skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The advice is generally not to try to teach your children to read ahead of when they do it in school.

That seems like a classic example of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Because we know that schools are slow and underchallenging, let's not let our children advance at all academically. That advice is not for me.

It's true that not all precocious readers become eminent adults, but maybe the mechanism that results in that observation is precisely that many schools are too lock-step in their organization

http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html

and too likely to slow children down.
Biochemists use easily hundreds of different techniques to elucidate, logically or probabilistically, details about cellular processes. They take serious advantage of techniques like optical properties of solutions and selective targeting of fluorescent tags to visualize effects. Moreover, they tend to abuse the very nanomachine proteins they're trying to study in order to study them further.

A simple example (the names are removed to make this easier to digest, but if you're curious it's the action of Glyceraldehyde-3-Phosphate Dehydrogenase in glycolysis) involves a protein which is known to play a part in the breakdown of glucose. This protein catalyzes the addition of a "high energy" phosphate to our compound so we can break it down further while also pulling off a reactive hydrogen (and adding it to NAD+ to make NADH) so the cell can use that later (another kind of energy like ATP).

Biochemists, assuming they can already purify the compound and know the overall reaction, investigated the action of the enzyme by mixing in a highly reactive fluorescent-tagged molecule that looks similar to the product of the reaction. This molecule bound permanently to the inside of the enzyme which was then denatured and sequenced, looking for whatever amino acid showed the fluorescent tag (cysteine). Then the inserted modified reagents which contained radioactive hydrogen and phosphate to figure out where exactly those molecules ended up. In this way they learned where the enzyme added the phosphate to the product and exactly which hydrogen was removed from the initial compound to make that NADH.

Biochemistry is a really fascinating story of minute triumphs of discovery. Unfortunately, like any part of science like that, it means that the day-to-day life of a biochemist is backbreaking and tedious. Regardless, if you're interesting, there is a lot of fun stuff to study.
Oh, and as far as imaging goes, it's simply amazing what has been done with X-ray crystallography.
That's the difference between profitable and profiterole.
doing everything by hand and not automating stuff
Excellent observation about understanding pointers; I never really had any difficulty understanding pointers in C, but I had already programmed in assembly language.

Shakespeare on the other hand, is still opaque to me.
didn't know it was using turk for their own image recognition services... not sure if they are using it internally or actually making these tasks available to public.
At about 29:30 "You basically can't pay people enough to carefully review dull code."

I found that very insightful.
This is probably getting a tad too complicated but having a number of different 'upvote' icons (ala Slashdot) would be interesting.

You could upvote someone for being funny, informative, insightful, and so on.

If someone has a high karma for being funny in topics related to computer security, you probably wouldn't trust their security advice so much.
How far could this technology reach physically?

He addresses proximity on a desktop and such; is it feasible to get the magnetic coil to provide power within an entire house?
Interesting. I think I like the idea of having different sites with different granularities. HN could be a site that occasionally has a post saying, "Hey, there now exists a subreddit for this," and Reddit could have articles saying, "OMG, pg just tweeted about a sandwich!" And since news.rc is so easy to run, it should be easy to throw another news server (wow, remember when that phrase meant something else?) up there (except for the OpenId integration, that is) for each internal node in the LOD structure of sites.
I expect this within 10 years. This might be the 'next big thing'
Invest in recycling plants... there is going to be a lot of cable taken down and given a new life... this technology is amazing.
When I asked it to show its work, it demonstrated that it did the algebra first. I was asking if that's legal here.
8 Steps to a Healthier Heart - Page 2
I use it indirectly from Doxygen regularly. I've also had data in custom formats that is naturally graph-like, and it was trivial to produce visualizers by writing scripts to convert the custom format into "dot" syntax.

One idea I have is to use "dot" to give auto-layout capabilities to a GUI that has a simple canvas. Right now, any data set that wasn't created by a GUI user (e.g. automatically generated) looks ugly, because it has no useful layout information. Since "dot" knows how to do layout, it would seem possible to run it in the background, parse the results, and use the node positions to make the default canvas look much more intelligent.
From the author's homepage, this is a project of 2006, seems that it hasn't changed for 3 years.
Maybe someone like me got ahold of it. I wrote an app that I put on one of my coworkers machines that would start to slowly move the mouse to the right side of the screen if it sat in the same spot for more than 30 seconds.
That would remove some of the utility of the site for me. Some people consistently say smarter things than the mean, so it's more worth my time to read what they write than most of the content on the site. (I subscribe to some comment RSS feeds from searchyc.)

If all domain names were removed from the blogosphere it would enable a more fair distribution of readership, but it wouldn't make for a better reading experience. It would also mean the regulars would have to qualify things more often.

