skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow. They didn't require knowledge of calculus? I took the actual CS 229 at Stanford and a class that doesn't require calculus at all would only be able to touch on a small fraction of topics.

My worry, which is similar to the worry of the student in the linked post, is that these lectures may be devaluing the in-person versions of the course. CS 229 was one of the top 5 hardest classes I have ever taken. I would rather not someone else take it via a dumbed down online lecture and say "I did that too! It wasn't so bad!"
Single page:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228440.700-dotdashdi...
Ganar Dinero con Blog es FACIL
My remarks that those of us opposed to SOPA should engage in more organized action rather than throwing in with Occupy were in response to this comment:

> Maybe all us angry nerds should OCCUPY something. Something big, related to SOPA.

Did you forget the context of this thread already?

You still haven't explained how I'm a murderer by proxy and you aren't. I'm actually curious as to your rationale. I've never actually voted for anyone who authorized any military action at all; did you think I had? If you voted for almost anyone currently in office, you're a murderer by proxy more than I am. I don't avoid paying taxes, but how would you know whether I did? If you really do make a "comfortable income", either you're evading a lot of taxes or you are far more of a murderer by proxy than I am. I haven't renounced my citizenship and left for a peaceful country--but how would you know if I did? If you stayed and worked in the US, you contributed to the war economy and are a murderer by proxy, likely more so than I.

So what gives you the right to call me a murderer by proxy? Because I said something to defend the troops? Does that mean you are by proxy guilty of everything that's happened in the Occupy camps that you defend?
Shoot, Google Wave probably solves/solved half of those. I always considered the platform being good for a pen-and-paper RPG, but a virtual book club would probably work too!

A starting point, anyway :-)
I know you prefer not to name names, but I think it would benefit a lot of people to be on the lookout for the three owners of that company.

I'm sure there is someone out there, who would create a new throwaway account and reply to this comment, who had a similar experience with the same company, and who would name the company and owner names.
You might not know this since it's your second language, but it sounds pretty rude in English to refer to Asians as "yellows". That alone will make people read your comment through the lens of "this guy doesn't respect other races."

In informal settings, you can generally call people of western European descent "white" and people of African descent "black," but for other races, referring to them by stereotypical colors will get you pegged as culturally insensitive at best.

Couple that with the fact that blanket statements about races are treading on thin ice even in the most benign circumstances and you'll see what happened here.
I would add an additional column for the accelerator location (i.e. New York City, Palo Alto, etc.)
> In other cases that upgrade will require significant engineering investments—time and money—on the part of the handset maker and the carrier. They might decide to spend the money and deliver the update, six months later. Or they might decide that the investment isn't worth it.

It's a double whammy. The OEMs need to spend the money for the update and the customer will be disincentivized to buy the newest hardware.

Not supplying ICS for the Galaxy S will help the sales of S II and the Galaxy Nexus.
109 years ago. Mind boggling.
It's almost as impressive as the UI.
You say encourage to challenge themselves (Internal) and then say the course must challenge them (external factor). In any course the basics are thought and the student must take it on themselves to learn more and ask when they do not understand. If you have played any sport the basics are easy but you spend time and practice so if your coach says hit the ball from 10 yards and if you feel that is easy you can move back to hit the ball from further why do you expect the coach to tell you that.You can ask the prof for more complex examples or use the homework in a real world example. This seems to be a case about he gets the same marks as me and I know a lot more than him.
That was just to take his example, I don't actually limit the length of passwords (although seeing http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3002828/bcrypt-says-long-... I should limit to 71 characters)
@AznHisoka hit the nail on the head. It's ironic that the author missed the bigger picture of what his/her friend was trying to say when that was the point of his/her post.
On the point regarding the necessary knowledge of maths for ML (or indeed statistics which is the same material but a slightly different focus), I'm conflicted.

Coming at it from my perspective (learned a lot of math in high school, forgot most of it until I started a PhD), i would agree that a lot of the time, you don't need to understand the mathematical underpinnings of this stuff. That being said, as I've learned and remembered more of the math, my capability to understand (and debug errors) of all of this has increased tremendously.

