skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll preface this by saying that the felony aspect of this case, if accurate, is way out of proportion. I don't know how the US system works, but here in Australia it is very unlikely for the police to be called in for a matter such as this one.

> It's so clear to me that this kid actually is a hacker. Just in the Stallman sense of the word. I suspect he's just like any of us were at his age-- completely and utterly in love with computers. He was suspended before from using computers, and he found a way around it. Highschool is a waste of this guys time. We should have him in a CS program somewhere. Instead, he's got a few more years of hell.

This is pure speculation on your part. He could be the next, up and coming, Wozniak, or more likely, he is an otherwise unremarkable trouble maker.

As a male high school teacher I am acutely aware of the potentially career ending issues that can come about in my usual day-to-day work. We as teachers:

1. Are never in a room alone with a student

2. Are very careful about what we say/do around students. No curse words even among staff in the yard.

3. No suggestive language. Limited "joking around" etc.

As a teacher I am constantly on the defensive. This is because I have a job that puts me in a trusted position of power working with other people's children. The onus is on me for my actions to be above reproach at all times.

The amount of damage that could be inflicted on a teacher by a malicious student through the use of their system account makes me shudder. A truly malicious student could utterly destroy a teacher's reputation and ability to be re-hired by accessing illegal web material, sending inappropriate emails etc.

We work very hard to maintain a spotless reputation. Just the accusation of wrongdoing could do great harm to a teacher's standing.

Your characterization of this student as some gifted hacker is also more than likely wrong. In the past 10 years of teaching I've encountered countless cases of otherwise utterly unremarkable students who were obsessed with keyloggers and "programming" which amounted to little more that script kiddy BS. The truly gifted students were far less interested in stealing passwords than the students looking for a quick way to hack the system and cause grief/harm.

> But the point is this is a smart kid that is being punished for existing in a fucked up education system

I didn't see any indication that this was a "smart kid". Maybe he was. Shoulder surfing his teacher to steal their password doesn't indicate a high level of intelligence.

The fact that the school had a dumb password policy is tangential.

At my school we have a comprehensive computer ethics component to the curriculum where we do talk about the criminality of unauthorized computer access. Sounds like this student didn't get the message after his first suspension.

A felony is ridiculous, but part of a well rounded education must involve teaching students that this type of computer access will get you thrown in prison as an adult.
What I find interesting is it has been around for eons and appears to get rediscovered every few years as a new generation happens upon it. I think it could go a long way simply to expose young people to more ways of thinking and formulating arguments for daily discourse. We seem to only focus on modern formal methods like proofs, papers, and the scientific method.
Required in the 'it's a good idea because it will make the web more secure and make your customers trust you' sense, not required in the sense that it's something the API enforces.
An even better process would be to role out circa 1995 two-factor tokens.
I've more or less done this, and now pickjobs for what I'll learn, who I'm working with, and lifestyle.
I prefer Flash for videos and well...everything that can just start playing, take up bandwidth and make noise. Because it's easier to block that than an HTML5 content (without any specialized plug-ins in proper browsers, too).
Do you think privilege escalation is unusual on Windows now, then? :)
Crosstool-NG will take care of that.
Kids respond much better to positive reinforcement than negative reinforement.

The best values are never cultivated through fear and threats. Just ask this of yourself: how many of you are here because you were told to get better at computers rather than you found cmputers fun and interesting?
I can't blame them for double guessing a prototype synth. I'm pretty sure they use them in movies for "hacker" rooms or whatever.

Doesn't mean they're not asses.
But in the end, would you really want to go work for a shop like that? If they don't want you based on the color of your beard, then I wonder what "other" surprises lurk around the corner..

I'm in my mid-thirties, so please take that into an account. Also I know that these are the questions that I have to ponder in the coming years, so your insights are highly valued.
Coolest comment I've read today. Way to go!
Can you give more details on your story? I'm particularly interested in how much you needed to retire, and how you've set everything up to make yourself comfortable that you won't run out of money.
Go Dependency Injection with Pointers and Constructors
I actually think you misunderstand the point. I'm not trying to argue that learning complex things is easy and it doesn't require mental effort, but this is not simply "teaching anything using logical steps". It's about encouraging the student to discover the solution on their own, with very careful and reluctant guidance.
The only windows we had back then looked outside. :)

The computer labs were all IBM PS/2 model 30s running DOS. The servers were a model 70 running Netware. The school backbone was token ring.

The lab network ran on some oddball daisychain system. Telephone cable and the cards had two RJ11 jacks on them. Still trying to figure out what kind it was.
Show HN: List/play videos over ssh using mpv
> The best values are never cultivated through fear and threats.

