skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But is there any evidence that such ideas are actually influential in today's schools? I'll bet that most teachers, if shown your quote, would retch.

I assume you have read John Taylor Gatto's works before. In particular, you might be interested in his most recent: Weapons of Mass Instruction.

I don't know how exactly you would gauge their influence. It's certainly much more prevalent in certain countries (the USA and the major Western European forces, where the idea of modern compulsory schooling originated in the first place: Prussia), compared to say, Eastern European countries. The national psychology has always been different there, and after being ravaged by communism, the school system is quite chaotic and ineffectual, though the EU and other powers are trying to enact change (not necessarily for the better).

In any event, just look at how the classroom model of schooling works these days: intense focus on rote memorization, adherence to ritualistic and often obsolete or pointless standards, very bureaucratic operation and government, a fanatical concern with and faith in the grading system, standardized testing as the be-all-end-all of education and so on.

Then depending on the country, schools are used to instill nationalistic and other forms of propaganda, be it in the history textbooks or throughout the entire atmosphere of the classroom. Typically most states do this, though the exact level and subtlety depends on the individual nation.

The teachers would likely retch, but they're just as big of pawns as anybody else. They're not meant to know. They're told to serve a seemingly benevolent purpose in educating the nation's youth, and they must obviously comply with whatever they're given if they'd like to keep their job.
Why Your Digital Product Should Have A Money Back Guarantee
As with any large population there's a bell curve, good ones and bad ones at each end. You get what you pay for with programmers, Indian or not.

With those out of the way, there is one thing I've noticed:

There tends to be a culture that they always immediately say "Yes" to any request, even if they have absolutely no idea where to begin.

This is not the "I haven't built this exact thing before, but I have built two things that are similar and should be able to hook them together and change behaviour" <-- that thing is part of normal programming life.

No, this is more like "I have absolutely no idea if the technology stack can even DO what you're asking, if it's the correct choice, or if I am even remotely skilled enough to implement this" ... just immediately say "YES" and head over to stack overflow to ask questions.

I have a good friend who is a developer from India, and I asked him why this is, he told me that "There's a culture in India that you just say YES to your boss and never ever question him or his methods, the employee just says YES and then does their best to figure it out"

With this in mind, I always make sure that when dealing with Indian contractors, at the point of where I would normally go over the high level implementations with contractors I make an effort to dig a bit deeper, just to make sure there's good understanding and no miscommunication.

Overall experience has been good now that I know the cultural gotchas.

EDIT: One other bit of advice my father gave me "Pay peanuts, get monkeys" .. this sums up most of the problems with code I see :)
Who is a prude?
Honestly? Awful. I know I know I shouldn't generalize, but then again you asked my opinion. So, let me explain.
I work as freelance developer, 25% of my work is "fixing" Indian outsourced code. By fixing, I mean, rewriting the entire code an charging more than my normal rate.

I guess that happens when you are cheap and not only limited to Indians, but to be honest, every time I have to "fix" outsourced code, it's from India.
Why I switched back to Mac
>You have to do actual effort to install an npm module globally (namely, provide a switch). The default does the sane thing.

No it doesn't? You have to manually create a node_modules dir in the current directory because otherwise it'll scan up your tree for any parent dir containing node_modules, which is pretty much never what you want.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_rate
I can't understand it.It seems to be business so, why did`nt make`em pay ?
Even stranger, our sun has collapsed and been rebuilt at least once (estimates are 3 times). Makes you wonder how many civilizations could have been built.

More specifically to your comment, even on our planet, the evidence of civilization would be hard to find if there was a civilization several million or even a few hundred thousand years ago.

"Dust to dust"
What Bitcoin and Internet of Things Startups Have in Common
No worries, I'm unfamiliar with the terms, with being a work and all; curiosity could kill this cat.
Live Interactive Online Video Wishes Cat Lovers A Meowy Christmas
This is inaccurate.

Mandela was arrested in the 1962, and Shirley (the person in question) only retired from the agency a decade later, in 1973.

http://www.salon.com/1996/11/14/news_577/

I believe the confusion comes from when the training manuals for the South African security/intelligence forces were being developed by him, which came later, after his ostensible retirement.
On our website, http://clara.io, we found that HN sent us about 8000 hits the day we were hovered around item 15.

In general, our conversion rate from visit to signup is around 30% but with HN traffic it was significantly lower, around ~8% for that burst of traffic. Obviously, HN is not our target demographic of users.

