skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All of those ideas are certainly good things. But even if they managed to decrease the eduction budget to $0, that wouldn't make a dent in government deficits (in the USA, at least, and I suspect elsewhere). They're driven primarily by unfunded entitlement spending and to a lesser extent by the military budget.
Cloud Storage Face-Off: Dropbox Vs Google Drive Vs SkyDrive
Not even close; Minnesota isn't saying that Coursera cannot operate in Minnesota, just that it cannot do so without approval -- just like how you don't have the right to have a huge demonstration without proper permits. There is well-established precedent that it is acceptable to have minor hurdles in the expression of free speech in the interest of maintaining an orderly society.

Edit: also, the problem is that they are calling it a "college course", this is a simple consumer protection issue..
Thank you Terminator!!! We knew you'd do a great job!...
Yes, they do suck. I regularly see and help people that are dealing with broken systems because of stalled/incomplete/broken in place upgrades.

Regardless, it's easy to not lose your setup, run the latest OS AND not do in-place upgrades.

Just put /home on a separate partition and you're done. Use dpkg to make a list and restore a list of applications (same with repos). A few files to backup and a few minutes to wait for the apps to redownload. Completely clean system. Same apps. All the while /home was untouched.
I wonder if it still resistent to jamming when someone does so on each used DSSS channel...
That's optimistic. There are plenty of quacks out there who claim to cure cancer using things like "black salve," which regularly causes permanent disfigurement and sometimes death. (Googlers beware.)
Star Wars blaster speed analysis using physics and perspective
http://www.fliptext.org/
Google obviously depends greatly on their partners for Android's success and giving the Nexus business to their subsidiary right off the bat would probably end up sending Samsung, HTC, et al into forkland.

That said Google is supposed to be making a better effort to keep all of the A list Android handset makers more in the loop instead of just working with one at a time and dumping it on the others with the Nexus launches.
How is Esperanto classified?
http://www.fliptext.org/

which has this javascript code to convert:

http://www.fliptext.org/flip.js?c=2
Which company is making e-Ink readers for that cheap?
Install Linux on it. That's want Linus did to his.
Coursera is not non-profit.
The Tweetbot for Mac alpha was already out before the limit was announced, I would bet they already had way more than 100k tokens registered at the API limit announcement.

Tapbots has >135,000 twitter followers. They had significant exposure from many other sources too, like Daring Fireball which has >400,000 Mac + Twitter using RSS subscribers.

Early adopters are more likely to have multiple twitter accounts as well, so they would have already registered multiple tokens.
2 cell battery? Ouch. No wonder the battery life is surprisingly small for an ARM "laptop". My old netbook had 5 hours of battery life with a 6 cell battery, so they shouldn't have needed much more in battery capacity. 8h would've been "okay". 10-12h would've been hype-worthy. They definitely need to take this into account at least with future Chromebooks.
If it's one service though there is still always a single point of failure outside of your control. If you want true redundancy you need to use multiple versions with no interconnections and develop your own solution to mitigate partial failure, of course your own solution is also a single point of failure, but at least it's under your control.

That said, Github has never been down long enough for me to justify a fallback procedure and policy for my team. The complexity of the solution outweighs the benefit. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
NewsBlur Android App is now available
Japanese emergency crews will wear robotic exoskeletons
Startups: A Blog Is Not A Content Strategy
The problem is, eventually, the web will go down for everyone. Who knows why.. a war, and big solar flare.. whatever.

Also decentralization and p2p networks are difficult and complicated to operate. Look at diaspora, look at all the file sharing networks that have become centralized torrents.

A simple solution would be smart consumers that sign up for services that allow them to export their data. For YouTube it's difficult because they're a monopoly.. but maybe for a service like GMail and allows you to keep all your mail synced up locally in a plain text readable format.

Also pintrest.. I love using it to catalog my favorite photos, but it kills me thinking that this site might eventually go away and I'm going to lose everything I've built up. Give me an export option!
Fair - but too often the bugs are driver-related. I realize that this is kind of unavoidable for open-source software in our economic system, but it doesn't make it any less annoying.

