skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Precisely. Can we even see a complete simulation of E. Coli?

It's disheartening how much of science news and research today is all about hype, smoke, and mirrors. It's becoming more about catching fleeting fame and money grabbing than actually producing interesting advances and results.

Exactly how would they scale this when you have something like a hundred trillion synapses between the neurons in a brain? Mind you this is falsely assuming that there is nothing of worth to simulate within individual neurons/synapses. Our current technological infrastructure isn't even in the ballpark of being good enough to deal with actually LARGE graph data structures, and people are getting excited about this nonsense. They talk up these simulations, but we don't even know the basic details about these things yet.

Let's see a complete simulation of a spider's brain from the bottom up before talking about simulating the human brain. Let's figure out precisely what is going on in the brain of a spider. I will be surprised if we accomplish that in the next 50 years.
and watched it go to shit 1 week later
Summer's still got it. You could pick up the universe 10 years later, and nerd-dom would flock to it. Joss Whedon could make it work, if he wanted. Doesn't though. It would be a different show, with maybe a few actors from the old one, but it would still have the benefit of the franchise.
If I may ask, why? Genuinely curious, not trying to be a jerk.

Is it just to stay in the terminal?
"Women continue to make up seventy-five percent of all microcredit recipients worldwide."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcredit#Lending_to_women

Microcredit loans are for persons starting their own business. Selling drinking water sounds like a good match.
As an Australian who can't get Netflix without breaking the Netflix Terms of Service I suspect there's going to be an awful lot of downloading going on here, even moreso than the game of thrones situation we had where we were only just behind.

Now it's just 'off limits' entirely.

legally, anyway.
I'm skeeved out by technolibertarianism too, but I disagree that this is a well-reasoned piece. It's a guilt- by- ideological- association hit piece that at one point has its cake and smears it all over its own face by linking Coursera/Udacity to Michelle Rhee and the scandals of low quality classroom education. It's quick to toss in references to "Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists" or throw Khan Academy under one or more imagined busses, but did you notice that in its attempt at a takedown on an "overview of US history" video at Khan, it didn't even ask the question of how coherently secondary school courseware handled the same subject?

I feel like the reviews I've read from subject matter experts on Coursera courses have been positive. I don't feel like individual problem courses on Udacity damn the whole medium. I can understand how people who thoroughly enjoyed their years at college would feel threatened by alternative paths to the same goal, but it's the goal that matters, not the college life experience.
According to their annual report, Netflix spent almost $500m on marketing last year.

I don't understand why people find it so inexplicable that they're spending $100m/yr on creating exclusive content as an extension to that.
>It's not bad. Having Kevin Spacey as the lead is good. There's a good cast of supporting actors too. The writing is a bit mundane, but not terrible.

This is a tangent, but HBO and Showtime appear to have noticed that there's a deep pool of talent actors with skills equal to famous, expensive actors. The cable networks realized that these lesser-known but very good actors can be hired to create very compelling shows that spend less on actors and more on the surrounding stuff that makes actors more effective.
While I agree that we're still a far way from replacing the classic university model with online courses, I feel that pointing out the flaws of any individual lesson video is a limited and weak argument in this debate.

Not because it's wrong to point those flaws out. But because classic educational courses don't expose themselves to such transparency. I can think of a good number of classes I sat through that if they were put on YouTube for the convenience of critics to rewatch and nitpick, they would be as mock-worthy as the examples the OP uses
The question to ask from here (for you US readers) -- why ban american civilians from owning the same types of weapons as the government allows the military to? In the spirit of the constitution it seems as though our founding fathers would have wanted us, the american people, the same rights to own any type of weapon the government has access to^ for reasons of protecting the people against (potential) attacks from our government; if there is an inequality in weaponry available there is an induced inequality of power.

^Fixed typo
Kevin Spacey should play Jeff Bezos in the Amazon biopic. (Jeff Bezos always reminded me of K-Pax.)
I hear where you're coming from. It can seem annoying. But look at it as a coal mine canary. If no one was interested in the show, no one would talk about it.

What multiple postings show has less to do with which show Netflix produces, but rather that Netflix is making its own show(s).

We live in the transitional period of high price, high production content mainly being distributed via traditional means and lower quality content being produced by independents on places like YouTube and distributed independently.

Netflix is one of the first major companies that bases it's business on Internet distribution rather than cable. That company is now making high production, high price content and distributing that online. People are interested to see how this experiment will pan out, thus generating things like multiple postings about House of Cards.
Sort of. There are only 302 neurons in a nematode, but knowing what weights to put on each of them is an issue.

