skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a plaintext version of the Plotnitsky article, and I think it addresses the Dawkins article so directly (though it was published one year earlier) that it bears a direct link here: http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.197/plotnit...
We are not sheep
He's totally missing the point of studying computer science. It doesn't matter if you are using Linux or Windows during your studies; a proper education in CS will give you a foundation on which you can easily adapt to any platform, language, or environment. My school was almost entirely Unix-based, and my first job was with Microsoft. They weren't concerned at all about whether I was familiar with the Win32 API, C#, COM or anything similar - and this attitude was consistent across all new hires, not just college hires. Most competent companies (the ones you want to work for) will recognize this as well.

But in any case, there are an enormous number of jobs that do not require knowledge of Microsoft-based technology.
There are plenty of Google employees building their (arguably ;) good software engineering career using mainly Linux, just an example.
I appreciate that, you know, to someone who hasn't read it yet, such a message is pretty important... but is there really anyone here who hasn't heard this dozens of times already?

This article doesn't really add anything to the topic, either, merely rehashing a bunch of quotes on the topic of failure...
dup http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=642248
The dull ones, mostly.

That said, the company I work for has an IT department that is not happy at all to issue non-windows boxes for employees. You can have one, but then you will have to manage it yourself. We have a couple Windows servers but all our software run on *nix-ish boxes.

At least I could install cygwin and X on top of XP.
Orthogonal persistence, for one. All of the gymnastics we currently perform to make data outlive unplugging are a waste of precious lifetime:

http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=643794
Harvesting: Seeking Markets with the Best/Easiest Returns
So Asians and Jews outperform all Americans, while West Indian Blacks only outperform American Blacks (but presumably not Americans in aggregate)? This hardly seems like evidence against racial differences in intelligence/achievement.

He doesn't say there aren't racial differences in intelligence. He is saying that irrespective of any actual differences in intelligence, some groups do better than others purely due to cultural norms.

It's along the lines of genius being "1% inspiration and 99% perspiration". The point put forward is that any natural variations in the inspiration part are dwarfed by sufficient application of the perspiration part.
When I saw Scribblenauts on E3 coverage my thought was immediately:

I want to stop everything I'm doing and make a game quite like this, but for the iPhone or Flash and allow anyone to make things for it (like a wiktionary of 2d "mobs" and items).

The video I liked most was: http://revision3.com/coop/showfloor/#seek=636:839

Of course, I've got too much on my plate to do that right now, so maybe someone else will. :)
Precisely. You could say that those sentences filled a much-needed gap.
Yeah, it really makes me feel paranoid that the item I want will be hidden when the menu is shown, so I always expanded it (until I turned it off entirely).

I'm probably the only one who feels the same way about hidden tooltray icons, too, but I usually expose them all on Windows.
I would certainly not want communism, especially not as it's been classicly implemented. I don't believe a classless society worth living in will be possible before a true end to scarcity; this may or may not be possible with the advent of MNT; some have high hopes.

It's important to note that I refer mainly to material classlessness here; obviously classes of intellect and culture will still exist and you wouldn't want to eradicate them anyway. I would imagine political classes would also exist but hopefully determined by will to participate, not material means.

And why? Well, egalitarianism, basically, and the belief that material means of one's parents should be neither benefit nor hindrance in life.

This is the stuff of essays, not little comments like this, but I hope you get the idea : D
A more accurate title would be -- CentOS 5.3 x86_64 Server and ISPConfig 3 Installation Tutorial (on 6 Pages)
Postmodernism isn't science. You're right in that the mediocre stuff will fade and the interesting ideas will remain. Yet I have two counterpoints to offer. First, will postmodernism leave lasting ideas at all? Has its skepticism towards language, for example, led to anything new over what was given to us by Wittgenstein? Second, even if all the dross fades and disappears, isn't it a shame about all those years when it dominated humanities and much of philosophy? What kind of genuinely interesting ideas were never explored because of that domination?
I'm not sure if this should surprise anyone. Of course higher education is worth it for most people. It's just if you're a programmer, after you learn basic programming skills, a lot can be easily self taught.
OK we cool then : )

I have to admit, the name is memorable. By that metric, you've succeeded admirably. It might be seared into my brain as "worst name ever" but - it's seared into my brain, lol ...
If you think it's a dup, flag it. I'm tired of seeing these digg like dup comments. They come across as a power grab for community recognition and karma, not for bettering the content on the site.
How about some more? Adding "teacher" to my list leaves us closer to "few" than "many".

