skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
tl;dr - focusing globally at the outset, instead of nailing it locally first, Groupon has set themselves up for failure.

The article is a disappointment in that very little is actually said about Groupon. I was hoping for the nitty gritty details of their dirty scammy business.
Tetris is Russian, not Japanese...
Reddit.com: New Submit
Here's a handy guide:

Level. Description

-10. Macintosh/Windows evangelist

0. Never heard of linux

1. Heard of linux, never used it

2. Tried linux once in '97, didn't get OSS working, gave up

3. Tried linux, couldn't make it be exactly like some other OS, gave up

4. Uses linux from time to time at home and/or at work as a server os

5. Uses linux as a desktop os when needed

6. Uses linux as a desktop os, but dual/triple boots for some apps

7. Uses linux exclusively

8. Uses linux exclusively and writes kernel patches

9. Uses linux exclusively, writes kernel patches and has touched Linus Torvalds

10. Is Linus Torvalds

11. Is Linus Torvalds's wife
Standardized tests don't have to be multiple-choice tests from a question bank, though. You can have practical sections, like in the CCIE. You can have long-form scenarios you have to analyze like on part 3 of the CFA. You can have the exams only given on specific dates at specific times of the years, as is done on several exams, so that the questions are always secret and not reused.

The highest quality certifications comnbine more than one of the above techniques. For instance, you might make phase 1 be just a multiple choice test. This mainly acts as a filter so that not too many resources are wasted scoring the more comprehensive sections for test takers who aren't really serious. Then phase 2 testers might take a more open-ended test with essays, etc. Finally, people who pass phase 2 might have some kind of practical, similar to medical boards or the network building in the CCIE.

This kind of process might not be cheap, either. A lot of people's time are involved in creating, administering and grading of this kind of rigorous testing process, but it even if it costs $2000 - $3000, it is still much cheaper than a university. It is still much more egalitarian as it is not open only to the chosen few.
Also by Marshall Brain, a somewhat-related thought-provoking short story about a theoretical future where robots displace the minimum wage workforce: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
> It's not like the people using Facebook aren't aware that it tracks you.

I call bullshit on this. The majority of the people using Facebook have no clue what information they are giving up to a third party, and would be very concerned if they realized that their browsing habits were tracked by Facebook without their explicit authorization.
That is a fairy tale kind of story.

In reality, by being who you genuinely are you can earn living, if you're lucky, but to earn wealth you need to press and push and cheat.

Look, at the differences between CL and Java, Redis and MongoDB, Postgres and MySQL to name the few very popular examples. "Commercially successful" products invest heavily in creating, creating a misleading hype and other manipulations.

Being who you means to become a marginal, a hobbyist, with, perhaps, much above average abilities, in the best case.

But to make money you must pressure and bullshit people, because it is only by cheating you could get above-average returns. It is much easier and cheaper than to make something which is above average.

Look at that Java, ERP, or artificially inflated open source crap? This is how to sell. SAP has the best sales people it could hire. But once you're convinced to buy - you are locked for life.

It is all about tricks like SEO or MVPs, faked reviews or whatever, when you put words and hype ahead of the real things. And, of course, there are people, who are ready to do tricks instead of doing real things.

I'm not trying to say that it is illegal - trying to exploit fools is a legal practice, the problem is that it become a dominant one.

Writing a pleasant stories for fools instead of real product specifications and reference documentation is so common, that nobody even reads it anymore.)
I don't know the first thing about statistics, but I know that the set of people reading this website are in a selection problem- everyone here could probably learn to program and go some spec work. For each person here, there are some ratio of other people that cannot do this work. Why they cannot is undefined. Maybe it's as simple as they find it boring or have a low dedication. But I believe it is a fact that there are some number of people who cannot simply ramp up their mental aperture and get a better profession.
Barack Obama wins the presidential elections and becomes the second president
People all over the world were waiting impatiently to know the results of the presidential elections that started from yesterday; Barak Obama and Romney were in a close race and it was a toss-up who will win.
High Profile UK VC Faces Jail After Sexual Assault Conviction
http://weddinglovely.com/
There are a lot of potential pitfalls with this, the first one I can think of being having sex. I wouldn't want to have slits in the mattress that my arms or legs could get caught in when having sex.
Announcing Riak Cloud Storage With Multi-Datacenter Replication
I know it's cool to hate on Blackberry now, and I have done it too, simply for the fact that when everyone warned them that Android and iOS will kill them, they refused to believe it - until it was already too late and they were going downhill fast. You don't try to adapt your company for the new market rules when it's going downhill and losing money. You try to see where the market is going years ahead and try to be one of the first to move in the direction, and avoid a collapse.

