skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The obvious answer is that what a class buys is a sunk cost, to force the parent to send the kid to the class, and then the kid out of sheer boredom or osmosis will wind up learning something. If the kid had the motivation to begin with, the book would be quite enough. (I had the motivation simply because I wanted to show up my elder sister; so the class was a waste for me.)

Which directly leads to one of the questions I posed: how could this startup force the target kids to learn, if it's remote? Without a good answer to that, I don't think it's a good idea.

(And on a tangent: school can be a good idea, even for motivated students, simply because some things are very difficult to teach yourself out of a book. It'd be kind of hard to learn how to read and write from just books, for example.)
More people are smart and reasonable than you give credit for, the problems are the soundbite-driven media and advancements in the field of marketing and news-as-entertainment.
To google.
this is interesting, from the parent:
"As levels of pedestrian and bicyclist activity rise their per capita risk falls. Drivers adapt their behavior in the presence of increased cycling and walking (17)."
(17) Jacobsen P. Safety in numbers: more walkers and bicyclists, safer walking and bicycling. 2003.
Yeah, that'd be an awesome conversation for HN, wouldn't it. And we'd all learn so much about cybersecurity, too!
Not only that, how many of them subscribe to time warner cable television.. most people watching hulu who have had cable/satellite have not given up their digital boxes for the internet.
When I end up with > 25 tabs, it usually just means I need to run a garbage collection cycle.

I agree in theory; that many tabs are pretty difficult to manage. Unfortunately, a garbage collection cycle forces me to focus on garbage collecting (since I will usually have several important sites open among the trash), breaking my concentration on the research. It ends up being more productive to leave them open for a while, until they reach some threshold where I have to do too much work to find the important open sites among the garbage. That point for me is definitely more than 25 but also less than 100. I assume that it's different for different people.
Can't believe I'm asking this, but how is that cyclical?
Bad advice. The correct solution to SQL injection is to use parameterized queries - relying on filters will screw you over if you actually need to insert metacharacters.
Somebody needs to show this to Paul Krugman:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/how-big-is-9-tri...
Power7 probably destroys i7, but it's also much more expensive. The proper comparison would be Power7 vs. Intel "Beckton" Xeon 7500; the jury is out on that since neither chip has been released yet.
Any reasoned discussion about things that matter has the potential to be interesting.
OK; I've applied the fix to the master. Thank you!
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With 32mb of DRAM on CPU, it's not long before computer manufacturers build the power on self tests to run entirely within L3, making it possible to interact with a machine with no RAM installed.

Or put another way, pretty soon on-chip DRAM will be plentiful enough that external RAM will be optional -- a lot of machines will basically be implemented with microcontroller-like integrated architecture.
I just told my wife, "The next time I want to be an early adopter, just hit me until I fall to the ground and stay there."

I have a bilateral hand disability, and the program I DEPEND on, MacSpeech Dictate, doesn't work under Snow Leopard. I had refused to pay an extra $55 for features that should have been there in the first place, but now I have to. Furthermore, the UPDATE ISN'T DOWNLOADABLE (they mail it to you, for $10 to $90 extra, based on how fast you want it). And the final insult is that it's not clear the new version will even work until they (not an especially responsive company, of course) release a Snow Leopard update that may be delayed by "several minor functional and cosmetic issues" they want to add!

I'm hosed for at least a week, maybe longer. I'm 55 years old, the very definition of a gentle, responsible person, and this is the first time I've flamed IN MY LIFE. But I've got to say this:

I HATE MACSPEECH, THEIR BUSINESS PRACTICES, THEIR INSANELY BRAIN-DEAD DESIGN AND USABILITY DECISIONS, AND THEIR TOTAL DISREGARD OF INFORMED (former 10-year technical Apple employee) FEEDBACK BY SOMEONE WHO ACTUALLY USES AND DEPENDS ON THEIR PRODUCT EVERY DAY.

Even though it hurts my hands to type this, it was WORTH IT.

I could go on...but that's it, basically. And not a single exclamation mark or #$@%&* expletive, either.
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This article deceptively makes little mention of Bell's macro condition. Just to say it went from 30,000 employees to 1000 in a 7 year span is not the whole picture. Let me provide some perspective.

If you look at ALU stock mid 2000, it had at a high of over $80. It currently is at 3.80ish with a huge come back from a low of $1.09.

Alcatel and Lucent merged in Dec. of 2006.

In 2007, it lost 3.5 billion on about 18B of sales. In 2008 it lost 5B in 2008 on about 17B of sales. It has had about 4B in cash (&equivalents) and is providing itself with runway to get back into the black with asset sales.

Since the merger, there have been multiple lay off initiatives to try and stop the bleeding. (Not pansy 5-10% cuts, we're talking about deeper broader strokes)

Recently, it has begun to do better but is still rolling deep with legacy products and losses.