Note that the vast majority of engineers aren't licensed....
Those who accomplish the most fail the most as well. Travel around the world and people love to mock the crappy movies that come out of America. They say with disgust, "America makes terrible movies." I say, "America makes the most movies, so of course they are going to make the most crappy movies, but they also make the most great movies as well."
I do not often literally laugh out loud while reading HN. Today, I did. :)
Ooohh... It just dawned on me right now, why all the higher education hatin lately.

Lots of young kids just graduated from college and they can't get jobs, so they're thinking, "Aw crap... I just went $100,000 in debt and I can't get a job. What the hell did I just waste 4 years in school for? School sucks. I was lied to. This wasn't worth anything. I'm screwed."

My heart goes out to you. It's not your fault that the economy sucks. It's not your fault that the world told you you'd get a job if you went to college. It's a pretty sick carrot to dangle in front of you.

Your education though, does have a value. But so does work experience. Your degree does give you an advantage over those without degrees, but it doesn't give you an advantage over those with degrees and work experience. Even those with work experience can't get jobs right now and they don't have parents they can move back in with. Imagine how screwed they are.

The year after you graduate is often the scariest, most depressing you will have experienced thus far in your life. My friends from college a year or two behind me, they'd graduate and phone me depressed. They'd ask themselves and me, "Why did I just go through that? I'm lonely. All my friends moved away. I work with a bunch of old people."

It's normal. It's normal to feel this way. I think college creates a lot of hope in us. The world makes us think that if we just make it through college, life will be easy, but getting that degree is only the start. Don't look at Matt Damon, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs and think you could have been like them, why didn't you drop out sooner. Those guys are the exceptions that prove the rule.

Make the most of your time now. Get experience. Keep your skills up to date. Go travel if you can afford it. Expand your mind. Keep working hard. It does pay off.
Repeatedly I see articles of this theme and the comments insisting that "education is broken." Well I would like to advance the argument that education in the United States at the present is better than any place else in the world and better than it has ever been. But with one caveat, and that is that children, like people, differ in their abilities and not everyone will or can become a great mathematician or engineer or writer. However, for the ones who are have talent, our educational system, at the secondary and post-secondary level is unique in its ability to nurture budding genius.

American education still has a emphasis on liberal education which practically only exists in the anglo world and most strongly in the US. For all the antagonism towards the general curriculum requirements here on HN, which IMHO is a strain of philistinism, our mental life, and the strength of our democracy depends on citizens well aware of the world around them and capable of critical argument. While some are innately born with this ability, a liberal education is the way to ensure it in those who are not.

Beyond this, for our most promising scientific minds are very well served by our educational system. Generally attending a strong public or good private secondary school, they will be recognized early in their ability and encouraged to supplement their mathematical and scientific coursework at a local institution of higher learning. During summers, they will work in the lab of a prominent university professor and get early exposure to research. This will continue in university as they become further familiar with the state of the art as an undergraduate and are better prepared for graduate school than someone without these benefits so early, say in India or China where the state of research is not so strong.

Do some talented individuals fall by the wayside? Yes, but not as many as imagined. The only real criticism of american education is that it leaves those who may not want or be capable of a high status creative profession underserved. But this is a uniquely american calculation in the interests of equity and idealism. We accept some measure of inefficiency here in our educational system to maintain coherence with our national mythos that all men are created equal, an ambiguous but politically useful statement. Otherwise we could follow a german model and single out the talented children from the rest around the age of 10 and send them to different schools. But I can't really imagine this working in the United States.
Enhance your blog posts with Yahoo Shortcuts.
CodeRun- browser-based online development platform
Most important thing to me is that you better start dancing in the right environment. If you start doing that in the middle of the street, rather than in a music festival, people will call the cops.
C++ templates are similar to macros: they run at compile time to generate code, but they're a lot harder to use.
I think just simplifying things helped a lot. When have you ever seen a "web magazine" (lots of topics, no single focus or content type) that you came back to again and again and again? The sites people return to are the ones they can customize and participate in.
I don't recall any paperwork at all circa 1992-1994. You filled out an e-mail form and sent it back to NSF. It was pretty much all automated.
And this is a very specific and slightly weird setup as well. Who uses mail quotas!? Well, I guess some people might but it's hardly common and unless you are setting up some kind of rural ISP or low budget community college or something why bother ..
Yes, I'm flagging it too.

The reason I post a comment is because the comments on that story might be useful for readers who missed it.
It's not the education that matters, it's how you use it.
About financial aid: the previous year my parents had made at least 80k, and that's generally how people judge your need. The year I picked schools one of them had lost their job and my family was at below sustainability levels.

