skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> although simple, does requires some knowledge of scientific jargon

Knowledge of jargon isn't the same as knowledge of science.

The problem is not so much that the questions are too easy, it is that they are not science questions, because they don't test knowledge of scientific concepts.

It would be easy to ask questions that are science questions but that are also easy questions (for less able or younger examinees).

For example in physics one could ask: A man went to the top of a tall building, and threw a glass from it. The glass landed on concrete 30 m below. What happened to the glass when it landed? he then dropped a rubber ball; what happened to the ball when it landed?

Or a simple biology question: A woman wanted to breed striped cats. She had a male cat and a female cat. Both cats were coloured black all over. She painted white stripes on both cats, then got them to have sex. Is this likely to produce striped kittens?

These are very easy questions, yet to answer them one needs to understand important concepts about science. Teaching science is about teaching concepts, not about rote learning of definitions. Unfortunately the bumbling incompetents who're in charge of education don't seem to understand that.
Yeah, lists are by far the best way to organize large amounts of information in a way that the human eye and brain can deal with it.

Windows is still based on Windows 95 hierarchical menus. Btw. I never use those Windows menus unless the system forces me to.
Notice how all the new terms are trademarked. That must have played a big role in the decision.
how precisely can they trademark "Design/Develop" ?
Where can I get all the links of HN older times
The HN website serves as a great minimally polluted digg like service targetted at the geek community. While many links are time sensitive, many are precious nuggets of non diminishing value. Eg the drawing homer simpson using epicycles is really neat. I wish to comb thru this treasure trove and unearth the gems. Unfortunately HN shows only the top 210 or so submissions. Can u make the rest public in some way? I hope all those jewels r not lost. ibm.sudarshan@gmaildddoootttcom (gmail.com)
Google Apps as distinct apps are dead men walking.

Their only future is as a collection of gadgets and robots for WAVE. WAVE simultaneously solves the problems of over-bloated office suites and Google Apps problem of not having a locally-hosted option.
That's like saying "provide the content and they will come", both are myths that never die. Also in most cases not the best product wins but the one that spreads the fastest, think Betamax vs VHS.
A nicely argued article, but I haven't come across anti-Dijkstra sentiment before, so I didn't realize it needed a response. Are there many folks out there who consider Dijkstra "out of touch with reality", or was this just one wack-job on a mailing list?
The Rails Way: Users and Passwords
Blue-State Blues
I was logging in to make that same comment. A default judgment is when the defendant doesn't show up in court. The judge didn't look at the merits of the case and find in favor of Sethi. A default judgment just says that the plaintiff wins because the defendant didn't show up.

Here's the key part from the second link (emphasis added):

> The purpose of this letter is to inform you that TechCrunch and Mr. Arrington will not, as is their right, submit to the jurisdiction of the English courts in this matter. As we have previously informed you in our letters of March 18 and May 17, 2009, TechCrunch is not susceptible to the jurisdiction of the English courts and the proper forum for your client’s claims would be the State of California, which is the location where the words were both written and published in accordance with the prevailing local laws and standards. As a result, any vindication that your client seeks should properly be sought in the courts of the appropriate California jurisdiction. Accordingly, defendants will not file an Acknowledgment of Service in the High Court of Justice. As we have previously informed you, any judgment that your client may obtain in this matter will be unenforceable in the United States.

I've heard of this happening, but I don't know how it actually plays out. Would the UK detain an American citizen with a default judgment against him? I guess every country's laws on how to handle civil claims against foreign nationals visiting the country differ... interesting stuff, never really thought about it before. Would be curious to have a solicitor or lawyer with knowledge of the law weigh in.

Edit: I looked at the zdnet link - it's got some information, but looks a bit off to me. Arrington and Techcrunch not defending in England when they didn't do anything in England isn't running from the law. The reason jurisdictions exist is so your company doesn't get sued in a foreign country where you have no staff, no offices, took no actions, and didn't do any business. The article goes on to say:

> By default, the judgment recognizes that Arringon/Interserve are in a position of power where what they say carries weight to a large audience and can be considered damaging.

Pretty sure that's incorrect: The court stamped a piece of paper saying that the defendants weren't there, they didn't make a ruling about positions of power in international media in the internet age. I'd still be curious to hear someone with knowledge of the law weigh in - I can understand not wanting to defend a suit in a foreign country that you don't have operations in, and I don't think the English jurisdiction would apply. But does that mean Arrington could get arrested in England? Interesting to think about this case.
Dr. Eric Schmidt Resigns from Apple’s Board of Directors
How cavalier of you... never mind that there are many thousands of people who may not have a choice but to use Java. Anything that eases the pain of boilerplate is a good thing.
Understanding MySQL Appliances and Hardware Acceleration
I thought that we were meant to lie down or put a paper bag over our head or something.
I suspect you're abusing the term "theoretical computer science," which is surprisingly common in this crowd. I assume you actually mean basic computer science concepts relevant to programming.

