skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Something needs to be done to make the school year more worthwhile for such students

Actually, it needs to be done for ALL students. You really think the only kids poorly served by school are those that teach themselves math on the side?

Nearly every kid has an innate curiosity about the world and more importantly the people around him. Some prefer symbolic worlds, others the physical, and most the social.

Schools are currently poor places to learn about any of those. The bizarre hierarchies in place seriously warp most children - witness the daily cruelty that is normal in an average school (others on the internet have made this point better than I can).

To most people, Lockhart's lament is a very minor annoyance compared to the social retardation that goes on in these institutions. Rampant alcohol abuse and unreasonable sexual promiscuity in universities are the inevitable backlash to years of social repression, far beyond the young ages at which it might be called for.

It was not unreasonable in earlier times to consider someone a "young man" or "young woman" at 13 or 14, and as a fully functional society member at 16. Why does this seem so completely ludicrous now? Has our genetic lifecycle programming changed? Of course not - but our social lifecycle programming has.

All this to say that the kids for whom symbolic systems education is too slow are the lucky ones. For them, there is at least the library as an outlet for that spark. Consider the rest, who have no such thing.
That was one of the reasons I posted this link -- it adds nothing of value to pg's essay, and quotes a whole lot of it; I think bordering on plagarism.
Poll: Do you take the domain into account when deciding to click an HN link?
I noticed something interesting. I submitted a link a few hours ago:

Things a Startup Founder Will Never Say (slideshare.net)

2 minutes later, someone else submitted a link:

Things A Startup Founder Will Never Say (techcrunch.com)

These are the same slideshow, but one is linked directly and one is linked from TechCrunch. Even though mine is first, the points are 2 for my link and 12 for the other link.

Of course I'm not complaining, but it brings up an interesting point: how much does the domain name impact your decision whether or not to click a link (and implicitly vote on it)?

Note: I realize this is probably just because the other link is higher up in the new list, but the question is still valid.
I don't or only click links from certain sites
The domain is important but not the only factor
The title is all that matters
Also, in game programming trigonometry is fundamental, and in 3D an entirely higher order of magnitude is required.
It's hard to tell if this is an interesting correlation of several different sociological trends, or just sloppy journalism. This whole thing reminds me of the "metrosexual" thing in the US, but it's interesting that they also tied in vegetarianism and living at home with their parents.
What you are saying for about kids working is definitely not true for my part of Europe. I've had plenty of friends from rich families growing up and if anything they tend to be more likely to get a summer job and I can't in the slightest imagine anyone getting embarrassed over their children having a blue collar summer job.

Just because you are rich it doesn't mean you get everything you point at and even still it's quite satisfying for any young person to know hes earned something.

I on the other hand come from the lower classes, pretty much as low as it gets in Sweden and I've never felt the need to have a summer job because of income.
Even if you don't "use math" per se in your daily life, it still provides a rich source of metaphors for understanding the world; Everything from the way flu spreads to your chances of winning the lottery. You may not stop to actually calculate these things, but "a feeling for math" will give you a great deal more insight than someone who didn't "need to learn useless concepts".

I can't unequivocally say that innumeracy = poverty, but my hunch is its damn close.
It's shameful for our children NOT to work because it suggests they are spoiled and lazy.

During college, there was an unspoken resentment towards students without jobs because most of us schlubs had to work to pay our own tuition / rent / spending money / whatever, while some people were just given everything by their parents.
Ugh ... I for one couldn't stomach a world of people who had skipped English Literature (or Algebra) to attend Rails Bootcamp.
OK, so what's the optimum strategy?

How about starting with a CD and book of nursery rhymes and then listening whilst following the text.

Then eventually ditching the CD and reading/singing the rhymes from the book out loud.

Then (having read the translations) doing the same whilst visualising the content.
Estrogen-in-the-water-supply-eaters more like it. Or PCBs. Or something.
If algebra is truely neccessary, than it will be taught in some school specializing in basic education. If it is neccessary for higher mathematics to be taught, than you could just go to an engineering school.

If you're a truly care about pure mathematican, than you would go to an actual university and study to become part of the scholar class.

Beyond that, I don't really care much about being a "participatory citizen" nonsense because I don't believe in democracy or writing pointless letters to politicans, but I do care a lot about civic because I am an anarchist, not an apolitical person. I don't know the approriate place to teach it but I suspect that is simply the duty of parents.
Male BRAS?

Japan has always struck me as very strange, at turns brutally rigid, bullying, and at the same time very faddish. The article paints this behavior as a reaction to the salaryman excesses of the post war environment, where the people in their 20s and 30s are withdrawing from commitments and becoming virtual hermits.