ALU is fighting for it's life. Facing these conditions, most companies would have severely cut a 'no short term profit' R&D division.

The cherry to top off this Article is that ALU is a French company with Lucent and Bell as its American subsidiaries.

Edit: Grammar and full disclosure: I am an ALU employee.
I've seen this trick used in BIOSes; using cache as RAM it's possible to do quite a bit before the memory controller has been turned on.
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Has the whole piracy episode taught us nothing? You cannot control the internet. The internet is about the efficient conveyance of information: it's basically a law of physics that nothing can stop information from spreading.
>Some people even go so far as thinking that you're offering to buy them lunch because you think they can't afford it.

Excellent point, I've seen a kind gesture blow up in a person's face for exactly this reason. It's always best to offer, ask or at least let the other person know BEFORE paying the check.
Yeah, I'm hoping / assuming the OP was submitted as a joke.
If you're heavily AJAXed up then bounce rate is a meaningless metric for you. I don't know why you'd spend time optimizing for it -- instead, measure a meaningful metric (such as average number of interactions, or number of visitors with at least one interaction, or -- my personal favorite -- sales).
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The adult generations have complained of the lack of virtue in their 1-2 successor generations probably for the past few millennia (in European history, going back at least to ancient Greek/Roman times) - enough written evidence has survived the times. What is qualitatively different from the "usual" stereotypes with this complaint here is the alleged deficits in face-to-face communication. But I agree with the caveat of lacking evidence.

OTOH, among (supposed?) adults, with the widespread use of email and "digital media" I have been observing an apparent decline in the quality of written work and correspondence (and I'm not (just) talking about rudeness and lack of etiquette in email), and also a lack of attention to refinement in oral communication, at least in business. But maybe this is just an instance of the stereotyped perception of a general decline in standards of excellence (and aspiration).
Startup idea: hack customer service into a product that scales.
Idiocy abounds here in Chicago.

So true. I don't think I've ever ridden on the north side of the Lakefront Trail without experiencing at least one moment of sheer terror. A nice ride, but I had to give it up. People talking on their cell phones, riding on the wrong side of the road, little kids playing on the path, joggers that jump right in front of you (got a new wheelset out of that), sand all over the road surface around blind curves... (and yes, I went down hard because of this). When it's raining, though, it's a great ride. A drop of rain and the entire city goes inside, leaving the entire trail for me :)

The south side is much better (but a very boring ride), and I have never really felt unsafe on the road.

Anyway, I am just waiting for someone to get really hurt... it is bound to happen some day.
It all comes back to this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=756529
However it seems dead. Anything new on Synthesis (and related ideas) in the last two decades?
If you're oriental you're in for a shock. Westerns tend to be a little, ummm, cheap. Gifts are not valued by them as they're in the east. OTOH, some orientals, specially arabs and chinese will probably bankrupt themselves hosting lavish dinners for others; while not a good idea, it at least buys them some social capital. Whoever takes care of the others is taken care of by all. While to Westerners, if you're out of money you have no recourse but the bank.
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By that standard, it's just as impractical in a car.

Last time I checked, you don't have to unclip to stop your car. And anyway, I live by a stop sign, and I have never seen a car come to a full stop either.

Just out of curiosity, have you ever ridden a bike? You get a sense of what rules you can and can't ignore. A stop sign when you are on the non-conflicting side of a T intersection? Probably safe to slow for, rather than stop, unclip, wait, and clip back in. A red light at a major intersection? Might as well wait.

Anyway, I am pretty conservative in breaking the rules, but I don't feel at all bad ignoring a stop sign when there is literally no traffic.
Incidentally, I've almost been hit by a car who suddenly decided to take a left turn from the right lane. Bad drivers are dangerous regardless of which vehicle they happen to be piloting.
Seems like this Cooper guy is the hero of the story.
Who is doing basic research though? Assume there is a class of ideas which will take 10-20 years to even result in a marketable product, yet the applications will be mindblowing compared to anything someone can develop in <5 years. The current startup model is not going to even touch any of those ideas.
Yeah, its always shocked me that Microsoft couldn't be bothered to put in decent histogram fucntionality where you can choose your buckets and it'll put together a histogram.
A certain large Japanese software consultancy I know of outsources to people who learn programming best practices from blogs like this.

Code reviews there are never dull. Its sort of like a horror movie -- "Don't go in there, he's got a regexp to sanitize SQL! NO! NO! Oh, why didn't you listen!"
What did you report in the survey? Some people probably reported just their day job and others their total work.

If anyone ever wants to do this again, they should try to see where interpretation was difficult and make it clear in the next survey.
Depends on where you are. In redneck country, maybe. In any major city, not really a problem.

