skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Having taken far more than my fair share of classes, my experience is that, aside from project heavy courses, only upper level grad classes are really something you couldn't replace with a mass-audience, online course." I wholeheartedly agree.

Sure, they have the right to protest and ban online courses...but let's be realistic, this is in no way protective of students. This is 100% a "save our own ass" initiative. Call it what it is. Anyone that remembers their first two/three years of college can attest to the utter nonsense that is classroom lecturing.
Personally I think the future of education should be something like students taking Stanford's ai class with local teachers acting as TAs and adding a few supplements + classroom interaction.

I like that model, especially since you can break geographical boundaries and get the best instructors into places where it would be impractical to get them otherwise (e.g. the remote village in a developing country). You can also break time boundaries, by taking classes when they suit you, instead of when they're offered, and it allows future classes to learn from teachers who may no longer be living. It is impossible to take a physics course taught by Albert Einstein or a business class taught by Steve Jobs, but with new methods of education, this would be possible.
Saying "No" to my boss on a significant issue that got me fired was the most important thing I have ever done in my life.
You premise that Monsanto is an evil company. And yet people are buying their product willingly. Their GM products increase yields allowing farmers to grow more, leading to lower food prices, which means less people starve. How is this evil?

If there wasn't an advantage of using their product nobody would be buying from them.

You seem to be proposing that the government should ban farmers from buying from Monsanto. Or maybe you want the government to let some people buy from them but not everyone? Or maybe you only want farmers to be allowed to purchase a product approved by some FDA bureaucrat instead of letting the farmer decide for themselves whether a product is worth their money.

Perhaps, like many of the protesters sleeping on the street recently, you have not thought through the consequences of what you propose, and really you don't know what you want.
> complex architectures with a lot of XML

I hope you're not trying to say those are equivalent.
how is this different from a simple proposal that dissenters simply leave society ?

I'd prefer dissent to be a little more structurally integrated into our society, thanks.
Steve Jobs is Rolling Over In His Grave: iPad Bricked by 3014 and 3200 Errors
This is the key point isn't it? For so many services whose core demographic is not HN readers, vast numbers of the customers will prefer to use a telephone over anything else. Even I will occasionally prefer to call if there's an issue with a large company that needs sorting immediately, or I'm finding emails getting constantly ignored.

Certainly requiring a telephone number (or any other personal details that I'd rather not share) is ridiculous, and it's the company's responsibility to contact me at my convenience, but there'd be a far bigger complaint over services no longer even asking for a number.
Great post by Jeff Atwood here. It reminds me of this old RWW piece featuring SO and some great quotes by Spolsky: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/anthropology_the_art_of...

"What we do have to think about [in the era of social networking] is human to human interaction," he said. And according to Spolsky, to do that, you have to think as an anthropologist does.
Besides accessibility being enshrined in law in many places there are lots of people that simply don't like giving their phone number and/or being called. Giving your users multiple options for communication is a no-brainer.
Ask HN: Closing the coupon redemption loop... Where to start?
I've got some ideas on a mobile coupon/rewards app and I wanted to know if there's a company out there with a big database of coupons for CPG (consumer product goods) like groceries or for specialty retail (e.g. $10 off XYZ headphones) at Best Buy for example.

So far, I know of coupons.com & catalina but what are some other sources out there for potential integration that can be redeemed at checkout?
A signup form is there to make money. Optimizing against 0.5% of the population at the expense of 99.5% is a poor way to make money.

If they require a phone number for activation, that's straight up annoying to everyone, and a terrible way to make money. If they just ask for the number, you can enter a fake, no harm, no foul
Yeah, for a lot if cases it's harder to explain things over the phone. Also you might get someone who doesn't know the answer and you need to explain it again to the next person. Add to that I'd rather my email sit in a queue that stay on hold on the phone.
Thanks, I definately need to get better at filtering out the noise. I may just open it up to let people flag the noise themselves but hopefully I can improve the automated filtering to a point it's 'good enough'.
Using strace and lsof to track down process hangs
It honestly wouldn't be so bad if the message wasn't neck deep in hypocrisy. Stop thinking about yourself (1%) and start thinking about us (99%). Yes, much less selfishness there...

I was actually frequenting the taste of DC with my wife and kid this weekend and found that the protest was just half a block away. It was pretty awesome listening to them drop F bombs left and right out of their loud speakers with hundreds and thousands of kids right there. Great example....
Huzah.