That being said, I like some of the innovations, especially UI ones, that they've done in BB10, and I hope they remain a strong competitor to Android and iOS.
If you are already a programmer, you should know most of of the operators and keywords except for a few Python-isms.

Quote:
"What's also important is to find out what you do not know so you can fix it later."
I am using ion3 right now. It's pretty cool. Feels a bit limited though, I'm thinking of maybe transitioning to something more ... awesome ;] .
Get with the program, man, you can't have a startup without tshirts! They usually end up being 90% of the actual products shipped.
Update today. Hope you guyz like it.
"BlackBerry 10: AWESOME. If the hardware matches it, RIM jobs are safe"

Stay classy Register.
Do not confuse old with crappy. The fact that most lecture-based schools are crappy does not diminish the value of a lecture (cf. Oxford etc.). The problem is not necessary the method but the numbers.

Of course, a "lecture" on Perl is probably as useless as a "practical with computers" on Metaphysics.
Tanenbaum-Linus Torvalds  Debate: Part II
You get it at a few places. It has its downsides though: expensive for the university, and a big time suck for the supervisors, but honestly it's a really successful system. I'd go as far to say that if there's any one thing an institution can do to improve the abilities of their students, it would be to adopt a system like that.

I'm not sure how students can be expected to learn from a one-sided teaching system. We're not photocopiers. There's so much value from a meaningful, extended dialogue between a student and a "mentor." Unfortunately, a lot of people have to wait until postgraduate programs to get that, and even then may not.

A lot of US institutions have office hours which could offer much of the same if students knew to take advantage of them in the right way.
I'd bet that most people who install AdBlock software aren't doing it because they care about getting tracked, but because they get sick of obnoxious ads, which exist independent of tracking.

AdBlocking software does not stop tracking. That's not feasible, unless turning on AdBlock also severs your internet connection. It might diminish tracking, but only incidentally.
If someone is a fucking idiot, still better to have them say, spend their time in an retirement home talking to and looking after elderly people, than it is to have them feeding groceries to a scanner as some kind of redundant biological link in a machine.
Posted in my fb feed. A huge hit.
Xkcd: Two Years
OpenTTD in Emscripten is particularly impressive: http://play-ttd.com/
Based on the handful of sites that it sent me to, I'd rename this "The Creative Web".
What’s Next for Kik, One of the Original Mobile Messaging Hotshots
How much battery life are you getting on it?

I'm also in the market for a linux ultrabook, but considering the price difference I'll prolly go with the samsung chromebook or even with the thinkpad x1 carbon (yes, I'd pay a lot for a better screen resolution/specs-wise).
How The Sale Of Vulnerabilities Will Change In 2013
Oh wow, this takes me back.

My first job was at Virgin Games as an artist. I got a beta version of Dune II, and played it obsessively.

The artwork Westwood Studios created was very inspiring - their artists were very good and developed some wonder palettes.
It's because the website owners choose a machine gun over a rifle when it comes to ads - instead of carefully selecting and testing ads for each page, they just slap half a dozen of them on every page and hope some get clicked on. It's very annoying for the readers/users, hence the popularity of ABP and NS.

Of course, the former approach takes more work, but the results are worth it in the long run...
I also got the same website. Damn it's stuck in my mind right now
Sometimes browser zooming breaks pixel calculations... yeah, one more edge case to the already long list of edge cases.
The secret tech inside the Wii U Nintendo has yet to unlock
It's 2020. Lots of teenagers don't have jobs and would like them. Someone starts a new business based on the available cheap labor.

Dog poop scooping? Personal couriers? Game testing? Something we haven't thought of because the relevant industry doesn't exist yet?

Economies aren't static. You can always find something useful to do.
FYI, there is a post from the author, describing some game designs and listing existing bugs (unfortunately, Russian only) - http://habrahabr.ru/post/159501/

In short, he says that sync model used in OpenDune ran very badly in JS, so he had to replace it with async model (thus introducing some bugs).

He also lists hotkeys:

Attack, Move, Harvest, Retreat, Guard, Tab, Build
NYTimes: Panel Approves a Bill to Safeguard E-Mail
Is it time for the US to ditch the dollar bill?
Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution,
The Tanenbaum-Torvalds Debate: http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/appa.html
I think there's an important insight hiding here. Art-world folk are perhaps overeager to shoehorn games into their definition of "art" (which is naturally rather nebulous). Just because a piece of software has NES-era graphics and allows you to use the keyboard to move a sprite around does not, to my mind, instantly qualify it as a game.

