skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As odd as it sounds schools that service poorer students have more computers in general (at least in California where I live). This is because schools are granted what's called Title 1 funds based on the amount of lower income students who attend. Beyond that the state and federal governments subsidize high speed Internet connections like T3 lines through the E-Rate program

It still might be a problem but less because of lower income students and more because there's no way to put a computer on every student's desktop
Computers are more or less a commodity now...I mean you can get one for a few hundred dollars, or a used one off craigslist for 20 bucks, pretty much every household has one nowadays.
If you have, you're breaking an NDA by talking about it.
Sadly that's not true. The first study I could find (don't have much time to research right now) shows that only 73% of U.S. households have Internet access: http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2006/Internet-Penetration...
Ask HN: Web2py vs Django?
Anyone has experience with both? Django seems to be the popular choice right now, but it appears Web2py has better support for Google App Engine. What major reasons are there to pick one over the other? Which would be easier to get into, coming from a Rails background?
Ask HN: How do you use the Safari Developer tools?
I just updated to 4.0 and just now I started to toy with it, loving how it is breaking down the loading times of the sites I have built. I'm not yet sure what the true power of it is though, I'm about to start googling but in the mean time I was wondering how _you_ use the tools, if you have any tips, etc. to share...
I don't know about those studies, but as a student I hated having to lug textbooks around but was lucky enough that my high school rarely if ever made it a requirement. The school and its students are doing well regardless. Maybe they could be doing even better, but at least they have light backpacks :)

With regards to the Governor's plan, this seems like a really good idea in general, and at least a sign that our Governor is willing to reform education in a meaningful (i.e. not by commissioning book committees of the type that Feynman derided) way.
Google Voice, keep your current phone number
Here is a more recent report from December 2008.

http://www.pewinternet.org/Data-Tools/Download-Data/~/media/...

The younger demographics are much more likely to be online. 18-29 has close to 90% penetration, while the 65+ has only 41%.

+ the major people who aren't online, are those who don't see the need for it. Needing it for their children, would change the situation.

+ you also also have geography to consider, Californians are much more likely to have internet access, than some farmers in Ohio.
You could have computers for each student in the classroom, but I imagine that would be quite expensive.

I don't see the problem with a projector. The teacher can control what material is displayed, and can thus choose to display relevant material for the current lesson. Yes, this relies on the teacher knowing what they're doing, but the entire school system does anyways. If a student wants to have their own reference in class, it would be cheaper and more educational for the student to take notes on whatever topics they found interesting or wanted to have on paper.

I'd be interested to look at those studies, though.
Conclusion from the article:

"Dr Wood suggests that positive self-statements cause negative moods in people with low self-esteem because they conflict with those people’s views of themselves. When positive self-statements strongly conflict with self-perception, she argues, there is not mere resistance but a reinforcing of self-perception. People who view themselves as unlovable find saying that they are so unbelievable that it strengthens their own negative view rather than reversing it. Given that many readers of self-help books that encourage positive self-statements are likely to suffer from low self-esteem, they may be worse than useless."
I never signed an NDA, I guess I agreed to one when installing the software? I'm not a developer, the WWDC release is all over BitTorrent.
what happens to the cheaters?
Which they explained were 2 main focuses in the keynote. A Cocoa rewrite will make it faster out of the box.
Since you're from a Rails background, it's worth mentioning that you can run JRuby on Rails on Google App Engine.

http://olabini.com/blog/2009/04/jruby-on-rails-on-google-app...
I urge readers to consider the importance of civil disobedience in the face of overwhelming abuses of power by the Iranian government. I'm not advocating any one particular method, but his arguments are weak. Abusers of freedom may cry foul, but that doesn't make it so.
I will like to believe that the Desktop software will move towards parallelism, may not be to the same extent as of HPC, but in a similar direction in the sense that it will certainly go away from strictly single core approach. It won't be easy, e.g. none of the web browsers today fully exploits all cores of a box. But, it will be fun to watch.

Off topic: I'm in your fan club, :) due to your "Hack the planet" blog http://wmf.editthispage.com since Dec. 1999.
I'll try to find a few online and post them here when I have more time. But the gist is that there's a cognitive advantage to reading which in turn means reading along causes the material to be absorbed better.

I've tried to think back to my own experience to verify the findings but I can't think of any definitive examples for or against
This seems to reiterate an argument I once read against positive affirmations (no longer recall the source). The idea is that every time you consciously make an affirmation, your subconscious corrects it, as in:

I am an outgoing person.
- no, I'm not.

I am an outgoing person.
- no, I'm not.

I am an outgoing person.
- no, I'm not.

