skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, you're fully missing the point of the article. The problem is people's one-to-one connection between schools and education. No such connection exists. A school is not the only place to get an education, and for many people no education occurs there. You can learn math, science or history on your own accord and in a way that is suited to how you learn.
Did you hear the recent NPR segment on the Panama canal too?
I hope I don't get down voted, but unless you're being schooled in a hovel and/or lack decent living conditions, it's up to you. No one is a self-made man, every successful man has been supported in some way by society, but there is a certain threshold at which you can't blame circumstances. I support public education from kindergarten to PhD level, but I don't think everyone needs to have the best education possible. Everyone should have access to proper conditions for learning, then it's up to the students to learn or not to learn.
"suffer an electric shock…at the hands of your friends"

This seems to be confusing masochism with self improvement. There are ways to reinforce a routine without putting on a twitter-enabled shock collar, and I'm not sure being Pavlov's dog is a psychological ideal many people aspire to attain.
G-d. If my college freshmen came in knowing how to add fractions and understanding the meaning of x^2+y^2 = r^2, they'd do pretty well in precalc or calc. As far as I can tell many American students learn nothing mathematically between 7th grade and 12th grade, except a big old mental block about math. These kids will be fine with math when it happens.
Son of Bill W
> with zero concern for the the world around them

How do you figure that?
There are also USSD menus which I hadn't heard of before going to Asia. It was used by carriers there to provide an alternative to voice menus to topup and buy addons. In India there is a company providing access to Facebook over it:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/airtel_in/airtel-launches-the...
Theory is unfortunately silent on how many observations it takes to see convergence. If you mean that there are processes that "should" converge that do not seem to empirically—yes, there are, but that is not evidence for failure of the theory.

Is this unsatisfying? Yes, it is.
These subjects can be learned from people who are actually passionate about them, whether in person or remotely.

My uncle is a University history professor, and I learn more about world history from his uncontrollable desire to constantly relate every event in our lives to some event historical, than I have from any in-school study.

No sense in having to spend so long covering the first eight years of school arithmetic — the material is achingly simple, and can be taught with colour and passion in an afternoon by someone who truly loves it, to someone who is truly keen to learn.

If you give a self-motivated and eager kid access to someone who actually cares deeply for the material (unlike most every school teacher I've known), they'll be able to convey the principals and tenets of the field quickly and effectively.

When facts are needed, we have the best source of facts ever in the history of humanity: the internet, and the all the world's experts it puts you in touch with.
Isn't it better to keep your kid inside and teach him to code?
Not sure why kp25 was downvoted. I've been working with a 12-year old for the last couple of months to teach him programming and some web development.

> a young child doesn't want to write more than ONE line of code without a meaningful result.

This is something that I completely agree with and found to be true in my experience. To this end, I've found IPython to be an excellent way of giving feedback while coding. The notebooks have a nice UI, documentation is readily available and its much easier to edit mistakes by simply editing the cell.

I'd recommend you give IPython a shot.
A few years ago, I decided I wanted to get a good power strip. At the end of a few hours research, I concluded that there wasn't any trustworthy third party actually doing verification of manufacturer claims, and do not believe that "1750 Joules Surge Protection" actually means anything useful given that I do not trust it.

I just bought a mid-price range one that looked like it wasn't by some fly-by-night company.

It would be really cool to find somebody actually testing these things.
In my view, periodic re-clustering isn't the same thing, though it may be good enough for most use cases. I'd label it "transactionally maintain clustering on a table"
Being automatically paired up (groups of two, maybe more) with another user and getting shocked if the buddy does not complete his/her goal could be an interesting way to help learn how to motivate others, and perhaps then yourself. This then adds an element of randomness to the shocks (if the deadline for a buddy's task is unknown) which may not be present for the non-paired-user scenario.
Yes -- I stand corrected. Thank you
I would like to clarify that this article is not representative of all unschooling, I'm not an expert on the subject, but my best friend was essentially unschooled until eighth grade. His parents ran a biology lab and just took him with them to work and let him go. He quickly became interested in the computer system in the lab and developed a lifelong love of computing. At age 6 he installed Linux on a computer for the first time. By 14 he was employed by the lab as a sysadmin and also did some bioinformatics for them.

