skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great points. I'm definitely interested in allowing students to provide more in-depth feedback.

Participation is a much trickier issue. In the classes that I tested in about 40 - 60% of the students actually used it. I was thinking of weighting the confusion 'votes' based on 'active' users.

I'm hoping that through feedback form professors I'll be able to add features that make it more worth while for students.
Weebly Adds Slick iOS App To Its Quietly Huge Web Site Creation Business
This is where I show my complete lack of understanding about Social Media, but really, what is the point of a 'like' button?

The web is built on URLs. If you like something and want to share it with people, send them a URL. That's what they're for.
Coping with consumerisation: an approach to setting sensible policies
L’arme absolue
Since this is Union Law, and according to the treaties, a party in Poland could escalate such a copyright case to the ECJ, which could then overrule any Polish higher court. The thing is that the ECJ requires (or advices) Poland courts to comply to its decisions, but cannot actually enforce them, which is totally up to the country. So if Poland decided to go on its own on this, theoretically it could since the EU states are sovereign, but in practical terms, and this is a really fuzzy divide, Poland would not do it if it wants to remain a politically "healthy" member of the EU.
CloudFlare is built on nginx at the front end. When nginx supports SPDY (soon!) we'll being rolling it out. We've been in very close contact with the nginx guys to make sure that SPDY happens.
I think there's some terminology confusion. You probably think of the actual generation of a binary-executable as "compiling the code," but that's not really accurate. Rather, the entire process of source code to machine-executable is "compiling." But there are many steps inbetween, many phases of the compiler, and even if you stop at any one of those steps, you've still "compiled" the code. I know that the compilation phases of gcc roughly go like this:

1. Lexing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_analysis

2. Parsing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsing This is where you would do static analysis on the high level language. [edited because zeugma's comment made we realize it was ambiguous which kind of static analysis I meant]

3. High-level (C, C++, etc.) source is transformed to a three-address intermediate representation called Gimple: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/GIMPLE.html This phase exists for two reasons. One, gcc support many languages, so all of those high-level languages are translated to a single representation. That way they can all share the same optimization and code generation back-end. "Three address" languages are kind of like a simplified version of assembly, but it's completely machine agnostic.

4. Various optimization passes are performed on the architecture agnostic intermediate representation (which, again, in gcc is Gimple). These are optimizations that have nothing to do with the target machine. Many modern compilers transform the code into SSA form (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_single_assignment_form) to enable other optimizations.

5. The optimized intermediate representation gets transformed into the assembly language for the target architecture. Architecture specific optimizations will typically happen at this phase.

6. The assembly language for the particular architecture is passed to an assembler for that architecture, which does the job of producing an actual binary-executable. gcc calls as, which means that what you probably think of as "compiling" isn't even done by gcc itself!

In theory, you could ask a compiler to stop and produce output at any one of those phases. In practice, I'm not sure how many of these phases you can ask gcc to stop at. I know, for example, that if you pass -S to gcc, it will stop at the end of step 5, and you can see the assembly it produces for the high-level source you give it. I'm not sure about stopping earlier.

Now. Back to your actual questions. No, you can't install the "static analyzer," because it is deeply integrated into the compiler - it's part of phase 2 from above. You may be able to ask gcc to stop after it produces Gimple, which would allow you to take advantage of its static analysis. But, as this article mentions, that means you're married to the Gimple format for doing all further work with the program.
About damn time, i've been waiting for this for ages. I abandoned MP3's when i signed up for spotify years ago. I like using my iPad and my bluetooth speakers as a stereo system with a decent remote control so having a proper interface now makes the experience much better.

Well done spotify! Now go sort out the record labels that dont like streaming so i have a full library.
There are 3 cars, none of them stealable though :(
BlackBerry 10, webOS and the platform predicament
The central topic of Buddhism is psychology, understanding that most of the reasons that life is painful are within ourselves.

It's not a religion. It doesn't describe a god, nor does it preclude one. It isn't even a philosophy, because it doesn't tell you what you should or shouldn't do.

It really is psychology. And as an old programmer from way back, who has always been cynical about life and laughed at the hypocrisy and dogma in religion, I can say straight up that Buddhism is the most intelligent thing I have ever encountered.
I completely agree, and wrote an article on this while I was frustrated with a node.js project at work that was trying to throw node, backbone, require, mustache, mocha, and dynamoDB.

http://rakeroutes.com/blog/the-problem-with-completely-clien...
What kind of graphics card you got?
Jessica Alba and the Rise of Startups as Charity
I would be surprised if such a pledge would be legally binding.

What section of law does it fall under? Contract? Can you sign a contract with "the general public"?
The folks working on it are making pretty good progress and took in some donation money early in its existence.
Can you elaborate? I don't remember the plot too clearly, but I count "Speaker for the Dead" as one of the books responsible for making me an atheist, as opposed to not having an opinion on the subject.
Prove it:

What is node equivalent of: "rails g resource User email:string password:string"? AFAIK there is none. At least not one that would take care of migrations, validation, security, logic and views.

