skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seneca College in Toronto has a similar thing going for its Computer Programming diploma. Or at least, this was the case when I went there:

1) You can take an exam for a class at the beginning of the semester if you think you know the material. There is a cost of this exam, but if you pass, then you save money on taking the whole class... and time too.

2) You must complete every single assignment to pass a given class. Your assignments must work 100%. You'll be graded on style.

3) Every class was offered every semester - even during the summer semester. And there was a section for most classes at night.

There's just one issue:
I thought universities were supposed to teach you how to learn, while community colleges were meant for specific job-related skills.

Shouldn't doctors, lawyers, nurses, computer programmers etc... all be getting their job-specific diplomas, just like the mechanics and the electricians? And shouldn't 'degrees' be more research oriented anyway? Why are degrees more valued when whats needed in most cases is someone with a specific skill? Do people with degrees really think that people with diplomas are incapable of learning? Do employers feel this way?
Kind of reminds me of a game I created a while ago:
http://ide.cnu.se/diddly

Although the addition of picture guessing it pretty cool.
Isn't this completely useless?

You can download about 10 million tweets a day just by watching Twitter's basic streaming API. You don't have to sign anything, and you probably get them faster because you just keep one HTTP connection open.

EDIT: Okay, I can see why it might be marginally useful -- to ensure that people doing similar research get the same set of tweets. But, as others have pointed out, that doesn't work if people actually comply with delete requests and don't do so with lockstep timing.
I'd guess Doomsday Argument (sigh).
Were back up, sorry about that, looks like all the traffic burned the blog webserver
Herve Leger Outlet, Herve Leger Sale, Up To 79% On Herve Leger Dress
UGG Felicity Boots, UGG Felicity Boots sale, Cheap UGG Felicity Boots
This is like asking for spoilers for The Titanic. The news of the leak has only been the biggest single news event on the planet for the past eighteen months. If you suspect it to implicate you and you didn't already do your best to escape there isn't much that can be done.

Remember though, that the USA shared more information with the worst of these dictators, till close to the end, than the leaked cables reveal in total. This whole FUD about Wikileaks killing whistleblowers is just a smokescreen. Our government still routinely drone-bombs more innocents weekly than have ever been suggested to be in danger, let alone dead, because of anything WikiLeaks has ever done.
I think about it, but I'm not to the point of buying a piece of land and building a basement and growing a vegetable garden...

There have always been risks, before it was wars, lately the cold war or terrorism, now peak oil, economic collapse etc.

I don't see any contradiction with being entrepreneur at the moment. Physical growth may be limited but the demand for services is not.

If you're interested in "collapse discussions", you should check out http://www.reddit.com/r/collapse (not to read if you're the worrying type though ;-))
I imagine that there would continue to be the equivalent of "rare breeds" farms if this ever took off.
Man faces 75 years in prison for filming police
I think it would be good if you added support for (or just switched to :) ) starting with a description rather than starting with a drawing. I think that tends to be funnier. Especially here -- the drawing interface is annoying, so people will start with something that's easy to draw rather than something more interesting. (Whereas I think people will be more willing to draw something complicated if they already have a description. I certainly am. :) )

Edit: Might I also add, that starting with simpler things is implicitly encouraged also means you get long chains of things like "balloon... balloon... balloon...".
One of the most insightful comments .
Great articulation @kubrickslair
How can one "abuse the unlimitedness"?
Not all customer development, but the flavour we practiced, which mostly involved just asking people how/what/why they did what they did.

Imagine a scale that represents the strength of positive signals you get from data collected during customer development. At one extreme, you have weak signals from potential customers who just say they'll use your product. At the other extreme, you have strong signals from potential customers who part with cold hard cash and sign multi-year contracts (despite not having a product yet).

When we first tested our concept, we focussed on the following:

* Just doing customer development (it was a big step and an exciting new world)
* Building a big sample set ("if we're going to do it, let's do it right")

But, in retrospect,

* We were oblivious to (the lack of) positive signal strength
* We too quickly dismissed negative signals as "people outside our market"

So the intention was there, and man we worked hard at it, but the data was useless and our analysis was heavily biased. Sounds harsh to say it was useless, but it really was. We learned very little from talking to hundreds of people. Of course we learned how to better do customer development next time, which was/is invaluable.

I think when you ask people about their behaviour and whether they'd use your product, they're likely to err on the side of politeness. That's a serious problem for concept validation. But ask them for cash, and politeness takes a back seat.

Also, just asking if someone will use your product introduces bias already. It's a leading question.

