skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there's a fair bit of variation between the Coursera courses.

I'm currently taking their Machine Learning and Computer Vision courses. The ML course is quite like what you described for Udacity: there are a lot of short lecture videos with questions embedded in them, online quizzes and automatically graded programming assignments. It's a very engaging way to learn and I'm getting a lot out of it. The CV course, on the other hand, has so far just been videos of the professor talking & no supplementary material.

I suspect that Coursera provides the platform and leaves how the material is presented on it up to the professor. The ML course has been run once already, so they presumably have the benefit of experience; whereas it's the first time the CV course has been run so it's quite possible that they just haven't figured out how to take full advantage of the platform yet.
What The Open Compute Project Means To Me
I tried, believe me I tried hard, but video is not my type. Over 20 years I've learnt all I know reading, surfing, browsing the web, not watching videos. I can digest/absorb/ignore a whole page of text in ten seconds instead of being forced to watch boring 10 mins videos that offer only one min of real interesting content.

So, the spot is open for an education tool where text is king, like wikipedia, but with a syllabus.
Seems more like just a nice bonus for people who were already planning to release a moderately successful commercial app for Blackberry. And RIM doesn't care about people creating free or ad-supported apps?
Almost positive you need one to thumbs up and down, which is where this becomes an issue.
Pinstagram: This Could Be Huge
> As for Chrome, the sin Chrome commits on Linux in particular is that it defaults to something called client-side window decorations, that is it tells the window manager not to display the decorations it would normally put around the client area and then proceeds to draw its own inside this client area, which behave potentially vastly differently from whatever the user has configured for his native system decorations.

One man's sin is another man's salvation. That's one of the main reasons I use Chromium and Chrome as my primary browsers on Linux, besides their superb performance optimization. It works well with Ubuntu's integration of the top OS info bar and the app's menu bar, and saves noticeable screen space. I love it.

I'm hoping Firefox at least provides that as an option in future builds as well.
Our CompSci Prof. uses something built in-house by students to evaluate who understands what & whatnot in real-time too.

How long is this around? Two years. Works.

He uses his iPad to present his slides wirelessly to our beamer and a student voluntarily manages the polls and when enough people haven't understood a topic, the student hits a button and the slide updates the graph, then the Prof focuses on that topic a little more.

That sounds more complicated than it is, it's dead easy and flawless, despite the fact that our Prof is an iDiot or iNerd, hehe :) He's just a huuge fan of everything Apple.

It challenges everyone to cooperate, thankfully it's anonymous, so we can fool around too, but the Prof notices that :D

In my eyes, the skill to built this is really low compared to the other stuff we've done, but it's a nice tool. Unfortunately most Prof just don't fucking care and go-on with their one-man-show.

PS: Our Prof uses the stats and data generated to create the exam also ;)
This thread contains no criticism of that decision. Your defense is unnecessary. Relax, understand that text is a poor medium for emotions and notice that the comment that lead to your first reply could very well be interpreted as "Nice idea, but with the coverage on HN they might need to edit that soon, because they'll soon be covered _now_".

It was, for all I can tell, a friendly and humorous remark. I really think you just misunderstood the tone/intentions.
That's interesting because it goes even further than I'd have expected: that file formats themselves aren't protected. I guess that isn't surprising, since you'd want a market where programs could all compete to operate on the same files, but I don't remember that being talked about before (at least in reference to Oracle vs Google). And that does go to the format of the Java .class files.

I wonder what the EU courts would have to say about an encrypted file format...
A weekend hobby project : hashedOut
Creating a personalized web index.
unless when Youtube set any requirements to earn continued funding it was based on hard numbers, in which case they may simply see fewer of their content partners make the cut to continue.

Stupid? Yes, but it's dangerous to just assume they'll do the right thing. Frankly they should have added a + button on top of thumbs up/down so you could easily share as a separate feature, not replace the thumbs.
How exactly is one supposed to make a clean-room reverse engineering in the absence of any documentation and sophisticated obfuscation on Skype's part ?
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/network-services-arent-free-or...
Completely agree. I'm currently taking 4 Udacity couses, and they are phenomenal. There is no question, in my mind at least, that Udacity or at least the Udacity approach is the future of the space.

Their advantage isn't just their technology platform, it's that they seem to have impeccable taste and judgment. They aren't just a bunch of MBAs who are 'licensing content' as part of an 'online distribution play' or whatever.

