skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just don't want my degree devalued by people who aren't as astute as yourself when it comes to the gap between the online courses and those taken by Stanford students.

I can certainly understand this worry, but I don't think you really have to worry too much about this. Those who matter will always know the true value of a Stanford education. It's not quite as good as an MIT education ;) but it's right up there.

When I worked at Harvard a few years ago, there was a tempest in a tea pot over Harvard Extension and Hillary Duff. The media got wind that Hillary was taking some distance learning classes via Harvard Extension and referred to her as a "Harvard student". Harvard Extension is an excellent institution, and Harvard should be commended for running it, but it is rather different from Harvard College and Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Harvard Extension, for instance, has no admissions requirements. They accept everyone, but you can't stay in it unless you get decent grades.

In response to the news stories about Hillary, The Crimson published an editorial that was extremely snide about Ms. Duff being a "Harvard (extension) student". This editorial did not make the undergraduate population of Harvard look good. It made them look like a bunch of unsympathetic brats. Sure, it might be a bit annoying if you feel that any ol' person can claim to be a Harvard student when you worked hard your entire life to get into Harvard. On the other hand, when it matters, there is unlikely to be any real confusion, and there is no real devaluation of a Harvard College degree.

It is true that some people do through a bit of vagary to pass off their Harvard Extension degree as a Harvard College or Graduate School degree, but when you catch someone in this, it just makes them look rather bad.

In summary, I hope that Stanford students don't make the same mistake that the Harvard Crimson made. If I didn't know a bunch of Harvard students personally, the Crimson article would have reinforced a bad taste in my mind about Harvard students in general.
> I never go to restaurant sites. I visit yelp instead.

I've tried and I let them know when I do.

When I want the experience, I'll go to the web site. When I just want to know if they have food that fits within my dietary constraints, I'd like to find out easily. That's not necessarily available via yelp (or whatever is awesome this week).
You know, I really hate it when people downvote for no good reasons. I simply said that I don't see his answers, and that is the truth. What's there to downvote my comment?
The correct interview question is, “Write a filter that blocks executable JavaScript but allows text.” And the correct answer is “Kobayashi Maru."
Get off of HN and get some things done. Most of these situations are self inflicted either by not getting things done on time or not managing expectations. The minute you actually talk to people and explain the situation, right or wrong, the better you will feel and easier you will be able to focus.
You can do a lot more than asset caching with Akamai; they have stuff from "edge-side includes" all the way up to your own J2EE at the edge.
related: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1154338
Complimentary to Introduction to Algorithms you might enjoy The Algorithm Design Manual (http://www.algorist.com/).
"it's time for people to stop leaving dumb comments about the color schemes and decorations of blog posts on threads"

Design is personally my biggest weakness and any feedback on my site designs is welcomed. Yes this feedback given here is poorly worded, but its user feedback none the less.
Wikipedia has a good page on this subject. In a nutshell, "strong/weak" typing is not formally defined. Usually languages are called weakly typed when they allow a lot of implicit type coercion or just don't strictly enforce types. It's not at all unique to dynamically typed languages. C is pretty weakly typed, for example. And a static language could just as easily have a quirk like this JavaScript thing.

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

Update to your update:

Strong typing does not subsume static typing. Ruby, for example, is dynamic and quite strongly typed. You can't bypass the type system at all, and the only real coercion is to boolean, which follows a very simple rule.
Not only better food, but better health education in general, including P.E., the 'lab' component to all that book learning.

When you are fit and healthy, running around and playing games like soccer, volleyball, tennis, basketball is fun. They are activities which are social and which you can do throughout most of your adult life.

Same goes for swimming and running. Those are harder to teach as "fun," especially to children, since they don't necessarily have a game component and are more mental in nature. Yoga and weightlifting fall into this category too.