I am sure Europe is very similar.

(As an aside, I noticed while in Copenhagen that they have laws to prevent cyclists from riding safely. In some places, you are forced to ride on the sidewalk, sometimes separated from the street by trees, which leads to dangerous encounters at intersections where the cars are turning across the flow of forward-moving bicycle traffic. This is where most accidents happen, and is why it's illegal to ride on the sidewalk in the US... in many places, anyway.)
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I hear Twitter is hiring!
At least Opera has a global default zoom level setting, which I've set to 150%. With the modern screen resolutions, I just can't read "normal" sized text on webpages anymore.
Your first incident reminds me of a similar story that I experienced, as the cyclist.

I'm going own a hill at about 60km/hr, and a car pulls out directly in front of me from a side street - presumably to see round another car illegally parked on the corner. trouble is, he didn't see me coming from the other direction. Note that I have right of way at this intersection.

I had no time to stop/avoid, so I smack into the side of the car, level with the front wheels. The whole bike rotated around the front wheel, with me still on it, so that my head smashed into the bonnet, leaving a nice old dent, before my bike and I rolled off the other side ofthe bonnet and ont the curb.

Naturally, I was concussed, and not terribly sure about who I was at this point of time, but I do remember the guy yelling at me for about 2 minutes, before jumping back in his car and storming off. He also made the comment about it being my fault that I hit a stationary car...
A one-lane road, in a town, with a speed limit of 65 miles an hour? That is the only problem here. (They don't even let you drive that fast on the 9-lane expressways in Chicago!)

The massive irony of that one, by the way, is that a paved bike lane runs parallel to that bypass, and I live in a town which takes pride in maintaining a healthy network of quality bike paths.

This doesn't mean much. There are many more accidents where a motorist turns across a bike path without looking than there are where a motorist hits a bicycle from behind. Playing the numbers, you're safer on the road than on the bike path. That is why "experienced cyclists" avoid them.

Your case is very, very rare, and the solution is to bring the speed limit on that section of road down to 25. Then everyone is safe.
It's great that it works as a stand-alone install too - I was hoping it would. I'm running Leopard now, but I'd like to do a clean full install of SL.
Did this motorist get into any trouble for this?
the actual article:

http://gigaom.com/2009/08/28/the-iphone-app-market-size-deba...
Hence the name omega coder, i.e. the last letter of the Greek alphabet, the bottom of the barrel.
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It makes the road network look woefully inadequate. The solution is to add another lane, not to whine about the cyclist wanting to get home from work without dying.
If it's rush hour, traffic probably isn't moving that much faster than the cyclist. Regardless, cyclists are allowed on the road at any time of day, so I'm not sure what you're looking for. Should I be forced to drive so you can save a couple of seconds?

You do realize that rush hour is caused by too many cars on the road, right? If cars were banned from the streets at rush hour, roads would probably have higher throughput. You can fit about four people on bikes in the space that (usually) one person is taking up with their car.

Blaming people for traffic is ridiculous. Everyone causes traffic. If you want free-flowing roads, price congestion.
My local problem with cyclists are ones who ride on the shoulder of fast narrow roads. Most of them are dressed up like they are cycling for the sake of cycling -- not trying to get somewhere. This behavior makes the automobile drivers less safe by causing them to move closer to oncoming traffic in the other lane. I may be able to see them and give them room but it doesn't mean the oncoming traffic understands what's going on -- especially when the roads are curvy. In those situations I feel like side swiping the cyclist would be preferable to a head-on collusion with an oncoming vehicle.
Netbooks and iPhones anticipated in "The other road ahead" (2001)
Paul Graham wrote, in "The other road ahead" (2001):

"All you'll need will be something with a keyboard, a screen, and a Web browser. Maybe it will have wireless Internet access. Maybe it will also be your cell phone. Whatever it is, it will be consumer electronics: something that costs about $200, and that people choose mostly based on how the case looks."

http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html

I find the above paragraph an extraordinary prediction of both netbooks and iphones.

That's all. You may now resume your browsing routines.
I can't speak to the second point, but to respond to the first: it's very well suited.

I've built two primary compiler projects targeting JS, a Python->JS compiler and a 6502 emulator that dynarec's to JS. Both were easy to build and its flexible nature made everything work out very well. I dislike writing JS myself (just don't dig the syntax), but writing compilers backending to it works out quite well.
So much bitterness.

This is why I lobby to ban cars. With everyone wanting to "run over" cyclists and pedestrians, I feel that non-commercial motor vehicles should be made illegal; they are just too dangerous in the hands of self-identified murderers.
points for having sample code obviously placed!