I actually think that Udacity is quite similar to YC circa 2005/2006 in a lot of respects.
Mistake? Youtube funded them (and all of Geek and Sundry) as part of an initiative to get better content onto Youtube. That's like saying taking VC is a mistake as an entrepreneur.
Really? I ported my app to PlayBook in less than a week, if you have any eclipse experience (or even xcode) you can get it working..
Oops, meant to upvote.
It's hard, but people have made progress with that approach:

http://recon.cx/en/f/vskype-part1.pdf http://recon.cx/en/f/vskype-part2.pdf
Why iOS apps look better than android apps
I didn't see any mention of price in the press release but MITx courses are free and on the MITx website they mention that Harvard is joining so I'm assuming that the Harvard courses will be free too.

http://mitx.mit.edu/
Timedb, a lightweight, high-perf RRDtool-like time series data base
How Hacker News Saved My Startup
Yeah, I can appreciate the spirit of it, but I think the "not featured on" could be a little more prominent. Heck, I think it might even add to the joke a bit because some people would still end up just scanning and say "Oh wow, TechCrunch!"
Amazon Gets Into the Sitcom Business
Part of the process of joining the EU is to make your legislation compatible with the EU legislation.
Does this mean that if Oracle loses the case, the question of whether APIs are copyrightable will not be answered in this case? Or will the judge still give a ruling on that once the verdict is entered? The former being a big win for Google only, the latter being a big win for the industry.
BlackBerry WebWorks +1 for PhoneGap
Exactly. This is a significant portion of a graduate-level computer architecture course. You average Rails/Node/etc. programmer doesn't need to know half of what's covered during the 3 weeks of an undergraduate architecture course that's devoted to the memory system.

How many programmers in 2012 are ever even going to need to cache-optimize their code? 25%? 10%? The content is fascinating, but the title is pretty wrong.
I carefully avoided making the statement you've just deconstructed. Nothing in my original post mentions newness.

The point I made is that enthusiastic and excited developers are valuable. Developers tend to find learning exciting. They could be interested in learning Rails or Django for the first time, trying out Sinatra when a full Rails app seems overkill, or exploring Node for a small and non-critical part of your architecture. Hell, they might be excited about learning PHP.

Allowing people to explore their curiosity brings material benefits. It doesn't have to involve new technology, and I didn't suggest that it does.

As an aside:

> The real market for technology adoption should fueled by demand for simplicity, rather than demand new-ness

I think part of node's mass appeal is that it has introduced an element of simplicity to a generation of developers who have grown up around bloat.
So much for Microsoft loving the open-source movement.
Yes, I use it all the time. I believe it's QT app, which might help explain the robust UI.
What a fantastic idea for teacher feedback. I can see this being useful in every single classroom.
For reference, Quick Tally[1], has been operating a service along these lines for over a decade or more.

It isn't web-based, and IIRC they offer/sell a voting widget to TV producers that can be given to audience members to vote with.

Worthy of a "web 2.0/iOS" disruption me thinks...

[1]http://www.quicktally.com/

P.S. Well done OP, that's a great concept and nicely (MVP?) executed.
DoT.js playground: fastest templating for Node.js and browsers
The key thing to remember is that the case in front of Judge Alsup in the US Northern District of California is a jury case. It'll be up to people who have no idea how computers work to decide this. Having just served on a jury, I see the value, but in this sort of instance, I am frightened by the possible result.
Aspose.Newsletter May 2012 Edition is out Now
Aspose Newsletter for May 2012 has now been published that highlights all the newly supported features offered in the recent releases of its JasperReports exporters, SQL Server rendering extensions, .NET, Java & SharePoint components. This month’s technical article shows how to Convert MSGs to TIFFs with Aspose.Email for .NET & a migration tip for Creating a New Presentation with VSTO or Aspose.Cells for .NET. A video tutorial for Use Aspose.Cells for .NET to Convert Excel Files to PDF.

- Collect original copy of Aspose.Newsletter, May – 2012: http://www.aspose.com/blogs/aspose-business/customer-newsletters/archive/2012/05/01/aspose-newsletter-may-2012.html
You're probably right, although as of right now it reads "in some order", ergo there is no guarantee that i comes before i+1 for all i. It could have been updated though.
writing one sided stories about your business relations in public, like this, is not ethically correct, in my opinion.
WTF is CISPA?
It is a question of semantics and word choice really - pretty sure that if they had said "Login with your Google Account" instead of "Upgrade to Google+", the reaction would not have been as negative. All that the Upgrade to Google+ does is tie your Google account to Google+ - you don't have to follow anyone, post anything or fill out any details of you profile. So they could have just called it : We are tying / converting (not upgrading) your account to a Google+ account so you can Like the video.
This is ultimately more by luck than judgement. Because the main legal perspective is utterly, fundamentally flawed. The notion that there is a principled difference between idea and expression simply does not work with software. In software everything is an abstraction, which means everything has some generality. There is no dividing line anymore.

The idea/expression rule of thumb only made sense because it was a simple proxy for actual market effect. And there is the nub of the matter: no-one really wants to measure what the real market effects are for any of these rules. The law is unhinged from reality. It is just stupid.

