skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> Have you gone through such a program?

Yes

>> Do you regret it?

Very much so. My middle school was a small charter school, with about 60 kids in each grade, and 2 classes going on at any one time. One day out of the blue they announced that some students had been selected to participate in some gifted classes. I was selected for all 3, and at first I felt honored. But only 5 kids had been picked, and each gifted class had at most, 3 kids in it. Obviously I was isolated from all my friends, and strongly disliked by all the rest. I learnt nothing from the class (other than how to take a beating) and would have to call it the most miserable year of my life.

edit: Oh, and the school also required that I complete all the homework from my regular classes, even though I wasn't attending the class and doing additional work. I think I failed most of that year. Real 'gifted'.

So all in all, I'd consider that particular program a failure, and I'd be surprised if most other programs didn't have similar consequences. The school neglected the fact that sociality is part of an education. I felt at a disadvantage when I got to high school, and didn't know the kids my age any more. They thought I was a weirdo, and I actually felt less prepared for some classes than they did. I had missed a full year of social development.
I think that's what they're doing. From the OP: "Each one of these files is supposed to be protected with a special digital key"
Number of wtf questions:

"putting a huge amount of effort into such a program is a huge waste of time that is better spent on startups."

what startups would those be? tech startups? how about the gift kids who couldn't care less about tech? maybe they just want to become authors? who knows. startups?

"Moreover, such programs increase the probability that you would pursue a career in academia, which generally leads to failure for the vast majority of people."

define failure. failure to get into academia? misery at getting into academia?

"Even picking a university major is an issue when certain fields such as mathematics are considered more respectable than others such as CS in such programs."

what does a university major have to do with a gifted program in a high school?

"Finally, the possibility of not even going to university is certainly not encouraged in such programs."

other than vocational tech programs, where exactly is not going to university encouraged?

--

how about this, lets say you take away they gifted and talented program and put them back in standard college prep course work. how many did you think will get bored beyond belief by not being challenged? how well are they going to do? shouldn't you teach to level of each individual student rather than as a faceless homogenous mass?
Well, to get pedantic, I think the original Navigator fizzled out before CSS was truly supported. Not sure you could do it without it.
For some reason that bug reminds me of the way they removed update-manager from the notification area.

- No clear public information before the change, even if it affects almost 100% of users.

- Mark S. responding to the reported bug.

- Some devs avoiding straight responses.

- Introduced in late alphas, before the freezes...

I really hope that they just had a "great idea" on some meeting and people responsible for the packages have problems in handling the situation (they are attacked by hordes of outraged geeks ;) ). But if the situation repeats in 10.04, maybe it's a sign of things going bad? Unfortunately launchpad doesn't count bug subscribers, but it looks like ~60 + 2 duplicate bugs and everyone saying they don't like the idea as it is presented right now... 2 weeks after it was introduced in alpha version. IMHO that's a pretty strong signal that something's going seriously wrong.
The intent isn't (purely) anti-terrorism. It's an effort towards reducing things like benefit fraud, too. So any success from the card reduces these kind of budget 'leaks.'
They have a "Donate" link and no options for support I could see - It doesn't really inspire you with confidence.

Being a Microsoft Certified Partner just means some of your staff have passed some MS exams and you paid MS some money.
Why I Hate All Computer Programming Languages
Sacrificial virgins of the Mississippi
You don't need CSS to do this, just positioned images (which you can do with layers, or even with a blank image above the main one).
New phone apps seek to 'augment' reality
I'm just about to switch to Google for mail hosting, and your comment worries me a little.

What kind of trouble have people had with Google's outgoing mail servers?
"Microsoft has a problem—the whole industry has a problem. Everyone needs Windows 7 to be a huge success. In the past week, even Intel has been bemoaning the fact that nobody is upgrading machines like they used to."

I really don't think this has anything to do with Windows 7 specifically. What's happening is that PCs have reached the point where even a machine that's a few years old running Win2003 is entirely adequate to do the things most people and businesses want a PC to do: run Office, read email, watch YouTube, surf the net.

The value-added argument is just no longer convincing for many consumers, especially in this economy.
what startups would those be? tech startups? how about the gift kids who couldn't care less about tech? maybe they just want to become authors? who knows. startups?

They can write novels. It's hard to do that while competing with bright peers in a gifted program.

define failure. failure to get into academia? misery at getting into academia?

Not enjoying grad school. Getting a job at a mostly teaching college afterward. Teaching uninteresting courses. Teaching the same courses over and over again. Not having much time to do research. Getting your grant proposals/papers rejected. Not finding bright students to do research with.

what does a university major have to do with a gifted program in a high school?

