skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What stood out for me from this article wasn't the homework load, which only seems slightly more than what I remember from my own youth, but rather that:

1) a teacher can accuse a parent of "cyberbullying" for an email sent in purported confidentiality to others, and that the claim can be taken seriously. Obviously I didn't read the email, but the author seems well-read and reasonable, so I'm inclined to conjecture that whatever he sent wasn't outrageous. If I as a parent were "called in to the vice principal's office" and accused of cyberbullying a teacher, I'd laugh in their face. Is this teacher teaching middle school, or in middle school?

2) that the parent is having constant meetings with school officials, and seemingly-frequent interaction with other parents via email. Granted in my days (mid-90's or so) email wasn't a big thing, but my parents typically took the hands-off stand of "did the teacher say so? then do it", plus the occasional PTA meeting. (They did help when asked, but I can probably count all the face-to-face meetings they had with school faculty on one hand). And that's a stance I can very much appreciate. I don't know what parent-teacher relationships are like today, but it sure sounds like the teachers are hearing almost as much from the parents as they are from the students.

Which isn't to say the system can't be improved. But honestly I remember nearly as much homework from my days, and those points stuck out more to me as a sign of the times.
At this point, I wish we could just pass a stupid special-case law granting Disney and Apple Music whatever copyrights they currently hold in perpetuity, so that the rest of the copyright system could get back to being useful/healthy.
> No, Apple's deciding and the market votes with his wallet (and judging from their actually buying stuff --and at the quite expensive end of the market at that--, it has voted much in favor of those decisions for a decade or so).

So, when Apple said that the MINIMUM screen size for tablets was 10" people talked with their wallet and this was the right size.

When Apple released iPad Mini people talked with their wallet and this was a right size along the regular iPad?

> There's always some people, call them sui generis, or mavericks, or loonies, that do want a floppy drive in their laptop

Really, do you have top put a nonsensical analogy to try to defend the indefensible?
Not really a comment but this is an exception I see that gets thrown every once and awhile :(

throw new Exception("no exception thrown");
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The start of that sentence mentions finding three quotes, so it should be their significance.
He didn't really hate the character as much as he was tired of him and wanted to focus his time on writing what he considered more important works. He did try to stop writing Holmes stories in the middle of his career, and managed about 10 years before being forced back due to pressure from his publishers and the public.
> I will never know the right way to do it in C++

IME, looking for a "right way" of doing anything requiring some kind of knowledge or technique is a tell-tale sign of inexperience. Pursuing the search, analyzing possibilities, weighing their trade-offs in the light of envisioned use-cases makes you better and more experienced.

Abandoning the search.. well, you'll certainly never get better.

This extends also to things like designing a LAN, database tables and relations, even to martial arts and sports.
>Not having FM radio for example is like not having a floppy disk drive an modern PCs.

FYI: The iphone wireless chipset (BCM4334) already contains an FM radio. Apple has chosen to ship the phone with the functionality disabled. Presumably to push people towards itunes offerings.
> Might as well have replied "well, my grandfather rocks floppy disks on his 286 just fine".

Well, it is clear that you like stupid analogies and you have not clear what it is obsolete or not and radio is not obsolete.
Yeah, that time picker is awesome. All the other apps need to use this one, especially Calendar.
As a fellow high school dropout I sympathize with what you're saying, but I don't think it can be the basis for effective public policy. How many Americans have the ability to teach their children math, science, writing, history and civics at a high school level? How many American families have the time to provide children with anything close to the amount of hours of instruction available in schools? And what happens if we build an educational system that doesn't delegate education to the state, as you put it. That system might be fine for parents who have free time and/or can afford tutors, but what about everyone else? Public schools are far from perfect, but they provide vastly more equality of opportunity than existed in our society before their invention.
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Yup. That's all I want.
> Early Android prototypes, shown by Google just before the iPhone was announced had half-size screens and physical keyboards, just like the rest of the smartphones of the day.

And now it is clear that you don't know a shit abouit what your talking

By the way, Apple also invented the wheel and the sliced bread
Ah, of course. Thanks both.
One option is to move the state to be explicit in the call to the step, which means the test becomes an example rather than a general rule (although that's what it always was, now it's just a bit clearer). It also means the steps can be reused, rather than having steps with dependencies (which aren't specified anywhere or statically enforced).

> removing all state limits the ability for a scenario to express the intent the author speaks about.

