Lets Musicians Collaborate Without Ever Abandoning Ableton
You can get an exception from any canvas or WebGL API in cases where a driver is misbehaving (or, worst case, you have hit a browser bug).

You gotta wrap that stuff in try/catch (at least the getContext call, as a minimum). I don't think this is spec compliant, but I've seen it in Firefox, Chrome and Opera under various configurations.
(oldster here, mostly doing 'back end' type stuff) -- I think it's due to the fact that younger folk are usually more comfy with the GUI aspects of the latest tech. Me and my 40+ prog friends generally hate all the newest webby mobile stuff, we like email and IRC and text documents and command shells. We generally despise Twitter, FB, anything that enforces a 'modern' GUI experience on us.

Also, the back-end stuff tends to be a bit less sexy, but also less fault-tolerant. Management sees the front end; the back end is basically magic. So it makes sense that you have Gandalf back there with his beard and recumbent bike banging out magical koans to keep the database alive, while young bucks guard the front gate of the castle.
The corner radius is too big for app icons... though it does resemble the corner radius of the Apple TV. Perhaps an Apple TV SDK?
Public education can not be fixed because it exists to support regimes, education is best done in private.

In all likelihood, people won't divorce the statist religion, nor will they give up public schools.

Right now the regime in /my/ nation prevents me from even opening a school without their approval.
I'm at -5 and -6 and the last time I tried things was with a Nikon many years ago.
According to the article: "Each state that wants “remote sellers” to collect sales tax must establish a single entity to manage tax collection and audits for the entire state. Sellers won’t have to deal with all 5,900+ separate taxing municipalities in the country, just 50."

So the bill does address this concern.
20+ typographically engaging websites with large type
City Council approves iProvo sale to Google
Now, could SFDC please do the same - not having a datacenter in EU is so bad. Performance is measurably worse.

And Safe Harbor is nice, but having a DC in EU would make the discussions around it even easier.
Good. They certainly need it, their stuff breaks enough & needs performance improvements.
There is no special provision in the bill for any kind of goods or services. What's taxable will continue to be determined by the individual states.
I agree... corner radius is too large for app icons. Apple TV SDK would be my guess
Zombie VC Shakeout Continues
Hahah, clearly you're referring to http://www.gimp.org
Most conversations are far worse than any written communication about umming and repeating things, etc. To me, this sounds like just so much baggage, assuming that every conversation is significant. I am also reminded of some quotes or lines about words getting in the way of communication. I think that problem is bad enough in the world without BigBrothering our lives.

Having said that, I do think there are some potential niche uses for this. In addition to law enforcement and court, it makes me think of the South American tribe that used video recordings of meetings with whites to hold them to their word. They did not read and write English but they found a means to avoid the fate of so many indigent peoples who have been lied to, taken advantage of, and screwed over by people from more "advanced" cultures.
This is still javascript. Just only using the most highly optimized pieces.

This uses WebGL, so there's potential that you have a bad driver/video card that this will be slow. That's the only reason I can think of.
Living Full On
Yes, we've considered this and spoken to our lawyer about it. Unfortunately, can't really talk about the details of that at the moment.
World According to pakistan
BitTorrent Sync creates private, peer-to-peer Dropbox, no cloud required
I'm pretty sure not, because the doormat will be caught by the first place that pays him any low wage he accepts, they will accept his deal because it's remarkably low, and he won't cycle out.

Companies do not pay you more money just for being brilliant, when it is not obvious that they need to.
Thanks for your view, what nation are you residing in?
The corner radius of the logo closely matches that of the current Apple TV product. Perhaps an Apple TV SDK will be announced.
Can Apple survive without Jobs? Who is shaking up the can until the product is polished?

Large organizations often take very smart people and very good ideas and then produce crap. The most successful organizations usually have one very strong leader with visionary ideas yet an incredible attention to product detail. Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Salesforce, Facebook... take away that one leader and they struggle. Because large organizations thrive on teamwork and not taking any big risks (if you are right, everyone basks in your glory, if you are wrong, your ass is on the line.)

Apples latest maps application was far from polished. Then their CEO fired the one guy who seemed willing to shake things up. I am looking forward to their next big thing, to see how polished it is.
How does this compare to the European VAT system? (Which has its own rules about purchasing between EU states.)
just a quick observation - solid feedback from HN here - way to be folks.
Girlfriends aside, the interface is fantastic. I would use this. Good job.
He can also enter with some of his personal wealth, to sum to the 2 million from kickstarter. I don't know.
I think the arguments against summly have more to do with the fact that they didn't have any tech or in-house expertise. They licensed tech from SRI and even had another group build the app itself.

That aside, summarization is a relatively old field of study (in CS) and there is tons of good information to read and even many free libraries. My suggestion would be to try out an unsupervised learning algorithm such as LDA. You still need training data, but you don't need to label it with categories. The downside is that you will have no control over what it learns. Still, classic examples of LDA involve classifying news sources.

For standard linear classification, understanding Bayes is important, but for actual implementation look at something like liblinear and use logistic regression with regularization. The difference between Bayes and LR is that Bayes optimizes learning the underlying probability distribution while LR optimizes "getting the classification right", otherwise known as optimizing the expectation. Regularization controls for overfitting and there can be a big difference between the type you use (L1 vs L2) and the settings. Dont' make the mistake of treating it as a minor tweak.
Funny that individual maximizers are "sociopathic" but the exact same tactics from a corporation are just what they're supposed to do.

'satisfice' is a word at least in academia
This reeks of those other developments from India that get lots of publicity, then never really materialize ($35 tablet: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-10740817)

'Normal' Braille cells use piezo-electrics cells that are centimeters tall, making it infeasible to have more than, say, one line of 10 characters in anything resembling a mobile phone. On top of that, Those cells need high voltages to operate (200V or so), and are at least $20 a piece (yes, a ten-character, single-font, single style, single colour display will set you back at least a couple of hundred dollars)

So, this combines a novel technology with a very low price. Impossible? No, but it isn't likely, either.

Also, I expect the likes of Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung will try and buy this firm, if the product is real. The market for the Braille-reading blind is minute, but imagine having that functionality in the edge of your tablet, in a game controller (configurable tactile key layout), or possibly even on your screen.
The bill appears to address the collection/audit concerns, but not the burden of correctly calculating the tax due on any particular sale.
Crashes my iOS safari browser
I read it this morning in the english Wikipedia entry for "To Kill A Mockingbird" - it's relatively common in that context.
When will the Ubuntu PPA will be updated?
Which are all free to have different categorization schemes as to what counts as what, correct? (If I understand correctly, this categorization could vary by street level. Chainsaw selling to this house is home improvement, to the house next door it's construction)
Why Did You Endorse Me?
For those of us who are curious, who is referenced in #4? I have a good suspicion, but am not 100% sure.