PS: Not mine but this looks like a good summery. http://www.jefftk.com/news/2011-11-02
I had an idea to plot comment karma as a function of number of replies, and upvotes. So the axis would be 'discussion' and 'popularity'. A controversial opinion is probably unpopular but heavily discussed. Likewise, a pithy one-liner is popular but not discussed. Then you can see whether you tend to just parrot public sentiment and spout off-the-cuff remarks, or whether you create interesting conversations.
>In the 1950s, there was the great promise of "the leisure society" - a future of such material abundance that most people would hardly need to work. That society became possible, but we systematically rejected it in favour of more consumption.

I'm not convinced this is true: there are also intense coordination costs and learning costs. Two programmers working 20 hours a week, for example, are way less productive than one programmer working 40 hours a week. And the one programmer will learn faster because she's putting in an extra 20 hours a week.

That's true in virtually all knowledge / creative / intellectual professions.

If people are simply executing a set of tasks, maybe working 20 hours a week can make sense, but those jobs are basically commodities, and commodity jobs are a) highly competitive, b) not that remunerative, and c) because of a and b, not that much fun.

EDIT: In response to the commenters below, take a look at Brooks' The Mythical Man Month if you'd like data, at least as far as programmers are concerned.
Super Bowl stalls for 35 minutes as Superdome experiences major power outage
Raja = King not warlord.
Chandragupt Maurya the Emperor of Patliputra (now Patna) had an army much bigger than Porus'
OK - I am your student

I live in the bay area, Married, have 2 kids and work in SF.

Show me how to live on $10/day.

Consider me your student.

Unless your comment of "showing me how to live on $10/day" is really titled "show a homeless 15 year-old with no job, family or financial obligations how to subsist on $10/day"

If you really can show me how to live on less than the cost it is for me to get to work ($7.10, BTW) then i will accept you as my teacher. (I already ride my bike EVERYWHERE - literally - I do not personally drive at all)

If not, then fuck you you smug ass - it costs to live.
U.S. House of Representatives bans Spotify from member's computers
I'm also rethinking my whitespace comment. And quite insightful.
When was education working and who was it working for?

As a means of social control, a method of inuring people to being ranked, judged and told what to do it works wonderfully[0]. It is not about learning or it would not start so early, at least not for teenagers[1], nor would there be so much homework[2]. Doing lots of work that you dislike because you have been told to do it is good training for the world of work for most though. Every large school system is lineally or organisationationally descended from one designed to produce good soldiers[3].

The school system works just fine for childcare, for socialising people to accept random authority figures telling them what to do and for reducing creativity. It does what it's meant to, even if no one who's in charge will acknowledge that's what it's function is.

[0] http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

[1] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/07/sleepy-kids-learn-less...

[2] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/06/only-do-math-homework....

[3] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/05/schools-are-for-war.ht...
Also, shotgun weddings.
>I would draw a distinction between productivity and innovation

Again, check out the paper, the papers citing it, and the papers cited in its bibliography—based on that research, the distinction is fuzzy at best.
Especially since the Segway was just a spinoff of technology developed for the awesome iBot wheelchair that can balance the user at normal eye-level, negotiate curbs, and even climb stairs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibot
Extremely valid points. I was in no way demeaning the value of the experiment, or of the show itself; it was just my initial reaction to seeing the post.

Anytime a company decides to shakeup the establishment (in this case, cable and pay-per-view), it is extremely interesting to the community as a whole.
I really don't get things like Coursera et. al. Textbooks have been available for purchase far before the modern university existed, but the only thing stopping people from teaching themselves and making a career out of it is the degree. I would far prefer a site that just made certifying knowledge of a given subject easier, replacing the BA, so you can cover e.g. Multivariable Calculus over three weeks instead of three months. As it stands, these online "schools" don't offer anything that you couldn't get before, and in fact are perhaps worse because they offer the illusion of having proof of knowledge (when people would be far better served just proving that they know something outright with personal projects).

Furthermore, there are vast areas of education that require small student:teacher ratios, if only for grading papers. Peer reviews can only go so far, and they are really only good for the center two quartiles of the class: who the hell grades the top person? How does she improve? And don't even mention the performance and studio arts.

I think we (and the founders of these places) have a somewhat warped perception of how effective these courses are because our subject areas (math-heavy) are extremely easy to test and quantify progress, but the other subjects are just as critical to society's well-being.

And let's not forget the other side of school: learning work ethic, forging an identity, and how to function in society. Physical colleges are worth far more than the sum of their parts (though probably not what they are charging).

I would love to be proven wrong!

EDIT: I think we would get a much, much, much larger return on the investment by improving the quality of our community colleges, reducing the stigma of attending them & other state schools, and encouraging more people to attend vocational schools instead of a degree that won't get them a job.
Jesus, you and ctdonath sound like 20-something morons.

Get a fucking life with several mortgages and children.