And if I want to use postgres? Sure, there's a npm package. But it's for queries, I still need to define models and validation manually.

....
Are you willing to pay 23%[1] more for the convenience of not having to open a window? Because Apple's 30% cut introduces a new cost into the system. Dunno about you, but I'll almost always take the 23% discount and click a few extra buttons.

[1] 1 - (1/1.3) is the additional percentage that must be added to a price maintain constant revenue.[2]

[2] To be pedantic, Apple also handles payment card processing, which is ~3%. So the difference is really 1-(1.03/1.30) = 20.8%
You made me cry.
Sure, you can get it through here: https://lwn.net/subscribe/Info
The dark side of Internet marketing
It's done partially because "everyone else is doing it," but there is also the "wisdom of crowds" value. The number of likes or dislikes is a quick metric that can be used for sorting, searching, populating a home page, or building recommendations.
Without hoping to encourage any sort of flamewar, I couldn't agree with that statement more.

I used to consider myself 'agnostic', because I did not know, nor did I care to know, whether there was a God in heaven, or even a heaven at all. In fact, I would have accused any man that told me they did know (whether atheist, christian or whatever) that they couldn't possibly. Even the bible reiterates that statement, with phrases like "no man can truly understand God", and all the rhetoric about faith being unprovable, that's the point of faith, that you can believe it without proof.

I've since grown (or shrunk, depending) into the viewpoint that religion is a detriment to mankind, and now identify more with humanists than anybody else. I don't think that a belief in a moral system is wrong, but I think the reliance on anything other than one's self to get something done is naive, and I think that the biggest harm belief in a god does is to limit one's own potential.

Ignoring any of the myriad of issues I have with organized religion on the whole, that is the problem I have with the very premise of religion.

That said, to answer the great-grandparent, I do not have a problem reading works by religious people, and I consider them just as valuable as works by anybody else, except where the work is primarily religious and/or preachy.
I have tried a lot of these new online courses that have been created but I still think they have missed the point, the point that khan academy got right. I don't want to plan my life around weekly assignments. I keep getting emails about about assignment deadlines, causing unneeded anxiety which puts off the whole learning experience.
It's tempting to say "Oh yes, definitely," but that wouldn't be completely honest. The real answer is, of course, much more nuanced than that.

It's not the totally unfettered we-do-what-we-want-when-we-want-to Wild West that was Ksplice-the-startup, but it is still a small, tight-knit team with a lot of autonomy, and I think the small-team aspect is a huge component of what makes a startup so fun.

Of course, the transition to big-company has its benefits. For example: benefits (see what I did there?), an HR department so that we can hire people internationally, a sizeable budget, and the ability to focus on the things that are core to what we're doing without having to worry about all of the overhead associated with running the company.

Not to mention the legitimacy benefits: a few years ago, we had a meeting with BigFinancialCo and they basically told us: "Yes, we love your product and we want to run it, but look, we're BigFinancialCo and we spend a zillion dollars on IT. As much as we want to, we just can't run some product made by people who work out of what appears to be some sort of co-ed MIT nerd frathouse in Cambridge." Which, fair enough -- the house was pretty gross.

Now that we're Oracle, it's much more of an, ah, how shall I put this, "no one got fired for buying IBM" situation. (Yes, I see the irony in that statement.) Any technical skepticism is easily dispensed with, because we credibly have the support resources to back up the product.

My job in particular is definitely one that has probably changed the most: I no longer do day-to-day sales stuff (the Oracle Linux sales team does it all), and as a result I get to focus a lot more on product management, only tactically dropping in on customer meetings when it makes sense.

By contrast, the day-to-day of our engineering team here at Oracle is actually extremely similar to how it was at Ksplice. Which hopefully answers your question :)
That's a lot more participation than I would have guessed, that's pretty awesome! Thanks for the info, and I look forward to seeing this getting more widespread use :)
Which again, presumes I have to use multiple files. I can append small data to a log file faster than I can insert small rows of data to a database, and with much less effort.

And my main point was, speed is not the reason we use databases, transactional semantics and query capabilities are.
:) that's what we like to hear
On Ubuntu 11.10 and Chrome 18.0.1025.168, this just completely killed the OS. As soon as the tab loaded, the mouse froze and the display stopped updating. I couldn't even enter a separate TTY session (ctrl-alt-F6 for example). At least this has apparently exposed a big security issue in the browser.
5 start rating used to be a "core part of YouTube".
> his simply telling Google 'go fuck yourself' doesn't really offer an in-depth critique of why these changes or wrong

Well it's good that in addition to "go fuck yourself", he offered an in-depth critique of why these changes are wrong. I guess maybe you stopped reading before that?

