skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But how? Again, here's the facts I'm basing my opinion on:

1. I know, for a fact, that the School District in my area has a list of approved sites from which teachers can get lessons plans from. So they don't have to make those up from scratch.

2. Every teacher is guaranteed a prep period to take care of work

3. Grading shouldn't take all that much time. I could be missing something (and if so please tell me) but I ran the numbers above and they seem pretty accurate.

If public teachers really are as underpaid and over worked as they say I'd like to know about it. But they never offer any explanation and the numbers I can come up with (see above) paint a different picture.
Thanks. Helpful! Appreciated.
Ask HN: Startups founded by MBAs?
I am preparing a presentation about Silicon Valley and its startup culture for software developers in Korea. From my research (and reading from Founders at Work), most successful startups in Silicon Valley are founded by engineers. I am curious, though, if there have ever been any successful startups founded by MBAs? If you know one (or many), please post!
After seeing that video, it seems to me that he’s engaging in theatrics and fireworks...

Compared to everything else at Techcrunch, how could you tell the difference?
Perhaps Arrington could launch a more reasonable TechCrunch25
Church Numerals in Clojure
I think it is used more to predict how a system will respond to a change in resources. If you reduce the amount of resources available to a population, that population will shrink approximately proportionally (until there is enough for the rest to survive), and if you increase the resources the population will grow to use those resources reasonably quickly.

It also points out that it is the scarcest resource that limits growth. Increasing food will not allow the population grow if there isn't enough water, sun, etc.

My point was mostly to point out that we may have some other scarcity that isn't food which is limiting the growth rate in industrialized countries, while increasing the food in starving countries will just cause the population to grow until it hits the limit of some other resource.

I suspect that it isn't any sort of time scarcity that is limiting current human growth, but more likely the impact of contraceptives messing with our normal biological mechanisms.
Why would an observation that may (or may not) apply to bacteria or even to wolves apply to human beings?

Because it appears we're also DNA replicators.

But, let me play devil's advocate on your behalf, because I like your question. Let's assume that humans do realize their population problems and act to level growth, or reduce it. There's a strong argument that they would also act to reduce their resources, as well. Fewer people means less food necessary to feed the population; So why grow it?
Twisted Web in 60 seconds: serve static content from a directory
I wouldn't want my kid doing either. I'm not so sure that the virtual scenario is any better than the real world one. You're still dealing with other people and in this example there's still a victim.

An MMO is still a social environment where you interact with other people. Those interactions can play out pretty much the same way they do in real life. The only difference is the protection of anonymity... which in my opinion is actually a negative difference. It relaxes people sense of social responsibility.

I won't be teaching my kids that it's OK to be a complete douchebag online simply because no one knows who you really are... and if I ever catch a kid of mine doing something like that, you can bet your ass there'll be some very real world consequences.
MarcoPolo - Context-aware computing for Mac OS X
> I think an unfriendly community is a great feature, because it keeps idiots out, and there's no place for idiots in the world of Lisp.

It also keeps a lot of smart people out though.
That's a shame. The shell is great, once you know how to use it.
Personality is a lot more important than intelligence in elementary school. You should actually be smarter than your students, yes, but dealing with young kids takes a certain temperament and ability to adapt to personality differences.

Between kindergarten and fifth grade, I'd probably rate my teachers entirely based upon personality. The ones who lost their temper with me or were arbitrary or capricious in discipline were bad teachers. To some extent this remained true even until eighth grade (I was somewhat of a disciplinary problem until high school), but middle school is where my teachers' stupidity started becoming an issue.

In high school, most of my teachers were pretty smart at what they taught. But personality still mattered.
Last I checked we were still animals that are, as a population, driven by instinct.

We do have at least one significant difference from other species in our intelligence/self-awareness, but I challenge you to find any significantly large (compared to world population) group that acts even mostly out of rationality.
Interesting and effective
>There will always be people that don't like what we do, no matter what we do.

You're absolutely right about this.

>I think the trick is to find the right balance for our target market

Again I agree. And maybe losing a customer or two who dislike the blog posts about drinking is acceptable, if the get togethers gain you more than enough clients to make up for that occasional loss. You are going to be the judge of the value of blogging about parties versus retaining some customers.

As far as I can tell, the customer in question was upset principally about the blogging about the parties, not necessarily the fact that you are having a bunch of drinks with customers and potential customers. You might consider whether continuing with the customer parties, but refraining from blogging in indiscreet detail about them, is a better strategy for retaining frustrated existing customers. Is there a cost to not blogging about drinking?

> If all people see is us drinking every other Thursday, they're missing a lot.