If your teachers in a gifted program look down on computing as a career, that certainly isn't encouraging.

other than vocational tech programs, where exactly is not going to university encouraged?

Gifted students are expected to get into top universities. The pressure to pursue a university education is very strong in a gifted program.
This doesn't make any sense. The only way this speculation could ruin computing is if it somehow also meant that all other computers stopped working.
I second namecheap. I've used them for several years and have around 30 domains registered there (including Divvyshot). It's worth paying a little more for a more intuitive interface. I've never felt afraid of being tricked into buying something I didn't want.

Another suggestion: Use everydns.net for DNS. It's donation-based (http://www.everydns.com/donate.php), powerful, reliable, and run by David Ulevitch of opendns.com.
No, it's not, at least not to the point you were originally making, which was that Apple has put in place a system of control for apps but not for their own browser - that's false.

Why are you hung up on this? I'm not saying "don't be pissed at Apple", I'm saying "don't be pissed at Apple for imaginary things".
No, but but they have massive plans to rollout LTE. LTE is a 4G technology with 4G being defined as IP address + data stream, no fancypants, no application (ala telephonery) has specific own physical/link layer.
Let's be honest here, Apple could only do it because of the relatively small size and loyalty of their user base. Apple users have proven themselves willing to upgrade in a timely fashion. Windows users are more likely to stick with an old version if the new version gets bad press. Think WindowsME and Vista. If Microsoft were to make a complete, compatibility-breaking overhaul, they would have a lot of trouble selling it.
Interesting concept - reminds me of the black box on airplanes...

From a privacy perspective, there shouldn't be any automatic upload of this information to apple's servers-only when you go in and ask for a replacement. We'll have to wait and watch though.

I also wonder if this requires them to add a few sensors to the phone that are not present in the 3G or 3GS versions - which would mean this would only be applicable from the next version
Thanks for the comments. I should have made a better distinction between actual and codified process. My thoughts were toward codified, which, as you state, are endemic in larger organizations, and seem to build on themselves over the years, good and bad, until less and less actual progress toward the ultimate goals of the organization is accomplished. Process is delivered, rather than products...

Although I did not agree with everything in the Netflix deck, I was impressed by the "bias" toward great people rather than great process, which seems to me, to be a fresh take on it. There will always be necessary processes and there are certainly many great process best practices to draw from, but I do think we should all be CONSTANTLY QUESTIONING what is in place, asking ourselves if it is serving us or we serving it, and making changes as needed. It is my experience that this happens rarely in large organizations. There simply isn't the political will to take it on...
Hah, just had an argument with my mom over this the other day - I'm 23 (living separately), my sister is 12 (living with mom), and her and my mom were visiting. I had just emptied a piggy bank and my sister (12 yo) was counting the coins. First my mom said "oi, those are dirty, you shouldn't touch them", and was promptly ignored. She kept escalating her rhetoric, finally describing the unimaginable diseases my sister could pick up. Still ignored, until she raised her voice. At that point, I stepped in, and the argument turned into whether or not I should question my mother's authority in front of my sis. Whether or not my sister learned it, I still think that questioning authority calmly and firmly is a great lesson. :)
I can't help but have the strong feeling that you're on to something.

For the last couple of weeks I've been trying the best I can to read everything under the sun that has to do with alternative computer architectures. I know that just like in 'regular' science there is a fringe to computing, but what if there are viable alternatives to the von Neumann architecture and we just stopped looking for them ?

Even a really good alternative way to program existing computers would already be quite a step.
The code was only partly written by me, but actually we're not really JS wranglers -- we're C++ guys so we just kind of apply our C++ coding style to similar languages (JavaScript, Java, etc.) when we're working with them to the extent that that's possible.
how about this, lets say you take away they gifted and talented program and put them back in standard college prep course work. how many did you think will get bored beyond belief by not being challenged? how well are they going to do? shouldn't you teach to level of each individual student rather than as a faceless homogenous mass?

High school education -- gifted or not -- is mostly a waste of time. It's better to limit it as much as possible and encourage students to try to make money on their own.
Why Murdoch's plan just might work - Charging for News Corp Content
Agree with everything you say here, thanks
Joker.com has a horrible UI, but does the job just fine.
I second 1&1 — they are cheap, incredibly responsive to support requests, and generally a pleasure to deal with all around.
I noticed a bunch of people are using enom for email. I assume this is because of their hosted exchange. Does anyone have any experience with enom's standard hosted exchange and using it using mobile devices such as BB/iphone
Compared to email that's not such a big percentage, but if you take into account how long twitter exists and how small it really still is the number is pretty scary.

Maybe it should read 'already 24% of tweets created by bots'.

