skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since as long as I can remember, my work and fun has been programming languages and learning foreign languages. Recently, I am building my ideal language learning site. So its pretty focused on tools for learning foreign languages which I think is fairly different from being a general learning platform. I think that really the fastest way to learn a language is live in the area that speaks that language, but everyone can't do that, so I'm trying to build a community where people can practice reading,writing,speaking, and listening in the langauge they are targeting. It is a work in progress and still not where I want it to be in terms of features. You can check it out at http://sanbit.com . I used Blackboard a bit during college, but I don't even really know what it does. Whatever you build, I think to create value, it should help both teachers and students save time, when I used blackboard a few years ago, it seemed for of a hassle rather than actually help me, but maybe we weren't using it to its fullest potential.
Ask HN: Suggestions for learning statistics (& prob) really fast?
Any suggestions for learning basic statistics and probability (and beyond, but need a decent base first :-)?

Preferably, any material that uses R or something student-friendly (read: free or student license) would be extra credit.

Motivation: don't want to take year long stats courses in college that don't use stats software.

EDIT: Just to make the experience fruitful, I am aware of OCW, this (http://www.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html), etc... But, which materials in here or elsewhere are helpful?
I had the honor of inviting Ralph Nader to speak at my University. Amazing man. He came the day after the presidential election. He spent a few hours speaking to a full theatre and then flew out to his next stop. He would not even let us book him a hotel room. He's a very go-go kind of person. Very fit as well.

I will say this too. He makes great Chris Rock impressions! "The corporations. They're stealing your money. They're not stealing THEIR money..they're stealing YOUR money!"

Plenty of good advice in this article. Enjoy.
An Open Letter to the Developer(s) of Conficker
Totally agree with your sentiments, but the obvious objection to your argument is that ones credit rating would take a massive hit on default, affecting everything from car insurance, to rental agreements.
What's with all the moralising? You think China are under some sort of moral obligation to take their losses cause they 'had it coming' for keeping the yuan low? Just like the US they'll do whatever they see is in their advantage. I don't see anyone saying you should feel remorseful but if China want to move towards other currencies then that is their right.
Expert Reactions to Geithner Plan: Net Positive
Wow, looking at the website, this looks like an amazing school.
Ouch. Bummer it's Java.

As a plain old lamp kinda guy, I wouldn't know the first about servicing Java requests. (Not just running a simple server like the docs recommend.) How hard is it?
I would probably buy the How to Soundproof Your Apartment or House for Cheap, Guaranteed ebook. You could probably find some not too competitive keywords for this, or find people bitching about noisy neighbors on Twitter.

How hard/expensive would it be to do as a retrofit?
I am in Longmont... not sure if there is any group going, but if there is enough interest... I'd be game for a get together somewhere on Pearl St sometime...
Hulu Needs to Work on their Up-Sell
The App Engine team has been very cognizant of the lock-in issue and how it may prevent developers from using App Engine as a platform. When asked about this, they usually mention (1) this project at UCSB, (2) using Django as some abstraction level, and (3) being aware of your SDK API use. Method #3 means the team pushes standard ways of interfacing with Google services like GData instead of rolling out App Engine-specific APIs that won't be as portable.
Well, it's occurring in Africa already. Egypt is always saber-rattling on the topic... Whilst it's not a sovereign issue, there are regularly internal battles over access to water.

And yes, not the same thing -- But in Australia the critical Murray-Darling basin was taken over by the Federal Government (from the 3 state that were otherwise at loggerheads).
Pretty brilliant in it's simplicity. I'm not sure how it'll deal with all the crap that always works it way down the drain, though.
Clever device, I'm not convinced it would save a lot of money for one person taking a quick shower every morning, but I do think it could benefit those households with three or four people all wanting a shower in the morning: by recovering part of the heat from the first showers, the last person has a better chance of getting a hot shower instead of a lukewarm or cold one.
This is a really great point. I think many people buy homes because it is that thing they have to keep up with their neighbors/peers.

On the other hand, owning your own property empowers you in ways that should not be discounted. To give simple example, consider the problem of "gentrification." This happens when there is a poor neighborhood that over time attracts a young, usually creative crowd. This leads to pressure for housing there, that in turn leads to speculators and developers who improve/replace buildings further driving the process until the character of the neighborhood is totally changed.

This is a pattern that people observe over and over again. This process is at its worst when the original neighborhood has few or no owner occupants. In these situations there is little to stop a developer from being able to go through and completely change the character of the neighborhood en masse and overnight. Worst of all, the original residents don't benefit form this process-- their rent rises and when they stop being able to afford living there, they have no choice but to leave.

