javanix

They only used a 500 student set for their model?

The metrics they arrived at aren't exactly shocking, either - students who live below the poverty line, who miss 42% of their classes, etc. It almost sounds like someone just needed an officially approved reason to concentrate efforts on these kids more than others, without it looking racially biased.

What are you talking about?

I gave a link to Wikipedia (which lists the actual legal sources). I wasn't passing judgement, just saying that what he did seems to be illegal if you accept the fact that the protests were illegal.

I feel like I should point out that according to federal law, it is an illegal use of a police scanner to "use information received to aid in the commission of a crime, or disclose information received to other persons."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanner_(radio)#Legal_issues_in...

There are ethical and legal considerations concerning whether or not the protests were illegal, but I think as it stands now the defendant is very close to being on illegal footing.

I agree. Sometimes exactly what kind of PR speak is used is interesting in and of itself - no need to paraphrase unless absolutely necessary.

I would reccommend this Dell monitor:

http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/products/Monitors/product...

The key point is that it is LED backlit - this means much better contrast than similarly priced screens, as well as generally less power consumption.

CNET also gave it its highest-ever image-quality score, which as far as I can tell, is based on as objective of tests as they could do.

http://reviews.cnet.com/lcd-monitors/dell-g2410/4505-3174_7-...

I think the trouble with teaching mostly Java-only courses early on in CS curricula is that it makes it difficult to catch the subtle middle ground where OO actually makes code more readable/maintainable instead of more bloated.

Granted, a lot of that comes from experience in OO languages, but I think using C or another language helps people see that middle ground a lot easier. It helps make it more obvious where OO would help and where it would just be needless obfuscation.

Prozac? I doubt it. The bulk of homicides have always occurred in the inner cities, and those people would be the last to get their hands on prescription pharmaceuticals.

Its possible Prozac had some effect on more suburbanized areas of the country, but I think its doubtful that any change from prescription drugs would be statistically relevant to the tune of a 12% total drop.

Any drop in homicide rates in the inner cities almost certainly comes from another source, and my money is on political manipulation of the data.

As an example, the Baltimore mayor's office came under fire in 2006 for tweaking their crime numbers, and I'm sure that other large cities aren't immune from the same pressures.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02...

Presenting data on the elements that aren't subject to self-bias would bolster his case - absenteeism and failure to complete homework (as opposed to completing homework poorly), from the list you gave. I'm not sure that he would have gotten much use out of the rest of them, as they would be self-reported in most cases and difficult to quantify in the others.

I'm always kind of surprised with the sort of things my dog picks up on from time to time.

She will follow a pointed finger to go get a toy that she can't see, and apparently recognizes the names of her different toys ("go get your rope" will get you a rope from her bucket, and "go get your ball" will get you her ball). These weren't things she was ever trained to do, but she seemed to just pick them up over time.

She's almost 12 years old now, and I would estimate that her level of "knowledge" of the world around her (though obviously not with the same ability to learn) is about on a par with a human toddler.

People younger than 54 count as "the young" these days?

Is this some sort of commentary on USA Today's subscriber demographics?

Ah, thanks for the info, both of you.

Here's hoping some useful Linux uses can come out of this - packet-based multithreading seems like a useful abstraction to me, though I am an admittedly inexperienced in multithreaded programming outside of class.

I'm not too familiar with how various Linux applications are licensed currently, so perhaps someone else can enlighten me.

Does anyone know of any major GPLv2-only apps out there that would provide a major roadblock to porting this to Linux?

No, its not rocket science as to how it works. But, at least one of these companies is making a good-faith show of openness.

As the article mentioned, the scary part of this technology isn't the technology itself - it is the potential applications of the technology. Any openness coming from a company with an application like this is a positive market pressure.

I'm perfectly fine (and I think most people would be) with certain applications being throttled (to a reasonable extent) as long as I am told up front about it in my ToS, and as long as I know that my data is not being stored anywhere.

A first step to that kind of trustworthiness is more openness as to the filtering software being used.

Ah, I wasn't aware that Snort had that capability.