The subconscious wins, and what actually gets affirmed is that you're not an outgoing person. This article seems to suggest that this effect primarily occurs when the affirmation is sufficiently different from one's self image. (But do we generally need to affirm things we already believe?)
Kaiga N-plant scientist missing
You can get cheaper handheld ECGs from medchoice/medchina. think 300$ or thereabouts. Surf the recent American Telemedicine Associations conference at the Rio in las vegas for more options.
So it's more or less call forwarding on steroids. I don't see anything groundbreaking that I can't do using the call forwarding on my AT&T plan, with the exception that GV's more automatic and Googley (and will, though not yet, make the number you appear to be calling from your GV number)
"Use the Internet" is different from "have the Internet in their home." Many if not most people do the bulk of their Internet usage in the office. Plus that study doesn't count kids what so ever.

Oh, and it's a small issue that's probably not statistically relevant (due to the city populations) but for the record California consists of more farm land than it does cities. Primarily in Central and Northern regions.
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Here's a fun one: http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/219038772/Handheld_ECG_mac...
I do most of my web development using the terminal and emacs, so there's nothing intrinsic to OS X that's an advantage there.

The real advantage of OS X is that the rest of the system gets the heck out of your way so that you can get work done. There's a million tiny little touches in the system that make life easier, so you spend more time doing actual development instead of wrestling with the email attachment that Aunt Edna sent you.

It's also the most popular *NIX out there, outnumbering everything else by an order of magnitude (or two). That means that virtually all recent UNIX software has been either been tested on the Mac, or written on one. That's nice.
I live in Japan so I've got an obvious bias, but growing up I don't remember many Americans who went with Japanese cars because they were cheaper.

The incompetence of city government angle, though, that I can get behind. Detroit in particular is two cities. We could call them Red Detroit and Blue Detroit. The Red politicians hate Blue Detroit with a passion, because they think the Blues have money and aren't sharing enough of it with Reds (and, most particularly, Red politicians). The Blues are deathly afraid of the Reds killing them, but try to be circumspect about putting it in so many words, so rather than stay in the city and face a possibility of death and a certainty of being "the colorist bastards always keeping hardworking Blues down" they have long since left for greener pastures.

That is a metaphor, of course -- no one in Detroit is actually colored Red or Blue.
kyle.c.maxwell at mail<->g.com
This misses the point. The signal-to-noise ratio of poker is relatively low, especially when you're dealing with win rates that are only slightly above zero (as is normally the case with poker bots). A hypothetical player whose "true" winrate is -0.5 BB/100 could easily play 30,000 hands and win more than 100BB, due to randomness. So you need a vast number of hands to determine if you're actually employing a winning strategy.
Is it safe to take weight loss pills when we are pregnant?
Pregnancy is one of the most crucial phases of womanhood. We can even say that womanhood comes to its completion or fulfillment when a woman is pregnant. During such an important phase of life your should take extra precautions to ensure that you and your baby is safe. You should avoid all possible medication that can turnout to be risky for the baby. Even doctors do not prescribe any medication unnecessarily.
Part of me wants to laugh, part of me wants to cry, and part of me wants to say "Good for them."

What's next? Photoshop? Flash? It's weird to see a large company embrace this type of business model, which (at least in my mind) is normally reserved for the smaller guys.

I bet they're just testing the waters. I suppose Acrobat is a good product to do it with.
Or just give every student an eReader ie: Kindle in 1st grade and they can use it through every grade. You break you kindle you are SOL.
A good way for me to maintain motivation when slogging through information-dense nonfiction books (like textbooks, programming language manuals) is to read through actively (writing notes/questions in margins or post-its) and then to quickly "generate" something from what I just learned. For instance, if I am reading a math textbook, I will play with the theorems, adding and subtracting conditions and generating counterexamples, and then do all the problems and TeX them up. If I am reading a philosophy book, I will summarize the accounts of the section and then argue my own perspective, essentially writing a brief philosophy paper. If I am reading something that I tend to mostly disagree with, like GEB, I will even try and write a "devil's advocate" paper, where I try suspend by disbelief and figure out why the particular perspective has appeal by arguing against myself.

In the short run, this may mean that you take a lot more time to finish books, but it has drastically improved my ability to recall what I have learned and my ability to not abandon the process after I hit a wall. This not only because you are immediately reinforcing what you have just learned, but I've found that if I see the fruit of my labors, even if it's just a steadily growing PDF on my desktop or a short, elegant program in my home directory, it provides just enough to motivation to finish the next chapter, and the next chapter, until you're finally done.
The entire race is heading in the wrong direction, I feel. The best sites I've ever visited were ones where I got linked to an article or essay and found myself stuck on the site for an entire day, reading multiple years worth of archives. Sites like paulgraham.com, joelonsoftware.com, actsofgord.com, and the now-defunct myboot.com are still etched in my mind, even if I originally read them 5+ years. Hell, I kept coming back to myboot.com for 9 years; he never did post chapter 24 of She Hates My Futon GODDAMNIT!!!
seems like a good opportunity to teach kids to be responsible.
Bruce Bueno Mesquita: Talk on predicting negotiations (video)
I live in Japan so I've got an obvious bias, but growing up I don't remember many Americans who went with Japanese cars because they were cheaper.