On the other hand, when there is a mix of ownership and rentership in the neighborhood the gentrification process proceeds much more slowly and in a way that benefits the original residents who, if they choose to leave, enjoy a profit in the sale, not steadily increasing rents.
This is interesting, this would certainly be a very new direction for foreign currency.

Another interesting point is this was not raised during the 2008 APEC meeting, much to the dismay of European countries.

However this time around things seem to have progressed, and Russia has put forth the proposal to the G20, it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

http://en.rian.ru/world/20090323/120689432.html

and this one with some humor:

http://mnweekly.ru/news/20090305/55369676.html
Your argument is that celebrities use drugs? Really? Celebrities also eat food, breath air, and sleep. Maybe you should spend more time evaluating your arguments and less time on OK Magazine. Homeless people, business people, house wives, blue collar workers, people of every walk of life use drugs. Big deal.And the products are all sold without marketing propaganda. How many crack dealers do you really think read Seth Godin? Or "How to Win Friends and Influece?"

What is stupid exactly about my "bridge" argument? What does the "bridge to nowhere" have to do with anything? That is just a Red Herring. All the marketing in the world will never produce any non-trivial feat of engineering. Sorry. Part of the issue is that you and people of your view want to point to marketing for the success of any idea; you have no demarcation criterion.
I've done both, and I like owning my own home.

Biggest advantage of home ownership? Freedom to do what you like with it; I can hack my own home.

But - I'm outside the US and I pay far less (half) in mortgage payments than I would in rent.
It needs to be free. An online "college" is a joke in the eyes of the world, so you shouldn't even try to compete in that segment by trying to charge money.

You should instead focus on teaching people the subjects. Think of it as a secondary tool that students could use to learn the material on their own. I'd focus mainly on problems, I think thats the only way you actually learn anything but doing examples.

You also should make it competitive, have different rankings and achievements etc that the students can strive for. i.e. Algebra Level I, Level II, etc. Each level would have a different set of questions, that get harder and harder.

Then let users challenge each other i.e glen vs mike - Algebra III. The users would compete to finish the 10 questions, and the winner would be either the person who got the most answers right, or if its a tie, the person with the fastest answers. Give different point values for tests based on how hard they are.

Then help users further, by letting users offer tutoring services. And to compare, the users would be able to see profiles, and see what type of achievements the "tutor" achieved.

But this is mostly just brain storming off the top of my head
When to migrate hosting? 
I am developing a web application that we hope to one day turn into a high-traffic website. Our site is currently in a shared hosting account which is fine because it is in private alpha and has only a handful of users. As we move towards beta and eventually our release, we will need to migrate hosting to a virtual host. For those with experience building a web app, when did you decide to migrate? Is it better to move earlier or wait until you have enough traffic that it makes sense to move?
Pirate Bay Announces Global Anonymity Service
obviously...but what makes you think you'll be able to get that much, when most of your money is going towards rent? At least with home ownership, most of the money you pay, will go back in your pocket when you sell the house
That's crazy. That has to be the number one complaint that neighbors in an apartment building are likely to have. I'd pay a premium on rent for soundproofing.
Yes, it's one of the best private schools in the nation.
Looking for CTO partner for startup
I am looking for technical co-founder in the Bay Area to partner up with for my startup called digizal.com, an e-commerce platform for a disruptive industry.

If you consider yourself a guru in PHP, Javascript, Ajax, HTML, CSS, MYSQL and other languages and just love to hack stuff please send me some info about you and your projects to digizal08@gmail.com. As a co-founder you will be responsible for heavy coding, infrastructure, and all aspects technical.

I have recently applied for Ycombinator summer term and with a kick but technical partner this startup can't be reckoned with. I have vast experience with e-commerce and have generated a lot of moola for a successful e-commerce company.

About me, this is my second startup the first was acquired when I finished college by a Bay Area technology company. I can give you all the details later, I am welcome to face to face meetings.
World's First Conversation Game (Or so it is claimed)
The Headfirst series has a statistics book now:
http://www.amazon.com/Head-First-Statistics-Dawn-Griffiths/d...

No it doesn't have R in it, but it's an interesting read
I disagree of course. Even 3% inflation is more than most people get in interest. But, of course, the good old days of 3%, or even 6% inflation are firmly behind us, aren't they?

What burns me is the capital gains tax, which, even in the best of times, is a slap in the face. But now, as we enter this period of extremely high inflation, anybody lucky enough to not be in cash, is promptly charged a nice fat capital gains tax the instant they convert their asset (gold/land/etc) into the inflated currency. Now, even if you are a good socialist and believe in capital gains taxes, I wonder how you feel when there's been no real gain at all? When all you did was preserve what used to buy a loaf of bread, so that you could still buy a loaf of bread after the inflation, and even then, are deemed worthy of confiscation.

