skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the more popular TV channels in India, especially during the exams, is Topper ( http://www.yupptv.com/topper_tv_live.html )
The channel has its share of teaching, but mostly its crude gameification. Very effective channel. In terms of viewership during the exam season( totally unfair given India's huge student population ), it would easily surpass your CNN or Fox or whatever it is that Americans watch.

I watch a fair deal of Topper ( very addictive channel ). So they "teach" determinants by rapidly flashing square matrices on the screen and the competing student groups have to guess the value of the determinant. Not by computing adjoints and cofactors - that would be painfully slow. Mostly you use properties of determinants (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinant#Properties_of_the_d... ). So if its a 3 by 3 and say a column is 3,1,4 and another column is 9,3,12, you know the value is zero ( because you could factor out the scalar multiple 3 and then two columns become identical, ergo value zero ).
Sometimes they'll flash a triangular matrix and all you have to do is multiply along the diagonals. Or you'd have row 1 = [4,1,2], row 2 = [5,3,5], row 3 = [1,2,3]. Some smartypants would correctly guess that row 2 was just the sum of the other two rows, so the determinant must be zero.

Is this sort of thing "useful" ? I don't know. But this is how I learnt much of my math in India...and they continue to use these games to this day. I can look at equations of lines & tell you if they slope up or down. I can tell you whether your parabola is convex or concave, where the focii are and what the lengths of the minor and major axis of your ellipse will be....tons and tons of repititive trivia, force-fed through pattern matching & gamification. Just by looking, no actual calculations! But this is one of the reasons Indian grad students tend to do well out here in STEM...we have no intuition but tons of gameified training. Once we are here, we'll get the intuition as well. To start with intuition would be a horrible idea, because the teacher quality back home is horible. Most of them honestly have no idea what a vector is or a complex number is...in most cases English is not our native tongue, so we can't even pronounce "surd" correctly, let alone know where it came from, but we all know that the root of 3 is a surd and its root isn't a surd and so on ( my math text: http://books.google.com/books?id=1C4iQNUWLBwC&lpg=PA25&#... )

imho, gamefication is unequivocally good in STEM, atleast upto college math level. Ultimately its all symbol pushing.
Stop making sense. Next you'll start on about how people should be able to work, vote and run for office regardless of which patch of dirt their mothers delivered them on.

Turning away brown people from our shores and then slaughtering them in other countries is my God-given right as an American.
You're quite right that the analogy isn't perfect. The point I was trying to make, though, is precisely that PHP development can proceed without any recourse whatsoever to a framework. Jumping straight into web dev without an accompanying framework like Rails or Sinatra is a complete non-starter if you're a Rubyist.

So you're quite right, but I hope you would agree that the Rails/PHP comparison, in spite of its imperfections, is compatible with the point I was trying to make.
Retired Judge Joins Fight Against DOJ's 'Outrageous' Seizures in Megaupload Case
"The only way the Pauls could threaten Romney is to run as a third party candidate and siphon off enough of the vote to ensure a Democrat win. I don't think they'll do that though."

They don't actually have to do that though, they only need enough support to credibly threaten it. And since right now Ron is polling almost equal to Obama in a head to head race, the threat is certainly real.
I beat a lot of odds to get to where I am now.

Doesn't mean I act like a cock about it.
Mosaic Awarded $2M from Department of Energy for Solar Finance Innovation
If only there were some way for the publications to stop writing those checks, or somehow make them contingent on the "supporters" not spamming sites that don't want to be spammed... but what could it be? </sarcasm>
The issue with PHP isn't that you can't make it do a whole bunch of things that are wonderful...

It's why PHP would be the best tool for the job once you have a specific objective in mind.

When you have a specific problem to solve other than 'supported by millions of cheap webhosts' PHP is rarely the best choice.