Regardless, it seems that some people obsess over the number on the scale or the appearance in the mirror, rather than focus on treating their bodies well and using them in active, physically rewarding ways. Weight and body image should follow from this approach, not drive it.
I came from the same country as Herval (Brazil) and I am flying to Chile on the 4th of January. Myself and my partner are working hard on bootstrapping our 2nd company for the last 1 1/2 year. We are very fortunate to have landed big contracts in Brazil this year. We will keep a commercial operation in Brazil. I can point out wonderful reasons to do business in Brazil:
- Very large market, 200M people
- Booming consumer market
- Internet penetration, 70M
- Mobile phone penetration, > 200M
- Engaged social media users
- Beautiful woman and beaches ;-)
- More VC capital than in Chile
.But there are several restraints here:
- Highest interest rate in the world (11% year, in practice more than 28%) vs 3,5% in Chile
- One of the worst countries in the world to employ people, according to Employing Worker Index Brazil ranks at 120th position vs 69th for Chile
- Nothing similar to SUP in Brazil
- One of highest taxes in the world totalizing 35% of GDP vs 18% in Chile
- Very corrupted
- There are in Brazil a few serious, honest and friendly venture capitalists, but Brazil is also crowded with crippled VC´s, angel investors that never invested in anything (whenever you meet one, ask them what were their last 3 investments).

(for a complete comparison look at http://www.heritage.org)
So, reading Herval post I got concerned but, what he describes is pretty much what we have 'for lunch' in Brazil everyday. Sounds to me like a shallow analysis. I can live with those issues, those seems to be like micro issues that can be, at some point, fixed. What I would like to hear from the author or from someone else is if, compared to Brazil, Chile is a good place to set up a business that targets LATAM? How do those incredible better economic indicators (again, when compared to Brazil) impact your business and your life in the LONG-TERM? Did you think about the long term perspective of having your headquarters in Brazil vs Chile?
CIA.gov and Nasa.gov Vulnerable to XSS Still
"""Desktop apps are becoming a niche. I used to have an e-mail client, a spreadsheet, word processor, groupware, project management and an IDE installed on my machine. Now all I need is a browser and a text editor (although it's Emacs)."""

People say that, but I don't see it. The Mac App Store has sold millions of apps already. And the iTunes App Store has sold a BILLION native (non browser) mobile apps.

If you only need is "a browser and a text editor" good for you. I need: a media player, a text editor, a word processor, an IDE, a chat client, Evernote, Dropbox, Skitch, Photoshop, VMWare Fusion, and some other stuff besides...
>they're very "safe" opinions. No one's ever going to disagree with them.

This is baldly, unequivocally false. There are PLENTY of senators and other opinion leaders who would nod at these points then immediately start to spit out arguments that would sound distinctly like they were arguing against them (while in their mind they were agreeing with them). There is not a "clearer line in the dirt." These are fundamental, ideological differences in what "promoting innovation over litigation" means.

I think you're either trying too hard to be cynical or simply have a poor understanding of how deep the divide is on this issue (among others, of course).
Fraud is the general class of crime committed, and wrongful hire is a more specific categorization. I don't see the problem here.
Thanks! I haven't added line-breaks and a few edge-case checks such as submitting strings of spaces - but will fix it in the morning.
It's just the Internet English word for schadenfreude; what you really want is for the concept to go away.
Camtasia and Smoothdraw http://www.khanacademy.org/about/faq#equipment
We should send the video to our representatives and other SOPA/PIPA supporters. Maybe some of them will get it.
It's also time for us to stop nerding our way out of common sense. The comment to which you're referring reads, "Aside: Did someone vomit out that design?". That's not "feedback".

For the third time I find myself pointing out to a site newcomer that there are guidelines linked to the bottom of every page, and the comment we're discussing violates the very first of them.

