skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"My understanding is that the textbook business is designed to be inefficient (from a student's perspective - and very profitable from a publisher's perspective)."

I think this varies quite a bit according to the field of study and the level of coverage of the topic.

To take one example: introductory calculus (which most undergraduates are required to take) textbooks can get away with this because students have little choice. They have to take the course, and so they have to get the book, and so the publisher essentially has a free hand, abetted by the academic bookstores which do quite well off the churn of new books.

But this isn't universally applicable. My degree's in philosophy, for example; I still have all the books, and nearly all of them are still in print in the same edition. Most of those have been in their current editions at least as long as I've been alive (fun data point: the teaching guide for one course -- not the text, the teaching guide -- has been in the same edition since the 1970s). The only things which change frequently are topical anthologies, which do need to be updated more often to track recent developments.

And anecdotally, I suspect that's a bit more common once you move out of the math/science area of most schools; the number of standard texts which simply aren't amenable to constant churn seems to decrease rapidly as you move over into the liberal arts.
Look at Paul Erdős.
Decoding the HTML 5 video codec debate
A simple example would be a fifth-grade teacher testing on the pythagorean theorum. I think the problem would always be worded (assuming no diagram)

a = 3
b = 4
c = ?

Granted, this is one person's experience, but I never recall a variable's value being presented as

3 = a
As a student working in AI, I have to say that I both agree and disagree with this writer. I agree with his assertion that AI, in its current state, is not nearly as generalizable as we hope it to be, but simply because it is not now doesn't mean we should give up on it entirely and wait for some breakthrough to come in from another field. Better hardware has been a great boon to AI researchers, but it's in times like these that we need not only to verify or dismiss the mathematical theories put forth 50 odd years ago but enhance them with experimentation.

For example, perhaps descriptors are truly the wrong way to go about object recognition in images, or perhaps segmentation is the wrong way to look at a scene, but they are ideas and they are worth testing. We won't find out unless we try, because unlike the equations proven decades before, there are no constraints we can simply apply.
Wow, that is a little depressing.

Just out of idle curiosity - are you the djb (qmail, cdb, etc)?
I think it is a replicated result among students of gifted students that they GAIN ground intellectually during the summer school vacation, because they pursue their own intellectual interests by independent reading and aren't slowed down by the school curriculum. At least, that was my experience in childhood.

A really good book for a teenager would be The Chosen by Chaim Potok,

http://www.amazon.com/Chosen-Chaim-Potok/dp/0449213447/

which I think I read at age fourteen. It's an excellent story about two very bright boys growing up in Brooklyn during World War II.
I actually think that this rule/convention of having the value on the right and location on the left is a little arbitrary and potentially confusing. To someone that's learning to program, you're putting something that comes after (the assignment) before something that comes before (computation of the value to assign) can be counterintuitive.

Once you get used to it you stop thinking about it, but it's important to realize that this concept isn't as intuitive as it may appear.

Oh, and you didn't ever use the store arrow key (STO->) on your TI-83 to store a value? With this operation the variable goes on the right of the expression, not the left.
I don't want a chip in me and I'm obviously not the only one
I had a pretty good feeling that I'd come back to a comment like this. I was simple articulating why I believe many "hackers", historically the folks we'd call "geeks, are popping pills. It's not completely inconsistent when you consider the culture they're living in. I was not trying to lend any legitimacy to it. That's just putting words in my mouth.

Furthermore, arguing about the legitimacy is a completely different matter, and deserves its own thread altogether IMO. I would be with you on amphetamines being illegitimate, a subtle form of cheating. However, what is one man's cheat is simply "clever" or "brilliant" to another. You ought to be prepared to spell out exactly what you mean by "cheating", and in what context, before you try and rail against me for suggesting something as innocuous as I did.

Finally, if you think higher education is for 'self-development and learning', then you're either living in the past, or have a naively idealistic view on what the current situation is in colleges across the country. If colleges are about one thing, it's about getting a job. The school I attend is incredibly competitive, and there isn't room for self-development. If you want self-development, you're better off dropping out. 0.02c
But your friends all use their service too. What's to say Facebook doesn't have a good reason to remind you of them?
Would you want it if it were free?
Vijay Gill: Google Does Not Mock Bing
A great book for when people have enough financial backup to explore a bit. Nowadays with people's 401k down 40% and underwater in their house, they can't afford to take a year off to 'figure life out'
The user experience of the two phones are not remotely comparable. But, as you say, to each his own.
I would like to see someone take one thousand twelve year olds, stratify them and randomly split them up into groups of two hundred for the summer and teach each group basic programming using five different languages: Python, Basic, Scheme, and a couple more, then at the end, perform some type of objective programming skills evaluation to determine which language really is the best for beginning learners.
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Yup, in Haskell it's as explicit as a <- for assignment, and = for what amounts to pattern equality.
Indeed. I found the following amusing:

"There is actually more hydrogen in a liter of gasoline (116 grams) than there is in a liter of pure liquid hydrogen (71 grams)!"