It was the driver bugs that drove me back to Windows - doing multi-monitor is a pain in the rear, and suspend/hibernate would often break on distro update in the rare cases they worked before. Getting an up-to-date Web browser is a big plus for Windows over most Linux distros too (I know about Debian testing, Arch, PPA's, etc. - I said "most").
Hello American. I'm from one of those other pesky countries that make up most of the human population of earth, and which usually have other keyboard layouts. I have to type shift+, to get the semicolon.
Some of this seems cool and some of it is soaring over my head. I'm kind of embarassed and newly motivated to learn Rust.
What's the legality with disassembling closed source apps whose code which uses a VM, effectively giving the source code? (Is ObjC similar to how C# uses .NET? ILSpy can print pretty clean output)
> move towards homework and exams that can be marked by a computer rather than by hand...

Pretty much all of current homeworks and exams can be. It's called standarized tests, and I'd argue it's one of the reasons education sucks as much as it does.

Except from that one, where I think a move in opposite direction is desirable, I'd love for all the changes you mentioned to happen.
What The Hell Just Happened At Google?
Hands-on with the new Samsung Chromebook
JQuery Plugin Development Boilerplate
txtr
http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/txtr-beagle-8-kindle-rival-...

Not sure about all the details but the gist is you can make these things cheaper by stripping out some of the features that the Kindle has: built-in battery, wifi, 3G, lots of controls on the device.
How Much Is Your College Degree Worth? Let the Census Folks Tell You
File-Sharers More Likely to Pay for Movies, Books, Games and Concerts
Onswipe's Jason Baptiste Talks Revenues & Reinvention of Tech for Touchscreens
Fair enough - you're not the first person to draw that conclusion, so perhaps I should have been more explicit.

"I'd love to read more about what I can do in Win8 versus iOS; that's just not the main point I got from your article (but may have been your intent :)"

This is a great idea; we'll do that.
"A Chromebook for everyone"; cool. The article talks about the author's childhood in India, how he dreams of bringing computers to everyone. The price makes it a device that could be bought by anyone. The size of the computer, the autonomy, the low power, everything looks like it's meant to really democratize computers to an even wider audience, say in developing countries where 3G/LTE networks are surprisingly developed and cheap (depends on the country, of course).

But then, its bundled with Verizon, limited to the US and the UK. What are the 3G frequencies? Is this thing locked with Verizon? Say I want to give one to my friend in Vietnam, so he/she can get access to a computer, will the 3G modem support the carrier's frequencies there? Unknown: it's listed as "WLAN : 802.11 a/b/g/n, WWAN : Verizon 3G". Great.

The device is nice, the price is nice. But marketing it as "a Chromebook for everyone" is just wrong. It's a laptop for people in the US, that's it. And really, I wonder what kind of "humanitarian" problem it's solving. I understand the low price is to create a following for the product, but I find the "Chromebook for everyone" brand phony.

Unless "everyone" == "Verizon customers living in the US".
This article is an excellent example of the knee-jerk reaction from the stock market and the attitude that if it's not profitable this quarter it's not worth doing.
Which keyboard layout is that?
Coursera isn't a nonprofit, and a plain reading of that statute seems to require nonprofit status.
Google Disavow Links the Death of SEO?
My impression is that they can get away with requiring permits for demonstrations because there are physical space considerations, public safety, etc. Imagine if a state decided you needed a permit to write for a political blog. Same content as a protest may have, but without the meatspace messiness.
Take a look at Haskell for a very clean and expressive syntax without (required) semicolons.
I'd love to get my hands on e-ink displays for < £8; I'd put them to great use. A replacement screen for Kindle costed me around $45 two months ago.
Swedish is one such keyboard.
Never say no to networking
It also appears that this site supports the hRecipe Microformat:

http://microformats.org/wiki/hrecipe

That's pretty slick.
quoth wiki:

"Vaporware is a term in the computer industry that describes a product, typically computer hardware or software, that is announced to the general public but is never actually released"

Self-driving google cars and google glasses nominally qualify.
I hope this becomes a meme: An Introduction to _______ via R. Kelly’s “Trapped in the Closet”
Seeing some of my favorite hole in the wall restaurants get bad reviews and seeing some bland and uninteresting (but good) places get great reviews on Yelp has made me remember Malcolm Gladwell's commentary on people's preferences for three distinct flavors of spaghetti sauce.