To address your question, Java abstracts away memory management - not just dynamic memory allocation, but common off-by-one mistakes will result in a runtime exception. It's possible, but unlikely, that you'll get a segfault in C. You probably own the memory just past your array, and you're more likely to get strange errors because you're invisibly overwriting values.

If you want to focus on algorithmic thinking, and not the realities of a computer, this is a win. As another posted pointed out above, I think other languages are better suited for this, but Java is still valid.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt Resigns From Apple Board. Surprised?
AT&T has repeated demonstrated an ability to influence what is allowed on the app store.

You can't throw a stone through 'app store' search results without hitting a story of some app being removed or artificially limited at AT&T's request.
I was wondering as well, arrington already cancelled his fowa talk and mentioned he wont be visiting here for some time.

I imagine as long as the damages arent a crazy amount techcrunch will just quietly pay them.
Now tell me that this has nothing to do with the recent events (the Google Voice removal from the App Store).
Google's Schmidt Leaves Apple's Board
I purposefully phrased my statement to allow for dynamic language like Python - which is what I would probably choose for a starting language. I constructed my comment to also address the same arguments that have popped up in the "MIT switched to Python" discussions.

I've taught intro to Java labs to undergrads, and I did get questions on the scaffolding required. I answered their question, but also told them they don't need to understand that now. I'd rather not have to do that.
since thats what the press release actually says, I doubt all that many people are going to argue.
The NS suffix is even more confusing for Cocoa programmers.

[[nsWebAddress alloc] initWithDomain:@"example.com"]
Winning isn't everything tho (as everyone here seems to agree). Collecting is the issue.
A whole lot of this has been happening in my neighborhood, so I feel like I should drop in some context.

First, the "attacks" have been uniformly non-violent. They've been expensive acts of vandalism, not actual attacks on people. Second, the article is wrong. These are not concentrated in the richer, more upscale areas. They've been targeted at luxury cars in the alternative, bohemian districts.

These districts have strong alternative (punks, squatters, etc.) leanings. One of those is the district that I live in. People actually move to those areas because they're hip. The problem is that as hip places start to get hipper they also tend to get more expensive and gentrified. Gentrification tends to lead towards changing attitudes in urban development, so...

The Spree is the main river that runs through Berlin and locations along the Spree that run through the alternative parts of town have been earmarked for a construction project with the city's cooperation called the "Media Spree" where large office buildings would be built on both sides of the Spree and many of the local bars, clubs and other alternative gathering points in the area would be shut down.

There have been referendums on this and they have been overwhelmingly voted down. Nevertheless those pushing the development project keep finding ways to work around the results. There is a vibe within Berlin's alternative scenes that they're being pushed out of the boroughs that they've claimed as their own since the wall came down, and it's starting to piss some people off.

Now, I don't condone burning cars. But we're talking about Berlin -- one of the world's last punk holdouts. Fredrichhain-Kreuzberg (most densely populated borough, and most alternative) has a local government that is an alliance between the "Left Party" (Socialist / Communist) and the Greens. Along with the heating up of economic pressure there have been more raids on squats and I think that vandalism is being ratcheted up is a desperate push back.
I agree, the main reason (besides the fact that LaTeX is the greatest for any type of document, and that greatness is extended by XeTeX,) is because I still believe one must have good file structure. As much as CMSes and Wikis are the rage today in web trendiness, you still need to manually organize them in some way, and this doesn't solve the problem that the article hints at about sticking them on a network share. If it's gonna be lost in a network share it's gonna be lost in a wiki or a CMS. The difference is you might not be running an indexing service for your docs on the network share but searching is intrinsic to the wiki.

And also, git for tracking changes, version control isn't simple, I find that MediaWiki's version control is more annoying to use than git.
What are you talking about? Clojure is a lisp for java, written in java and itself, published as a jar.
Is the AP worth $2.50 a word?
A language that your kids can identify with as their own and practise everyday will do more for their further language learning ability than an 'useful' language that they'll gloss over in the classroom and seldom get to practice with natives.

Also, if that 'false' nationalism perchance catches on, your English-Sumerian speaking children might end up feeling like half foreigners in their own country. I've seen that kind of thing and it's sad.
It doesn't. There, I told you.

In all probability, it's a case of the google voice debacle being the final straw rather than it being the deciding factor.
I think it does have to do with recent events, just not the events you're mentioning.

Having on your board an executive from a company that competes with you in multiple ways is awkward, both for your company and for the executive.
Not really.

