skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately Seaborn only got half of the picture right. The relationship between per pupil spending and SAT scores or other metrics of quality is weak to non-existent. Those like Seaborn, not unlike those currently holding office, talk a great game of increasing funding to education 'in order to compete' and fall short when it comes to accountability and then being too afraid to stand up to teachers unions (unions who absolutely abhor the idea of merit pay) when they actually get into office.

Education _is_ everything, but the way the system is currently run, the poor are often hurt the most, ironically, by their most vociferous and supposed advocates.
Assuming your phone is plugged into an A/C charger at all times, sure, why not.
The second (abilities unique in your community) is hard, though one way is to learn them from another community where they are common, i.e. cross-disciplinary.
Really? In the UK almost every supermarket does, from Iceland at the low end of the market to Waitrose at the high end, with Sainsbury's and Tesco in the middle. Getting a big shop delivered every couple of weeks and picking up small items yourself on the way home from work is normal now.
I thought I used TLS because I didn't want my sensitive data going over the wire in plaintext.
some whipped-sounding guy

He owns the company. Does he also hold the whip?
Well, can't they?

For $5 I can get a load of groceries delivered to any suburb in Sydney, you don't even need a credit card. I had assumed there was something similar there. No need for the sarcasm.
Same in Australia, I was pretty surprised at apparently causing offence. Even my unemployed bum friends get their groceries delivered, it is the cheapest way to shop.
How To Update your Blog If You Don't Have Enough Time
To me it seems like they might really want to build a natural gas pipeline, take the profits, and possibly may be financing it with drug money.

Ya know, for a country that supposedly barges in everywhere and just takes the oil with our mighty military, we sure do get a lousy return on that investment.

Now get your tin foil hat off my lawn, I have a moon landing to fake.
I mostly agree, and especially with the point about the social capital. But it's more than that. In this country, education pays (which is not true in all countries) but is expensive, and the best kind of education, self-education, requires a personal discipline and a certain type of learning-loving culture with which one should really be imbued in childhood. Poor families often lack this.

This is only one point, and maybe not the most important one.
I agree that the quote is only half the picture. But what I remember is, "Education is the silver bullet." Not more money for education will cure all. The level of conversation on education is not nearly enough just like the amount of money. It shows a lack of care.

I don't know what the fix for education is; all I know is that education is the fix for most of the world's problems.

I think that is a step in the right direction that plenty of people have not taken.
FirePHP is absolutely great. Even better is that multiple languages are getting libraries for the protocol underlying FirePHP:

Python with firepy: http://code.google.com/p/firepy/wiki/Documentation
Ruby/Rails with rails-firephp: http://rubyforge.org/projects/rails-firephp/
Perl in typical fashion with several modules: http://search.cpan.org/search?query=FirePHP&mode=all

There's even a patch for Apache's mod_rewrite: http://www.firephp.org/Wiki/Libraries/ModRewrite

There's also documentation about the protocol if you need/want to build your own: http://www.firephp.org/Wiki/Reference/Protocol

I find it a very useful development aid. I'm just hoping more browsers (well, my preferred browser) start having something that can interpret the FirePHP stuff :-)
I'm going to recommend RentHop to my NYC contacts! :)
Yeah, Iceland for example targets the sector of the market that wants highly processed food in large quantities for a low price. The idea that home delivery is just for the so-called rich is ridiculous.

Even Waitrose, the most expensive grocery store in the UK apart from maybe Whole Foods Market, charges GBP 99/year up-front for as many deliveries of over GBP 40 as you want. If you are doing the majority of your shopping this way (incl. household supplies, alcohol etc) esp. for a family, it's pretty economical. Probably less than driving to the supermarket once a week would cost.
This appears to be a pretty thoroughly attacked problem:

http://dalampati.com/ihacker/
Graduate students are only superficially poor. They can be better called "temporarily out of money". They are not at the life's dead end, on the contrary, they invest heavily in their future lives. Very different from the poor people lacking education to get ahead as well as means to get the education. Different from those poor people who lack the capability (or habit?) of planning their life. In addition, grad students typically do not have families and kids to take care of.
If only we could post some of the comments we were getting from brokers right after the NYT article!

select * from feedback; was definitely NSFW

Nowadays it's our hab.la live chat that's getting all the juicy stuff.
Available in some places.
We've used this stuff all over our coworking space:

http://www.magicwhiteboard.co.uk/

Might be worth giving it a try before investing in paint. It sticks to almost anything through static cling.
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Reusable static sheets that turn walls (or any surface) into a whiteboard.
http://mythryl.org/book130.html gives some differences from SML/NJ. It looks like it's slightly more than a new syntax skin (which is good, because otherwise the decision to fork was horrible; SML/NJ now has 64bit and the fork doesn't).

