skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Only because of artificial limitations.

No, because of a design tradeoff: ease of use and mind vs openess.

Apple would still get to sell their iOS devices and iTunes content even if they allowed shell access and arbitrary installation of programs on them.

>I believe with 60% probability that by the end of 2015, Apple won't sell any consumer-targeted products that allow root access or installation of arbitrary software.

2015? Not a chance. Although the industry WILL move towards more auto-managable OSs...
That's a pretty interesting idea; do you have links to the "root weave" image? I googled but the search didn't turn anything up.

I'm not sure it's quite the direction I want to take Silk, but thanks for sharing -- I never thought about using desktop images for a pragmatic purpose such as that.
>> However, I think most people would agree that academics are not the only thing that matters for success,
>> either personally or professionally.

I would agree. I graduated from Caltech in engineering, and on the whole I would say that my class has been fairly successful in whatever they did. However, if you look at people that are the best known in their field, most of them combine being very strong technically (but not in my observation the best in their field) with tremendous drive and a talent for self-promotion.
>"Minding the Campus readers probably need little instruction on the corrupting effects of the racial balancing game played by almost all our elite universities"

Racial balancing is somehow corrupting? If I am making a claim like that I would definitely like to back it up with some facts.

>" The typical African- American and Latino student who gets admitted to the most elite colleges and universities in the U.S...."

What is a typical African-American student? Can I meet him? Racial stereotypes are loaded, and the authors throws them around like bad puns.

>"a requirement often interpreted to mean that if there is a male lacrosse, soccer, water polo, volleyball, cross-country, or fencing team there must be a female equivalent"

And this is a problem, why? Why shouldn't there be a female equivalent of a fencing team?

I don't think the author is racist or sexist, I am sure he is a perfectly nice person to meet. However, his deep hatred for programs to achieve social equality leads him to have beliefs that are very very worrisome from a racial and gender equality point of view.
Wow, you've managed to pick the worst reasons not to appreciate a good school, and they really don't align with anything I've witnessed at MIT.

Kid's take time off after repeated failure, but they often come back once they're off of academic probation. Others will leave to take jobs, start companies, or transfer to a similarly ranked school that they simply like better. I've heard/seen tens of these cases, but never one where students purposely transfer to a school where they're less prone to fail.

Moreover, financial aid seems generous here. And private school prices anywhere, regardless of the caliber, are very similar.

If anything, take solace from the awkward social life, the excessive workload that makes entrepreneurial endeavors seemingly impossible, and the fact that you really don't need a good school to succeed.
It's a common misconception that humanities and social science is second rate at Caltech. It's true you wouldn't go to Caltech to get a degree in political science--but that's not because the political science professors there are weak. It's because there aren't enough of them for a broad program--but most of the professors are first rate in their area.

For instance, when I was a student there, they had a professor, Edwin Munger, who was a professor of Geography. He was one of the world's leading authorities on Africa. He taught a popular class on Africa. The lectures were held in his office, which was big enough to comfortably hold a dozen or so students. Adjoining his office was his personal library of materials on Africa--one of the best collections of African research material in the world.

His classes were particularly interesting because he frequently would have guests speak and take questions. One week, the guest might be his good personal friend, the President or Emperor or Dictator of some African country. Then, a few weeks later, the guest might be his good personal friends, the leader of the revolutionary army trying to overthrow the aforementioned President. Munger knew nearly every important leader in Africa on both sides of most significant conflicts, and was close friends with many of them. When they would visit the US, they would often swing by Pasadena to visit him.
I think it's possible to reach this situation without a cover-up culture.

Survey feedback can easily drift upwards: as a few people start scoring 'great' more often than necessary, everyone else needs to start scoring average workers as great to ensure they aren't left behind. Eventually anything less than perfection indicates total failure.
that's what I was thinking. make it send the pics to a web archive whenever it finds an open connection. then you'd almost want your laptop to get stolen
I think this kind of thinking is quite dangerous. Again, you're trying to lump in Demand Media/Content Farms with these scrapers and that can have dangerous consequences, because where do you draw the line?

Even in an automated scraper scenario, things aren't clear cut. How much processing needs to be done on source data before it goes from illegitimate copying to value-add? Fundamentally Google is just a really really amazing scraper system.

Same thing with content farms. At what point does original content go from "paraphrasing Wikipedia" to providing useful summary information? Should Wikipedia now hold a defacto monopoly on summary-style encyclopedic information?
Hustlers Wanted
T-Mobile UK cuts 'fair use' data limits sixfold
> The world doesn't end when overvalued companies go through corrections or failures.

Nobody said anything about the "world ending".

And a few overvalued companies "getting through corrections or failures" has different effects than a whole lot of overvalued companies getting through corrections or failures. The second case is called a "bubble burst".
Actually, off the top of my head, I see "everyday" as an adjective (something that is common, typical, happening/extent every day) while "Every day, ..." would be a temporal clause (denoting "when").

