skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe parents are right in not being that interested in schooling. I think I wouldn't be.

You'd be doing your kids a great disservice.

School is mostly about rote learning, fitting in and being a good worker drone.

Only if that's what you want it to be about. My parents took a great interest in my schooling and I feel that those years where both educational and formative. First and foremost they where willing to acknowledge that not all schools are equal and that not all schools work for all people. So they made sure I went to good schools that worked for me. They also continuously monitored my progress and where in dialogue with my teachers and where willing to go to bat for me. They made sure I got extra tutoring in subjects I had problems in, and helped me advance in subjects I was doing well in.

So while it is only one data point, I believe that the parents interest in their child's schooling is critical for the child getting anything out of school. You cannot show a complete disinterest in your child's education and then complain when he doesn't get education you think he needs or deserves.
Made me think why brushing my teeth is so "easy" for me. I don't like it, but I won't miss it. I suspect one reason could be the immediate feedback (bad breath) if I miss it one night.

So interpolating from that, presumably the delay of feedback might make a huge difference for successfully or unsuccessfully taking on a new habit?

I guess pretty much the only other habit I have is drinking a cup of coffee in the morning. So being addictive helps, too.
Was it training, or did you just have to wait till your child got older?
Results 1 – 10 of about 8,620,000 for java is dead. Dead indeed.

Results 1 - 10 of about 22,200,000 for obama is a muslim. Muslim indeed.

On a more serious note, the JVM is a platform that enterprise has a lot of experience deploying and securing. As the author admits, the JVM doesn't need Clojure or anything else to save it; it's entrenched in enterprise. This, combined with the fact that even COBOL isn't dead yet, makes me think that Java has a long way to go. Languages never die because there are better ones out there. It's certainly not trendy, but companies are going to need Java programmers for a helluva long time.
Somewhat of an old link, as John Ogbu died the same year (2003) the submitted article was published.

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

A somewhat more recent source

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/noexcuses/

brings the story a little more up to date, by mentioning places where the achievement gap is not so broad.
Is Java dead?
No

Will controversial headlines often get undeserved interest?
Yes
This sums up what is wrong with this industry.

Quit the endless "This is hot! This is dead! We're reinventing X by taking all the features out!"

We're not the fashion industry here, we're software developers.

How can a language even die? Sure, the community could die off, there could be no new updates, but that doesn't mean death.
Interesting article! I had a similar idea to make sport bets & win money.

So, do you know any site that aggregates bets from different bookies?

Update: http://www.betbrain.com/ is even listing SureBets :).
Natural Cures For Diabetes Mellitus
I guess it takes a lot of self-experiments to find out. I usually go with this "one habit/month-approach" from T.Ferris: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/01/07/the-power-of...
"So like micro-credit, it seems that access to electricity is more about making life in rural communities more convenient than it is about climbing out of poverty."

Making life convenient is climbing out of poverty. In the West only the homeless don't own TV or can't at least afford them. You can't expect people who have nothing to invest the first money they get.

On the other hand mobile phones have proven very useful in the developing world. They get used for everything: Banking, people rent their mobiles to other people (like a phone booth so to say), even organizing fishing (fishers exchange news where the fish actually is).
Presented in this horrible flash player without rewind/forward. Anyone here to find a way to download?
Those aren't habits. It's _habituated_ when it happens without you having to work at it or think about it. Until that point all you have is an "intention".
What VCs do: Swamp ideas with money and kill off the better ideas, while continuing to lecture the rest of us about how our PPTs should be, what dress we need to wear, and how to be respectful of their time.
No, it wasn't negative. He brought me along as he moved because I was a "family friend"
Creating precarious working places for otherwise desperate people helps a lot but on the other hand can't lift an economy out of poverty.

As long as most countries in the so called "third world" get exploited by the West which via the IMF and World Bank does not even allow them to built an infrastructure ("barriers to free trade" like hospitals, schools, environmental protection, labor rights) they won't make it.

The West should pay reparations for colonialism and slavery to the countries affected by them. This would ease the situation a little.
it seems sensible that "text selection" is default behaviour which is overridden when you add a drag event, as opposed to having to manually disable things.

I wish the text selection tools were more powerful in css/js as well, its reasonably problematic to make text unselectable.
Article today about Elite on BBC news website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8261272.stm
As an addition to dagw's response the other crucial thought that occurs ot me is that, yes, I agree with you schooling probably needs a big refresh. BUT if a parents response to that is "well schooling sucks so there is no point bothering" then their kids will probably inherit that attitude (this is my Aunt's problem - her kids struggle a LOT). If the yhave that view they should be providing alternative options in their own "teaching time" rather than take it out on the child - right?

