skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure it's something Facebook is necessarily pushing. I think it's just businesses squeezing e-commerce pages into Facebook page tabs.

I think a lot of folks still don't notice the custom page tabs. They "like" something and they see the items that get dumped into their stream as a result or they occasionally go to the "wall" for that thing, and just don't see the links in the sidebar to the custom pages.

Even if the company sets it as the default tab for their page, once the user has "liked" the page, the default changes to the wall.

I think it's because Facebook isn't officially enabling and supporting e-commerce that it's not working out well.
I can't find any indication that this new release supports 3D, did I miss something?
>Who says people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value?

Professional guilds - legal bars, medical boards, engineering, academia - you're pretty much excluded from all those fields lacking a formal degree accepted by the mentioned institutions, even tough you can have the required skills and even experience (as a skilled immigrant for eg., you can even have a degree from a non-accredited/foreign education institution). The monopolistic nature of this system is nicely illustrated by the "diploma mills" that allow people to get hired for the job requiring a diploma without completing the education program, perform their jobs successfully for considerable amount of time and then when/if discovered "cheating" get fired - without actually failing to do their job at any point, just because they don't have the degree. Granted this is logical from the employers point of view as the legal liability is huge but that's the result of the system.

>I think it's ironic that the OP used a computer and the internet to publish his propagandist rant; an action that would've been impossible without all the academic research into computing and networking systems in the last few decades. I'd argue that the economic fallout of that research alone has more than paid back whatever money the US government has invested in universities.

I'd argue that you don't consider the opportunity cost and the crowding out of R&D investment in that assertion and implied that without public funding the academic work wouldn't be done. Here's a different view of that argument :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_PVI6V6o-4 , also he has a book on topic.
I think you nailed it with 3. A constantly changing UI makes people hesitant to submit their credit cards. Whereas Amazon has looked pretty much the same for twenty years.
If macros are marked as different to functions at the callsite, then do they need to be marked different at the definition site? Most functions return a non-Expr value, but could return a Expr if the program's job is manipulating them. Most macros return a Expr, but could return a literal for insertion into the code.

So I'm wondering does a programming language which marks macro expansions different to function calls (as Julia does with the @ prefix) really need to distinguish functions from macros in the definition (as Julia does with the 'function' and 'macro' keywords) ?
Gah! I didn't know Clint Mansell did the Moon OST. Must acquire. I have been listening for The Fountain soundtrack (by Mansell) while programming - and I love it. I also just discovered he did the Pi soundtrack.

Other OST picks: Tron (and Tron Reconfigured) and Nick Cave / Warren Ellis soundtracks - particularly The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
First, where I live (India), libraries are provided by the private sector. So clearly market forces can provided libraries.

Second, how much crime is prevented by libraries? Is this the cheapest way to prevent crime? Or would it be cheaper to devote the money to a few more beat cops?
The article is, at best, heavy on the hyperbole and at worst factually wrong. The first sentence is:

"So, California is cutting library funding instead of, you know, anything else."

The state budget has forced cuts in many departments. We're talking a $12 million cut to libraries. Higher education has been cut hundreds of millions of dollars.

The article then goes on to claim that higher education serve poor people "at best, tend to do this indirectly, if at all." The next sentence says "Most university students and professors are already middle class or higher." If not all university students are middle class or higher then it is benefitting lower class students. Why say "if at all" when the next sentence implies that some poor people are helped? Does the author want professors to be poor? Of course most professors are middle class or higher. I expect all of them to be.

Then there is this statement: "The primary purpose of universities, granting credentials, is by definition exclusionary." This sentence, together with the sentence before it, suggests the author thinks this is a bad thing. Some students fail out of engineering. This is a good thing because not everyone is cut out for this type of work.

Libraries should be open for everyone. Universities should not grant degrees to everyone. The functions of libraries and universities are disparate. It's fine to think one is more important than the other. It's sloppy to not take into consideration the differences in focus between the two entities.
Richard Feynman Makes a Wager
Don't listen to the haters. We (me, my wife, my family) are all using VLC and don't care about anything else.

It can open all media files we care until today.

It displays subtitles correctly.

It enhances the sound of some media files that would otherwise have lower volume level when played on Windows Media Player.

It is cross-platform: we use it on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Did I tell you that people around me are happy users (regardless the UI tweak?) because it just works with minimum effort to install?

Keep the very good work.
>Most university departments are rife with ideology and are hostile to conflicting views.

>I'm going to ignore this bit which sounds suspiciously like right-wing propaganda.

You don't like this part of the argument, so instead of refuting it you declare it "propaganda" and move on?

Look at the campaign contribution numbers of university professors and tell me that they aren't incredibly one sided.