The comments are fascinating with some likening them to Well's Eloi and others commenting on parallel behavior in Britain.
Follow @mousavi1388 to see updates on the #iranelection - every other channel is down for them, but the Twitter account is still being updated. Lots of videos and photos from the streets too.
I am a game programming hobbyist, even I know how vital trignometry is.
"Her company claims that roughly two-thirds of all Japanese men aged 20-34 are now partial or total grass-eaters..."

A very imprecisely defined term, so how do we know that it accurately describes two thirds of men in that age range, roughly or not?

It is hard to tell whether this article is hyperbole or not. There is very little in the way of quantitative data to say. Although this bit of quantitative data caught my eye:

"About one third of the Japanese workforce is now casual or part-time"

That seems a huge number to me, and could account for some of the claimed changes in the culture.

I also found interesting the inclusion of "has a liking for deserts and foreign travel." These are indeed traits considered feminine in Japan, but not so much in the rest of the world (I learned to curb my enthusiasm for sweets when I lived in Japan).
Some domains contain very little information, e.g. tumblr.com hosts hundreds of thousands of blogs on sub domains not shown.
Google has a multi-camera method which corrects for page curvature, making it unnecessary to despine/flatten the books. Unfortunately, it's patented...

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/15/1834246
You use a disassembler to read the code, but accept that static analysis is a hard problem you might as well be looking at garbage.

You use runtime disassembly, the primtive disassembly feature built into most systems level debuggers (and the one good systems level debugger ;-)

You can replace instruction in memory with the 'a'ssemble command you can test your hypothesis without affecting that actual code on disk. Once you path the program in memory and see everything to your liking, you fire up a hex editor and patch that memory region. Patching is an art; if you new instruction can overwrite a region of the code, you can insert a jump to the new instructions, then 'ret'urn from them with another jmp to your call point. If, otoh, you're adding more code than the instructions you're replacing, then you will need to find more places to stuff it, or you might need to reconstruct the program header and adjust the sizes.

This is called reverse engineering, google it.
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I ran into a paper called "The Next 700 Languages" while doing Scala research. The paper, written in 1966, is lengthy but awesome. Its conclusion reminded me a lot of PGs paper, which I hadn't read:

The languages people use to communicate with computers differ in their intended aptitudes, towards either a particular application area, or a particular phase of computer use (high level programming, program assembly, job scheduling, etc). They also differ in physical appearance, and more important, in logical structure. The question arises, do the idiosyncracies reflect basic logical properties of the situations that are being catered for? Or are they accidents of history and personal background that may be obscuring fruitful developments? This question is clearly important if we are trying to predict or influence language evolution.

To answer it we must think in terms, not of languages, but of families of languages. That is to say we must systematize their design so that a new language is a point chosen from a well-mapped space, rather than a laboriously devised construction.

PDF: http://ttic.uchicago.edu/~blume/classes/aut2008/proglang/pap...
A lesson in the power of brands and reputation. We like to think that we are above marketing, reputation, and stereotypes, but at the end of the day something from "techcrunch.com" or "stanford.edu" will almost always attract more eyeballs and respect than joeschmoe.com for the same piece of content.
Thanks for taking the time to explain this!
The username is all that matters :)
sorry for the long comment but I had to address these because they're all kind of silly to me.

Men Like Blonde Bombshells: The article claims this is all but universal but...to be honest...I like redheads. So that's disproved right there.

Humans are naturally polygamous: Well...duh. If this is so politically incorrect why did I learn it in my 8th grade science class?

Most women benefit from polygymy: The example they give as "proof" is women can share wealthy men in polygamous societies. That only works if women value wealth overall. I can show you thousands of studies where a poor man got the girl by being more attentive than a rich man. So this is bunk,

Most suicide bombers are Muslim: Well again...duh. The sheer number of muslims combined with their religion being in a struggle between fundamentalism and progressivism pretty much guarantees that. But that probably wasn't the case 2,000 years ago and it probably won't be the case 2,000 years from now.

Having sons reduces the likelihood of divorce: Maybe. But it seems like a pretty complicated thought process to be an instinct. Most men I know don't consider how they're going to pass on wealth to their son when getting divorced.

Beautiful people have more daughters: Completely unproven hypothesis.

What Gates and McCarthy have in common with criminals: Stupid. Yes, young people take more risks and people who take more risks produce more. That's common in all humans.

It's natural for politicians to risk everything for an affair: Politicians are risk takers. Duh. They're in a job where they have to win over millions of people every few years or lose their job.