> Leave the analyses to the real UX folks.

Whoa now, hold on just a goddamned minute. What "real UX folks" say only holds weight insofar as it accurately pertains to the interaction and communication of producers and consumers. When content producers say "This change breaks an important connection to our users", then "UX folks" had better listen good and hard.
Right, which means we can't handle generic virtual methods, since we cannot JIT compile them. See: http://docs.xamarin.com/ios/about/limitations#Generic_Virtua...
Blizzard to take up to 15 percent of Diablo III real-money auction house sales
Mapping Wikipedia: the world as dots
> First one to award real degree credit per course wins, I suspect

With github and stackoverflow. Do we really need a degree? You only want a degree so you can get a confirmation that you know what you know, so employers will hire you. But why don't you just link to your github and stackoverflow accounts? These online courses could incentive you to build awesome stuff and put online for this purpose.

Then the whole cycle is complete. You have a place to learn, and means to show what you've learned to get yourself employed. What else do you need?

(well, maybe the social part of universities is missing, but that can be fixed with hackatons I guess)
I feel as though you missed the point.
That's a really nice site. Thanks for making it!

I think that a useful feature would be to allow students to comment on / review the courses. This will probably become more important as institutions start to offer similar courses.
Yes a bit. It's isolated to your app folder though. Additionally, Dropbox reviews your app and approves it or not.
From what I could tell, that spawns actual child processes and communicates with them over pipes. Fine from an architectural standpoint, but a penalty compared to shared memory from a performance standpoint. And it still has the problem of a single heavy CPU request on a given worker blocking all the requests behind it on that worker.

Again, I'm not saying node sucks, I'm using it and I like it. I'm just saying if you really need to crank out performance, use java.util.concurrent, or maybe Go. They both offer event-driven i/o if you really want it, and have better threading models.
Go seems to me to provide the benefits of Node's non-blocking IO with a much easier programming model and a much less warty language. But I haven't actually built anything real in either language yet.

Anyone with experience in both care to contrast them? Their problem domains seem to overlap quite a bit.
Like / Dislike is the rating system evolved, there was an article about how they had come to the decision through research that a 1 - 5 rating system doesn't work; people more often than not either like it or they dislike it, so 1 and 5 were the common votes.

If you want to be pedantic then sure, they removed a core part of Youtube when they removed the rating system, but in reality the system evolved. 1 - 5 was (at it's core) a way to rate videos: like / dislike is (at it's core) a way to rate videos, the interface and finer points are different but it's still the same thing overall.
Years later, it still annoys me that you need a Google account to sign up for YouTube.
Peteris Krumins had a nice series of Node.js modules you should know about: http://www.catonmat.net/category/nodejs-modules

Some of my favorites:

- async -- flow control
- stitch -- packaging client side scripts
- express -- web framework
- redis -- great Redis client
- stylus -- css preprocessor
- request -- HTTP client

I find myself following certain people, like how I'm a fan of different rappers. Usually, stuff by visionmedia, felixge, mikeal, isaacs, substack is top notch.
I agree that it at least seems fake. She's moving out her home at 02:30 AM to move into a hospice? They take a detour and she's two hours late, yet the orderlies are immediately around to assist her (presumably it's 04:30 AM now)? There are no details in the story, like place names, that would support the claim that it's a true story.
Turing was right
As a business they must realize that alienating users is against their business interests. I don't see what the big problem would be in leaving the thumbsup-thumbsdown options alongside the +1 button.

YouTube is a social network in itself (at this point a much more powerful one than Google+) so they have to respect its users and not try to force them to signup for the other network.

I don't personally vote on Youtube videos but I can understand how a video publisher might be upset that he's suddenly going to be getting fewer likes on his content.

Again it seems this was just a test, so considering the negative user feedback I certainly hope it stays just that.
As more employers look at your github repo, give coding tests, etc, the credits will be less important than the learning.

Though certificates look good on a resume, that makes them tomorrow's solution to yesterday's problem.
One thing that concerns me is that Riak pushes two solutions for doing queries that operate on collections of objects: Riak Search and MapReduce. Both are implemented in a way that is pretty unacceptable for "real-time" use (eg., live application use, as opposed to background maintenance jobs).

Riak Search should in theory be good stuff. It uses Lucene underneath, which is known to be rather slow, and last I checked it could not properly distribute documents across nodes, severely limiting its scalability. It is, in short, known to perform pretty badly.

MapReduce is interesting, but evidently not designed for "real-time", since it relies on traversing inter-object links, key by key. It does not scale to large number of links, either, since it's not possible to add or remove links incrementally. To add or remove a link, you have to rewrite the entire object and all its link in a single update operation.