For copyright to make sense, we should get rid of all the lawyers and remove it from the legal domain. Copyright is really a matter of data measurement and analysis. If the negative effects of restricting and paying for movement of information are outweighed by the positive effects of creating information, let us measure that . . .

We built the internet, but then we want to rule it as if it were a small stack of manuscripts. It is ridiculous.
The title isn't need, it's should. Both are debatable of course, but I'd argue that should is a lot more defensible: Abstractions are leaky, and even if you can get by without knowing what's going on down there, you'll at the very least sharpen your mind and be more surefooted if you do.

What you're saying is a bit like the but I'll never need math in life argument. You're going to say that math is a lot more fundamental to existence then computer memory is of course, and that's true, but if you're looking at just computers, the way the memory system works is a fundamental part of the whole not entirely unlike math is to understanding nature. If you really want to know what you're dealing with and make sure you're not limiting yourself, you want to be inquisitive and go there.

Basically, I don't really get why the gut reaction to these sort of things (especially if they actually have meat; there's of course a lot of crummy pretenders) is so often to declare them pointless. Yes, you need to filter your information intake, but still, better err on the side of knowing too much.
Bubbles vs Growth
Thanks for your support! Today Stripe really only supports US bank accounts. But they are working really hard to make it available outside the US. You can submit your information to Stripe and they are trying to keep people updated. We had to do a lot around getting ourselves setup in the States to use it for our own invoicing, but it was worth it :)

https://stripe.com/global
Internet Tarayıcıları (Browserlar) Savaşında Galip Kim?
Entrepreneurs: Do You really Need Virtual Offices?
Yes, Professor Widom was incredible in terms of teaching concepts clearly. But it's very difficult for anyone to produce such an enthusiasm to a passive camera as one would in a live classroom full of students. What I am complaining is not about the quality of the knowledge they impart, but about the passion and enthusiasm that they just can't impart to a student viewing these videos.

But again, there are professors in these courses (In this particular course the Prof. teaches as if someone is listening to him http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs262/CourseRev/apr20...) who put a lot of effort, to produce an awe of surprise for instance when they arrive at something imp, like in a class-room. But this is an exception and can't be applied to every professor.

So I think there should be an improvement someway in this regard.
It also scales nicely.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/home/improvement/interior/43...
At http://themefurnace.com/member/signup/index/c/, got a database connection error and an Engrish error message.

Posting a comment also threw a database connection error.
Yep. That seems like a lifetime ago. I'm glad to see you're keeping busy. I also blogged about Pinstagram's signup experience and UI just now. Hopefully that gives you guys an additional boost.
Celebrities should to startups over charities to leave their mark on the world
Stop solving problems you don’t yet have
Report: Microsoft to offer $99 Xbox 360 bundle with online service commitment
Customer lists are intellectual and business property. Cue "who's the customer" debate.

The real assets for Facebook, though, are its user relationships and the data stream this generates (where currency of data and interrelationships among it are key) by which it can generate advertising and other revenues through its true customer relationships -- the relations between FB and those entities paying cash on the barrelhead (or however the cool kids are conducting monetary transactions these days).

Brand identity, network effects, and a few other things also come into play.

Source code may weaken portions of the value e or expose windows of vulnerability. It's by no means the most valuable asset though.
Hitchhiker's guide to high-performance with netsniff-ng
Let's face it, not all systems in the world need to be "web scaled", as the author also said: "Simple, use the right tool for the job".

But you need to understand not all jobs are created equal..
> Every programmer should have a basic understanding of latencies.

Why exactly?

Aren't you making the same mistake of the author and confusing "every programmer" with "every low level programmer whose work is highly dependent on speed optimization"? Which, from my understanding are the minority of us. I don't even know how the APIs I use are implemented, let alone know how much "fetching from L2 cache" they're making.

But of course, I know very little about hardware. So I could be very mistaken. I would love to be proven wrong.
That's a long list of things rocket lease does not do.
GRANJA ROSENDO
There are currently 5 (if I recall correctly) full courses from Stanford on iTunes U for FREE.
F*ck Grad School. I 10 Products in 1 year.
Facebook, Google... Let's not be friends
I've only heard terrible things from other people about BlackBerry dev. Specifically, that there were numerous issues porting. Does anyone have any experience to the contrary? What is the BlackBerry user base like at this point anyway?
The guidelines quite clearly state that HN stories don't have to be related to tech/science:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

on the other hand:

"If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

Now that you know the criteria, I leave it to you to draw your own conclusions as to whether this story belongs.
are they using Windows?
Apache/2.2.22 (Win32) mod_ssl/2.2.22 OpenSSL/0.9.8t PHP/5.2.17 Server at www.edxonline.org Port 80
or just spoofed.
Computer-forensics firm proves Turkish gov't faked documents to convict enemies
10 Products in 1 year.
Impressive work! It’s a really nice app, not just normal and boring, not a visual mess, a joy to navigate. If only I could convince myself to pay.
But that is what art is supposed to do - inspire emotion. I had the same reaction btw.
That's a good thing. It's really easy to get lost in comments. In some ways it would be nice to hide all comments until you make one. Though you'll probably end up with a list of the same remarks. In some ways you have that already! (People don't seem to think for themselves any more...)