In the absence of the Japanese buying dollars, the price of Japanese cars would keep rising until trade balanced between the United States and Japan.
Try adding "because..." after the "I am...".
Not only are you confirming the not outgoing, but the dishonesty compounds the mental negatives, making you feel even worse!
Note that the affirmations practice doubted in the submitted article, based on "self-esteem," is distinct from the Three Good Things exercise developed by Martin E. P. Seligman.

http://www.cabinetgirls.com/Three_Good_Things_Exercise.pdf

http://positivepsychologynews.com/news/jen-hausmann/20070403...

Seligman has done considerable research on the development of "optimism," a distinct concept from self-esteem, and as former president of the American Psychological Association has done much to champion the "positive psychology" movement, a research-based look at how well-functioning individuals function well, and how all of us can learn to function better in the stress of daily life. Seligman would be the first to decry most school "self-esteem" programs--youth suicide rates went up rather than down during the decades when those were implemented--but he thinks there is a research base to show that improvement of optimism reduces depression and suicide and builds problem-solving ability.
Good in theory, bad in practice. The kids need to have text books by law. The School can't really do anything to punish them (except maybe detention). So in the end you spend a lot of money trying to get kids to stop acting the way kids naturally act.
The question then is, "Why the closed .NET stack" and not Java or Mono.
what your describing is continuing contracts. this is covered by markets. many informal exchanges would be better off if they were formalized in contracts.
I get the feeling that the folks at VW don't maintain or pay for repairs of their vehicles. A bunch of former co-workers of mine had Beetles and Jettas and the price of maintenance / repairs was obscene. The broken door handle and the non-customer replaceable $300+ headlight swore me off buying the diesel Jetta I wanted.
More durable hardware is hard to come by. The Apple stuff is usually pretty sturdy. There's exceptions, but I generally trust Apple hardware over Dell, HP, Toshiba, Acer, etc. The Thinkpads used to be as good or better, but standards have declined somewhat since Lenovo took over the line.

For me, the real winner is AppleCare. Apple has the best support that I've encountered for consumer hardware. It's also valid anywhere in the world, which is a lifesaver if you do a lot of international traveling.
Microsoft Thinks It Can Feed You on .14 A Meal
Use Their Work Free? Artists Say No to Google
Op-Ed Columnist - Drugs Won the War
well pure paleontology is abduction is a sense. but the thing about paleontology is that it is based on biology in which we can do experiments.
I pretty much agree with you. A trained Evaluation Team would have been a better use of resources, especially if they had the ability to send changes to design / manufacturing and could make sure a bad design is not produced.
Textbooks aren't invincible either. A rugged education oriented e-book reader may end up costing less than replacing textbooks on a regular basis as they become damaged and outdated.
Op-Ed Columnist - Pixilated Over Pixels
People are always into new stuff because there's a chance something new might be good. When something's "old" and you haven't heard about it, odds are it's because it isn't any good.

So people are deciding that the odds that something unknown could turn out to be good are better than the odds that something known could turn out to have been misjudged by their network of contacts and info sources.
For those who haven't read Cialdini [1], this is a refernce to a study which shows that asking:

"Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?"

lets you cut the line 60% of the time, but

"Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies?"

Lets you cut the line 93% of the time. A more extensive quote from the book is [2]. To me, the latter just sounds a little more polite.

1. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/006124189X/

2. http://www.hodu.com/one-word.shtml
Matt, this is great stuff, I hope you continue this series of posts. This topic loosely breaks into two domains--the technical details of programming and running the bot and the theory that drives the bot's AI. Personally I think there's already been a lot written about the former, so I'm more interested in the latter. Would love to know how went about developing the bot's decision algorithm.
rather than making you write all the code to do so from scratch

Emacs does not make you do this. (setf font-lock-keywords '(("some-regexp" . whatever-face-you-want-that-to-be) ...)).
There are several other forms that font-lock understands, including custom functions that do highlighting.

Emacs also has something called the "syntax table", which allows you to declare what comments and string literals look like. Emacs can then use this information to syntax highlight those elements, and not do other syntax highlighting inside them.

cperl-mode uses this combination of features to correctly highlight nearly 99% of Perl constructions correctly. (Keep in mind that Perl and C++ have the dubious honor of not being parseable with a formal grammar, so it is somewhat impressive that syntax annotations + regexps is enough to do a good job.)
I keep hearing people state their love for TextMate but since I don run OSX and there is no Linux version, I am out of luck.