I've never considered "fear" when I was told that I got to have more than x score to pass in next grade. That's just called expectations - and settings expectations on your growth as a human being is a positive thing.

Would you think it's acceptable that a 12 years old still can't read properly ? Because that's what happening in several countries now where we have removed any barrier to ensure kids have a certain level to progress on the education ladder.
If they were concerned about unauthorized people getting into their accounts, they should've changed the password away from their lastname and not posted it publicly.
Back in middle-school; the public library nearby installed 4-5 new machines down on a lower level for word-processing (they were better than my home pc even), so pretty soon we had Unreal Tournament installed on every machine, and that would be our goto spot after school.

Once in a while someone would get banned from the library for a couple weeks (I think other kids that saw us started playing as well, so it was hard for them to identify a culprit), they would call in IT, overhaul their computers and we'd be back to laning a month later once things cooled off.
> he could certainly have been fired

not only fired. In Australia, teachers must be centrally registered to enter the classroom. An accusation such as this which was actually upheld would disqualify them from gaining registration across Australia, effectively nuking their career from orbit.

I assume similar registration requirements exist in the US.
This is a red herring -- the OP's post didn't say anything that was overly or gratuitously negative, at least not compared to many of the other comments on this thread. It's very true that saying that users are 'cheating the system' when they expect a libre product to be provided to them free of charge when the developers of said product themselves have added little more than a glossy sheen upon years of blood, sweat, and tears is an arrogant thing to say. Modifying GNU/Linux isn't new and it doesn't give you the right to say such outlandish things in defence of your own project.
> Please leave your anti-science anti-intellectual comments outside of hacker news.

> I recommend becoming informed and making a rational decision about such things instead of lying to yourself.

Please don't insult the person you're talking to. Doing so breaks our rule about civility.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
IMHO, I really do believe how Socratic Method can improve teaching. Coming from a computer science degree and then studying Law, this method was really an eye opener on how to learn in a school room setup. It has been long used in Law schools and I believe if it can be implemented partly or fully in all schools, we might see good results. It tests the knowledge of the person being asked, whether he/she really understands the subject.
The AI does not automatically make these apps. Its an assistant - that helps you make. You are still the driver/puppeteer.
Seems interesting. I do hate interacting with Material design however and can't wait for it to go away.

I feel the same way about it as I do about the hipster trend. I got bored with it a long time ago and still people think it is cool somehow.
The inane listicles are just money drivers for BuzzFeed News, which is where much of the real journalism takes place. The site was founded in the late 00s as a simple lifestyle website in the vein of the AOL homepage but over time it's branched out into other areas, one of them being news. If they want to be taken seriously as a source of journalism (which they have in the past), then this sort of thing needs to be called out and punished accordingly.
For the Love of God
Once you're old enough, you'll realise that if your plans change weekly you're in serious trouble.
I'm scared to back up the bulk of my data because I don't want to put it on dropbox or s3 because they could get hacked or otherwise divulge to law enforcement. And encrypting it all first is a pain.
Banning the word “Agile” from the workplace
You teach Socratic questioning as a habit (otherwise, you forget it). And as a habit, it requires repetition. Repetition, in turn, needs motivation. But the best motivation I know comes from people around. So, it's very non-techy.

And computers still do a lousy job in talking to people. Try to make people to answer a 10-question online survey. Harder to motivate than in face-to-face meetings.
Poor reading comprehension on my part.
Glad to hear that you think its futuristic :). There are probably two main differences between thegrid and dhi. Dhi can help with JS also - along with HTML and CSS. Thegrid atleast appears to be mostly focused on design (HTML & CSS ) from their copy.
Second important difference is that - with thegrid - the AI does the design or layout. With Dhi - you do the design.

Giving YOU, the developer - full control is extremely important to us.
All those actions around the theme of acting appropriate around students at all times are the result of a fairly large number of teachers acting inappropriately at some time in the past.

Surely kids pulling pranks happened long before teachers became much more sensitive to making sure their actions would not be mis-interpreted and this really is just another prank.

Making such a big deal out of it seems to be a total over-reaction.

FWIW the high school that I went to had a teacher cadre of approximately 40 teachers and three of those were confirmed to be paedophiles after I left the school (2 males, 1 female). That's a 'sample of 1' so take it with a grain of salt but to me it is a shockingly large number and it's those people that are the cause of your 'walking on eggs' feeling, not the pranks the students have been pulling on their teachers since the dawn of time.

Changing a background picture is right up there with putting a poster on the backside of the blackboard, on a scale of the kind of pranks high school students tend to pull it's a complete non-event, the fact that it involves a computer makes the offence not much worse. This habitual over-reaction because something involves a computer really should stop, everything involves computers at some level nowadays. He's being punished for what he could have done, rather than for what he actually did (change a background pic and alert the teacher to get a much better password rather than destroy his reputation, in return they are now destroying his reputation).