I don't think you'll find anyone who will seriously argue with the premise that there are far more left leaning than right leaning professors.

Anecdote: When I was in college, I was much more conservative than I am now. I experienced outright disdain for my relatively moderate political beliefs from the majority of my professors and my peers; so much so that after a year or two I got tired of it and just learned to shut up.
Ask HN: Is Google having problems?
Lately, I have noticed Google being terribly slow. Gmail, Docs, etc. does not load properly. And when it loads, I have problems attaching files.

Today, I opened up Stackoverflow and I got this:
"Stack Overflow requires external JavaScript from another domain, which is blocked or failed to load."

Checked in firebug and noticed this: http://doqdoq.com/U_Vfi/
Skrittle Screen Flow [video]
Comeon, they aren't losing e-commerce. They never had it to begin with.

One massive problem is obvious: from the top down, Zuckerberg knows absolutely nothing about retail, fashion, and so on. They can't engineer their way out of not understanding the business.
Love the convenience of RightSignature. Makes signing my contacts easy to do anywhere.
If you could create good software engineers without teaching CS, someone would be getting rich doing that. There are many people who know CS and are not good software engineers, but I have never met a good software engineer who didn't know CS.
Math was written on paper long before there were computers. As a result, the use of infix notation was an act of necessity not a calculated decision. Now that we have computers and keyboards we should use prefix notation.
Why Glenn Kelman is wrong: A defense of networking
One town in the UK rebranded their Libraries to "Idea Stores" http://www.ideastore.co.uk/
In 0-based indexing, n % length is a value inside the range.
I think that would be a simple solution. Those bottom corners are just important!
If you provide a service people wants, they will pay. Is it really that surprising?
Who wants to shut down free online Stanford CSE classes?
I would sure like to know...
Why would I go to Facebook to interact with a store when I can go to, you know, the store's site to interact with the store?

Facebook could, I imagine, be a powerful online store for people who don't otherwise have storefronts, but people who think I'm going to go to FB to shop online at Macy's are probably the same people who thought I'd go to Second Life to shop online at Macy's.
Yes. Right now we are looking at installing an affiliate plugin on a Magento site with Varnish caching. Instead of inventing a new Magento/Varnish plugin, we are planning to use a javascript-driven solution.
As expected, it doesn't support your absolute conclusion (that the poor don't work).

You clearly didn't read even the first paragraph, which shows that just under 80% of the poor don't work (by choice). You can even read further and discover that a big chunk of the working 20% work only part time (also by choice).

In America, we obsess over separating the virtuous from non-virtuous poor...

No, we don't. We throw money and services wantonly at anyone who wants them.

If we really wanted to target the virtuous poor, we'd cut all welfare programs and replace them with a guaranteed low paying job. It's perfectly targeted, since by showing and working a poor person proves their virtue.

If you want to argue that we should give money to people who refuse to work so they can buy alcohol, crack cocaine and satellite TV, be my guest. I just refuse to describe such people as "struggling" or "barely surviving".
I need to buy shoes on Facebook like I need to share photos with other shoppers at the mall.
Facebook can merge with Pinterest in a 50/50 merger, then it can justify the 100B valuation!
Whitney Houston remembered by fellow stars at her funeral
Voir dire will be used to make sure nobody who's ever downloaded anything sits on the jury, just as with Thomas-Rasset.
U.S. Box Office Sales Are Not Affected by BitTorrent Piracy At All
My understanding is that Castro is quite anti-religious just like any other communist leader (confirmed by Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Cuba). Hitler was in conflict with Christian churches as well since he was essentially building his own religion and did not want competition.
I was born in a country where religion was systematically mocked and religious people had to hide their beliefs. Yet somehow getting rid of the religion did not make people any nicer. I am glad that it is not the case in ex-SU anymore. Tolerance and letting people be whatever they want to be is the way to build a stable society. In the US it may seem like many fanatics are religious, but having seen many examples of the opposite I do not think fanaticism and religion are strongly correlated.
VLC can use libass also for subtitles. I don't believe this is the default way it's shipped in most linux distros however.

Once it's added in and the plugin is enabled however It does do it just as well as mplayer. This is one of the reasons that I like gentoo on my desktop. It makes getting some of these things nearly trivial once setup.
I didn't mean you personally so much as angels and VCs in general. But sure, given how much the funding environment is changing I can't imagine that it would hurt to experience what it's currently like even if you've been through it in the past.

Of course I'm speaking here as a founder who has never raised any funding, so everything I say on the topic is deserving of multiple grains of salt.
Professional guilds - legal bars, medical boards, engineering, geology, academia - you're pretty much excluded from all those fields lacking a formal degree accepted by the mentioned institutions, even tough you can have the experience (or even a degree from a non-accredited/foreign education institution).