But I'm a little tired -- may be a mental glitch on my part.
From the press release: 'In the last year, Groupon has been called “the fastest growing company ever” by Forbes Magazine and “America’s best website” by one of Groupon’s television commercials.'

Are they saying that tongue in cheek? I am asking seriously... I haven't had enough experience with them to know. My wife is the one who uses it...
I agree with replacing "Never edit your videos again" with "Never miss a moment again."

On first glance, I understood the purpose of the app. But when I read "Never edit your videos again" I started to question my understanding. Made me think I missed something.

Nice job, guys!
Also, we're hiring: https://squareup.com/jobs

Square is a great place to work. It's an awesome team that's working on solving a big and real problem. On the server side we're mostly writing Ruby and practice pairing, TDD and aggressive refactoring. We're also looking for talented iOS and Android developers for the client side. If all this sounds interesting, feel free to email me: zach -at- squareup.com
Absolutely beautiful. I am not very "artistic" but it sure gave me the feeling like I was. Can't wait to see how the experience turns out on the mobile devices. I hope you decide to give it a go on Android devices as well.
It said he was tested (tempted) in all ways. Hell isn't a test or temptation, I don't think it counts.
First, let me just say sorry for the previous comment. Clearly, my attempt at humour fell flat. I never intended to imply that you were an apple fan or anything of the sort.

What I meant to say was that I've seen many reports which show a large percentage of executives at Google to be engineers and programmers, although I can't find a link right now. However, I seriously doubt that Google engineers would have gone along without revolt down a slippery slope as the one implied in the original article.
This would work well for DailyBooth, a la scrobbling for last.fm.
Well you're right that I know nothing about the regulation aspect of it. But I do know a thing about the hardware production side of things (what my startup is doing). I know enough to say that an existing player in the credit card processing space (regulation problem solved) could find consulting shops to build a audio-port credit card scanner for them. Or 30 pin connected scanner. Or usb connected scanner.

And while I doubt they would have a brilliant product design like Square has, they only need to charge slightly less per transaction to get merchants on board.
My Default Recipes For Vagrant Virtual Machines
I'm pleased Mongo is getting single server durability. I have never understood why it got so popular without this feature. I'd love to know why people choose Mongo over say, Riak, or CouchDB, as the majority of projects don't need more than one server.
Great work, it's simply stunningly beautiful. I think (and hope) your iPhone/iPad apps will do well, best of luck!
Proteins designed ‘from scratch’ function in living cells
> The Mac interface uses modes for crying out loud.

You'll find out that a well designed F16 interface also uses modes. You don't want to "launch missiles" and "adjust height" in the same menu.

Oh, and the "expert interface" par excellence, Vim, also uses modes..
Mother Nature Shocks Scientists with Microbes' Effectiveness
Scvngr Founder "We launched before Foursquare"
We're hiring for two positions (Bay Area)
StyleOwner is an early stage, venture backed startup. We're currently hiring for two positions in the SF Bay Area:

- Front End Engineer: We are looking for someone who has a solid understanding of front-end technologies (web standards, javascript) and who wants to jump in and help us take our site to the next level with backbone.js. A major plus if you're good at design too.

- Back End Engineer: We're looking for someone to work with all the other systems we integrate with (and wish to integrate with). You should be comfortable with everything from JSON-RPC to SOAP, FTP, DataMapper and SQL.

Our code is mostly Ruby with a bit of Python, and our deployment stack is Heroku.

Please email matt@styleowner.com if you're interested in learning more about either of these positions. We're ready to interview this week.

Please include a link to any relevant info (resume, github profile, etc.) and let us know what time you can have a quick chat by phone.
From man bash, the variable PROMPT_COMMAND:

If set, the value is executed as a command prior to issuing each primary prompt.

e.g.:

PROMPT_COMMAND='[[ "$PWD" =~ ^/sensitive/area ]] && PS1="be careful: " || PS1="normalprompt: "'
Crowdsource funding raises hope first,money second.
The author is not afraid of an app store, he is afraid of a "closed" OS X. Closed being:

* Unable to install apps that aren't App Store Approved(TM)

* Unable to run commands as root

* Unable to access the filesystem

Basically, the author fears OS X becoming iOS.

There's a lot of speculation about what OS X will become, but there is only one sure bet: It will follow the money.

Consumers -- in general -- have been proven not to care about things like "open". If you ask Joe Blow Android owner about why he/she likes their phone, they might tell you that they like how it's "open", among other things, but I'd lay you odds that they don't know what that really means. And you can bet that most people are not rooting their Android phones.

