skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Such strong language. I did pose it as a parenthetical question...

Anyway, I think automated grading could work for anything math-based, as well as for some computer programs. Consider that much of learning is done through homework and exercises that build upon previous exercises. I spent many hours learning by working through problems and checking my answers with an answer guide. (And being infuriated when I found mistakes in the answer guide!) Doing homework isn't a complete education, but it sure is a part of one. And yes, as long as the exercises are well designed, they make you able to think.

Needless to say, grading essays and whatnot is another ballgame altogether.
Sorry, but that's incorrect.
The major browsers will let you in - you just have to pass all their audits, comply to all their regulations, and commonly have a WebTrust audit....which can set you back mid-$xx,xxx.
All browsers/OSs are accepting new roots all the time - check the Mozilla dev lists/Bugzilla and you'll see.
I like it. It kinda reminds me of '80s era Syd Mead designs for some reason (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syd_Mead).
What do you think of goto in php?
I am not a php programmer but when I heard that php would introduce goto's to the core I started to asking myself why anyone would ever think something like this, so what do you think of goto in php?
Answer: they are working on other projects. The ones that have already left the stone age, and choose tools on merit rather than fear, dogma, and "that's the way we always did it".

Disclaimer: ex-defense programmer. Java. C++. <shudder>
not only is this a warning about history, but it is one about politics.

we voted for this via popular support across the world. we took popularism and democracy too far. the populous was wrong, so....

my question is, how do you design a system that both accommodates the population of your system, but also allows success with counter examples?

i am afraid that wikipedia will develop a sedentary culture, and will slow down in its rate of change, hence making it corruptible. so how do we fix that, how do we protect communities from them selves?
My concern is that "practicality" is often just a code word for "resembles Java or whatever else I was comfortable with so I can continue on doing what I've always done before." (With the result that the student learns less than if they were required to do something truly different.)

Reminds me of this post that came up on HN not too long ago:

http://funcall.blogspot.com/2009/03/not-lisp-again.html
1. Like almost anyone who remembers the cold fusion craze and fallout (hehe) of the late 80s and early 90s, I'm extremely skeptical.

2. The fact that this comes from researchers from the US Navy does lend it some credence, but I'm still very skeptical.

3. The reporting in this article is a good example of how the whole "fair and balanced" approach to reporting sometimes backfires when it comes to science reporting.

Paul Padley, a physicist at Rice University who reviewed Mosier-Boss's published work, said the study did not provide a plausible explanation of how cold fusion could take place in the conditions described.

...

But Steven Krivit, editor of the New Energy Times, said the study was "big" and could open a new scientific field.

The neutrons produced in the experiments "may not be caused by fusion but perhaps some new, unknown nuclear process," added Krivit, who has monitored cold fusion studies for the past 20 years.

So in most people's mind, there's this struggle and controversy within the scientific community about this topic, but one of these sources is quite a bit more credible than the other, at least to me.

This has been a primary tactic of the "Intelligent Design" and the anti-climate-change groups for quite some time.
Don't Count Ad Impressions, Make Them
Although the production costs are free, the maintenance costs (both short and long term) to make the certificates have any worth to purchasers is very significant.
William Zinsser: Writing "On Writing Well" and keeping it up-to-date for 35 years
A website that offers for sale any and all merchandise a consumer sees on TV that they'd like to purchase. Merchandise may be clothing, shoes, fragrance, electronics, automobiles, jewelry, etc.

Website will offer an opportunity to purchase exact items, or selected less expensive imitations, in a very AMAZON.COM way.

Website will offer discounts and a rewards program that is viral.

Additionally, company will provide powerful advertising & branding opportunities for manufacturers who wish to attain premium website placement for their products.
"And why Python, then? Well, said Sussman, it probably just had a library already implemented for the robotics interface, that was all."

I can confirm this is true. The Python Robotics module (Pyro) inspired MIT's internal library, SoaR, which was developed at first by a highly motivated TA.