I think you're being generous to the author here. He said "people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value" which is different from your claim that you can't do some things of value that without a degree.

In any case, none of this is an indictment of the university itself. While I agree that it's possible that some of these professions might be better served with looser guidelines, I don't see how the author's idea of cutting university funding will improve this situation.

I'd argue that you don't consider the opportunity cost and the crowding out of R&D investment in that assertion.

I'm not sure what you mean by "crowding out of R&D investment". If you're suggesting that the federal grant money would've been better spent on private entities doing research, isn't that what NSF and co. are already doing when they fund, say, professors at the likes of Princeton and Harvard?

I'm not disagreeing with this statement of yours, but I hope you realize that you're arguing a much weaker and better articulated position than the OP. If the OP is suggesting that we re-examine how federal grant money is allocated, I would consider that a defensible position. But he's clearly not saying that and has chosen instead to launch a broadside against the university institution and seems to have no evidence backing up his assertions.
This is the problem with Facebook commerce so far - most retailers are simply offering their entire catalog up for sale via FB without any curation or exclusivity. Consumers don't want to browse through thousands of products via FB; but there still exists the opportunity for success through curated content. Brands need to create reason for consumers to shop via Facebook and most brands aren't doing that (yet).
People interested in other STEM fields shouldn't be forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars and four years to gain access to this knowledge.

They don't. The vast majority of my physics knowledge was gained for a few hundred bucks, most of it going to whoever publishes $MAJOR_PHYSICS_TOPIC, by Landau and Lifshitz.

What I paid $30-40k for was certification that I had this knowledge.

We really need to separate certification/credentialing from education. This is the main thing that will allow innovation in education - people need to buy the credential, and since it's bundled with education, they have no choice but to buy unnecessary education.
I know that.

In fact, I expect that the first four minutes would be spent defining most of the words in that paragraph.

And thats assuming you have someone who "clicks" on it the first time around. If they don't, it's going to take a while. Part of the problem is that as you put it, most people don't care. And it's just too costly (in all senses of the word) to really educate people about "computer stuff". This is why we've been advocating user education for years and it hasn't worked.

So we say that we can't teach users not to shoot themselves in the foot. Cool. What are our other options? We can try to make it impossible for users to shoot themselves in the foot. But what we've found is that users ignore warnings. If you make the security restrictions too strict, users can't figure out how to evade them and deem the machine broken. If you make them too easy to circumvent, users go ahead and shoot themselves anyway. If you use a trusted computing architecture, user freedom is lost in such a way that it'd be better for people to be shooting themselves.

If you can't stop people from losing a limb, and you can't tell them how not to do so, what is the world to do?

EDIT: The only thing I can think of is to make computer education cheaper. And I don't mean in the monetary sense, I mean the mental sense. We need to find some way to get more people to care about computers, or make the concepts easier to teach, or make the materials easier to access, or make humans smarter, or something.

This is a problem I spend mental computer time on daily trying to solve. No answers present themselves. I would actually love for someone to show me the silver bullet, or even a box of lead ones. (LINK: http://bhorowitz.com/2011/10/26/lead-bullets/)

EDIT_2: And just for clarification, I'm focusing on all aspects of computing here, not just security or usability or what have you.
This amazon review caused me to buy this book (Game Theory 101)
What is the meaning of source code?
Also, it's not a zero-sum game. Granting certifications to a few doesn't improve their prospects at the expense of others.

Yes it does. Please learn about signalling.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)

If you want to argue that college is about human capital creation rather than signalling, be my guest. But insofar as college is signalling, it directly redistributes wealth from those without the signal to those with it.
In emacs I represent everything in Lisp and I use separate color schemes for SXML documents and code. This effectively allows me to distinguish between these different classes of data. Furthermore, emacs has different sets of functionality for different types of data, so I feel that I have all the features you mentioned already.
> Next time you think of buying a book, seriously check out your local library system.

I agree, but there are something like 250,000[1] books published each year.

At just $5[2] per book that's $1,250,000 just to buy each year's worth of books, never mind the staff to do the buying and unpacking and cataloguing and stocking and lending etc etc.

[1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_per...) (but go careful because who knows where the wikipedia numbers come from)

[2] A ridiculously low figure. Here's some UK data; not sure where it comes from. (http://www.holtjackson.co.uk/cgi-perl/web_avg_book_price.pl)
Zuldi - Looking for a Developer
Zuldi is a startup developing a next generation self-ordering and payment processing platform for Mobile and Mobile Tablets in Restaurants and Nightclubs. Swipe your credit card on the device (PayAnywhere) and get SMS or Email'ed the receipt.