Basically I care more about utility than fairness and I think reputation is a concept with significant utility.
Wow this blew me away! Nothing beats visual confirmation from an emotional perspective ;-)
When you hit 30 you may discover that Pop Tarts are too sweet and Mountain Dew gives you heartburn. :D
It'd be interesting to see something like this that uses Python 3's function annotations.

def greetings(ladies: int, gentlemen: (int, 80, 40)): pass
I think the trick for now is to strategically position charging stations in common areas (desk, bedroom table, kitchen, etc.). Also, it looks like alignment is required, so it's not quite like the wireless router in your home reaching all of the rooms, more like your TV remote reaching the TV set.
I propose you personally hit the button labeled "flag" in future.
The comparison to homeschoolers seems a bit off. First, there are very few other students in a homeschooled kid's class. It makes sense that a kid will do better in a class of two or three, rather than eighteen or twenty. Additionally, kids with involved parents do better in school, and parents who homeschool their kids usually are quite involved.

It seems obvious that it's better to group kids by ability rather than age. Of course, that can lead to forcing kids into unchangable "tracks", where little Jimmy can never get back to where the "advanced" kids of his age are, but that shouldn't be as much of a problem if the classes are mixed-age.
I tried to simulate this by putting a couple laptops next to each other but the flatness of the screens really makes it uncomfortable to work with since as it's a laptop you have to be close to the monitors (to reach the keyboard).

If they managed to make them angle towards your face it would be better.
The Virus of Marketing
Technically, everything works fine. I don't see what AR buys me over a map, though.

I find Google Sky Map to be a more useful use of the same data. (GPS + compass + accelerometers.) That is one cool application.
+Newton's Principia as a masterpiece of marketing and for creating the modern scholasticism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophiæ_Naturalis_Principia...

+Descartes' Geometry where he declares that you can choose any line as a unit to measure other lines (your knowledge depends on what you already know, your unit) (p.1)
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26400/26400-pdf.pdf

+Galileo's Dialogues for the realization that real understanding of nature does not come from academic gibberish and research is actually fun
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogue_Concerning_the_Two_Chi...

+Dana Densmore's Newton book to understand Principia
http://www.greenlion.com/cgi-bin/SoftCart.100.exe/principi.h...

+Slow burn by Stu Mittleman to understand how human body deals with fat and sugar
http://www.amazon.com/Slow-Burn-Faster-Exercising-Slower/dp/...

+The Answer John Assaraf about habits
http://www.amazon.com/Answer-Business-Achieve-Financial-Extr...

+Paul Graham's essays on education and dropping out of school for early startup
http://www.paulgraham.com/mit.html

+Ernst Mach's History of mechanics for its incredible lucidity and classic simplicity
http://books.google.com/books?id=8bI3-JSarecC&dq=ernst+m...

+Euclid for its complete lack of physics in it and its beautiful diagrams
http://aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.html
+Aristotle for appreciation of curiosity
http://books.google.com/books?id=WWyF4vS8P7UC&pg=PA154&#...

+Bertrand Russel for his humor
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell
and for his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy
Really beautiful book so simple and fun to read...
http://books.google.com/books?id=9GK_Fhz5RDUC&dq=introdu...

+Tolstoy's Confessions
http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/tolstoy/confession...
For his intellectual quest going in circles

I believe that if you continue long enough in your quest, your research and understandings will describe such a circle. That's not a bad thing, I guess.

How does the world work? The world works the way you look at it. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=210104 We see what we believe.

Ooops, I think I am steering away from your question. But I learned something about how the world works from each one of these books.

I totally appreciate your approach to the question from a wholistic view (including the social and human elements) by disregarding academic boundaries.
[Ask HN] Good book about functional programming?
Hello all.

What would you recommend me to read if I want to dive deep into the functional programming paradigm? There's plenty of this kind of material for Object Oriented programming (of course, given the hype.), but i dunno about FP.
I guess my point was more around the return on investment- not a point against universities in general, but a point against paying a lot of money for a subject where the proof that you have learned something is simply not there with a degree. I claim that most of the benefits to oneself from a liberal arts education can be garnered without the fee.

"You're paying for some external motivation, for one thing."
What is the external motivation- that I have sunk $50k into the year of school so I should try learn more? That I will get a bad grade? I think it still takes self motivation to learn.

I am not for home study, but a liberal arts education is sometimes more of a dilettante's dalliance than a useful economic move. The status associated with such a degree appears to be dropping, and hopefully the price will follow.
Very cool, one problem I found is that you can't have 2 word objects.

Example: Router connects to Web Server

It uses Router and Server as the objects with "connects to Web" as the connection. Putting the 2 word object (Web Server) in quotes confused it:

Example: Router connects to "Web Server"

It should be possible to have a 2 word object with some kind of escape character to create an object with more than one word without having it think you are supplying it with part of a connection.
Actually, you can and should. Its the difference between patents and copyrights. The (L)GPL pertains to the copyright on the actual code and the laws are (in comparison) fairly universal and well understood.