What I was mostly talking about was this annoyingly prevelant attitude of some modern parents where they believe schools are where their kids learn and non of that responsibility lies with them.

If you know any teachers ask them about this: I bet what they have to say will be a shock.
From corporation to start-up: Who is going to fix the printer?
If java is dead, what is alive?
Results 1 - 10 of about 936 for "java is dead".

Changes quite a bit if you quote it, leaving out pages with headlines like "Dozens dead in Java quake." People should think a bit more carefully before referencing numbers like these.
Submarine cables
In short:
The article is so so, its more thought provoking than instantly insightful.

note ( I voted this up by mistake )

Below is "Thought provoked" response.

This kind of study/statement should be semi straight forward to turn into a web application. Assuming there was a way to have complete faith in the trust mechanism.
But im off topic.

Back to the forming of habits.
I don't believe even for an olympic athlete going to the gym or doing a rep, set or lap of something is ever without thinking. So its safe to say everyone's view of a habit will be different.

Things which you get feedback from I would say are easy to continue doing. The feedback can be loose jeans, feeling fresher, looking better, not going back to the api.

Would learning to write unix commands be like learning a habit?

What would happen if you mixed up learning a habit and the spaced learning ( SRS ) concept for learning something new? Or could you argue that they are one of the same.
It's more common in British English. Substitute "bothered" or "bothered to get off my arse" for "arsed".
That's what you might think at first. And that's exactly what I perceived to be the case. But as someone who frequents 2-3 networking (tech/startup related) events a week in NYC for the past three years, that's actually not true at all. We want to talk about things outside of our daily grind first i.e. our hobbies, where we like to eat, what we do in our off time, etc., and where/what we work on will work its way in with time. Why the rush? You're (hopefully) trying to make a friend not pitch a random stranger that will forget you the next day if all they hear about is your company.

You don't have to believe me, but I went from knowing nobody in the NYC tech community three years ago to knowing everyone. My initial approach was going up to people and asking "Hey, I'm Spencer, what do you do?" and playing the whole back-and-forth like a recorded conversation. That gets you a routine glazed over eyed response. I then started getting to know people and them getting to know me and everything flipped and I've now made dozens of friends for life where we now get together outside of work, go to each other's birthdays, know each other's girlfriends/boyfriends, go on vacations together, etc. And this all changed when the conversation shifted to being more about the people than only what we did for a living.
that looks like it's modelled on how drag and drop works in desktop windows apps. Which is not a straightforward as it can be, but the "opt-in" nature of drag-drop is, I think, important. Even more so in a browser where the Ui is mostly selectable text and graphics anyway.I'm quite happy to have to specify that an element is dragable, and that elements can't be dragged otherwise.

It also makes sense that when you drag it over a potential target, that target gets to decide if you can drop that particular item or not. At least, that's what I'm used to. What's the alternative - having to turn off dropping on all other elements that might not want it?
that was exactly my point.

If these events had "permit the drag & drop operation" as their default action, selecting text would be impossible.
>I'd also be very interested in similar in-depth causal studies on the gap between white and Jewish academic achievement

I'm not sure what you mean here. There are European White Jews (They are the Jews with elevated IQ, Ashkenazi), African Jews, Oriental Jews, and so on. You can't say that Jews are not white or Jews are not black. You'd be surprised by the number of blond hair, blue eyed Jews in Israel. There are Jews with a Jewish characteristic, but just as many without. There are also non-Jews with Jewish characteristics. In my Jewish circle, they all claim to be white, and that's what you'd call them, you'd never know any difference unless you found out that they go to synagogue.
I tend to agree with the comments about intentionally controversial headlines, but the article itself was excellent. If you haven't actually read it, please take the time to do so.

I think in the end, the author really nailed it. The important question is, "Is Java dead for me?" I would not use Java for a new personal project (and probably not for a work project either unless the libraries were needed). I do not have a clear replacement in mind... Python stands out the most.

My biggest problems with Java are the compilation step (admittedly not that big a deal with an IDE, but I don't always like to use an IDE), the insistence on objects, and most importantly, the lack of first class functions.

A new issue that has come up for me in comparison to Python is constructor overloading. In Python, constructor overloading is beautiful because of args and kwargs. In any C-family language (including Java here), it's horrible. With small objects where inheritance works well, the constructors in other languages can get unwieldy fast. In Python, they're always concise. I also love keyword arguments in general. It can make code much more readable, especially when using something like wxPython, where the parameter lists are long and otherwise would be quite vague.
I hope you don't have kids. Whether you do or don't like school is immaterial. The fact is, schools take up a majority of your kids' time until they graduate and get a life of their own. By default, you should be interested in what your kid is learning. No one is asking you to sit in class 8 hours a day, but at least get to know what it is they are learning. If my kid takes an interest in music, I'm there, wrestling? me too, football/soccer/hockey? I'm game. God forbid I have to get up from the keyboard because junior wants to go to the park.