I'm not a reader of your blog, but how many posts do you make saying "Tom upgraded X today, and is working on Y now," "Chris managed a major XYZ this week, and is working on optimizing ABC"? What is the ratio between posts highlighting you guys working your asses off and you guys having drinks with customers? Perhaps you should consider adjusting that ratio, if frustrated customers perceive it to be out of balance. What is the cost to you of making that change?
I don't really like this analogy because you can more easily shared piece of useful software across Linux distributions than you can across lisp implementations.

True that the differences are limited to things outside the specs, but somehow my applications almost always stepped in these parts.
"When billions are made on millisecond-level trade throughput, having your server right next to the server that executes your trade is worth a lot more than $4,000 per square foot, it’s priceless."

It's actually not priceless. If the space is truly that valuable, the price will keep rising to the point where the profitability decreases relative to the risk. The risk inherent in this is also key. If you are buying and waiting for the uptick, and then it goes down...
reCAPTCHA has some pretty good network effects due to the amount of data they have. reCAPTCHA detects suspect behaviour from IP addresses/ranges/sites etc. and blocks users based on that.
N.B. The official term is "filthy lucre".
IMHO, Android has one of the worst mainstream APIs
I think it would be more like if I get to find out that Guy A wants to buy some widgets before you get this information. I also get to find out that you're selling widgets before Guy A gets this information. I can buy widgets from you for cheap because you don't know that there is a market yet. I can sell them to Guy A for expensive because he doesn't know there are plenty of widgets to go around.

On the face of it, there's really nothing wrong with this - too bad for you and Guy A that you don't have access to the information that I do. But I think the concern is that I can use my position to control the markets, or that everyone will lose faith in the game and stop playing.
That said, I doubt the attacks perpetuated by 4chan are the wrong place to start searching if what you're looking for is intelligent attempts to crack the system. They are among the truest supporters of the rule to "When in doubt, use brute force." The fact that they fell back on that technique probably means very little for the actual security of recaptcha.
Indeed. I threw together this dead simple HTTP server written in shell + netcat the other day, for debugging some CGI scripts:

http://github.com/tlrobinson/wwwoosh/blob/master/wwwoosh.sh

(only handles CGI scripts at the moment, could be modified to serve files, etc)
Yes, no more TechCrunch_50_. I'm guessing that this is just a way of getting publicity so that they can announce it is expanding to become TechCrunch100 (or whatever).
They actually argue that piracy (in the context of downloading music) is o.k. It's to hard to believe that they think using anonymity on the Internet to be a predator is o.k.
Google opens up more of their core Java libraries
Is that really so hard to answer? Everything that’s possible (to form through evolution) can form. Evolution doesn’t care about human aesthetic judgments. (This is obviously not strictly true, but close enough.)

It is very much conceivable that we won’t think of the same things evolution can form.

And it is just a collection of freaky photos, but the title doesn’t imply differently.
Actually on a long enough scale population growth is exponential and has been increasing at a phenomenal rate (by such time scales). However the good news is that the time it takes for the world population to double is estimated to increase. (Ed, note that any growth on any scale can be read as exponential. On a geological scale the human population growth is akin to the big-bang, but on a daily scale it's equivalent to a lethargic snail.)

This is due to the fact that if current trends continue, it will have taken 12.3 years for the world population to go up by a billion (however it should be noted, earlier estimates -1990 IIRC- suggested it should have hit 10 billion ~2012), which is a mild increase over the last billion of 12.25 years. I believe the next billions are expected to take 13, 15 and then IIRC 18 years.

There's many relevant factors effecting population growth. Many of the diseases that plagued our ancestors are almost completely cured in the west (I've never heard of someone dying from a broken arm, however 200 years ago it was a prominent risk).

We also have food preservation techniques that no one had before. Everywhere from penicillium being used in meats to prevent bacterial growth to refrigeration, vacuum sealing, freeze drying and even vacuum freezing (where the moisture is literally sucked out of food, meaning it can last unrefrigerated for up to 10 years). There's also irradiation techniques that, given proper storage, can enable food to last indefinitely.

There are also vast misconceptions about over population that plague these discussions. For example, China is less densely populated than the UK and Japan, yet has food struggles because they don't have the economy to import food on mass. Many African countries plague by starvation are desolate compared to most countries, yet neighbouring countries have populations almost one hundred times as populated (note that this even applies in the landlocked countries interior and isn't a comparison between a country with a large ocean border and one with no border).
>...some techies have an incorrect bias against alcohol.

And some have a bias against alcohol that comes out of personal experience. Either because of their own struggles, the struggles of family members, or the behavior of friends or acquaintances. Maybe some do have an irrational or unfounded prejudice against alcohol (or alcohol in the workplace in the very least). But it might not be the best move from a PR point of view to simply dismiss your customer's perceptions as irrational or biased or erroneous.