I am sure Basho is working on those problems, but in the meantime, I'm surprised not more people complain about these issues. Riak had awful, awful performance before they released 1.0 with LevelDB support. Now the performance is much better, but it's still "merely" equivalent to the basic CRUD support of S3 (minus ACL support and so on).

It's not fast enough to replace Memcached or Redis as a first-level cache, and unlike Cassandra it does not do range lookups well, and anything that needs to scan the dataset sequentially will end up sucking, performancewise. These things limit its usefulness for many apps.

Right now you have something that is quite decent for implementing a distributed file system, session store or persistent fallback cache (behind something fast such as Memcached or Redis), but is a bad fit for many other applications.
It's not a black/white situation here. Being the boss, I know sometimes (most of the time, to be honest) we need to stick to proven and tested stuff, as economic times are not the prettiest and clients that would pay for the extra mile don't just sit around.

What happens when you assign 2 developers on a project that they are very passionate and enthusiastic about because you allowed them to use, say, node.js.

Only to discover in a month or two that they spent 200 hours more that they would if they used something proven and tested. That's several k$ out of the window and maybe milestone not met.

Sometimes it's worth it, sometimes it's not.
On the other hand, I find the Coursera classes much better in quality. At least the CS ones seem to have a more formal and rigorous tone, which is something that I value more than presentation.

I agree though, the Udacity lectures are more engaging.
I used to work and train (Wushu) with Pek back in the day (at POW Kung Fu in Chicago). It's great to see a genuinely nice guy doing something that could be very very big.

Good luck Pek!
"That's silly. No one in their sane mind would serve web requests AND do heavy processing in the same thread - no matter what language"

Sure you could, depends on what you are doing.. In many cases it's fine that the request takes a second to complete, but blocking the entire server for 1 second is not.

Guess you define "heavy processing" a little differently, but in event driven you can't do any (blocking) processing
Not really - producing a better quality product at a lower price is pretty much the definition of (successful) competition. Anticompetitive would be actions preventing such a company from winning more of the market.

In this case, Apple's IAP rules are preventing apps from selling products/services at their 'natural' prices in rival marketplaces, which could be considered anticompetitive depending on the various factors involved.
What if the law in question has existed before Poland joined the EU?
Some of the courses on Udacity no longer have assignment deadlines. I'm not certain what I think about this yet: on the one hand having hard deadlines means that each "semester" of students stays on the same page and the instructors can respond to the most pressing difficulties they are having. It also allows them to iteratively refine the courses without disrupting current students.

On the other hand, it can make things difficult for us in the working world who have to balance education with our work life! I'm taking three courses now, which I found out to be overly ambitious (I should probably spend time with my wife!) so I'll probably drop one.
I agree strongly with these observations, and have found it to hold true over Udacity's Robotics AI, Web Apps, Programming Languages, and Design courses, and over portions of Coursera's Machine learning and NLP classes.

Edit: and I also agree with Brunov, Udacity courses are not mathematically rigorous.
It's just funny that people want google to fuck herself while they are perfectly fine to be forced to sign in to comment either on the original article or here.
Code rant: The Database As Queue Anti-Pattern
I am a big fan of the weekly assignments. Keeps me on track.
Indeed. My favorite recently [1]: omg!! look at chart #1! they lost all their users... not!

http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-daily-users-...
Pretty hefty penalties. Are they intentionally trying to leave room for the grey market? Some are planning to avoid the RMAH altogether: http://jesse.forthewin.com/blog/2012/05/1000000-in-diablo-2-...
>It's not clear that Motorola didn't offer "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms" for licensing. Microsoft claims licensing would cost them $4bn/year; Motorola disputes this claim.

It's not clear why Motorola should be able to do in the first place. If Motorola's patents cover encoding and decoding of H.264, those patents should be in MPEG LA's pool. However, Motorola is not listed as licensor on the website(http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Licensors.aspx ). Since the pool covers all the essential patents related to encoding and decoding H.264, why isn't Motorola included in the list?
I don't know enough about programming to make a comment on the quality, and I should have mentioned that in my initial post. I was trying to convey my experience of the teaching in each course, not the quality of the material.

But yes, from what I've taken in the AI class so far they are definitely teaching Computer Science. Udacity so far seems to be "applied programming" with a bit of helpful CS here and there.
worlds collide. Didn't expect to see a wushu guy on HN - POW was like 10 years ago.
I'll extend and restate the obvious: EC2 doesn't make economic sense for most startups.

EC2 shines for very small, very large or very dynamic deployments (jitter of at least +/- 20 servers).

Most startups outgrow "very small" (2-4 Servers) quickly and then stick around in the mid-range (5-30 servers) for an eternity.

During this mid-range phase EC2 is usually 2x-3x more expensive than rented dedicated servers.
Udacity follows a different model. You can submit assignments even after the deadline.