If a forged email can get you fired you have different problems, that email could be forged quite convincingly without access to your computer at all...
> Really? In the Judeo-christian framework? Which, like-it-or-not, has to be considered the base reference for the definition of marriage.

Not sure why that would be the case, given that the USA, at least, was founded by a bunch of enlightenment fans, the products of a time when the christian church's credibility was foundering.

> Without trying to escalate anything, could you please show me the references for that?

However since you asked about christianity in particular:: http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
It's usually no problem to keep a package or two from upgrading via the --ignore argument to pacman. Arch calling it "unsupported" doesn't mean it's inherently risky, it mainly comes from the fact that you can shoot yourself in the foot with it if you do it to something like glibc. Keeping a userland program like Chrome or Gimp downgraded will not screw up your system.
IMHO It's more usually bad developers who get promoted into management, so they can do less damage.
That 7.5T in payouts doesn't just disappear from the economy. Most people will put almost all of that payment right back into the economic equation through consumerism. In most models the basic income would be pretty close to the cost of living, and (this is strongly speculative) savings would drop to near-zero if people are less concerned about where their next paycheck is coming from.

A huge proportion of the welfare will is spent right away on consumption of necessities (food, rent) which goes right back into the economy. Specifically, it becomes revenue for business owners.
First four episodes of Game of Thrones S5 leaked
I do believe in it too, but so far it's only a belief. I accept the question first method because it avoids the rote learning since it doesn't give a lot of information to the student, and merely drives him through ideas. Which was the case every time I learned something, being left mostly alone in a concept and poking at it until something clicks. That said, I never experienced a real Socratic class.
The much simpler answer is that this is the special case of the empty product being 1 (or more precisely, the neutral element of the monoid on which your multiplication operates).

The empty product is 1 so that $\prod_{x \in S \setminus T}x\prod_{x \in T}x = \prod_{x \in S}x$ holds for all $T \subseteq S$.

It's the exact same reason why the empty sum is zero (zero being the neutral element of a monoid using additive notation).

n! is commonly defined as the product of all positive integers less than or equal to n. For n = 0, this is the product of the empty set.
So planting an obscene/pornographic image isn't malicious by your standards. Where do you draw the line? That is why rules exist for a reason.
> Yes I watched the video you moron [...] WTF is wrong with you people?

Please don't post comments like this to Hacker News, even when someone has behaved unjustly and you feel strongly about it.
Wow you're a meta-hipster - you were a hipster before it was cool. How ironic of you!
The Persistence of Sects
I would love it if HBO adopted Netflix' model. I hate getting it doled out bit by bit. Let us binge watch and get on with things.
Also there's a relationship between remembering and understanding. Sometimes just remembering a lot of premises is the only way to be able to really understand them later on (because they fit in your brain cache -- programmer analogy). Many times a concept became clear to me after a while, even though I did nothing special, but the pieces and their relationship became familiar enough to be meaningful. Some mathematicians said it better, it still feels weird anyway.
Let's not turn this into a discussion of something other than what it is: a harmless prank. Kids have been pranking teachers since before public education was a thing, let alone computers. I'm not saying it's a good or smart thing to do - but that's why they are kids and not adults.

Of course educators have to enforce the rules as well as their authority in the face of insubordination, - and I don't think people are arguing the kid shouldn't get in trouble.

But apologia for the felony charges is crazy, if that's sufficient grounds for a felony charge - I'd wager that a significant (double-digit) percentage of all people employed in tech would have been charged as kids.
Hummm...

I am not sure I agree completely, what you mean by "knowledge" ?

Let's suppose I don't know how to multiply numbers, however I do know how to add numbers and I also know what multiplication is... Do I know how to multiply numbers ?

The real caveat here is another one, the author prepared a sequence a question, for what I can recall from my philosophy class Socrate did not...

It was more a random exploration...

Finally we all know that some work is necessary to retain knowledge (again, what we mean by knowledge ?), but a logic, inductive work is way more enjoyable (read easier) than a mere mnemonic one.
I suppose changing the screensaver would've gotten him life without parole.

Was he black?
Interesting. Worth noting Spanish, French, Catalan and probably some more connected languages I'm not so familiar with are irregular up to 16 (17 is akin to 10-7, whereas 11-16 follow other rules)
Hopefully this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon

will put us back in the space race.
See also http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zircon_(satellite)

There's a small satellite industry in the UK, which seems to be thriving despite official neglect.

