skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, that's the network effect. It's useful because it's used. It's a fact becuase it's a fact because it's a fact, etc. And it's not just young people either. Most of the people who force me to reluctantly use Facebook sometimes are actually older than me.

But I want to know if there is anything genuinely useful about the form of communication that is Facebook. I think there has to be something, or it wouldn't have become what it is.

Maybe it's that the default mode of communication is spam. Maybe it's that what is said on Facebook carries less weight and hence requires less effort to say. Maybe it's that statements need no reply there. Maybe it's like the village square where people hang out so they don't feel lonely even if they don't have anything to say.

I don't know what it really is. But us hackers should ask the question because it might tell us what to create in the future.
Blockbuster is more than videos. It provides jobs to youth and sells snacks to customers. All of which is irrelevant to their basic economics when people stop buying from them.

If 10-25% of students decide to learn online, a university's budget is seriously compromised.

This could shutter a lot of the teaching-focused universities.
It's both. Did you check out their website? Looks like a classic startup.

> We are a rapidly growing company located in Palo Alto, California looking for great people to join our team. We're looking for a wide variety of backgrounds - the only thing in common is a passion for improving education.
Yeah, I think it's a typo too (especially with the ?{query} there in the spec. Btw, do you understand the purpose of this Action?
From the actual filings this article is making those pie charts with, Google reports 72% of their advertising revenue comes from websites they operate.

They also reported paying 51% (AdSense for Search) and 68% (AdSense for Content) of the fees (which they defined as the revenue) to the "Google Network Member".

Doing the math out, that would indicate that the advertising profit from their own websites accounts for 85-90% of their total profit from advertising.

In essence, the fact that they "run the largest display advertising network in the world" is actually in any way "where they make the money".

(Of course, the money they get from that isn't "chump change", and I'd even make the argument that if they didn't run that off-Google advertising network their core advertising business would have less content available.).
Facebook Users Ask, ‘Where’s Our Cut?’
Keiser Report: Kill Hollywood [video]
My idea on how to fix High School math. Spend the first 3 years doing nothing but mastering basic algebra.

I've seen from tutoring my siblings that basic algebra skills are what they lack. They concepts of trig and calculus aren't that difficult, it's the algebra that trips them up.

Leave the higher level math, for everyone but the most advanced students, to college. If I was a college math professor I'd rather teach a group of kids who have mastered algebra, than ones who've had a whirlwind tour of everything.
Your counterexamples for the most part make make no sense. I feel like I should give a line by line rebuttal, but that's probably giving your joke more attention that it deserves.
I found that incredible, amazing, stunning but also hilarious for some reason. I don't know why but it funny seeing them all working together like that.
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I don't think that social media sites need to pay their users. It is interesting, however, to watch the public conversation around this topic, especially at a time when there is so much attention being focused on facebook's revenue model.
+1 on this. It's a great book (not finished yet). What I like is that it's like a review (even rediscovery) of mathematical basics and how powerful they are, coupled with the beauty of Haskell. I know it sounds cheesy but _that_ is like, well, a religious feeling. Similar to what I felt when I discovered metamath.org (so wonderful).
Companies which use Lisp
With tasks I only perform occasionally, automation becomes my record of how to do those tasks. I find this extremely valuable for complex tasks infrequently performed. Taking the time to write a script ensures that (1) I pay attention to what I'm doing, not just run into a snag->google->get the fix->forget (or never investigate!) what the hell the problem was; and (2) allows me to quickly check that my procedure is repeatable; and (3) gives me a step-by-step record of exactly what needs to be done, with no steps skipped (like when I take notes) because they're "obvious." What is obvious when you've been working a couple of hours to solve a problem is very different than what is obvious when you haven't done something in a couple of months.
This is most likely a lesser contribution - and remember this is only of practical interest in very long-lived cells, such as the neurons that never turn over and are as old as you are. Compare this mechanism with failure of the lysosome due to buildup of indigestible lipofuscin, or mitochondrial DNA damage, or the cell being battered by higher levels of surrounding AGEs and amyloid or other aggregates, and so forth.

What this does tend to point out, however, is the very long term need for ways to replace or completely repair currently irreplacable cells. That isn't the low-hanging fruit, but it's the sort if thing to be working in once SENS is realized.

By then, of course, the options will be veering off into the space of molecular manufacturing and medical nanorobotics and synthetic replacements for biological molecular machinery.
I think the idea is that cell death isn't the problem. Cells die all the time and get replaced, that's not really a problem.

A problem is cells that don't die, but instead start working poorer.
How I learned to stop worrying and love REST
A good portion of a degree's value is in its branding/prestige value. It's not just about the knowledge, it's about the overall reputation of an educational institution. The material at Penn State is 99% the same as MIT's. If this weren't the case, MIT and Stanford would have lost their luster to public schools decades ago.