However, at the very least the open-sourcing of some subset of a commercial DPI product is interesting in that it provides more information than any other company (that I'm aware of, anyway) has revealed on the subject thus far.

edit: Not to say that it alleviates many of the concerns about packet monitoring, but some information is better than no information.

True, but seeing as broadband speeds are (or should be) pretty much completely dependent on market forces (unlike most of the others you mentioned), there's no reason a country with our GDP shouldn't be closer to the top of any list.

I think this stat is a pretty clear indicator that whatever the government is doing with the ISP industry, it isn't working.

Quit posting this crap.

Every single reader of this site is perfectly capable of finding their own music if they want.

Of course there is overlap, but seeing as it is a press release this article adds nothing to the general hacker/start-up knowledgebase, and considering the discussion here itself seems mostly centered on what crossovers/new movies are possible, I'm really having a hard time gaining any value from this sort of thing.

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Why on earth is this relevant here?

Well, I didn't mean to imply that we should try to impose any sort of literal rules on the community, only that all we can do is hope most of them get the point.

How are we supposed to "tell them the point"? We can't contact this jrp fellow directly and tell him to quit submitting irrelevant articles (nor would that do a whole lot of good, methinks) - our only options right now are flagging and making pointed comments on the more egregious submissions. Either those techniques work and persuade the three new readers to toe the line, or they don't. We simply don't have much control over the masses.

Personally, I think the problem could be reduced if long-time users could downvote submissions in some way (there have to be enough people who think this is a dumb article to get it off the front page, at least). After all, the number of decent comments here far outweighs the number of crappy ones, and I'd imagine that same self-moderation dynamic would hold for submissions as well.

20 people upvoting it is not "many" people nor does it reflect poorly on the community as a whole. Those 20 people can't make up more than 5% of the total number of active users on HN.

No matter how hard we try, we're never going to be able to control the community's whims without literal rules. No matter how much we'd like it to be so, the Reddit/TechCrunch/Gizmodo/etc commentors are not going to "unfind" HN. All we can do is flag crappy submissions like this and hope they eventually get the point.

I'm not sure I agree with you. Karma as a measure of personal worth is silly, but as a way of cutting down on trolls it works pretty well. That number at the top of the screen is something that I'd bet the Reddit and TechCrunch commentors would care deeply about, and as such, it keeps them from dumbing down the discussion here too much.

In any case, HN is by far the best self-moderated discussion forum I've ever seen, and I'd be leery of making any major change that might conceivably disrupt that.

Heh, I think the person who wrote it needs to read more HN.

The thing that drives me nuts the most is slow people who stay in the left lane in the passing lanes that are sometimes put in on 2 lane highways (ie, 2 lanes going in the same direction for a time). Some states (Minnesota for sure) simply make a solid line to shunt drivers over to the right lane and it makes a huge difference, but around here (Wisconsin) they don't do that and inevitably I'll end up stuck driving 45 on a behind an old camper on a 2 lane highway because they refuse to keep right.

I think the 60 bits/sec figure is more analogous to encoding an mp3 than listening to one. Making distinct choices like you're probably doing with your work is the sort of processing that the article was referring to, not the "parsing" done by reading or listening to an mp3.

This is pretty cool - as good as an example of the power of massive parallelism as I've ever seen, anyway.

I'm not sure "deserve" is the right word, considering the amount of thought that goes into most of them.

Wow, that's a fantastic analogy.

Kudos to him (or her) for placing a real, reasoned response on a gaming blog as well.

Agreed on all of your points other than "power-hungry politicians with a deeper, anti-capitalist agenda". There are some true morons in office in this country, especially most of Congress, but if you can provide me with a single example of an elected official who appears to be truly "anti-capitalist" I'd be shocked.

I would agree with you - but the 'infobox' (for lack of a better term) stays stationary over the same point of the building for the whole thing. I can't imagine the computations to keep it that centered based simply on the orientation of the phone would be either accurate enough or much faster than basic block/rectangle image processing.

After all, Google street-view does some simple image processing like that in-browser using JavaScript, and I'd imagine native iPhone code performance would approach that level of power.

If Microsoft were to "go away and die" it would be because their competitors were, in fact, "polished diamonds".