However, writing them like that means each step moves further away from what it says it's doing. The more you do this, the more you might as well not execute them and go and write more examples.
White Teeth, Zadie Smith

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, Tom Robbins

Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell

Catch 22, Joseph Heller

Timequake; Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom, TE Lawrence

The Histories, Tacitus

The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger (caveat, it was most effective when I read it at 16)

Redwall, Brian Jaques (got me really excited about reading when I was in the fourth grade)

This list could be much, much longer, but those are the most prominent 'life-changers' that come to mind.
Welcome to the educated new world; where education matters.
One thing to consider; perhaps the child shouldn't be in that class/level or school? Perhaps their previous school didn't cover the material so this is all base stuff for everyone else?

If it takes you 3-5hrs to do something and you want to sleep before midnight, start earlier. Perhaps when less tired it would be quicker.

I used to have homework that could take me between 30 mins and 2.5 hrs each day (7 days a week). I started when I came in from school and had a break for some tv and then finished to have time to do other things.
You learn how to be faster at the homework. When I was 16-18 I most probably spent longer still

I used to have enough time to walk home from school, watch tv, play sport, play trumpet and do that work. Also, at lunch time there is usually time to do some work. We used to collaborate on some stuff too.
Languages are simple syntactically, but I'd have a hard time believing that anyone could pick up the set of idioms necessary to effectively use a new language in a few days.

Norvig it covers this well in his Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (http://norvig.com/21-days.html) essay.
There are some concepts at odds here. "The measurements included numbers like 78 13/64, and all this multiplying and dividing was to be done without a calculator." is not 'rote learning'/'memorisation without rationalisation'. It's directly exercising an ability. I've had a university-level experience reach for her calculator to multiply 0.2 by 3, and when I forbade her from using it, she just stared dumbly at me. That someone of that age can't do that multiplication 'automatically' was quite a surprise, especially given that it was a science course.

Similarly, finding the distances between state capitals exercises research and application skills, and gives a feeling for geographical distances. Doing it in miles and kilometers is helping to get people accustomed to using the Standard International set of units alongside the archaic Imperial units. Likewise, a journalist finding scientific mathematical notation 'unintuitive' doesn't mean it has no merit.

The workload is ridiculous, absolutely, but the content of the homework doesn't sound as useless as the article makes it out to be.
This I agree. Kids who are a decade younger than me are drawing circles around me. It seems smart people are smart at any level they are.
Very interesting. I wonder if this project will then make it easier for students to get a job or freelance gig.
Do you have a solution that is more practical than waving a magic wand?
Numbers are from 2012 b/c I didn't want to spend more time looking for more recent #s. But according the MS Q3 2012 numbers, their Business division revenue was $5.81 billion, up 9 percent from $5.33 billion a year earlier.
Sure but crap as such isn't an ethical problem. In fact, theoretically it would be the job of publications, not authors, to prevent crap from being published.

Plus, if the competition wasn't so gruesome and that evaluation criteria weren't shallow, the pressure to pad one's CV wouldn't be so great.

"Holy ethical violation batman, the slaves are slipping out of their manacles and they certified on their honor they would not do that"
I suspect that this is done primarily to enhance Apple services like Siri, iMessage, and the like (anything that touches the iCloud), since Apple controls both end points.
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Me too, I actually find hipster culture, to the extent it is indeed a thing, to bring a certain sense of fun to my little world. As opposed to everyone just giving up and buying what they see on TV, watching football, Facebook etc.
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But who will report for the apple fan-boy.
I don't follow.

iPhones already exist in the enterprise space. They aren't going to need to buy more of them to use them as laptops, just keep buying the ones they're already buying and use them for two things instead of one.
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> I hold the opinion that the proper training and education of one's offspring should be a foremost life goal, and that delegating it to the state because "it's easier", "I don't have the time", etc. is an abhorrent cop-out.

This is one of the main reasons why I do not (and very well may never) have children; I realized that the commitment to do it properly is just too great for me to make.
As far as I understand, it uses the least congested path available. In theory, this would mean it would prefer the wifi connection.
Six and a half hours sleep, this is way too low, Millpond Children’s Sleep Clinic recommends over nine for a 13yr old. http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Childrenssleep/Pages/howmuchsleep...
Accountability would be a start.
To be honest, the article isn't really all that wrong or sensationalist - It's a little bit simplified in some spots but for the most part is an accurate depiction of how simple it is to perform man-in-the-middle attacks on the unsuspecting with a device running Karma.

I'm not sure which exact points of article your parent poster has an issue with, though so I can't rebut his arguments.

The first paragraph is relatively straightforward - just posting to HTTPS isn't enough. Your login form has to be HTTPS too, and not mixed-mode. Inject a javascript keylogger into your login form which you served over HTTP? Don't mind if I do.

The rest of the article is just a tutorial on how to get to the point where you can do something like that, by using the Pineapple.