A bit of a trend would be useful information.

Would be interesting to have a breakdown on 'useful' bot tweets and 'spam' bot tweets as well, the article suggests that there is a bit discrepancy but does nothing to document how big.
At that point, you're dependent upon Google for running your public number. If somebody comes out for a better service, or Google decides to charge money for the GV service, you might not be able to transfer your number.

I'm all for giving AT&T less control in favor of Google because Google is decidedly less evil, for now. But make sure you have protections for future events.
Who uses the bundled firefox anyway? It's always a release behind (and now this)...
Napkee has been released!
How is this a nasty message?

"Warning!
You are using an outdated browser
For a better experience using this site, please upgrade to a modern web browser."

It's the literal truth, and it's not abusive...
http://register4less.com. Been using them for years, no complaints. I even got them to lean on Tucows (their upstream provider) to get me AAAA glue records, something Tucows doesn't normally support.
A properly handled honors/gifted/advanced high school course can be a great benefit.

You seem to assume that those who would be in such a program want to start a startup. Most people simply do not want to do that at all. Startup founders are a very small percentage of the population, and while it is growing it is likely to remain very small (and successful startup founders are a relatively small percentage of startup founders at that....)

Even for those that do, few of them do or should have started work on the startup during high school.

As to academia, there is certainly a correlation with people in those programs and people that go into academia, but I think the causal connection is relatively weak. And if they want to go into academia, that is not a bad thing. It is not a path I would choose, but it is not bad for many.

As for your point about picking a major, I do not know about all programs, but the one I was in certainly did not discriminate against any majors. Even if it did, that would be a force easily resisted as soon as you left that program and went into an actual college. And for that matter, many people change majors at least once (went through 3).

As a whole, they are beneficial to their students.
Mamma and Pappa don't care about this only nerds do. Nerds can move away from linux but I guess cannonical feels Ubuntu has gained traction with Mama and papa and that it doesn't need nerds anymore.
Well for one thing, Apple does not let you give out promo codes for 17+ apps, which is a big handicap for promotion of your work.

Similarly, I wrote the Jishobot app and had to change its rating up to 17+. I'm calling bullshit on Phil Schiller's response. Am I allowed to say that?
This article describes model driven application development, the focus of my current company, where an application is considered to have a model that describes the application state and a domain specific model and the model that describes application state may be varied dynamically. This is completely distinct from programming. Programming is about manipulating data and how a computer actually operates on data (threads & ram etc). Somebody will always have to do programming in some language in order to enable "interesting" business users with such point of views to do things easily. The other side of the model-driven coin (distinct from UI code) is using rules to describe data transformations. This is not exactly a shameless plug because I am leaving this company but you can see model driven development in action by downloading TopBraid Composer Maestro Edition http://www.topquadrant.com/products/TB_Composer.html and navigating to http://localhost:8083/tbl You will see several applications which you can select and then select a data model to work with.... at that point your application is in a particular state (such and such widget configuration) that application state may then be saved off as another application and so forth. Going back to TBC you can see that actual data models that represent this application state and you can look into SparqlMotion and SPIN for how inferencing can be used to add support for rules in a model driven manner. The advantage of TQ's approach is that it is based on open standards most notably RDF, which is a sufficiently generic data model that it may be considered universal. I still believe that actually implementing components and complex algorithms should still be done in code. To me the memory state of an operating system represents a very particular closed world that can then be mapped to the general, open world expressed in RDF (or however you like to express the universe of data, I believe RDF is best atm)
I don't get it, sure it's impressive, kind of like a Rube Goldberg machine is impressive. But let's step back a second - isn't it a sign of a monumental failure of computer programming that we're gawking at a machine which can perform ~6 billion calculations/second (not counting the GPU) displaying a 310 by 190 "3d" maze at ~25 frames a second?
really? i thought it kinda sucked.

"If grades and enthusiasm are waning, it’s time for parental intervention. But not too much. And not too little. Really, you know your daughter best, and it’s important to talk about what’s going on at school."

i expect better writing from Wired
This is pretty much the exact breakdown of information I have had in the back of my mind to find for quite a while. It's very helpful — perhaps the most useful thing I've seen posted on HN since I started reading. (At least, most useful for me!) Of course, I wouldn't want to jump off a bridge just because everyone else was doing it, but researching all the available providers for all these hosting requirements is a potentially endless job. It's nice to see the decisions other companies have made, to crowdsource it a bit and narrow down the options.
High school education -- gifted or not -- is mostly a waste of time....

This depends on the high school and how the student approaches it. If a student just tries to get through it, then they will with little effort and 0 learning. If on the other hand, they put some effort in, they really can learn something from some of those classes, especially if they take AP classes.