The press release says that it's about the potential conflict of interest. It would have been a concern as soon as Google announced Android, and probably even before.
While on the whole the story is accurate the details are quite mangled. It's probably not the best idea to submit an Australian source about a story in Germany.

I actually live in Berlin in an inner city area that is considered "radical" by many but compared to the US or even elsewhere in Europe it's the most peaceful place on earth.

The leftist violence gets less in recent years, last year for the first time in 20 years there were no "riots" on May 1st. Those riots btw. are only a tourist attraction by now.

The leftist groups stage their own protests, thousands come but nobody notices due to the lack or riots that sell better in the media business.

We have a lot more neonazi violence over here though. Even previously safe areas are again dangerous for all people looking differently be it people of color, gays or whomever dares not to look like a real German.

When visiting Berlin "while black or gay" make sure not to use public transportation at night in the wrong area, especially the outskirts.
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searchyc.com lets you access / search for older links
I think he's saying that the average human, over all of history, has been much lower on Maslow's hierarchy than we technophiles.
Worse, the lowercase "ns" prefix is used by Mozilla. E.g. https://developer.mozilla.org/en/nsString
His position has been unmaintainable for a while, but it may have made him realise its time to leave.
This is really only in the US, though, where the government pays more for corn than it's worth on the market. This makes it cheap, and since people want cheap food, "they" have figured out how to put it in everything.

When I go to Europe, the drinks on the flight there are sweetened with HFCS. On the way back, they are sweetened with cane sugar. "Corn in everything" is mostly and American thing. (And we're so healthy because of it!)
They sent me a message about one of my domains which contained the following text "nsWebAddress .COM". I couldn't actually parse that and figured their email system must have been misconfigured.
Quitting the board of a company like apple isnt a decision taken lightly.

As most people and the techcrunch headline pointed out, this has been a long time coming, the google voice situation may have been the tipping point, but this would have happened sooner or later regardless.
This could be a legitimate lawsuit. There's not enough information in the article to know what promises the school made to students and if it delivered on them.
Why not just use http://dustincurtis.com/screenshots/DCP_0005-thumb-20090802-... ?
You live nearby it seems ;-) Nonetheless you got some things wrong: There are no more squatters in Berlin. Just people who legalized once squatted buildings 15 or more ears ago.

Also I don't see a connection between the burned cars and the Mediaspree gentrification issue. The cars get burned all over the city (not just the area you refer to) while the anti-gentrification movement is using democratic means to fight the megalomaniac Mediaspree project.
Because they're all dealing with relatively similar problems with weight and drag.

The flip side of 'why do hybrids have to look like hybrids' is the Chevy Volt. That car's final design looks as bland and unremarkable as the last few revisions of the Malibu. Is that really a better alternative?
High speed rural broadband hope using wireless phone relays
We don't really have a solution to resistant bacteria in hospitals. You have to go there to get medical care, and everything has to be cleaned. This combination of sick people and constant disinfection creates resistant bacterial strains, but unfortunately, the human race does not yet know how to fix this problem. We are doing our best.

Factory farming, on the other hand, is harmful to animals and the general health of the planet. We know how to avoid the problems, but it takes a few months longer to get the meat from the animals that way, and time is money. Plus, creating a worldwide pandemic doesn't cut into the profit margin -- treating the animals humanely does. You want cheap meat, riiiight?
I've seen print transformations of hyperlinks that replace them with numbered footnotes. A sufficiently clever one could use its own pagination and put in "[1] see section X page Y". But honestly that's an obsolete format. If your business can't cope without, use Word. But it ought to be able to. What use is paper nowadays? Who prints stuff out?
I know that the article is foremost about Dijkstra, and uses Hoare-style verification of programs as an example only, but there's a C function with "break;" being verified using Hoare logic right there:

http://frama-c.cea.fr/jessie_tutorial_index.html

Presumably exceptions were not a standard feature in programming languages when Dijkstra made his comment about premature-loop-exits. The "break;" C construct is only a restricted form of exception and exceptions are much better understood now than then. Verifying a program that uses them is no more difficult than verifying a program that doesn't.

Pascal Cuoq
Because programming best practices don't really affect farmers, but not having food or a planet to live on does affect programmers.
Guess the GV thing was the tip of the iceberg for him.
I had never given this any thought at all but totally agree with the article. My company uses GoogleDocs for everything but rarely prints anything out. I'll have to look into the wiki thing.
Styrofoam Homes
I think you can write a letter to the editor.