What does SoaR stand for? Snakes on a Robot, of course.
It pisses you off that your use of the service isn't being subsidized by other parts of the world anymore? I mean, that's what seems to be the reason for instituting the fee. They are able to use ad sales to generate revenue for the 3 countries mentioned, so the service is paid for that way. They aren't able to generate enough ad revenue in the other countries, hence the fee.

I do find the general reactions a bit perplexing. Most range along the lines of "Everyone should pay or no one should pay.", "Companies should charge the people who can afford it more.", "I expect music to always be free to listen to." and "I refuse to pay for music, so I will now go back to pirating more."
i think its php's attempt to cater to the procedural programmers, which is still a hefty chunk of its userbase.

don't use it.
Reducibility Among Combinatorial Problems (summary of classic paper)
You also have to wait about 5 years before you will have the 99%-99.9% browser support that customers require.
Well, the business upside is that they can work on features instead of debugging a broken browser.

A more esoteric upside would be that a company that speaks out visibly against IE gives me, a technical minded customer, this warm tingly feeling inside. It suggests that someone in the company is like-minded with me. Which in turn suggests that their product and direction might appeal to me, too.

It'd obviously be a different story if this was a product aiming for joe sixpack and the mass-market. But since messaging APIs are a hard sell in the joe-sixpack market in first place I can only applaud their move; focus your resources on the product, not on the latest IE bug.
GMail meets the Web:  Applying "Mark as Read" and other email features to web page blocks.
The idea here would be to click on a web page block (much as you would with iphone's safari to zoom in) to indicate that you have read it. Read blocks are dimmed.

This could be very useful in a news site to see what's left to read -- especially as the front page is updated. But it could also be useful in reading non-fiction of any sort where you can jump around from section to section.

In addition to "Mark as Read", you could also apply "Archive", "Report Spam", "Forward", etc to web page blocks.

Note in particular that "Report Spam" would allow you to hide certain parts of web pages.
testing the market.
"2D time based points." Not sure I follow. Was that just an example?

Regarding the type of content on the site, I think you make a good point.
YMMV, but in my experience twitter would be prompter than the typical SMS service from a big carrier. More reliable, too.
When there's a large gap between an item's marginal cost and value to consumers, producers who capture a large amount of the difference are considered lucky or evil. This is an advantageous meme for consumers, and nearly everyone sees more individual consumption transactions than production transactions, so it's not going to go away, no matter how much more we drill people in economics.

"They need to be somewhat expensive to not dilute the amount of valid certs."

I don't understand you. The validity of a cert isn't dependent on its cost, though as you note, steps taken to ensure validity drive up cost. In any case, virtually no one is served by getting a more expensive cert these days, now that $50 and lower certs are available and just as trusted by browser manufacturers. The original idea that cert providers would verify actual identity has given way to the idea that certs only verify that the encryption really comes from the website itself, rather than some middleman. There's a place for business identification, but it's hard to do cheaply. Actually, it's hard to do at all, in a global marketplace.
Another PBS fantastic report highly related is The Secret History of the Credit Card (2004) http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9048007397539880204...
You could probably pair this advice with http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ in your is-it-down script, so that you really get a good idea about how widespread your outage is. Just a thought.
Twitter hasn't had any serious downtime for months.
Here we go:

There's essentially 3 types of certificate:

DV - Domain Validation. The cheap, automated ones. Certs contain no more than the domain name they're issued to, and the whole process is automated.

OV - Organisational Validation. The original 'standard' of certs, that most CAs issued until a few years back. Domain ownership checked, business checked (for legal existence and verified address).

EV - Extended Validation. The new 'green bar' standard. Lots of hoops to jump through - agreements, legally-notarised letters, checking of business existence with local govt. & third parties, phone number verification, verification that the person requesting the cert actually has the right to do so....and so on.

The question then becomes: why?

The OV and DV sadly appear the same to the user. A few years back, one CA decided to issue the certs purely based on domain checking. Automation = cheap certs = big, fast marker share. It took, they made money.
Then a time came to do something about the DV certs (ie making the browser chrome showing them 'less' secure or similar). By this time, the big boys in the CA world had aquired the company and had a pretty penny invested in the DV certs not becoming the red-headed stepchild.