Men sexually harass women because they are not sexist: Their theory is that men treat women aggressively just like they do men so they aren't sexist. But not being sexist means realizing women are different than men and treating them accordingly so their theory is nothing more than a word game.
Boy discovers microbe that eats plastic
I have my own personal blacklist and will usually click on the hn comments first for those if the title seems interesting.

There are also some domains on which I am more likely to click.
I wonder if this is the coming business model for newspapers?
Although I may read the comments, I ignore all (youtube.com) postings.
"preference for blue eyes seems both universal and undeniable"

I've literally never heard this claimed before. They give a plausible argument for it, but is there any basis to think the preference really exists?
$200 surcharge for new iPhone 3G S? Not here.
I usually read the comments first and only read the article if the comments are good. I look at domain when their are no comments and the title seems linkbaity.
For me, the title is all that matters when the article is strictly about programming. If it's some sort of Top X list, TechCrunch or CNet almost always have the best ones, but you'll definitely have a hard time finding actual programming-related articles. In fact, I have more fun reading through the comments here on HN and the given blog/website than the actual articles themselves; I would not be able to count the amount of times a bug with a piece of code was fixed thanks to a guy writing a comment on the blogs.
I agree. For even the most basic understanding of the world, a feel for mathematics is absolutely necessary.

While I wouldn't quite go as far as Heinlein does, his opinion on the matter seems to be:

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house.

-- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"
Yes, in the sense that it is 10% genuine social change and 90% desire for a snappy title to sell books/journalism.

(Pro-tip for foreign consumers of Japanese journalism: NHK is the BBC, the 3 big national dailies are the NYT, Nikkei is the WSJ, and every other news outlet in the country will happily just make things up. 85% of 35 year olds below the poverty line!? For pity's sake.)
I think it's a mistake to conflate marketing, reputation, and stereotypes. I don't have an unlimited amount of time to spend reading articles. Reputation is one indicator that I use in determining which articles to spend that time on.
Processed soy (like tofu) has Estrogen like chemicals in it.
great news ... but ... is it ready for the desktop ???
Any recommendations on learning to speak and understand japanese without learning kanji? I hated studying kanji while taking japanese language courses in undergrad.
I have read that the Y-chromosome is more "brittle" (for lack of a better word) than the others in the human genome. Therefore, as environmental factors get worse, the likelihood of females increases. Rich, not too old males are in pretty good shape, so their progeny should be split between gender. Less-rich, or old, or disadvantaged folks should be in worse shape leading to increased XX's.

It's inductive reasoning, but most of the folks I've know the last 10-20 years have had daughters - older parents, often in chemical laboratories.
I wish the domain showed up in the RSS feed...
Except the home can't be run in a VM so programmers can't (easily) test home. Business can't play DVDs - becuase a business would never need to show a DVD
Yeah, but those are (amazing) PC games.

The guy who wrote the article seems to be a Console-only player.
DoS vulnerability in Chrome (hitting me frequently today)
He hates DRM but uses an iPhone?
The train sequence in Crysis Warhead was incredibly hard to me.
Y-chromo doesn't recombine much, so it figures that it'd be more fragile. Mutations have probably been building up basically forever.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam
Having semi-worked in the nightlife industry for a little while, I can assure you that the same phenomenon is very present here in the US. A night out in ATL is chock full of guys with spiky hair and fauxhawks wearing Affliction / Ed Hardy / whatever the new craze is and sporting more accessories than the girls that they're hitting on. Google "peacocking" and you'll see what I'm talking about.

This just seems like more of westernized / American culture making its way to Japan, more specifically "local celebrity" / "rockstar" culture. The critics are even using similar terminology; hip-hop has been calling guys like this herbs for over a decade now. From Urban Dictionary: Herb - Someone who tries too hard to be cool. An overzealous poseur.
I agree that money is a proxy for value. That still does not justify the unsupported claim that it "encourages all negative externalities", and causes "deep rifts and strife." I agree that economic activity can have negative consequences - but how is this caused by the mere existence of money?

Being rewarded with the value is not more helpful than being rewarded with the marker - most people appreciate using their paycheck at their choice of restaurants, rather than simply trading code for hogs at the local bazaar.

If nobody owns anything, trade is nonsense.

Barring slavery, nearly everyone owns their time. Thus people own something. Until a startup solves death, that remains a scarce resource. The existence of scarce resources with ownership is thus fundamental to the human condition. Much (most?) trade involves the exchange of labor for "markers." Any time you do a favor for anyone, it's trade. Sometimes, they do you a return favor by giving markers. We can rename money to markers and trade to favors, but that's what it is.

