skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Little known fact: only the webapp part of Pandora is IP-restricted. The media servers are open to the world. So as long as you can load the player through a tunnel, the actual mp3s can go through your normal connection.
The use of our data for purposes beyond advertizing is definitely a rapidly brewing storm. I already get emails from pretty looking web services offering sometimes dubious claims of magical insight, if only I send them a list of emails I want checked out. I expect the reach of those claims will only continue to broaden.

At the heart of the problem is that the sharing of data is assymetric, which will prevent market forces from weeding out services that don't put a premium on ensuring their data is even accurate, let alone whether their conclusions are sound. In other words, I have no idea who is sharing what about me, or how it is actually affecting the decisions being made around me. Employers, banks, etc, don't do a post game wrap up where they show you the data mining services they use, and what they say about you (relevant aside: when I get these data mining pitches emailed to me, where did they get my email, and why do they think I may be interested in these services? I have no way of knowing). I may be able to curate my facebook data, but I can't curate an augean stable of ever changing services that I don't even use, or know exist.
I agree. The exercises are a bit lacking but the videos are top notch. They are far better than any other instruction I've received.

Khan Academy helped me recover from a subpar high school education and gave me the tools to excel in college mathematics.
That is an astounding graph. I didn't consciously realize this till the example of Apple made it clear a few years ago, but market share is actually an unambitious thing to aim for. When people treat market share as a proxy for profit share, they're implicitly assuming all the competitors are roughly equivalent. But Apple shows that if your products are sufficiently more desirable than competitors', you can make market share and profit share diverge.
But have you talked to the people at the accelerator yet? I don't know which accelerator it is, but if it's anything like I/O ventures, Techstars or YC, I'm sure that Paul, Brad or Paul has meaningful advice for you. In fact, that's where I would turn the second I realized my cofounder is going to quit.
The article is very biased opinion indeed.
PHP, JavaScript, SQL, Java and Perl? Wow. Party like it's 1999.
Honestly, I don't see DevOps doing JavaScript. I am no aware of any DevOps tools based on JavaScript and server-side JavaScript movement is only beginning. PHP, Perl, SQL, Java are a dead waste of time.
Major DevOps tools such as Chef, Capistrano, Fog, Puppet, are based on Ruby. Systems are written in C and system control utilities are all Shell.
A DevOps guy needs to know Ruby or Python (pick one), Shell and C. Erlang and JavaScript would probably be next on the list.
>The fact it requires any response on my part, minimal or not, is absurd and unacceptable.

Cookies and ad-based tracking have been around for years. I find characterizing that behavior as "evil" is patently absurd.

So no, I don't "get" that. I don't see what you're so up in arms about.
This is how and, more importantly, why I learned to program. My office uses a horribly unintuitive centralized database from which employees 'pull reports' to prove to supervisors the work they've done.

One of the guys in the office was maintaining a monthly report that involved him burning 3 hours a week pulling and compiling reports into a needlessly complex Excel spreadsheet. I offered to help out, and wrote an Excel macro that did the job for him.

From there, I figured 'hell, why should everyone have to spend time doing this?' So I downloaded a copy of VB and learned enough of it to turn the Excel macro into a simple deployable application that turned an absolute waste of manpower into an easy-to-use desktop app.

In hindsight, a native application wasn't the best way to do it. Our office has a strictly controlled internet/intranet policy, and the people maintaining the database are likely too busy doing just that — maintenance — to build a more robust data reporting system. That might be the beauty of learning on your own, you quickly gain insight into how things should and could work.

It wasn't his point, but simonw is right: building things IS fun. I got started and I haven't looked back.
Non listed stuff (its funny that the ssh "supertrick" comes up every week on HN, i guess i should copy past this post):

* the other advantage is "not forwarding the agent" which is more secure

* using control socket can be annoying because of the way it closes / is opened in certain conditions

* ssh -W saves a nc command

* the % hack does not work in all conditions, only for simple constructs

It would be nice to have this stuff just work native in SSH to avoid all the issues, and more reliable control socket release.

i've been using a script adding the entries to .ssh/config for many years and enable control socket manually when i know i want it, but all this is quite cumbersome, even if its still better and less annoying than ssh -A.
Thanks for your detailed thoughts.

Peer review is already evolving. Increasingly academics discover their papers via search engines (Google, Google Scholar), and social platforms (blogs, email, arXiv, Academia.edu, Twitter). The usage of these channels as discovery channels for research shows that the metrics that drive those channels are doing a good job at expert curation - i.e. surfacing good content.

On Google Scholar, it's citation counts that drive the ranking, and therefore the discovery process. This is the "crowd review" process I talked about in the post. With social platforms, it's recommendations from friends and colleagues that drive the discovery process. This is the "social review" process I talked about in the post.