That being said, I got an excellent scholarship for the college I went to. But I still regret not going to a "name-brand" school independent of the educational quality of the college. The kind of people you're around and the contacts you make are really different. That can be useful on an ongoing basis, not just right after you graduate.
It seems to me like you are expecting people to buy this app so that they can see what a color blind person would see with sample images. But who cares? You seem to have identified that parents or relatives of colorblind would be one likely demographic. Although it is big but paying for it would be a hard for them to justify when they can show these examples on the web.

If you could make an app that would show how an iPhone would look for color blind people I can quite a few people buying it. My point is that using this technology that you have you should expand on it.
Isn't this basically a rehash of a Feld article, down to the "check box on the IRS form" and the "frowned upon" UBTI tax?

Does it actually matter what company structure you have when you go look for funding? I don't think it does. Everyone I've ever talked to on this subject says "whatever you do, they're just going to re-do it anyways."
This looks like a troll post, but this is actually good advice. Don't try to force a good Ruby environment on Windows. Instead, merely edit your source code on Windows, and use PuTTy to SSH into a Linux machine that runs your development Ruby on Rails installation. This will also help enforce best practices like keeping your source code in source control instead of hacking it bits-to-metal on your local machine.
Left-Brained vs. Right-Brained - The Developer/Designer Paradox
Need a database person and a software developer for new startup
I am looking for 2 persons to join my team for a startup. If you are that person, or know of anyone who might be interested, please let me know - kumar@dekha.com
http://xkcd.com/169/

Communicating badly and then acting smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness.

Or, in other words (since you are no doubt preparing to quibble that you weren't acting particularly smug), the onus is on you to clearly communicate your argument, and using phrases like "titles of nobility were supposed to be abolished" and then not answering my objections about the Constitutional text that did, in fact, abolish titles of nobility impeded getting your point across, rather than helping. You give the distinct impression that you're blaming me for misunderstanding what you so poorly communicated in the first place.

If your argument is simply that college degrees are anti-egalitarian, I will happily agree with you. But our society wasn't meant to be legally egalitarian in the first place. It had slavery. I'm also happy to point out that it's not possible to even have pure egalitarianism, which is one reason why meritocracy is so much better. (You will undoubtedly counter that reliance upon college degrees is not efficiently meritocratic, but see? Now we've got ourselves a truly interesting and worthwhile discussion.)

There is also the alternate hypothesis that whenever I debunk your argument, you start pretending you meant something entirely different from the outset. But I am choosing to be charitable and assuming you simply miscommunicated what you meant in the first place.
But programming by itself is not knowledge. It's a means to solve problems. It's a very important and critical skill and like any other, it's difficult to become a master, but how are you applying it?

For example, let's say you are trying to solve a problem in crystallography. You need to be a good programmer to come up with a nice refinement algorithm, but without a fundamental understanding of the problem you're trying to solve, you're not going to be able to solve it. The same goes for financial modeling, or some other kind of optimization problem.

In any field you have to keep teaching yourself new skills, since the technologies and approaches change. Even the foundational knowledge changes, but what education helps you get is a core understanding of depth that allows you to adjust. There will always be those who can do it without getting a good education, but those are rare, and in the worlds I've lived in, almost non-existent.
The article is good as an occasional reminder. We all forget easily. http://bit.ly/w8zIp
I'm honestly not surprised since Leo is a nice guy. However, it speaks to Arrington's character that he would accuse Leo of bias before allowing him to explain why he liked the pre. I agree with Leo's original assessment that Arrington is a Troll.
College will be hard for them socially but they'll be more focused than their peers, so it's a coin-toss whether they'll be more or less successful than the average student.
How intellectual pollution has crippled America's children
Ben also maintains a blog at http://www.badscience.net/

My understanding is that the editors at The Guardian give him a lot of freedom but there are still items published on his blog which don't make it into his column.
He does try to imply (without actually stating) that there are small/no racial differences in intelligence. He first debunks a straw man ("success as a simple product of intrinsic intellect") and then quotes someone claiming that intelligence is malleable and non-genetic.

But lets ignore that. Going from his examples, cultural norms can help some blacks outperform other blacks. But it doesn't actually allow blacks to outperform whites. If his examples are representative, the natural variations of the "inspiration" part are actually similar in size to the "perspiration" part of the equation.
Simple Ways to Improve the Kitchen
Ok lets consider this. I'm willing to believe that we could eliminate some of these "gymnastics" by adopting new persistence models but not without paying a cost somewhere else. Perhaps that cost is only some additional education but I'm not convinced things are that simple. A decade or two ago many organizations tried proprietary object-oriented databases for various applications in part because they purported to simplify persistence issues. For some specific applications they did but more often than not the problems they caused their users were worse than the ones they solved and most ultimately decided to settle for app servers and ORM solutions.