As for rote learning. Every other nation has stuck to rote learning or some form of it. It's only the US that has taken a method of education that has worked for hundreds of years in many nations and manage to completely fuck it up. And every few years some academic will invent some new form of learning, convince the school board to buy into, and then after 10 years of "experimenting" on kids they might have gained/lost 0.5% on the academic test compared to rote learning.

I'm not sure where the skill of learning will be replaced by another, except maybe unlearning. Rote is just a baseline, if you can't work your way through a basic problem set then you certainly aren't qualified to handle something that might require a bit of brainpower.

I hope your still young because you'll realize, after many years, that in high school no one truly fit in. That is why John Hughes films (RIP) and shows like Freeks and Geeks were so popular. Everyone was awkward and that was the point. High school is a microcosm not a career, there was no skill to learn there.
ie. "I don’t pay them for sex. I pay them to leave" - Charlie Sheen on prostitutes :).
Perhaps that entail freedom of sexual acts?
Solid review of the dev hiring process, the pitfalls and even reference to Seth Godin. Joel Spolsky put some time and effort into a short list of best practices but watching how someone works is a great way to gauge their potential contribution.

Of course if you're like myself, you may be a little nervous about coding with a "reviewer" at your back. The best way to get past uneasisness is pair programming if you can afford to dedicate a developer for a few hours (most startups can't, but they have to if they want to grow in a rational way).
Search User Interfaces (New Book from Berkeley Prof, Free Online)
Twenty five years of Elite
Much more relevant than CIA manuals, 'the problem with black people', treasure islands or some of the other crap getting voted up.
Another angle on inspiration, motivation, and leadership. Originally inspired by the what if comics (" what if batman fought superman?")
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Seagate Announces the First SATA 6Gb/s 2TB Drive
Soft iron is affected by magnetic fields, but does not create a magnetic field of its own.

Well... yes and no.

Iron is ferromagnetic. If you look carefully at this word, and know a little Latin and/or a little chemistry, you will see that it was basically invented to describe iron. (Although nickel, cobalt, and other elements and compounds are also ferromagnetic.)

Individual iron atoms have a magnetic moment, which is to say: they are tiny magnets. They both create a magnetic field and respond to other magnetic fields. And when iron crystallizes the atoms which are next to each other tend to align their magnetic fields.

However, the typical iron-containing crystal has a large number of individual magnetic domains. Within a domain all the tiny magnetic iron atoms are aligned with each other, but each domain is randomly oriented with respect to the others. Thus, the tiny magnets tend to cancel out, and outside the iron we don't see it creating a net magnetic field. However, if you apply a (nonuniform) magnetic field to the iron it gets attracted, because the individual atoms do respond to magnetic fields even if they aren't all in line. [1]

If you apply a magnetic field to the iron -- preferably a strong one -- possibly together with a bit of heat or some banging with a hammer, you can encourage its magnetic domains to realign themselves and produce a piece of iron that has a net magnetic moment. Now you have a magnet.

This is what the bacteria are doing. Like most biological things, they are capable of taking iron apart to its component atoms and then putting those atoms together again, so this isn't especially astonishing behavior.

The point of the oxidation, to create magnetite, is that a magnetite crystal bonds the iron particularly tightly, improving the odds that the individual atoms will retain their orientation. As you know, a rod of pure iron isn't very stable: It tends to turn into iron oxide all by itself, then flake apart. We call that rusting.

--

[1] Of course, in the real world pieces of iron do tend to have a net magnetic moment... because they crystallize on the Earth, and the whole Earth has a magnetic field. But the Earth's field isn't very strong, so the orientation effect isn't very strong either.
What about Wave do you feel is bloat?
Open-Source CRM Solutions
Reminds me of a passage from Philip Greenspun's article, How to Become as Rich as Bill Gates, http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/:

When I arrived at MIT as a first-year graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, I asked a professor for help with a research problem. He said "The reason that you've having trouble is that you don't know anything and you're not working very hard." A friend of mine was a surgery resident at Johns Hopkins. He complained to one of his teachers that he was having trouble concentrating because he'd been up all night for several nights in a row. The professor replied "Oh... does your pussy hurt?" According to Business Week, Jack Welch "encouraged near-brutal candor in the meetings he held [at GE]".

The bottom line: self-esteem is great but beware of creating a cozy home for unproductive people with bad ideas.
I'm looking for a CRM solution that will work also for a small scale business like mine (I'm not a corporation). Which CRM solution do you use?
I've had good and bad experiences with free and paid software.