So the CAs and the browser and the OS people invented EV. There's still talk that DV will be 'downgraded' one day, but we'll see.

Other types: Wildcards as someone mentioned will cover unlimited subdomains of the domain they're issued to (traditionally certs are for single FQDNs).
Then we've got the new UCC for MS Exchange/OCS which has multiple, unique FQDNs in a single cert.
Then you've got client & email certs, code-signing, and more :)
First, never buy a GeoTrust certificate directly from GeoTrust. They charge their MSRP, but all their resellers charge less than the MSRP. For example, you can buy that same exact certificate through Trustico for half the price (scroll down): http://www.trustico.com/products/truebusinessid/true_busines...

Second, if you want a wildcard cert that works with mobile browsers, Verisign and Geotrust are your only options for the next few years. After that, prices should drop considerably as newer devices ship with many more root certs than older ones.
Thank you, PHP!
What do you see as the features that critically differentiate this from Delivery Agent? http://➡.ws/ꉨ
With a bit of curl hacking I managed to abuse their demo API to send arbitrary messages.

Just try this :
curl -v -d "channel=email&address=EMAIL_HERE&commit=Submit&message=messagepub%20sucks%20I%20JustHackedTheirDemoAPItoSendArbitraryMessagesUsingCURLlolSpam&authenticity_token=1f52274baf9904dd33b012c1a4c1548afd197438" -b _trunk_session=BAh7BzoMY3NyZl9pZCIlM2JmZDg3ZDhlYTZjN2U3MzFkNmMyMWMyNGYxYmQ4YTQiCmZsYXNoSUM6J0FjdGlvbkNvbnRyb2xsZXI6OkZsYXNoOjpGbGFzaEhhc2h7AAY6CkB1c2VkewA%3D--2e9b47678c68095440f03ce3b7558712b4fba37a http://messagepub.com/demo/create

You'll have to grab the cookie and authenticity_token from a preceding GET request, as the cookie seems to change from time to time. The authenticity token does not change among successive posts.

Hello spam!

Guys, please fix your security.
They've been on and off for me all day today.
The first time I tried to send a phone message, it rang my phone but never read anything back. The second time, I noticed the low-quality TTS. If you're going to charge for this, at least use something good like Cepstral. Interesting concept though, might save a lot of development time for people.
Dog Crap Bomb
I am thinking of starting something like this
http://www.derekerdman.com/burger_bomb.htm
but with dog crap. I would love some input. I am thinking $5 and we send an unmarked pack of crap anywhere in the US.
But the above examples are taken straight from SICP. Wasn't that the textbook for 6.001 before they switched to Python?
But then he chooses the second most unreliable route?

I think this approach is neat and novel, but ultimately I don't believe they've solved their problems.

YAPS/SMSClient with a good gateway SMS provider, if the SMS is that critical. I don't understand why email only is a failure, assuming they have push email to their phone (and if you don't, well why not?)
New Geithner plan is capitalism for the poor, and socialism for the rich
Also: I'll do a shameless plug here.
If anyone here on HN needs a cert, or just advise on setting one up, what to buy - I'm more than happy to help (even if you don't get one of ours!).
I'll certainly do what I can discounts-wise.

I'm a techie, not a marketeer-o-naut.

Email on my user profile.
Google Refines Presentation Of Search Results
Most PHP devs I've worked with (myself included) would consider these tips so trivial as to be expected knowledge. So don't be so unfair on PHP developers--the good ones find the ridiculous questions on PHP.net, and articles like this, just as stupid as you apparently do.
This is so true. Stability and security are illusions that we want to think they exist. What are they anyway? Equity gets lost too. In the end you never really know what's going to happen. You can play the probabilities game to help you ignore that for a while but in the end you never really know what's ahead.