You could instead ask the following:

* "What are your top 5 interests?"
* If they mention your industry or niche, continue with...
* "What are your top 5 problems relating to X-interest?"
* If they mention a problem your concept solves, then record a weak positive signal
* Describe your concept/solution/product...
* If they're willing to provide an email address, increase signal strength
* If they're willing to sign-up for a trial, increase...
* Pay deposit, increase... etc

Long story short, I think signal strength and honest analysis is the key to validating a concept. It takes some real hustle to get financial commitments for non-existent products, but hey, that's what differentiates founders.
"... even in the high end, right? "

Source?
How to play background audio on iOs devices’ web pages?
You're asking for more government intervention because of the poor results from the first intervention. If the government didn't bail out the banks in the first place, most of these banks would have been broken up and their assets sold off during bankruptcy. Many of those executives who made big bucks running their companies into the ground would have been out of a job.

You could even go one step back: if the government and its central bank didn't subsidize risk through low interest rates, incentives to lend to people who were massive credit risks, and so on, we may not have had the housing bubble - at least at that scale - to begin with.

Let's go back even further to the easy money .com bubble and the resulting collapse which "excused" the artificially low interest rates mentioned above...

Instead of focusing on more intervention, how about we argue for fixing the real problem: let the market work, end these artificial interest rates, and stop debasing the currency.
Don't Design and Code - ac
Greplin (YC W10) Is One Smart Search Engine
Selling to survivalists is probably a great business. Doom! Gloom! Gold! Guns! With anything sort of cultish like that, once you hook people, it's easy to steer them further and further away from the rest of the world.

This stuff came and went in the 80ies, too. This film is a funny portrayal of that particular brand of it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Survivors_%281983_film%29
no real demo( does it work?
SEEKING WORK (Freelance only) – London, UK

I’m an Oxford graduate moving to London (from Ireland) in three weeks. I offer full stack web development using Ruby/Rails and help with online marketing (SEO, conversion optimisation, Adwords, Facebook advertising). As of this week I've written half of my first draft of a book on Rails best practices, and I will apply these vigorously in my work (unless it makes business sense not to).

I consider myself a Marketing-Driven-Developer because the majority of programming I do is intended to improve conversions. Some recent examples:

-	A 15-step client management state machine, sending iteratively engineered emails to clients at key stages, the net result improving conversions nearly 400%.

-	Automatically generating arrays of keywords from data and using these to power Google Adwords campaigns.

-	AB-Testing design elements to improve conversions. Examples include internal remarketing pop-ups, advantages spiels, “add to cart” button placements (Top or bottom of the page? Both.), checkout button design (A big green “buy now” button lost to a grey and bland “checkout” button. A surprising result, but that’s exactly why you should be AB-Testing.).

-	Improving organic traffic three-fold by generating hundreds of unique pages using existing data and adding SEO keywords (determined through analytics data) to the URL, title, a H1 tag, the first P, a sidebar (in bold), the meta-description, and to internal links to that page elsewhere on the website . I also swear by sitemaps, which ought to be automatically generated on each build.

I’ve studied works on advertising and influence and, if requested, I can offer some help with advertising copywriting. Briefly, I like to bombard users with long lists of advantages related to their core desires, use visually emotive vocabulary, then, once the users desire a product, apply influence techniques such as building trust by demonstrating social proof (testimonials, stories of other users, Facebook likes), and creating believable scarcity.

Work Samples:

www.oxbridgenotes.co.uk (I've worked mainly on this for the last year and a half) - A marketplace for students to buy and sell their notes online. I am the owner of the website and all development, design and copy is my own. I run an assortment of Adwords and Facebook advertising campaigns.

www.bolivianexpress.org - CMS on front, with a applicant management system behind the scenes for managing intern hires (Bolivian Express's business). Sole developer.

www.hiredhelp.ie - Directory for babysitters, housekeepers and so on. Lead developer.

www.westernlasserclinic.ie - I built the website (albeit with a nice ThemeForest template), and I edited the copy and run their Adwords campaign in the competitive “laser eye surgery” domain. According to the owner "they've never been busier” after my help, despite the recession. (Full disclosure: I’m related.)

www.secondconscience.ie - Personal project based on Benjamin Franklin’s behavioral modification technique.

www.findgrinds.ie - Teething project. Directory for private tutors.

Contact: jack.kinsellahatgmail.com (remove “hat”)
The question you should be asking: what is the marginal benefit of ass-in-seat time to a student?
AT&T Merger Fail Highlights Failure Of Spectrum Politics
Win a Prime Spot at the Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2012
Postmile, an open source collaboration tool in Node.js
I applied two weeks ago and was accepted in a few hours. It took 3 days to activate my production quota after I emailed to request its activation. I am still testing a few more features before I fully launch the new version of my program but I have to say A2DM is really easy to use.
We're certainly headed for extreme economic contraction. That means political unrest as well. Many (really, many!) wealthy people I know or know through others are preparing for civil unrest. From bankers in The City in London creating places in rural Montana to a billionaire who has built a "bunker" (his word -- although it's more a heavily-secured mansion) in Switzerland, it's definitely concerning them enough to "insure" against it.