Why we're a good team for you: My co-founder Patrick and I have got the business side of things down. We have gotten excellent feedback pitching the company at DC Entrepreneurship Week. We have been accepted to Startup Chile (startupchile.org) granting us $40k. We have been in talks with restaurants and nightclubs who are on board and prepared to run a Zuldi beta.

We aren't just 2 business bums looking to bring on a developer. Patrick and I (Hartej) have gone through Zed Shaw's Learn Python the Hard Way, Python Osmosis, and are teaching ourselves how to code although we aren't anywhere close to being pros.

Looking for a developer with knowledge of iOS, HTML5, Java Script, SQL, how to utilize jquery, knowledge of server side language such as php, c#, java, and good object oriented java script.
Currently the prototype is being built solely in iOS.

Also, to be clear: We are NOT looking for someone who has a full-time job / freelance gigs, and wants to spend 10 hours a week on this with me as a cofounder. We are fully committed to this and want someone who is able to fully commit to it as well.

Why is this a great opportunity?: - We are offering equity in the company (terms to be discussed) - A chance to take a project and help mold it into a success - Proven to obtain funding and if necessary will secure more funding. Who know's, 6 months from now we'll be sippin on drinks with Jay-Z at the 40/40 club as he utilizes Zuldi for bottle service (An actual possibility)

Interested in talking more?? Contact me at hartej@zuldi.com and let's get the dialogue started.

http://angel.co/s/7qTUEM
Exactly. There's a lot good about this post but this business of "finding what you love" is meaningless. There is no one thing you love. Just like there is no Mr/Mrs Right. The good advice in this blog is that the secret to succeeding at something is to stop analyzing why you're failing and do it _as if_ you love it, as if you're doing it because you love it. That also happens to be the secret to a good relationship.
Agreed. I recently went to the Boston Public Library to get a specific book that was supposed to be on the shelf. I couldn't find it so a librarian put in a request to have it found and held for me. She noticed that it had been checked out 6 times in the last year, which she said was a lot, and therefore if it couldn't be found they'd make sure to order another copy. (It was http://beinggeek.com/, and it eventually turned up.)
I recently went to the Boston Public Library to get a specific book that was supposed to be on the shelf. I couldn't find it so a librarian put in a request to have it found and held for me. She noticed that it had been checked out 6 times in the last year, which she said was a lot, and therefore if it couldn't be found they'd make sure to order another copy. (It was http://beinggeek.com/, and it eventually turned up.)
Ask HN: Different Types of Productivity
Is it better to intensely productive in bursts, or mildly productive consistently?

I'm wondering if one way is better than the other. In my case, I'm able to be very productive for a few days, but then I usually have a slump where I get bored easily and find it hard to focus (lasts a day or two). Some people are more consistently productive, but probably not as intensely so. I'm guessing it's not healthy to always be 100% productive.

If it's the case that one is better than the other, is it possible to shift your productivity habit? How might you do so?
That is a very good point. Yeah, I completely agree with you that the easy access to such high sums of loan money for students has led to the high inflation of college prices, but we don't need anything to raise those rates even higher.
I am familiar with that theme - thanx! I am not the guy who initiated the idea - so the decision in this case is not in my hands really.
I'm interested in this for ninjablocks, too - I think we're currently bundling a small number of resources (SMSes etc) with each account, but then perhaps more fine-grained tracking.
There is a decent market.

While its not our core business, we host content APIS for some large publishers. Because we're ingesting their content anyway (content syndication is our main business) and we already have a robust API, we've productized it to provide APIs as a service back to our content providers.

I think content and ecommerce APIs are where you will see the most traction.
May Better Technology Really Mean Better Medicine?
It could be a bit smoother, though. When you launch Java you just have to click twice (once to install, a second time to accept the terms), wait a few seconds until it downloads and installs, and you are done. Everyone can do that, it’s smooth and it’s nearly impossible to go wrong.

When you start X11 you get a similar dialog, but it currently sends you to a website where you have to download stuff. That’s not the same.

It’s no big deal, really, but it could be smoother.
Rothbard:

"The parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights. The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing so. But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die."

See http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics/fourteen.asp

Yeah, pretty disgusting.
Our descent into fascism continues.
I've seen quite a few that execute the coffee shop idea nicely!

The main branch of the Ottawa Public Library has a nice little coffee/food shop in the middle of its main floor.

I've also visited two public libraries in smaller cities north of Toronto recently, and they also have similar shops. I think it is a great idea, as I will sometimes go to the library to work for the day and don't even have to leave the building for lunch.