skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I've gone to all the trouble to study for an exam anyway, just in case, then I'd much rather actually take the exam to check my knowledge. The article tries to paint this result as a case of solidarity and coordination, rather than slacking and intimidation. "on the day of the exam, all the students arrived half an hour early and stood outside the doors to make sure no one went into the exam room"; what is this, a picket line?

I had a few classes that had three exams and a final, and the grading policy dropped the lowest exam score. Even when I got 100% or more on the first two exams, and got explicitly told by the professor that the exam was optional and I didn't need to show up, I still took the last one, because why not check the knowledge I studied?

Given the intimidation factor, I'd probably end up asking the professor if I could take the exam outside of the normal class time anonymously, and leave people to guess based on who isn't in the same class the next term.
[Edit: my comment was in reply to a sentence in the parent comment which has since been removed.]

There's nothing they "got away with".

“In my courses, all grades are relative to the highest actually
achieved score. Thus, if no one showed up and everyone got 0
percent, everyone would be marked as 100 percent,” Froehlich
wrote.

The students took advantage of a stated policy and received the promised result of that policy. It's game theory, and they played by the game's rules fair and square.
It sounds like they were just introductory courses. If they didn't learn anything they'll soon be weeded out by more advanced CS classes.
They cleverly "gamed" the system. I say clever, but I wonder if they would have actually learned programming better by studying and taking the exam.
What are the rough operating costs of posterous?

If you want we could discuss keeping it alive rather than shutting it down (like what I've been doing with http://www.Reocities.com/).

I don't like large gaping holes in the web.
Impressive feat. Too bad the class wasn't in Game Theory, that would've been even more isomorphic than the Harvard Intro to Congress class incident.

EDIT: Isomorphic used in the sense of the event ("boycott", cheating) being similar in form/geist to the class taken. I'm sure there's a better word for it.
You're reaching, no one outside of Google likes NaCl or Dart (and even many in Google don't care for it). It's not just Mozilla that's against it.

NaCl and Dart were both created in a Dart room without anyone else's input.
> "They know what our margins are and they won't let us make any money," he said.

Wow. When you depend on your customers to "let" you make money, you simply don't have a business.

Come back when they need your service, and then force them to cover your expenses with some profit thrown in. Until then, go do something profitable.
Yes, the Schadenfreude
* Dedicated instance @ rackspace cloud
* Linux (default ubuntu 12.04 LTS install)
* Apache
* PHP 5.3
* Postgresql 9.1
* beanstalkd + supervisord + php scripts for async queues
* cronjobs for housekeeping, ETL, data rollups, etc
* Sendgrid via SMTP for email
* New Relic for app monitoring
* Rackspace cloudfiles for image hosting/storage

* github for code
* shell scripts for deployment/new server setups

This setup servers 50 beta testers on our latest product at the moment. Should scale up for a while as we will just bump the instance size as needed.
Hadoop - Pig - Redis - Flask
I remember some friends of mine who did the same thing, except that one kid managed to sneak in and take the exam. Everyone hated him, but his class rank skyrocketed.
What about porn made by women?[1] What about the millions of women who like and enjoy porn?

"Sorry darling, you can't do that, but it's for your own good!"

What we need isn't paternalistic censorship. If mainstream porn is bad - and I certainly agree it is - we need better porn, and more openness discussing it.

[1]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/mar/22/porn-wome...