My $0.02.
They have an incentive to keep repair costs under control, not to avoid repairs entirely. But, that said, not everyone is economically rational. Some landlords do perceive fixing stuff just as an expense rather than a way to ensure repeat business.

I'm either lucky or super picky because my landlords have usually been great about fixing stuff.
I am in a Prop and Stats course right now would like this just so I can apply it outside of class to something useful.
PETA's Ingrid Newkirk's Unique Will
> Which I think would distort something like Erlang greatly.

Perhaps you could actually measure how long it takes Erlang to startup, so you know if it's more like 0.1s than 10s or 10 minutes?

> then it runs very fast

Compared to what?
I'd start with http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com/

I know many people and couple close friends that are making very decent living by learning seo/adwords/copywriting(or getting really really good at one of 'em).

The biggest hurdle that holds a lot of us back from this industry is our own intelligence. That is why we shrug in disbelief that a website with a cheesy 2000 word copy makes thousands of dollars in sales. For the time I dabbled with this stuff, that was the most challenging part: putting myself in my avg customer's shoes.

ie. if you goto the site I am recommending, most of us would dismiss it as a "scam." Hey, I did--it took a lot of convincing and showing by my friends before I learned that may be should put my suspicion on hold and explore further.

With that said, getting the initial sales funnel going is not easy and can require lots of patience.
Hahaha, gotta love the cash4gold banner ad below the flame!
I was struck, on reading your post, the similarities between your premise and the premise of "Intelligent Design" advocates. To paraphrase both you and they, "How can something so perfect have occurred iteratively?"

Not judging, just noting the similarity.
Starting up a business is not about taking over the market. It's about making profits to sustain and grow. You can't learn to walk, until you learn to crawl.
You don't have to have a college degree but unless you have experience you will face a significantly higher barrier to entry in getting a job without one.

The question will always, be, if you are really such a kick-ass coder and love programming so much, why didn't you go and study what you love at college? If the answer is that you couldn't be bothered or you already know everything there is to know so it would be a waste of time etc. then it indicates something possibly highly problematic about your personality, like an arrogant or lazy attitude.
I agree. Actually, this is not a new idea. I remember hearing this view expressed around 1999 or 2000 on Online Tonight on CNET's Radio if you can believe it. That view has stuck with me ever since.
I must understand everything thoroughly before I use that API in an "application". In the meanwhile, I try to make as many little sample toy apps as possible. Having said that, learning a new API is made easy if you understand its application doman; see one 2D bitmap graphics API and you have seen them all, for example.
If Newton were to meet Einstein, he'd accept Einstein's adjustments after a few hours (days?). If Hayek were to meet Krugman, they'd be ruthlessly arguing months later.
I'm coming from the dictionary, which I cited.
When I saw the title, I was expecting basically a low flow drain. I'd imagine you would take a shorter shower if the water was pooling up around your feet as you did it.
Books. Even in the USA, classrooms are starved of just books. Not to mention the third world.

Okay, if it has to be some gee-whiz techno-thingy, then a Kindle which is about as cheap as an iPod shuffle. Which reads aloud and can automatically adjust to your reading level, suggesting new books as you go.

I think we need to look at some new economic models for teaching. Maybe a school could simply garnish 5% of every dollar a student makes above, say, 75% of the median wage, for 10 years. That gives the school some guaranteed income and the incentive to teach students economically useful skills, quickly.

Also, new reasons to learn and new ways to learn.

The main problem with educational software today is that the administration buys it and it serves their purposes, not the students'. This is an exactly analogous situation with corporate IT software buying. Except it's even worse because the administration is a quasi-branch of the government.

Out with the state curriculum and the bureaucrats. In with selling education to the people being educated. Education for its own sake. If that means we develop a course in rap lyrics, we'll give you rap lyrics. But we'll also discuss the history of martial poetry too, from the Greeks onwards. We're also going to discuss rhetoric, the mathematics of periodicity, rhythm, and the Nyquist theorem of sampling. If you want to learn how to read the Bible better, we'll do that too, and that way we can bring in practically everything in English literature after the King James Version.

Graduating from a grade should be like getting a belt in martial arts. Something you do at your own pace and a test you take at your own initiative (with parental prompting too). The difference between slow students and fast students is usually something like 33-50%. So if someone needs two years to master algebra, let them TAKE two years. It's not a race for fuck's sake.

Education should be interwoven with doing actually useful things. I think pg is right on the money that kids are mainly disconnected from society because we go to great lengths to disconnect them. Drug dealers know that at least some 14-year-olds can be trusted with limited responsibilities; so would it really be so terrible to have kids doing some jobs in a more positive working environment?