But the coolest of all is that hydrogen flames are invisible! Hydrogen flames are so energetic that they emit UV radiation! I remember when I was in grade school and tried electrolysis at home. I managed to collect some hydrogen in a test tube, and I ignited it with a match. I heard a loud bang, but no flame. Sound, but no light. That was fascinating.
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Good grief. Read the Harry Potter books aloud over the summer? How long are the summer holidays where he lives?

But while on the subject, the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan is a great choice with both genders and is great fun for adults too.
Past labor-saving technologies have not increased structural unemployment. People found other things to do.

Perhaps eventually this will change. It sounds like you think it will. Why?
Well if you're seriously considering the neo freerunner then you obviously also don't like the hassle of "making/receiving phone calls" or "navigating a usable interface" - I'm sorry but the entire project (even 12 months later) more closely resembles a geek's idea of a sick joke rather than an actual, usable communications device.
I think the style was the only thing that kept me reading... truly smart and smooth.
A very thoughtful and well-written post. Thank you for that.

I would like to talk just for a moment about my problems with concentration. ADD is a very real problem for me. I don't mean this in a learned helplessness, "trust me I've been diagnosed" sort of way. I mean it in a "Everything in my entire life points to this diagnosis, 100% -- and I would challenge anyone to try and explain it in an alternative fashion."

I won't go into the details and don't really care to discuss my symptoms and issues much further. However I will say that there are many people out there who are correctly diagnosed as ADD, and whom would probably have never finish high school, let alone college, without the aid of adderall, ritalin, etc. I can tell you this with a certain level of confidence because I am one of them.

I never abused them, and avoided taking them because they make me feel like a zombie, no sense of humor, lack of appetite, irritable, etc. However, for many people out there, they're not just a brain hack, they're the only ticket they have to competing with brains that have a normal level of attention.
Fine, if you want to give your money to Government, please do so. But for the love of God, don't suggest that everyone else should also give their hard earned money to the government and that government should raise taxes.
Thanks for the flashback. I wonder how many HN members got started on their TI-83. I remember even the most remedial users figuring out how to store enough data to cheat in pre-calc. IMO, the language is less relevant, it just takes a project.
As the author of the original article stated, that's how the amphetamines "work" when used properly. Something is studied under the influence of amphetamines, and is much easier to access when in that state again.
Ask HN: What I must read to be python savvy?
I'm a ruby enthusiast, but I really need to learn python for a new job. What's the best material I can read/watch to quickly get the best of python + accesories frameworks (django, easy_install, etc). tks!
This is super unlikely to happen.

Google's snarky messages would invite people to download Chrome, while Apple's would try to convince people to download Safari. Combined with the fact that people still using IE6 of their own volition would be most likely to blame Microsoft for "breaking the Internet" and switch to a different browser, it would not be in Microsoft's best interests to coordinate something like this.

In addition, television advertising made sense for switching off analog television, since the people most likely to be affected would be watching. Even if even one of the three companies you mentioned put up money for television advertising, it would be a waste of resources. Targeted banner ads would be better.
But, at minimum, that university student would need room and board ---plus income to service debt--- to work with you. Not all people have trivial access to that even small income ---particularly if their family does not live in the metropolitan area.

This doesn't mean that unpaid internships shouldn't exist if they otherwise couldn't exist as paid positions, but it does mean that some empathy and social awareness to offer even a couple hundred dollars a week, plus lunch, would help many young people "find something that pays them back in ways that will help them."
> Cars now are "just" faster and have a few more doohickeys on them

Good example! What part of this statement is false? Oh yeah, the "faster."
I had a similar experience when helping a friend with a bug in his code from an introductory programming course at my alma mater. The programming assignment involved manipulation of an array of data in C, and there was a counter variable involved to keep track of which element of the array was currently being manipulated.

He understood that there was a relationship between the array and the counter variable, but he took the relationship to far. He thought that the counter variable needed to represent the element of the array, and so he was assigning the value of the particular element in the array to the counter variable. In his mind, the counter variable didn't just provide the element number to look for; it was the element he was looking for, or at least it needed to become so.

Both this, and the color example provided by the author, demonstrate how many implied relationships we depend on within the programs we write, and how many people believe that those relationships to be explicitly stated or else the compiler won't understand what we mean.