"If you sifted carefully through the data, though, you could find patterns, and Moskowitz learned that most people's preferences fell into one of three broad groups: plain, spicy, and extra-chunky"[1]

Which tells me that since Yelp tries to aggregate everyone's taste into one unified rating metric, the tastes from which Yelp ratings are derived are quite likely to be different from those of my own.

Thus I really can't trust Yelp ratings, even if there were no 'gaming' or 'extortion' going on in their reviews.

[1] http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_09_06_a_ketchup.html
i.e. not the current "shit and vomit" one?
What you said has little to do with dollars and cents and more to do with perspective. People short puts for all kinds of reasons, only one of which is that they believe the stock is worth buying at that price. For example, someone might short a put if they have strong convictions the stock is going to have lower volatility than the implied vol of the price of the option, regardless of the intrinsic value of the stock. Or, as is likely in this case, that the market has priced in excessive volatility pre-earnings. From strictly a money point of view, this guy is sitting on a large unrealized loss simply because this thing unexpectedly got leaked. This event was obviously not priced into the option chain. His intention was to not be exposed to GOOG post-earnings and the black swan event of some idiot mis-releasing earnings caused him to get hammered.
If they code some "secret" features and then release the code... why does it matter it was coded in secret? This seems to be such a non-issue. In fact, Shuttleworth's mistake here was talking about it at all.

He is paying to have code developed to help improve Ubuntu and he happens to want to get somewhat polished versions of it before they release to public. Why is this bad? Sometimes people release early/often and that works for them. In this case Shuttleworth and by extension Canonical believe that releasing at the polished stage is beneficial.

Plus its not like there is some uber-secret group in a dark chamber coding this stuff up -- you just have to be an ubuntu developer with a little bit of traction to be part of it.
My personal theory / guess (and let's face it, we're all guessing) is that Google doesn't particularly want motorola for phones at all.

I think they've decided they need an in-house capability to produce hardware in general and they intend to suck all the juice out of Motorola and then discard its corpse so that they have the ongoing ability to invest in R&D for hardware like Google Glass, self driving cars, etc. Just like they decided years in advance of needing it that they had to have a mobile OS in their arsenal, they've now decided that strategically they have to be able to produce hardware. Not because they want to but because there are strategic initiatives they can't pursue without that.

Think of it as the biggest acqhire in history (+ a boat load of patents, of course).
Oh I see, that would resolve my concerns then! Thank you for the insight :)
Holy awesome! I really like postgres and, with FDW, a question comes to mind.

Can I basically put up a PG instance and have that manage/proxy to all of my backend stores? It would be nice to be able to just use my one DB library to query Riak, Redis and Postgresql [my usual datastore stack]. I didn't see anything in here about doing CUD operations on the FDW stores, but the benefit of having a single consistent interface for READs might be large enough to adopt this.
Bullshit.

Android has one job and one job only. It is there to kill iOS.

Why does Google want to kill iOS? Because it makes money on ads and if Apple controls the entire high-end mobile platform - they've got Google's future by the balls and they can squeeze them or their competitors for all they're worth.

So what does Google do? It commoditizes the complement just like Microsoft did to kill Netscape - aka the introduction of a free alternative - IE.

You release some product for free - probably the cash cow of another company (iOS/Netscape vs. Android/IE). You push industry wide adoption across competing interests that absolutely loathe the competitor or you squeeze them until they adopt it as an industry standard.