It's like a swiss army knife, it's highly useful in many situations and a good tool to have in your pocket, but if you know you're going to need to unscrew something you should probably bring a screw driver.
I enjoyed PHP. I enjoyed Ruby. If I was to do a complex project that would require a lot of integration with external services, I would want a good OOP language like python or ruby.

There are something PHP does nicely than Ruby does. Visa versa. However in all the PHP apps I have made / used, their structures started out with good intentions and then descended into pure chaos. There isn't a unified package manager for Python and PHP that is widely accepted. Ruby has rubygems and bundler.

Maybe next time when I start building another PHP app with namespacing, I'll behave better and make my designs more decoupled so that components can be removed and added, provided their interfaces match.
Doesn't dropbox use AWS? Do they have their own drives?
Random Subway Sandwich Generator
> Keeping everything and all variables on the server is impossible [...]
> Kinda like RDP for games.

Are you familiar with OnLive?

http://www.onlive.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive
A group of terrorists lucked into taking down two big buildings and so we have to debate whether we can afford civil liberties? The premise should be self-evidently absurd.

If we'll kill thousands of Arabs to protect freedom, we shouldn't be so eager to walk away from it for the death of a few thousand Americans.

I would also suggest that abandoning principle for expediency can be hobbling in itself. Wars aren't entirely fought by robots just yet. "Power" isn't a column in an Excel spreadsheet.
Everything I've ever seen on HN -- I don't know about Reddit -- from ScienceDaily has been a cut-and-paste copy of something else available from nearer the original source. In some cases ScienceDaily's copy is distinctly worse than the original because it lacks relevant links, enlightening pictures, etc.

ScienceDaily may be a very handy secondary source. It may be a great place to browse looking for what's been happening lately in the world of science. But if you find something there and feel like sharing it, it's pretty much always best to take ten seconds to find the original source and submit that instead of ScienceDaily.

(I expect the actual reason why Reddit banned it is some sort of spammy malfeasance, which would be sufficient reason even if it were a first-rate purveyor of entirely original content. But, as it happens, it isn't.)
Who in their right mind eats a Big Mac anyway? They're disgusting.
What's with the downvote? I was being sarcastic. =/
Well... of course you should always determine Use Case first and then choose technology based on that.
It seems that "The Front Page of the Internet" only includes some of the internet.
Time for a repost filter.
I would assume their 'anti-gaming layer' is perfectly adequate. Admins and employees have stated multiple times that much time and effort goes into making sure that Reddit is run by actual users posting content they want to. This is affirmed by the fact that virtually none of the comments are of the style 'slj2wkvje Said: please review my site: w w w dot myxxxstuff dot c@m'

The automation becomes much less useful when real-live users are the issue. It's easy enough (and probably enjoyable) to spar with the onslaught of link-bots, but paid users (if such users really exist) create a problem which can't be solved programmatically.
It's a case of wishing they had more, not gave more, information - or more accurately, wishing they will keep going to get this information.
Now, imagine when Ares2 is working... =)
I would say that pip is regarded as the standard, unified package manager for Python.

http://www.pip-installer.org/en/latest/index.html
How hard would it be to disassemble the userspace code and work out how the card works? (Serious question)
I didn't, but I don't know if it was swapping all that much... Maybe that was it.
Data.gov is open source
I read the bill again, and it is even more badly drafted than I had thought. Basically, no drone use to gather evidence for any crime is allowed, if done by anyone who receives money from the Federal government, unless they have a warrant.

There are some exceptions: border patrol to combat illegal immigration and illegal importation of controlled substances, specific terrorist threats identified by homeland security from specific organizations or individuals, and exigent circumstances. That last basically means there is a life in imminent danger and the drone is operated by a law enforcement party, which is defined as a party that is paid by the Federal government to investigate or prosecute crimes against the United States.

So, if a traffic monitoring drone operated by local police saw a hit and run, they could not use the drone to track the hit and run driver. The exigent circumstances exception would not apply because (1) there is no imminent danger to life, and (2) even if there was local police may not be a law enforcement party, as that is limited to parties that deal with crimes against the United States, not local and state crimes.