Then why are people so afraid of something bad happening that they need to build securities and seek stability to ease their worries? Why do they crave for stability when the world itself is in constant flux -- with everybody in it as well? Is it some fundamental belief of not ever having enough, manifesting itself in barricading oneself inside things that at least seem rock solid?
Hackers (1995)
For all who like that movie!
I don't know about racket, but you can read my other comments for, I hope, some more insight.

As for the green-bar - I'll admit it's taking some time to get hold, but testing (not just from my CA, but all of them) has shown consumer awareness is increasing and people are inclined to 'trust' the green a bit more.

Mind you, the same users will stick their bank login details on a phishing page with no ssl hosted on some .cn....so what can you do, eh? :)
One minute of phone call would probably cost him/her 2.5-3 cents while one SMS will cost him 5 cents. The cost to send/receive SMS will not go down unless you buy hundreds of thousands at the same time.
The method: dynamic programming algorithm, triangulation and tracert.
> "We witnessed a significant increase in people who get to a page and stay on the page,"

I thought that quote is very interesting. If people visit your page and then hit the back button to visit another result, you'll probably get penalized. Pay attention to that metric and try to do a better job at providing what people want for that particular query.
Please stop saying social media is free
They've gone on record as saying the reason the 3 countries were picked as keeping the status quo is purely down to advertising sales in those countries.

What's really stupid is the way international entities still segment countries as far as bottom line goes. I assume this is for tax reasons or similar, but since their products cross international borders it just seems a bit strange.
I'm no expert, but I'm guessing it's so they don't have a bunch of accounts with 2 or 3 transactions a month making them lose money.
It's an even older library, so what's your point ?
I think I missed the RSS reading part of it; it makes more sense now. Seconded on the themes looking very nice!

@jacobbijani: I'm not sure if you care much, but Firefox users can remove the start.io menu from their pages by adding a display:none tag to it in their layout. Also, users can write javascript in the layout editor. Mine is currently redirecting all visitors to google... Perhaps the layout editor should be restricted to css?
The fix is easy, just add an integer value to the message select, and server-side, use it to select canned messages from a dictionary.

This will not stop abuse of your canned messages, but at least messagepost's demo page will not become a spam gateway.
TopCoder uses fundamentally automated grading for its contests, and people learn much about programming through it -- the teaching happens from human to human, but the presence of an immobile, unthinking obstacle to overcome doesn't at all hinder the learning process.
In terms of 'goto' in general, I always apply this rule: Use your head.

'goto' isn't exactly elegant most of the time, but there are some cases where it produces cleaner, yet still correct, code. If you understand it and its repercussions, tread carefully.
There are corner cases where goto is more convenient than hacking around it using higher-level constructs. It's not inherently evil. It's repeatedly been shown that the developers of PHP regard it as a "kitchen sink" language where every feature is thrown in in some form so adding goto makes sense in that perspective.
Or rather, everyone who voted for it should have "Senator Dorgan told me so" tattooed on theirs...
10 Weight Loss Tips | Recipes, recipe guide, diet, health guide
Delivery Agent works hand in hand with the networks to promote their objectives. Inventory options are terrible and in no way is the site dedicated to a first rate consumer experience.

Think about the Barnes & Noble website prior to introduction of Amazon.com.
Using the words "in the internet space" makes you sound like middle-management, especially when your idea is specifically retail ecommerce.

Do you actually want to deal with fulfillment headaches? Especially when a competitor could avoid that by primarily being an Amazon affiliate (and using Amazon for fulfillment of novel items)?
Carmack release open source Wolfenstein for iPhone
Actually it is very simple: adding Twitter to the mix adds one more "moving part". Shooting a simple email and then multiplexing it (via aliasing, for instance) to X recipients is easier and more reliable. Create an address like my-startup-site-is-down@gmail.com and forward to X other destinations from there (including Twitter if you want), and send your notifications to that address using standard 20+ year old protocols and tools, instead of some 3rd party proprietary stuff which was "released often, released early" and hasn't crashed "in months"
incentives matter.
I don't know if these pages are meant to be shown publicly so much: I link to mine from my web site, but it's not a very social thing. It's not like a social network where people see lots of pages and so redirecting can be seen as hostile.
It seems like for 1, if you just have a bunch of files somewhere, you should be able to keep that in source control. When is it a good idea (if ever) to keep a SQLite database in git?
IPhone App Developers Gripe About Payment Delays and Dismal Customer Service
/metoo
Which sort of wanders back around to begging the question; is that still the best way to start teaching, as Sussman talks about?

