skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that something like the Math Emporium could represent an excellent additional resource ... but using it to replace lectures altogether would seem, to me, to be a missed opportunity and a big mistake. I hope that they at least have something like recitations / TA-led classes so that students can get face time with, periodically, with someone knowledgeable w/re to the subject matter.

Also, the article says "The key is letting computers do what they do best - grading multiple-choice tests, [...]".

That's alarming because it suggests that the automatically generated practice tests and possibly even the real, proctored tests in the Math Emporium scheme are all multiple-choice. For exams in introductory, memorization-heavy humanities courses, that's fine, but the multiple-choice format is ill-suited for math. There's no way to assign partial credit for wrong answers and, more importantly, there's no capability to examine the steps that the student took when trying to find the solution to a given problem so that their mistake can be explained to them.

Based on the article, it sounds as though Virginia Tech is replacing part of their undergrad math curriculum with Kumon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumon) for grown-ups. Depressing.
"Databases know more about you than you realise. A Carnegie Mellon University study recently showed that simply by knowing gender, birth date and postal zip code, 87% of people in the United States could be pinpointed by name."

Umm, that was back in 2001. The research has come a long way since then. This is what I do for a day job (studying privacy leaks in databases), and IMO it's worse than you might think. Example: http://33bits.org/about/netflix-paper-home-page/

And here's something from two weeks ago: http://33bits.org/2008/11/12/57/
"it's the browser API that's a piece of garbage."

And that's the real purpose of Prototype, JQuery and friends. To glom over the unholy mess that is cross browser DOM compatibility.

Another question: is MVC still a suitable design pattern for web application development? We have HTML to model structure, CSS to model appearance, and Javascript/DOM to model interaction, and JSON to transfer structured data over the network. This suggests a design where each language plays to its respective strength, instead of trying to find "one language to bind them all."

This suggests a different model than what Xerox PARC had in mind when they came up with MVC for SmallTalk. I'm not sure what that model is, but I believe that the unstated assumption that MVC is a good pattern for web applications needs to be defended.
Summary of MIT's Introduction to Algorithms, Lecture 15: Dynamic Programming
The online hw and tests that I have worked with for math classes are fill in the blank with the correct answer. The computer refuses incorrect answers and will give them a specified number of retries Its a pretty savvy way to save time, especially on hw and gives students instant feedback.
Did you even click the link? Which of the examples listed in the article was due to bad regulation? A "net neutrality" bill would've forced the CRTC to rule in favor of the small ISPs, the copyright modernization act is being pushed by the Conservative party, and opposed by every "big government" party, and the SMS scandal is a failure to challenge price gouging.

I love that, without any knowledge of Canadian telecom regulation, you're ready to announce that over-regulation is the problem. Way to go, brownie.
I am not saying that Mac's don't have a good offering for small business. But trippling virtually overnight? I find that implausible and pending independent confirmation I am not buying any of it.

Appleinsider came up with this "survey" last month about how Samsung is better than the BlackBerry for business use. Huh??!
Monetizing a large user base is proving to be more difficult than some had assumed.
The Human Soul: An Ancient Idea
Their business is based around Bayes theorem, not mentioned in the article.

I guess their hype has doubled this quarter.
How does "Limit upload rate automatically" work? What does it limit it to? What kind of algorithm do they use?
Gaze-controlled robot gets demoed on video
Hah. You wish. I just spent 4 months living in Seattle, and here's how the cell service stacks up. In both places I paid $50 a month (give or take a few bucks).

In the US:
- 300 minutes daytime
- unlimited evenings/weekends
- voicemail, call display, etc
- unlimited data

In Canada:
- 200 minutes daytime
- unlimited evenings/weekends

Notice the big difference? :P America is behind the curve on technology infrastructure, but it's still a lot better off than Canada.
Wal-Mart Employee Trampled to Death by Customers
Great article. I'm writing an open source PHP framework called Recess! which addresses these issues and an alpha release will be public in a week or so. http://www.recessframework.com/
could you give me a quick example of this?
The other half of "Artists Ship"
Brains More Distracted, Not Slower with Age
The article specifically pointed out how America has much more access to modern digital conveniences that are not available in Canada.
I agree. Biased, poorly written.

"the idea of handing complete responsibility for "View" generation and near-complete responsibility for Model "business rules" validation to the Web Browser would make perfect sense"

The idea of handling business logic in the browser makes me puke. This guy should hand in his programmer card and never approach a computer again. You end-up with different set of rules implemented twice in two very different execution environments.