In the pre-web days, people used to walk down to their libraries to read the latest edition from a particular journal. In those days, the journals did drive a lot of the discovery process. Nowadays, pretty much all discovery of research papers happens on the web, and most of the discovery is via channels such as search, and recommendations from colleagues over social & communication platforms.

You are right to think about the incentive systems that drive different kinds of peer review. In the case of the social review process, you want to share good recommendations with your friends, not bad ones (this is why Twitter and Facebook work as discovery channels). In the case of the crowd review process, you want to cite good works that your work genuinely built on, not bad work.
I haven't viewed the KA videos yet, although I'm looking into them. So, while not versed in the math instructional set du jour at the moment, I have a vested interest in the subject -- my kids in 5th grade.

Several parents I know (and respect) have substituted the math instruction their kids are receiving from local schools to using the Khan Academy. While I would never throw my kids into any program without understanding it well ahead of time, I'm reasonably confident that KA would be a helpful addition to my kids' math instruction.

I don't claim to understand the best methods for learning math (or teaching it), but for my kids I follow simple results-based assessment with the eye test: do they understand problem sets, can they use math as a tool, are they confident when asked to do math-based exercises, etc. And, yes, do they score well when taking exams. In other words, while I care about the means...I'm really interested in the end.

In reading this article, I find someone critical of the KA approach on spurious grounds (very little in this critique is based on fact). That the original author also has a service that sells into the current education system that KA obviously threatens makes the argument that much weaker. I question the motivations of the author, especially with a comment like this:

"Of course, fans of Khan Academy — which, to be fair, includes many teachers, parents and administrators — say that their students are engaged and performing better than ever. Still, this may be a false sense of security."

Hmmm, where have I heard this pitch before? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt
> The material at Penn State is 99% the same as MIT's

As someone who attended Penn State (but not MIT), I would have to say that's some extremely wishful thinking. And even if the material is 100% identical, the way it's taught certainly isn't. The fact that the latter is far more important is undeniable. After all, why bother with a university at all when we could all purchase the same material (textbooks) on Amazon.com?

You also seem to ignore the fact that many tech companies are now far more interested in your personal website/portfolio and GitHub page than the degree listed on your resume. Even if you find a potential employer who values an expensive piece of paper more than your actual ability, would your really want to work for them anyway?
I recently implemented a library for http://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/EventSourcing.html . I also just wanted to get more practice. Go channels match perfectly for this topic.
The new "go" command is a great step forward for rapid development. TDD in seconds.
" because it was not technology related, at all. The only link it had to anything technology related was where the author worked."

I find articles like this interesting, regardless of the fact that they may be far from purely technical. I happen to think that technology is a means, not an end. Finding different perspectives on problems or circumstances that I may not have been exposed to allows me to better weigh pro's and con's of an issue and think of how technology could help solve/change/improve things.
Making Bootstrap examples using Sinatra-Haml-Bootstrap
It is true that Amazon is attempting to be a one stop shop for all merchandises physical and digital. However that goal have made Amazon's web front crowded and convoluted.

If Amazon were to extend their product models to better express the "qualities" of the products, and extend their search and recommendations for products, I believe their web storefront can easily double or triple in sales.
This is something I wish universities would provide: open enrollment for adults without the cookie-cutter bureaucratic undergraduate track and the 18-year-old-focused high-bar on-rails admissions process.

The "continuing education" programs that do exist are generally stunted and poor.

Would it be so terrible if I spent 10 years gradually taking classes in engineering and sciences, perhaps never earning a degree? Why is college something you do only once, when you're arguably too young to genuinely appreciate it or even know what you want?

This is why I find Khan Academy to be so fascinating.
Besides being able to be sexist, you were also allowed to treat women as women, something you have to bypass a certain byzantine PC-code to be able to do today.

Ah yes, the curse of the modern straight male. It's like a child who had all the toys and now is told they have to share. Men's Rights groups tend to think that things are crazy now, you can't treat a woman like a woman! You have to treat them as an equal! Madness!
You are borderline to the false dichotomy. Of course "well-behaved doesn't equate to better", (except if all other things are being equal), but having well-behaved children don't preclude them from being creative and so over. Agitated is not the synonymous of entrepreneurial!
The author dismisses Sal's videos as "ineffective instruction":

"This paint-by-numbers method of instruction emphasizes procedures — how to do math — but ignores the conceptual understanding that’s central to authentic learning: what math means."

This comment by the author is enraging. It is great to be able to understand things abstractly and use conceptual understanding to apply knowledge, but this rarely comes first.

- No one understands the nuances and implications of language and communicates with a high -level of skill without first mastering the basic mechanics of their native tongue.

