skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does Khan Academy also provide an atmosphere where students can study, party, hook up, make mistakes, and otherwise learn how to become members of society?

You know what provides that atmosphere? New York. Or SF. Or Boston, Seattle, Austin--pretty much any city. I did not miss out on those opportunities from dropping out. The difference was that I was in the real world that colleges theoretically prepare you for: no RAs, no meal plans, fewer second chances, etc. I don't know why a fake version of the real world is a better preparation for the real world that the real real world.

There was one other difference: not going to school is far, far cheaper. And you have enough free time to defray even that minimal cost by working.
There's some good discussion of one approach here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3046785
That's a good point - I can see why they wouldn't exactly want to encourage macro hacks at this point.
QR code generator and QR code creator
QR code generator for dynamic QR codes. QR code manager and lots of cool utilities.
Yet another blog post that wonders why the author's Google+ stream is so barren. Not sure why this is not obvious to most of these authors - If you do not want your Google+ stream to look like a ghost town, you have to follow/circle active Google+ users who post regularly and publicly. Here are a few to get started : Tom Anderson, Robert Scoble, Mike Elgan, Bill Gross, Trey Ratcliff. Then find more interesting people to follow by seeing who these people follow, reading the comments in their posts, etc.
You are never going to complain about not seeing content in your stream after that..and a lot of it will be interesting as well.
You should watch iBioSeminars (www.ibioseminars.org) to become familiar with biology research. These are free online talks given by leading scientists. They contain a general intro to a topic and then go into the research behind it.

Here are links to two genomics lectures: David Botstein (Princeton): http://www.ibioseminars.org/lectures/cell-bio-a-med/david-bo...

and Jonathan Weissman (UCSF): http://ibioseminars.org/lectures/bio-techniques/jonathan-wei...

Good luck!
The issue is not education but schooling. We don't invest very heavily in education but spend inordinate amounts of money on schooling. How many people could be given an education for the price of a building with someone's name on it?

Once a child is taught to read and write, basic arithmetic, and critical thinking, they should have the tools necessary to teach themselves most subjects. It's easy to fix education, it's difficult to fix schooling.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig11/gatto2.1.1.html

"Self-evaluation – the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet – is never a factor in these things. The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents, but must rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth."
Wouldn't it be better to wait until there's a better idea of how many people had problems? typically only those with problems are vocal about them, those without don't bother. I upgraded two ipads, two iphones, an iPod touch and a couple of macs, and they're all working fine. I don't think we'll know how widespread any problems were unless Apple apologize publically, like they did with MobileMe.
Why Clojure Doesn't Need Invokedynamic (Unless You Want It to be More Awesome)
This is the code that should go to the server side for calculating star ratings:

Star Ratings

I’ve been awfully busy programming lately. My Django-based side project is coming along well and I hope to have it ready for use in a few weeks. Please don’t ask more about it, that’s really all I can say for now. Anyways, I came across an interesting little math problem today and was hoping some skilled programmers out there could come up with a more elegant solution than mine.

Problem: Star Ratings

People can rate cheeseburgers on my website with a star rating of 0-5 stars (whole stars only), 5 being mighty tasty and 0 being disgusting. I would like to show the average of everyone’s ratings of a particular cheeseburger to the nearest half star. I have already calculated the average rating as a float (star_sum) and the total number of people that rated the particular cheeseburger (num_raters). The result should be stored as a float in a variable named “stars.”

My Solution (in Python):

# round to one decimal place and
# separate into whole and fractional parts
parts = str(round(star_sum/num_raters, 1)).split('.')
whole = int(parts[0])
frac = int(parts[1])

if frac < 3:
___frac = 0
elif frac > 7:
___frac = 0
___whole += 1
else:
___frac = 5

# recombine for a star rating rounded to the half
stars = float(str(whole)+’.'+str(frac))

Mmmm… In-N-Out Burgers… Please leave a comment if you’ve got a better solution.
For me, at least, graphics was the way to learn trig in the first place. I wanted to make a thingy on the screen go at a specified angle at a specified speed, so that I could change its angle without changing the speed, and I vaguely knew that this had something to do with sine and cosine, so I took a trig textbook off the shelf and puzzled it out. Didn't need things like the double-angle formulas, though, so I didn't learn those until I took a class that covered them.
Civilization has gotten more complex in some ways. But the modern world shields us from a lot of other complexity: how many poisonous plants and dangerous animals do you need to identify? How many social/religious rituals do you need to perform completely perfectly lest you be ostracized from society?

One of the limiting factors on early-stage civilizations is that it takes pretty much a lifetime to transmit information from one generation to the next; between books, specialization, urbanization, and price signals (which are basically an API on human desires and the resources necessary to fulfill them), we need far less general knowledge than we used to.
And the old one will retroactively be "a long way down the road to the chemist's" array.
Zynga’s accounting change sets off alarms
Thanks for your advice Mike! We can't attend .NET meetings that much, because we are based in Czech Republic.