The kids in the article might go on to a life in agriculture like their parents, or they might develop an interest in carpentry, as per the structures in the forest. I know that to many people on HN such a lifestyle might be very foreign, but there's nothing wrong with it, and if one is happy in that lifestyle than they are much better off than the many people who were pigeonholed into engineering or medicine or law and find themselves unhappy.
I spent 12 years at Microsoft, working on .NET technologies, half of it as a manager, but still very technically involved in design and coding. Last year, I left Microsoft and joined a much smaller SaaS company, built on non-Microsoft technologies. I am a manager here as well, but I made the switch to get exposure to these technologies and I have actually been in the code quite a bit. My current company looks for raw smarts while hiring and so the Microsoft background doesn't matter, even for the engineers. In fact there are a bunch of ex-Microsoft engineers across the engineering org. Unless you are applying for a role that requires very specific expertise, most companies shouldn't care that you don't have experience with a specific language or framework.

I am hiring right now on my teams! Let me know if you are interested and we can figure out offline if there's a mutual fit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_unions_in_the_Soviet_Unio...

Both the extreme left and the extreme right are very much opposed to unions. Ergo making a difference between them on that basis seems impossible.

It worked on the other side of the fence as well : Nazi Germany restricted or outlawed trade and business organisation just as it did it unions. They went after the Church too. They restriced universities. They replaced or otherwise forced the management of large businesses to do their bidding too. Hell, they went after a number of soccer clubs.

And the Soviets did the same. Slightly different order, with the emphasis placed slightly differently, but the same result.

In general I'd say that extreme left and extreme right are both totalitarian ideologies and will not allow any form of authority or power to reside in any organisation other than their own. Left or right merely determines the order and the emphasis.
Children in New Zealand who began learning to read at age 7 had better reading comprehension than those that started at age 5 by the time they were 10.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0885200612...

Children in Germany who started school at age 7 performed better on standardized tests than those who started at age 6.

http://ftp.iza.org/dp1827.pdf
>And I do think there are broad swathes of the political establishment that are really invested in keeping America dumb.

To me this sounds as crazy as thinking that the US government knew about 9/11. Unless your under living under extraordinary circumstances (a disease bankrupting you, etc) nothing can stop you from learning. People choose how they spend their free time if they choose to watch TV instead of learning, it's their own choice not some mandate from the establishment.
'...that you can't take off!'

This sounds like something from a dystopian sci-fi story.
Except Instacart, the company mentioned in the lead-in of the article, is not just in SF or NYC. Neither is Uber or Lyft. So I'm not sure what you're saying totally holds up.

--

Do you serve my area?

Our Personal Shoppers deliver in the Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. areas. We're expanding quickly, so sign up with your zip code to let us know where you want to see Instacart next! [0]

[0] https://www.instacart.com/faq#popular-questions-q2
The extermination of minorities is a very popular tactic amongst people supporting social equality. Just look at the French revolution, for an explicit example, if you don't think Pol Pot and the other communists are really left wing.
> You can claim yourself to be a pacifist (left wing) all you want. But if your actions result in war (right wing), then you aren't a pacifist.

So you mean "left wing" is anything that leads to peace and "right wing" is anything that results in war. You may want to look up "tautology" or "circular reasoning".

By that standard a successful nuclear strike is left wing, and a failed one is right wing.
Physically destroying a microcontroller with Software
The point of the article was not that "everyone needs to have the best education possible". Go read it again. The primary message is that personal touch is crucial, and can often make a difference in the value you extract out of an education.
Agreed that oDesk and other freelancing sites are great sources of ideas.

However, the projects that get posted there have jumped a bunch of hoops to get there. A person posting there has got an idea, fleshed it out, committed to pay money to have it built, written a project description, expects a typically closed source implementation in exchange for money, and is comfortable with negotiating technical and project management issues with developers. It's not a workflow a non-technical, non-managerial average joe would be comfortable with.

What I'm looking for is a site where anybody can write ideas with no financial or other commitments. Developer(s) pick them up, work on them (only) with an open source model for anybody to use. Whenever there's a release, the system can notify the idea originator as a courtesy.
Is this available online somewhere?
It sounds pretty cheap for Japan. I wonder what it would be like to work remotely while living there?

Also, it's weird, but I love the Japanese melons even though I do not like cantaloupe--they always taste rotten to me.
Seriously what is up with the emotions? You use quite a bit of them.

EDIT: The emoticons in your comment replys
They can send the police, sure. Doesn't mean I have to answer their questions.

This is a somewhat absurd argument because what I'd do ultimately depends on the circumstance. If I truly know nothing besides my own name and that I found this person bleeding, I would be wondering where my other memories went and if I were brain damaged.

In the general case, they aren't going to be sending detectives immediately to ask questions because someone called 911. Nor would I stay on the scene longer than I was medically needed to be there. But the "general case" is a useless fiction.
Turn it around: think of Google as a young startup, VST is a big 800-lb gorilla. Startup is working on something cool; big gorilla comes along and says "hey, you should buy that from me, and/or license my patents". But maybe patents are these all-too-common obvious troll-patents, and startup's stuff is different anyway. But startup would still be rightfully concerned about (arguably frivolous) lawsuits.