Unfortunately I don't see a degree from a website named "Udacity" garnering anywhere near the level of respect that a traditional university has. Step 1 to bringing down the university system: pick a decent name.
> the goal is to employ teachers and education of students is a welcome-but-unnecessary industrial byproduct.

This is pretty much exactly what I was thinking, albeit less eloquently, as I read this article. The entire article, while it made good points, always had an undertone of "Khan Academy is dangerous to me, therefore it's dangerous for everyone."

It could just be a difference of perspective - the author is a teacher and has been trained in a certain way of educating students, so any idea that isn't the way they were taught seems weird, scary, and wrong.

I'm not saying that Khan Academy is entirely the right direction to take - I haven't used it enough to say, and I'm too old to be able to stand in the shoes of its target demographic - but the entire time I read the article, I felt a bias underpinning the entire thing.
That prestige issue goes away real fast for most students if the degree lets them get a job.
@rhizome

Please return to sticking your head back up your ass and pretending that what you do on Rails is "coding".
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7 cool and crazy computer workspaces
Totally agree with zedshaw here. When a long-running, highly-secret conspiracy with demonstrable follow-through (HR staff being fired) is uncovered, the onus is clearly on the conspirators to prove that their conspiracy was harmless, rather than on the uncoverers to quantify its harm. I understand why a venture capitalist would be nervous about the implications of this conspiracy's discovery (higher programmer salaries = shorter runway for investments), but trying to downplay (with no evidence) the impact of the no-poach on developers is disappointing to see on a site called Hacker News.
I would probably pay $200-$300/year, so maybe $15-25/month if this hypothetical service could completely match gmail in features.
Sign in and check it out. Feedback is welcome =)
> Unfortunately I don't see a degree from a website named "Udacity" garnering anywhere near the level of respect that a traditional university has. Step 1 to bringing down the university system: pick a decent name.

A good point, but what about the alphabet soup of various certifications and standards bodies?
C++11 adopted strongly-typed enums, but I wish it also added strongly-typed typedefs. I've written (and found others') template classes to implement something similar, but the implementation is surprisingly (?) verbose and may introduce code bloat or runtime overhead. The compiler could implement this with no overhead!

C++11's strongly-typed enums look like:

enum class Enumeration { Val1, Val2};
enum class Enum2 : unsigned int {Val1, Val2};

A strongly-typed typedef could use similar "declare a class deriving from a native type" syntax:

class Celcius : double; // something like this?
typedef Fahrenheit : double; // or maybe this?
Celcius celcius = 0f;
Fahrenheit fahrenheit = celcius; // ERROR
You seem to assume it's on purpose. When almost everyone in your circle has a Facebook account, it's easy to forget that person X or Y doesn't (usually depending on how close a friend they are with them).

Personally, I don't miss my account, but I can understand why others can.
Fired you a note :-)
Hi i think that you need to work now in something that you're very passionate about, that's when the really hard work comes..

I started too with ROR to develop applications in less amount of time, and believe javascript i think is a good tool to implement with ROR, it will help you a lot to develop the front-end...

But please don't try to make another social network, or photo sharing app, i think there are too much right now, i have no doubt that this could help you improve your coding skills...i got crazy when i hear that this xx company is developing a new cool sharing app...that's all!

good luck in your next project!
How I received 16000 spam comments within a month on my WordPress blog
1. Programmers often have an attitude of “I can code, you can’t, so I am defacto better than you.” This often comes out in Hacker News comments.

While this observation is somewhat anecdotal, I can sympathize with the sentiment. But the real reason that commenters on Hacker News might appear conceited or condescending is because they usually comment to disagree. If they do comment to express their agreement, they are encouraged to do so only when they have a non-trivial contribution to make. And this focus on a high signal-to-noise-ratio (even though it may consist of far more disagreement) on HN is not by happenstance, it is by design (achieved through guidelines, self-selection, and curation).

The comment thread on Google+ referred to by the OP, is largely an echo chamber of low-on-signal assent, with the odd nugget in the rough. And while this isn't a bad thing for a marketer trying to cultivate and engage a large audience, it would be toxic for Hacker News as a community.

While the most insightful commentary generally lies in a well reasoned, thoughtfully worded counterargument, it's always hard to deal with being judged or disagreed with; especially in public. This may be exacerbated when an argument is worded poorly (see http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html). Unfortunately, the odds of either happening on Hacker News, are far higher.
Sal didn't start the Academy to change the way children are taught math in school. He made it to fulfill a need he saw in a majority of student -- the same thing the article points out.

That being said, I think Sal's TED talk (mentioned in another comment here) really hits the nail on the head. I do believe that education in its current North American form is flawed. I don't think exams are a proper way of testing anything more than memory retention and ability to perform repetitive tasks (do this, then this, then that, etc).