We do not have a paying option, thus we only have the front end conversion number at this point.
Rockstar Consortium US LP v. Google Inc
This is some crazy entitlement culture. If you help someone out, you are not entitled to a reward. If you want a guaranteed reward for your efforts, get a contract first.
What's stopping another crypto currency such as Litecoin from superceding Bitcoin?
Dejavu: Audio Recognition and Fingerprinting in Python
Let's suppose everyone is behaving relativity rationally. How could we explain this? One obvious suggestion: the average value of a "creative" idea is less than that of a inside-the-box idea. Though the peek value of a "creative" idea can be tremendous, most "creative" ideas are of negative utility, similar to how most mutations decrease fitness, even though most increases in fitness are caused by mutations. Though all earth-shattering ideas are creative, perhaps all creative ideas aren’t earth-shattering and, on average, one is better off thinking inside the box.
Detailed analysis of Federal Circuit hearing: copyrightability is certain
ET on the Atari 2600, if you played it you would agree.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial_(vid...
Create-error.js – A simple helper for subclassed errors in Javascript
"Loser Pays" is the convention in most of the rest of the world, but not America, due to opposition from American liberals who say that poor people will be afraid to sue anyone if they fear having to pay the other side's legal fees if they lose.

The problem with the American system, and it's a huge one, is that it allows TONS of legal extortion. Everyone pays their own legal fees even if they win, so all you have to do is threaten a lawsuit, then tell your victim that you'll "settle" for some amount less than it would cost them to go to court. No matter how baseless your lawsuit is, they still pay you because they can't afford to go to court and pay their own legal fees. Thus the poor suffer far more under this system.
With such a small sample size, I generally tend to shy away from speaking of results in percentages. Stating the results as "5 conversions from 26 visits" keeps things in perspective.
I appreciate the insight into your experience, but the sample size is way too low to draw meaningful general conclusions.
There is no dirt. Hydroponic means just water and a medium without nutrients (small white perlite rocks in this case).

I already use my laptop in the presence of water, coffee, and food. I doubt there is much risk in this.

Looking around my office right now and I'm pretty bummed to say we have no plants in here.. Its probably time to fix that.
Yeah, I saw a ton of sea mist in Wuhan when I visited.
What do you think about Lobster? http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Lobster

Great idea for a web app by the way!
There's also evidence that primates have an innate visual response to snakes - http://www.pnas.org/content/110/47/19000
You can do chargebacks much later and for a far greater range of reasons than you can practically do with m-of-n transactions.
NYT, being firmly entrenched with Wall Street, is probably at least slightly disincentivized from supporting BTC's rise to prominence
"The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel." - Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere
Well, I'd say let's give communication a chance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape_language
The fact that you keep saying WoW is a "serious game" shows just how little you know.
With a username like 'badman_ting', you must be a fellow Jamaican :). How can I contact you? There's no email in your profile.
Best drop the anal
Accelerator/incubator for design agencies
It's unclear what you mean by that, but to the extent that it implies ANC reprisals or a race war, it's ridiculous.
Rockstar v. Google, Complaint for Patent Infringement:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2J5eZQISWCKTVFKTXVybE5JdGc/...
Docker + Google Compute Engine = Happiness
Wouldn't that involve getting every programmer in the world to actually agree on something? Good luck with that!
The most fascinating part about this post is seeing how differently people react to it: nihilism, awe, wonder, etc. The story seems to be a rorschach test of sorts.
Great guide about startup equity and founders stock
i also Think that none of the guests on this planet is able to survive without food. pure existential... 20 years to go, to get a food printer in each kitchen maybe with an subscription service for the cartridges and extra "recipes" modell.
are you retarded? 25btc is just an arbitrary number and thats why it can't be too high, it use to be fractions of a penny. now its 25k because that is how much that work is considered to be worth. the end.
My perl experience was brief and a long time ago, so apply a large grain of salt.

I find perl to be a language that makes it easy to write bad, incomprehensible code. I'm sure it's possible to write good perl. If you're going to take the trouble to write good code, why not pick a language that actually supports that goal? I don't understand why perl would be the starting point, when there are alternatives like python and ruby available.
How some babies like Alan Kay in his childhood acquire exceptional talent of reading in such a small age. The wiki tells that he had read lofty number of books before he was three? Is it a talent or something to do with nurturing?
Any educational solution that works within the framework of the existing system is doomed to failure.

Schooling, in its present form, is the greatest lie ever told, I would say.

Education is something that should heavily depend on the individual person. The best way to educate is to self-educate. Then there could be certain gatherings like
free schools (free as in freedom, look them up if you aren't aware) and democratic schools if one wants to study with a group or requires tutoring from an experienced person. Apprenticeship is also something I would like to see make a comeback.

