skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
True good point. I still maintain that it's not a great idea in production and it really doesn't scale. I did stuff like this in single host servers in rails as well. Turns out to not be so repeatable and not a great idea in prod. Also isn't great if you bring down one node of prod or if you have a load that takes more than one box worth of processing.
best way to find a unicorn job is to build and release a library of some sort and then contract yourself out to customize it for specific needs.
Generally speaking they seem to do similar activities to what I do on the weekends, with my free time. I might read a book, play a video game, learn something new, visit with friends, etc. That roughly describes what I've seen from them in the time I've spent at a Sudbury Valley school in the Bay Area.
An abstract or the context might be useful, otherwise it's just some guy going ad hominem on some old mailing list.
My unicorn job would be getting a steady salary to start businesses (multiple)--riding the highs and the lows, without risking my own money.

Maybe I should join a VC firm?
There's absolutely no reason to construct a new chain for this. You can do data storage in the block chain using Merkle trees whose roots are committed in the coinbase string or an OP_RETURN txout.
There's a lot of literature out there from the founders of the school. Generally speaking they do engage in a lot of self-directed learning, but I think if you walked around the school you would not say that they were spending their time engaged in learning the way most of us think about it.

I'll be writing more about it. This was meant as a teaser, but I don't mean to leave it there. As I spend more time at the school I'll have more observations to share.
I suspect he doesn't mean literally "working for yourself". Or by yourself, for that matter - but rather, do the work and seek improvement because you enjoy the doing of it.

And on that I have to agree. It's the difference between a seat-warmer and person who will improve throughout his career.
That said, "pick a niche" is common advice for would-be entrepreneurs looking to break into a crowded market. Plenty of people hate Nickelback enough that I'm sure this carves out a nice space of mindshare for those who share the opinion that, as a marketing tactic for entering into a very crowded space, this seems about as effective as any other tribe-building exercise.
> I found it easier to implement ℚ[φ] than ℚ[√5], even though the two are isomorphic as fields.

In fact they are equal (as opposed to, say, ℝ[x]/(x^2 + 1) and ℂ, which are 'merely' isomorphic).
> the biggest problem is that the SHA1 digest of a message is not an authenticator of that message, because an attacker can generate the same digest given only the contents of the message.

Curious, if the secret token comes after the message & there is proper delimiters to separate the message from the secret, where is the vulnerability?

Take a look at this link: https://blog.jcoglan.com/2012/06/09/why-you-should-never-use...

Am I correct to think that the example cited is bad? It appears that it would be a strong MAC because of the reasons that I cited.
For most people, it's good to be both but leaning towards "the other guy" and focus on Getting Shit Done.

Most people are seeking success in their business. You become a detriment to yourself/company if you are constantly studying programming languages and always throwing away yesterdays code with [Y]'s new hotness. Yesterday's code become stale, no one wants to maintain or fix it because they have deemed it unworthy, "ugh who decided to write this in [X], terrible, this is career suicide to waste time on [X] when [Y] was about to be released"

Soon we are throwing away [Y] because [Z] just came out and it will solve all of our problems. There will be no end to "First guy"'s pursuit of the holy grail.

I value Get Shit Done more than any [X,Y,Z]. Nights and weekends are when I get to experiment and try new stuff to satisfy my learning needs, however I look to see what problems [Y] or [Z] is attempting to solve and how I might apply that to [X] and continue to Get Shit Done and focus on business success.

As coders we are similar to craftsmen. You can continue to make furniture with your tools you have now, or you can buy that new machine which will do it faster/better. You are going to take a $$$ hit purchasing that machine but eventually you should break even and return to profit. Now a new machine comes out doing it even faster/better than before. At some point you need to stop investing time/money in trying to become faster/better and realize some profits on what you have learned and are currently using. Likewise there is a time and place for introducing a new language to your company, but you need to make sure you can cash in on that investment or you will never Get Shit Done.
Those which don't need a new currency shouldn't create one. Build on top of bitcoin instead.
You don't need to have all the data to run a full node. That's just what the reference client does.
Also notice how bitcoin and litecoin were introduced with a great gui. They sure picked up.
Do you really believe the court system works to determine innocence? Do you believe he would be guaranteed a fair trial? Do you think Manning got a fair trial?

Do you believe that by taking refuge in Russia he's "propping up" their government? How?

Do you believe that giving up a 6-figure salary and life to expose violations of the US constitution is an act of a coward?

Are these opinions harbored by real people, or is this a troll?
> and whatever Groovy and Clojure have planned

Groovy's roadmap just added version 2.3, featuring "_Traits_", which were actually originally announced for version 2.2 [1], but were delayed so Codehaus could get a release of Groovy out the door in time for selling seats to their annual December GrailsXchange conference in London.