Patents on the other hand pertain to a method of doing something (separate from actual code) and are far from certain and vary widely between jurisdictions. The outcomes are decided in local courts based on a mix of precedent and who can spend the most on lawyers.

In short, copyrights and patents have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.
I've been pondering information architecture a lot lately. I've found that much of Gödel, Escher, Bach resonates well with my thoughts.

Particularly I've been contemplating the relationship between transformation and efficiency, as well as parallel processing and recurive architectures.
Same here. Found some business this way, so it's been worth it.
If I wanted (and had the money for) a huge laptop, I'd go for something like Hanselman's huge Lenovo [ http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MyLenovoChoiceThinkPadW700VsTh... ] I just think having a second, smaller monitor works better than two symmetrical monitors.
Grape juice is to wine what wine is to vinegar...
Years ago, a brilliant if eccentric friend had one of those one-pane comics on his bulletin board. It depicted a figure walking down a city street. All the forms of communication around him -- I'm a bit fuzzy on the details, but remember particularly items such as a bus stop bench, perhaps a TV in a shop window, newspaper vending machine, and a billboard -- displayed the word "lies".

At the time, I thought it was a rather cynical take on life. Over the years, though, I've come to be more and more in agreement with it.

He's also the fellow who once, in response perhaps to my own low self-esteem, said: "Xxx, you have to realize, most people are as dumb as rocks." I'm still working on that bit of imparted wisdom. Some days I agree. Some days, I am surprised by the unexpected abilities I find in others. (And a bit disappointed at my own lack of insight prior to such realizations.)

I guess the real eye opener, although it didn't come all at once and I still fall short, is that, the more you (truly) respect yourself, the more others respect you. Don't look to others to give you your self worth, though you can find it in part in your interactions with them.

Finally, one time I said to a group, thinking it nothing terribly special, that one should not expect from others what they are unable to give you. Another brilliant, if a bit self-centered and brutal friend, responded in a surprisingly positive fashion: She said she had never expected to learn anything from me, but that this really surprised her. Her feedback reinforced my own point to me. It also showed me that you cannot always tell what someone else will find valuable. Finally, over time, it showed me that when someone echos a sentiment to you, pay heed: I was hoping for a relationship with her that she was willing to tease and "pretend" about, but not willing to really start.

Despite the comic and sentiment about "lies", most people, when you really pay attention, are communicating fairly immediately what their interests and perspective are. It may not always be in their words or even in their short term actions, but it is in -- pardon the use of the word -- their Gestalt.

EDIT (again): Decided to remove the previously edited in, additional portion of my comment addressing others pointing out and then my own anecdotal observations of correlations between physical attractiveness and success, as well as congregation of such attractiveness -- like seeking like. I do seem to see such, but I'm not comfortable my observations are objective enough to warrant exposition.
They're both designed to teach specific languages, but I found both Real World Haskell and Programming Erlang conveyed a lot about practical functional programming. You can read RWH for free online (but it seems to be down as I type this): http://book.realworldhaskell.org/
I think this will look wrong-like-flairs at some future time when we're all looking back and thinking about designs that seemed so cool at the time.

The mega laptop is a dead evolutionary path, because it does its two priorities badly. It's not a good portable, and it's not a good desktop because you have fixed eye position and no configuration opportunity.

I expect the design that dominates the future will involve computers with the form factor of a phone. Users will run a lead between this and a unit that multiplexes one to many monitors when they want monitors, and be able to plug in an external keyboard. I wonder how long it is until mac laptops get offered where they're just a dumb housing for an iphone unit?
I've used it to keep in touch with former co-workers after they've moved on or been layed-off. :-(

I started using it actually after a few of my friends have got jobs by using linkedin to contact former co-workers to see if their current workplace has anything available.
"""If I had something like this, my productivity would probably double."""

Would your productivity double? (This is a serious question btw). Perhaps some fb employees are thinking about their next world class meal and overlooking a new idea, and employees at a facebook successor are grinding away while eating rice and beans for 2n.

Did Ion Storm ultimately end up beating out their competition due to their luxurious office space [1]? There is a difference between a perk and an indicator of success.

[1] http://www.rbdg.com/projects/ionstorm/
Augmented Reality Is All Around You
or, you could man up and say something... isn't the one with his head up his ass precisely the one who needs more than "a hint"?
Wow! I always thought it strange that I felt I was the only one who was truly obsessed about "how the world works". It always amazes me that people under 20 don't even bother to watch news to stay up to date with current events or special information reports...

Me personally, I would say the newspaper. I would read it cover to cover when I was a kid (yes I know, I am weird like that). Even clip out articles I found super interesting.

