skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: "Just Works" Solution for MIT OpenCourseWare?
I was looking at the MIT OpenCourseware and it's not very easy to use, or learn from. It's not presented in a particularly intuitive way. What about a "just works" front-end for MIT OpenCourseware that would help people learn from home?

For example, if you wanted to get a solid understanding of Computer Science through MIT's OpenCourseware, but didn't know where to start this would help you find your way.

In other words, Blackboard for OpenCourseware that doesn't suck

What do you guys think?
Also, it's nice to be nice, whether you need somebody or not.
Yes, systems can definitely fake any ID you attempt to use: MAC addresses, machine IDs, hostnames, etc. Attackers can intercept rekey attempts and clone the new key on their systems. But arguing that these improvements shouldn't be done because they don't totally close every security vulnerability in a system is an example of Perfect Solution fallacy [1]. Just because security cannot be perfect doesn't mean that steps to improve it shouldn't be taken.

The advantage of rekeying or secondary verification of the client is that it addresses the kind of attack where you can simply copy this metadata and have enough information to remotely compromise the Dropbox data later. As you say, whether that is worth fixing is up to Dropbox to do a cost-benefit analysis. But I hope they wouldn't discard the chance to improve their security simply because a perfectly secure system isn't possible.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy#Perfect_Solutio...
Free-Online-Bhutan-Newspapers
exactly. Mandarin, english, spanish, the arabic family, portuguese, russian, urdu and probably others all have speaking populations of more than 200 millions.
> The good news for both developers and managers is that estimation is a learnable skill. If you get in the habit of making estimates and testing them, you'll get better amazingly fast.

To an extent, though, the better you are at programming, the worse you'll be at estimating.

A bad programmer, given a one-week task similar to one he's done before (when it took him two and a half weeks), will estimate it at two weeks and do it in two weeks, plus or minus a bit.

A good programmer given the same task will try to apply the previous solution, or use a library that solves the problem, and usually get it done in two to four hours. But some of the time that won't work, and then they will spend three days doing what would have taken the bad programmer two weeks, and a fourth day generalizing it so that when they have to do a similar task the third time, they can do it in two to four hours.

The good programmer's estimate will, therefore, frequently be off by a factor of ten or more.

In short, the better you are at automating what you've previously done, the more time you spend doing things you haven't done before, and so the more uncertain your estimates are.

The central limit theorem says that if you add up enough independent random variables from whatever distribution, their sum will eventually start to look like a Gaussian normal distribution. Unfortunately, this isn't as useful as you might think for software project estimation, both because different tasks aren't independent and because when the underlying distribution is heavy-tailed (e.g. lognormal, exponential, etc.) "enough variables" can be much larger than the number of tasks in your project: in the hundreds or thousands.
No really, I do.
Actually, classical gnome won't even be installed by default at all:

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/04/ubuntu-11-10-will-not-shi...

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/739812/...

We made very good progress on a11y in Natty, but will miss the goal of
perfect a11y. We'll nail it in Oneiric. That's OK, because we have the
Classic desktop fallback in Natty, but will not in Oneiric.

Mark
Perhaps the idea is that the Google employees will suddenly feel compelled to get all their family and friends to use the social stuff, and they'll in turn bring in their friends, and that will be enough to tip it into mainstream usage
Congratulations, man! I'm transitioning to this sort of thing myself (going from 6 figures to a pt gig, 2 days a week).

My suggestion: get a whiteboard, now. Don't do anything but decompress for the next few days (i.e.. fuck off) and write anything that comes to mind about your startup.

One of the most important processes for the human brain is externalization: it's why talking about problems helps as you can't think feelings... but you can write them down and later think about them.

I'd wager you're quite emotionally charged right now, hence the paralysis, so just start writing (don't erase anything) and sort it out next week. Things will be much clearer then.

Best of luck to you!
Gitosis is obsolete.

If you are starting frsh, set up gitolite servers instead. Gitolite is actively maintained and has more features and better documentation.
The question specifies client communication. Replacing SMTP in the network is also a valid issue, but it is not the question that was asked here.
Is it my under powered laptop or is the character very slow to move around? The graphics seem plenty smooth enough but the gameplay creeks along.

Gorgeous looking game though, I look forward to trying it out again and maybe poking at the code.
Coffee and fast food a killer combination | Australian Food News
LinkedIn Developer API Goes Live
I've worked at two companies where the bonuses worked well, and both of them tied their bonuses to events: either getting code past a milestone, or sales of a product reachign a certain level (though this one was a little too delayed from the actual work)
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2421110
I've done projects where I'd wing it out from my box in lieu of having a build server. Usually works fine, but I've shot myself in the foot enough to know that if you can spare the time and resources to get a build server up and running to be an independent voice in the source control chain, it tends to be worth it.

