skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An HNer, kylemathews, has a nice Drupal-based package, eduglu (http://eduglu.com/). It's both an opensource project and start-up.
Having followed him on Twitter for a while now, I know his interest and passion for improving/hacking education long precedes his financial interest in it. Really rooting for his project and anything else that moves the edu situation forward.
"And if Verizon wants to do some on-stage bragging about the ways that their network is better than AT&T’s, Apple can’t really be a part of that. Apple is not leaving AT&T for Verizon."

I'm sure Apple is completely indifferent about moving, what is the latest guess, 10 million more iPhones?
Smart money is on "we copy/pasted the same thing we always send ISPs." (Unless Twitter started billing people recently and someone forgot to mention.)
I recently graduated from undergrad. While I was there, my alma mater switched from Blackboard to Moodle. A few of the 'bleeding edge' professors started experimenting with Moodle's features, but most used it exactly the same as Blackboard (post the syllabus, post weekly assignments if they weren't already on the syllabus).

Moodle was prettier. That's all most of the student's noticed. I'm reminded of the chapter in ReWork 'Tools Don't Matter'.

With either system, the great teachers were still insightful, engaging, and likable. Two years of Moodle didn't change that.
Apple does have a kill switch, but they don't use it for situations like this one (or, actually, they haven't used it at all so far). You can keep using it, but backup that .ipa file.
In the submitted article they are talking about officially registered record.
You assume that he was able to apply logic to his emotional sensibilities. Because of what happened to him, this could never be the case. The darkness, as he called it, enveloped his reason. One of a host of horrific and sad consequences of his suffering.
until they get brought by a slightly eviler co.
Right, you can be "average", but "average" in CS lies between "Programmers" and "Senior Citizens". Average programmers aren't really programmers, they're just people who combine prewritten chunks of code without proper understanding of it.

"Programmers" have to be doing side projects, otherwise they
re no better than an artist who only paints for money, or a musician who only plays for shows.
HN, Thanks a lot for all your comments/feedback

I have worked through many of them to make the site better.

here are some

Date/time of the tweet now appears next to retweet/reply options

Tweets are color coded based on their recency.

there is a quick profile view and follow/unfollow facility

The page used to hang because of load.. now there is only a pageful of tweets loaded on startup and then it auto-loads as the user scrolls down to see more making the experience significantly smoother.

The wanted the site to be a way of finding interesting people to follow. Now you can search for them by topics/keywords by clicking on the "Find tweeters for a topic" link. For example if you type in Google, it lists all the Google tweet accounts for you and you can follow the ones that interest you easily.

Again, thanks a lot for giving me a big list of sure fire improvements to work on
Have you considered giving a bit more structure to the "Idea" submission? Maybe just split out basic questions like "What problem is this solving?", "Who is this for?", etc. into separate fields. Might give it a bit more organization and would potentially allow users to categorize/search based on certain criteria.

One assumption that would need to be tested is whether people will take the time to review ideas. And the other is whether people would be willing to disclose their ideas so publicly. I think you can find better quotes/articles to help convince people to disclose their ideas. Here's an excerpt from Paul Graham's How to Start a Startup essay you may want to use (PG has some more good quotes on the same topic in some other essays):

"An idea for a startup, however, is only a beginning. A lot of would-be startup founders think the key to the whole process is the initial idea, and from that point all you have to do is execute. Venture capitalists know better. If you go to VC firms with a brilliant idea that you'll tell them about if they sign a nondisclosure agreement, most will tell you to get lost. That shows how much a mere idea is worth. The market price is less than the inconvenience of signing an NDA.

Another sign of how little the initial idea is worth is the number of startups that change their plan en route. Microsoft's original plan was to make money selling programming languages, of all things. Their current business model didn't occur to them until IBM dropped it in their lap five years later.

Ideas for startups are worth something, certainly, but the trouble is, they're not transferrable. They're not something you could hand to someone else to execute. Their value is mainly as starting points: as questions for the people who had them to continue thinking about."
Having only Blackboard as a delivery mechanism in South Africa (TUT) was really detrimental. Everything is a service call or a call out. I eventually (after 2 semesters) just used my own Moodle setups.
UK Met Office gives Government (sometimes accurate) confidential weather advice
Agreed. Sad when capitalism gets 'dictated' by law.
Jason Ross of http://www.jackthreads.com
Matt Lauzon of http://www.gemvara.com
Google has more dirt on me (primarily due to email) than any one other company/individual, but I find it really hard to care. While I'm sure certain bits of it could be used against me, I just can't muster the energy to be bothered by it. They give me enough value that I just don't care.
Traffic Squeezer - Optimized Packet Analysis
> It would make a lot of sense to have something like StarLisp or APL for CUDA right now. Trying to do data parallelism in C is about the most brain-damaged idea ever. I don't know if anyone is working or interested in that, though.

