skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that most universities will probably be totally fucked by the upcoming changes in education. :) If it leads to better and/or cheaper education overall, I'm fine with that, even if it could be slightly inconvenient for me personally. I doubt that the MOOCs will do it on their own, even though they could eat up a large source of revenue for these colleges, but whatever comes a generation or two after them should be really interesting.

I wasn't clear about the tv/video analogy; I meant that there have been people (in the past) as excited about the effect those technologies would have on education as people are currently excited about MOOCs, etc. I agree that tv, etc haven't had as big of an impact as the internet seems to. I plan to take a coursera class soon to get first hand experience but haven't gotten around to it yet, so I can't really make a comparison. I would not be surprised at all if it were just as good as or better than a large lecture, but I'd want decent data before making up my mind. Not because I think that there's a lot of "personal attention" that students get in a 500 seat lecture, but because showing up in person and participating with groups seems to (anecdotally) somehow matter in lots of activities.

re: completion rates, I know that a lot of the students who sign up for these classes have no real commitment to take it to completion. But I'm pretty confident that if you did a random experiment and assigned students to online or in-class courses, the students assigned to online classes would have a lower completion rate. I don't know how much lower, and it's quite likely that for some classes, the reduction in costs and the increase in access would make up for the decrease in completion rates, and for other classes it wouldn't.

The recommendations aren't totally worthless, because (at least as I read it) they're pretty specific to colleges replacing traditional lectures with online courses. There's a lot of enthusiasm among (many but not all) university administrators to do this -- to offer online versions of existing classes along with or instead of the traditional version -- as a cost cutting move. I haven't seen a lot of concern or resources for adapting the material to be a good fit for an online course, making sure that the students get adequate support (most resources for student support require the student to be physically on campus), etc.
The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists
"24 April 2012"

I thought this sounded familiar.
To clarify, there are definite plans to document and release the Copy API. The only thing we can't make promises about is when that will happen (soon?).
Parrots call each other by names as well[1] and crows have been shown to speak in two different dialects depending if they are with a group or among individuals[2]. In the same link about crows, they have also been seen using tools in the wild and in experiments using "meta tools", something that only primates have been observed doing (using one tool to reach another tool that will be used for their end goal [generally food]).

It's quite amazing how much we take the animals around us for granted sometimes since all of this, like the dolphins is really new research that has only hit the tip of the iceberg.

The documentary about crows from PBS is quite insightful (full episode is at the link below if your region allows it). I was never much of a fan of crows and considered them kind of an annoyance. However, after watching it, I gained much more respect for their intelligence and complexity.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed9A4HPdXgQ

[2] http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/a-murder-of-crows/fu...

edit: the OP link actually mentions those particular crows and their tool usage in one of the slides.
This goes well with Philip Greenspun's "Women in Science:" http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science, though I don't think his argument about medical school is a good one.

(See my view on the perils and opportunity costs of med school here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/10/20/why-you-should-beco... ; Greenspun hosted this: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/why-i-gave-up-practicing... in 2011.)
Square is the long-run winner in this category. Look at why Starbucks adopted them instead of competitors like GoPago.

1. They invested in getting the pay-by-phone experience perfect from the start. That's why Starbucks adopted them. Their wallet app makes GoPago's look amateurish.

2. They invested in getting their processing fee simple and low for their initial targets, P2P and cafes/boutiques. It's lower than GoPago, and that's the biggest cost to the business in the long run. Starbucks noted actually saving money with Square. Starbucks!

3. They don't ship crap. It's true their register feature set is not yet sophisticated enough for more complex businesses like restaurants. But rather than overreaching, they're starting from the simplest businesses and working their way up.

Square would rather start with simpler cases and make a perfect end-to-end system, including the consumer's wallet app. It's really smart. I'm already paying with Square's app at my favorite cafes and local boutiques. I can't overemphasize the importance of their early focus on a wallet app to their long-term success.

BTW, the "it's just slick marketing" jab is one that was often used against Apple. Square is following the Apple playbook.
Reminds me about the "Subterfugue"[1] project I read about way back when.

Neat idea anyways!

[1] http://subterfugue.org/

Edit: Funnily enough, there's a "TimeWarp" example at the bottom of http://subterfugue.org/screenshot.html
Why many entrepreneurs are suffering and what to do about it
why isn't there an additional battery on the other side to balance them out?
Actually, I like to avoid the bloat of C++ and just use "object-oriented" C with structs and function pointers wherever possible.

This is largely due to the fact that I have a strong aesthetic preference for languages where you can hold most of the language [1] in your head. Such languages are called compact [2].

[1] Compactness of language and standard library are different. Having a non-compact standard library isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially if it means I don't have to complicate my life with third-party libraries.

[2] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch04s02.html
Steve Ballmer On the Strategy Behind His Strangest Product
I completely believe this story, because I've done similar stuff. In 1998 I was working for a company that was using a lot more incoming bandwidth than outgoing bandwidth, which is the reverse of the usual pattern. So when we outgrew our data shack and had to move to a real data center, I badgered my sales guy into showing me the overall bandwidth usage charts for the proposed location.