I've always thought a key barrier to the adoption of systems that support Orthogonal persistence is that it's harder to make applications designed around it perform as efficiently as ones designed to use lower level things like files or databases, partly because many techniques (e.g. efficient working set management, concurrency control, schema change, replication, data archival) are pretty well understood for applications that use the latter on systems like Unix.

Maybe there are new opportunities for orthogonal persistence now that distributed cloud storage and computing is becoming popular. Such an OS specifically designed for application providers running on large clusters with S3-style storage could change things. However none of the systems you mentioned look like good candidates to me for such change.
The short answer is that I didn't get into Stanford, and I couldn't justify the cost of other schools. I'd already had the liberal arts education so I didn't need to do that again. I wasn't sure what I wanted to study, didn't want to be doctor or a lawyer, but I also wasn't ready to drop out all together. The state school was cheap, had lots of graduate programs so I knew there would be something interesting to do. And I could always transfer out after a year or two with a perfect GPA.

But once I got there and compared notes with my prep school friends who were already in their junior year at various big name schools, I realized I had a good thing going and that transferring out wasn't so attractive after all. If I really needed a pedigree later on, I could acquire one in graduate school.

The long answer (?) is that while one half of my family is highly educated, the other half is comprised of tradesmen and small business owners with little formal education. I had a choice--I could have gone to Harvard, had that been my goal. I had all the prerequisites and could have traded on family connections if need be. I had the option, and I opted out. That's a lot easier than standing outside the gates and saying "I don't need this," even though they never would have let me in anyway. I am not that strong.

re: professors

It's much easier to find and get the attention of good professors when you are a big fish in a little pond. They will find you. Obscure departments are better than big name ones, but even a comp-sci department will have plenty to offer once you get past the hazing. At a no-name school, you trade duller classmates for better access to the faculty. There were a few good students at my university to be sure, but outside the upper level and graduate classes, the mediocrity was astounding. At least I didn't go in expecting big things! Elite schools can be really disappointing that way.

re: exciting things

This wasn't my route, but two years at a Jesuit monastery somewhere in Europe could be pretty exciting. You could learn Latin and the local language, work alongside the monks (?), and quiz them on their studies. Philology, the precursor to modern linguistics, is very interesting but has high barriers to entry (multiple classical languages). Fields like that are self-selective.

Italy has lots of small scale yet sophisticated manufacturing, so that would be an obvious direction were you so inclined. Lots of legal hurdles but it can be done. Take that back to college and you'd be in a class by yourself.
Excellent question - is this survivors bias? We need the negative information to get a sense whether their technique works better than random luck applied to good times.
If he'd let Arrington, speak, Arrington would have mentioned that Palm seems to have only been giving review units to reviewers who have previously given the Palm Pre favorable coverage.
"You can have one, but then you will have to manage it yourself."

You say that like it's a bad thing ...
In the interest of gathering more data points, has anyone attempted to use this technique computing debates?

I'm thinking of discussions concerning sexps and significant whitespace in particular.
The Secret to Getting Things Done: Acceptance, Love, and Patience
You have to wonder how much selection bias skews this. It seems like "those who would complete more school" isn't that far off from "those who are ambitious and willing to work hard". Without schooling, I wonder how well that second group would perform. Pretty well, I'd think.
Dawkins never wrote a book on memes. He wrote a book on evolution at the genetic level, The Selfish Gene. In it, he drew a comparison to genes that replicate themselves using organisms as a vehicle to ideas that replicate themselves using humans as a vehicle.

It was a throw-away comparison, not the point of the book. But, the term "meme" is a good meme, and it caught on.
The guy doesn't know what he is talking about. One of the problems with Prop 13 is that property taxes are limited to 1% increase per year. It gets reset to 1% of the property value when the property is resold. Home taxes have been rising steadily because homes get resold on the average of every 5 years. Commercial property, like oil refineries and office buildings which are not often resold, are stuck at 1978 rates. If commercial properties were revalued every 5 years, local jurisdictions would be in a lot better shape.

The San Diego Union Tribune is a right wing knee jerk paper. Any commentary in it should be taken with a grain of salt.
Yup, there were a couple of these print books back in the day. How else were you supposed to find sites when there was no decent search, no decent directory, and lots of stuff simply wasn't on the web (yet).