I don't think I was able to get my friend to really understand what was going on and why we couldn't just 'tell' the computer to 'relate' these two things for us. It was a level of such naive concreteness that his mind just fought against descending to. I wonder how someone might educate people in thinking at this level? The optimist in me says it might be possible; the pessimist suggests that it might be in the same realm as trying to get people to understand pointers and recursion, which enough people I've read suggest is extremely hard for some (many?) people to understand.
Really? From whose perspective is Prisoner A described as asking the question? The narrator's. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but there is an implicit third person in my view.
i've been wondering about pests, too. where do you live, what are you growing and how much land are you farming?

we have a small plot in Cambridge, MA--at most 12 ft by 5ft. we've had a good run of (snap?) peas and kale. zucchini and tomatoes should be producing soon. watermelons never took hold and sprouts never produced radishes, but those were somewhat experimental plantings.

pests have been eating our basil. right now we're seeing how much loss this turns into. we're not sure what the next step is, other than identifying the pests. we're an organic coop to begin with, so unless we can find friendly pesticides, i expect we'll get creative with nets or some other mechanisms. or grow other plants.
I don't know where I picked this up, but I use asymmetric whitespace around the assignment operator: a= b. It provides a subtle hint that assignment is not equality.
It would seem you would need more than one group for each language in order to determine if it was the language or the teacher that has the greatest influence on a student's ability to learn to program.
This URL may only be visible to Facebook users, but please let me know if this helps.

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=16929680703&...
this is fantastic trolling but there doesn't really seem to be much substance to it.
Really, whatever can be done now with a computer was in principle doable in 1965

Yes, but in 1965 we couldn't read your snooty LiveJournal entries.
Units on the horizontal axis would be great too. Really, these graphs don't mean a whole lot without units.
Even better, once they've learned one, see how they perform relative to one another at learning one or more of the other languages.

See if there is a language that is further upstream than the rest, and also see if there is a language that is such a paradigm shift from the rest, and perhaps even from typical human-thought patterns, that many people from every group struggle to learn it. For those who don't, see if you can discover what is different about how they reason their way through programming.

Or perhaps find the language that everyone just gets once they've been exposed to one or more other languages. See if it really is the easiest, and more sparsely featured of the bunch, or if it just does a remarkably good job of unifying the concepts from all the others.

Just a couple of thoughts as I read your comment. :-)
http://diveintopython.org/ is a great book, though it hasn't been updated since Python 2.2. There's a revision currently being written for Python 3.0: http://diveintopython3.org/

(I should note that since Python 3.0 made (necessary) backwards-incompatible changes to syntax, most large libraries and frameworks, such as Django, do not yet run on it.)
Does anyone know what the 'Ford paradox' is? He refers to it in regards to the physical implications of real number representation.
Doesn't IE6 have almost the exact same JS Engine as IE8?
Yeah, that's exactly the point Mark was making in his blog.
Nokia turns to Android in smartphone wars
Ask HN: track iPhone app page views
Greetings,

I need to track page views/visitors on my iPhone app.

The app has a web view and currently I use google analytics to track usage. I'd like to expand this to track usage on other views.

Do you recommend any analytics package for iPhone ?
I should have put teach in quotes, I'm from the unschooling camp, if you're familiar with that. I think the "teachers" if they existed at all would be minimalists.
This will accelerate greatly if Microsoft doesnt get IE9 out the door with comparable javascript speeds. It took Firefox a while, but its finally performing as fast as Safari & Chrome. Lots of people use apps like gmail and google maps, and if they see one browser running them silky smooth, while the other is a jerky mess, they'll be compelled to switch.
Is this what HN has become? A place to dump random wikipedia links? (andy trawl up the last N blog posts of anyone's blog who manages to get posted)

Please, NEW, relevant information please. This stuff is killing the S/N ratio.

Do we need to have an only-erlang week here?
I tried that with just two kids using PLT Scheme and Javascript. The biggest hurdle is convincing them that software is useful outside the development environment; we wrote apps for the desktop/GUI, console, and MySpace. Kids then tried to customize everything, including system utilities, Open Office, and their own 3rd party games. It was baffling how much they expected from their programming tools; they demanded full integration between compiler and whatever else they were running on their system. They don't understand that some software is extensible (The Dr. Scheme IDE) and others are not (Minesweeper, Bejeweled.), but that was mainly my fault because I did some magic behind the scenes and put their javascript "commands" in the firefox toolbar.