Or, better yet - go live the idolized life of the genius software development hermit you both appear to think yourself to be. What a wonderful life that will be.

I am so sick of these douchebag HNers that all think of themselves to be the next rails revolution and have no fucking clue as to what it actually costs to live a normal life in Silicon Valley with kids (even when, as I have, you have been living and working in tech for 20 years)

Get the fuck out.
> I think this kind of thing is hard to replicate in digital settings.

I think we are a group of people discussing a topic in a digital forum right now.

Coursera, Udacity, and the others all have forums as well where there are extended discussions on various topics between students, TAs and faculty.
Never trust a neuroscientist.

I doubt we will see an adequate simulation of a single human cell in our lifetimes much less a brain.
Hold on a second, we're just talking about security images, not debating the whole phishing paradigm. Which would be futile, by the way, because phishing happens all the time - sometimes with homographic urls, sometimes without. As for rogue routers in the rest, you don't need that kind of thing at all. Most phishing is just getting gullible people to click on links in their inbox.

While it's true that adding security images will make the phisher's job a little harder (and yes, you will need a server but then the phisher is serving this page up somewhere already) it doesn't add that much work. And now you have a situation where you've told your users: "If you don't see the image, it's not secure. If you do see the image, you're in the clear!" You're completely undermining them. Don't you think a user is going to look at things a lot less critically if they see their pet dog or whatever staring back at them?

That's why it's worse. It creates a small amount of extra work for phishers, but once they've done that, they are in a much better position. It's like a bad gambit in chess.
Also, given that the 2nd amendment puts this in the context of a "well regulated militia," why not put wait list and verification requirements on buyers who come off the street, but also enable gun ownership through state-sponsored (as opposed to federal) militia groups? This way, gun ownership comes in a social/civic context.
Will be fun to watch NFLX at the end of this upcoming quarter.
http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ANFLX&ei=Oz0PUaC...

They are going to have to promote the show heavily offline I'm guessing. I am a fan so far after only 1 episode.
why ban american civilians from owning the same types of weapons as the government allows the military to?

Tanks and F16s are a bit too dangerous though :). Even a shotgun will beat an extremely well trained army, provided millions of guerrilla fighters own them. IIRC, the fear was (is) that X Party will pass a law or simply arm their supporters, who would then take over given that Y Party supporters are disarmed. And that the Feds would seek to take away state's rights by force.

Personally I'm not a big fan of disarming the populace. Strange things have happened.
I'll defend.

1. House of Cards was 13 "chapters" that have definite rhythm and flow. Every hour was a mini three act play and it would make sense considering at the end of the day, video is just scripts brought to life by an accomplished playwright, accomplished director, accomplished talent, and accomplished cast.

2. We don't live in that world anymore. We're a civilization on an escalating need for input stimulation. It's an addiction, you're either the pusher or you're user. We've transitioned on the web from merely just hypertext to multimedia and real time, like how we've transitioned from typing in boring text updates to photo updates, and how we've moved from just merely chatting to video chatting.

3. But you experience much more in a given block of time than just pages on a book. And look at the movie industry versus the print industry. And the impact of a well crafted moment in a show, I posit, is much more powerful sometimes than a page can deliver.

4. Surf Tumblr for a few hours and you'll understand how things are done these days. Kids don't just share quotes anymore, kids share GIF screen caps of their favorite moments in the movie or show they like. And there are better and better tools each season to make screencapping creation/sharing easier by the day. Look up what IntoNow is doing with their community and how they're getting people to interact in real time to individual shows.

Writing's on the wall: People don't read anymore, quoth Steve Jobs.
This is an attack piece, and a bad one at that. It's the same, weak attack anti-MOOC people always make which involves a few anecdotal smears on a few of Salman Khan's lectures, a completely false claim that MOOCs are trying to do no more than drive empty facts into students' heads, and an anecdotal filled, rose-tinted, hand-waving defense of the value of a traditional college education. I hear the same weak arguments raised against remote working. People love to extol the virtues of face-to-face communication and intangible experiences, all in the defense of stale traditions and broken, out of date models, but they rarely have any practical solutions for bringing education to the masses that doesn't involve spending an ever increasing amount of money.