Let's put education in unusual places, with the people who need it and are motivated to learn. Undocumented workers are where I would start. We already know these people are ambitious, hardworking, and habituated to risk.
I would pay for an online learning site if it was good. I think the freemium model would work best.
With the exception of Sub-Saharan Africa or areas recently devastated by a natural disaster*

Other parts of the world lack water, but not due to the lack of freshwater sources. Just the lack of technology to access or purify what was once clean water that they have.

But even so, there still aren't wars with countries that have water over water in the areas where the lack of water is a major issue. Over other things, yes. But not water.
Something else I'll promptly be turning off/removing ASAP when I am forced to upgrade to a newer version of Firefox. Firefox was at its best in 1.5 -- hardly anything after that has been anything but developer flights of fancy.
For another example: I'm working with a large online invitation website that is doing a big redesign of their site. The new UI is effectively one "page" and everything is done via AJAX calls to a JSON service layer, including login. Authentication to that service layer is done via a custom HTTP header that is a SHA encoding of the username + password + timestamp (among other things). If you wanted to test with 1000's of user accounts with traditional load testing, you end up needing to do the SHA encoding on the fly in whatever tool you're using (VBScript, LoadRunner's crazy C-like language, etc).

Well, now that's what I would call a corner case, and an absurd implementation. I'd suggest to optimize for the 99% "normal" Ajax and Flash websites and leave the testing of such obscurities to the people who invented them in first place.

I really just can't think of a UI that would allow you easily record a Google search for one term and then abstract the test out to work with N search terms.

I'm not sure what you mean here. I thought google search terms are normally passed in a single parameter?

Because the AJAX requests become data dependent ("foo" causes 3 requests, "foobar" causes 6), you ultimately end up writing control structures

Well, hence the proposed "Make-n-substr-clones-to-emulate-incremental-search" functionality. And yes, branching and loops would be most welcome - make it a neat drag'n'drop affair with your javascript framework of choice.
Honestly this stuff is not rocket science. It needs thought and there will be ugly corner cases. But if you can smack down only 80% of cases with a flexible UI then that's a big deal. For the rest we can still dive in and debug selenium scripts (which is a royal pita in my expirience, but admittedly I haven't touched it in over a year).

Anyways, I didn't mean to bash your service here. It certainly has its place, I'm just not the target audience.

If you want to appeal to people like me then you'll just have to add a bit more flexibility and comfort to the actual script creation part. As said, that's where the lions share of our time is going, and pretty screenshots do nothing for us.

Still keep up the good work. :-)
3-4 of the best years of your life is a hefty price to pay just to demonstrate that you can do something for a long time.

This question is asked frequently and I can summarize the ensuing debate. For any benefit offered by college, or competence that it allegedly demonstrates, it can be said that:

1. college doesn't actually accomplish that in practice, and/or

2. it's not actually important in the real world, and/or

3. the same thing can be achieved faster/cheaper/more effectively through self-education/work experience, and/or

4. it is obviously not worth the staggering investment of time and money.

I rarely see tech job ads that don't qualify the education requirement with "or equivalent experience" so the people doing the hiring seem to feel the same way.
Hacker News would scale better with some caching headers
sayrer$ curl -I http://news.ycombinator.com/news

HTTP/1.0 200 OK

Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

Connection: close
I have never received a single spam letter just because I used a toll highway and the toll highway operator doesn't know about every other road I have traveled, every destinations I have driven to or what shop windows I have looked at while I'm driving around aimlessly. ISPs do.
I was looking at the members list and David Usher (vocalist for Moist) is going to be there? Hacker meetups in Montreal are much cooler than the ones in Silicon Valley...
Hi dotmatrix, did we meet at a recent HN meetup?
You are overestimating the significance and impact of Clojure. The language has potential, but it hasn't stolen mindshare from Scheme or any other Lisp dialect for that matter. People going to Clojure are coming mostly from non-Lisp languages. Lispers are quite happy with what they have; there are standards compliant, mature Schemes for the JVM. Clojure offers nothing to Schemers.
Samsung to Launch its Video Download Service
This is mentioned in Kurzweil's Singularity book. With Moores Law, he expects transistors to peak at 2020 and molecular computing to take over after that and continue the growth.

He believes innovation and paradigm shifts supplement the plateauing of S-curves.
No, it's not typical for programmers as a whole, but it's typical of his specialty, which is quantitative market analysis. He quit to do a Web 2.0 startup for a lot more money.
http://www.amazon.com/Theoretic-Probability-Statistical-Prob... is a great book if you want to learn advanced probability theory and techniques.
A friend of mine is doing the music for this game. Go Shane!
Telstra offshoot hires teen hacker 'Akill'
Sorry, EveryDNS took the site down for a while - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=529445
Toy project.
The real question is not "do" but "when".