Or if a drone operated by NOAA for weather research spotted a crime in progress where someone was in imminent danger of being killed, and the NOAA drone operators then used the drone to monitor this and gather evidence, they would be in violation of the law and the evidence would be inadmissible. The exigent circumstances exception would not apply because NOAA is not a law enforcement party.

There are about 500 comments on this on Reddit, and almost all of them indicate people think this is about stopping the government from sending drones over your backyard to spy on you.

Legislation to do that would be a good thing. This is not that legislation.
We at Zapier love Olark. Rarely a day goes by where we don't proclaim to each other our undying love for all that is Olark. Its invaluable. Oddly enough, it is one of the most expensive SaaS apps we pay for, and if they doubled prices, we'd still pay for it.

One humble request: a REST API that just spits out recent conversations. Basically a JSON version of https://www.olark.com/transcripts. Lots of Zapier customers want to send their Olark transcripts into service X, Y, or Z but without that endpoint we can't... [1]

Keep it up guys. :-)

[1] Well, they could use your email feature to send it to our inbound address.. but that isn't intuitive at all.
Seems a lot of people think Reddit should just "get better" at detecting this sort of stuff, as if effective anti-gaming systems are trivial to implement and will keep out an adaptable foe. If Reddit could wave a magic wand and make all the shady bullcrap vanish, I'm sure they would, but that's an unrealistic scenario.

It looks to me, Reddit simply doesn't want to get involved in a land war in Asia. Trying to tinker with the rewards systems means investing a greater and greater fraction of their resources to fighting opponents who are better-funded and adaptable, in an asymmetric fight that favors the attacker. Even if they could succeed, that comes at an opportunity cost of what they could have done to improve Reddit in ways that actually have an impact, instead of just treading water.

Perma-banning these domains could be the full strategy. The long-term strategy could also just be to negotiate with these domains, with these initial bans acting as the "No really, I'm fucking serious" threat that gives themj real leverage. I would prefer their strategy is the latter, but I wouldn't really blame them for picking the former either.
https://github.com/jondot/gravy/issues/1
With regards to "Direct HTML embedding."...

PHP is a Web scripting language (which I consider to be very different from a general-purpose programming language or even a scripting language), designed and developed to generate markup.

I have seen a lot of "templating" libraries (Smarty among them) and all they do is mimic the basic syntax of PHP using something else that is not PHP.

I know the theory ("designers don't know how or want to program"), but learning PHP conditional statements or loops is as difficult or simple as any "templating" library that asks you to learn its exotic syntax.

Now, MVC is good and one should avoid blending presentation code with models and controllers, but most MVC frameworks fail when they require you to instantiate a gazillion extra objects, just to render a Web page.
IE Vulnerability under Active Exploit: Patch your systems now
I'm curious what's actually undesirable about this? After reading that article, it seems like

* An employee of The Atlantic consistently submits their content to Reddit

* Those submissions are genuinely popular with Reddit users

Isn't this beneficial for both The Atlantic and Reddit?
I didn't end up filling out the survey because all of the questions are oriented towards how we currently use redis, to which the answer is "barely, almost not at all" even though there is huge potential for us to use it in the future. Since I know antirez keeps up with these discussions on HN, I'll leave my feedback here instead. ;)

We used redis for some really intensive stuff for a short while at Grooveshark, but we were bitten by some really nasty issues related to writing data to disk and handling getting over the amount of memory available (redis was using 2x amount of memory needed for data every time it wrote the data set to disk because of broken copy-on-write)...those issues have long since been solved, but by the time they had been, we had thoroughly tested and switched over to mongo.

We haven't had the time to re-evaluate modern redis or the inclination to switch back since mongo is working OK for the most part, but I really do miss the advanced data structures and the atomic operations that can be performed on them, so I'd love to see us switch back some day.