My nephews kept thinking of functions, operators, and special forms (conditionals and iteration) as "objects". They wanted to put "title", "value" and "callback" on the "wrong" objects. For example, they could bind a callback to a button and have it popup when it was clicked; they want to attach a similar callback to a block of code and have it fired when the block was executed (a trivial problem to fix; just call your callback from the body of the code block, but they wanted to use call-back syntax.)

I am sure they would have loved Squeak, but I didn't have the time to learn it on time; my previous experience with Smalltalk has been brief, mainly with GST and theoretic uses of Self.

Kids are a tougher crowd to please than programmers with some "training", because children have not yet accepted whatever limitations imposed at us by "industry". They want the Ideal.
I live in Durham, NC. You can check out my blog for more on the garden. The latest post, which I wrote tonight, details some of our successes and failures.

http://www.beechtreetech.com/about/josh-pearce-blog.aspx

Love them snap peas too!
Some get it right, e.g., := as assignment.

This is a tradeoff of one hard day in your teens ("But but but equals should work both ways! head explodes") and thirty seconds every time you pick up a new language ("Assignment operator is equals? Got it.") versus typing more several dozen or hundred times a day every day for the rest of your professional life.
You think that you'll make lots of money and get back to your dream in 2-3 years but you'd be wrong. You'll be dead in 2-3 years. Perhaps not physically but this person right now that is you -- he will no longer exist, only someone who has memories of being you.
I do. But then, I learned my arithmetic in arabic ;-)

(OT: I can also write mirror-text at my natural hand-writing pace, and often get the order of drawing individual glyphs "wrong"; I might, for example, make a dot first then a vertical bar to wite an 'i'. The occassional "russian" backward or upside down letter creeps in when I am tired, etc.)
I did that a bit when I first got it but most of the time I forget its there now a days. It's like my tattoo when I first got it I noticed it every time I moved my arm. Now unless someone points it out I forget it's even there.
You need to sit down with your text editor and see if you can teach it a few tricks.
The first real applications I ever wrote were TI-Basic apps I wrote for my TI-89 back in Algebra class.

I remember coding them directly with the keyboard on the calculator. I wrote all kinds of things, things to help me solve things, solve equations, geometry solvers, games. It was a blast, and I think that's what got me interested in programming.

Thanks TI! Maybe Middle Schools should work on developing an introductory programming curriculum to introduce kinds to the idea of programming. It's probably more important then most things middle schoolers are learning, especially considering I probably spent so much of my time in math class programming my calculator.
World of Warcraft does something similar:
http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/6985/wowcancel.jpg
The licensing fees for H.264 that go into effect next year should kill it off pretty quickly.

Of course, we should really just get rid of software patents.
I was surprised nobody had submitted it to Digg yet...

http://digg.com/political_opinion/America_s_Place_In_The_Wor...
Yeah, There's no way I'd let a microchip under my skin.

"If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will of course frantically try to clamber out. But if you place it gently in a pot of tepid water and turn the heat on low, it will float there quite placidly. As the water gradually heats up, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor, exactly like one of us in a hot bath, and before long, with a smile on its face, it will unresisting-ly allow itself to be boiled to death."

(Also yes, for those of you pedantic enough I'm aware the story is not biologically accurate, but the metaphor remains valid)
Yes, but don't overlook the "Let x =" syntax of mathematics. Programming has just dropped the "let". So, really there is a choice to be made about how to resolve that ambiguity in a language parser. Visual Basic has the nice case of A = B = C setting A equal to the boolean expression B = C.
Can anyone who solved #13 just put the darn answer down!
nice blog! i grew up near durham, so it brings back memories.

i hadn't heard of lime conditioning, either. at least i can learn from your mistakes.
I found working through the django tutorial to be a great start. You'll pick up the language naturally along the way.
One of the many points the author is wrong about. Luckily, his arguments weren't based on any facts or research (but likely hearsay of grad students of the late 90s.)
Great article, terrible HN headline.
I didn't say that I wanted to raise taxes. I said I don't mind giving a fat chunk of it to the government.

If someone decides to not pay their taxes though... well, I dunno, I don't think they should be surprised when they get charged with tax evasion.
so what youre telling me is that setting someone on fire with hydrogen is the perfect crime.
Ah, but then you just go challenge the assessment. The taxable basis should always reflect the market value. In any case, the downside protection for the property owner in prop 13 is the 2% cap on annual increases.

The government really shouldn't have downside protection, it's just more evidence as to why property taxes aren't a very good basis for taxation, as the original article suggested and I disputed. Property had the distinction of being a more stable asset price, but when the market rose abnormally, government got fat off of the proceeds, and is now paying the price as capital is being reallocated from property assets.