The only way it would not be utterly stupid would be if the server somehow generated the JavaScript validators based on the business rules, but that would, also, be a very ugly kludge (and probably require a validation DSL that is different from the implementation language of the rest of the server side).
This is the big question I've been pondering lately: will this economic madness create an inflection point in American cultural/political values leading to the idea that you can't spend more than you have? Clearly Washington has no plans to change yet: will the US have to go bankrupt before the lesson is learned?
Outsourced Blog Comments
Why The Dollar Is Getting Stronger
Five Strategies Microsoft Got Right
Ask YC:Suggest an online finance app to use for my startup
What online money management/finance/accounting service do you use to manage your business? I am not looking for personal finance services such as buxfer and mint.
It didn't, DRY is much older than Rails.
Ask HN: Buying servers?
I might be buying 10-20 servers in the next few months, and I'd really appreciate any advice folks have about getting the best deals. I'm mainly looking for some fairly reliable 1U boxes with 8 cores and 16-32 GB RAM. Disk is not that much of a concern.

Can I get significantly better prices if I start talking to a sales guy vs going over the web for places like Dell and HP? Are there any white box vendors you guys would recommend? Has anybody learned any lessons or had a great experience with a vendor they can share?
Do you agree or disagree that it is the case that only since 1958 or 1959, have any accurate measurements at all of atmospheric CO2 been made, and that at only a limited number of places around the globe? We can start with that statement if you like.
CSS-Tricks | Prevent iPhone Text Enlargement
I pay $30 a month in canada for that canadian plan + voicemail and caller id. You have to get retention plans for that although. Data is the killer. And I think the infrastructre here is just as good, it's just they want to make more profit, and because of the duopoly situation, they can.
hmm... i thought disqus or whatever was supposed to unify social media commenting
Newer versions of uTorrent have features designed to maximize its bandwidth usage while getting out of the way of other network traffic, so that it doesn't monopolize your connection. Not much has been written about that stuff so far, but some of it is pretty interesting technology. There's a little bit of info in this forum thread:

http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=49813
Not defending or refuting this, really, but thought I'd point to a compelling argument I saw on TED by a "climate engineer." The summary is that he claims if things continue and there are problems and we haven't done anything about them, people like him will step up and say stuff like "we can set off a few volcanoes, put some ash in the air and cool things down." And he thinks you're better off working on the problem now so that people like him don't get to try things which could have unintended consequences. Or at the very least, be a band-aid without neosporin.

It was an interesting talk.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/david_keith_s_surprising_...
go on eBay, lots of refurbished stuff there, a guy I know buys all his stuff from one user.

Me personally, I prefer to just lease them
This article is premised on the idea that colleges are selling education. Colleges sell a credential and I suppose a token to access the reputation and ability of other credential holders.

The credential is the scarce good whereas education is increasingly free. It makes sense that they'd focus on pricing related to the credential rather than the education.

I think people are buying the college's recruiting filter and its reputation first and the college's education second.
Leasing computer hardware instead of buying results in tax credits in Canada, so many people take this route.
Gvke - US cotton export rises 16% during Nov 14-20: USDA
You should use a spreadsheet (Google or Microsoft will do) until you are actually taking payments of any sort, and use whatever capabilities your bank provides through their online banking as well.
> I believe that global warming is man-made

Believing is irrational. Given enough time, charisma and persuasion anyone can be made to believe anything.

> I am genuinely open to being persuaded otherwise

Read on the recent research into the abrupt climate change that is now thought to have caused the demise of the Egyptian civilization. Specifically they uncovered the evidence that there was a few degrees jump in average temperatures in a scope of few years.

Discovery covered this half a year ago or so. Ironically enough they were airing it right after yet another fart-less-save-the-earth special.
Indeed I'm no security expert, and I've never claimed to be. That's why I posted it here: to get some feedback from people who know what they're talking about.

As for certificate extensions being too much to grasp, it's more a case of not knowing about them. Although it might be hard to belive, some people haven't spent much time working with certificates!

Next, what would be the point of using this instead of TLS? I've tried to do a few things that TLS doesn't, as far as I know, do:

* Support for caches/proxies such as Squid

Caches could help with lowering network traffic, although it's probably just big corporations that use proxies that would actually benefit from this.

* No need for one certificate per server IP

Since I don't run a server park full of https servers I don't know how much of a problem this would be in real life, but I imagine that maintaining and updating certificates for lots of machines can be a lot of work.

* Third party servers can serve verified content

Suppose you'd like to use Amazon CloudFront to serve your static content. They don't support TLS, but with Content-Signature you could use them anyway.

* Less load on the server

Assuming that the signature isn't re-calculated on the fly for each request, but instead stored and re-used, the extra work for the server to support this is close to zero with static content.

For dynamic content it's not as nice, but could be used if you have a cacheing proxy in front of whatever is generating the content.

