skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Education could use some disruption. But, I remember quite often kids at my school talking about the futility of learning subject X. I want to be Y, and I'll never use subject X. It always bugged me when I heard that. I knew I wanted to be a software developer when I grew up, but it turns out writing well and having excellent communication skills make the real difference in my line of work. At the time, had I thought the way my peers thought, I don't think I would have made good choices about my education. Let's be honest kids, on a whole, aren't known for making great choices.

On the flip side I think getting kids interested in a single subject, and allowing them to go deep within that subject at their own choosing could spark them to get interested in other subjects. But, where's the balance? There are some basic things kids need to learn.

The problem is with education is that if you pick a poor model for educating you're affecting people's lives for a very long time. Poor choices made at the early levels have life changing impact. Do it incorrectly and you can hurt the potential of people later on down the road. And, I think there in lies the true chance for disruption. How can we change the system so it's more forgiving for poor choices?

The disruption that's already happening is getting adults back to school. The trade school side of education is already doing this in a significant way. Phoenix, Strayer, ITT Tech, etc are all disruptive tech. They are targeting a segment that typical university systems are ignoring. They are also teaching very practical subjects, or subjects not offered by the big 4 year institutions. It's less based on research and more on practical knowledge. But, by going up the value chain they could really change the face of higher education. But, what if everyone continued to go to school through out their lifetime? A big question is what is proper certification? If everything is a-la-carte how do you certify someone? Should that be set of the educators or industry?

Now fast forward to Business Week's recent head line stating 3 Million job openings during this recession, but they can't be filled due to lack of skilled applicants. There in lies the real reason to get adults engaged in lifetime education. The more fluid we can make the workforce the faster we can recover from these down turns, and the more employable people will be moving forward. If you're not going to be employed in one field for 40 years make sure you can work in many different fields.
"Extreme Polyhierarchy" rings so true. Why could there be any need for a Tag Cloud which is rendered larger that small page fragment?

e.g.::http://www.labourhome.org/tags

If you give up trying to focus your information, your site starts to resemble domain hijackers who are hoping for 'a click, any click'

--

That YC search startup Scoopler suffers from "Extreme Polyhierarchy". I'm sure they'll be working hard to make the information more relevant and less abundant.

http://www.scoopler.com/search/#%22katie+price%22+OR+%22jord...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599653
> Georgia or Verdana. And never put black (#000) on white (#FFF)

Uh... isn't this blog black on white?
Fascinating that Yossi Kreinin hates Boost libraries so much. I have had my share of problems with them (slooooooow compilation and horrible template compiler error messages, mainly), but the Boost.Spirit parser library turned out to have been a lifesaver. I needed to parse JSON in a C++ system, had Boost available, but could not realistically install any other external library dependencies. Well --- the TinyJSON (http://blog.beef.de/projects/tinyjson/) looks a little funky thanks to all the templates and operator overloading magic, but it works well and I dropped it into the system as a header file. Problem solved.

I'd make heavier use of Boost.Filesystem, too, but I'm stuck deploying with an older version of Boost which lacks a few essentials. I never understood the messiness of concatenating path strings by hand until I was forced to stop using os.path (Python) and java.io.File (Java, Clojure).
Agreed. I use CakePHP (used the dart-against-a-wall method of picking it from the major frameworks). Now very familiar with it, enough so to understand its limitations, and especially its strengths. Probably going to switch to Zend soon, as I'm not the biggest CakePHP fan. But if you're only using it for a few days, you're not doing yourself any favors. Try writing a complete app in it (maybe an app you wrote a couple years ago, that you've always wanted to rewrite...)
26 steps? Typical of Microsoft, and anyone who isn't really interested in listening.