I do think, if you intend to use ML every day, then you need to commit to understanding everything you use within a certain time frame of you beginning to use it (ideally immediately but that's often not possible). Anyway, derivatives are cool, and transform the way you look at the world, so you should definitely learn some of those.
I am not sure you're on the same page as the author.
لعبة ماريو 
لعبة ماريو لعبة ماريو لعبة ماريو لعبة ماريو لعبة ماريو لعبة ماريو لعبة ماريو لعبة ماريو لعبة ماريو لعبة ماريو لعبة ماريو
http://games-banat.blogspot.com/2011/12/mario-game.html
Like Any Old Product, Tech Blogging Isn’t “Evolving” – It’s Just Getting Stale
What? Do you know the second biggest website on the internet is written in PHP (Yes, the backend uses a different interpreter, but the front is still raw PHP) and was started before the guy was even 25?
Yes. The rules are very clear about that. You get 800 USD as single team member and USD 1200 if you are two or more. Also for upto three team members, you can take USD 700/month per member salary. The office space (with snacks, coffee etc) is free for upto three team members. Your tickets, Visa fees, Medical insurance etc is all reimbursed.
The Bach metaphor is really bad. I believe Hofstadter referees to the canon by which Bach inscribed "Ascendenteque Modulatione ascendat Gloria Regis" ("As the keys ascend so may the glory of the king also ascend"). Bach did not mean that after going up an octave the king's glory would have returned to it's starting point.

disclaimer: I did not read the book.
If you send it by a secure courier service or even certain types of post I would think that liability no longer rests with you. If damaging information leaks you could then likely sue the carrier and/or Seagate. A likely solution would be to use a vendor that can appropriately wipe the device before sending it to the manufacturer for warranty. There's really nothing else a hardware manufacturer can do on their end. If you're dealing with information that sensitive, some sort of degauss, replace, and recycle is just part of operating cost.
Maybe virtualization will help?

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/android-virtualization-its-...

I also know that Cortex A15 has hardware virtualization, so that might make things easier, too.
Well, self discipline isn't really the same as consistency, but his point still stands.

To be fair though, you could completely lack self discipline and be extremely consistent when it comes to watching TV on the couch all day.
Publisher's Cartel on Law "a chilling effect on reaching consensus"
I started developing apps the first month it was possible. I initially decided to test the waters by cloning apps which were very popular on iPhone and Android.

I spent a month creating clones of Koi Pond, Fart App, Hipstamatic, and acoustic guitar. In something like 9 months I've sold ~1000 apps. I've made about enough money to pay for the phone and for a year of publishing access to the marketplace.

http://www.mobilematiq.com/
Developing a way to cure aging and saving the world are generally very different things, depending on how you define saving the world. Because the concept of saving involves an idea of saving from something. If we have a concept of the world, what should it be saved from? And are we an essential part of the world? Does the world end if we all die?
ITunes Best of 2011 is Curated by Apple. Time to Curate with Social Data.
This future sounds like the present to me.

The underlying worry in this article is that intelligence begets more intelligence and that the new forms of intelligence might not have the same morals/goals as the author. Beneath this worry is that due to its exponential growth, intelligence and thus power quickly concentrates. Any thing/life that is not directly supporting whatever goals this new intelligence has is at great existential risk. We hope that these goals include benevolence towards other, less powerful forms of life.

This all sounds reasonable, however they are held back by the idea that AI must look like a really smart human that is remotely controlling a robot/computer interface. The reality is that there is a lot of intelligence which looks nothing like us. The 'intelligence' of a market would be one basic example.

If we take this more abstract/literal view of Artificially/human created intelligence, then most of what the article worries about is already upon us. Some people have so much wealth that we might as well consider them augmented. In many cases their interface to their augmented intelligence is another human, or many humans but that does not take away from their power.

they have hoards of wealth at their disposal
wealth is power and can currently be exchanged for both human and computer intelligence
that purchased intelligence is then used to further increase the wealth/power/intelligence of the agent (billionaire/corporation)
NOTE: The richest 0.000000044% of the world's population have the same amount of wealth as the bottom 8.8%. http://www.stwr.org/poverty-inequality/key-facts.html

The result is that the rich/powerful/intelligent get more so, and everyone else must hope that they can somehow serve the few or that the few will be benevolent.

If you'd rather avoid the rich/99% memes, try to describe our current market to someone from 1000 AD, and it sure sounds like an artificial intelligence:

It grows. No single person controls it. It controls how resources and human labor are allocated in such a way so as to optimize its own growth. There are cases where people tried to take over the job of the market and they almost always fail (or always fail, depending on who you ask). Sure sounds like Artificially created intelligence to me.

Either way, augmented billionaire, ultra-powerful cultural meme or human like intelligence in a machine, he seems to imply that our best bet is to teach and install morals and values in our 'children', with the hope that they will be benevolent.

######

I think that creating decentralization and diversity is more important than moral/value education; especially if you take the view that we are already in the midst of it all.

One strong measure of the health of an ecological system is its diversity. This is partially because a monoculture is risky - it has a single point of failure. An ecosystem which is diverse is also an ecosystem which has the resources and stability to explore and learn. This is required if an ecosystem is going to survive change, as ours is now.
I think that's why MITx plans to use a third-party for their certification exams. Similiar to testing centers for standardized exams like the LSAT, GMAT, GRE, etc.
> Google should step in and assure that all Android (tm) hardware can be updated to vanilla releases of the operating system without the need to be a technology wizard.