Seems like the perspective changes depending on who plays David and who is Goliath. Generally, YC crowd is pretty hard core anti-patent, especially where software and algorithms are concerned.
To a point - if I don't ever get into accidents that are my fault, why have insurance in the first place?
yes, I certainly need to stay in the mvp frame of mind, thanks for that reminder.
If I don't cause accidents, why should I have insurance in the first place?
> This library is taking the only possible approach

It is taking the only possible approach if we assume that it must use one and only one algorithm for all uses. Otherwise, it seems to me that a lot of careful tuning and configuration would be needed in order for this library to make the best guesses it possibly can make for a specific user’s situation and data.

> might take a very long time to converge

A limit there might be appropriate – otherwise there might exist a “billion laughs” style attack.
But that is true of all such literature. The little Red Book, The Communist manifesto, Mein Kampf, the Quran, all of these books are boring to the point that despite their historical influence, and the massacres ascribed to them, it is a real struggle to get through them.

Well, at least most of them are really short.
German City Munich considers moving back to Microsoft (from Linux)
Show HN: Liaar v0.2.0 – Create fake REST API in a minute
Very neat.

How often are the images pulled? Could they be sorted by date? It would be interesting to see the flow of pictures in real time during specific events.
thanks, the web app approach certainly makes a lot of sense. my only concern is whether html5 can get access to the phone's resources like the camera, dialer, etc.
The main source for the country is lake Nicaragua (which has bull sharks btw!) and they would be dredging this too. This would cause massive amounts of silt to cloud the water which would kill a lot of the fish/fauna. Not to mention there are going to be a lot of corners cut on this since it's Latin America and bribes will get paid (I'm Panamanian, I know how this stuff works).
Tantek Çelik – The once and future IndieWeb [video]
This looks cool but I think your syntax clashes with JS's standard LabeledStatement
Perhaps I am clouded by my own positive experiences with school, but I disagree on two levels.

Firstly, your use of the phrase 'in the west' implies that outside of the 'west' there is some different, better elementary education system. This has not been my experience in India, where capacity for rote memorization is regarded as equivalent to intelligence from an early age. What countries fit your boundaries of 'the west'?

Secondly, school serves as a valuable social and educational center to most children. Even though elementary education is imperfect, it does not mean that a viable solution is to simply do away with it. In fact, I think the social interaction with other children of similar age is extremely important to developing social skills and friendships.
For many people, having insurance is required, either by the state (for a car) or a bank (for a house). Those who don't fall into these categories often choose to self-insure, and self-insurance has the advantage that you derive the benefit of the invested money, rather than the insurance company's stockholders.
Ok, we'll take "[video]" out of the title.
The folks at Evil Mad Scientist started the CandyFab project [1] a while back. The printing method is different so the resolution isn't as good, but it's open source.

[1] http://candyfab.org/
I don't understand how, on a site called "Hacker News," so many people seem oblivious to how damaging the primary educational system is to young peoples' minds and methods of thought. Unschooling doesn't mean not teaching children: that's what happens in schools.
Same for Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, and I suspect a lot of the rest of the (non-Eastern) Africa.

USSD codes are critical.
Mbox does a lot more than this.
Absolutely nothing in the article implies that this father is attempting to expose his children to books or other resources (the internet, perhaps?) about math, science, or history.
You can still generally get negs+contact sheet+scans for ok prices. I do negs+contact sheet at a pro lab, and then shoot them with my D800 on a lightbox, and import into Lightroom. With the proper curve and adjustment presets, they're higher quality than my best film scanner scans.
> A virtual shrink may sometimes be better than the real thing

It's true, and this speaks volumes about the value of therapy as a profession. The reason? It proves that people are competent to treat themselves, the real meaning of virtual therapy.

EDIT: Nothing is more annoying that anonymous cowards who, out of ignorance, consistently downvote posts consisting solely of easily verified facts.
So I had read that this guy the point person from China had a dubious history of floating giant infrastructure projects that never materialized. The Nicaraguans I've spoken too think the project is all BS. However once you pay off enough locals, consider it more likely.