I always fancied threaded comment systems, but they can spiral off topic. That's not in tiself a bad thing. Loads of comments can be hard to read, or rather take a long time to read. Perhaps a character limit - and a comment limit would make them more succinct and better all round.

Wasn't the +1 just a shortcut for those that used to just cut and paste someone else's comment to signify that they were in agreement with what the other person said anyway? Perhaps I'm wrong and it means something different to other people.

Part of me says do anything to make the YouTube comment system better. But I'm not sure if Google+ is the right way to go about it.
Hmm. this shouldn't be too difficulty to piggyback on top of something like bittorrent's DHT, which does have a p2p like/5-star rating system.
What video card do you have, and what driver are you using for this video card?
Tried on Chrome on both Windows 7 and OS X 10.7.3
I went along to Amazon AWS Cloud for startups and developers (http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/AWS-cloud-for-startups-devel...) last week in London. One very interesting talk was http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/optimizing-your-... -- same slide deck, but different speaker in the London event. If there's a video available of this talk, try to watch it.

On Reserved instances a one year Reserved instance is equivalent to 6 months running a non-reserved instance. So it starts to save you money after 6 months. Don't remember if this was a High, Medium or Low usage reserved instance. (slides 15, 16, 17)

Other cost savings techniques I found interesting:

* Using AWS ancillary services instead of building your own on EC2 servers saves a big chunk of cost (elastic load balancer, SQS, DynamoDB) -- slides 30-34

* Consider bidding for spot instances if you have data processing requirements that fit those usecases (Map/Reduce jobs for example). This will save you heaps. -- slides 21-30

* It's really all about fitting your usage graph to the right combination of EC2 instances, so something long-term to handle the average traffic. A medium resource to handle the daily peak loads, and something extra on hand to handle a short but sharp spike in traffic. And spot instances to push down the per hour resource cost in batch processing.

(Disclaimer, I work for LOVEFiLM, an Amazon company, but not involved in AWS side of things)
Sites back up now - did take a bit of a hammering.
I ported my SDL/C++ DJ app DJPad from HP TouchPad to Android, and then to PlayBook. It took less than a week to do the port and on the first day of sales, it outsold 2 months of Android sales in a single day and continues to outsell Android by about 2 to 1.

Without any press it did about $300+/day for the first 3-4 days, then drifted down to about $30/day where it is still selling at that rate a month and a half later.

I also got a free PlayBook out of the deal as it was during a "write a new app for BlackBerry and we ship you a free PlayBook" offer.
Sometimes I have the impression that some entrepreneurs like to say that there is a bubble because so they can say: "Yes, he raised all that money, or had that big exit, but not because he is better than me, only because there is the bubble".
First 180-Degree Spherical HD Gaming Simulator Costs $18,000
We did some bake-offs with node and Go (and other languages of course). Go won pretty much across the board, except in the time to write category.

The other big downside to Node is hiring. You have two types of "JavaScript" developers. People good with JQuery, and people who have written JavaScript books. There is extremely little middle ground from which to hire good to awesome developers.

Go is the C replacement.
Node.js is going to be a Ruby replacement one day.
DB2 Express-C 10 is now out
(OP here)

I should probably note that the use of the word "rejected" was done to emphasize the humor of the situation (we rejected someone who is now being publicly recruited), and to draw attention to what a mistake it was.

I would completely agree that A level hiring isn't about rejection, job descriptions, or assembly lines. That's why I am such a fan of what Jason Freedman is doing at 42floors.

To your second point, I remain a firm believer that early stage companies (less than 10 people) in this hiring environment should be open to bringing on A players, even if they don't fit into an immediately defined role.
You probably didn't read the article. I came into it with a similar mindset.
They don't need to cache-optimize, but knowing how stuff really works can help prevent some pathological cases of premature optimization in higher-level languages.

I've read most of this during my undegrad OS course, and found it absolutely fascinating.
Not always, and less so in technical fields, but there is a huge difference between a course like "Leveraging Sharepoint for HR Management" (job training) and "Philosophy of the Mind" (pure education). You can only put the former on a resume, but I find the latter to be more meaningful.
Intel researchers plot a smarter, personalized cloud
The F-word in court
What Online Social Networks May Know about Non-members
A Stock Exchange for Your Personal Data
Tristan Walker leaves Foursquare for Andreessen Horowitz