Cheers to that! Every programming language home page should have a quick way of getting to simple sample code. Erlang does a decent job of this: "Getting Started" -> "Getting started quickly" gives you source right away. Most P/L sites do not make it easy to find a code sample.
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Bikes brake more slowly than a car. I've been hit by a car while riding in the past, where they've pulled in front, overtaken and slammed on the brakes.

Sounds like a reaction time or misuse of your brakes, rather than a general rule about the amount of time required to slow the bike.

Go somewhere where there's no traffic (or obstacles), get your bike up to speed, and slowly engage the front brake. Now do it again, but more quickly. Eventually you will learn how much force you can apply without flipping the bike; this is a skill you need to ride your bike safely.

Just pulling the rear brake is not going to stop the bicycle quickly; the wheel skids and you develop no more braking force.
Who is doing basic research though?

Microsoft, for one, invests truly staggering amounts of money in basic research. So does the American defense industry -- for entirely different scales of "staggering".
The Founder's Institute is great. Heard Adeo speak at Startup Idol and he was fantastic. Insightful, practical advice.

Really hope he brings this to Boston.
.. which is what I was trying to explain to jws who called it a $30k ad buy.

No, I do not want to run my own private exchange server. I want to use Rackspace hosted exchange to host 1 email address. A shared exchange server.
Even if you try to put bike lanes everywhere, left turns are still a fact of life. Cars and bikes have to coexist. If you regularly interact with cyclists, then I'm guessing you're on city streets with a speed limit of about 35 mph. If occasionally slowing down to 15 is that big of an inconvenience to you, then you should probably reevaluate things. Seriously. I explained why cyclists take lanes and you still insist on harboring animosity towards us for it. All for stealing valuable seconds from you. If people are stealing your right of way from you (which I see far too often) that's one thing. But you have a problem with law-abiding cyclists. That is odd to me.
Networks are housed in buildings. There are likely existing laws allowing the state to take over private-sector buildings that are being used criminally. Why not utilize these laws instead of creating buggy new laws that, in their vagueness, invite future abuse?
I was confused when he mentioned the importance of code correctness. Wouldn't it be easy to write more software to monitor how your trading software is doing and intercede if it seems to be losing you a lot of money?
If you want free-flowing roads, price congestion.

But gas is already too expensive, and riding public transportation is too inconvenient! Let's blame a minority group for all our problems!!
I would just call the police. Leaving the scene of an accident? Enjoy your time in jail.
This is exactly why I proselytize.
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WTF, I cannot believe that's not a joke.
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When it comes to sharing the road with cars, many people seem to assume that such accidents are usually the cyclist’s fault

Well, there's a context-free assertion. but that's OK, because it means we can fill up that Important Daily Blog Post with a rather obvious and unsurprising statistic. It might have been interesting to correlate accident levels with surveys of driving manners in different cities - I hear New Yorkers are famously discourteous drivers, which may have prompted the quote above - but this didn't happen. Indeed, the discussion here, even among people who consider this irrelevant, has been considerably more education than the trite little article that inspired it, and for which I hope the writer was paid a mere pittance.
Did you really watch it? He explains that at the speed and volume with which they handle transactions, an error could cause them to disintegrate in a handful of milliseconds.

Besides – why write more code to check if your original code is correct, when you can just write correct code? And if you write software to check your software, then do you have to write software to check the checking software? Police police police police...
The Apple Newton was hacked with WiFi right around that time:

http://www.deleet.de/ray/newton/802.11b-FAQ.html
“I don’t really know what the next big thing is because I don’t spend my time making big things,” he says. “I spend time making small things and then when the time comes I put them together.”
I think some cyclists -- because they are in the open air, with full peripheral vision and hearing, looking through no windshield, totally in tune with the environment -- expect all other vehicles on the road to have the same awareness.

But the same total awareness is impossible in a car, even among the vigilant. That's why the visibility aids, legal/customary traffic rhythms, and assigned places for different travelers on shared paths are so important.

The cyclists who scare the crap out of me seem to believe that everyone will see them even though they're in dark clothes, at dusk, with a dim taillight if anything at all, and traveling in an unexpected place (like against traffic, in crosswalks/from sidewalks as if they were pedestrians, or making turns at places or angles where other vehicles don't). I tend to see them -- though never as soon as if they were in normal flows -- but it only takes one momentarily inattentive driver for disaster to strike.

(And don't even get me started about joggers who prefer to jog in the street, often with headphones on or in dark clothes at dusk, when there's a sidewalk right there. I think the "runner's high" impairs judgment as much as some other highs.)
You do know that you sweat just as much on a mountain bike and therefore would need to wear the same "special suits", right?

Anyway, my advice is to calm down a bit and drive slower. You'll make the roads safer for everyone, "special suit" or not.
Ahh, your comment is so innocent, so pure. It's cute, even.