You may well be right, but I challenge you to prove it. I myself am very interested in whether this would work. I have spent many sleepless nights programming GPU algorithms, and wondered if ideas from other programming languages and paradigms (especially functional programming) could be applied to make it easier and more elegant.

The nested data-parallelism approach does look promising on paper, and many people are well aware of the theoretical possibility of this working on GPUs (including people at Nvidia itself), but so far nobody succeeded to make it practical.

So, doing data parallelism in CUDA may be brain-damaged, but the flexibility and performance it delivers is mind-blowing. If you can achieve something comparable using a higher-level functional approach, I will be among your first users, and I'll tell everyone I know.

MultiLisp (AFAIK) is traditional task-parallelism rather than data-parallelism, and would not work well on a GPU.
Doesn't relying imply trust?
I think it's because most help system emebedded inside applications are useless. Vim is the only internal help I find useful.
It doesn't always have to work that way. If patents are secured, they can effectively be released into public domain, at least as far as I understand. Take a look at Xiph and Ogg; my understanding is that they publicly relinquished any rights to pursue infringement claims on their Vorbis-related (?) patents. IANAL.

Someone may also take a more creative route and attempt to make the point that software patents are terrible and evil by doing something absurd and high-profile by wielding them. For instance, if people can't get an iPhone anymore because of an injunction related to a patent suit, people will get mad and someone will probably at least try to fix the law, but probably end up making it worse. Generally, it seems people don't care about principle as much as they care about having their fleeting wants fulfilled. If you take away American Idol or iPhone, you will get angry citizens.
Which is why they should listen to patio11 (and won't).
I don't fault him for what he did and I'm sure his state of mind wasn't anything most of us could relate to- but the one thing I feel like he could have done before this was to open up to _someone_ about what happened to him. Maybe it wouldn't have changed anything but maybe it would have been the first step to dealing with this a different way. I understand why people commit suicide, but at least try _everything_ first.
Poll seems to be good but 'trust google' is a broad question. Companies and people are bound by rules and regulations. If something like Google Buzz happens, they will get punished.

Could you pls explain what is the purpose of this poll?

Plug: I am the creator of just released http://www.getdropandlock.com/ I use this for sending all attachments.
I don't understand your recommendation to get rid of views when possible.

There is nothing particularly slow about views in Postgres, nor is there anything particularly optimized about them. They act mostly like any other query, except they are available to you like a table is.

A view is only as good as the query you use to define it.
Trust implies comfort and positive results. It's a very value-laden term. "Do you trust X to Y..." always seems like a set-up question to me.

A clearer question would be "what do you expect Google to do, how effectively and consistently do you expect them to do it, how well does that serve you and what alternatives do you imagine?"
MapChat - Chat with you friends, discuss events, plan meetings - anywhere
Maybe, but the emails are mostly used for subscriptions and the like, so if they go down it wouldn't affect me that much.

As for the Analytics/Docs etc. I use them because my clients do and I don't have many other places to point them to.

As for Trusting, what I mean is that I think that they would breach my privacy if they wanted/had to. It's a corporation that profits based on its user data, so I wouldn't be they'll look after their users if it affects their bottomline.
I was thinking the same thing, but I think it's mostly safe to assume he means trusting Google with regards to privacy?

Technically and functionally, Google shows significant prowess. I put a fair amount of trust in them from a technical perspective (though search is suffering now). In terms of defending cyber-attacks--I remember when the Chinese government was backing a bunch of hackers that compromised ~100 acounts (I think?), but Google was on top of it and also reported them to the DoD ultrafast.

I'm imaging other companies of their size being placed in the same position and wondering about how they'd fare...
Electric sheep
I do know that in the races these cars are designed to compete in, the top teams regularly run at the speed limits: 130 km/h in the (Australia) World Solar Challenge, 65 mph in the (USA) American Solar Challenge; not sure about the South African or Japanese races. If for some reason Guinness doesn't have that recorded, then perhaps one of the competitors in those races should invite them?

e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokai_Challenger or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuna_5
I trust Google precisely as much as I trust any other corporation on the Fortune 500. (For poll choices, "I trust them with a substantial portion of my income" -- 100%, for all intents and purposes. I'm the lamprey to their shark -- I wish I could quit them but wouldn't be much good swimming without them and if I let go for an instant I have a funny feeling I'll meet the teeth.)
Yeah, it is confusing.

Many participants are complaining about that in TopCoder's forums, take a look here: http://forums.topcoder.com/?module=Thread&threadID=69577...