I absolutely understand --- being myself a nerd --- the pleasure commenters here take in contrariness. I can also understand that smug corrective comments might rankle and prompt objections. But I don't care. If you want to form the opinion that I'm smug and self-regarding for calling people on comments like this, that's fine, as long as the bullshit mean comments stop.
From what I know of Jay and DRW, which admittedly is not much, yes he's that good and yes they're that good.
His argument is that if he's using a Mac, a lot of them are written in Objective-C.

And if he's using Gnome in Linux, most are written in C.

But for Windows apps, commercial apps, cross platform and games, C++ leads by far.
Taleo’s Recruiting Solution Processed 15% of Last Year’s US Hires
I thought this was a rant on flash photography for a second... was I disappointed.
Reminds me of the J programming language
Subpug RSS Reader Looks To Pull You Away From Google Reader
I am not one of the elite. I had to drop out due to a not simple life. So I think I can offer an outside perspective. I did teach myself a lot of math to be able to understand machine learning. I did not read ahead, that is boring. But I found that as I went along, the more I wanted to tune the algorithm beyond the standard fare, the more power I wanted, well then the more math I had to read and understand. I simply was not satisfied to write decision tree code without understanding how. Or if you read a paper and you want to implement something you will need to be able to understand the math hiding the ideas because the pseudo code is often rubbish and bugged - assuming its even there at all. I did this to implement matrix factorization, to extend logistic regression beyond binary and with sparser weights, SVM etc.

And then something began to happen the more I learned. I no longer thought I need naive bayes this, Decision tree that, random forest there or whatever. I thought I need this concept from statistics or that idea from information theory, i just need to group and count there and that loss function is useful here. So I could come up or modify something to my need. As I go long I am finding that while before I looked for an excuse to use something fancy sounding now I prefer to go as simple as possible - but without having gone through the hard stage I could not appreciate where the simpler solution is better.

I also learned a great deal of differential calculus when implementing an automatic differentiator (a backpropogating Neural net is basically just a special case of reverse auto diff). Its fast can work with decent sized vectors (10^5 - 10^6 entries I tested) and can do gradients, hessians and jacobians of arbitrary functions. I also expect that I can easily extend it to be able to work with tensors although I haven't needed them yet. Using it I wrote a stochastic gradient descent algorithm and can plug in arbitrary loss functions and a whole bunch of algorithms just merge. I could also easily write say L-BFGS for it. Neural networks, logistic, linear regression, support vector were basically just swapping out one line.

This flexibility is what you gain.

===========================

In the below fn is an arbitrary mathematical function such as

let eq1 (x:float[]) = 1. - 4. * x.[0] + 2. * x.[0] ** 2.- 2. * x.[1] **3.

let newtonOpt prec iters fn (guess:float[]) =
let rec iterate delta iter cguess =
match delta with
| _ when delta < prec || iter > iters -> cguess
| _ -> let h = hessian cguess fn
let _, g, _ = grad_ cguess fn
let gs = cguess - m.Inverse() * g
let cdel = (gs - cguess).Norm(2.)
iterate cdel (iter + 1) gs
iterate Double.MaxValue 0 guess

example of a loss function

[<ReflectedDefinition>]
let llog (cx:float[]) _XdotW y = y * log (1./(1. + exp(_XdotW))) + (1. - y) * log(1. - (1./(1. + exp(_XdotW))))
TechStars Launches Accelerato.rs, A Common App for Accelerator programs
Getting a little off the topic, I find it interesting that so many people RAID their backups but not their primary storage.
Groupon Acquires Stealth Silicon Valley Startup Campfire Labs
A couple days ago BBC was carrying the story of a 15-year-old who had become the youngest person to climb the Seven Summits (the tallest summit on each continent). He was, of course, the child of two wealthy mountaineers.
I'll skip commenting on the actual site they're building, and zero in one paragraph I found particularly interesting:

"When he was an undergrad in 2005, Boyer, who is now 27, took a job at the Student Trade Justice Campaign, an organization focused on trade policy reform. In 2007, he wanted to build an online platform for individual chapters to organize into groups and to link those groups for national discussions – essentially what the FGA is meant to do. But Boyer couldn’t build it, he said. “I didn’t even know how to program at the point that I started with it.”