Big issue is that this will take 120 miles to cut, will they be able to recoup their investment if their fees to traverse are lower than panama, because they have to be to compete. Time crossing this canal has to be slower than panama's 48 mile long canal. So assume 2.5x travel time, you have to charge lower fees because of the travel costs associated with the extra distance etc. time = fuel

Edit : See this recent article about wang jing http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/04/us-china-canal-ins...
>I can't shake the feeling that this is elitist

Hardly relevant. You have a better life on top of a society, it has always been so. Hence we should encourage people to move up in society.
The post was a duplicate.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8185935
Just FYI Germany was providing training and equipment to the Chinese nationalists to fight at first against regional warlords and then the Japanese until 1941 when the tripartite pact was signed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-German_cooperation_until_1...
My strong opinion is that educationally, THE most important thing you must do with your child is TALK to them. From the beginning. From year 0. Discuss things with them. Let them soak as much understandable speech as they can between years 0 and 2. This will have a far more profound effect in their life rather than did they learn to read at 4 or 8 years of age.

Could you specify what is horrifying about the previous post? Why would it be more important for a 5 year old to learn to read rather than, say, spend their time building Legos, practice crafts or climbing into trees? Like another poster stated, most kids in Finland do not start to formally learn to read until they are 6 (preschool, if the parents want so) and at the latest when they enter primary school (7). I would claim Finland has a pretty good public primary education system.

Pushing kids to do too much too soon has no advantages, imho. There are skills that are best started acquiring at a youngish age but you will have to convince me pretty hard that reading is one of them. Kids have this natural curiosity to an amazing variety of things. But what those things are can be quite random. The best way to have them learn something is to apply this natural curiosity - i.e. find what they are interested in - and the support them in this activity. This does not mean allowing them play videogames or watch cartoons whole the whole day.

I would say if the kids like it and want to then sure, teach them to read. But before 7, I would claim it is more valuable to find those things that they are really keen into and let them practice those. This creates a positive association to knowledge acquisition (the love of learning). And at that age they soak information and skills like sponges if they are motivated and have the mental capacity to grasp the concepts.
Pretty much what dragged the UK into WWI was the German violation of Belgiums neutrality.
Democrat != Liberal. Liberals have not controlled the government in the U.S. (or Israel) for a very long time.
Eliminating untracked behaviour on the Web
If true, that's abusive. If you email links of previous instances to hn@ycombinator.com, we will investigate.
No, a fairer grouping would be with refusing to let your child attend a school, read books, or use the Internet.
Is the elementary educational system truly "damaging" to young minds?

I think of my elementary education (which, mind you, was only 6 years ago) as perhaps boring or tedious in some areas (like math, for me), while also exciting and rewarding in others (science, learning to make friends, deal with gossip, etc). I certainly don't think I have a very 'damaged' method of thought now because of my elementary education.

I think that, on the whole, it was not at all damaging; in fact, it was important to my development as a child.
I did not imply anything about school systems outside the western world, I used the term simply because I know close to nothing about education outside the west and therefore did not want to include it in my description.

I also certainly did not imply that children should be educated in isolation. I agree that social interaction with other children is fundamental to kids' development throughout elementary education. In fact, if you followed my suggestion and let kids do, to a certain extent, what they were interested in, I assume you would see most of them gravitate towards social learning, because that's how most humans are wired.
The Wirecutter actually carried out some thorough tests in order to recommend a good surge protector/power strip;

http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-surge-protector/
Do the kids in the article have access to the internet? Do they use it?
Private school, well off neighbourhood?
That's because the children that learned at age 7 weren't educated enough to understand that cramming for a standardized test was a waste of their lives.
StumbleProduct
hahahahahahhaha. Yeee. I also love emoticons. We actually started out with a gif messenger (glyphic) because we loved texting with emoticons/gifs so much.
I thought of Putin too when I first saw this posted a day ago for the reason that Putin has indicated many time that he would like to reestablish the USSR. If he ends up invading Ukraine and other former Soviet states (he already took a test drive through Georgia), we were all forewarned and did nothing to prevent it - much as Hitler's clear statements were ignored. I hope Putin has more foresight as this could be an enourmous disaster.

"The breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century." - Putin 2005
maaaaan what can I say. Gifs are worth 100x emoticons. But if I can't post gifs, gotta use emoticons
I read it as part of a school project.

You can easily find the English edition online.
will look into seeing if any quality is lost ^_^. cheers
Not a custom title, but the subtitle of the article.
This is partly attributed to 'No Child Left Behind'. The fact that public funding for schools is strictly determined by each school's performance on rigid, standardized tests is a huge issue. How can schools allow free-flowing learning, culture, exploration, and self direction when they HAVE to perform well on standardized tests?
I don't know if self-direction is really a good idea. When I was a kid I would have directed myself towards video games and cartoons. I probably would not have independently developed an interest in english grammer and math.
Public school, but fairly wealthy.

What's your point?