Hack-a-thon sponsorship is an excellent idea. Any idea how to find these?

Thanks for spotting the inconsistency, too!
The great thing about bioinformatics is that there's so much data available online for free. Here are some links:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ - sequences, papers, and so much more
http://www.expasy.org/
http://smd.stanford.edu/ - microarray data
http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/ - not biology related but good data sets to play with R

To navigate NCBI databases and learn file formats, you can read their documentation (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/education/) or get any bioinformatics book.
Zinnia is pretty good (https://github.com/Fantomas42/django-blog-zinnia)
How does 20 Under 20 change education in any way?

You start with just 20 Under 20, and then scale it out after initial success. Just like YC.

also provide an atmosphere where students can study,
party, hook up, make mistakes, and otherwise learn how to
become members of society...

kids shouldn't pay $40k a year to party

Well, we are in the middle of a Great Recession and the projections are that the double dip is coming [1].

We need to decouple the stated reason (it will get you a job) from the actual reason (it is fun). Because it is not so much fun when it doesn't get you a job and the party is over.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/your-money/a-recession-for...
Judge cracks down on Bayesian stats dodginess in court
So? I've on occasion changed my Kindle account address to the U.K. (Amazon's office in Slough, more specifically), ordered a U.K.-only book (back when AMZN and the publishers were having their public spat) and changed my address back. I suspect the same might work in reverse.

It's a kludge, but it works.
The difference between the 4 and 4S is so trivial that I cannot imagine breaking my contract over it. When it's time to renew for another 2 years (Dec. 2012), the 5 will be out, with LTE support. What do I miss out on in the meantime? A phone that talks back to me.
Is there an official Ubuntu PPA repo, that serves the latest redis version.

I did find some here, but they look older?:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+ppas?name_filter=redis
Can't you just do:

p/x *foo@100
And also the other way around.

don't want new features that introduce a long list of known and possibly exploitable defects every 2 hours, as it is with google-chrome.

i rather have them 2 weeks later or so.
Side-Channel Leaks in Web Applications [pdf]
"Overnight, a few key people decide to abandon the traditional desktop metaphor,
against the will of a majority of their users and to the detriment of the whole
linux desktop. The users hated it and are still hating it..."

Seriously? I'm not a Wikipedia guy, but.. Care to provide some sources here? Back up

- "overnight" - Versus an open discussion among everyone interested, with lots of early prototypes available to discuss the changes.

- "against the majority of their users" - Got numbers? Reasonable surveys? Or are we just trusting that the loud crowd that curses about this change is not a vocal minority, but really 'the userbase'?

- "the detriment of the whole linux desktop" - Puh - lease.. That's not even funny. This part is just sad..

- "Users hated it and are still hating it" - Generalization, care to provide numbers, surveys - ah, right. It's just a repetition of the second point, right? To really make it stick?

Really, that was uncalled for and totally useless. You could've made your point about not being able to 'use the source' without adding unqualified attacks.
Byte and char are not the same thing.

I had an OCD incident few years back and did a lot of thoughtful reading of all things readable on the subject. In distilled form the sacred knowledge is this - as far as the C standard is concerned, a byte is always exactly 8 bits, and a char is AT LEAST 8 bits. In fact, there is a compiler that operates in terms of 60 bit chars and that's the one on older Cray machines.
No, image is an Image, so image is an Image, so sizeof image is the amount of memory you need to allocate for an Image. Saying sizeof image rather than sizeof Image allows you to change the type of image in one fewer place, should you want to do that.
Interesting. For the most part, I agree with the principles there. My long-term (i.e. long past my lifetime) goal is to make software like that seen on Star Trek (minus the homicidal holodeck characters) -- no companies controlling things, no proprietary standards, just simple interfaces to do anything and everything. In the mean time, though, I don't think that full system introspection is economically possible for all systems in all places.
I think Higher Ed efficacy and Higher Ed financing are two separate issues. The system is broken, that does not mean that the system should be abolished. Granted there is a high level of student debt:

http://projectonstudentdebt.org/

But that does not mean that education in and of itself structured in curricula and colleges is actually a bad thing. Even with subsidies, education is quite a huge financial challenge for most people. And increasing privatisation of education will only lead to more student debt, almost to the point where the opportunity cost is too high to go to college. That is fine for the genius 1-2% of the USA but for the rest of the US the structure does not really create knowledge based human capital so needed to be competitive in the current global landscape

The financing of education brings about a core philosophical issue, which is, is education a public or private good. In most European countries, it is considered a public good, and as such the state's responsibility. As such student debt issues are almost marginal in these countries. However, on the other hand, education and research quality in these universities is really low, as evidenced by rankings:

http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2010.jsp

(I know rankings are debatable but this is the only worldwide global ranking system so lets just use it as a proxy for approximating how good a university is). I also know that due to huge amounts of student loans subsidized through private lenders, the whole education financial system came to an absolute halt in 2008, whereby lenders could not lend to eligible students to go to college. This is due to the fact that education loans are also packaged into securities and sold to investors. They are also some of the highest performing loans. The US government mainly guarantees these loans, but in 2008 had to actually inject money to get loan market flowing again.