By a similar token, a box containing a blank white board and a single six-sided die does not instantly attain the status of a board game. And even though it is, perhaps, art--and fully something I'd expect to see in a board game exhibit in a museum of modern art--I wouldn't begrudge board game enthusiasts (of which I know many) if they grumbled at how such a "useless" exhibit was soaking up attention that could have been devoted to a game that was more substantial, more influential, and more representative of what board games really are.

But at the end of the day we're still just disagreeing over the definition of "art", which is perhaps the least constructive argument that has ever taken place in the history of humanity. :)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4851589
yup, I can see my idea being the start to a sci-fi movie.

Even what you describe though is still just building more arms in an arms race.

Natural selection itself needs mutations as fuel. Another crack-pot thought - figure out how to decrease the speed of mutations that bacteria are subjected to. Something along the lines of biological or synthetic error correction on DNA.

At some point (have we crossed it?) human evolution has moved from physical 'fitness tests' to non-physical. When we get colder now we just design thicker clothes and warmer buildings, etc. Heart disease? more pills and surgeries. I've read people make an interesting case that corn is one of the most successful organisms as measured by adapting to fit because over time it became the corner stone of our entire diet as a species. And by that line of reasoning the genetic modification we do as humans on corn is part of corns continued adaptation. A little meta perhaps, but eventually I wonder how much control we'll have over the biology so that the mutations and modifications would seem artificial and human designed by today standards.
> So how is a teenager supposed to fund his pot habit in 2020?

Learn how to maintain/fix robots.
it at least can spam your web browser's history mark
Someone Made a Real-Life Pixar Desk Lamp
Google Play revenue rises by 311%
It very funny to see Vidyard erasing ALL comments on their post that are negative, constructive or not LOL...
>>> Zynga now has its own games platform, but players will no longer be able to share their progress on Facebook.

Isn't every app allowed to share certain things on a user's FB page? Why wouldn't this be possible for Zynga games?
thank you, I appreciate the input
Actually, applications can control colors in the same way over SSH as they can on a local distro.
IMO the "general malaise" you and I feel is the minority opinion held by technically-savvy people. The 90% of Facebook users who are not could care less. The trick now will be whether Zynga can transition from the unlimited access to casual users of Facebook to their own, or other gaming communities, where those audiences will be much more discriminating.
Welcome to new Koding, the next little thing.
thank you, those all look great - looks like I have a busy weekend (or week) ahead of me!
Hilarious.

It doesn't fit in with these sites, but my favorite useless site is still Beedogs: http://www.beedogs.com/

The best part is clicking for more beedogs repeatedly and reading what it says.
Yeah, that's the problem with automation isn't it? The point is not to free the mind of the common salaryman from the burden of manual labor but just to free the company of the burden of employees, much less of paying them more to do something else. And when there are no more bottom tier positions left which haven't been filled by a machine or outsourced for a tenth of your salary (to someone who's going to be replaced by a machine themselves in a few years)... too bad for you I guess.
It's also just damned useful. You can open up PDFs and grab diagrams out of research papers. You can re-save PDFs after converting all the text to paths, to avoid font embedding problems. You can manipulate the saved files with d3.js.

It's very quickly become one of my favorite tools.

Connectors still suck, though.
Obnoxious ads that also happen to slow down your computer.
That is where my thoughts are as well - business customers make a large mind share that I cannot imagine that they would ignore. I am hoping that Windows 8 as it is right now is the foundation for a more enterprise friendly set up. Please notice 'hoping' - I am equally prepared to not be surprised if this is it so to speak. Can't imagine that but hey, stranger things have happened.
The obsession with usability extends to giving everything a shortcut key... Nobody else does this.

Windows Phone has an app for that. I have a tile on my home screen. Tap it and it creates a pre-populated email to my wife asking how her day is going.
I think I may have just come up with their new slogan: "The seedless watermelon of mattresses".
Not sure I would have wanted my late grandmother to be looked after by "a fucking idiot".
Loved this one - http://heeeeeeeey.com/
From the same blog, this is the starting point where he breaks down a very simple process of drawing with circles and introduces some basic concepts.

http://2dgameartforprogrammers.blogspot.in/2011/10/lets-get-...
I use to be a devoted blackberry user. My biggest issue with what I'm seeing is it still looks a lot like the old crap I had to deal with.

I've moved onto bigger and better things.
Education intersects with two problem areas that have historically been correlated:

1. Knowledge sharing. Books no longer take three months of a person's time to copy, but <$0.01 of electricity. Video lectures are now freely available. This is awesome! But it's not the full picture when it comes to education. You also need frisbee games and poetry nights.