Because. Word. My first thought was: "Story of my life." Just substitute "2007" for "Summer 2010" and "Student Trade Justice Campaign" for "non-profit student organizations." I wonder how many others were inspired to learn web development because of similar motivations.
If you watch the talk, you will see that it was written for the choir. He discusses the challenges and responsibilities that we as hackers will face in future, and how they will go way beyond the current copyright wars. It was something of a call to arms basically.

I was in the audience last night, and it was an excellent presentation. All of the talks I have seen so far have been excellent, and I encourage you to check out the 28c3 youtube channel, where prerelease versions of all the talks are being posted (with extremely low delays I might add.)

http://youtube.com/28c3

Also, you can watch live streams here:

http://28c3.fem-net.de/
Tweeted you with a request.
Hybrid Cluster - a self-healing & auto-scaling cloud platform
Here's another way to use dynamic QR codes -- digital wallet:

http://s3qr.com
Golden Age of Tech Blogging Done? I Couldn't Disagree More
Question... (PS You really need the Dwight meme)... why Mongo and not Redis?
I can see what you're doing and even sort of admire the hustle. But in the grand scheme of things ifttt.com will always have the stronger brand.

For one thing, they work now, and I give them my auth proxies because they do useful things for me. I don't have to give them my email on the promise of a "Sneak Peak".
(You may want to fix that, the word you want is "peek".)

And as a fast follower you come off as a bit sleazy; your efforts here and in the comments of the TC story, and the fancy landing page with no test drive make me think that the product isn't quite ready. And I'm not seeing the value add, if I need some of what you're offering, why do I need you to middleman when most of the services you name have their own APIs? Are you saving me enough time and headache that you're worth the bother? Why should I trust you with my business?

In my world, at the moment; IFTTT is a toy with potential, I want them to add more channels, I want them to open up the API so I as a service provider can register channels both inbound and outbound. I want them to have a business model that works because I like them and they are useful. I want to be able to set up searches with plexusengine or duckduckgo and pipe them to my flipboard; I want to copy the text of articles about things I care about to a folder in box.net; and based on what I've seen; IFTTT can do that.

Whereas I only have your vague promise that I might be able to do all that some time soon maybe with a product you're not willing to show the world yet. IFTTT seems focused and capable, you guys... seem like a hype machine in search of something that works.
Insulin resistance is Type 2 Diabetes, whereas insulin injections are a treatment (not a cure) for Type 1 Diabetes. Despite the common name of diabetes, they're actually completely different diseases that share many symptoms. It's also possible to have both.
I am from India. I find the remark quite plausible.
Inbox Heroes: How Peter Rojas of Gdgt Uses Email
there's a time in the place for everything. static/dynamic typing is a trade off between short-term development pace and long term maintenance. strong/weak typing is a trade off between enforcing high-level constraints and, well, i'm not exactly sure, but (void*) is used all the time in baremetal C . ... that said, i've never read an opinion that weak-typing to the extent possible in javascript is a great idea.
How Apple could shake up TV: A la carte channels
Self control and willpower goes hand in hand. What else are you using to control yourself? I'm not sure what definition of discipline you are referring to, otherwise. In any case if I'm using your definition, then there's no sense in arguing, the argument wouldn't be interesting anyway.
Thats not a hypothesis in the scientific sense, that is a scientifically-based speculation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

btw, does SIAI, et al, actually align to a common speculation that logically unfolds to the notion of 'saving the world'? Could you send me a link? The best I could find is in this pdf - http://singinst.org/upload/artificial-intelligence-risk.pdf - pages 18, 19 gives an overview of this paper: http://singinst.org/upload/artificial-intelligence-risk.pdf

I believe the paper is intended to explore possible risks - not to state scientific hypotheses. Is it science that a super-intelligence will emerge at all? Is it science what the timing of the onset of super-intelligence will be? How about the transition speed of the onset? Is it proven or accepted that this notion of 'manipulation of human goals' is meaningfully defined or even a negative thing? Is it proven that Friendly AI would prevent any set of bad scenarios from occurring? No.. of course not. Each of these points is discussed as speculation in a general discussion of AI risks.