The things I'd love to see in redis (keep in mind I haven't kept up with redis so some of these may already be there) are:
-master/slave replication
-sharding
-automatic failover like mongo/mongos
-ability to store more data than fits in memory, with a sane degredation in performance when data not-in-memory is being accessed, rather than just going into swap death
-a way to write out data to disk without blocking/locking the whole server even when we're talking about 80+GB of data/RAM
-the ability to start redis with a large data set in a predictable/sane period of time
-memcached style psuedo-LRU eviction so redis can be used as a cache

again, no offense intended if these things are already in there and working well, this is just what we'll be looking at if/when it comes time to re-evaluate our "nosql" storage solution.
What Every CIO Should Know about Cloud Computing
Good thing they don't use the Internet or GPS then.
I'm going just a bit pedantic on this part: "when it's ready to merge, is rebased onto the latest canonical repo/branch before being merged in" should read "when it's ready to merge, we rebase the local development branch to the latest canonical repo/branch, resolve the rebase merge issues, and then merge the changes into the canonical repo/branch"

It's probably what you're doing but just saying it more precisely in the use of git (and SCM) terminology.
they're using SSDs for their metadata about the files you store. The actual files are stored in Amazon S3.
Does Olark do something different than other chat providers to indicate that a human is on the other end?
I'm just mad about the title. The post was about how PHP is quick and dirty for simple stuff. The reason all of the other web frameworks exist is because once you get past the learning curve, you can accomplish a lot in a very short span of time. If anything, they are the powerhouses, not PHP.
Reddit Bans top Domains in Sweeping Move
Beginning to feel like MySpace part 2. Cluttered and congested, ads becoming an interference from experience. Also, something that MS probably didn't do, invasive tracking of user activity on and off their site. Facebook has it coming, they are not as invincible as they seem.
Canada denied me a visitors visa because I am too poor
ask them for money.
You did the work :) No need to thank me. I had to copy paste to read it anyways.
Improving Customer Service with Rich Social Profiles
The entire domain is banned, not the users submitting the link.
If you come from a namespaced language, using PHP namespacing will only make you want to hunt down the PHP devs, point to PHP's namespacing implementation and say "Are you proud of what you've done?!?!?" over and over.
The article says that people who post their own content get banned from Reddit if they cross some ambiguous threshold of self promotion.

I think self promotion shouldn't be frowned upon on Reddit, only when someone manipulates the aggregator.
Tropical lakes on Saturn moon could expand options for life
You're killing kittens by using PHP.

PHP could be a wonderful thing if not for its original sins.
It is easy and fast, but it is also bad. It is "good enough", and for many years it prevented just "good" from arising and gaining adoption.

I would pick "good" over "good enough" even if it costs me a bit because I think this is fundamentally right.
Microsoft's Android Shakedown
PHP has some of the most robust and modern frameworks available today. Symfony draws on the best of almost every modern framework, and leaves a lot of the crap behind.
I think a lawyer was responsible for drafting those believe it or not. Kudos to that lawyer.
On a (semi)-related note:

http://www.quora.com/How-can-I-go-about-acquiring-a-worthy-o...

Need a nemesis or arch-rival? Here ya go... Quora on how to find one. :-)
According to a Reddit admin they contact the offenders before banning.

This type of action would merit some type of direct contact with the individuals or company who run the domain.

http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/v03qc/physor...
Sounds like the stereotypical coder.
What you want to see is the study, how the analysis variables were constructed, and what models were tested.

If a simple binary "subject slept 6 hours or fewer" variable is constructed, and there's no other discriminant, then if there is a significant positive correlation, it will show.

Testing multiple conditions, exclusively (3 or fewer, 4 or fewer, 5 ..., etc.) would get around this.