FB_David is a FB employee and he seems to know what is going on.
If you are curious about the differences of terms in the iTunes store policy and what has been introduced by the "Mac App Store":

http://www.goodiff.org/changeset/597/apple/www.apple.com/leg...
I didn't get that far in.
It seems that this is the best analysis for now.
http://mailman.videolan.org/pipermail/vlc-devel/2010-Novembe...

Apple changed App Store terms. Previously:

The Usage Rules shall govern your rights with respect to the Products, in addition to any other terms or rules that may have been established between you and another party

Now:

...unless the App Store Product is covered by a valid end user license agreement entered into between you and the licensor of the App Store Product (the "Licensor"), in which case the Licensor's end user license agreement will apply

So either GPLv2 is a valid end user license agreement, or if it isn't, one just needs some out-of-bound mechanism that users and developers agree on GPLv2.
Actually, he does provide a solution to this, in the section "Tasklets and futures". It's not simple though.
Facebook Hacker Cup = Resounding Failure
Although I successfully solved all three problems and submitted the results, it was a horrible experience. Facebook got it all wrong. A mismanaged programming competition.
Dont let the BIG Companies kill you
Most of the mistakes were due to my script using Team Cymru's IP to ASN mapping service (http://www.team-cymru.org/Services/ip-to-asn.html) thanks for your tip on using ARIN's Whois service. Looks like I've got more accurate results with them.
OLPC cuts price of XO 1.75 laptop to $165, power by half
So how does this in any way enhance the freedom of users?
Now, or later? Right now, I trust them fairly well in that they're not abusing their powers very much, aside from having issues with bugs in their support AI programs.

But, someday, I fully expect the founders to move out and other people to move in who really don't care about the corporate slogan and who have no way to make the company grow except to monetize more of the personal data they're sitting on in ways that people won't like.

That's when I expect the real evil to begin.
A while back I wrote an article talking about how Google has more information on you than any other single organization (government or corporate). Sure it's Gmail, search, ads (tracking cookies), but it's also maps, Chrome, Android. I'm just terrified Google is going to merge w/ the federal govt. jk
http://www.davidabailey.com/index.php?title=The%20Internet%2...
Two words: Berkshire Hathaway.
A bigger issue is that Blackboard keeps buying competitors. Without competition, there's not a lot of incentive to keep your product cutting-edge.

Blackboard bought my startup in 2001, and I worked there for about a year after. After they bought our company, our product was discontinued and our unique perspective was lost. The remaining employees were integrated into Blackboard's existing teams. Some of them have become excellent leaders at Blackboard, but after the acquisition they were advancing Blackboard's vision, not our vision.

WebCT was the only other large competitor in this market, and Blackboard used its IPO cash to acquire them in early 2006. Together Blackboard and WebCT had over 80% of the market, maybe closer to 90%.

Plus there's the traditional enterprise software problem: when the buyer is not the end user, product skew happens. When IT staff evaluate software alternatives, they're looking for IT features, like LDAP support or integration with a student records system. They know the end users need certain features like "a homework dropbox," but they're not able to evaluate the subtleties of those features. The IT department can't be as familiar with those subtleties as the end users are. And it's rare that an IT department would study internal users in depth, like a product designer would.
I'm at a similar stage, and I have settled on Transloadit (http://www.transloadit.com) for encoding and storing on S3, and the HTML5 VideoJS player (http://www.videojs.com) - which falls back on FlowPlayer for Flash, for playing the output video on the website. My experience with all three of them has been fairly positive, if not excellent.
Been wary of Google for a long time and fortunately it seems to be catching on a bit. Sometimes searches are necessary if none of the other engines turn up anything, but I try to avoid them in all other contexts (including GTalk and Google Groups). Realistically most of my information can still be found and connected, if specifically targeted, but at least someone has to work for it.
Judge orders Twitter to hand over info related to Wikileaks and Bradley Manning
Trust as in reliability or privacy?
I would suggest that if it seems like three-quarters of humanity is hateful, ignorant, or dulled you might want to consider the possibility of selection bias in your data.
Unique Online Grocery Store in India at Lowest Price
The exclusive grocery store is profuse with a myriad variety of coffee, tea, cookies and other items of food supplement. People can now buy grocery online. Grocery Online shopping is easier on the environment in the long run, too. Infibeam.com offers best grocery products like Tea, Coffee, Cookies, Food Supplement, Food Beverages & many more with free shipping in India.
Please log in. No point with these walled sites.
Warning: the page opens a video ad that starts to play automatically. I nearly shat my pants, since I opened it in the background :)
A very sad story. I find it interesting that Bush is still brought up without noting that the policy of rendition started under Clinton and was largely replaced under Bush with Gitmo.

Also, calling Kuwait a puppet of the U.S. is a vast over simplification of the situation. Though, the FBI agent and other officials who visited this young man should be severely disciplined if they showed the disregard that is alleged here.
Shocking! But my comment is about something else: the different presentation style used by NYT and Salon.