Mythryl handles (as part of language defn) printf format strings => type safe library call (I think Ocaml did this too).

The only thing I found that seemed substantial (more than syntax) was explicit support for an eval facility (also in SML/NJ, but not officially) -

eval: String -> Void;

evali: String -> Int;
evalf: String -> Float;
evals: String -> String;

evalli: String -> List( Int );
evallf: String -> List( Float );
evalls: String -> List( String );

But only for those result types (!)

Syntax difference table: http://mythryl.org/book135.html

I definitely prefer mythryl's syntax on the whole, to SML's.
I was really offended when I found out about things like flash passes or fast passes (http://www.sixflags.com/greatAmerica/tickets/flashpass.aspx) that let you either queue up for an additional price or just cut to the front of the line while poorer people have to wait.

There was just something about having such a class segmentation at a public, kid-oriented park that got to me.
Ocaml is still making you fork to multiprocess.

I agree that the docs + stdlib aren't great.

But the performance is very good, and the type checker is awesome. I like it (in my experience on toy problems).

You mentioned performance vs. usability - Not_found is vague for a reason; it's the way you find out if a key is in a hashtable (no null or Maybe return). Exceptions without payload are apparently very efficient in Ocaml; they're used often in "non-exceptional" cases in the library.
I should have also qualified my response and thinking in saying that I think that in the US and much of the west this holds true. In developing countries, often the key barrier for the poor to becoming rich is the lack of strong property rights systems. There are numerous studies that show the education spending is largely useless or rather suboptimal relative to other interventions in developing countries (see William Easterly's books - he was an economist with the World Bank).

Unfortunately I think you're right in that most people don't think hard enough about the issue - but the problem is that most people equate caring with blindly spending money instead of delving into some of the more nuanced issues. That they do so is often because this blind spending also happens to cater to special interests like teachers unions. The research on charter and voucher schools for instance is quite promising but just look at the spending that teachers unions have done in those districts that have even considered the ideas. Again, it's the poor who are the worst off given that the wealth(ier) just send their kids to private schools.
Education means students learning, not teachers teaching. The product of the process of educating is what is inside the students' heads, not what has been said by the teachers. So this is more a question of cultural preferences than that of the money thrown this way or that way.

If you want to have a well educated population, get the parents love the process of learning and help them pass this love to their children.
Yea this is just smoke and mirrors to allow the 'sale' of The Pirate Bay. In reality all they're selling is the domain name.
Government honours veterans of Bletchley Park at last
Short answer: yes, it ghosts. But it's not that bad.

Certain markers are better than others. And rubbing alcohol or other strong cleaners will clean it up pretty well.

At $12 for 4'x8' it's hard to go wrong if you're on a budget. You could even replace it every so often once the ghosting gets bad.
I like the (description of) the language.

I love statically typed functional languages with type inferencing. But look forward a few years. Hasn't F# definitively won, except for people who prefer Java libraries (Scala), and people who like lazy computation and/or extreme purity (Haskell)?

Yes, F# performance in Mono is bad right now. But there's no reason the language itself can't be implemented (perhaps as a skin on top of the Ocaml code base - or does the license not permit it?)

The size of a language community does matter. It's not "most popular 1-3 in each niche live, others die" but "15 years from now, will it still exist, or will the 1-3 hardcore hackers have moved on?"
Your US-centric assumptions are faulty in the UK legal context; stuff funded by the government isn't public domain, it's Crown Copyright.
What do you mean... "other" things? :-)
Thanks - I would like to hear form you, and from anyone else, who has been able to successfully break away from Google, Amazon etc to go on their own, esp early stage companies. Once you are known, and (may be) a popular site, then sponsors will flock to you.
Now make Growl-Like Notifications With jQuery very easy : Gritter
There is a reason the American project is an ongoing experiment. There must be something in the human nature (hierarchical societal structure?) which leads some (many?) people to behaving like hogs. Egalitarianism requires constant work. If you stop, the experiment is over.