The article has a conservative slant, anyway, which likely means that they don't want to let facts get in the way of their beliefs. I wish it was not this simple, but it seems to be...
Farber's book is actually one of the worst in that moderately large genre, but thanks for reminding me to post a link to a bibliography with some better books.

http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html

And thanks for the other links, several of which are new to me.
Reporting what's up at 4chan. I see techcrunch has found its level.
I'm curious now, so I've been doing some Googling around, it's not really resolved yet. This is interesting:

"Belgium Fines Yahoo For Protecting User Privacy On Its US Servers"

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090716/0405415571.shtml

> For many years, we've discussed the many challenges faced by countries in trying to recognize that "jurisdiction" on the internet isn't what they probably think it is. Many countries want to interpret internet jurisdiction as "if it's accessible here via the internet, it's covered by our laws." But it doesn't take much scenario planning to recognizing what a disaster would result from such an interpretation. Effectively that means that the most restrictive legislation anywhere in the world (think: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc.) would apply everywhere else.

Similar articles talking about the different rulings, merits, jurisdictions in technology:

http://www.techdirt.com/blog.php?tag=jurisdiction

Wikipedia on jurisdiction as a general overview for curious people:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurisdiction

The American/Californian law is pretty clear that American officials, courts, law enforcement, etc. won't enforce the English default judgment. How it'd be handled in England, in the UK, and maybe even the EU is another story. What does England do with its own citizens that don't pay? If there's assets, I assume they can be frozen/seized with a court order. No assets? Arresting a person for a civil judgment when they don't have assets seems a bit barbaric. Foreign national from a friendly country? My initial hunch is that Arrington could go to England without a problem, but maybe not.

The more I think about it, the more it seems international civil law regarding technology and the internet is going to be a rapidly growing field the next 5-20 years. Curious as to how this plays out in theory and in real life.
Yes, I knew that the squats had been legalized; I didn't realize that it was that far back. But the big ones around the Kreuzberg / Frerichshain / Mitte border still function culturally as squats.

As for cars, if you at the linked map, the concentration is clearly in Frerichshain and Kreuzberg with a decent amount of spillover into Prenzlauerberg (which isn't surprising):

http://www.brennende-autos.de/

Edit: Incidentally, if your "Impressum" is up to date, your office is about 200m from where I live. :-)
More like, "light" object system, web server, URL dispatcher, and IOC framework. Why use libraries when you can do it all yourself?
I was a little bit confused when the speaker kept referring to "yava" until I realized he meant "java".

Neat tool, but I really don't see this being that much of a time-saver over the built-in tools that Eclipse or Idea has for this.

In addition, using annotations to generate things like "cleanup" blocks around a stream seems dangerous in the long run to me - I don't like having any part of the flow of my code being handled by "magic".
As the son of a dryland wheat farmer, I have been concerned about the amount of fertilizer and pesticides put into the soil.

The author has a very good basic point. Farmers and the agribusiness industry do what they do not because they are evil but because customers want what they produce. This is often overlooked by those of us who criticize the current system of production. So we need to keep in mind that it is a system, and we all consume what this vast system produces, and we don't show any slackening of demand in the stuff we buy, particularly in the corn economy.

But the author's self interest gets a little heated, and he misses many of the points made in Omnivore's Dilemma (note the second word of the title and who it belongs to). There is a lot of exposition about the current financial structure of the industry with subsidies going to the small and huge family farms that actually provide significant benefit to the agribusiness and reduces the flexibility that the farmer might otherwise have regarding what to grow.

It is not useful, in my mind, to demonize the critics of our current way of business, nor is it useful to demonize the industry. This is a pretty complex problem.

As a former farmboy and current tech guy I found Omnivore's Dilemma to be quite evenhanded. This article is not. Both have good points worth contemplation.

Food is a huge ethical dilemma, and things are more interrelated than one might first think.
I'm surprised this hasn't sparked more discussion already.

I think it's easy to throw all of these "platforms" into the same basket (the way "ecommerce" was the catch-all bucket for all web apps involving money in the roaring 90's). This post nicely summarizes the difference between something like Facebook (which essentially wraps a traditional web app) and an actual operating system/hardware platform.
Discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=739070
yes, but I still expect my entertainment site to be able to read charts and graphs.
Alan Johnson can't stop hacker Gary McKinnon's extradition
FYI, the original Barron's article requires a subscription:

(http://online.barrons.com/article/SB124907975033998015.html)

And to summarize, still lots of smoke in the distance regarding the One Tablet to Rule Them All, but little heat as of yet.
You don't get to collect if you don't win.
Defcon attendees find dodgy ATMs in Las Vegas
Where do lost megabits go? Broadband speeds.
Generally, mention anything Dijkstra and you get the quick smackdown. And this has been going on since he was publishing. There was a big brouhaha when he was publishing that what he was proposing in the way of programming training wouldn't work because they were not culturally acceptable (?).

Some examples are http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=477177 or http://www.catonmat.net/blog/edsger-dijkstra-discipline-in-t..., both the article and the comments. I could go on.

And I would bet that if you watch this space you will see more of the same.