In June last year, Codehaus/Pivotal had also announced a new meta-object protocol for Groovy version 3.0 [2] to come after version 2.1, but that was postponed early this year to make way for version 2.2. I don't think Groovy really has anything "planned" as you put it, rather they're reacting to external conditions.

[1] http://groovy.329449.n5.nabble.com/Adding-Trait-to-Groovy-td...

[2] http://groovy.329449.n5.nabble.com/Groovy-3-tt5710334.html
It's hard to get any footage out of North Korea but Rimjingang Media employs North Korean civilians to take hidden camera into North Korea. The footage returned are shocking.

http://www.asiapress.org/rimjingang/english/
I appreciate everything you've said. Obviously not everyone will have their mind blown by these observations if they're already well informed on much of this.

My point was more toward the general public and the idea that such a radically different educational environment is preparing students for success in college and wide range of jobs should be at least inspire some curiosity...
So the alternative is not buying things or services from people who need the money?
I'm having hard time wrapping my head around the time-money analogy here. In the case of money, by investing it or delaying spending, you can have more of it in future. In the case of time this does not hold, because time is essentially a shrinking resource. You can't have more time in future by delaying spending or 'investing' it in the manner OP suggests.

Return on time, (ROT?), is always something other than time and thus measures of it are highly subjective. In the end, what you are spending is your life and although there might be preferable ways of doing it, I'd imagine that being the achievers they are, HN members usually err on the side of investing it. Actually PG's essay offers a nice exposition of spending time (having fun) vs investing it vs fake work:

http://www.paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html
Greater vulnerability to botnet operators? Higher costs for proof of work validation? Widely varying computational costs?

Oh wait, those aren't advantages.
It's not surprising at all, it's a facet of a world system that is no longer relevant. But look at other things such as labor laws and unions, if you propose changing them people will yell at you because of the perception that they benefit workers. The same way that schools benefit students. But neither is true. Unions are exclusionary of entry level workers, they benefit people who already have good jobs and training often to the detriment of workers who don't. And laws which force employers to provide benefits to "full time workers" generally just encourage businesses to keep some workers part time, forcing those people to work multiple jobs to earn more money.

Similarly, an excess of business regulation tends to force small companies out of business and promotes the creation of large corporations (due to economies of scale with respect to regulatory compliance). These effects are probably not intended but that's rather irrelevant when they are still happening.

I bring these up because they are more controversial than the idea that institutionalized public schooling in the "prussian" model is harmful. It's difficult to overcome ingrained biases and prejudices. If you find it troublesome to consider the idea that unions aren't an unalloyed good then you shouldn't be surprised that a lot of people have a hard time reconsidering the value of the current educational system.
And it's when change doesn't happen with court rulings, or are hidden further, and then found out to be still true - then when does shit hit the fan? I could see this cycle occurring many times.
Half way through it, fantastic read! Thank you for the recommendation!
Well, the NSA collected more data on US citizens than the Stasi ever collected on Germans.
The point of the post was not to claim that Sudbury Valley is for everyone or is better than other educational environments necessarily. It was more to observe that I'm surprised that people are not more curious about such a different environment. I would expect people to have more questions and want to learn more...
What evidence do you provide? We've never once seen Amex side with us on a chargeback despite reams of evidence.
I agree with you (excepting that the violence evidenced in primitive capital accumulation is a historical accident), but the thrust of my argument was to demonstrate that Libertarian philosophy is wrong on it's own terms.

There are a variety of other arguments you could advance against it - for example that the self is social fiction with no scientific basis, the increasing communality of all labor, the inherent instability of Capitalism evidenced by the Long Wave cycle, the sociological fact that people's consciousness is shaped by their relationship to the means of production (evidenced, on their part, by their almost uniformly advantaged upbringings)...

Speaking for myself, I have lost my taste for extended intellectual debate on the internet, and all of these vectors of criticism would (if I were being intellectually honest) lead to extended debate. It may not be fair of me, but as a Marxist I do believe that the material world will change much more workers minds than some logic arguments arrayed in an online discussion.
taking precautions is not worse for us.

Are you naive enough to assume that all effects of "precautions" are necessarily benign?
Can't say I did. Granted, those are the types of items I would never buy at Amazon if they were cheaper. But all the stuff I recently purchased was a good $10-15 dollars less than going to the store.
> In real life, need to feed the family, debt, hunger, mortages, need for shelter, medical treatment needs, etc etc are forcing them to accept it.

Why other people should provide food, housing, medical treatment, etc if the person provides almost nothing in return?

Another question: Would you replace your doctor, who earns 50x minimum wage, with 50 random minimum wage earners to do a medical procedure on you?
Do you want the NSA to keep on spying on US citizens without oversight, to turn over its data to US law enforcement for "parallel reconstruction"?