You now turn the cash cow into a free/undifferentiated product that quickly assumes inflation tracking rapidly falling commodity pricing (most tablets are now indistinguishable - as is the software - prepare the squeeze). This pushes your competitor's cash over into your business model (licenses/search).

Android is an astonishing success with billions of devices activated, and a growth rate that is in excess of iOS by an order of magnitude. It is already well on the way to killing iOS and the entire Apple platform.

Apple is dead. Long live iOS!

It was good while it lasted.
What about advanced courses? Almost nothing in an advanced math course, for instance, can be computer graded by current technology, or even technology reasonably on the horizon. For instance, in a number theory course, how would you handle grading a problem like "Prove that every prime number has a primitive root"? Would you dumb down the course to match the limits of grading technology?
I find it very hard to believe anyone can possibly be confused here.

Coursera is not a university, doesn't look or pretend to be a university. It doesn't grant PhDs, MDs, or indeed anything beyond a simple certificate that isn't even valid as college credit. They go to some length on every single course page to explain this. Some courses don't even give you a certificate. The website doesn't talk about certification it talks about "Advance your knowledge and career". There is a big tab that says "Universities" so I can't see how you could think Coursera was a university.
I think you are confusing the federal and state governments. The federal government spends most of its budget on defense and entitlements. Only a smaller portion goes on to education (usually in the form of grants and subsidies to the state). Education happens at the state level. For example, California's proposed budget for 2012-2013 (http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/pdf/Revised/BudgetSummary/SummaryC...) spends $50 of the $141 billion total budget on education (k-12 and higher education). Compare that to the < 2% ($72 billion) that the US federal budget will spend in the department of education. (Note: Consider that California alone spends 5/7ths of what the federal government will spend on the department of education this year).

The parent's ideas for reforms are most applicable to state governments, since that's where most education spending happens. California is also in a pretty bad spot economically, so if it were possible to drastically reduce the cost of education (without impacting the level of service), it would significantly help our state's finances.

[Disclaimer: California is the largest state economy, and the relative education budget will vary between states.]
ARM in servers: be skeptical in buying the hype
If you flip the developer switch on the side, you can load whatever you want. Here's a guide for loading Ubuntu on one: http://www.devchronicles.com/2011/10/installing-ubuntu-on-sa...
For startups in emerging fields, patents are critical
If you were a global international media company and someone were jamming your signal over a region of the planet wouldn't you put out a short, factual press release too?

If nothing else, it will help some of the affected viewers know to quit smacking their televisions on the side.
Czech; German; Polish; French; Spanish; Italian; Portuguese; etc etc etc.
Ridiculous isn't it? A little searching will lead you to a pdf if you're willing to channel your inner pirate.
Help Apportable (YC W11) bring the next Humble Android Bundle to life
Humble Bundle (YC W'11) and Apportable (YC W'11) are bringing indie games to Android through Humble Android Bundles. Indie developers often don't have the resources to create a polished Android version, so they need our help. We've worked together with the original devs to port over some of the best mobile indie games including Osmos, EDGE, Cogs, Avadon: the Black Fortress, Zen Bound 2, BIT.TRIP BEAT, Spirits, Uplink, and Swords and Soldiers. With your help, these bundles have raised $2.4 million to support the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Child's Play, and independent game developers.

We're working on a new Android bundle that has the potential to be the best yet. And we'd like to try an experiment. Would any of you like to come to San Francisco and help us finish it?

We're looking for strong programmers who love games. Familiarity with Objective-C, C++, and Python will be helpful. No Android experience necessary; we'll be using Apportable's Objective-C SDK for Android.