We live in a time where information is more abundant and accessible than ever, yet the old guard are doing everything they can to keep it locked up in ivory towers to be doled out bit by bit, in person, for a hefty fee, to anyone willing to rack up tens of thousands of dollars of debt. After all, that money is the only thing keeping the old guard afloat. It's always fascinating to hear the swan song disrupted industries. First they laugh at you. Then they attack you. Then, they fade away.
Investors might want to know. Consider the social utility of not propping up (via ignorance & secrecy) the stock price on a company that is cratering.
I used to work at DEKA, and this is correct.
As a counter-example, everyone in Australia knows that our Prime Minister is at least agnostic. It might well be a point in her favor, to the very slight extent that people care.
> Physical colleges are worth far more than the sum of their parts

I hear this and variants of this argument often but it always seems to be taken completely on faith.
While Netflix may not release viewer numbers, there are plenty of other ways to tell if HoC is a "hit." How often is it mentioned in blogs, forums, Facebook, newspapers, Twitter, magazines, podcasts, etc.? Do fan groups, forums, and meetups emerge? Is there fan fiction? Does Netflix pursue merchandising, book versions, a video game, or a feature film?
Television would probably be far better without ratings. Just imagine if CNN didn't need to worry about viewers: they could actually report news instead of providing entertainment.
Grading Super Bowl Commercials
The people adjusting the hiring process are those that passed it. It is a filtering system that picks out a particular type of person and reinforces it. I find it hard to believe that it will change in any way that adjusts the filtering system. People at Google might experiment, but it will be within the orthodoxies, e.g., choosing between hybrid or gasoline vehicles, rather than considering mass transit.
What a phishing scam looks like. Click at your own risk.
Bill Gates sure is a great marketer. Igniting this issue in such direct way made people pay attention. No wonder he was able to build MS into what it was.
I agree with the substance of this. Passing on wisdom is not the first, second, or even 3rd point of "education" anymore. Its basically a state-sanctioned childcare/socialization programme. Its cleverly mandated under the legal authority for education, but one should make no mistake as to its purpose, and this is one of the many great trojan-horse examples of government-gone-wild in the name of "compassion". All those kids at failing inner-city schools are just being soul-destroyed for a life of minimum-subsistence-wage menial labour.
I love Meditations. I actually use it as a journalling tool.

I have about four copies of Meditations sitting on my bookshelf. What I really enjoy about reading it is that at any point, I can pore through a chapter, find something that "hits" and is relevant to something going on in my life, and I'll process it in pen, on the page, whether I actually agree or not with the line. I write down the date whenever I pick up the book, so it's a kind of diarying reflective process.

In my experience, reading it more than a chapter or two at a time is a bit of a waste. Too many ideas going in one ear and out the other - I hit two or three and that's all that's going to stick in my head.
If I recall correctly, Switzerland require their citizens to retain a service rifle at home.

Something like your proposal would help alleviate many of the civic and political concerns with government regulation and bans on firearms.
Most of the classes I've taken have been great. They are certainly comparable to in-person college courses and have delivered incredible value to people world wide at a very small cost per student.

It's all advantages with no disadvantages.

This disruptive model of course is an absolute terror to the large number of poor teachers and colleges providing substandard classes while saddling their students with debt.

It's no wonder that on a weekly and sometimes daily basis, a ridiculous and contrived hit piece is published by those from the dinosaur set who are in the process of being obsoleted because they can't keep up with progress and are unwilling to retool.
It's almost like Google built a tool that tracks exactly that sort of thing!

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=house%20of%20cards

Don't worry, I forgot about it too until just now.
The best that the law/government can do is to break up the collusions (e.g. among VCs)

No, the best that the government can do for startups and the economy is just get out of the way.
Writing correct HTML is not significantly harder than writing crappy HTML. Comparing it to latex vs word isn't a good analogy IMO. And wouldn't nontechnical users be using higher level HTML editors anyway? At least some bad HTML comes from lazy developers who should know better, and could have done better with a stricter tool.
Agreed. That was a truly bizarre statement. People who continue to claim that our education problems will all be magically solved by throwing more money at the problem bewilder me unless they're the ones directly benefiting from that money, that is. Tuition rates have been rising out of control for decades, but education is a big problem right now. More money did not solve the problem.
The whole point of this kind of man-in-the-middle phishing is that you present a fake page just like the bank's page. Then when they submit whatever it is they have to submit, you do the same via your server and then present them with the next page and so on until you are logged in.

More steps are more work for the attacker but that's not a big deal. The issue is that the security image isn't just another layer. It's a layer that the bank is making a guarantee about that it can't back up. They don't say, "Pick a security image to make it slightly harder for phishers." They say, "Pick or upload your own image so that you really know you're on our site."
Such a great precursor to what goes on nowadays with music and such.
Your solution is penny wise and pound foolish. Using heat pumps will save you enormous amounts of energy overall, even though your appliances look superficially worst under that analysis.

The economic equivalent would be:

You: "Hey Bob, those are expensive fishing trips. Think of the opportunity cost!"

Bob: "Thanks, you've saved me a bundle. I'll go quit my job immediately!"

(The effect you're citing is real, but the explanation is more basic: at low energy costs, efficient goods have longer payoffs. This happens regardless of what heating method people use.)