Do you want to live in a total-surveillance society?
Thank you for this! 82% is right in the middle.

Children who have been raised to value learning will, in all likelihood, value learning. This is not a surprise!

I would also be curious to see the breakdown of what fields those students go into.

Some people are capable of self-learning in certain fields where as others are not. A great example of this is math, we all have heard stories (or know the person, or are the person!) of someone who can learn math on their own straight from a text book. Then there are others who learn best from an interactive discussion about math with a teacher. And then there are those who learn best about math from a discussion within a peer group!

If you look at our current teaching system, it tries to target all three learning styles to varying degrees.

Hearing stories about some wonder-kid in 7th grade who taught himself everything up to calculus in a single summer by reading on his own doesn't really help the discussion around setting national educational policy, because that kid is, to say the least, an outlier.

Writing is similar. Having an instructor guide students in areas to learn can be very valuable. Left to their own devices and being told to just write poems for a few hours a day for some length of time, I am betting most students wouldn't stumble upon haiku(s?) on their own!
My photos of food
Snowden to give UK Channel 4s Alternative Christmas Message
The license is a tool. The importance is the freedom. We work on a branding, the GNU brand.
JIF: Java + Information Flow
> Haskell's relatively fine-grained distinctions between numeric types is nothing like Lisp's numeric tower.

Ugh; we're not calling out Haskell's numeric hierarchy as a good example, are we?

(Well, maybe it's a good example of how to handle numbers—although I find the lack of a positive-integer type a pain—but it's certainly not a good example of how to handle general algebraic structures, which is what it seems to pretend to be. What in the world is `sign` doing in there, for example?)
> But as long as you can read Python there's no reason you couldn't do these in your preferred language with the Python references.

That's a good point, but surely, just as an expert user would want to use the appropriate tool for his problem, also a learning user would want to use the appropriate problem for his tool? By which I mean, an exercise that is a good way to learn Python is likely to be a terrible way to learn, say, R.
To be broadcast on national terrestrial TV at 4:15pm UTC Christmas Day
Especially ironic when it simultaneously uses phrases like "short sighted" and "disgusting lack of humanity."
Warning: this only works if you upload a significant amount of photos to Google+
Mac and W32 installers are coming soon.
I think you've just described what 'self-selection' is: the school is not selective, but the students who choose to attend the school may not be representative of the general population
Releasing binaries is a lot more work. You can tell other people to do the work, sure, but this telling is unlikely to accomplish more than some doing.

Consider making a donation towards binaries, perhaps of build servers or Windows licenses so that this can be done. GNU projects are funded by the FSF, so a donation to the FSF along with a request for binaries carries a lot of weight.

Of course, the most weight is carried by a code contribution. Help GNUnet make those binaries!
If you think about it in a results-oriented manner, in order to "vote her out," what is needed is an opponent whose strengths outweigh the forces keeping her in place. Next on the list of possibilities as I see them is to create a force of voice that she must listen to. I don't think an internet petition is as effective here (keep in mind that the vast majority of IPs have zero effect, so the odds are against this one), so the alternative is purchasing enough vocal power to drown out the lobbyists who have her ear and direct her toward unfavorable positions.

An ideological position based on the malleable concept of representative democracy is already on shaky ground, so putting oneself in her place, learning about her motivations, and playing to those will operate the machinery of predictable political action much more efficiently. "Know your enemy" is a better action-plan than "designate an enemy and say the same thing as you would with anybody else."

In other words, calling her a "cancer" isn't enough.
Paul,
Take a look now and let me know what you think.

QwikDial.com

Thanks
From a different perspective, it generated a lot of headlines so it was a good choice for publicity.
Yes. Recommending Applied Cryptography is usually a warning sign that the person doesn't know what they are talking about. In this case the rest of the advice is reasonably sound for an engineer that wants to start learning the fundamentals of modern cryptography.
The day BBC News Entertainment is worthy of discussion on hacker news is a dark day indeed.

Remember when this place was about programming and start ups?
Is worth it, they are as hilarious as they are informative.
It's a step into darkness, most certainly.
There are subcultures you can join, and, being a member of them, you can think of yourself as "better" than everyone else for seeing something they don't. (Religions work like this, for example.)

But there are other subcultures you can join, where being a member of them doesn't make you better. It makes you worse. And "accept that you're doing something bad and you should feel bad" is basically a checkbox on the EULA for joining the subculture. (Most sexual kinks/fetishes are like this, for example.)

The authors were surprised to find people who thought of Nickelback as more like a religion than a kink. Probably because anyone they knew who liked Nickelback, did it in the kink-like way.
Implement it in a ghetto, achieve similar similar stats and then it'll blow my mind.