2. "Social". This includes credentialing, social networking, and creation of an environment (in college, a mostly parentally funded and artificial one) conducive to rapid learning.

The second of these is much harder, because people still believe that exclusivity is necessary to preserve quality (and, sadly, they are not entirely wrong). I've said before that there are two sub-problems in social. One is documenting existing relationships. That's lucrative but does little real good for the world. The second is to expand the social graph. That does a lot of good but it's also risky and rarely remunerative because some people (and the vast majority of the powerful) like exclusivity. The problem with "disruption" is that it assumes the disrupted are old fogeys who won't fight back, and that's never true.
And the pendulum swings back.

While there are differences, fundamentally the proposition of mentors, internship-based learning, and living on site is not that different from apprenticeships. There's a wider exposure to ideas, perhaps (because maybe you jump between internships instead of staying with one), but at its most basic level the proposed idea is training people to do jobs instead of trying to expand their thinking minds. Yes, there's lip service given to seminars, but it's evident in the quote (“Traditional universities… list the Nobel laureates… ours… would list the… entrepreneurs, inventors, and executives”) that academics are held in a certain amount of contempt.

Let me be clear: I don't think there's anything wrong with this vision. This approach would probably be a success. It may be needed. The problem is this: somehow we mutated universities into a place where everyone goes in order to get a job. I think we benefit from having more people being educated at a university level, but that benefit is not purely practical. I don't think the point of getting higher education is getting a job. I think it's an extension of the same reason we go to school: because an educated population drives knowledge further. Because when a large part of the population gets a Bachelors of some sort, they can reason better. And because when there are more people at that knowledge level, a larger part than before gets a Ph.D. And that helps society and humanity move forward faster.

There's a tension right now between the university as a place to expand your mind and learn for the sake of learning and the university as a place where you prepare for a job. I think it's a good idea to play with that tension and that balance, and see what balance leads to better results in what way. But I think there is absolutely a place for universities as they are today, and I think their existence is part of what has driven us forward at the frenetic pace that we have seen the last several decades.
This isn't the first positive review I've read about BB10, so perhaps it has potential. Here's to hoping it is a success, as the more viable competition we see in mobile, the better. I work across the road from QNX, so it would be nice to see RIM succeed here.

I'm sure that BB popularity varies by geographic region, but for what it's worth I see far more BBs out in public here in Ottawa than I do iPhones. And not just in the hands of government employees, where you'd expect to see them. BBs seem to be extremely popular among high school and college aged people here, primarily due to BBM.
>Link electronic music that wasn't repetitive and wasn't released on Warp Records.

I personally don't believe that repetition in electronic music even implies a sub-par track, but that's highly subjective of course, and we know where you stand.

Some of the most groundbreaking and beautiful music to me is found on the Basic Channel and Chain Reaction labels, with tracks that are extremely minimal and would probably sound repetitive to many listeners.

Plus 8 has a long history of incredible and innovative artists and tracks. It really depends on how you define electronic as well. If Chain Reaction is repetitive, Plus 8 less so, Warp less so, but even less are labels like Wax Trax! that had much more dynamic and traditional song structures from their artists (industrial). Do you consider them electronic? Subjective. Labels like Mo Wax delivered far less repetitive offerings than Warp artists, and just as compelling. Ghostly International takes takes us back to more traditional electronic offering if Mo Wax and Wax Trax! aren't 'electronic' enough for one's definition.

Really, there are just too many to name, even with the constraint of stripping out electronic music subjectively deemed 'repetitive'.

But I take your point though. Warp Records, especially at a particular time in electronic music's history, was one of those special and legendary labels that every genre seems to have one or two of. They were home to some of the most compelling and innovative artists of their generation, and rather than having just one or two, they were home to many. Might be the best electronic music label in history for strength of talent and how deep their roster went.

And I too have a lawn, but you don't need to get off it, -instead you can hang out on it and bring your vinyl. I've got a few crates of some incredibly good and rare discs and a 1200 on which to play them ;)
And linux!
I think I'd rather keep my money and use it to "Travel. Eat. Thrive." for myself.
Because Drupal is a mess. It is like a naturally evolved organism with vestigial organisms and the difficulty in refactoring that comes along with it. The hooks are all global in scope. It all works, but it is all over the place. Using Drupal makes me feel productive, but dirty. And to develop any new functionality the Ruby/Rails stack is much faster. So the reason to want something that marries both is to get fast development for new parts, and giant reusable Duplo's for the repetitive common app parts. If I was religious about these things, I would not be developing in Drupal in the first place... :-)