I don't see how it can't get really ugly in the next five to ten years, including moments of martial law. The markets are set to go through the floor. My investiment advice is: cash + gold and silver coins in your matress. Seriously.

But I really don't think it will get worse than that. People get romantic and think civilization as we know it will fall apart. I don't see that happening. I do see a violent depression coming, and then after a few years, lifting.
Also, there's no surprise that it's addictive, because you didn't include a natural place to stop. Every time you submit something, you're immediately given something new to do, no break inbetween! Of course people are going to have a hard time stopping.

Edit: Let me also add, it's not immediately obvious that there's a way to see what becomes of your chains if you don't keep going.

(Also there's too many people who will just totally ignore what they're supposed to do, but others have already said that and I have no idea what you can actually do about that.)

Edit: Also, the mismatch between the drawing box size and the display box size can be a problem if the boundaries of the picture matter.
Post pc has nothing to do with windows
Google Bought Motorola for More Than Patents, Schmidt Says
It's a market. If you think you can get >1% for "saving the company" with your hax0r skilz, go right ahead and try to negotiate that.
To be honest, it required iOS 4.3, so I didn't install it on my main phone (which is still on 4.0 for various reasons); the end result being that I am not really stressing the thing out trying to determine how well it works (and thereby don't have that much to say). :(
Any scenario in any year is unlikely, but if you aggregate a bunch of long-tail scenarios and take a 40-year time horizon, it becomes worth dealing with.
A Guide to Norwegian Cruise Lines
What Do You Know Now That You Wish You Knew in College?
Astraweb, SabNZBd, Sickbeard, nzbmatrix. Never going back.
That's exactly right. It doesn't seem right that one can receive credit hours for knowledge previously held. The only value added by GWU in that instance is some form of verification/certification. It seems more appropriate that if you already know the material you be placed into a higher level course, otherwise the educational system runs the risk of stagnating at a base level of knowledge rather than challenging students to excel.
Space junk at tipping point, says report
I'm not convinced that utter fiction makes for uninteresting writing, but it certainly lacks value as journalism.
If it's actually a PR plant, being in the top results (or ad I suppose) in Google for related queries might be enough. Unlike the suits example from the essay, people looking for standing desks probably aren't going to go to a local store and instead will use the Internet to look up brands/models and where to buy. Sure, you are sharing with your competitor, but if it's the difference between the story getting published or not it would still be worth it.
Radii Straight Jacket Shoes_05
I wonder if they will grow human flavoured meat :)
Fred Wilson at http://www.avc.com writes very interesting stuff about startups he has a stake in, showing it's possible, but it definitely has to be considered whenever you read something by him.
Taking the Best Condo Website
If you are looking for hoa websites, here we provide quality services. Easily manage your homeowner community on-line with our easy and powerful tools. Homeowners associations websites, condo website. For more details, please visit us.
Chalerm's Corrupt Chiefs Casino Campaign
美伊美美容仪
Great find @padmanabhan01, i think this talk is not very widely known about.

Direct link to the audio talk by SJ :
http://www.achievement.org/newsletter/audio/jobs-aud.mov
Clean Up Your Mess - A Guide to Visual Design for Everyone
I have thought about doing this many times but my family is bilingual. If I want the movie in original (usually English) and German am I going to have to rip the movie twice? That would be a deal breaker then.
Get a sense of perspective. The USA and its allies (who are, of course, by all their own laws, complicit) have directly killed and caused the deaths of over a million people in Iraq and Afghanistan during the faked hunt for Osama. The vast majority of those were of course absolutely unrelated to the conflict in any way. And of the rest, most were innocent in this context because they didn't support Osama and weren't shooting at us until we started shooting at them.

There are a million dead, at least, many of them with holes made by US (and allied) munitions, and you're quibbling about a few who could be threatened, in what has actually been by far the largest and safest (innocents/dictators hurt) release of classified documents EVER.

This is serious stuff, stuff worth having posted everywhere, spammed to everyone, SMSing to every phone in the world, etc, on the chance that one copy would get through and let one journalist write one good expose. That it's been managed so as to have a groundbreakingly huge ratio of exposes written to actual data leaked is a stunning testimony to their delicate and thoughtful handling of the media organizations. What we see in North America and the EU is just a shadow of the literally world-wide (and now, hopefully, world-wise) fallout from these leaks.