http://www.goodforher.com/feminist_porn_awards

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_pornography
I believe that the point is: If you have the user's timezone, you can /know/ if they are in DST through modules such as pytz+datetime.
What about developers who are also bloggers?
True? We've gone from requiring a browser plugin to requiring an iOS tablet in your examples? leeoniya is correct, this is not as useful as Kuler, despite being an interesting concept. Requiring particular software (Flash, iOS, Windows, HTML5, etc) does not make a tool less useful; perhaps less accessible to some. I'll wager that even this experiment doesn't work on all browsers like Kuler does.
Adobe/Macromedia tried to take a step into standardisation for Flash ( ES4 ) it failed ,because some were pushing crappy alternatives ( Microsoft and Silverlight ) and Mozilla had cold feet ( tamarin ... ). Funny how some now try to shove you typescript when we could have had a better language back then.
It doesnt mean that we will still be writing some javascript in 10 years ,hopefully we wont.
He first said it is preperation. Something to prepare for. He is saying take your jackets and lets run. The best is yet to come.
When he runs into the group he describes that it was flying overhead. Then he points to the smoke saying it was in the atmosphere. People said that could be war starting. They were not sure of the reason for the explosion. He almost got hit by the broken glass.
"Also, since students didn’t know for sure until exam time if the boycott would be successful, they had to study for it anyway, which is a main benefit of exams,” Selinski wrote.
this is terrific idea,, its better than zip car .... though the model is different .... i wish all the best ... just wondering whether i can buy a old car and make money as an investment (same as airbnb)??
That is a good point. A bit like how people would switch to Macs to avoid viruses, but all they were really doing was moving to a place that wasn't being targeted yet.

I don't like the monolithic design of modern browsers - it is rendering engine, javascript interpreter, sandbox, audio, video, webgl, user management, local store etc. all in one big heap.

We will need features to let users swap parts out, highly customize them, apply advanced ACL's to each component (since the browser becomes the new OS) and disable them (chrome://flags)
I think your goal is a good one. Can you clarify what you mean by inject scripts and how that isn't going to run into the stripping problem?
There is something more important that the students learned by organizing themselves this way: that they are not each other's enemies. I am sure a few students received high marks that they did not deserve as a result, but I suspect that would have been the case even had the students taken the exam (judging by what I saw as a TA in my first year of grad school).

The professor now offers students a choice between an exam and a project, and the students voted for a project. The project is a better way to measure their aptitude. On the whole, I think this was positive for all involved.
I use kippt, it is really nice.
Pig can connect to so many systems.
I could live very well without porn, but censorship certainly depresses me.
The Tough Sell Of Commerce On Twitter | Liisten by Tyler Hayes
Really? Working to keep customers helps keep customers?
Holy crap. That's quite a service.
Firefox also has the feature that will block Flash and the other plugins if an update has been released, which is also good

IMO all browsers should implement 'click to run' by default for all plugins on all sites
Thanks for the reply. I figured for a dataset of that size, the main bottleneck might be not indexing -- maybe RedShift stores row data in a higher-latency medium while keeping indexes in-memory. Curious, I checked the documentation[1] and found this:

> Amazon Redshift doesn’t require indexes or materialized views and so uses less space than traditional relational database systems.

Reading through the rest of their FAQ, it sounds like they echo your conclusion -- RedShift shines the most for use-cases where the dataset is large enough that, to use PostgreSQL, you'd have to shard out multiple instances.

--

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/redshift/faqs/#0030
Namecheap Against CISPA
Donating $0.10 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation for every retweet and share.
Harvard Professor Finds That Innovative Ideas Spread Like The Flu
Posterous cofounders create a replacement: Posthaven
Um, perhaps. And what exactly does this have to do with Russian girls?
Can we defend the Earth from meteors and asteroids? Absolutely
Ugh. Having been in those more advanced CS classes, quite often the biggest problem they have involves the pile of students who supposedly passed the prerequisites but don't actually know the material. Unless you have a professor willing to just let those people fail or study outside of class, the class ends up cramming in piles of remedial material and discussions to get everyone to the same baseline.
It's a media player for web. Or chrome, but i am working on moving it to web. A replacement for background media player and a user dashboard and notifications system. (Dashboard work is not released yet)

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/achshar-player/fdd...
I'am working on Kettik, a blogging + content/services monetization platform for travellers. The landing page is pretty bare (on purpose) so i'll link to a user profile page (mine) which should give you a better overview of the site.

http://www.kettik.com/meet/saravk

It started as hobby when i quit my job couple of years back and wanted to travel the world & blog about it. I set out wanting to become a travel photographer but instead i found myself spending more time on the site, learning on the go and hacking it together bit by bit (this the first & only website i've ever built).