UK procurement is just too small-minded and penny-pinching to do these kind of projects.
Thanks ! We should definitely improve user on-boarding. We're adding some features like Tour & videos, but if you have any examples of great user on-boarding feel free to share.
I sometimes think, that the reason for this age discrimination was the switch from female to male coders in the early 80s. It was that sudden break, that introduced the computer kid as a replacement of the former cheap female workforce, and made the highly payed former system architect obsolete, as nobody had a use for a programmer anymore, who needs a secretary for typing, in the modern time of personal computers. Some of them moved to management, just renaming their job position.

So the gender discrimination of cheap female coder vs expensive male system architect switched into an age discrimination between cheap young coders, and expensive managers.

We lost both the skilled and the female coders in this way.
Remind HN: Followups are impossible if you have no contact details
One of the things I do on HN is look up previous discussions. When doing so I deliberately keep my search terms open and under-specified, because in that way I regularly and frequently turn up related items that turn out to be of interest.

Many times I want to follow up on the discussion, to recount more up-to-date experiences, or to find out what happened so I can share in any discoveries made. People so often learn things, and so rarely come back to share them.

But very few people have any contact details in their profiles. I've not been gathering data explicitly, but this submission is prompted by the frustration of wanting to help, wanting to share my experiences and/or expertise, wanting to respond to a request for assistance, or wanting to find out how things turned out, and being unable to.

I know people are concerned about exposing email addresses, etc., but I get virtually no spam to the HN visible email address, and what little I get is more than out-weighed by the emails I get from the HN community.

Sometimes people think they have shared their address when in fact they haven't. The "email" field is not visible to others, it needs to be in the box of text.

Do you share your email? Have you explicitly listed contact details in your profile?
>>Your characterization of this student as some gifted hacker is also more than likely wrong.

True, like the above comment , there is so much of profiling for a teacher's role and so much at stake for the teacher.

Think of not letting the kid (gifted/otherwise!) learn the seriousness of stepping into others private space?He/She would think its ok forever and can possibly have damaging consequences not just for himself/herself ,but for all those surrounding.

Hunger/motivation can help one focus & learn complexities of comp-sci but its more important that one learn to deal one's own thoughts and mind in a younger age.This is where i regard high-school as most important!

And honestly reading the above from a teacher in another place really makes me happy :
>>job that puts me in a trusted position of power working with other people's children

In my place, most of the students study in remote villages where there are all sorts of teachers and there are few who feel the same way and every-time i meet one, i only wish to thank.
Please resist the temptation to post about being downvoted, even though having a comment downvoted is frustrating. (It is for all of us.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Clojure's loop and recur in JavaScript
The obsession with Finland's education system is rather stupid. I mean, they are doing innovative stuff and someday the US might want to follow those footsteps, but first you need to fix the basic stuff, stuff that Finland had fixed a long time ago.

First of, you cannot nurture and educate a child if they spend eight hours a day in a horrendously underfunded inner city school and the rest of the day living in a poor dysfunctional household without any mentors and good role models.
This is true. They can't charge everyone under the cfaa, if, suppose, reddit or 4chan found a public ip and a VPN server...
Mumbai Dabbawalas to help Flipkart for last mile deliveries
You have to understand that this device is not a watch, in the traditional sense its simply an iPhone Accessory which is named the "Watch because its worn on the wrist, same with all other smart watches none of them are watches they're jut phone accessories So to expect the kind of traditional sentiment that you get from a really beautiful well made swiss watch that lasts for generations is futile.
left of what? (or from what?)
Please, both of you, don't bicker like this on Hacker News.
Very often these biases work at an unconscious level in people who are otherwise perfectly fine. Don't discount this effect.
I think they've actually just conflated "two men kissing" with "pornography". This is Florida, which I equate with "geriatric and bigoted".
Donation was broken for me

"An error occurred while processing your request.

Reference #102.a68e1402.1428827623.1ff08e60"
What I was thinking was acceptable on the low side. If you get things done, but it seems fast, that should be okay.

Of course working too much is bad for everyone, I sympathise with your examples.
Really? When I was using archlinux, it broke nearly every month. My wife uses Windows with auto update turn on and she never has a problem with it.
I think pa-pee-root.
For our "internal" stuff:

* Monthly whole drive snapshots to an external HD

* Daily Time Machine backups to an external HD

* Everything backed up continually with CrashPlan

* All work stuff synced continuously in DropBox

* Monthly restore-a-random-file test to sanity check
If we were treating kids as adults from a legal point of view, all of them would have a criminal record before they are 10. Kids steal from each others, fight each other, etc. It is the role of education to precisely elevate them to the standards of our society. So I agree with you the felony charge seems overblown. Though the article says the kid is a recidivist, which may explain the legal escalation.