I went to a [non US] high end private school & learned pretty quickly that education is a matter of "you get what you pay for".

Perhaps its country specific, but locally the private schools crush the public ones into fine dust. Plus (local) private schools tend to attract the kids of the elite...which comes with some seriously high caliber connections.
where the very same M-CAM dude claimed there was a "patent on toast".

This comes pretty close no? "Bread refreshing method" (US 6080436 A).

http://www.google.com/patents/US6080436

Abstract

A method of refreshening a bread product by heating the bread product to a temperature between 2500 are maintained at this temperature range for a period of 3 to 90 seconds.
> autodidacticism is the most efficient form of learning

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_2_Sigma_Problem
I understand, and I apologize for my arrogant tone.

However, I felt as though the general tone expressed in this blog post was quite condescending. It's as if you've discovered some deeply hidden and arcane mystery of life that you're now willing to share with the unwashed, and you express shock at how their minds could not be blown by such a proposition.

Then, you are posting this on HN, so it was only a matter of time, anyway. I hope I saved a fellow ostentatious bloke the work.

In the end, thanks for spreading awareness of this.
I like to phrase this to my friends as "don't Dawkins your points."
Walking the Walk: What Sharks, Honeybees and Humans Have in Common
The purpose of modern school system is to prepare children to be good factory workers. Long work day, doing what you're told, sitting still and being a good little worker.
>Why other people should provide food, housing, medical treatment, etc if the person provides almost nothing in return?

They do provide stuff in return. Actually they do all the important stuff: cooking, cleaning the streets, driving the cabs, delivering packages, extracting oil, mining coal, replacing the hospital bedsheets, growing and picking our food, taking care of the dead, and tons more besides, while the rest of the population gets to play "highly specialized professional" for doing high level BS from marketing to accounting.

>Another question: Would you replace your doctor, who earns 50x minimum wage, with 50 random minimum wage earners to do a medical procedure on you?

No, I'd replace him with a doctor that earns 1x mininum wage -- so everybody can afford him. If he doesn't like the job enough to do it for what it is and for the service he offers, then he's not a passionate doctor anyway. (In the same way real hackers would even program for free, just because they enjoy it so much)
> Ultimately, what people need to realize is that autodidacticism is the most efficient form of learning.

I call bull.

I can learn from a math teacher in an hour what would take me possibly years, or a lifetime for that matter, to discover on my own.

During 2 years of college lecture classes one can learn what took philosophers and eventually mathematicians nearly 2000 years to discover.

But what about the arts?

Again, same story. Thousands of years of progress and theory can be summed up and taught in just months. (A wee bit of practice may then be required to master certain skills! ;) )

Yes some self directed learning is valuable, and indeed almost every class I took had aspect of self guided learning in it. Teachers loved leading us halfway to the goal, pointing us in a general direction, and then letting us go forth and discover the answer for ourselves.

Now do I think how public schools are currently ran is ideal? Heck no, far from it. No Child Left Behind was a huge damaging blow to the American educational system.

But what I always wanted out of school was more direction, not less. I passionately hated assignments where students had to go off and make their own video presentations and other such activities.

Yet in theory, giving presentations is of some value, it requires the students to acquire information on their own, summarize it into a communicable form, and then share that information with others. (I just despised how much class time was devoted to watching very bad presentations...)

But hey, that sounds like self guided learning, at a public school no less!

One thing to remember is that trying to dictate any one educational style is going to fail some non-trivial percent of students.

As I said in another comment, I did horrible in unstructured classes. More structure would have been my desire. IMHO school would have benefited from having 2 hours set aside just for an open study room for students to do HW in. But that is mostly because as a kid, left to my own devices, I would go home and play games rather than study. Heck I'd read a month's worth of reading assignments on the bus home, then never do the book reports!

Likewise for finding study groups. As someone with social anxiety (which was much worse as a kid!) asking the class to form groups would result in me hiding in a corner somewhere. Suffice to say I never was good at getting language practice in either!

But lab classes, oh wow I rocked at those. Love'd them. On a related note, questions come up as to the suitability of unstructured learning for certain topics. E.g. How would unstructured learning have students do genetic modifications of bacteria? Or play with explosives? Both are some of my fondest memories from high school! Both involved very explicit step by step instructions written down that we followed to the letter! (For good reason!)

I guess my overall point is that ideologues of any type tend to have a drum and enjoy beating it, much to the determent of someone somewhere else.
Well, I was in my 20s working for a hedge fund, and caught the aviation bug BAD, so don't read much into that prioritization other than, "I had money burning a hole in my pocket and all the sense of a 20-something..." :)

You can buy a functional single-engine airplane for $30-50K. $50K even gets you into something that I'd consider pretty nice for an entry level airplane. They go way, way up from there, of course...