The school system, however, has done a truly horrifying and dreadful act in that it has killed off the desire for people to autodidact, and has convinced generations that it is the only right way. Of course, many people self-educate in their spare time, but they often do not realize it and instead hold faith in formal academics and schooling as the sole credible form of education.

Another fallacy the schooling system has perpetuated is the incorrect equivocation of school and education. They have nothing alike. One is a strict and guided system, the other is the acquisition of knowledge by any means that are possible.
And Chinese workers have stuff like food.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_China#Poverty_reduct...
> Kickstarter is basically leading people to believe they are going to get something very specific in return for their money.

No, they don't. They've done nothing to suggest otherwise, and they continue to try and make it clear that it's not a story, you aren't buying something like in a store. They've been consistent in this manner, and have even taken steps to ensure this point is made, such as making it so you can't pledge for more than one of the items.

> But calling it a pledge just because there are caveats attached still does not (IMO) change what people SEE Kickstarter as...

If that was all they did, you might have a point. But that's so far from the truth, it's insulting.

> I haven't heard from too many people that "pledged" money into a successfully funded project that never delivered walk away saying "Oh well, no big deal".

I haven't heard from too many people that "invested" money into a successfully funded startup that never delivered walk away saying "Oh well, no big deal".

At the end of the day, the only people thinking they are "buying" something at KS are those people that don't actually read what they are "buying". At some point, you have to put the blame on the user.
I think it looks awesome! I for one welcome our Kraken overlords.
Looks great!!

Was just about to set up a Secret Santa on Elfster... was wondering how your site stacks up in terms of facilitating a gift exchange between friends/coworkers?
I like better the version in which a civilization could colonize the entire galaxy in about 5 to 50 million years (with low-speed means of space travel):
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=where-are-t...
New cybersecurity boom arrives in Silicon Valley
No, because there is a distinct difference in the result of Groupon and KS. KS makes it clear at many, many levels what your pledge means. Groupon makes it clear how your purchase works.
What we can learn about quantum mechanics from a single qubit
We live in a society where people who use "diversity" as a buzzword are actively promoting policies that discourage diversity of thought and demand conformance. "Standards" dictated from on high are the bane of creative exploration.

At the same time, many "creative" ideas are actually just really stupid ideas. It's to be expected that the person with the stupid idea will accuse his critics of stifling his "creativity". That doesn't mean they're wrong.
Looks like a good candidate for a feature that should be opt-in, depending on how interesting the data you're logging is.

Also, it might be interesting to increase the logging verbosity to the remote service for users who've opted in and are experiencing problems.

I wasn't aware reading from the log now required root, but I'm guessing it's still a best practice to avoid logging sensitive data and/or copious amounts to the system log in production applications.
Agreed. Fundamentally, picking a cutoff of "not one of the top 3 guesses" is part of the problem. I'd suggest that not being one of the top 16 guesses (i.e. less than half a byte of entropy) would be obvious the threshold.
An observation about the article is the frequent mention of risk. What's risk? It's the chance that something will go wrong. If risk is how we formally define it, then a ten million dollar idea with a 90% chance of failure is worth a million. This suggests a potential gap between the innovator's view of their own idea, and its actual value. On the other hand, a dullard who comes up with a million dollar idea that's demonstrably risk free, has delivered equal value.

What happens when the innovator presents the ten million dollar idea to a room full of dullards? After several such episodes in succession, they've persuaded themselves that the dullards hate innovation.

Blaming people for being risk-averse isn't good enough. There has to be something else going on, such as a gap between perceived risk and real risk, that influences both innovators and dullards.
Someone Bought a Tesla Model S With Bitcoins
I like your contributions here and follow your blog. I think this particular post is being downvoted because it seems a bit out of place and not your usual intelligent response to an article or comment.
I can do one better

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> do not naturally believe and thus need constant reminding of

> consider how often we're telling ourselves here on HN that procrastination is bad. If we want to believe that, we need constant reminding of it

I don't think it's so much that there are people who think procrastination isn't a bad thing, it's just that it can be a really hard problem to overcome; hence, so much discussion about ways to do so.
Disclaimer: I am definitely being contrarian here and do not necessarily advocate Dijkstra's position.

In Dijkstra's essay "On the cruelty of really teaching computer science", posted here multiple times, he states:

"Right from the beginning, and all through the course, we stress that the programmer's task is not just to write down a program, but that his main task is to give a formal proof that the program he proposes meets the equally formal functional specification. While designing proofs and programs hand in hand, the student gets ample opportunity to perfect his manipulative agility with the predicate calculus. Finally, in order to drive home the message that this introductory programming course is primarily a course in formal mathematics, we see to it that the programming language in question has not been implemented on campus so that students are protected from the temptation to test their programs. And this concludes the sketch of my proposal for an introductory programming course for freshmen."