>People who think like this are not thinking logically, and I personally wouldn't want to have them as my customer.

We don't all get to pick and choose our customers, and there are very few 'always logical' Vulcan customers to go around. Managing your company's public image is an important part of running a business, especially a small business. If you are doing well enough that you can afford to simply turn away some customers, good on you. If customers cost you more in hassle and demands than they bring in in revenue, it's probably a good idea to turn them away. But blogging less enthusiastically or less frequently about drinking events is a zero cost change that may prevent the loss of business. You don't need to have to stop having the events, you just need to be sensitive about how your portray yourself to a diverse audience.
And completely unsustainable. It only takes a parser that checks if the field is visible. It's just a simple matter of adapting. reCAPTCHA is much harder to work around for a spammer.
The newt reminds me of wolverine and how his claws come out through his skin. Pretty interesting stuff all around.
If you did, indeed, see the talk then i think you missed the point.
It takes about one session of five minutes to block all those applications permanently. I haven't seen a single non-Facebook app in half a year, and before then I saw a handful at most.

The one thing Facebook doesn't do is regulate itself. If you want to block those things it takes a little initiative.
Top reasons why entrepreneurs fail
what you mean is that nature is interesting. here's a clip to watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhh32JYkQPk
I once wrote a 3x3 pixel bitmap (just 1-colour pixels) font on my ZX Spectrum in Art Studio! The main problem was the S - it had to have a diagonal.
Why does that fish seem to have teeth?
Understood and agreed - I don't really want to contaminate a planet-sized experimental sample before we have wrung as much knowledge out of it as possible. At the same time, though, I think we should balance the possibilities of knowledge acquisition with those of resource exploitation.

For example, if we successfully conduct 5 exobiologically-oriented missions over the next 25 years without making any breakthroughs, then maybe we should just Try Something Else. Ditto for Venus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observations_and_explorations_o...
So what actually happened? Or is that still a mystery?
Study HN: The Blame Study Pre-Study (for sociological survey)
Depending on how pure the language is, /variables/ can be immutable. Nonetheless, the standard, default, run-of-the-mill variables that most programmers will run into most of the time are not. Same goes for closures.
Can't upvote this hard enough. Those guys are pro's.
>...judge the team by their product.

That's exactly what their customer was doing. The customer complained about, "frequent outages, slow queues, occasional inability to push/pull, frequent breakage after code pushes, etc." It seems that the customer perceived the blog posts about drinking events as adding insult to injury (i.e. not only is the service problematic, but they're partying instead of fixing things before they become problems for end users).

Managing public perception of your company is important. The team probably needs to spend more time highlighting all their hard work, and less time comparatively highlighting the parties.

I'm aware that investment bankers (or, the people who were formerly investment bankers, before the financial crisis made all the investment banks convert into normal banks) are fast and loose with money, and drinks, and cocaine, and women and so on. I know, because I went to college with a number of them, and have been to some pretty awesome bachelor's parties up in NYC.

But Fidelity doesn't blog about their parties. Their public face is a man or woman in a suit with a briefcase and a Bloomberg terminal. Same with my 3-4 friends working at Accenture. I know they party hard because we went to college together. But they're not blogging about it, or sending out notes about it on their weekly email updates. They know how to manage their public image in a way that doesn't upset their customers. I know techies are allergic to suits, but there's something to be said for getting your customers to automatically give you the benefit of the doubt.
The more interesting question is not if any successful startups have been founded by MBAs but what their success ratio was vs startups funded by other groups of people.

I know at least one very well funded one that was sunk by an MBA CEO, but that's just one datapoint, I'm sure there must be plenty to the contrary.

The MBA is the poster child for bad management decisions but I find it hard to believe it is as bad as the stereotype would have you think, so it won't surprise me at all if the number of successful startups started by MBAs numbers in the hundreds, thousands or even much more.
Here's an explanation:

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vistahardwa...
All good points, though I am not so sure about your suggestion that porn no longer has leading indicator status. I'd make a small bet that if 3d-capable monitors see significant rates of adoption, the industry will, ahem, rise again.
Who Was The Top Canadian Startup At TechCrunch 50?
I wrote a blog post about this very thing about 6-7 months ago: http://blog.fogus.me/2009/02/06/yegge-clojure-arc-and-lolita...
I was slightly confused as well...and I appreciate your support!
Interesting....how do you go about this?

I've been able to block application invitations, etc. but I've found no way to eliminate the "updates" from the news feed.
If you're putting text in a favicon you're doing it wrong.
The Next Bubble: Eyeballs
ISP Black Internet starts fund to cover court costs
I find food from my garden consistently much tastier than food from the supermarket. Especially tomatoes, haricots verts, peas & lettuce. Tomatoes from the supermarket taste as if they injected 80% water. Haricots verts from the supermarket taste as if they're a month old. You wouldn't even recognize peas if you're used to frozen peas.