So the question is, is the university just a place to teach, or somewhere we advance humanity through sometimes isoteric research that may become relevant 20 years from now. The US system has betted on the latter of these two options for the past 30 years or so. The University system in the US is more of a business than a place of education. The increased privitisation of education has thus lead us to this place. Does it make sense to privatise it more given the current situation? In my opinion, probably not.

As for people calling for the Khan Academy Model, please look at what they are doing recently: they have partnered up with the Los Altos School district to integrate their platform in classes. That increases the use of tech in education, but it does not necessarily entirely change the way education is imbibed to children. Same with Knewton, which works with universities.
I am super surprised by your comment, because thats exactly the question I asked my friend yesterday. I am trying to implement a ranking system on my website, so I asked my more experienced friend about it and he recommended me one book:
Programming Collective Intelligence Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications by Toby Segaran, O'Reilly

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596529321.do
This is a lot like what I tried with http://www.mindwallet.com. Here is a video if you don't want to sign up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNpAH7AGhIk

I like the hash tag syntax quite a bit. I love these types of apps and seeing how different people approach it. The one box entry is also a really nice touch.
But Harvard provides incremental value over Khan academy by serving as a networking tool and a credentialing mechanism.
This is where we differ then :) For me, it's akin to how each application on PCs implement tabs, but in a slightly different way (Chrome v. Firefox v. Nautilus). Because webOS has a consistent interface for handling multiple pages (and WebOS 2+ has card grouping), it makes for less mental effort to expect that is going to happen.

Holding down the home button is as fast as scrolling through cards in my experience. You're right, that is a comparable interface for going back and forth between applications. I like how in webOS there is an infinitely-scrollable list of tabs, whereas in Android OS/iOS it is "most recently opened" applications, the state of each application is hard to tell just from their icons, etc. webOS better mimicks the PC model.

And I was unclear about copy/paste on webOS; I meant situations where you can't just copy and paste (like consulting a map for nearby cities or roads, and you have to perform manual entry). But I'm skilled in the webOS switch, others in Android/iOS. YMMV.
I think he means not having to test the pointer before handing it off to free().
It's also only one GET request for the image instead of three.
I wouldn't know about pizza orientation, but here in Brazil, (some) folk from São Paulo can be recognized for pouring a little olive oil on their pizza, whereas (some) Rio de Janeiro folk can be recognized for seasoning their pizza with ketchup.

(Folk from Minas Gerais are said to sometimes dip their cheesebread loafs in their coffee; those coming from the West drink their mate cold, from a horn called guampa, and call it tereré, whereas folk from the South drink it hot, from a bowl called cuia, and call it chimarrão.)

Though a bit proverbial, those are all region-specific and common enough that they can be thought of as "reliable enough" as a conversation starter.
Vibration pads could be more widely used than they are. I'm thinking of the direction belt, and, then, this. It's a great, non-other-disturbing asynchronous alert. You could have one on your watch band, or tucked inside your belt.
Hey the author again. :-). It is true that in the article, I did not explain why I think that the era of A.I. started on October 4th. The article starts with the assertion that it has begun and moves on from there. I guess more than anything, the article is a call for action. I wanted the discussion to start and it did.

If I can present my chain of thoughts leading up to my decision in an interesting way I may write another article called "Why I think Siri is the Next Big Thing".

But here is my chain of thought for the curious mind in a very crude way:

What I did was to observe the moves of Apple and try to figure out their strategy. I put together the information that is available on the Internet. I connected the dots.

I knew Apple bought Siri for about $200 mil. I knew about Siri's history. You don't buy voice recognition software for this price. I watched the Mossberg-Jobs interview where Mossberg keeps insisting that Siri is in the search area and Jobs keep correcting him saying no Siri is in the A.I. area. I watched how the critical question "What are you going to do with it?" got lost during the conversation. When Mossberg said that the iPad is great for consumption but not for creation, it was very clear that Jobs did not see it like that at all. I also watched some Apple videos from late 80's which depicts a professor talking to his computer and getting his daily business done. It seemed to me that they had this vision all along and now they were implementing it.

Then I realized how iCloud fits in to this all. With the introduction of Siri it was clear to me that the next frontier the competition is moving to is A.I. Apple is going all in. IBM is pushing hard. Apparently, Google is baking some stuff.