Now it has come to a point where i believe i could turn it into a viable startup. But the transition from a 1-man hobby/startup to a proper business seems to be quite a daunting prospect, especially since i hail from an environment with little or no startup culture.
Go Daddy-serviced Web sites go down; hacker takes credit
Samsung will be published in May, the Galaxy Mini S4
Intimidation probably played a role in people not taking the exam, but they weren't there soley for intimidation. If someone did walk in to take the exam, they all would have done the same - they were there in case someone did, they would avoid the 0.
Obama Calls for Patent Reform to Topple Trolls
I'm from Fairfax County, and my guess is that it will still be hard for you to explain to me how his location in Virginia is closer to DC than it is to Virginia.
This works only for outdated Java versions that are known to be vulnerable (they're blacklisted by Mozilla version-by-version).

If you happen to have the newest Java version which hasn't been publicly announced as exploitable, it will not be blocked unless you enable `plugins.click_to_play` in `about:config`.

Anyway it's still a very good move from Mozilla side to minimize the risks.
Hardware Design Challenge: Design a Nerf Sentry, Win Money
I have two banks, that require me to use Java. Please, banks, stop using java, so we can finally get rid of that POS.
if you look at the code, it's based on TJ Holowaychuk's component: https://github.com/component/component. there's i believe 600 "utilities" you can pick and choose from: https://github.com/component/component/wiki/Components. since it's CommonJS, you won't have any namespace collisions or conflicts.

i don't know how this relates to Apache commons, JodaTime, or Guava however, but i just wanted to add a little context.
> ... even if there are still holes remaining in Java, ...

Heh

> ... the user will have to click through at least one, probably two warnings before they can run the dangerous applet ...

Unfortunately, there are still way too many users who will happily click through those warnings (unsigned code, invalid certificates, UAC, and so on) in order to {look at stupid pictures|play retarded games|win a free iPad|...}
Why is that? It always seems the case that vfx eats up everyone time, but it always seemed to me that it was that projects were terribly managed, and if they weren't, this wouldn't be as much of an issue.
Were you there? If not, you don't know how much intimidation may have been applied.
The article said "Some had studied just in case"; "some", not "all".
> has no direct access to the DOM or external JavaScript, meaning it lacks support for some APIs (WebRTC) and cannot really be used as a drop-in replacement for JS or to take advantage of the existing HTML renderer (it's all or nothing).

Is there some fundamental reason why these won't all get solved in the future?
Second Rackspace, love it.
Beanstalk for deployment of wp themes is fantastic.
Did not have a good experience with WPEngine. But other's have, so take that with a grain of salt.
Stay away from GoDaddy, obviously.
> But how often do your friends actually get attacked?

Well, once someone shot a rifle through their house, and they discovered the bullet holes and the bullet lodged in the back wall the next morning. However, the husband works in criminal justice, so they hear about a lot more violent incidents than most people.

> And what kind of area was this?

Suburban Houston.
>> If you want to move your site to another service, WordPress and Squarespace offer importers that can move all of your content over to either service. Just remember: you need to back up your Spaces by April 30.

Oh the irony. Karma's a bitch, huh?
Yes exactly!

<personal_anecdote>
In high school I had a physics professor who had this exact policy, except that he never imagined the consequences of everybody NOT taking the test. I did, and with the help of a friend we tried to organize the 'boycott'. It failed horribly, but at least we tried. Great story OP!
</personal_anecdote>
Are you seriously proposing that Obama submits a budget with a line item, "Add programming classes to every high school"?
Steam Games for Linux Officially Launched
It's also idiotic to compare HN to Reddit, but I was being nice.
Oh sorry. Thought they were part of society.
In my Intro to Computers class we had guest speakers. One speaker/professor was in charge of statistics. Many of the first year CS students left the class. He stopped the 10th one asking where he thought he was going? The student said he had better things to do.