On the client side you'd have to check a PGP signature (or some other scheme, if that'd be better for some reason) for each file. I haven't done any performance tests on this, I just assumed that in the grand scheme of things this wouldn't be a big problem.

So.. Maybe it's not a good idea, but some of these properties would be useful and aren't provided by TLS.
surprised to see this down-voted. Insight and rebuttle or reasoning please?
How Will Obama Now Use the Internet Army He Built?
I guess so many checks in a big company could be considered the biggest mistake of all?
Yes, you will get better deals by talking to a sales person, ESPECIALLY in about 2 weeks (as the quarter and year are coming to a close and people are trying to make their numbers).

Make it clear that you know the value of what you are after and are ready to make a purchase as soon as you find the right deal.
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pg worked in fast food?
I might be misunderstanding what you're saying here with the replay comment, but I'd like to point out that I'm not trying to encrypt the content - I just want the client to be able to verify the source of the content.
One problem is that the cost of checks is only visible in the aggregate. The marginal cost of each new check seems to be pretty low.

I wonder if there's a way to limit the total cost without hard-and-fast silly rules.
Is "one in, one out" a silly rule?

e.g. you can only add a new step to a process if a step is removed from another.
it was pre-artix ;-)
Getting started on sustainability
Well, as companies get larger they can afford less and less to make mistakes. If I'm running a start-up company, I can get away with changing things abruptly, because I have a smaller base of users and I have fewer people relying on my running at production-level. Also, chances are I'll be able to look at user feedback effectively.

Once you get large, and your company is providing sustenance for all your employees, people rely on your product, and you've got too many users for effective feedback-checking, you have to close up, take fewer risks. Because suddenly, people want you to move slowly. They don't want you constantly skyrocketing ahead with their playing backup. Look at any big company - even Google, which was once famous for moving quickly - and you'll see that part of what gives a big company a good reputation is its being "solid." They have to give things up for an advantage.

It's why newspapers are so relied-upon. Of course, now it's what is hurting newspapers the most. They're being beaten by the flexible Internet. But even there, we're seeing a trade-off. Look at the quality of stories by the top writers online and by the top NY Times writers, and the online writers are much more amateur. They're faster, occasionally they're more interesting, but the Internet is thus far not retaining a high level of professionalism among reporting. Similarly, start-ups are much less reliable on the whole than large companies - look at Twitter and its problems, for instance.

So I think that PG's article is right. You can't restrict people and expect them to do as well. However, too much freedom leads to less stability, so it becomes a trade-off. Everything in moderation.
Whoa! Thanks!!!
(A) Lease vs. Buy: If you can swing it, lease them instead - tax benefits, etc.

(B) Do you really need 8 cores per box? I.e., you can get used dual-dual machines a lot cheaper than 50% of the price of the dual-quad machines.

(C) If you know what you want and are buying new then going with a white box builder is significantly cheaper than buying from Dell/HP/etc. I've been pretty happy with ASA especially since they've delivered/picked-up/serviced machines directly to/from/in our colo but there are plenty of decent vendors and they most end up using SuperMicro-based systems anyways.

(D) Do you really need 1U? Why? Power/cooling issues are putting more constraints on things than size at many places and a 2U is often cheaper, more flexible, fixable, etc.

(E) Really knowing exactly what you want can make a big difference in talking with the salespeople. Buying at the end of the quarter is a good thing if you can swing it.

(F) More ram is more better and 32GB is the current sweet spot in terms of lots of memory for a good price. Pay particular attention to the motherboards that you're considering as there can be a price premium at the various steps depending on if you need the flexibility to upgrade the memory a lot later.

(G) You mention that disk isn't much of a concern. Is that because you just want lots of compute nodes or because you're putting everything into a NAS/SAN or what?
We have a smattering of 100-150 HP DL380s and BL460c blades. We've seen approximately a 5% infant mortality rate (DOA or issues in the first 90 days). Depending on the channel HP's custom configurations come as a base and add on accessories -- if you order a dual 5160 DL380 with 32G of ram and 4x146g SAS you might get a preassembled 1x5160 4G 1x146 and a CPU, 14 2g DIMMS, and 3 disks, each in a separate shipping carton. You then spend about one person day per two computers unpacking individual components from cardboard and shipping foam boxes and installing CPUs, DIMMs, and disks. It's not my favorite thing to do, and it means that you only get about three computers per pallet. It's also, of course, not burnt-in beforehand, so you get to rack and memtest them for a day or two yourself.

In contrast we've had really good luck with a regional whitebox VAR -- they would assemble Intel reference platforms and Supermicro systems, burn them in, and ship them, assembled, in the one box the case came in. As far as I know we've had closer to a 1% failure rate over three years with these (exclusive of HD failures but not environmental, over-heat, issues).