Yes, Karma does actually work like explained in the article, and yes, clients will connect to any AP running Karma or a similar implementation, and it will do it for the exact reason he stated: They will broadcast the SSIDs they 'remember'. Once they're connected to your AP, well, you're on the path between them and anything they try to visit. That's pretty much the definition of being a man in the middle.

The article doesn't go too deep into what you can do and simply mentions that you can take a look at HTTP traffic -- If you can look at it, you can modify it on the fly. If you can do that you can spin up something like SSLstrip[0], or drop in a java driveby or... well, anything you can imagine doing to traffic on the wire.

Note that the pineapple is not the only device that can do this. There's all sorts of things like the expensive and super sneaky Pwn Plug[1] to something like a hand-made minipwner[2] which you can put together with $30 and a bunch of spare time.

[0] http://www.thoughtcrime.org/software/sslstrip/
[1] http://pwnieexpress.com/products/pwnplug-elite
[2] http://www.minipwner.com/
Firstly, iOS as it stands is very very poor compared with a desktop OS for office work. At an absolute minimum people need to be able to have two documents up on screen at once, maybe one spreadsheet and one PowerPoint doc.

Secondly, im willing to entertain the idea that iOS could evolve into something that could become useful as a desktop replacement, but i am yet to see a single reason why it would have an advantage over competitors, and there are many reasons, such as cost, that they are at a disadvantage.
I would say that perhaps parsing logging works best when using awk, grep and the like, because that's more or less what they were designed for. But not everything is unix logs, and not everything is over 10GB. Having said that, python can absolutely handle 10GB data sets. In fact with things like PySpark, you can really go much bigger.
I spent a lot of time up until high school forcing myself not to use a calculator, because I wanted to work on my mental skills in arithmetic, but I always make a lot of small mistakes, even now.

I have a hard enough time concentrating on 'easy' things , please don't ask me to hold numbers in my brain. I am a pretty "mathy" person but mental multiplication is not meant for the human thought process, too much is going on.

I say this half in jest, but I've met people with very good mathematical sense (especially in domains such as topology) who are incapable of multiplying 3 numbers without making a mistake. Some people have very few registers, and RAM is really slow.
The main micro blogging site I use is a mixture of scala, java, with ruby/iOS for the front end.

I dare you to write a fully featured, async web stack that handles many-core on the scale of hundreds of millions of users in C and ASM within equal or lesser man hours. Once such a thing exists i'll start believing the hype.
> I think it is an easy fall back to make comparisons between the rich and poor, but that isn't the problem here. It is the government....How much does the US government funnel into programs to feed the war machine, or spy on their own people.

You need to dig a little deeper. Who funds these government officials? Who hires them into lucrative private companies? Who effectively owns government?

If you say "the people" you are technically correct - most of the US Debt is owed to social security trust fund - which has been consistently drained over the past few decades to pay for wars and spying as you say. Social Security is owed to private individuals.

However, the funding of political campaigns through lobbying is an above board bribery that effectively debt the government official to their sposors... which are increasingly large corporations with wealthy owners.

The anti-tax drown-the-government firebreathers in Congress are often the most corrupt of the lot.
My high school in Connecticut declared that you should spend 1 hour doing homework for each academic class every day, which adds up to 12 hours each day focused on attending school, or more. I have no idea why this sounds reasonable to administrators and teachers.

The idea of 'memorization' as learning has always bothered me... The most reliable long-term way to recall things is to learn and comprehend them.
school isn't just about learning, it's also about meeting your peers. The last thing we need is even more social segregation because all the rich kids don't know what it's like to not be able to afford 3 homes.
So much whining. These tasks represent actual problems you might be tasked with finding out in the real world; not all of them are directly relevant to students or their utility immediately apparent, but the mothodologies are solid. Growing up in Ireland and going to high school int he 80s, I was doing 3-4 hours/night of homework from the equivalent of your grade 7, and I still found time to watch TV and read for pleasure each evening.

I laughed out loud at the author's complaint that math homework involved doing a lot of calculation without the aid of a calculator. Well yes, that is how you develop math feel. Using a calculator is great, and appropriate in later math classes, but training in mechanistic tasks is important too, for the same reason that athletic exercise involves a good deal of repetition and practice.

It's the same reason musicians play scales every day - it's not because they don't care about the theoretical underpinnings, it's because performance depends on practice. Likewise, understanding the mechanics of a tennis ball hitting a racket won't make you into a good tennis player, and understanding how to punch something into a calculator won't help you develop your mental math skills.

What I am interested in is what my daughter is doing during those nightly hours between 8 o’clock and midnight

Why are you letting her wait until 8pm to start homework? Start at 6, done by 9.

