ImFatYoureFat

The problem with this (at least in theory) is that unless US schools devote as much time to learning mandarin, or spanish for that matter, as chinese and taiwanese schools spend teaching english the effort is useless. I have studied mandarin for several years and traveling to anywhere outside of rural china makes my efforts seem largely pointless. There is always a chinese person who speaks far better english than I do mandarin. Essentially unless these schools plan on starting kids in mandarin from kindergarten an going through high school and using it for at least 3 hours every school day, these kids are never going to catch up to chinese children's second language proficiency.

There is something to be said for the power of litigation. Presumably this guy does not have millions of dollars to spend fighting legal battles for the next ten years no matter how much the evidence is in his favor. Facebook and Zuckerberg do.

I know you kid, but there is a lot to be said for the fact that lack of margin leads to corruption. ie, the best way to discourage this kind of behavior would be to create some sort of noticeable difference in value from one model to the next.

you're right, I'm an idiot and was looking at the Netherlands flag.

Having looked at their bracket I kind of wish France or Germany had won.

"In an age when nations have become so large that their citizens no longer identify with distant governments..."

What? it would seem like the complete opposite of this is true. I would say that nationalism and national identity, in the US and most other places in the world, is stronger now than it has been in the past 50 years.

I totally agree that html/css with js and maybe even some basic php if they are up for it is the way to go.

Sure html and css aren't languages, but couple them with javascript and a complete novice can make quite a few dynamic pages (read programs) in an afternoon.

I think one of the most important elements for introducing young children, or really anyone, to programming is providing the ability to build a complete interactive program almost immediately. This can definitely be accomplished with a few html tags and a few lines of js.

Alternatively, if you have access to a licenses for it I would recommend initially starting them out in Visual Basic Studio. It strikes me as a good balance between immediate buildableness and a easy environment to learn the basics of loops, strings, if/then, for/do, etc. Maybe a week or two in vbs and then switch them over to js.

While I have no qualms with languages like ruby or python, the call for them to be used as introductory languages seem misleading. While you can learn to build a stand alone program in them in a week or less, I get the feeling that a static box program is not going to be that exciting for most 10-12 year olds today (obviously this same problem exists for vbs)

My feeling is that to most children computers are two things, the internet and video games. Building your own video games immediately (outside of flash which isn't a terrible suggestion) is somewhat out of reach for most beginners. But building web pages, and pretty interesting ones at that, is very accessible for anyone once they get the syntax down. In truth you have to get relatively far into ruby or python before you can understand how to display a page you've build or get to very much interactivity.

the design of embedding a lot of videos in one page is very nice.

see those were my two guesses: Taiwan or Pakistan.

Guys, it obvious he's from the Vatican.

The down voting is really strange.

If he is Israeli, and in his mid twenties then he has already served in the IDF, likely in a CS capacity. Also if he was Sherut Leumi, then I wouldn't think he would apply for a military contract job in the first place. Furthermore, its especially difficult for people with highly desirable backgrounds like CS or engineering to get Sherut approval.

My only point was that an Israeli in their mid twenties has already served in the military and if they have, or plan to get a degree in CS, they have served in the military in a capacity relating to CS or engineering.

Of course it's totally possible that I'm wrong and he is from Israel.

Just out of curiosity, anyone have any explanations of the down voting? Don't really mind, I just find it kind of bizarre.

Don't think it's Israel, he would have already spent time in the military if he was Israeli.

Lenovo is still pretty solid, though decreasing is quality pretty rapidly. I could probably name for you their 5 or 6 thinkpad brands (s,w,t,r,... well apparently I can only name 4) but I couldn't for the life of me tell you the difference between any of them.

But I don't think the branding is the primary problem.

thanks for the explanations

I only skimmed the article so they might have covered this, but I would think that this comparison would, at least in theory, hold true for any two substances.

Pressure is pressure. No liquid is going to react differently to pressure applied by your head and shoulders than it does to pressure applied by your arms and legs. In other words: swimming is essentially pushing against something with your head while you push against something else with your arms and legs. The pressure and force received from these two actions should stay comparably constant in any PURE substance.

So maybe you would swim at a different speed in mud, if there were rocks in it.

it's like "Math Magic Land" except even more bad ass

This was a great article if for no other reason than that it just helped me diagnose my insomnia. Knew my symptoms but didn't know the name for my particular type. And F.lux seems like a great first step. Thanks

While I wouldn't entirely disagree with you, I think the analogy needs a little tweaking.

To my mind, it's not that the act of a girl looking for a rich guy and a guy looking for an attractive girl are the same act so much as it is that more times than not these two will find each other.

Girls whose priorities are in wealth and financial security with not end up attracting guys who are interested in relationships based off of emotional commonalities (read similar likes and values). Likewise, guys whose priorities are in finding the most attractive girl will not end up attracting girls who are interested in relationships based off of emotional commonalities.

This is essentially consistent with your analogy. The problem is that just because this is true is no reason to accept it as a healthy basis for a relationship.