By way of comparison: I've used the Harris-Benedict basal metabolic rate formula to estimate caloric expenditure by individuals. The question came up: how well does this scale to extreme weights. It turns out that the original study is online as a PDF, including full stats on all the study subjects. My surprises were that 1) the formula is a lot older than I'd imagined (dating to 1919), involved a relatively small study size (a few score participants), and the weight range did not include high-end extremes unfortunately rather too common in current populations. I've taken to treating the values generated for extremely overweight individuals with a bit more suspicion as a result.

Study context matters.
"2 - Hire a good salesperson" - "I couldn’t afford #2 "

Why not partner with a good salesperson someone who isn't afraid to pick up the phone and make sales calls?
Noctua shows off pure science at Computex 2012
Argentina is the very definition of economic schizophrenia. People are put in jail for reporting the actual inflation rate (instead of the "official" inflation rate). The Economist magazine recently published a story that they are no longer going to lie to their readers and report the official rate and instead will report unofficial, private estimates. Argentina's real inflation rate has been running at about 25% per year.
I have yet to see a REST interface that self describes in details its incoming params and output. REST gives you discoverability which is different from documentation.
They're getting better and better, really fast. Still not quite reliable enough that I've started suggesting to family and friends that they move to SSDs, and if I had to pay for them I'm not sure I would have bothered moving yet (though I haven't personally had a problem in quite some time now), but they're getting there, and quickly.
At Reddit. Not here. Though, personally, I think we'd benefit from losing VentureWire and ITWorld.
I was playing that game (Trandoshan FTW!) around the same time and was always playing clean. However I kept winning matches because I found a good tactic (stick two time-delayed rockets in their back, then send a third to detonate all three on impact -> kills anyone with full health and shields with "one" hit) and was repeatedly tossed from servers for "cheating." Eventually I quit playing because everyone was so paranoid about booting cheaters and I couldn't play two matches without an interruption.

I think the cheater's pool is a great idea though. It should be amusing at the least.
It's unfortunate that they do and I would support Mr Paul if he tried to stop that as well.

The FBI is actively working on lobbying for backdoors into every major communications service, including the social networks.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/05/fbi-seeks-internet-...

They are also using GPS to spy on random people of interest without warrants.

http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/253374/3000-war...
I would assume they are typically upvoted for a reason. Obviously you have access to data I'm not privvy to, but 400+ upvotes in that little time would, I imagine, represent a significant portion of people who read the post. Obviously the site is no democracy, and I think we all understand that. But I would also guess that user feedback is appreciated (hence the request to send feedback via email). I would also think that many users have the same questions, but do not bother with an email because it is not really worth the hassle, and upvote a thread like that just to voice their agreement [else they would not upvote, unless they were simply trying to troll].

The whole scenario is fairly minor, but it seems to raise at least a small concern among what I would guess is a respectable portion of the userbase.

edit: grammar.
I didn't think of that option, to be frank. It's amazing how much you learn over the years, simply by screwing up and trying again.
No More Half Measures
Yes, I agree. You make the point a lot better here than in your linked post - i.e. with PHP, you can 'just start'. With Ruby you need to choose a framework, understand enough about how it works, and where things go before you can even start to do "hello world"

Although that is not necessarily a bad thing.
Good luck with that!! What tools are you using to retrieve the data? Or is it all gone?
I fully agree, the point that I'm trying to make is that there is a step in between you offering an API and people using it. Explicitly defining your interface will make the transition easier for 3rd party developers.
If you guys create a tutorial for [1] we'll promote it on our blog and twitter.

To do the json version of http://www.olark.com/transcripts we'd need to expose an Oauth endpoint and do a few other things that would probably take a while :-)

(Also have you looked at http://www.olark.com/help/webhooks )
It's not like that baby, we swear it!

No, you're right, it sucks that Google oauth just has an email scope without anything more fine-grained, like just seeing message counts.
Kim Stanley Robinson Sees Humans Colonizing the Solar System in 2312
The Music Industry's Perception Problem