Contrarians, please remember that, regardless of your opinion or business size, you are required by federal law (ADA of 1990) to make your services accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing. For some great examples, scroll down to "Ten Small Business Mistakes" on this page - http://www.ada.gov/videogallery.htm
What about Maya or Modo support? is it something you are planning to support?
So basically the service I built[1] is completely useless? Hasn't even been out for a week! :)

[1]: https://www.remindlyo.com
If I recall correctly, crossing the streams did kill marshmallow man!

In any case, I agree with you, search engine indexing search results would be bad, but the line is not that clear all the time!

Some vertical search engine result pages are a great and relevant result from a user perspective on the question they are trying to solve.
I'm not a Monsanto fan at all, and actually called out pg on his comment, but you are 100% correct in your analysis of where the real source of "evil" comes from.

That being said, the emergence of the organic food movement and such businesses such as Whole Foods goes to show that people are starting to adjust their spending habits.

In an effort to support this, I'm sure you'd agree that the end consumer should be supported in understanding what is in their food. Interestingly, Monsanto actively opposes the labeling of GMO foods, or the labeling of milk as being rBGH free.

(Quick hint if you care: buy your milk in Canada - or anywhere else in the western world - where rBGH has been determined to be too dangerous to add to milk).
iMessage & location based reminders dont work on my 3GS :(
Apple don't put out press releases saying 'We're proud to be working with Monsanto'
A couple of issues:

-I suppose as someone that gets the majority of my food from a local CSA, the farmer's market and a food co-op, I'm allowed to challenge your point in your reckoning. But I very fortunately live in a community where such alternatives are an option. The expense or total lack of viable alternatives to food produced by big agribusiness isn't the result of an unadulterated free market, it's in large part because of policy lobbying from these businesses for massive subsidies and anti-competitive intellectual property laws and enforcement (e.g. successfully suing farmers whose non-GMO plants were cross-pollinated by Monsanto varieties from neighboring farms). You can't use "take your business elsewhere" free-market logic when the company in question has systematically choked off competition so that there are no alternatives. You're right, what Monsanto does is with my money, in the sense that way too many of my tax dollars go to the company.

-"Evil is efficient" is a lazy and indefensible excuse for bad behavior. Green business has successfully shown that, actually, "good" can be more efficient, especially if you take a long-term view of your business.

-While I would find doing business with Monsanto personally distasteful, what Cloudant does with Monsanto is, I guess, Cloudant's business. However, trumpeting the fact in a press release makes a statement about the company's values at a level that invites public scrutiny. You can't put out a press release and then cry about the blowback you get from it.

-Finally, I think there's a larger point to be made here about the hustle that founding a startup requires and the temptations you face when things aren't going well and you're facing a quickly disappearing runway. Maybe things are moving too fast for you to really think about what you're doing but remember that the day you stop making decisions that you believe in for the sake of external pressure, your vision starts to slip away from you.
Yeah, I've heard that some AWS teams can have heavy operational load. If it's important to you to avoid that, you could consider somewhere in WAP/BuilderTools. That's where I work (so yes I am biased), and in my experience the operational load tends to be pretty light throughout the org. On my particular team we almost never get paged. Plus we get to build neat things in this org (remember how Stevey mentioned that Amazon's "versioned-library" system is good?).

Silk is probably a neat team to look into as well. They're building a cool product, they're still a small team, and they have good leadership. The director in charge of it used to be the head of Builder Tools and he's great.

But yeah, talk to a lot of teams and ask them about the things that are important to you (operational load, current/future projects, code quality standards, whatever other things you can think of to ask) and see if any of those teams sound cool to you. I won't lie and say that every place in Amazon is perfect, but if you choose well I think it's possible to find a great team to work on.
Italian office hours are something like 8-12 and 2-8 or so. The (official) workday is much longer there,with a nice break in the middle.
> how is this different from a simple proposal that dissenters simply leave society ?

It isn't. If enough people leave, the old society disappears and a new one forms. If not enough people leave, then the people who left were morons and suffer for it. As simple as that.

The funny part is, everybody knows the above. It's a part of human nature. It's how new societies form and old ones disappear.
ah, apparently it's currently broken if you load jobstractor.com instead of www.jobstractor.com which might be the problem. The other is there's no feedback whilst it's loading so possibly it was just running slow. Otherwise I guess my geo lookup could have just failed silently...

Thanks for letting me know. There's some improvements to be made as to how it fails wrt this.
I prefer email myself since I work on the night shift and pretty much miss every call during the day.
How is this good for Google? Akamai is rarely used by Google, but used by Microsoft/Apple/Facebook. Something seems dirty about a Google acquisition.
I also liked the reply (from a Twilion) which implemented it. "This could be also be a Twilio app that could be easily written in less than a minute. Actually, here you go"

http://spottedsun.com/stop-asking-me-for-my-phone-number/#co...
Considering that I've seen that in a prior bad job myself, and the correlation between that and "bad work environment," I'd say that shitty computers for a developer is a classic red flag.