Thanks, but I hope IE just dies and we can get on with our lives. It's already becoming irrelevant, and that's just fine by me.
Does it really take 26 steps to suggest a feature for Internet Explorer?
Second Amendment in Iraq, Combat Robotics, and the Future of Human Liberty
This is an education bubble. It's an education bubble because the more people who go to college, the less valuable a Bachelor's degree is. To get the top jobs, you need to have gone to a top school, or you need to have a postgraduate degree. With the value of a Bachelor's degree declining as tuition rises dramatically, college will soon become "not worth it". At that point, one of several things will happen:

1) College simply becomes accepted as "mandatory education" in the same way that high school is now, and a college degree is seen as worth what a high school diploma is now.

2) More and more people swear off colleges for more useful "trade schools" that are cheaper than college and better prepare them for work in a specific sector.

3) We have a great education reorganization, where we push a lot of the "liberal arts education" burden back on high schools (and tighten diploma requirements). This restores the value of a college degree while making high school graduation actually mean something.

I'm not an intellectual elitist. If this increase in AP tests and going to (and graduating from) college was because people were actually getting smarter, I'd be thrilled. But it seems to be the case that "more people going to college" is a result of our culture pushing people into college, which is actually bad for them. It's getting harder and harder to find a middle class job that doesn't involve 4+ years of college (and the attendant expenses and loans). The end result is people need 4 more years of education to get the same sorts (economically) of jobs people 40-50 years ago could get without college.
Stop trying to compare it to engineering and fine art.

Could you elaborate on how programming is different from engineering? I feel like if programming seems that different from an engineering discipline, you're probably doing it wrong.
No, it is #333 on #FFF.
According to Firebug it's #333 on #fff.
That's what I was going to say. It looks like that the article was put together from 4 or 5 tweets (or whatever they call those short messages).

Perhaps, the article-let is true, but there's just no meat as to why. And I dont understand why a tweet isn't similar to inviting a client on IRC and making short messages via that. All you'd need is a bot to watch who's online and who isnt and have the bot save messages aimed at that user.

The tech is easily here to replace Twitter. And by the times people complain about it going down (fail whale), why not just replace it?
It's a very thorough review, but it's of a pre-beta version, and a lot has changed about Windows 7 since then. I'd love to find a more recent review...
Is there a reason you don't link to the profiles of the top 10? It is quite difficult to determine if someone is hot based on a ~24x24px icon.
I really like this as well as Kohana. I have been using Kohana lately for php5 benefits
Sorry about that. Here is a non-iTunes link.

http://pair.com/asim/slowpoke
Isn't conformity sometimes appropriate? It seems to me that the trick is knowing when to follow the rules (including your own) and when to bend or break them.

Constantly railing against conformity sounds like a teenager attempting to be "edgy".
Ubuntu One : Store, Sync & Share
You know, I don't get the hate here. 1) These are public profile pictures. Anyone can see them anyway. 2) There's no list of "not" - that's the harsh part. Yeah, people might be a little disappointed that they're not hot, but no one is being called out for being unattractive.

I love that I can start picking my hotties - not rating everyone - without logging in at all; that's very nice. And it's so much quicker to pick up to three hotties than rate and rate over and over again.