Irresponsible ego tripping and deluded transparency advocates indeed.
Shhhh, don't tell everyone!
Apple relents, begins selling "old" Final Cut Studio again
It might help perceived performance to load the drawing widget before loading all the previous chains... as it is I have to wait for the entire page to load before I can start drawing again.
I do get his frustration with Barclays. They sent my wife a basket of flowers and a bottle of wine with a "sorry for your loss" card and closed my personal account.

Apparently something had broken somewhere leading to them assuming that I was deceased?!? I never did get a proper explanation.

That took a whole two weeks to get sorted out.
Where do you get the "8 per instance"? I can't find any information about the number of threads per instance. Thanks
Death in dolphins: do they understand they are mortal?
Here's how it's different now: A lot of the progress of the 20th century was predicated on cheap oil. With a Return on Energy (ROE is like ROI but for energy; how much energy you get vs. how much you need to get it out) of 30 to 1, crude oil essentially still gushes from the ground.

After a certain point, even for the same reserve, that ROE drops. There's still oil, but it's harder to get out. We'll always have oil, but we won't have it cheaply for much longer. Converting to an alternative is possible but it will take time and pain. And that's the sticking point. America especially relies on a JIT inventory of trucked-in goods, cars to get to work, school, the store, etc. The switch will be ugly.

Piggybacking on that is the long, wonderful period of growth that had us overextend. The Great Depression also came after a period of over-extension, but back then we had yet to tap our resources and our debt. We've tapped both out at the start of this depression that's coming. Add to it the increased demand for resources from China, India and the rest of the world. We're out. Bacteria is at its greatest expansion when it hits the edge of the petri dish, and in an instant, it's over.

I won't plant a garden or buy a gun -- I don't think it will ever be so bad -- but for a while, during the process of converting to alternate energies and transportation mechanisms, it won't be fun.
How come all of your objections (as well as US v Paramount) haven't applied to online game developers as well? Making movies is one hell of a lot easier than developing modern PC/console games, and the game studios are having no qualms with the direct-to-consumer model. Companies like Valve and EA were game developers and publishers long before they started offering services like Steam and Origin.

Ultimately, the same Internet that will kill the cable companies will also kill Netflix. (I have more confidence in Netflix to reinvent itself when the time comes, of course, since you've already done it once.)
I remember reading, it was probably in "The Big Short", that FICO scores are actually a pretty awful measure of whether someone is a good risk for a mortgage.
There seems to be some sort of variant of Goodwins law surrounding Bayesian analysis. Anytime a topic anywhere touches anything related to statistics or probability chances are someone, who's total understanding of the field is a couple of misunderstood wikipedia articles, will jump in and say "Pah, you're only saying that because you're all dirty Frequentists. If only you'd use Bayesian analysis is everything would be obvious".
Starz I can see, but HBO? Content trumps all and HBO is one of the best content producers there is. No matter what happens, they will continue to find ways to make money so long as they keep delivering.

Personally I would expect Netflix to be gone in 10 years unless they start producing their own content.
Why not Erick Schonfeld?
Show HN: Anonymous, web-based bookmarking
http://www.anomarks.com

Hey everyone,

I don't know about you, but my bookmarks somehow always get lost in weird nested folders that I never bother to organize properly. The stuff I eventually want to refer back to just becomes clutter, and then I can't find that sweet tutorial for photo editing a text logo, doing something cool with CSS, or whatever.

I took a look at Google Bookmarks and Delicious, but those two services are so cluttered with excess bullshit that I decided to do it myself.

Anomarks stands for anonymous bookmarks. You don't have to sign up or anything. You can just start with a URL and assign it to a list. Then you can add other bookmarks to the list and search them all really easily. That's it.

My goal was to make it supremely simply and a pleasure to use. Let me know how I did. Hopefully it'll be of use to someone beyond myself.
Then I have a question for you, which nobody's answering on the google group.

Google is charging per datastore operation, and last I saw was defining each entity returned as an operation.

If you were building a social network or twitter clone using the techniques they recommend in this talk at GoogleIO: http://www.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/BuildingScalab...

...you could easily pull back a hundred entities each time you pull someone's feed. Each entry is a separate entity. It'd cost you a buck for every pageview.

Is that an accurate assessment?
九阳豆浆机
I agree, I bought a Varier Balans five months ago and it improved my posture a lot and I don't have back pain anymore.
The first weeks I had some knee pain though, now I try to remember to stretch the legs every half an hour.
Well, no, the truly ethical thing is not to let the fact that you have a stake in a company affect whether or not you will write about it. Not writing about it completely is biased the other way.