In my book, it means that bean counting has taken over productivity. That's no place to be a software developer.
> Genetic manipulation by Monsanto has relied on herbicides/pesticides and monocultures. This comes with averse effects and risks. The use of herbicides/pesticides must be reduced. We need pollinators, we need genetic diversity and biodiversity. We must look ahead more than 25 or so years. When it comes to soil fertility and contamination we should be looking ahead 100 years.

1. lowered levels of food production have their own averse effects and risks, notably, famine and starvation. herbicides, persticides and monocultures of high yield strains are widely believed to be responsible for saving a billion lives. if you eliminated those things from the planet right now, hundreds of millions of people would starve next year.

2. the things you're talking about aren't monsanto's fault. people are doing business with monsanto willingly. you don't have to buy gmo seeds (or any seeds) from them if you don't want to.

> Is it possible for a group to select and breed their seeds over years, and eventually having a breed that is similar to a patented Monsanto seed?

sure. if you have a breed similar to a monsanto seed, they'd win a lawsuit against you only if your breed had the same gene that they patented. you may think that that's not fair, but that's how things work. if i win a patent for a space engine for interstellar space travel, and you independently invent the same engine, i'd also win a lawsuit against you. also note that no one has actually bred a RoundUp resistant strain of plants independently of monsanto.
Please don't point at YC for this - don't ask an innovative tech incubator to take on a broken culture of business ethics. PG/YC has taught the world to build companies around products that people want and to be relentlessly resourceful.

I want companies to be more ethical too. I want honesty and transparency - just like I want a government that works.

Register your concerns through constructive comments.. save your protest for Monsanto, DC and Wall Street. And, if you really want to make a difference build your own company and lead by example.

Edit: I'd also like to note its impressive this thread is still on the front-page of HN when it could have easily been removed.
Thanks. I'm going to try and expand the number of jobs I can find in future.

Best of luck with the recruitment for those jobs.
This is not really surprising. Infrastructure is a key competitive advantage of Google, and they prefer to build their own stuff (including CDNs) instead of outsourcing it.
Very interesting, I knew UI Web View is a lot slower than native mobile safari browser, but the details are very educative. Thanks
1. You are 100 percent correct, the fact that this is supposedly a pain point will lead a lot of people to be the best at solving this and will drive the cost of collection to near zero. (Walmart.com already does it)

2. Of course, Amazon.com got CA to agree waiting before taxing bc they knew once people tried prime, they would be hooked and would pay the tax later since there will be no alternative.
You have been very respectful, and I appreciate that, but on one hand you build up OWS and on the other reduce my solution to "cancel AT&T and grow vegetables." I believe that you could have more charitably summarized it as "stop giving money to these companies." One way to do it is to patronize locally owned alternatives and starve them. There are others, as well.

I could cut down OWS pretty harshly, too, but I do see its merit. It's one side of the Protest & Act coin. I would prefer people do both, not just complain loudly.

The Civil Rights act, fwiw, didn't solve any of the race-related problems I identified either. It was the perspective shift that protesting brought, and it opened doors. OWS might result in tighter regulations and laws which formally denigrate or outright restrict the kind of business which led to these problems in the first place but that only stops those who care about the law or are careless in their chicanery.

It does not resolve more fundamental issues: how did these people get this much power? How do we disrupt the cycle of people getting rich and using their wealth to keep others down? How do we keep people informed about complex financial risks? How do we bolster local economies? How do we get control of the institutions which have so much control over our lives?

OWS will not solve any of those things. It has successfully raised awareness but now we have to put our money where our mouths are.
There's trolling, and then there is the negativity which comes from utter weariness with things. You spend 5 years on the mailing list, trying to help all the newbies, but it just never gets any better. Every week there's a new guy who didn't read the archives, who never even bothered to look at the documentation or the FAQ, or who thinks he knows (after a 10 minute reading of the Wikipedia article) that he knows exactly what's "wrong" with your project and that his ideas will solve everything. You spend 5 years politely pointing them to the right place, or gently explaining the problems with what they're proposing, but nobody ever learns. Then you just start ignoring them, because you've run out of politeness--this is how we get 3 year old bug reports with 20 "me too!" comments and a single "Won't fix. Closed" from the developer. But all the other people have started ignoring them too, except the very-recently-noobs. Who don't know any answers, but will happily post all sorts of misinformation and noise. So you start to answer questions like "How to download iso plz?" with "Look at the fucking front page of the website", instead of the old "Here's a link, and you'll need bunzip2 installed to unpack the file". You've spent years trying to be nice and polite but it never seems to help--you just get more entitled idiots asking the same crap, so maybe it's time to try being nasty.