Nowadays, with the internet and wikipedia, anything that pops in my mind is easily searchable. Plus, I read a lot of non-fiction books on a variety of topics (though I mostly prefer anything having to do with money, analyzing human behaviour, social/society issues and analysis).

One book I would highly recommend to understand the concrete world around you (power lines, power plants, road development, etc.) would be this fantastic book: http://industrial-landscape.com/index.html
It looks like the only major distinguishing factor is daily rather than weekly alerts for saved searches...

Perhaps it's useful for those recruiters who want to be the first to contact people when they get on the market?
This is no surprise to those who follow psychometric research.

Also, what seems to be true (from preliminary studies) is that the gene variants that were under strong selection (reached fixation) over the last 10k years are different in different clusters. That is, the way that modern people in each cluster differ, due to natural selection, from their own ancestors 10k years ago is not the same in each cluster -- we have been, at least at the genetic level, experiencing divergent evolution.

In fact, recent research suggests that 7% or more of all our genes are mutant versions that replaced earlier variants through natural selection over the last tens of thousands of years. There was little gene flow between continental clusters ("races") during that period, so there is circumstantial evidence for group differences beyond the already established ones (superficial appearance, disease resistance).

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/01/no-scientific-basis-for...

psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007391
Interview with Henry Markram, Director of the Blue Brain project
It's 11 dollars used on amazon, I'm going to opt for that one instead. I am fully with you on ebooks, reading books on screen isn't pleasurable for me at all.

edit: amazon has it for 8 dollars for the kindle( which can be read on am iphone if you're so inclined)
Sorry to come back to this thread so late. But I'd like to add
that I find Jane Street's sober, mature view to be very
attractive. Not the usual pastel-coloured-hype you get from
dotcoms, or Button-down-idiocy you get from corporate work but
a very appealing no nonsense intellectual approach.

If I were looking for a job they'd be in my top 10. That is all,
carry on.
This technology is not interesting to me. The efficiency is too low, the coils are too big, the distances are too short, and too much alignment is required. The talk of replacing batteries is just hype.

But the real reason I'm not excited is I don't believe this technology is going to improve much. People look at this and think that it's just like computers, so in 10 years these things will be 10 times smaller with 10 times the range. That's simply not true; there's no Moore's law for wireless power. We've known how to do this for over 100 years and the basic physics aren't changing. In 10 years the coils will still be that big, with the same range and the same alignment issues.

Batteries, on the other hand, have plenty of room to improve. In 10 years batteries will definitely be storing more energy with less mass at lower cost with faster charging and longer lifetimes. That's a technology I can get excited about.
I'm suprised that no one has mentioned JRuby in this context put here is a great post related to your question:

http://blog.headius.com/2009/04/how-jruby-makes-ruby-fast.ht...

This post shows how if you turn off certain Ruby language features you can make it much faster. Then he shows how his Ruby-like but static language is much faster.
How much karma do I need for that privilege?
Both groups are self-selected, though one of the samples is larger. But I've no reason to doubt the numbers--they seem to be in the right ballpark. In a competitive, technical community like this one, 2-5% women is about what experience tells me to expect. Fighter pilots are a similar, if more extreme, example: http://userpages.aug.com/captbarb/fighters.html

The phenomenon simply is what it is -- I do not know or speculate on the cause. But I find it fascinating that many people feel compelled to quickly invent stories to explain it away. A little encounter with heresy seems to provoke a defensive rush into mythology.

I think a little cognitive dissonance, a little acceptance of heretical fact, a little uncomfortable admission of ignorance, is good for intellectual hygeine; I welcome and cherish odd little phenomena like this, even if--in fact, especially because--they run so counter to my beliefs and expectations.
Yehuda is nicely filling the void left by Jamis Buck after he stopped blogging about Ruby/Rails.
No mention of lambda style anonymous functions, too!
Can anyone comment on whether this book would be a better purchase compared to Cooper's Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1430223634/ref=pd_luc_sbs_0...
200 at present
There were 2,269 less deaths in the US in 2007 than in 2006
Yes, explain, please.
Amazon Wins Lawsuit Saying It Didn't Infringe On One Click Patent
>>But with the disappearance it's now on everyone's mind.

Yeah I totally agree with you!!
http://www.tokbox.com ?
2009 Par Lab Boot Camp - Short Course on Parallel Programming
1. Do flag

2. Don't comment

3. Go to http://news.ycombinator.com/newest and upvote the stories that you do think are appropriate to HN
"Flying Taxi" inventor killed in crash
The problem I have with this link is that I gain no insight from it.
Maybe it's too obvious but someone's got to mention Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (aka SICP). It's not strictly about functional programming, but it starts with functional programming and then discusses the implications of adding mutable state. I think it's a good idea to get that under your belt before diving into Haskell where it's already taken as a foregone conclusion that the negatives of mutable state outweigh the benefits.

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/