To take a stacked set of speculations, and say you are 'saving the world' - I don't know how you get there without religion.
Keep corporations out of it. Almost everything they touch turns into an ugly mess.
How to make a web standards proposal
My favorite answer:

‎"In the ideal world, the Khan Academy [or another online learning solution] will progress to the point that you can get a deep understanding of most topics independently and "school" will be a physical place and support network that helps you explore and apply what you know (build robots, start businesses, write a book)"
"Configure it badly" is simplistic. If you have a webmail application, how do you allow your users to upload reasonable email attachments (say 10MB for most providers) while not exposing yourself to this particular problem?

The max_input_vars parameter was a new one for me.
Clever, but not as surprising...

(null,'cool',false,NaN,4) evaluates to the last expression - 4

Array(4) creates an array with 4 elements.

Array(4).toString() = ",,,"
I had this running (except with netatalk 2.2.x I don't think all that "unsupported" prefs setting and xml hacking was necessary), anyway after a month or so Mac OS started complaining that the backup couldn't be "verified" or somesuch, and then proceeded to re-do the whole backup. As this started happening every couple of days I gave up and switched to running rdiff-backup manually across ssh instead. Makes browsing the backup repository much easier too, especially if I only need something from the last run.
Off topic: I'm really happy that the pic is of a scientist who is not in a white coat.
IE8 has a JS error on its own "new tab" page
It would be great if Europe took the lead on these kind of services, it currently seems impossible to get decent web services that are outside the reach of US subpoenas. Boston PD has already issued a subpoena to Twitter for Occupy related info. Europe needs to step up.
That's just because I was quickly putting things together and I know mongo well enough. I agree Redis would be much better suited for this.
Its not just we vs them, as he mentions the possibility to print biological structures is kind of creepy, so some control is necessary. You wouldnt want kids printing out viruses and such far fetched scenarios.

We hackers have a responsibility to not only fight against stupid laws, but to put in place sane ones, which respect freedom and privacy and also maintain public safety.
> the camera

Do you have QR-enabled cameras at each door? Is it a custom solution?
This is the talk they gave on 28C3: http://www.youtube.com/28c3#p/u/24/_EEhviEO1Vo
Why Hasn't Google Responded to Death Threats on Google+?
>>such as declaring your apps templates directory when by default Django searches all apps for a templates directory.

I don't think so. Removing the templates directory gives you an exception. Maybe you are using another loader?

>>Also running nearly everything as root.

Right, this was meant for starters so I didn't want to complicate things. But I just added some options so now Upstart will run GUnicorn under other user.
Couldn't it be implemented as an Open ID provider?
"Same room" is another factor being independent of the fact of having or not a process for software development. I think the article proposal is close to the proposal "Programming, Motherfucker Do you speak it?" - http://programming-motherfucker.com/

I have seen a lot of enterprise making "software development" avoiding programming by replacing it with an ugly process. Just to avoid doing the real job of programming. If I look for the past years in my narrow view, usually the most successful ones are the ones focusing on programming and nothing more.
Thanks for the recommendation. I did watch the first half hour's worth, up to the Q/A session. I didn't really hear any 'next action' though... was there any recommendation on what I should be doing about this now?
Client side image cropping
IT staffing troubles begin, especially with younger developers
You can disable that with Javascript too. It is about as secure.
Show HN: We just launched our MVP, a new RSS Reader
Little fun - hidden startup ideas
This sounds like a neat setup - do you have anymore info on it? I assume it's custom and not off the shelf?