(Just one point where the American experiment may break.)

This whole thread is a side note, but I think it is relevant.
Yeah, and certainly much cheaper than owning a car in the first place. Being able to carry things is half the reason for having a car, and groceries would be the #1 thing most people carry, I would think. For example, I have a friend who rides a motorcycle, and that's fine for him since he gets anything big delivered.

You have more supermarket chains in the UK I think - here there's only two really big ones, but their coverage is pretty much universal. Delivery costs start at $5 and get more expensive as the time window narrows - eg, delivery sometime between 3pm-9pm is $5, between 5pm-9pm is $9, or between 7pm and 9pm is $13. We're not advanced enough to have annual "plans" yet though : D
Can we make them cancel each other?
While this is nice, I think it somewhat misses the point of Python’s careful syntax debates & decision-making process. Yes, it is good to have the flexibility to do cool stuff (and I'm sure there were ways of getting somewhat decorator-like behavior hacked into Python before decorators), but it's even better when there's a standard, readable, clear way to accomplish whatever cool thing. Then whenever someone needs to do whatever-it-is, they can, easily, and anyone else who comes along will know just what they're doing, and not have to read through whatever code works behind the scenes to make it happen.

IOW, complete flexibility is not the only end goal: adding predictability as well makes the feature twice as nice. There are many possible syntaxes for doing roughly similar things, but if every app uses a different one, life can be hell for whoever has to read the code.
I am running Windows 7 on a SSD right now. While most of the author's points aren't based on the assertion that this is impossible, such a poorly researched argument makes it hard to take the rest of the article seriously.
Silverlight 3 Released
I remember seeing Fog Creek use glass whiteboards. I keep meaning to get some made, and I don't like the idea of writing all the walls. Just found a link to a photo:

http://picasaweb.google.com/spolsky/FogCreekSNewOffice#52853...
That's the problem, the country doesn't profit, which is why we can't know what is really going on.
" The role of an independent musician these days requires a mastery of first hand use of these tools. If you don't get it - find someone who does to do this for you."

Opportunity to be had being the "someone" who does this for artists?
Well done. Looks cool.
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If a GOTO can be used to make code easier to read and debug then I'm all for it. I'm an old programmer so seeing a GOTO in code won't spook me as much as it does some other people apparently. I've had experience debugging GOTO code.
A work-around at most, not a solution. First, TOR can be outlawed just like hacking tools and copy-protection circumvention programs.

Secondly, it's not about technologically educated people not being able to communicate any more. It's about the masses, the have-nothing-to-hide 95%. It's about the BKA being able to tell those 95% that Stefan Schmidt's blog contains evil illegal stuff and that by consequence, Stefan Schmidt shouldn't be let near your kids.
No, I wanted to cover the 16 x 8 foot surface of one wall in my apartment, so that wouldn't have been practicable in my case.
Granted - FOSS is good. But the traffic will still be running through google for almost all of this. And that, combined with their sole invention of this... I don't like it. I'm tired of them. They are too big. The worship bothers me. They've turned a corner.
HA! Thanks. I should have known...
I'm curious. Are you GEMA members? Do you have to pay them to give away your tracks?
i often think that would be a good method of promoting my own ventures, but i suspect i am actually rationalizing
I think the section "MGBs, TANKS, AND BATMOBILES" from Stephenson's In the Beginning was the Command Line was a much better analogy, despite it being a slightly different, but related, topic. That whole intro analogy bit could have been skipped without losing anything.
If you have a high-traffic site where the difference between reading a 6kb compressed php-script or a 8kb formatted php-script makes a huge difference, this cms isn't right for you anyway.
What is the size of the SSD? If it's a desktop-sized (60GB+) SSD, then I don't think it applies; the author's argument is that it won't fit on the tiny netbook SSDs. Obviously, within a little while that will be wrong as well.
I have to say, this looks more attractive to me than the paint from the other thread.