- No one perceives a chessboards as a whole system and identifies critical components until they've mastered the basic movement of pieces and trained basic tactics.

- No one programs complex applications without first mastering basic programming constructs like loops and conditionals.

The fact is that understanding math takes work, and the real reason students perform poorly is that they're not interested in doing the work. This isn't a bad thing. Forcing children to be detained in all day in an oppressive setting is a bad thing. Actively stamping out imagination and then expecting people to want to learn is a ridiculous thing.

Sal's contribution to education is remarkable because he is empowering learners, rather than threatening them. Schools threaten students with poor grades and the implication that those poor grades will lead to an unfulfilling life. This fear-mongering stifles creative growth and doesn't mix well with a population that harbors an extreme sense of entitlement.

Not everyone is going to care about math for math's sake, but empowering resources like the Khan Academy are heroes in the uphill battle of encouraging intellectual curiosity. To call out Khan Academy as "the most dangerous phenomenon in education today" seems like a reactionary statement rooted in the author's self-interest and fear.
And? So? Ages ago, 9-year olds went to school and nothing happened to them, except when it did, but then they wouldn't write about their own romanticized experiences in a newspaper, so nobody cares about them.

You have some mental model where 9-yo going to school were ...commonly harmed and we only get to learn about the few that both survived and romanticized their experiences?!! Nothing of the sort happened --it's just the modern safety paranoia speaking.

First, yes, a FEW kids got harmed, just as a FEW kids get harmed today too. Even adults get harmed. Shit happens. That doesn't mean that harm was something more widespread or it was more prevalent that it is today. Are you that crazy to suggest that parents of the fifties let their kids walk to school (and all around) DESPITE KNOWING that they will get frequently harmed? It is precisely because nothing of the sort happened 99.9999999% of the time that they did so. And this is exactly why Europeans in most EU countries, Africans, Asians and Latin Americans, still allow their kids to do exactly the same.

No, despite CSI, FOX News, etc, the world is not hostile, every black/latino/asian person is not a murderer, every guy in the park is not a pedophile with a van, and serial killers are not a dime a dozen. (Actually, the reports say they are like tops 30-50 active in the US at a time, so more like 1 in 10,000,000).

And it's not like this is something that happened in ancient history. Fifties is not exactly ages ago, not to mention that this happened way up until the seventies / early eighties. It's just that most post 70's american parents just don't know when to stop with their spoiled and overly protected brats --which is what TFA is all about.

Also, "Disrespect was not tolerated. Neither was whining." is begging for "unless the one disrespectful/whining was the parent, then it was okay".

Even if we fathom your idea of the "disrespectful/whining" parent, that is not an excuse for tolerating the case of disrespectful/whining kids. That would be a sure-fire to produce EVEN MORE disrespectful/whining adults when those kids grow up. People you wouldn't look forward to having social/professional interactions with...
"Bad guys" can just as easily abuse an insecure world.
I think the biggest difference from traditional education is that Khan Academy is making the focus-on-the-individual approach scale to an arbitrary number of people.
Show HN: Pinterest for Hacker News
Agreed. I was really hoping that the document would get into some best practices around the structure of the JSON objects themselves, particularly in regards to self-documenting, such as:

1. Requiring that the root of the application or domain contain metadata regarding the resources available to the JSON service.

2. Providing a common documentation and structure for nested resources, including perhaps counts and a reference URI for accessing the nested resource, along with an alternate scheme when nested resources are embedded in the resource itself.

3. Documenting how identifiers and references to other resources are included in a JSON object.

4. A standard structure for how collections should be queried (how to reference fields, specify operators, provide values, etc.)

These sorts of concerns are the things in which there's tons of variation and lots of disagreement on standardization. Using HTTP verbs to describe operations in JSON services is well understood and doesn't require much in the way of standardization.
> I found this amount of shared lifestyle/outside-interests to be unique among places I've worked. I'm certain we weren't hired because of these interests, but it seems to have worked out that we share a lot of them.

Well there you go then.

I can't say for sure, but I'm going to ask you to consider a possibility: either consciously or not, you have a hiring process that filters for "people like me". For instance, if your team was interviewing a fat person, somewhere in the interview process either you or the candidate would get a strong sense that they wouldn't "fit in" or they wouldn't be a good "cultural fit".