What's included:

- All-expenses paid trip to San Francisco (if you're not already here)

- Spend 3 - 7 days in the Humble Bundle and Apportable offices in October or November

- Hands-on tutorial building Objective-C apps on Android using Apportable SDK

- Work with the source code of the best indie game developers (under NDA, of course)

- Opportunities for future employment at Humble Bundle and Apportable

- That warm feeling that you made the world a better place

Interested? Let us know at humblebundle@apportable.com
Multiple choice is not ideal... but at the very least we shouldn't be employing teachers to tick these papers by hand when a computer could mark the pupils' answers instantaneously .

To be honest I don't think anything can be done to the 'education system' that will drastically improve the results. The bottleneck lies with the children (and their parents) and their thirst for knowledge (or lack thereof), which is a reflection of the culture and values they grow up with.

But what we can do is save a boatload of money on costs.
From one of the developers on the project: "(And getting a regular u-boot on these to use as generic linux hacking platforms isn't all that hard. Should be a nice base for people to do native ARM development)"

https://plus.google.com/109993695638569781190/posts/6MDhf9Hu...
recordings instead of lecturers? I'm not sure that's a great idea.
A company that is constantly being sued for extorting businesses into subscribing so that those businesses can suppress bad reviews is now calling out businesses who purchase good reviews.

Yelp is just a shitty company.
1) & 3) Plenty of vaporware actually works and is invested in. Vaporware is defined loosely as stuff-we-talk-about-a-lot-but-you-can't-buy-today TM. When they release it, like Daikatana and Chinese Democracy, it ceases to be vaporware anymore.

And don't forget that vaporware does not imply non-innovation! Plenty of vaporware is innovative but fails for other reasons.
No, they account for such things, and did, and despite that, Google "missed" the estimated earnings.

There is no bigger industry on the planet than the financial industry. That means a ton of money flowing around. There is far more sophistication there than you give it credit for.
Interesting point from the original nytimes article, that opens up a whole can of worms:

"What’s to stop someone from going and soliciting fake positive reviews for a competitor’s restaurant, in order for them to be publicly shamed?"
Norwegian. Many european countries use the same placement for semicolon. All the Scandinavian and Baltic countries, Germany and Netherlands to name a few.

Russia uses shift+4. Can't imagine how annoying that is.
Subd. 3 seems to be more likely

Educational program; business firms. Educational programs which are sponsored by a business firm for the training of its employees or the employees of other business firms with which it has contracted to provide educational services at no cost to the employees are exempted from the provisions of sections 136A.61 to 136A.71.
How CloudFlare launched 10 data centers in 30 days
I would really like to see derivations of this. While Google generally touts itself as being "open," I feel like this is an atypical implementation. It would be nice to see a more FOSS version using Gecko/Mozilla with some kind of personal cloud based storage like dropbox or ubuntu one. I'd even like to see Microsoft release a build that ties directly into MS products -- sky drive, azure, office365.

While arguably, that's what other products are for, it'd be nice to use the chromebook as a base to help drive down hardware cost and increase user adoption. I want to think of this as the IBM for the cloud generation.
Social rejection can make you more creative
Not really. There is no system that ever has had an always-fresh cache.

Are you disputing the premise or just disagreeing for the sake of it?
Decyber: taking the fear out of cybersecurity
A Guy Who Saw Lincoln Get Shot Was on a TV Show in 1956
Except that there's no reason it has to be underground. For a long time, instant messaging services tried to block third party clients, but I've never heard of them trying to take legal action. The Twitter TOS claims that "you have to use the Twitter API if you want to reproduce, modify, create derivative works", but that's copyright language, and Twitter does not own the copyright to tweets; only individual tweeters would have standing to sue for copyright infringement (see the recent Craigslist controversy), and I'm not sure such a claim would be valid anyway. There's the CFAA, but... anyway, I'm not a lawyer, but I'd be surprised if Twitter made a first by suing the makers of an unofficial client. In the meantime, dunno if Apple would let it into the App Store, but they could freely sell their client from their home page.

Well, that's my dream. tent.io is nice, but it's not going to replace Twitter anytime soon, and I actively dislike app.net. But we're past the age when third party clients can be effectively blocked by technical means, and I want to see their return.