I'm not talking about your friends. I'm talking about your mom's friends; your dad's friends; your cousins' friends. The ones who can't figure out how to update their anti-virus. They don't care about open, root access, or filesystems. They care about the specific task they want to achieve: to be entertained (music/movies), have some fun (games), do some work (productivity), or communicate with others (email/social networking).

These are the people that will drive the direction of OS X and Windows. But don't freak out just yet. There will always be another layer to the computing world. Apple builds a very small set of core iOS apps. A large part of iOS's success is owed to independent developers. Not big companies. Independents. The Mac has many popular independent developers, and Apple knows this. There will always be an "open" Mac, in the sense that there will always be a Mac you can develop on, if only by neccessity.

Let's consider what happens if I'm wrong. Even though we're (hackers) a tiny part of the market, we're not a "small" group by any measure. Imagine that all the talented people who like using OS X for development are suddenly forced to use Linux. So, you have this large group of talented people, and all of the sudden their platform is yanked out from under them. Where do they go? They go to the platform that solves their needs. They go to the next thing. That thing would be Linux.

I don't believe there will be any rug-yanking going on. I think the process will be much slower, and many won't even notice, but I do think we'll start to see more hackers moving to Linux as Apple develops their "walled garden" approach for OS X. That's not a bad thing. It's going to bring a lot of talent over to the Linux side of things, and that's gotta be a good thing.
"completely decentralized" is a strong claim when depending on a network that relies on a canonical directory of relays (at least during client bootstrap?), unless I'm missing something.
"The pursuit of non-academic diversity has a major negative impact on the academic quality of most major research universities in the US"

I haven't read the book these claims are based on, but a Harvard professor wrote what looks like a pretty thorough debunking here:

http://www.row2k.com/features/print_feature.cfm?id=82&ty...
Perhaps because we're the only ones to actually put the work "America" in our country's name.
Embarrassing! Thanks for catching it; I've made the change in the post now.
A real person, a lot like you (redux)
None of the quotes you list suggest that the author is attacking any minorities, only that he is criticizing these programs. I'm not saying the author isn't an angry person, I'm just taking issue with you saying he is attacking minorities.

Incidentally, I decided to add to my original comment and address your other points. I'd love it if you had the time to respond. If you prefer, I can move those points to a separate reply.
Do you know how many times I've had to show my mom how to upload something to Facebook? A lot of times. Facebook upload support is baked into her photo manager (Shotwell), and it's as easy as clicking "Publish", and she still usually can't figure it out.

Do you really think that many FB users are going to know how to move "their favorite old photos" from Facebook? Unless the next product includes an automatic importer, which Facebook would attempt to destroy as quickly as possible, and it would devolve into an arms race/lawsuits (as scraping Facebook has for people with much more innocent intentions), then I don't think that many FB users will be interested in coming over.
My point was that even if the language is superior (maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. I'm not really qualified to debate the point) if the /platform/ is immature, that is still quite a disadvantage.

Me, I'm not complaining about the large, predictable breakage you get when changing major versions, but the breakage that you got with minor versions of perl5 10 years ago, that you get with minor versions of python 2 today.
Asking for a photo is not considered unusual for specific jobs like modeling, acting. The term you are looking for Equal Opportunity Employment. You should stay away from anything that might look like you are asking about one of the protected classes listed below.

[sourced from wikipedia:Equal Opportunity Employment]

The list is: race, sex, creed, religion, national origin, Age(note only ages over 40 protected, so not hiring 39 year olds is valid ), disabilities, genetic information, military history.

Twelve states, over one hundred local governments, and the District of Columbia have passed statutes that forbid discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
As a Zimbabwean myself, I would have to say that most of the posters here totally missed the point of the site.

The site was not a critique of quantitative easing. It is a commentary on the Zim government's attack on a newspaper that dared to criticize their fiscal policy (in this case a whole lot of printing money, or ... ahem quantitative easing).

The paper then fought back, using this effectively worthless money (available in huge quantities, and cheaper than paper), to front their guerrilla campaign.

Looking at the box of Zim dollars under my desk, you can see how the currency got steadily worse (physically), as the currency got steadily worse (economically). The last straw was the EU sanctions that then prevented the German company from exporting banknote 'paper' to Zimbabwe ... the notes after that were sad. Really sad.

Interestingly, at the height of the Zim crisis, a friend of mine in Germany sent me a couple of notes from the hyper inflation days in Germany (apparently, even now, there are still so many of those notes around that they are not worth much). The 1919 '50 mark' note feels like real money (quite oily too), while the 1923 '500 million mark' note, is just a plain paper bill, printed on one side, with just a bit of colour.

When the govt starts printing money on paper, instead of cotton, then you know you are in big trouble.

I suppose the point I was trying to make, was that while you can debate the similarities between the Zim situation and the Fed's quantitative easing, the site is really about the fight between one paper and the Mugabe government.