I do tend to agree that the focus on deployment should be interaction with the source control repository and doesn't require a build server, I just like that added protection of the build server being the one to do that interaction when it comes to releasing code.
I forgive you. Most of us are human.
The theory is about total carbs, which includes sugar, potatoes, etc, not just grains. Strange to just focus on grains.
And what's the first thing people do after cloning a project they want to try out? Some might read all of the code, most will just run "./configure" or "make" or "rake" or "script/server" or whatever. All of which can execute arbitrary code.

Piping a file to a shell isn't inherently less secure than downloading a zip or cloning a repo and blindly executing something from it.

I'm willing to bet the majority of people who are complaining about the "curl URL | sh" trick also regularly download and execute code without verifying it won't own them.
I started http://www.MigrationBox.com in Chicago, now about to graduate TechStars in NYC.
Get placeholders related to the site you are developing, by pulling images from flickr based on tags

http://flickholdr.com/
They should seriously open source this design before the oil industry spooks show up and make it go away.
My company tends to get t-shirts from the same supplier most of the time. So keeping a size on record for everyone would be a great idea for us.
InboxQ is closed when you switch back to Chrome because this is how Chrome extensions work. There is no persistant interface for extensions other then the browserAction buttons which can perform actions or open popups.

If you give the new FireFox version on http://inboxq.com a try it has a persistant sidebar that works like what it sounds you want.
Illogical question, obviously everyone was way more active in 1914.
Given the increasing importance of JavaScript, I'm surprised there has not been more research into static type inference of JavaScript code (for compile-time type checking, not JIT code generation). I've only seen a couple academic papers on the subject. I see now that Unity 3D's game tools and Google's "Closure Compiler" support some type inference.
I am VERY introverted and I've actually read the book this post mentions. I have always had a question about it: Why is it printed in blue? As if introverts are so delicate reading black ink would somehow scar us?
Well, like I said, typically they are owned by not by individual companies but by industry associations or coalitions. These consist of member companies which individually compete with each other, but have worked together to define a standard and market it to consumers. For example, Supima is a non-profit organization run by a coalition of cotton growers, which licenses its trademarks to textile manufacturers.

It's a fair point that there is a private entity that owns the trademark and can technically do whatever it wants with it. It doesn't just magically "emerge" from the market without any coordination - but then, nothing does. Market actors come up with mechanisms to communicate standards. Some of these mechanisms happen to be voluntary and reputation-based rather than enforced by law.
Was this get modified? I didn't notice anything reading through.
Thanks, reading it now
A minor nitpick-nitpick: it's not so much that a JVM requirement prevents Scala from using H-M type inference, it's that H-M doesn't work very well with subtyping, which Scala supports for its own O-O reasons. This comment from Martin provides some context: http://www.codecommit.com/blog/scala/is-scala-not-functional...
For some reason the rejection has bumped my productivity.
I've produced so much today than I haven't done since months now.
I guess the rejection made me feel like I don't need help, Start-up is about business and if for some reasons* YC feel like our idea don't worth investing in (I doubt it) or maybe we are not good enough to execute then it's up to us to prove the contrary.
Yes, Larry Page specifically mentioned that in the memo.
Is today Star Trek day? This is the second top-ranked Star Trek reference I've seen on HN today.
Maybe if you live in a cold climate, then wearing a long-sleeved shirt and trousers won't be a problem. In Sydney, where I work for a company that permits casual dress, most of engineers show up in shorts, t-shirt and flip-flops for the whole summer. The formal suits that I see the bankers wearing to work are neither well suited to our climate, nor essential for the work most of them do.

When I walk to work in a t-shirt through a city of suits, I mostly think about how it's the freedom I like. Freedom to wear appropriate clothing, rather than being tied into wearing something to fit in, or to impress somebody.
Fresh out of college.

Discussing with others it was pretty standard from conversion through a co-op program.
He didn't say only buy small shirts. But not everybody is fat and male, so you need to have some. And by the way, it's not 1993 anymore. T-Shirts should fit.

This goes double if you're going to a convention. Give a petite girl a men's large and chances are it will never make it over her head once. Be the only booth at the show that gives out fitted women's gear, though, and suddenly you'll find them on every girl in the place.
I suppose the epitome of this would be pre-orders for Duke Nukem Forever?
That might work if adcenter desktop was actually stable!
Compile Objective-C Programs Using gcc
Frame Wars
I definitely agree with this.
If you applied to YC to have your project validated by @pg and associates. Then you should think twice about your real motivations.
Only close shop when you're sure your idea is not a good one or that you KNOW that you're not able to achieve it.
Got it :)

I still know for a fact that, it takes at-least a month on average, for a search change list to reach production. Would you disagree Matt?
Breathtakingly wrong? Are you saying there aren't any old lispers left? Or that old lipers cannot write similar software?