This enraged the professor who went on a loud rant about how this really is important and we were awful for not paying attention. He then stormed out.

A week later the usual class professor emailed all of saying we had to study the topic on our own since half the class had walked out.

I emailed her and the rest of the class that if any of his topic were on the test I would make sure they both were fired at least reprimanded.

By the offended professors own words, half the class was still there and interested in the topic. Basically, he walked out on us.

His topic was not on the final.
Ask HN: Is it okay to ask friends to upvote a submission?
Something like, "if you like this, please upvote it on Hacker News." Is that, you know, kosher to tweet n stuff?
I will give you a different angle. Do you want to develop it for fun/fame/experience or for profit? If the former you should do it.
> Requiring particular software (Flash, iOS, Windows, HTML5, etc) does not make a tool less useful

this.
Great - until that one gets acquired or acqui-hired by Facebook|MS|Google...

I wish there were some open source resource sharing protocol a bit more high-level than HTTP.
Turns out it was actually going much faster than escape velocity, at around Mach 59.
Oh yeah. I want this.
Sustainable. "503 Service Unavailable"
"I had a few classes that had three exams and a final, and the grading policy dropped the lowest exam score. Even when I got 100% or more on the first two exams, and got explicitly told by the professor that the exam was optional and I didn't need to show up, I still took the last one, because why not check the knowledge I studied?"

Congratulations? I don't see why you're proud of wasting your own time.

Either A) you already knew the material, knew you knew the material, and it was just intellectual masturbation, or B) you didn't know the material as well as you claim, and wanted to raise your grade.

This seems like bragging to me.
What specifically made the driving in Russia so terrifying? Was it the kind of things the article was talking about, or something else?
There is a pledge:

Our pledge to you...
We'll never be acquired.
We'll always keep your URL's online.
We'll always keep it the best place to post.

And they charge $5 per month, so the sustainability is more clear.

I've talked to Garry and Brett about Post Haven and they are genuinely committed to making this work as they pledge on the website.
Wow, I must've really hurt your feelings in the other thread. Delighted.
They should probably update this header:

This is where we post about new features on Posterous Spaces. You can get a Posterous Space just like this by emailing post@posterous.com or signing up for a new account.
Posthaven. If you liked Posterous, I promise you will like Posthaven. I was one of the cofounders of Posterous and wrote much of the site. Brett joined us as a cofounder and we really enjoyed working on it.

The difference this time is that we'll be 100% sustainable, and we are pledging to keep the site online forever. It's just me and Brett coding it right now.

http://posthaven.com
"0-day" means "unpatched or unknown exploit". It's a silly and sensationalist term that is hugely overused.
Correct, which is why I said "intimidation probably played a role." I don't know how much, but I find it likely it was there. But my point was that even if they applied no intimidation, they would have still shown up to avoid getting that 0.
Wait, so if you were the one student who did take the exam you would get 100% and everyone else gets 0?
http://sloblog.io/ - simple, responsive layout, Markdown everywhere, syntax highlighting, BrowserID/Persona-based signup, native comments + subscriptions, JSON export.

Coming soon: full API (someone's already building an iOS app on it), anonymous posting, authenticating against Twitter (not just Persona), Flattr integration.

No ads _ever_, monetization through Flattr, and I may eventually do a full open-source release. (My business is in training and consulting, not in running websites.)

Enjoy.
Regarding the corporate users, I think actually most of them should not need any of those 3 plugins enabled:

1. Acrobat Reader plugin: use some less popular PDF reader which is not that commonly attacked

2. Flash: you shouldn't play Flash games in the office ;) For Youtube, you can enable HTML5 version in modern browsers

3. Java: IMO it's mostly needed in IE6-dating web apps but I might be very naive here...

Regarding Acrobat: there's a built-in PDF reader coming in Firefox soon (pdfjs). Currently I do not use any plugin, just make the browser download a PDF and render it in SumatraPDF or PDF Xchange Viewer.
I find your approach distasteful. And that's putting it charitably, to be honest.