I do think there should be a "I'm interested in guys/girls" switch before rating, but other than that, I'm actually incredibly impressed. Whatever you think of the merits of the app, it's incredibly well-executed and well-designed. Everything works exactly the way I thought it would.
Your Brain Is an Index
The app is an experiment to figure out what makes people buy things, to figure out what people want. I know how to write unit-tests and to write code, but I have no idea how to complete the outer loop -- to create something that people would eagerly buy. The app represents a shot in the dark to figure out this space. If you have comments or ideas about what direction to take this in, feel free to share.
Does it matter if I took the physics/cs/calc AP exams for fun? :)
Another sign of a bubble is that a factor is ignored in the pursuit of something. Everything looks great until that factor (mortgage defaults, non-sustainability of business plans, systemic risk, etc.) rears its ugly head and pops the bubble. The focus on more schooling was originally based on the desire to allow people to be upwardly mobile economically. However, what is happening is that the current system is making a college degree a given for a middle-class job. You can no longer get a middle-class job through an apprenticeship or a trade school. You have to go to a 4-year college. As a result, economic (and social) mobility has been pinned entirely on "did you go to college".
This is the second day in a row I can use the same comment!
Products with >50% market-share are not irrelevant; they are VERY relevant. And as much as you might hate it, IE is not just going to die.
Major upvotes for a single word answer? Please clarify your perspective so he understands why you're so adamant.
It's only Microsoft who can make a product with "only" 65% market share and have people describe it as 'becoming irrelevant'.
LOVE the idea, but apparently Twitterers are too damn ugly for this to work- Hot Or Not worked because every few people someone actually hot would come on. Went three pages before marking someone... pimply middle aged geeks kinda ruin the concept.
Ruby is pretty easy to learn. RoR is great, but the easiest Ruby framework to learn is Sinatra.
@halo and @maukdaddy: the trend of marketshare of IE is downwards. It's not irrelevant now (I never said it was) but it's already becoming irrelevant: It's marketshare is going down with no obvious response from MS to stop this trend.
The title is a little bit misleading, better title, "Microsoft rep responds with boiler-plate about how you can go through some byzantine process to put a comment on a forum about a situation that everyone is well aware of."
agreed. an RC review says a lot more because it lets you know what microsoft thinks of as finished code.
Sporadic play activity as beneficial to child health as continuous bouts of exercise
Unforward ToRSS
Do you disagree? Why?
I treated college as the end. What to do after that became a bridge I'd cross when I got there.
>Every discussion I have with Americans about healthcare leads directly to these imagined totalitarian futures, as if "everybody" knew that this was what happens. I don't understand it. Where did you all learn this narrative?

Pre-WWII footage of Nazi health programs, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the movie Soylent Green and pretty much everything William Gibson has written. We've seen just about every distopian outcome imaginable.

Star Trek counters this to some degree, but it's considered "nerdy".
I strongly agree, so I voted it up. No need to expand on it.
Most of this seems silly. OSX is the only laptop OS? Since so many people buy PC laptops, that answer is clearly wrong more than 75% of the time (unless he wants newbies to try and hackintosh). Also, what's with the "no black on white" thing? Can someone explain that to me?
I posted a non-iTunes link above. It's in the genre of joke apps. Sorry about it being a paid app -- I can send out free promo codes if anyone is interested (my HN username at gmail.com). I am more interested in feedback and reviews than sales here.
http://famspam.com/
To be fair, I recommend taking the "doomed" comments here with a grain of salt-- HN readers aren't likely to be the sort to enjoy a service like this, so there could be a lot more pessimism than you'd see in wider audiences.

In general (and I agree with them) HN users seem to look down on superficiality more than casual internet users would. We got a lot of pessimistic comments here on HN for our site yumbunny.com but we ended up with surprising press coverage (e.g. TechCrunch) and our users really are enjoying the obviously-superficial fun.

That doesn't mean your site will do well even if the HN audience dislikes the site-- just keep in mind the potential differences. A lot of the practical advice on this thread is good, even if it's toned a bit pessimistically.
Sure, having an organization strategy is a good plan, and I didn't mean to imply otherwise. The problem I have is with people claiming that their way is the "right" way without having any legitimate scientific backing for the claim.
I should have posted a link to the web page. I missed HN's edit window. Anyway, the link is http://pair.com/asim/slowpoke.
I think the title is fine. He's not suggesting that this new malloc is the one "to rule them all". It sounds like he hasn't even tried it yet. Instead, he's wishing that there was such a malloc:

That’s the crazy thing about malloc implementations. They
all claim to be awesome in every way. So the burning
question is: is this better than what I’m using today? I
don’t know, but I’d sure like to!