Khan Academy fills a void within the current education system. Yes the system is flawed, but that's beside the Academy's scope.
Show HN: the first HTML5 avatar creator
Yes, that's my experience too.
I think most peoples invites have been approved at the moment.

We have a big release scheduled for Feb. Some cool new features like custom useragent strings and PagerDuty integration are going to be pushed out. We're excited :)
I'd say Netbeans is a comparable free option. VS isn't generally known for its JavaScript capabilities.
Thanks for your reply, it was very interesting.

One small comment - what makes C++ appropriate for my usage is mainly templates. Lots and lots of templates.

It is very useful to be able to easily compile an algorithm for different types. If compiling a whole 10,000+ line algorithm 4 times for char/short/int/long inputs with templates and doing run-time branching between the algorithms (but not in the algorithms) saves 15% CPU time, then that is well worth the work. I don't know (well) any other language that offers that. Obviously if you introduce some kind of abstract base class / interface like Java, you will immediately lose the benefit of going int -> short -> char, when a class is alway at least... 12 bytes? 16?)

In C doing that requires a lot of macros and rapidly gets unusable, in Java it requires introducing lots of interfaces and hoping things get inlined.

What I like about C++ (compared again to Java/C, not Haskell), is that I can without fear of cost (other than compile time) introduce another layer of abstraction. When benchmarking code this is amazing, I can easily swap in a vector, or a deque, or an optimised fixed-size stack array.

In Java it is common for people to 'un-Java' code, introducing arrays of primitives instead of arrays of classes for example.

I don't know how well Haskel does at that kind of thing.
Changing Safari's safe files list
I'm in fulltime work, and for years have wished I could go back to university and get another degree. It isn't a qualification I want - I don't need it to get on in my career, for example - but knowledge. Now the internet is bringing me and thousands like me the opportunity to learn at our own pace for free.

I'm currently taking the Khan chemistry course and loving it. When you criticise Khan for not helping kids as much as a real teacher does, I think you miss the bigger picture. It's enabling people of all ages to broaden their knowledge, not just people in formal education.

This, to me, is the real revolution: free lifelong learning.
(Obviously biased member of KA here.)

"Khan Academy and its donors may preclude better products from coming along"

I just don't understand this. KA, Udacity, Coursera, Codecademy, MITx, teachontablo.com, this list goes on. I don't see how KA has done anything but prove the possibility of traction. When professors like Thrun and Norvig and investors like Paul Graham, Fred Wilson, and Peter Thiel are excited about the educational space, I believe the students will eventually win. It's no secret that many of the above have been inspired by Sal in one way or another.

The more products competing here, the better education will be. Yelling at Khan Academy because it's "the only thing that [exists]" feels...oddly misplaced.
Designing a new project with this... it's literally saving me about 3-6 weeks worth of work. Thanks @Twitter.
Hello HN!

We are an italian startup and we are working on a social game in the manga universe. It will be ready in a couple of month, meantime on our website you can take a look to our avatar generator and the community.

The avatar generator is the first one completely HTML5! No flash...just canvas & javascript!

Tell me what you think about it from the technical and graphical point of view.

Any feedback will be appreciated...also about the community features.

Thanks ;)
I worked through most of the first half of the book, over about a month, doing most of the exercises.

As is stated in the arxiv review, its not meant to be a self contained intro to Haskell. I used 'learn you a haskell for great good', as a language tutorial, and did the exercises from 'Haskell Road' for practice, which worked well.

'Haskell Road' is a really nice book, with a very ambitious goal - provide an introduction to many fundamental mathematical/logical concepts through Haskell.

After a great first 3 chapters, though, I was a little disappointed, by chapter 4, which is 'Sets, Types and Lists', and for the next couple of chapters.
I felt the proportion of assignments that were in Haskell decreased substantially, and it became more like a normal Math text.

Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with that; and there were still many Haskell exercises in each chapter; but up to Chapter 4, I thought it had succeeded in teaching the Math/Logic mostly through Haskell; I felt it then became more like a traditional text.

I understand that many mathematical concepts, that have to be dealt with in a general sense (important general proofs etc) are best dealt with in the abstract, and not in Haskell.
But I really like programming, and I found that coding my way through the earlier material was a very enjoyable way to cover the ground.