I ask myself, "how would I teach my son to program?", and for all my copious academic and practical experience, "start with re-implementing car and cdr from lambda functions" isn't even remotely in the running. Sure, I'd introduce such things earlier than most people and SICP is still firmly in the running, but for that to be an introduction in the general case? Not so sure.

There's definitely an argument to be made that robotics is in many ways a much more realistic starting point. While some people may find the idea that we should actually start out by making a case to the students that their major is cool and important and gives them the ability to affect things in the real world vaguely repulsive, I'd say that it's an idea at least worth considering. The student that can leap from lambda, car, and cdr, to realizing that right in the introductory course is so exceptional that you're not going to hold them back anyhow.
Another good argument for not mourning the passing of Scheme is that it isn't dead. You just used it when you posted your comment. HN is implemented in Arc which is implemented in Scheme.
Low-income students feel left out at Stanford
I think here, "practicality" means "has a library for controlling robots". Also a good numeric library, a good matlab-like graphing library, good 3D graphics, good real-time performance, easy C++ embedding, etc.

Rather than complaining about how everyone else is a bonehead for not using Lisp, write some libraries to make it useful for more things in the real world.

Also, Python does pretty well for real-time control. At Anybots we use it to run walking balance feedback loops at 100 Hz in the same process as a GUI and logging and it never misses a tick. PLT Scheme (used on HN) frequently pauses for 10+ seconds to GC. While there are theoretical concurrent GC systems for Lisp, none of them seem usable in real implementations.
Can you get responses back by SMS? How does the user differentiate between my app running on messagepub and someone else's app? Does the user have to enter extra keywords to direct the SMS to one vs. another app?
> "We're talking about a new field of science that's a hybrid between chemistry and physics."

I already saw articles about that in Russian magazine "Technic for youngers" ("Техника - молодёжи"/"Tehnika - molodeji") about 20 years ago. A man (I cannot find article) experimented with middle energy range (around 0.1MeV) nuclear reactions. He used modified welding machine to generate high power, which he used to fuse alloy of metals. Then he analysed results and found new metals and non-metals in alloy. He created theory about stable nuclear fractions, similar to chemistry, which can be transmitted between nucleus at much lower energies than typical nuclear reaction without damaging of nucleus.

However, magazine was very popular due to science fiction. ;-)
Ask HN: What web database(s) do you guys use?
I was today in the middle of a mysql scenario where it corrupted index, had to repair it etc.. anyways which database are you guys using? Seems like Mysql pretty much prevails, but I was wondering what are your experience with other solutions - mainly PostgreSQL and others.
One of the truly great pictures ever made. Still my favorite Angelina Jolie movie.
I really liked this haskell ambigram: http://www.haskell.org/logos/logos/HaskelmR.png
Clojure is a Lisp. Lisp is 50 years old.
http://ibn-alhajjaj.freehostia.com/
"It's unrealistic to not expect a huge backlash against a service that's restricting itself to only those markets where they think they might make money."

Which, in one sentence, explains the insanity of the mindset of web startups at the moment. Fortunately, it looks like that's starting to change.

"And trust me, I've already stopped feeding them information. Also, come end of March and I will take my business elsewhere."

Great. Especially if you think Last.fm is wrong about the value of your market, why not start a competitor?

"I don't mind paying for a service. I do mind discrimination and senseless discrimination I mind even more."

There shouldn't be a taboo against saying you don't think last.fm (or any web startup) isn't worth paying for, but I hope you still don't think this is the result of CBSs xenophobia.
Hang out around Stanford or Berkeley CS departments.

Stanford has 'BASES' created specifically for this.