I would not worry too much about this. Assuming you are willing to use Google and edit your .emacs file, Emacs can do everything TextMate can. It also has the potential to do many things that TextMate can't. (I don't see Slime for TextMate.)
"Founders at Work" by Jessica Livingston. Full of good stories.

"My years with General Motors" by Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. How he built the organization is quite an interesting read.
I have not found this to be the case. A great many things are obscure because they don't appeal to a large audience. This does not make them inferior. Let's take music for example. The first Broken Social Scene album is superior to most of the albums that were released this week, but there is a good chance you haven't heard of it before. There are hundreds of great old books which you likely haven't read.

A secondary point to be made is that simply knowing of something doesn't mean that you know it. You are probably aware of at least a dozen old great books and haven't read them.
I don't know about that.

My kindle seems pretty sturdy (okay, no it doesn't)...but have you ever seen how destructive a 3rd grader can be?

I predict that, if this was tried, not a single kindle would make it through elementary school.
My favorite is Michael Gerber's "E-Myth Revisited". It lays down the foundation of a good business in a way most entrepreneurs connect with. Very well-written, simple, gets points across concisely, very valuable.

http://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-Abou...

(no affiliate link there)

Great book - my most highly recommended and most frequently gifted business book.
but it tends to appeal to a different crowd.

People that know how to read?
hang on - I just realised something? Are the textbooks purchased/owned by the school? As-in - they can be handed down to next years class?

That's fantastic.
Yeah, Apple is going to cut off his access to BitTorrent now...
My biggest disappointment, when I got my kindle, was how flimsy the thing feels...

I was dreaming about a device that was going to travel with me everywhere I went (the way my old palm pilots, which are what I used to use for ebooks, did)...
I'll throw this one out there, it's a little less well known, but I found it fascinating. "One From From Many, VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization" by Dee Hock. I can't recommend it more highly.

http://www.amazon.com/One-Many-VISA-Chaordic-Organization/dp...
Agreed. But this article is talking about the miserable masses of people out there, not the exceptions who go hunting for the absolute best stuff.

I see his point, but he's basically just lamenting human nature.
my junior+senior high school lent me old books so students didn't have to buy new inferior books

we had to summarize the books because at the end of the year, they are returned. the next year, we continued with our notes and loaned old books for the level

and no, it's not a poverty-stricken school. in fact it's the best in the nation (out of tens of thousands), producing dozens of ministers, governor, entrepreneurs, artists, etc

bad textbooks must die, good classics must live
I think the problem is partly a coordination problem. I want to read what everyone else is reading, so that we can talk about it together. I could read War And Peace, but I would have no-one to talk about it with. But I know everyone else is reading what's new.

There are other ways to coordinate, though. Book clubs, for example, often pick non-new books to read. Maybe solutions should concentrate on the coordination problem. I could imagine a version of Hacker News that bans all material published in the last month, so that it is only for timeless classics.

(I am not claiming that coordination is the only cause of this phenomenon.)
Sadly, I'm so cynical about anything that has to do with public education and state politics that whenever I read a story like this, the first thing I think of is how much money the vendor mentioned in the article is going to get paid for their shitty enterprise e-textbook software.
I'm not sure why this is modded down so far, as it raises a good point. If you ask the average entry-level office tech to differentiate x^2 with respect to x, it is likely that they will not even know that. Throw in the product rule, and all bets are off. (I am embarrassed to admit that I had to quickly look at MathWorld to make sure I hadn't misremembered it.)
Not to mention that many would be stolen.
I think his point was to suggest a simpler question. Do you really think most "entry-level office workers" remember the product rule?
I imagine there's a significant border-zone where the affirmation doesn't fire a reactionary denial, and so probably successfully reinforces itself and becomes truer.
Honestly, was just trying to see if it was available.
> and will, though not yet, make the number you appear to be
> calling from your GV number

In my (limited) testing, I've found that it does indeed present your GV number to caller id when you make outbound calls.
I did. It was actually TextMate that got me back into Emacs after all these years. I needed something at work on my not-a-Mac that was as good as TM. e and InType were close, but fell into the (sorry in advance for the cliche) uncanny valley, where any minor shortcoming relative to TM was doubly unsettling. It was actually easier to adjust to Emacs than to the also-rans.
I really like the books from the personal mba reading list

http://personalmba.com/best-business-books/

Joel Spolsky's reading list is pretty good too. But the titles are old. Its not been updated with newer publications

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FogCreekMBACurriculum...
Well I was just going by what the article said. Do you have to install software on your phone to do that? If not, how is it accomplished?
15 cents can buy a bowl of dried ramen. Maybe Microsoft is feeding hungry entrepreneurs?