It's no skin off my back whether you hire fat/unoutdoorsy/introverted people or not, unless I'm applying to work at your shop, but it seems like you're deliberately creating a rigid monoculture, and rigid monocultures are prone to groupthink. You're doing everything you can to squash diversity (not in the "women and non-white people" sense, but in the "people who genuinely think differently" sense). If you do that enough, then even the people you have will suppress any "heretical" thoughts they might have. Maybe the gains in cohesion are worth it for you, maybe not; I have no way to tell. But it frightens me a little when places deliberately design themselves to induce groupthink.
Since mom didn't work, she had time to stay home and cook

Mothers working? Why that would be child abuse. A mother should stay in the home and look after her children. Also, we can't have them taking jobs away from men!
Am I the only one that finds it ironic that TechCrunch is writing about peer review?
Yeah fitbit is great. If you follow a calorie counting diet it helps you by adjusting the allowed amount of calories based on how much you move. It is also an amazing motivator to get off your butt.
I would swear that it did when I read it...
Microsoft Removes Start Menu, Button from Windows 8
I think mankind should treat aging as the biggest threat it faces, and pour our every last resource into delivering us from its tyranny. It's like we all have this really slow and really insidious fatal disease (aging) and no one wants to admit that it's beatable.

The downside to immortality is that the wealthy would just keep getting wealthier (since building wealth is at least partly a function of having wealth and having experience accumulating wealth) until eventually they are more important than governments. And the great War of 2188 will be of the nation of Zuckerberg vs the nation of the United States of Buffett, winner gets Earth, loser is expelled to roam space for all time.

Ok, I should drink less coffee. :)
> Get enough points, proceed to the next grade.

That would improve on the current system, which passes failing students along as well, right up until they hit university and find out they need a few years of remedial classes.
> I think we need to define what "qualified" for a job means.

Yes, hiring is imperfect. I don't see how we can improve it by having uninvested bureaucrats introduce nationalistic biases into the process.

> The problem is companies are too cheap to tap into the talent that exists here.

Not seeing it. The companies that pay the most and hire the best people regardless of nationality bring in as many foreigners as anyone else.

> Bringing in talent from overseas when there are workers here that can do the job (with some training) is in fact a net-negative for the country as a whole. It's not a swap: were not sending away the "unqualified" American, the system still has to support him somehow.

You're acting like "training" has no cost and no risk. You think it's better to take the risk of trying to "train" someone, rather than hire someone who already knows what he's doing? So companies should spend more money and hire less qualified candidates--out of nationalism?

> Now he'll either have a lower paying job or in the case of the story in the article

Good! Then he still has a job and a chance to contribute to the economy, and so does the immigrant. Everyone wins. If he wants a higher paying job, he can work to earn the qualifications for it, just like the immigrant did.

> Their tax dollars has supported these companies, created environments where they can flourish, created a healthy workforce that allowed the company to grow, etc. The nations workers deserve the benefit of their "investment".

Immigrants pay taxes, immigrants provide a healthy workforce, and immigrants provide demand just as much as native-born workers.

> Yeah it is? As a citizen, I'm certainly more responsible for the wealth of this country than a non-citizen chosen at random.

We're not choosing at random, though. As the rhetorical employer, I'm choosing between a better engineer who happens to be from India, and a worse engineer who I'll have to try and "train", because he hasn't bothered to put in the same work as the Indian to gain the qualifications ahead of time.

Are you working to create wealth in this country? Then you're responsible for the wealth of this country. The color of passport is as irrelevant as the color of your skin. And when you're hiring people, hiring the best qualified worker who can produce the most with your company means that whoever you hire will be the one contributing the most possible to the wealth of your company and hence the wealth of your country.
3 Steps to Customer Discovery Before Your Product Is Clearly Defined
Yeah, my wife is a physicist and is very excited about this trend.
I noticed the same thing, especially when I just had the firing range headphones. However whenever paired, or even alone did help some. It turned the noise around me into more of Peanut's teacher sound (wawawaan).

Earbuds and white noise does seem to help. I've found that binaural beats help block the noise and increase my focus.
Disclaimer: I do not want to steal the author's page views, but I could hardly read this article, due to the white shadow in the Text. Here is a more readable view: http://rdit.in/5c
This is just as poor of an attitude as the people who only care about the degree. Like anything else a potential employee has done, a degree (especially from a good school) adds something that you can't capture using any other metric.
Khan Academy is a revolution in how lessons are delivered, not necessarily the content of the lessons themselves.

The author wants to take learn-math-by-rote to task, and that's fine, but that argument is no more specific to Khan Academy than any other math instruction.

Singling out Khan Academy is link-baiting. It's like if I were to bash the Nissan Leaf for not having the latest in, I don't know, tire technology or something. It would be a true statement, but the Leaf is notable for being an all-electric vehicle, and what I'm talking about is something completely orthogonal to what makes the Leaf noteworthy.
"the goal is to employ teachers and education of students is a welcome-but-unnecessary industrial byproduct"

For an example of this -- look at the amount of times the Student-to-Teacher ratio is brought up. Which is such an interesting statistic because it implies that time with a terrible teacher is preferable to having the good teachers handle a few more students.