Incidentally, the Zim Dollar died a couple of years ago. The only currency you will find in widespread use, is the South African Rand, and the US Dollar.
They're a very cheeky company.
Stunning! Can you give us some technical details? How are you producing the images (libraries, custom scripts, etc.)? I've thought about a project like this (your execution is light-years ahead of anything I could accomplish) using Nodebox -perhaps- as an excuse to learn something new about python.

Edit: I see it's in JavaScript? Excellent! Any other tools or techniques you found helpful would be interesting to read. Congrats!
Packing in the Cookies
Microsoft investigates 'phantom' Windows Phone 7 data
The democoder in me loves this. Very well done, and an awesome effect.
Does Asian Parenting Cause Asian Success?
The Curious Case of Benford’s Law
Clojure/core quick reference
Root weave is a rendering definition, rather than a bitmap image, so that's probably why you're having a hard time finding it. Someone could probably grab a screenshot for you though.
It is pretty old; I think I've seen it twice on here and three times on reddit.

Good tutorial, though and of course still relevant. It would be great if John (or another JSer) would update or add to it.
If there were no academic differences between the regular student body and minorities ...

You keep using that phrase, affirmative action. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Modern affirmative action in higher education isn't about meeting quotas and admitting inferior students; rather, it's more like the Rooney Rule in the NFL, a way to make sure that minority students are getting looked at.

By the way, MIT has an active affirmative action program and we still seem to be doing just fine.
Prezi for iPad
> (I think he should have said "epistemic" rather than "epistemological".)

Fixed.
Intel to Pay Nvidia Technology Licensing Fees of $1.5 Billion
One thing that helps Chrome release often is that the api for building extensions is all javascript. By comparison, Firefox extensions can have binary components. This means there needs to be a certain amount of platform stability or extensions will break every six weeks. I think that in the future we'll see faster release cycles for Firefox as the api for extension building becomes more js based and less dependent on xpcom components.
Announcing my focus on mobile
Monitaur + mongodb lightning talk
Help improve MDN in 2011
Knowing me, knowing you
My Favorite New Web App
I believe there are two DSL modes (profiles). Interleaved and Fast.

Interleaved is typically preferred method, as it is more stable, and provides better checksumming / error correction on noisy lines.

Fast has none of this correction/checksumming.

But Fast is also 5ms and Interleaves is 50ms.

Call your dls provider (?Comcast?) and ask if you can be taken into fast profile.
OK. In my comment, I was just trying to keep the discussion focused on non-academic diversity. I agree with what you say to a certain extent; I'm willing to consider other factors in admissions besides academic excellence. But I find it hard to believe that the quality of academics isn't negatively impacted to an unacceptable degree when a sizable fraction of the class (the OP claims > 10%) has much poorer scores (the OP claims roughly one standard deviation).

Also: Gauchos >> Banana Slugs
[video] Product Group Meetup: Jeremy Fisher on Dinevore UX
I remember when I was taking an entry-level Economics course in China. We were using Paul Samuelson's classic textbook “Economics”. The English version mentioned China in some not-so-pretty examples. Apparently the translated Chinese version replaced “China” with a generic “One country”.
I'm pretty sure I didn't use the phrase affirmative action so I'm rather taken aback that you think I don't know what it means. I'm sure you don't know what καλημέρα means, but I have better chance at being right because it's in Greek. And I wouldn't rub your face in it anyway.

But since you brought it up... At Caltech they didn't say they didn't use affirmative action at all. They said they didn't lower the "academic" criteria- i.e. test scores and GPA- for minority students. They do that at some schools. I wouldn't know about MIT.
As a follow up in case anyone is curious about the why behind this assertion, consider a line of code like this

eval("myObject."+functionName+"()")

Not only does it make it difficult to track down the calls to this method, it is now impossible to minify this chunk of code, something that is very commonly done in javascript. This is why javascript includes things like apply() and accessing members of an object in multiple ways (obj.attribute == obj['attribute'], for user-defined values of attribute).
All the teacher did was change the names of things; the underlying structure of the class is disappointingly standard.

It may seem like each assignment grants the maximum possible XP (which would be a different, though probably broken, grading model), but not if you read this: "Grading is rigorous. Spelling, grammar and punctuation must be proofed. Points will be deducted otherwise."
Or for those less python-happy: just use expect

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expect

Slightly weird syntax, but learnable in a few hours. You are likely to already have it on your machines.
Did you read the article? Looks like the posters are printed on bills "valuing" as much as Z$50,000,000,000.
And that even strengthens his point -- that the terms are confusing even for people who know what they mean, never mind newbies.
Would that be that majority that doesn't really care about uptime?
Have a look at startupflyer[1] which is a similar idea in hungary.
They make money by simply charging the members at the meetups.
You choose 5 people based on have/need infos.
If someone is choosen he will get notified that he should go.

[1] http://startupflyer.com/en