In the end, of course, it doesn't help, but it sure feels good to get that out. I'm working on it, because it's not good for the community, but it's hard to avoid sometimes.
no one is making you buy seeds at all. non-GMO seeds don't come with "no save" agreements. if you are a farmer, just do what farmers have done for thousands of years: get your seeds from this year's harvest.
> I'm not alarmed because there seems to be two very distinct crowds of people who hang out on hacker news. "Startup people", like yourself, who are across the political spectrum, with probably a disproportionate number of libertarians (as compared to the broader population) and the /r/politics crowd which are very anti-capitalist, anti-innovation, pro-taxes, etc.

You're just creating two stereotypes and shoving people in them without having any clue about the actual distribution. People on HN are thinkers. Sure there are clusters of opinion, but these aren't disjoint sets across the spectrum. We have a variety of nuanced opinion because we all think a lot.

Case in point: me. I guess you could say I lean a bit liberal, but fiscally I'm conservative because I think on balance the government doesn't do a good job spending money. I believe in capitalism, but I also believe that regulation is necessary (despite its blunt nature) to protect the public good.

The Monsanto issue an important one. They are profiting at the expense of the quality of the world food supply, and they use a lot of strong-arm methods to maintain their profits. Reasonable people can disagree about various corporations' practices, but to pigeon-hole people who complain about Monsanto rather than going and educating yourself about what they do does yourself and the whole world a disservice. The quality of the food supply is a life or death issue for everyone.
For the impatient: after downloading and backing up at least once -- you can put your device in DFU mode to try again (and again) without having to repeat the backup process.
I'm not sure it is irrelevant (in so far as one buys into the logic connecting Wall Street to Treasury).

If Goldman Sacs can be described as a "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity", for the way they are intertwined and tangled up with the regulatory frameworks in the US financial system, surely the same holds true for the way that Monsanto and Cargill have such monumental sway over the Department of Agriculture and the way that farmers do business.

That said, i agree with PG that the original post was content-free. I'd actually go further and say that even within gigantic evil corporations, good can be done. That's not to say that it will offset the awful things that Monsanto does, but i don't know that the Cloudant guys are (necessarily) being assimilated into the Borg. On the other hand, there is clearly a gap between the author's ethical judgements and PGs. So if he doesn't trust PG or the Cloudant guys, i can see why he'd be pissed.
diversification is dirty? Really?
You've pretty much nailed why JRuby catches on so well. It's still not fast for a JVM language, but it's blazing for Ruby - plus you can call through to Java where you need/want it.
The blog post in question says nothing of the sort. No where does it mention bringing government in to bring down Monsanto. He says he is a free market capitalist and..

If you agree with them, you will do business with them. If you don’t, you won’t purchase their products.

Which is certainly how I and most of my friends live life. Sure it costs a little bit more to eat healthy local options, but to me it is worth it.
Any time you make your boss look like a chump, you lose.
DART is just a more java like javascript. Java sucks and so does DART. All that's missing from DART is checked exceptions (and namespaces apparently, I miss typing __PR_ReallySecretStruct from C). Can we have DWORDS? Please?

Look at this DRECK and tell me it doesnt remind you of Java.

https://code.google.com/p/dart/source/browse/branches/bleedi...

Negativity? It seems like he's complaining about criticism. DART sucks and people are saying so, get over it. It's not just an email, it's a 200 page spec outlining exactly how and why the language is the retarded child of C and Java for browsers.

We all adopted javascript and you still have to typeof(blah) to find out if a variable is defined. I think that stuff sucks, and if you're improving javascript you might as well get rid of the java line noise at the same time.

If you're building a language for the web in 2011 I'd hope it at least has namespaces, monads, variables immutable by default, partial application, etc. It's not 1956 when these ideas were new.

I'll be negative about DART in hopes that it sucks less and isn't java/C for browsers. I'm done with languages that are just syntactic sugar for a JMP instruction and pushing a this pointer on to the stack. Maybe a language where we can glue functions together like:

let addByOneMultiplyByTwo = (add 1) >> (mul 2)

No thanks, I'll stick to coffeescript where the emphasis is on telling the browser what to do, not how to do it.

A main function is just an implementation detail not something that should be part of the language. Not all programs start in main and it's just an artifact that the first function some operating systems look for is called "main". I really don't need implementation details dating back to Jan 1, 1970 to clutter up a new language.

http://www.dartlang.org/docs/spec/dartLangSpec.pdf check page 72 to see that main() is actually a part of the language. WTF?