(Do read his guesses about how his suggestion would be attacked and ridiculed. Reasons he obviously didn't agree with).
There are probably valid use cases, but no programmer can be trusted with that kind of power.
>> the suppression of creativity and individualism is one of the key goals of the compulsory schooling system.

This is a popular meme but bears pretty much no relationship with reality.
OT to OP, I hadn't seen your site before.

It is really cool! I'm teaching kids to code games and I really like using browser based tools as it makes it easier for kids to practice at home and I don't have to worry about specific OS's and hardware.
...that has nothing to do with combatting fraud.
Jamaicans of the world unite!
Sure, you could route it through Sentry or whatever other logging-type backend you'd like, but the Android library takes care of the indirection and batching for you.
Maybe the CIA should not have worked with those guys in the first place ?

That's one part of capitalism I hate, paying fat checks, and knowing it will never backfire to you. When you're a government agency, when you hire somebody, there's espionage/politics involved, don't pretend the CIA is pinky pony. It's strategic moves from start to end.

I've seen worse headlines.
BitTorrent Sync doubles users in a single month
Turns out, if your browser isn't wide enough, the About link inexplicably disappears. (1152px is not wide enough, so I never saw it)

But even the About link, once visible, just links to they guy's blog of most recent posts. There is no direct "about" on that page.
Fair use is still likely to be on the table however although in this particular case (unlike WINE or mono) I don't really see it as there was no attempt (or need) to be compatible with Java.
Knowing the value of an idea is difficult until we see it in hindsight, already fulfilled. I think that pretending to know the value of a creative idea when it's merely an idea is presumptuous.

The article describes how the reception of creativity is all about risk--that we don't know its value immediately. I think this is a more logical way of looking at it.
Build a private NPM cache with NGINX
Energy, the long and short of it
The problem for me is that as soon as you start using a clever password system like this you discover so many sites with idiotic restrictions (I'm looking at YOU banking websites) won't allow most of them.

I've taken to using 1Password, but constantly have to dumb down its password generator, and it's almost always for financial institutions (which tend to have maximum password lengths -- which is truly scary in its implications -- and generally don't allow most non alphanumeric).
Creativity (substitute it by change if you prefer) is only interesting if it produces better results (by whatever definition of "better" that applies to the area).

Creative people will produce a lot of meh stuff/crap for each interesting output. Environments that promote creativity are easy on mistakes/failed outcomes, because they know that, at some point, it will produce something interesting. Will be 1/100th of the times, but it will be worth it.
But most of the people assumes that, just because someone is creative, all the stuff will be awesome. And that's simply not possible. With no patience, there can't be any creativity. And very few people is patient.
Had the exact same problem with my parents in New Delhi. Father was suffering from lung disease. Wanted to sit outside on the balcony - fresh air, apparently. I tried to explain to him that the air is laden with dangerous levels of particulate pollutants. He didn't care. He died earlier this year.

PM10/2.5 levels continue to be disastrous (1900+/700+ on some days especially around Diwali). Mother still likes to open balcony doors and room windows to let 'fresh air' flow through the house.

Neither are/were uneducated. Post grads in SCIENCE FFS!

Cannot. Explain. It.
>Has there been any long-term research done on the health effects of particulate pollution?

Yes. The 2013 WHO report "Health Effects of Particulate Matter" [1] provides a reasonable summary.

Primary long term impacts are increased mortality from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases and from lung cancer.

Recent findings indicate no real safe level, with increased mortality observed at even very low levels (as seen in "clean" developed cities).

[1] http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/189051/H...
Then the best possible job is to sell food. You're basically forcing people to give up currency that will insanely increase in value if they don't want to die..
yeah, the people I know who've had visa problems are mostly entrepreneurs living in China on a business visa.
Stop Me Before I “Innovate” Again
Curious... from a cancer-risk standpoint, this is the equivalent of smoking how many cigarettes that day?

One? Ten? A pack? Two packs? Fifty packs?

Or do we not have enough data to even guess?
I built a quick responsive front-end for this and re-wrote the JavaScript so the order goes: HTML -> CSS -> JavaScript

Github: https://github.com/tomhodgins/liveeditor

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/SuXoXHb.png

Demo: http://staticresource.com/editor
And yet your President is still prioritizing coal over Canadian oilsands....