More importantly, if they really put in effort into some of the semi-optional projects they can do something really interesting. Some high schoolers have done very impressive senior projects.

I do think that a smart person will spend considerable time on learning outside of school though, I certainly wish I had done a lot more of that.
But if you wanted to take out a big site like that with a lot less effort (or bots) all you’d need to do is … right. Take out their nameservers (DNS).

Oh yeah, interesting Troll-FUD coming from a company selling overpriced loadbalancer appliances. I say Troll-FUD because their technicians certainly know better than this nonsense. What is this, an attempt to drum up PR for some DNS product they are offering?

DNS is so trivial to distribute that it's not normally a worthwhile attack vector.
F5 knows that.
It's an interesting point, and one I'm surprised hasn't been brought up yet in the conversation. In fact, I've never received an email from a customer or potential customer about the negative aspects of the icon, while we've gotten a bunch from people who really like the approach to design and copywriting on both the site, the description page, and the app itself.

So, two things:

a) Business side. We certainly lose out on some customers who are turned off by the icon- that's probably the case with yourself. You posted in another thread saying you'd be interested in our upcoming Free Audiobooks app, so maybe we'll lose that sale based on the icon.

Based on past performance I'm confident that the upside of extra sales gained balances the downside of sales lost- that's what makes the icon effective. It stands out because most folks wouldn't be comfortable offering it, which is why there aren't a million icons that look just like it. It's a risk, and it's paying off.

b) Romanticization of a brutal dictatorship. I feel it mocks the Soviets more than anything- it's over the top and campy. Like on freebooksapp.com - "Free Books. Better than vodka. Great success!". Cheap laugh? For sure. But it converts phenomenally, with 2.5 minutes average time on site and 15% bounce rate in primary markets, and positive customer feedback in email.

If you look at the browse page (freebooksapp.com/browse) it's clearly done campy/mocking, not romanticizing- "selection like glorious grocery store!".

Taking the application flow as a whole, I just don't think there's any way that anyone can take this as a vote for communism. I'm glad you made the comment, though, because it's good to have feedback in the negative side of the box- it concerned me in the back of my head that I hadn't had ANY negative emails about it.
Yours might, but most Mammas and Pappas still don't know what an operating system is.
I have 50+ domains with them. I like them okay, but I don't love em. I did call support ~2-3 time recently and they were really quite good. 24/7 and almost no waiting.

When you cancel a domain they reveal your contact information for some period of time. Maybe they can't help this, but I blame them anyway.

Overall I think they're pretty good.
> The accuracy of this comparison is limited mainly because atomic clocks change frequencies by small, semi-random amounts (of order 1 ns/day) at unpredictable times for reasons that are not fully understood

What?
Yup, my bad- $350/day without advertising would be more accurate. I think of most of the icon/description/sales page work as positioning than as marketing, but that's probably splitting hairs too much.
The nomadic programmer
Microsoft already did almost the opposite when they did the switch from .ini files of old to the registry, by translating the .ini file API into equivalent registry calls.

There's no compelling reason why they couldn't do it, although it's probably much more involved than it first appears, and I seriously doubt it's due to the fact "they don't have the balls to take the risk" given many of the security changes introduced in Vista, it's probably just because it's just quite low down on their list of priorities when there's been bigger fish to fry, such as security, performance, and replacing the increasing dated WinForms.
Behold Xanadu
then canonical forgot who installed ubuntu on mamma and pappa in the first place. what was done can be undone.
Nokia 5610 Express Music True Value For Money
Tucows is more of a pain. You can become an eNom reseller in a day or two very easily. As I recall, there's a little faxing involved, but no biggie. It's convenient if you need to register or modify domains programmatically.
It really just shows that we're a bunch of web programming nerds.
You seem to assume that those who would be in such a program want to start a startup.

A large number of people would like to make money on their own. Just look at the number of apps in the app store for example.

Even for those that do, few of them do or should have started work on the startup during high school.

Why would you say that? The brain is sufficiently developed at that point to create interesting products/services -- especially with gifted students.
In the corporate world it's definitely a fresh take, and that alone is worth a lot.
Forgive me if this is obvious, but are you making a comparison to Project Xanadu with your title? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
I register through Google Apps. They use GoDaddy as the actual registrar, but the process of buying a domain through them is uber-simple; the complete opposite of GoDaddy's constant upsell.
There is still a registry, because the registry is still a great idea.

Dvorak argues that the registry is 'a pile of junk clogging up the machine'. The registry is a tree data structure - more nodes won't 'clog it up', it'll still take the same number of operations to get anywhere in the tree