I don't know if the difference is because of different species of plants or different light conditions or different soil. Whether it's better for your health I couldn't say.
Ask HN: Can You Tweet From Australia?
I'm visiting Australia/New Zealand over the next six weeks and I've gotten a loaner GSM phone from travel cell to use while I'm there.

Is there an easy way to tweet from there? The only thing I could find on the web was SMS'ing to some 13-digit number. Is that the way it's done? If so, is this a long distance number and would incur some kind of special charge?

(see http://help.twitter.com/forums/59008/entries/14014)
jerf, using the analogy of the furniture builder:

-Your shop would be your OS.

-Your wood would be your programming language.

-Your lathe would be your IDE / text editor

-Your broom would be your source control system.

A furniture builder would use a broom to reset after a messy job and at the end of the day. That is about how I use source control. I've never worked on a huge open source project with lots of branching and merging. I've worked in small teams where we have one evolving version and that's all we really care about. SVN works fine for syncing and resolving conflicts.

If SVN is a broom, Git is a complicated vacuum cleaner. Perhaps more powerful, but when I started using it, I took me 10x longer to clean the floor. I learned CVS, Rational Clearcase, MS Source Safe and SVN on the first day and spent very little time thinking about them afterwards. While I liked SVN the best, they all did their job well enough. I'm now good enough at git that it's not a time sink, but I'm not sure what I really gained from it.

Furthermore, you may want to adjust your tone and try not to jump to conclusions. You probably can't intuit what kind of a person / developer I am from a single comment.
Which is in-line with its purpose: (in this case) the cellular digestion of waste wood. Given enough time, the fungus would have consumed all the wood, rather than die off like a scientist would prefer to program it to do.
Long distance sms is a bit more expensive than 'local', but it works ok (I use it for pages from the US to alert me of server troubles).

It gets really expensive when you send or receive using your regular phone abroad (roaming).
guns.
My impression that you don't particularly care about losing that client comes from your blog post discussing the matter. If you wanted to keep that customer, I wouldn't have written a defensive blog post about it. I would have had a private email exchange with that particular customer, and maybe offered them some freebies or a discount for their troubles.

Taking the time to single their comment out and write several paragraphs on why 'it's totally justified to blog about partying' and why 'partying and service problems are totally unconnected phenomena because we work our asses off' seems dismissive not understanding.

The bottom line is that the blog post doesn't do anything to resolve the commenter's complaints. It's really just a long excuse, and not likely to persuade someone who begins from the premise of being dissatisfied with the level of service already being provided.

So, my impression is that since you're providing an excuse rather than a solution, you ultimately are willing to say, "we're okay with losing a customer or two in order to continue blogging about our events where we drink with customers, we'll make up the loss by attracting more customers with the parties." That's a valid business decision to make. But there may be a low cost way of managing your public image such that you can continue to have customer development parties with drinking and also keep frustrated customers.
Sure. Leave it in your hotel room when you go down for breakfast - service is pretty slow today for some reason...
Average reading speed means nothing: you have to add time to write comments in the margins and mark up the paper, you read more slowly when you're grading, often you're working with hard-to-read handwriting, and math problems (show your work!) take time to go through and debug, especially if you're giving partial credit (suppose I make a mistake at step 2 but the rest of my answer is logically consistent with that mistake...).

One one page typed essay assignment per week? I had 5 page papers, 20 page term projects, weekly quizzes in class, exams, 30 math problems once or twice a week, labs.

Of 30 math problems about five would be randomly selected and checked. 30 seconds on average to check a problem on your class size assumptions is about 5 hours a week (this is an average between about 10 seconds for someone who gets it right and 1-2 minutes for someone who makes some amount of mistakes and needs careful correction). Then you have quizzes and exams: let's amortize that to about 10 questions per week, and you need to carefully inspect them for partial credit. That's another 20 hours a week (let's say you take a full minute per problem). That's 25 hours a week to grade math.
Cell Phones on Planes: Why Not?
doesn't take any of my time up

So I assume your SVN server is on your local network which never goes down, you never work in another location, and your repository is tiny.
The thing is, anything that porn does now has as much to do with the peculiarities of porn as it does with being early adopters.
do you mean hungarian notation to track types or do you mean hungarian notation to track semantics?

If you mean tracking types, I agree.
If you mean semantics, I am nowhere near certainity about it being either good or bad. I can certainly see the use of using sInput, uCheckLimit(sInput) and uOutput. It is usually just a single character, and thus, not reading it does not require much effort, so I don't think it is diabolically evil.
He's a professor at CMU. I imagine some grad students will go to Google, but I'd imagine he'll stay at CMU?

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/