I'd love if there was a future edition, or another book, that brought us much further, with the same code-centric learning approach.
You should rewrite a "pseudo-non-blocking" implementation of these filters. Right now they block the UI thread for too long, which limits how useful these can be. Web workers in one option, although it's not widely supported. The better option is to use setTimout or setInterval to break of the processing work into chunks, which is supported in all browsers. For example, run the loop n iterations then run the next n after a 15 ms delay. The way you've implemented the processing right now makes this lib unsuitable for use on the clientside.
I completely agree, but there are also a lot of companies who live of the data facebook provides them. People have to consent to providing this data for the most part, but i wonder if people would offer their data up less often if they actually thought about the profit some people are making from it...would love to see that in the permissions popup :P
The author doesn't seem to have watched many of the khan academy videos, what KA excels in is in fact precisely what he's criticizing it for not doing: explaining what maths means.
We're hating on this article, but you know what, I really like it. It covers a one sided view, but it makes some solid points.

That Khan Academy is free WILL prevent some innovative paid for solutions entering the market/being created. The "learn this, now do this test" methodology is indeed flawed as I've found myself recently. Yet it does make adaptive learning systems easier to build.

There must be a better way to do it and I'd be open to suggestions anyone may have on a computerized learning system that just works. Links and ideas welcome.

The mathalicious site this is a PR piece for does look nice and I clicked around, The vids look good, but what's their testing system like? Adaptive?
You are an optimist. The most probable result is sales people shaking their heads at the programming curmudgeons.

One real story. The head of PR guy has a very strong voice. We were lucky that he doesn't talk in the phone too often, because he took me out of the zone, almost out of the office every time.

Then he was moved and placed in the sales people row, farther from programmers. Now he complains that he can't concentrate because their chatter.

Do you really think that this guy was just a little bit aware of the effect of his conversations? I really doubt it.
Did I say anything about becoming intoxicated? Anosmia/ageusia have nothing to do with intoxication.
From Minimum Viable Product to Building A Landing Page
> Some people

They're called extroverts. They get into management and then fuck everything up for the mass of introvert engineers because they're incapable of conceiving that a human being wouldn't want to be in constant contact with other human beings at all times.
I don't see Khan replacining teachers - Henie changing what they do. Rather than lecture and quiz in the classrom, he enables the model to be flipped. Lectures and quizzes on your own time, come to class for help and interactive discussion.
This was a terrible read for me. The author sounds like a stereotypical parent telling their child that they can not succeed where the parent failed.

His article is a list of arguably failed teaching techniques that our current education system has implemented and khan academy is currently implementing. He then draws the conclusion that since institutionalized education failed with these techniques so will khan academy.

But he ignores the biggest difference and promise of Khan Academy vs Traditional Education, which is focus on the individual vs focus on the masses.
Udacity isn't a brand yet. Someday something like it or it will be. Then it won't matter.

I respect people who are resourceful and get stuff done. If you choose to go to college and wait out the great recession, I'll look down on you no matter if you went to MIT or Stanford. If you went to college for business or technology and you didn't produce anything during your time at college, you'll have a hard time convincing me to hire you.

It's only a matter of time before the rest of the world catches up to my way of thinking.
Voice Sentiment Analysis Startup Saygent Predicts A NE Patriots Win
See how saygent.com used voice sentiment analysis by conducting a call-in voice survey for coming up with a scientific 'crowd' prediction of the Super Bowl 2012 winner.
This bug is such a disaster.

It comes up all the time as the reason web apps will never be able to compete with native apps. Pressing Ctrl-W in your text editor and having the window immediately close is one of the worst possible user experiences.
In an information economy, a data mine has the same value that an oil, iron, or coal mine has in an industrial economy. The great data aggregators--Facebook, Google, Twitter, et al.--will be the robber barons of the information economy because they own-and therefore control access to-the data mines.
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The material may be the same but the fellows at MIT generally pursue it much deeper.
It defines a generic mechanism for performing actions that don't fit the GET/PUT/PATCH/POST/DELETE model on resources and collections. For example aggregations:

POST /orders?action=sum&field=price HTTP/1.1

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json
{"sum": 9000}

Or actions with side effects:

POST /orders?action=process-queue HTTP/1.1

HTTP/1.1 204 No Content

Which is better than creating a specific resource for each of the "actions", such as /orders_sum_price or /orders_process_queue, because it keeps the URIs clean.
As far as I know, the data dump does not include your friends' email addresses, so it'd be useless for the author of the article.
Replace "better products" with "the products I make" and it makes more sense.
There is also Discrete Mathematics using a computer, which I assume from the .edu pdf is legitimately free.
http://www.x.edu.uy/inet/Springer.pdf
A lot of the learning occurs outside the classroom too. Going to an good university helps facilitate that. Not to mention the possibility of working on research with some of the best minds in the world.
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Hey thanks for the effort of creating a bookmarklet for ColrGrabr. I will provide it directly on the page.

Btw. you don't need the ?url= query param.

javascript:(function(){var%20s=encodeURIComponent(window.location.href.match(/:\/\/(.[^/]+)/)[1]);open('http://colrgrabr.swissamigos.com/#+s);})();
Well, "A Byte of Python" is good to start resource!

http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/Python