Except that's not the case, because all Android-powered hardware require drivers which are not part of Android itself, and are bundled by integrators. That's one of the reasons why efforts like Cyanogenmod have "supported devices" and there's a different file to download for each device.

In fact, Apple's the same thing: each device has its own firmware because hardware differences mean they don't bundle the same drivers, even if 95% of the firmware is the same across the device without the last 5% it just can not work.
One common problem I see is that some people tend to turn every conversation into an adversarial situation because they focus on poking holes in whatever the other person says. A more pleasant and fruitful way to talk to people is to try to see things from their perspective -- ask questions instead of saying "no". Finding common ground and learning from other people is far more important than ironing out whatever flaws you see in their logic.
Ask HN: Review my startup, songspin.fm
I submitted this site in the past, but we relaunched with a whole new site and design, and I would love to know what HN people think of it.
Just like the old days, graphics are the big sticking point. Most current shipping devices have some mix of the following:

- Resolution:

* HVGA (mostly only low-end phones now)

* WVGA ("standard")

* FWGVGA (early Motorola)

* qHD (most high-end phones)

* WSVGA (7" tablets)

* 720 (Rezound, Galaxy Nexus, more soon)

* WXGA (10" tablets)

- Graphics

* Adreno (Qualcomm)

* GeForce (nVidia Tegra)

* ARM Mali (SGSII, less the T-Mobile USA variant)

* PowerVR (everyone else)
That may be a bit of confirmation bias. Google's massive hard drive study [1] states that there was no significant difference in failure by manufacturer.

[1]http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf
He's discussing our perception of the tones, you might want to check out this entry on wikpedia to understand what he's referring to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone

This is a common concept in music synthesis, as you can create an endlessly rising 'melody' by repeating only 1 octave of some properly constructed timbres. This is the 'strange loop' he's referring to.
I think he's done the greater service to everyone reading by not naming names. The likelihood that anyone on HN will end up doing business with these three is very unlikely. However, there is a good chance one of us would run into someone employing the same tactics. That's what we should be on the lookout for.
To be honest any age group can use this. You can make the flash card's as hard or as easy as you want. One of our customers purchased the app for her 14 year old child. You can read her son's reaction here: http://hamptonroads.com/2011/12/chesapeake-father-creates-ap...

We are brand new but the feedback I am getting from therapists working in the age group 18 months - 10 years and in the moderate to severe category of Autism. Older children with higher ranges of Autism are still using the app. Rather than words however, they are using it for social interaction (learning visual and emotional cues) through the flash cards.
While the reimbursement policy is certainly (quite) troublesome and extremely annoying, I'm more concerned about the climate/environment in Chile once the program ends.

More countries need to foster entrepreneurial endeavors with a solid mix of residents and non-residents (almost like an exchange program) to get a better global mix of problem/market/solution. Startup Chile appears to be a good first step at addressing this.

However if Startup Chile didn't create a strong ecosystem (including investment and other support) then there's a risk that an increasing number of companies will fail once the program ends. Programs with high failure rates won't survive and have less chance of being funded in the future.

Hopefully Startup Chile is capable of adapting and addressing these concerns and other incubator/accelerator outside of long standing startup environments (e.g. SF, NYC) can learn from this example.
>a law prohibiting lying to people to get them to come work for you //

Isn't fraud a general prohibition in most legal jurisdictions? Why would it matter that the company personnel committing the fraud were doing so in the arena of employment as opposed to sales or whatever?
It seems like the perfect opportunity for a hardware vendor to separate themselves from the crowd.

"Buy our hardware and be assured software updates for 2 years."
I tried to contact you through the form on your site. Regardless, I wasn't accusing you of making things up, I was just stating that sometimes you don't use very reliable sources (like blog posts that may also be unreliable).

I don't work at reddit anymore, so I can't speak to their setup, but if you ever need help with an article on Netflix, let me know!
Android vs. iOS vs. Windows Phone 7: A mobile showdown
I just noticed that after I downloaded. Pretty unfortunate.

Oh well, one more dead tree won't hurt anyone.
Thanks Rob. I would be more than receptive to any help given. :)
I'm the author of the post.
And I was here at HN, 4 months ago, defending it EXACTLY like you are now :)
White noise, for sure. I'm not smart enough to think of two things at once.
Pulled the numbers from here: http://ucomm.stanford.edu/cds/2011.html
Azul's jHiccup - Measure hiccups in Java apps
My thought exactly -- does the author lack the self-awareness to realize that he is himself a smart ass?
Google could change the licensing terms to require free distribution of the drivers.
Startup Chile is a great program, but Herval's post is completely accurate (I was in his cohort there building pingpigeon.com). Drawing down on the funds takes a lot of paperwork and time and negotiation, when the government bean counters inevitably find some random reason to disagree with you.