Before you say something is breathtakingly wrong you should read it carefully and try to understand it. This way you might also get some of the jokes that are currently flying over your head.
Hmm. They did? Is there a proof to that? Because at Dive into Mobile conference last year Rubin said something totally different on that topic - to the effect of we don't care if some VZW phones are shipped with Bing and the market will sort it out - people will flock to the best experience.
It won't be too big if you shrink it... which was my point...
This reminded me of patio11's presentation from BoS that had the video of posted recently.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/03/26/software-for-underserved...

Sadly I don't think the market I'm interested in is UNDERserved but it's not social media so it isn't getting hounded either ;-)
You need to bring back your logo! I thought it was well designed and memorable. It wasn't until I scrolled down and saw it in a previous design that I realized that this new design was your site.
Miso API Developer Contest launched (1st prize iPad 2)
Natty = 11.04
Oneiric = 11.10

So 11.04 will have the classic by default :)

Either way, it's just an apt-get away :)
Paul, I really like your writing style. Your old designs weren't quite as awful as you make out either. Almost, but not quite. Cheers!
my argument of the lack of translated sources was not related to the inability of translating, so wealth and literacy are not relevant.

I was referring to the economics of going after a much smaller market.

A publisher is more likely to target french and german before going after norwegian, thus a non mainstream author may appear in a finnish translation much after the publication in english, if ever.
Or a movie distribution company may have less incentive to target the niche of TROMA aficionados in dutch than it does for the spanish ones.

They both would have relatively similar costs for the translation, but a much lower possible return.
> If you asked a developer to estimate how long it would take to hand write a class for every HTTP status code in v1.1 of the standard (and gave them a copy of the standard), they could probably give you an accurate figure.

Yes, but that's explicitly demanding that they write the software incompetently. Writing software incompetently, by mechanically carrying out actions that ought to be automated, is easy to estimate. But if I thought I needed a Java class for each HTTP/1.1 status code, I'd write a Perl script to generate them, be done in a tiny fraction of the time, and have a vastly more maintainable codebase.

Your other point about multiple stakeholders is well taken, of course. But even when it comes to solving a well-defined problem, it's easy to misestimate by orders of magnitude.
I use Placehold.it extensively. Most of the time wireframing requires non image placeholders.
http://placehold.it/320x210&text=Hacker+News
Perhaps the focus should be on the 140-150 pounds of annual per capita sugar consumption in the US.
Logical conclusion of what you say is that this is exactly the right time to make changes, otherwise they would be too dangerous for LTS releases!
Unity going into 11.04 means that by the 12.04 LTS it's had a whole year of real-world use on thousands/millions of desktops and all of the bug fixing that will result from that. Yay!
Not directly related to their acquisition, but I always really enjoyed their youtube "teaser video" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iuy4UIZWOxg

Congrats to the team, in any case!
In 1914 far more jobs involved physical labor, even house work. Also, there wasn't as much opportunity to consume excess calories in 1914. The killer combination today is sedentary lifestyles PLUS too much food PLUS the wrong sorts of foods.
I am about 6ft 4 so I never dry anything but socks or towels because even when I dry something (like boxers or plain white tee) on low or medium heat I notice shrinkage. And as to high quality, I've had Gitman Bros. shirts shrink in the dryer over time because that's just what happens.

Cotton does shrink in the dryer. Yes, higher quality dryers cause this less, but they all cause shrinking to some degree.
What do you think of my points in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2425838 about automation? It sounds like you disagree with them but I don't understand why.
These kind of talks depress me somewhat. It shows that there is a need to educate scientists into sharing data. Which is kinda sad, because scientists should know this and share by default. It shows current state of science is not yet very far in sharing data with everyone.

The main blockers of open science will probably be paper publishers and commercially funded science. For publishers, it's easy to see why: their market will be reduced to only peer-reviewing services. For commercially funded research (especially political commercial science): It's in their interest not to share the data. Because sharing it would allow critics to scrutinize the data and filter out the ugly.
Needs "women laughing while eating salads alone" and "racially diverse business team" categories.
> difficulties in the correct design for updating shared state, in a purely functional way

can you elaborate on the right way? i think the choice to write a game in a functional language is interesting, because games are inherently about managing state, and functional languages are all about not using state.
You're right that managers who understand your job can make life a lot easier. But this goes both ways. I find that understanding what constraints my management is under can help me to help them plan.