I like the article, but I'm not sure that there needs to be a single winner. Different programs have different needs. Right now, I'd love to find a malloc that can work within shared mmap segments, sort of as described here: http://blog.directededge.com/2009/02/27/on-building-a-stupid...
Uncle Bob Responds to DHH, Defines Professionalism
How long until somebody creates a wrapper that automates this into a neat 1 step process? :-)
Fair enough. But do you think it could tap into the same market as the other joke apps? What would it take to tap into the same market as the other joke apps?
On the other hand, irrelevant products with disproportiate marketshare inevitably lose marketshare eventually. And the more marketshare you have, the less you can gain and the more you can lose.
The one you manage to learn first because you really-really like it. Then, all others that come along are somehow worse. You will then feel compelled to engage in religious debates over this.
Building a Social Network, Island by Island
"we haven't quite figured out how to get the artist-programmers and the engineer-programmers working together"

Pair programming.

Alternatively, I would say that we actually have. I believe that the Artist-programmer is most concerned with the expressiveness of the code, wheras the engineer-programmer is concerned with the efficiency and stability (of course there is overlap/cross-pollination.) The artist-programmers work at the problem domain level, and the engineer-programmers work at the systems/implementation level. Apache/MySQL/Sphinx written by engineer-programmers, Sinatra apps written by artist-programmers.
XMPP was a core part of Twitter's feature-set from the earliest days. Delivery became a bit (cough) "spotty" in early 2008 or so, and has been turned off AFAIK for a while now. That being said, there's no reason it couldn't be a part of their product offering again, if the obvious security and peer-server throttling issues could be resolved.

OpenMicroBlogging, while an interesting idea in the abstract, suffers from combo of feature bloat (license info per post/link) and missing core items (no baked-in Atom/RSS feed support, no friend/follow listing in profile) that make it far from a "Twitter-killer" out of the box.

Furthermore, the "reference implementation" laconi.ca is a bog-standard PHP/MySQL app. Since many of the complaints about Twitter's dominance stem from frustration with their uptime and scalability, it hardly seems realistic to pin our hopes for a better, more reliable future on a collection of PHP scripts running on a bazillion cheap shared hosting boxen.

In fact, WordPress + P2 (http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/p2) seems like a much more potentially-disruptive technology to me. OMB may be much more carefully designed to preserve security, license terms, and privacy, but we've seen time and time again that normal users don't really care about those things. They want a clean, usable UI, and readily-available documentation and support for a commonly-available product.
Costs money. No freemium Model....
Cone of Silence [pdf]
Lying and Resumes
Will the success of games on the iPhone encourage ports to the Mac?
The iPhone is attracting developers who have never developed for the Mac before.

Will some of these developers start porting their games to the Mac now that they are familiar with development on the Mac and already have iPhone versions of their games?
I thought this was a bit of a puff piece.
OSX is the only laptop OS?

No; If you want a laptop and don't know what OS to go for and don't have a strong preference already, pick OS X. Not "OS X is the only option".

If you already want Windows or want the cheapest and therefore picked Windows then you're not asking non-questions on the web and you're not the target of the blog post.
Patent application: http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Se...

Laymen's writeup: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227075.700-cone-of-s...
Thanks for the link.

It seems weird that you test a dynamic language like Javascript by writing code in a statically typed language like Java. http://code.google.com/p/webdriver/wiki/GettingStarted

I hope they come up with a scripting user interface that draws from Expect.
I should have posted this sooner. Your idea is great, but I didn't leave people enough time to vote.
Anyone know the path for companies based on large capital intensive tasks? I would assume you need a patent, a demo, and then search for investors, but is there any good advice on this topic? The other option seems to be getting a patent, building a demo, and then selling the patent, but that also seems risky.
I'm looking at nedmalloc atm (http://www.nedprod.com/programs/portable/nedmalloc/) and I'm really impressed by what I'm seeing there.

Has anyone here had the opportunity to test nedmalloc in real life? What sort of performance benefits did you see? Any problems you ran into?

I'm currently designing embedded systems in C, and am looking to get the most performance out of strained resources as possible...