I don’t remember how much homework was assigned to me in eighth grade. I do know that I didn’t do very much of it and that what little I did, I did badly. My study habits were atrocious. After school I often went to friends’ houses, where I sometimes smoked marijuana, and then I returned home for dinner; after lying to my parents about not having homework that night, I might have caught an hour or two of television.

And look at the results: simple problems like calculating the area and perimeter of complex shapes just seem too, too hard for your poor brain. Instead you have the mental equivalent of a beer gut.
> Yes, initially you’ll be scratching your head trying to implement something in Haskell that you could hack in C++ in 10 minutes. If you’re lucky, and you work for Sean Parent or other exceptional programmer, he will code review your hacks and show you how not to program in C++.

Don't underestimate "instant gratification" even when it comes to programming languages. Yes you might code yourself into a mess further down the line, but most of us are in the business of shipping software not worrying about its correctness.
I don't recall similar homework loads (Germany, school being 10–20 years ago), but that might be due to laziness on my part or simply the fact that it wasn't a good time for me anyway. By the later grades (11th and onwards) it definitely wasn't as much.

I liked what our math teacher said regarding his homework: It's for practice and not strictly needed and thus voluntary. If we feel confident doing the homework ad-hoc on the blackboard in class then we don't need to do it at home. While this won't work for every class (e.g. I guess languages don't really work that way), it was definitely nicer than having to unconditionally do the homework (as well as all the rest).

> I’ve often suspected that teachers don’t have any idea about the
> cumulative amount of homework the kids are assigned when
> they are taking five academic classes. There is little to no
> coordination among teachers in most schools when it comes
> to assignments and test dates.

This is something my mother (a teacher) can confirm as well. Many teachers just assume that they're the only ones giving homework and thus don't really see why it can be so much. That was a problem in uni as well sometimes in the earlier years (and anecdotally the norm by now that we have the Bachelor/Master system, depending on your major).
> Government isn't an isolated entity in society it represents segments of a society. And usually that is the rich and or powerful.

I do believe the rich and powerful do have a leash around many governments, and so do the average person as that is how the government is often voted in by appeasing by populist policy.

However I doubt the rich and powerful have a requirement to cut food stamps. Again this isn't a rich man driving policy it is a government deciding where funding is going.
This is what jumped out at me, too. There are studies linking obesity, poor school performance, and problems with emotional control (just to name a few) to lack of sleep in children. Having to stay up late to do homework seems counterproductive.
Yes. I reached college with 24 AP credits and a 31 ACT (never touched the SAT) 5 years ago and I did barely any homework (~1hr/week total). Instead I played a lot of video games, and when I was 17 taught myself how to program C++ to mod Civ4. I could never have learned programming had I not had tons of free time.

Homework is evil because it's a massive opportunity cost in terms of time.
Oooh, yes, definitely, let's have this discussion again!
I'm disappointed that some people are disappointed in Matz after just several tweets of his. It's hard to get your point across in 140 chars or less, let alone in text form.

Edit: A word from the conf organizer:
http://martyhaught.com/articles/2013/09/18/rubyconf-2013-cfp...
You're right - in the end my solution for this particular project was using grep and awk to parse the loglines into a CSV-ish format. That was then interpreted by Python and matplotlib to create beautiful graphs.
Even as a poor country like India increases food aid to its poor, we cut food. Incredible.

How can the GOP claim to be so closely allied with Jesus, and yet work so consistently against the poor?

In case you missed is, the proposed annual savings of $3.9B is the cost of three (3) B-2 bombers.
I'm confused why can't docker run on bsd?
I think he means 'Google Display Network', which is what puts adverts on sites using 'Google AdSense'.
I have a hard enough time concentrating on 'easy' things , please don't ask me to hold numbers in my brain. I am a pretty "mathy" person but mental multiplication is not meant for the human thought process, too much is going on.

That's like saying humans were never meant to run up stairs so you're taking the elevator. In any case, nobody's asking yo to hold numbers in your brain; it's OK to use paper and pencil for your calculations, as generation after generation of mathematicians did.
To be fair, I don't hold her to be the slightest bit representative, it's just that such a simple mathematical process is just... automatic. I'm not mathy at all - I've abandoned several online crypto intro courses because I can't follow at a reasonable speed when the notation comes out - but when it comes to manipulating single-digit numbers?

In her case it was significantly affected by her lack of motivation, but it was just plain odd that such a trivial thing wasn't 'automatic' for someone in a science course (the actual question was calculating V=IR). I had to simplify it with "Well, what's 2x3?", and then, 'given the answer', she could continue.
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Ah, that is my misunderstanding. I thought it was some sort of "split traffic between each path".

But I guess for it to work it would still need to check the cellular connection every now and then. I wonder how much traffic that would generate? (hopefully a negligable amount.)
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