When you understand what their problem is (e.g. we promised X to the client and we have to make it work somehow), you might be able to rearrange things to make that possible. Of course, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure: if you can help them avoid promising the impossible, you'll be a lot better off. Otherwise, you end up suffering due to arbitrary deadlines created for the sake of looking good. If you can find better ways for your boss to look good than impossible deadlines, you'll be way ahead. I grant, though, much of this is easier said than done.
Gadhafi Does Swimming.ly on the Internet
I can see how that might trouble some people, but the Compatibility Definition Document has always existed, hasn't it? You can't just release anything at all and slap the Android trademark on it and use the store, right? You have always had to operated within Google's restrictions if you wanted to do that.

So... why are people surprised?
Maybe I'm reading between the lines here, but the feel of the article was "We got this code base from Summize and it worked great when we got it but now it's full of rot so we scraped it."

Twitter is big on the JVM and they have a bunch of Scala and Java engineers over there so this seems like the natural path. Besides, a lot of the big searching and map reduce frameworks out there are written in Java. This seems like a very natural transition.

The annoying thing is you're going to find a bunch of people who skim the article and start banging the "Rails can't scale" drum louder than they were 3 years ago.
so far respected scientists suspect a statistical ghost..
but dr cnn already announces possible energy revolutions.
they have too much airtime to fill
Chris, what you're saying is: not that MZ is awesome, he is super awesome! Because he is a billionaire without any talent or vision, and if you and I think we have talent and vision and got beaten by him, then who won?

An idea w/o execution is worth $2, and great execution on a semi-foolish idea often results in a hit! Also, no idea is original; it’s all iteration on what exists already - like the saying goes: if you want to make apple pie from scratch, you'd first have to invent the universe. ;)

I think what you're suggesting is totally true about Google dudes having brains, but Zuckster has brains too, he tapped into the human psyche, like myspace, orkut, hi5, friendster etc couldn't. Apples to apples you read a PhD thesis (guessing) and are comparing that to a u-grad.

And finally, you cannot discredit him for not working hard (enough), that actually makes him smarter not dumber. ;)
Such a simple, low budget video, but it really shows the care and work ethic the company has. That's exactly what any company I want to be part of would have.
On a team where Git is the source control mechanism, I do expect every developer to know how to use Git. And to a designer on that team, Git will be central to their workflow, assuming their workflow requires editing the site design.

If a developer needed to edit images regularly, I would expect them to learn enough Photoshop to do it, not to go bother a designer every time because Photoshop isn't a "developer tool".

For someone who can understand Photoshop layers, understanding commit, push, and pull shouldn't take too long!
I tried to start a science network a few years ago, knowble.net, and I know this problem well. The main roadblock we faced was the "publish or perish" mentality. Luckily this mindset seems to be shifting & the idea of a 'GitHub of Science' is very powerful. Much more than a Science LinkedIn, which is what Knowble was.

The main unanswered questions for this idea are 1) Funding & 2) Maintenance. Knowble was a for-profit venture, but should have been a non-profit organization. So where can you/someone get the funding to build & maintain the site?

If you need a python hacker to help out - my email is emile.petrone (at) gmail.com
Well, I don't live in The Valley. Not in the US, actually. I thought it would be reasonable to assume that people calling themselves investors would look at anything.
Right now it looks like that guy from Mountain View was right: if the iPhone's popular, everyone's doing something related to the iPhone. Which is fine, as it's their choice.
But it seems that if you utter the word Blackberry, you get fined or arrested for disturbing public order. And if you even think of Nokia, Gov. A. Schwarzenegger himself will punch you in the throat.

Okay, I didn't know that. I will remember it next time I have to deal with such people. Good to know.

What I think is obviously missing? Simple, Y Combinator's main page displaying a huge banner that says "we don't care about anything non-software, go away." It would have warned me right from the start. They never explicitly say it, they just heavily hint at it (e.g. they ask for your github ID, which you don't need unless you do some sort of coding) and I'm here to say quit hinting and just admit it out loud.
But I believe that's also typical - what we hint at, it's actually an axiom. What we recommend, it's actually required. I believe that's not right. Simple as that. No hard feelings.
I agree (http://www.quora.com/What-online-tools-do-scientists-wish-ex...). Why don't we just start using GitHub itself to do this and go from there? The pain points will suggest ways that a real science-focused github could improve on GitHub itself.
Unfortunately it's still technically in 'beta' so it intermittently has issues. I still use it everyday, though.
BizDev 2.5 with APIs and Self-Service Platforms
That is not an accurate translation. Using the two lists is not the same as using one list, then the other; it does the Cartesian closure. You've got other problems, too, such as the fact that won't compose anything like a monad will, but that will do for a start.

Monads are trivial to implement in other languages if you skip the way they use functions and thereby implement not-actually-a-Monad. I won't say C++ can't do a monad nicely but it certainly isn't going to be that easy.