The money is there for you to get it; Startup Chile is not "Bullshit". But once a month, the time and emotional energy spent in getting the money takes away from your ability to focus on your startup. Raising vc/angel money is the same: your company gets put on hold while you raise the round. Think of Startup Chile reimbursements as the same but on a much, much smaller scale, six times over six months.
i don't understand why Maybe is a monad. in his explanation he implies that Maybe uses ordering. But, I can implement Maybe in Java, no monad pattern. what's he talking about?
For everyone telling you "not to trust Wikipedia", there are 100 out there citing it for their blog post/article/school paper/personal research...
> And it's on IIS which blew my mind.

I think that says a lot more about you than about IIS. It's mature software, why wouldn't it perform on par with other mature webservers?
There is No Such Thing as Proprietary Client-side JavaScript
I believe the term he's looking for is pedantic.

pushes glasses up on nose
I am torn on this issue. I try not to be like this, but words have meaning. And if words don't have meaning or have arbitrary meaning then we can't communicate. Some words have more specific meaning than others.

One thing that drives me absolutely nuts is when people (my girlfriend) use supposedly to not mean anything. My girlfriend uses it when someone else told her something. So she might say, "Supposedly, She went into town today to buy food." and that just means someone told her she went into town.To me this is an empty meaning and "supposedly" implies that maybe she didn't go into town or maybe she went into town to meet her lover and not really to buy food.
Ask HN: Which computer science course should I take?
Hi everyone,

I was wondering if anyone could provide some insight into which course I should take in my last semester, Database Concepts or Distributed Systems. I don't know much about either of those, and I'd like to take the one that would be more useful for me in my career. I'm hoping to go into web development.

Thanks!
Not sure about the other questions but in regards to changing the actual table structure. If you're dropping columns you'd first make the changes to your code base so that it no longer relies on those columns. If you have long running queries you'd just have to wait till the old ones using those columns are finished and then you could change the DB. And you'd do it in just the opposite order when you wanted to add a column.
Intel to unveil 22nm Ivy Bridge processors on April 8, say Taiwan PC makers
Interesting...if I add you to friends it shows your name
Why do we have so many lives?
As a technical person, am I allowed to complain when non-technical people follow sloppy reasoning to faulty conclusions?
You have to register at SII, get a taxpayer code and file taxes before the 10th day of every month. So it is straightforward indeed

This is quite clear now - in our round, it was an "open issue" for 3 months, over which only a select few were able to get a salary (due again to personal relations - I was one of the benefitted ones in that case). So that's "excusable" - they were "figuring it out"
This comment section is a suitable demonstration of the author's point.
Their Noonday Demons, and Ours
So... you got into an argument with your friend because he could have just said "whatever". Or you could have done the same thing.
When I find myself in a situation like this, I say "we're being pedantic, take a drink".

It works great. It makes us both realize we're acting stupid, and the next day neither of us is going to write a blog post about how our pedantry didn't line up with someone else's.
I wonder if it is possible to make a drug that activates the Npas4 gene. A smart drug that would make you remember better could help old people.
People who have great memory might more easily activate the Npas4 gene. Could this be measured?
They both seem like they are thinking the same way to me. Both of them are wrong in some ways (self-discipline != consistency, and consistency alone was unlikely the key to the weight loss).

See also:
http://www.despair.com/consistency.html
If it has been known for so long, why isn't it something that mainstream science tells us?

Remember there is plenty of people who believe all kinds of things which still have (like thinning medicine with water makes it more effective) no basis in reality.

And your claim doesn't pass the bullshit filter: there are millions upon millions of people who were starved to death in Hitler and Stalins camps. If fat and calories don't matter, why is it that there isn't a single fat (or even close to normal weight) prisoner of the third rich? Or from the Gulags?

But we don't even need to go there, you can just look at basic themodynamics: energy cannot be created from nothing, so when the people take in less food, they grow thinner and eventually die.
challenge? http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/...
Not to be dismissive, but I feel that if you're a jQuery user, you shouldn't be calling it jQuery-like|style|whatever suffix either. The purpose of terms like fluent interface is so that we can identify a pattern and speak a common language.

Cool work none the less, I didn't give you props in my original post.
I can testify to this, I have pretty low self-discipline in the sense that I find it very hard to force myself to do something I don't want to do. When I do manage to build a habit or a routine though, I find it pretty easy to stick to it.

It's not even being anal, if I was telling someone I love tangerines and they tell me that's awesome, oranges are really good for you... I'd be a little baffled I suppose.

I really love how the author complains about the other missing the bigger picture, when there's a bigger picture they themselves are oblivious to: the ideas in your head are really awesome and all, but if you don't learn how to use language properly to communicate them then they're useless to everyone else.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. -- Leonardo Da Vinci
Epic Defense Battles
Dishing out generic tech startup advice is absurd - stop it