On balance it's a tough call, because HP (and I assume Dell) have a much slicker lights-out-management solution than the last IPMI demo I saw. Maybe the whiteboxes have improved, but I assume the HP machines are still easier to support.
This past summer I worked as an intern for a big company. On the first day of orientation the head of the legal compliance department said very flatly to us that any individual could do far more harm to the firm than good.

This mentality, reenforced by the company's bureaucratic change management system, really did not sit well with me.

Fortunately for my summer experience, my "buddy"/summer mentor and I found a loophole which we used to "hack" the change management system so that once we got our initial approval, we could propagate changes to prod without running through the whole process again for each change (which otherwise would have been required).
Be Thankful for the Earth’s Molten Interior
I'm not sure why they bothered with C++ at all. The essay says the parsing code is 6000 lines of C++. It seems that if they wrote the whole thing in Scheme, they would have gotten that way down, and then the parsing would have been extensible as well.

Oh well, at least they got it half right. ;)
Is "one in, one out" a silly rule?

Yes. ;)

When do you institute the rule -- on day one, in which case it is functionally equivalent to "do not have any checks"? On day 13? Day 7386?

What is the quantum of a "check"? Is Sarbanes-Oxley one "check" or a collection of hundreds of "checks"?

Does the limit apply department-by-department or company-wide? Your sysadmins will naturally tend to employ a lot more formal checks (most of which are hopefully enforced by tiny Perl scripts) than your R&D prototyping team. Do you force the sysadmins to compete with the accounting department for a quota of checks? Do you incentivize sysadmins to evade checks by getting tasks reassigned to the R&D prototyping team, which (alas) can't afford to have any checks?

The last thing you want to do is encourage teams of lawyerly meta-checkers to run around enforcing rules about rules. That's costly, squared.
This thinking has always kind of confused me. Why are customers/users at a big company more important than those at a startup? Just because there's more of them, now you can't make mistakes?

If you have the agility to make rapid production changes, you also have the ability to rapidly rollback. So the argument that larger companies require more checks and testing than startups isn't really valid, especially when you consider the costs.
You may consider 8anet.com. You can customize the server according to your needs. They also setup for you the server for 20 or 50 dollars. I don't remember exactl
Yes but I am saying we should not accept these mistakes, they are not inevitable but down to flaws in manufacturing and quality control. As a premium product these mistakes should not have occurred.

Apple make a choice to allow a certain failure rate or to skip testing of updates as getting it right 1st time is not as profitable as allowing mistakes which may or may not be cleared up at the Apple Store.
Here in Québec, Microsoft has the monopoly in the public sphere. The government does not do any bid invitations when it comes to buying computers. The open source is completely ignored.
Some thoughts:

As companies grow big, they like to emulate larger companies, and hence the people they like to hire are from larger companies since they understand scale -- this comes with a lot of baggage ofcourse. This in turn, most times, brings with it a culture of people who are worried more about not screwing up, covering their own ass, and thinking about getting promoted rather than doing what's right for the company or the business and screwing up as a byproduct of making quick decisions.

Re Joel Spolsky: The cost of the sale is not only the cost of the product, but what an organization would pay for a software/service, and what they would value it at. This is why most companies have a sales force, and don't advertise their prices on their website. As Joel mentions, for a lot of companies, charging less than $50k is a rounding error and not worth their time.

The flip side of people at big companies buying is based not entirely on the performance of the service or the product. As long as the service/product is reliable & ok, and it doesn't screw up in any major ways, they won't get fired for making that buying decision, rather than looking at ways of maximizing/optimizing the performance of the product -- yet another reason committees make buying decisions.

Re SOX: I like what founder's fund + facebook is doing -- letting early employees cash some of their equity out, thereby increasing the time early employees will stay with the company.

I also like Fred Wilson's thoughts on a secondary market for startup stock (similar to what goog does), this would in some sense, I guess let you be a private company, and not deal with the challenges associated with SOX compliance and at the same time not raise a highly dilutive Series D, in addition there is some sort of liquidation event for the investors.

PS: (std. Buchheit comments about Limited Life Experiences + Overgeneralization = Advice apply)

PPS: Say hi to the reddit guys for me ;-)
So, some lessons learned...

1. lights out management matters

2. ensure your OS is happy on the hardware ahead of time

3. if you are expecting to make regular purchases, with growth for example, tell the vendor that

4. always negotiate

5. dell actually makes good servers now

6. look hard at the power density you get wherever your servers will live and factor cost of rack space into server cost numbers -- if you have low power density, slightly pricier servers with lower power reqs may win out