While I was thinking about all these and trying to find its meaning, the interview between Fred Wilson and Carlota Perez helped me to put it all in context.

I think this is the time to invest in A.I. If a VC expects huge returns from his investment in 5-7 years, I think A.I. is the right way to go. If an entrepreneur wants to do something amazing, I think A.I. is the right way to go. My speculation is in 1-2 years this is going to be all we talk about.

I think A.I. is where the puck is going now. I might be wrong, I might be right. We will know soon enough.
Honeycomb-based tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9, for instance, score Web performance benchmarks very much similar to the iPhone 4S. And hardware-wise, the Galaxy Tab is using a processor similar to the Samsung Galaxy S II on AT&T. This shows us that Honeycomb is better-optimized for Web performance than Gingerbread, the latest version of Android available for smartphones.

Interesting. I didn't know there was a this much difference between Honeycomb and Gingerbread browser in terms of JS performance.

I really hope Google ups the game even further with Chrome on Android with ICS. The Android browser should really be based on Chrome code base (I read somewhere this is work in progress).
If mail goes to spam while using Postmark, it's almost ALWAYS related to the content. So we built this very simply tool to help you test the headers and contents of your emails to make sure that they're scoring as well as possible to go one step further in avoiding the spam folder!

We decided to offer it as a free API to make the world of email just a bit better. We also built a simple single-page scoring tool for anyone to use even if they're not API savvy.

Ideas and feedback are welcome!
From the comment section:

"Welcome to the end of middle class jobs in the entertainment industry. These shows will be non-union with corporations using shell corporations to produce them for Google. Everyone (directors, writers, actors, and crew) will be paid pennies on the dollar.

People who think the Entertainment Industry is full of fat cats don’t realize that show business is just like the rest the US economy right now. One percent earns a huge share of the profit, while the rest fight for crumbs, and this is another strong move in that direction. This isn’t a screed to support unions, it’s a screed about the reality of the loss of America’s middle class. It’s been going on for thirty years and it gets worse every day."

Are good directors/writers/actors/etc that easy to find that you can pay them "pennies on the dollar" and still produce a high quality product?
Gilad Bracha talks about Google Dart
Andreessen Horowitz Joins SV Angel, Yuri Milner in Y Combinator Start Fund
Why China's star CEO MUST acquire Yahoo
For now, that's still true.

But LinkedIn/github/etc. are starting to provide better networks. As an employer, I give more credence to a kid with a good github account than I do to even a CS major from Harvard.

As for credentialing, that is the next big step. It is already the case that if you see a CV with Google or Facebook on it, it doesn't matter whether that person has a college degree. You know they've been vetted by an institution of comparable prestige to Harvard.

Solving the vetting and credentialing problem is going to be important, but it's not insuperable by any means. For example, ai-class.org, db-class.org, and ml-class.org are providing certificates of accomplishment. Any kid who nails Andrew Ng's CS229 class is definitely someone to consider over a liberal arts major, or even most CS undergrads.
It's up to traditional cable companies to embrace this disruptive technology we like to call "the internet" and find a way to build a better business model using it. This would inevitably undercut their own "traditional" models for content delivery, but as more and more people cut the chord because more options are available, their refusal to innovate simply means that other players are going to come in and take the share they could/should have had.
I do, but it's unfortunately internal at work. Everything I write for fun has so many library dependencies that you just have to cross your fingers and hope that it will all work as documented :)
Seems to be 0 bytes long ... at least for me, so it is certainly doing its job in cutting down page size ;-)
> I can open LastPass, click "Copy Password", long-press home, tap browser, click paste.
>Or, I can open LastPass, "copy password", swipe up, swipe to my browser card, select it,
> then paste. How is that faster?

Those sound about equally as fast. One benefit of the card-swiping system is that I know the state of each application visually when I'm switching between them-- for me, there is a better mental model that the application will have the same state when I return (be that in two minutes or two weeks).

I meant to imply copying between applications by manual entry and interpretation. I'd be hard-pressed to defend how webOS copy/paste implementation is any better or worse than Android/iOS.

> I like some things about WebOS, but I don't know how it's card system is in anyway easier.

It mimicks the PC, and it preserves state a lot longer than Android/iOS. I can leave Notes, a web page, a map, and phone open; they'll be open in the sequence I opened them, and if I drop everything, when I return, I'll know I'm in the middle of performing data aggregation with each of those applications. Android/iOS simply tackles this differently, I guess.
"the sound from the _start_ line" :-)
>we need far less general knowledge than we used to.

yep, and more "good paying manufacturing jobs" :)

Seriously, it looks like you just don't understand the r- and K-selection (because it would be an unnecessary "general knowledge" until you're an evolution biology professional and thus you don't know it) and thus you don't understand where your sentiment is coming from.
StartupLotto - Win A Percentage Of A Startup
Awesome. RTFA?