Second video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZn46l7uEKg

Maybe I just wasn't being clear, I'll try and elaborate. Both public schools and charter schools are publicly funded. Usually the difference in the two is that charter schools get less funding per pupil in exchange for not having to adhere to the same administrative and academic standards.

My only point was that the article seemed to be suggesting that charter schools are good and public schools are bad (which doesn't make any sense since they are both public schools) and that in a perfect world charter schools would replace public schools (which doesn't make any sense because then, by definition, they wouldn't be charter schools.)

Remember, charter schools are given more freedoms so that they can experiment and see what practices work. The original idea was that the successful experiments would be used in normal public schools. There are lots of truly superb charter schools and some pretty bad charter schools.

I'm all for charter schools and I'm all for implementing successful practices in public schools. However, in my experience the people who want to "replace public schools with charter schools" either don't understand what charter schools are, or just want to cut the budgets of public schools.

There are plenty of people who advocate more funding for charter schools, and I am one of them. But in the public school reform movement there is almost no one who advocates expansion of charter schools instead of wider implementation of the successful practices of charter schools.

Great article, but it completely misunderstands the point of charter schools. Charter schools are suppose to be a testing ground for new methods in public school administration. If a charter school is successful, it's methods are suppose to be implemented on a wider range of public schools.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting the tone of the article but it seemed to be suggesting that charter schools in themselves were a viable replacement for normal public schools.

This is great, but where are the examples of successful implementation?

I didn't want to side track to discussion into an argument over whether laymen can think critically about complex issues or not but this is kind of a ridicules accusation.

There is a great difference between not trusting experts (what you are accusing me of) and having ideas of my own and asking others for their opinions of my ideas.

I don't do surgery on myself but if I had a deadly uncured disease I would question the doctor as to why various treatments won't work to cure me. In all likelihood he would answers for all of my questions (which in itself would put my mind at ease a little), but it is possible that he wouldn't have all the answers (leading me to want a second opinion).

up voted you because the opportunity to learn more about this situation was one of the main reasons I asked this question

Why?

How many times has this attitude been proven pointless and ineffective? As I understand it one of the great things about "startup cultures" is the utilization of the outsider's prospective. Why can't that mentality be applied to this problem?

That was kind of my point in creating this thread. While there are some complex elements in play here and it is a problem with many technicalities to it, there aren't THAT many elements to worry about at I understand it. You have water pressure, the pressure of the oil excreting, the depth and breadth of the hole, and how deep it is under water.

Further more its not like the solutions that they have tried so far have been particularly high tech (put a cap on it and hope the water pressure with seal it, stuff the hole with crap and hope the water pressure will seal it, put fluid in the hole and hope the water pressure will seal it).

There are a lot of smart people on HN, so if nothing else it is good mental masturbation to make suggestions and then explain why those suggestions are or are not feasible.

So to get started, my uneducated suggestion is that they put a giant cylinder over the leak so as to at least contain the oil as it rises to the surface. I understand the problems with depth and pressure so ideally there is some fabric that is highly mailable (plastic, rubber, etc.)

With little background in physics I would think that the pressure of the oil's need to rise to the surface would exceed the pressure of the water's need to collapse the cylinder.

Criticism of this or any other idea is more than welcome.

I would love to know what element of this website is used in mapping the moon.

my favorite data point on the issue of education reform is that of Washington DC a year ago. The new district leader offered a renegotiation of the teacher's contract in which they would give up their tenure rights in exchange for raises of the average teachers salary so that the bottom would be 70000 and the top would be 120000. The union was flatly against this renegotiation plainly stating that they would rather have security to be mediocre than have the opportunity to earn up to 3 times what they were currently earning.

completely ridicules. to my mind a district that pays their top teachers 120000 solves the entire problem. Imagine the competition for teaching positions in a district in which you start at 70000 at after 7 year you can be making up to 120000. What young ambitious twenty something wouldn't want a job were you could make 120000 a year a have three months guaranteed vacation time in a field in which you can feel confident that you are making a difference and there is clear tangible progress from your work.

While it would be nice, I'm not sure this is true.

Meta filter is a pretty unique online community in that it is a very large group of people who are sincerely helpful in a almost unlimited number of subjects. As the article says, there are many much smaller cases of similar actions of humanity and helpfulness on askmefi on a fairly regular basis.

It would be great if the proliferation of this type of online community was the future, but Mefi has been around for a long time and, in my opinion, truly separates itself from the rest in terms of helpfulness of the commenters and consistent quality of the content.

HN and some other communities are equally helpful from time to time, but I have come across none that match Mefi in consistency and breadth of subject matter. (obviously HN isn't trying to match in breadth of subject matter.)

I guess what I am saying is that with most online communities I accept that the other people won't necessarily act with the same compassion as they would with friends they have IRL. Mefi has done a pretty extraordinary job maintaining a community in which this standard of human decency is pretty well kept.

tldr: Mefi is a unique online community in that it's community members act more like they would IRL in confronting one another's problems.