I'm wondering if this'll compile for AVR or not.....
You could leave one helluva Leonardo-style sketch notebook, at the very least, if you could be spared the parchment.
The idea behind "no black on white" is that the contrast on most monitors is high enough that using the darkest color for text and the brightest color for background ends up being uncomfortable to read. So, use black on off-white (like HN), gray on white (like the posted article), or some similar combination.
I neither disagree or agree-- which is why I'd love more clarification, actually, to understand the positions.

Overall, I prefer not to see 1-word answers at the top of any comment chain-- they're upvote bait that are typical of sites that are a lot less useful than HN. They certainly don't promote good discussion!

For example, the comment from thesethings helps us understand better the position: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=603676
Even though Slicehost quotes monthly rates, in my experience they prorate charges for partial months used down to some unit even smaller than a day, and always spin up instances in a matter of minutes. So even 'month-to-month' pricing might have a de facto pricing/operations that's closer to hourly than monthly.
That's a fair point. I was addressing the premiss of the article that Twitter was a "communications mechanism" like email.
YooouuuTuuube
Looks like dropbox for ubuntu.
Greg McAdoo, Sequoia Partner, made an iPhone flight planning app
Is it supposed to look like this ?

http://img231.imageshack.us/img231/8422/instrumental.png
What I have found helpful, coming from someone that now uses RoR but failed to learn it the first time around, is that you need a project in place that you are going to build using the new framework. Then you need to tell all your friends and family that you're going to launch a new web app in X amount of days, and that they should be excited about that. After establishing a foundation of peer-pressure, you will be a lot more motivated to achieve your goal with the new framework.

With that in mind, it seems to me that Django, RoR, etc. are all pretty much the same difficulty to learn. It essentially boils down to some Active Record component, a MVC model, and some funny sugar here and there.
Yoga is also not merely the physical practice (Hatha Yoga.) There are other distinct branches as well that focus on right action (karma yoga), the cultivation of mental discipline / devotion (raja yoga,) and the cultivation of knowledge (jnana yoga.)
Yeah. Similarly, a big part of Buddhism is trying to be live mindfully, to avoid doing impulsive things that just lead to greater suffering. It's historically tended to get entangled with contemporary religious ideas as it spread throughout the world (not all Buddhists believe in reincarnation, etc.), but none of those are essential.
No, but if you buy the argument that techcrunch is making, it would seem odd.
I usually like the Register, but this article was pretty caustic. Not only was it irrationally biased against Adblock, and the user for that matter, but it made sweeping attacks against introverts and geeks in general.
If this progression is so inexorable, why hasn't internet instant-messaging given way to a commodity protocol? It has a ~10 year head-start on Twitter.
No, that's not the problem. I would have the same problem if I used integer primary keys -- "/comments/4/87/98/293.txt". I would still have to somehow map that old scheme to my new one. (If I used the same storage system for my rewrite, my UUID keys would be fine; no need for integer primary keys.)

Additionally, the current version uses an immutable lockless storage system; if I had to increment keys I would have to lock. (The new version will also use UUIDs for the same reason.)
can you then objectively define what's admirable? it seems like a subjectively slippery slope - your admirable might be different than my admirable. admirable is also very context-dependent: on HN, admirable is commonly agreed to adhere to the site guidelines & reflected in earned karma and so here, "hot" != admirable because that's not HN's scope. on a site like the OP though, the common agreement is that the site is used to distill that which the community determines to be 'hot'. if 'hot' means nothing to you, then you probably can't contribute to that community's body of knowledge and as such, you may want to avoid such places. here, though, you can contribute admirable feedback on how a site like this, regardless of the body of knowledge, is implemented/executed/marketed.

if you want to rant about aesthetic injustice and the ills of an over judgmental society, write a blog post about it and submit the link. if there's an interesting conversation to be had on that topic here, this community is relatively good at recognizing those opportunities and you'll get your forum for elucidation.
That actually looks horrible on my box--the original link is much nicer.