As for physical resources - their "ownership" is basically just a way of prioritizing access. So - you might prefer other ways, like waiting in line, or lotteries. When people have tried those ways, they've found that letting the guy with the most markers have the resource works out for the best. Obviously, you know this - so what do you think works better as a means of resource allocation?

Third, the Eisenstein thesis doesn't mention interest

He mentions several times (I'm referring primarily to his videos) an enthusiasm for instituting money that "decays," like bread, so that we are tempted to spend it more quickly rather than attempting to save it. I can't describe this idea as anything other than crazy, so I'm glad that you reject it as well.

Monetizing efficiencies....that one seems a bit faulty

It's true - I expressed myself poorly, and indeed the idea was unclear in my mind at the time. I think neither of us was right in our characterization of this so far. Technology and markets are, to me, each the seed of the other. Yes, technology creates new markets - but markets capitalize new (usable) technologies. You don't have to call them markets - you can call them patrons, such as those that financed da Vinci. Once again, however, markets appear to do a better job than feudal patrons. Increasingly, groups of patrons acting with good information can do a good job as well - but it remains a market, just a better-informed one.

Our current revolution (/me degrades into general rant:)

... is not a revolution at all. The "Web2.0" line of innovation seems quite trivial - office online instead of offline, social voting - these are simply efficiency improvements on existing organizational memes. It's probably impolite to post such a comment on a YC board, but nonetheless - does anybody seriously think that this stuff is earth-shaking? Culturally, it might be; but technologically, it's just variations on a theme. Go check out the stem cell labs in Singapore; they're innovating.
This is how "Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters" http://www.amazon.com/Mutant-59-Plastic-Eaters-Kit-Pedler/dp... started, a researcher who wants to clean up oil spills and plastic trash has developed a microbe the eats plastic that is accidentally released into the sewers of London.
Video gaming to be twice as big as music by 2011
You need to understand how HN works. Whenever someone submits a link that was already submitted, the submitted link gets a point.

So the techcrunch article would get more upvotes, as more people would be submitting it, compared to some random slideshare page.

And since the techcrunch article would get more upvotes in a short period of time, it'll end up on the front page quickly, which will in turn get that submission more upvotes.
You know the techcrunch link will include context, slides can often be difficult to interpret by themselves and won't attempt to understand the big picture.
"Reading a newspaper is not possible currently..."

It may be painful, but it should be possible; yes, you'll have to look up the kanji, over and over -- writing them down as you look them up -- and it'll take you half an hour to read half of one article. But if you keep at it, and keep looking them up, every day, you will improve -- you will learn them! You just have to tolerate a lot of tedium on your way.
Meh. If you follow your local elections on election night, perhaps in the U.S., you'll notice an interesting pattern: the percentage of the vote really doesn't change significantly between 10% of the vote counted and 100% of the vote counted. No matter which precincts report first, or how the bias is supposed to be (rural precincts support candidate X! minority precincts support candidate Y!), by the time 10% of the vote has been counted you have enough of a sample that you can call that particular race unless two candidates are very very close.

If 10% of the vote counted says candidate X is winning 60-40, candidate X is going to win, and she's going to win with about 60% of the vote.

I don't know (nor particularly care) whether the Iranian election was rigged, but this analysis doesn't show anything untoward at all.
The underworked American (The education of American kids)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=656645
Using Quick Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas
I was thinking of simply adding a link at the top of the main page between 'new' and 'threads' that was 'peers' and I could subscribe to multiple HN users' tagged links. I believe it would allow a closer connection between the members of the community that have interests in common. Seemingly, there is a sub-culture of people interested in mostly programming news; so, instead of moving them to a new site altogether, allow them to maintain a connection to this site, at the same time as giving them a tool to build community.
I'm sorry, but [scribd] == I will not click.
Thanks. Very useful information here. Current theory (Krashen) says output or production happens naturally only after hundreds of hours of "comprehensible input". It's great to see contrary evidence. I'd love to know more.
The most disturbing part is the number of 'Stay safe Ehsan' messages in the comments. Scary!

Stay safe Ehsan.
Reputation and brand is a product of good marketing.
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I like how your hats match.
Is there a legal way to sell used digital books or used digital music?

Like some app where you identify the mp3's that you'd like to sell. The price is half of itunes. When a user buys it, the app "permanently destroys" (yeah, yeah, i know) your copy of the mp3 and transmits the mp3 to the buyer.

Re-selling goods is a long-standing fixture of the economy. Doesn't it apply to digital goods too?
ActiveRecord Querying: Be Smart and Vigilant
Being nice on the phone to customer service has always gotten me everything I've ever wanted.