The chances that I would have skipped over the NYT article is much higher than I would have the Salon article. A picture makes a lot of difference, so does "U.S. Teenager" versus "Detained American", and of course "torture" versus "beaten".
Twitter Informs Users Of DOJ WikiLeaks Court Order, Didn’t Have To
That's exactly why depression is so hard to shake. You beat yourself up repeatedly without even knowing it and wonder why the heck you can't just snap out of it.

Sometimes I wonder how my counselor deals with telling me the same thing again and again for months. And then I sign her check :)

Seems like this is a book worth checking out, thanks!
The Goldfish and the Cat
This is a very funny post about a goldfish in a fishbowl and a curious cat.
Very well said, I totally agree. It's not always black and white.
in the future your time will fade
sorry I was unclear I guess. I don't mind having the _option_ to do it, even if it's the default and I have to opt out of it., I'd be maybe happy to shout "I have been x-ing for a month".

But if I _have_ to, I will not do it.
I would say pretty much they'll be the same, but as always it depends on what get the compiler ends up generating. Likely it'll be something like:

mov ax,0x####

mov bx,0000

cmp ax, bx

je equal

I say same cause the order of the data moves into the registers shouldn't matter in terms of perf. I 'guess' If you happen to see a minimal difference it would be because an interrupt happened in the middle of the execution,or there's some funky compiler optimization for one of the cases or if...

ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD.
Comments that set me off were ones such as "May God have mercy on his soul." and "I am sorry. Please forgive me. Maybe then you can forgive yourself."

Even the general "Lord, let your loving kindness be upon him; you came to us first, knowing we could not reach you on our own." seems more religious than consolatory, which bugged me as I got the impression from the note that religion was the facade his family and his abuser used to present themselves as good people and rationalise their inner demons.
Ask HN: Is 25 too old for Masters?
Hi HNers,

I am 23 yr old indian CS under grad working in Finland. I have plans to do MS(in NLP/ML) in one of the top universities in US this fall. However, I got an opportunity to work in a company in text analytics field last fall. I am really enjoying the work and all the new technologies I am learning in process. The team and work environment is great and they even requested me to extend my stay here. My only gripe is that if I stay for 1 more year, I will start my MS at the age of 25 and I may have plans for Phd, even it will be postponed.

I have thought a lot about it and deep down I want to stay for one more year and enjoy the work, learn more awesome things, experience finland and of course visit a lot of places in Europe but, on the other hand, I am a bit worried that I may be too old for MS.

I don't even know if it is a valid fear. So, I am asking the learned ones of HN to help me out if my fear is really valid? Does completing Masters as early as possible give me an advantage?

Thanks for your time.
You know, me and my friends were talking just the other day about how massive myTunes was in college, pretty much everyone was using it. What a sad loss of a fantastic talent.
Would it make you feel better if he'd said that it covers doubly linked lists?

Because those appear to satisfy every element of claim #1 that I can find. IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that's the same as being patented.

Specifically, we have a "plurality" of objects in a doubly-linked list because it's a list and we have a primary and auxiliary pointer that lets the computer go through all the items without resorting them. In a doubly-linked list, the primary pointer points forwards, the auxiliary pointer points backwards and it lets a computer program go through the list without sorting.

Notably, there's no limitation I can see on claim #1 that forbids the auxiliary pointers from all going backwards and the field of invention might as well just say "computers." Maybe there's something limiting it in the prosecution history, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

EDIT: Also note that nothing in that claim's text requires merging two lists. If I'm misreading anything, feel free to cite the exact portion that says otherwise.

At first, I honestly thought this was from a decade or more ago. But then I noticed this: Filing date: Sep 26, 2002 Issue date: Apr 11, 2006

Yeah, because nobody was using more than one pointer on a linked list before then. I feel like I should grep some old FOSS code and see how many published examples of this "invention" I can find.

I don't know enough LISP to be sure, but I wonder if the cons cell itself can't almost be prior art.
Who honestly believes that Google would snoop around in the email accounts of competing businesses?

How removed from reality and driven by paranoia do you have to be to think that?

I assume, jacquesm, that you were simply putting together scenarios to vote on and weren't necessarily implying this yourself.
I have no problem having my search history, email and analytics at Google.
Hack Club - Puzzle 1 (.doc)
It's not that I don't care... I just don't see the scenario were Google would care about my dirt specifically or do anything with it like blackmail me (not that there's really much worth blackmailing me with there).

It would be very hard for them to exploit personally identifying info on a large scale without it being noticed and causing a shit storm. And I don't call targeted ads 'exploiting' my info. That's a service.
It's almost like Feynman didn't care what other people thought of him.

I'm a lot like him in that respect: I, too, don't care what other people think of Feynman.