The idea that you would feign solidarity in a social experiment with real consequences so you could screw fellow students surreptitiously is just as bad (I would argue worse) than the intimidation you are presuming existed. In fact, even under the presumption that intimidation occurs, you are admitting to happily screwing over other students who would have been happy to take the test, but for the intimidation. So the fellow victims of the "crime" get punished once by them, and then again, by you.

If you actually want to take a principled stand, you'd have to do something shocking like.. be honest with everyone with what you intend on doing, and why.
I wrote this some time ago:

"It is obvious that electronic money will replace paper bills in the future. Not because they are better or worse than paper but simply because the methods of payment simply killed the need for paper bills. Instead of storing tons of paper and gold in their safes, banks will store the electronic money in their databases. The public will never touch that electronic money, they will be just a number in a bank statement. You won't have to install any bitcoin client. The only thing you will ever need is a authentication tool. It could be a card, it could be your cell phone, it will certainly be some sort of portable token."

Yet, I'm still not sure how eletronic money can really be democratic, not everyone has access to basic infrastructure.

http://eduardo.intermeta.com.br/posts/2013/1/18/bitcoins-and...
From what I've read, no. But I think you can link them to what you've posted, and that's probably something that would naturally happen anyway.
Like Brad said -- this one is not to be sold. We'll charge money and keep the lights on no matter what. We want to provide this service like a basic utility like water and power, because that's what having a voice on the Internet should be.
Love the irony!
How would God hire?

God says...

sleep the sleep of death;

13:4 Lest mine enemy say, I have prevailed against him; and those that
trouble me rejoice when I am moved.

13:5 But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy
salvation.

13:6 I will sing unto the LORD, because he hath dealt bountifully with
me.

14:1 The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are
corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth
good.

14:2 The LORD looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see
if there were any that did understand, and seek God.

14:3 They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy:
there is none that doeth good, no, not one.

---

Shakespeare?
It's back. Sorry about that.

We're starting over from scratch with a new codebase only recently, and there's infrastructure we still need to build. I scaled Posterous from nothing to tens of millions of uniques with my cofounder Brett, so we'll be able to keep it online for the long haul.

Please bear with us though through this launch period.
Yes, but it does seem like the students were cheeky and got away with it. They played the game according to the rules, but there is the issue of gentlemanly conduct.
Wait a moment, if all grades are relative to the highest, then aren't all grades a fraction using the highest grade as the denominator?

The reason this situation seems unusual: The prof's grading system has a division by zero bug.
I'm not sure you know what isomorphic means.
There is a data room by a very large M&A group that requires you to install Java. I hate them with a passion because you can't really avoid them in my line of work so I end up having a VM just for them. Java as a requirement to access a document store for which you've already signed a pretty solid NDA is a real nuisance. Especially since it then ends up giving you download access through their applet anyway...
That's true - we would detect it now. But the CTBTO International Monitoring System is a relatively new development (design and construction didn't start until 1997).
I believe you. Just thought it was a wonderful bit of irony :)
I'd be careful of using GitHub if you have things like important announcements, have had problems in the past of builds taking hours.
sleep the sleep of death;

13:4 Lest mine enemy say, I have prevailed against him; and those that
trouble me rejoice when I am moved.

13:5 But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy
salvation.

13:6 I will sing unto the LORD, because he hath dealt bountifully with
me.

14:1 The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are
corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth
good.

14:2 The LORD looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see
if there were any that did understand, and seek God.

14:3 They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy:
there is none that doeth good, no, not one.
Are you sure you are using JSONP properly?
Getting a 503 Service Unavailable.
I have a Wordpress install with a couple plugins: http://aaron.pk/bookmarks/

More info: http://aaron.pk/bookmarks/about/