I'd make a witty remark about how that's just like my sex life, too, but I haven't paid for sex yet. Unless you're counting alcohol.
Software is like sex. It's better when it's bug-free.
Microsoft says turn off Windows feature to protect Windows
I hope my kids would do reasonably well in school. I wouldn't say "whatever" if they brought home very bad marks. I just would want to avoid making them believe that school is the only thing that matters.

I acknowledge that it is necessary to learn putting up with unloved tasks - I am just not convinced that learning that has to take 13 years (length of school in my country). Maybe a couple of years of boredom could be shaved off without a great loss.

I would certainly be very interested in making my kids become autonomous learners and achievers. Just, as I say, the school metric does not mean very much to me. In the best case scenario I hope to teach them how to cope with school without expending too much energy. I think I would also encourage them to do all sorts of voluntary school projects they can possibly do (like writing for the school magazine, making movies, drama, science projects, whatever). I would not encourage them to spend every waking hour learning arbitrary stuff for school.

"My parents took a great interest in my schooling and I feel that those years where both educational and formative."

So what were the things you took out of it?

There are things to learn - namely, how to learn, I suppose. But again, as I said, I question the time it takes to learn these things.
That's a pretty neat idea, actually. You could start a "fantasy" game based on that, since I assume that some basic crime statistics are available via FOIA.

Except that these stats won't change much...
Last major PC makers ditch Chinese Web filter
I already can use XWindow on my phone - I have GPE with XWindow installed on my phone (Motorola A1200): http://gpe.handhelds.org/ .

GPE/X11 works much faster than QT/FB.
This isn't quite answering your question, but I think it's relevant.

I recently needed some alpha testers, so I picked a community I thought would benefit from the final product and announced that I had an unattractive, bug-ridden experimental version of a product I thought they'd find useful. It was pretty much guaranteed to lose data, but if they tried it, they had a chance to craft it into what they wanted.

The 5 who responded were absolutely invaluable. It was hard, because they told me I was wrong in so many ways, but the second version is infinitely better. More, I'm still getting advice from that first flux of feedback. I keep going back and re-reading it, and it's repaying me many times over.

Have you had any alpha testers from the wild? Your product stability may be at the beta stage, but is the product service?
My first boss was a black guy who graduated from Yale. It took 7 years before I was making more money than he did. I tried to get him to move to a new company, so I could get a signing bonus, and he could get a 30k raise, but had little interest. My father grew up as a poor white guy and had the same attitude. "I make a lot of money why strive for more?"

The people I work with have this attitude that 300k/year is expected (aka middle class) from a two income family. IMO, DNA has little impact on Black achievement, rather culture is "crushing" black America. When 80% of any population is not playing the game they hold the average hostage.

My personal theory is you tend to measure yourself in comparison the well to do people around you. If you fail to reach that level you are more likely to push your children up a notch. However, everyone needs to balance success vs. personal sacrifices and needs to decide when enough is enough.
thats a different point, being able to drag something (currently disabling text select events) doesnt mean text isnt selectable, if you drag over and entire page the text is still selected. its especially annoying if you have to support shift + arrow keyboard shortcuts.
Our corporate WebSite runs on Clojure and Google App Engine
I was quite excited when I saw that New Scientist - generally a pretty good magazine - had a piece on the maths of gambling. But unfortunately it turned out to be an extremely poor article.

The first three sections - on card counting, choosing unpopular lottery numbers and arbitrage - skim very briefly over well-known subject matter.

The fourth section is completely wrong - it applies the maths of a situation where you see a number of opportunities in turn until you choose one (e.g. choosing a marriage partner) to the problem of choosing when to stop gambling (where it doesn't apply at all), and draws nonsensical conclusions as a result.

The fact it was written by New Scientist's career editor is telling I suspect.
Can't people use some better models for monetizing on their creations in place of old "Pay us or we won't show you!"? It's hurting all of us and we have technology now to deal with this some better way.
I'm interested in the academic gap between Ashkenazim and non-Jewish whites. Even if you're bad at distinguishing the two groups by naked eye, it still exists.
"By default, you should be interested in what your kid is learning."

I hope they would learn interesting stuff, but if they don't, should I really try to make them believe it is interesting? I personally hated school for most of my life, and I have a hard time putting my kids through the same thing. Maybe it would help them more if I told them that I understand why they hate school so much. My goal would be to teach them how to get through school with the minimum possible effort - hopefully with reasonable grades, though, as they do help later in life. But only so much.

"Every other nation has stuck to rote learning or some form of it."

Sure, one probably needs to know how to do it - but is it necessary to practice it for 12+ years to get the hang of it? I rather doubt it.

Obviously it is not all so black and white, but lately I see a tendency of putting way to much importance on school. When can kids be kids?