Unsurprisingly, there was way more data flowing out of the facility than there was flowing in, so I talked him into a substantial discount on inbound traffic. "Hey, nothing else is using that half of the duplex..."
I think the finding here is not that dolphin A has a unique call, but that dolphin B calls out to A using A's unique call in order to find A. This is as opposed to B simply listening for A's call.
PernixData Launches With Goal To Become The VMware Of Flash
I'd assume mostly advertisements. Sites like Gizmodo get money from big corporations to review or write articles. Once the sites get big, I think they get free prototypes to test them and review them.
Let me try another way. Some Rails apps that are too unwieldy are barely even Rails apps. They just happen to have Rails at some layer of the tech stack, but also have many other non-Rails components such that saying "Rails" has become too complex is disingenuous.
SETI isn't about communication though, at least not the conversational type; the speed of light is a cruel mistress.
Ars review here: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/02/xamari...
The article said Java, not JEE. In Java land, the choice is much broader than JSF or JPA. The main problem that people bashing Java had was always that it offered too many choices. Ruby had Rails while Java had JSF, Struts, Struts 2, Tapestry, Wicket, Play. Rails had ActiveRecord, while Java had JDBC, Hibernate, MyBatis, OJB, EJB 1/2/3, JPA.
Rails Is A Ghetto (2007)
It's a very formal salutation. Its inclusion in an otherwise informal message is very sarcastic, and most native french speakers would take it as such.

That's actually what the minister did in his reply.
I'm not sure what your "Not at all" is in response to. I was saying it requires micro-ing from the person going up against them (specifically, you need to blink your stalkers under the brood lords, or tell your units to target the carriers and not the interceptors, etc etc). In other words, they are not units designed to be fought against by just a-clicking in their general direction and letting the AI do the work for you.
"pretty enough to accept new clients to your online game, audio/video chat, podcast etc."

If 'pretty enough' means only allowing 179 new connections to your server per second, that's great. When you have a large event, everyone gets on your site at the same time, not to mention times like getting to work, lunch break, evening rush, etc. You ever hear of the slashdot effect? That's more than 200 requests per second.

Ignoring the poor connection time, you could only have 179 users actively using your app every second. Out of a million. %0.000179 of your user base. Talk about really shitty user engagement.

I'm not even going to talk about the incredibly bad idea it is to host a million connections using one server. The idea that "most websites" only do "about 100 requests per second" is laughable. Sure, the average may be 100, over a month, but that's nothing compared to peak times. Try tens of thousands per second. A high-traffic site might do something on the order of thousands of database writes per second. Which, when all those connections come in, will kill your database servers, which backs up your frontends, which is why you have to have fast forward-facing pre-loaded cache. But I digress.

Focus on scaling your application to actually handle traffic before you obsess over concurrent connections.
I thought these stats were interesting.

Q: Do you think Microsoft has gotten better at figuring out what the user wants? You won’t deny that you’ve experienced challenges in making consumer products.

A: Oh, I don’t know. Our number one thing is supplying products to consumers. That’s kind of what we do. Sixty-five percent of all PCs go to the consumer, not to the enterprise. Seventy percent of all Office suites go to the consumer, not the enterprise. One hundred percent of all Xboxes go to the consumers, not the enterprise.
You lose it. You need a short stick.

Styluses are good when emulating a pen or pencil or paint brush is good. Painting and drawing apps on tablets are pretty awesome. I really wish Apple would integrate Wacom technology.

But I don't want to pull out a stylus to browse a website or play a game or make a call, or type a message.
I have a severe problem regarding this: my writing and indeed my explanation are often very verbose, and more often than not, filled with jargon.

I had been for a very long time, a believer that jargon simplifies communication because a lot of information is encapsulated in jargon. However I have come to believe, recently, that I could not have been more wrong.

Any idea how to simplify my communications? I'm starting to blog a bit more again, and I would really like to reach a wider audience on economic thinking
HN is 6 today.  Here's traffic since the beginning
Surely you don't think that Rails is better than everything else in every single respect? There are plenty of frameworks that are simpler (Flask/Sinatra), faster (Play, etc.), support lightweight concurrency better (node.js based, Play too, etc.), have much better IDE support (ASP.NET MVC), support client/server partitioning (Meteor/Opa), and so forth.
My computer crashed opening the link, now I don't know if it was a glitch or Egor.
Well, maybe one approach would be to search Hacker News for popular tech companies and see names of people at the company and then e-mail them? Ethical? I dunno. Attention grabbing? Probably.

Dropbox. E-Mail Drew Houston.
Twitter/Square. E-Mail Jack Dorsey.
Google. E-Mail Kevin Rose.

I dont't know how much this would help but maybe worth a try...

Kevin Rose also does a Foundation Podcast, a bunch of which are here in the bay area. Maybe review those for potential people to contact.
She clearly missed the following words.
"leveraging the cloud, mobile optimized, touch friendly"
The following YouTube video summarizes exactly how I felt after reading the announcement:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...

VS2012 integration w/OSX build host. Oh yeah.

Pricing changes have positives and some potential major negatives - In my eyes the "pay money to get started" approach served as a nice filter against pathological customers/mechanism to balance signal to noise. The introduction of a free tier generates mixed feelings within. Xamarin please, please don't allow the inevitable eternal september that will follow to become a distraction.

Seen it happen it happen a few times - forums/support become overrun with noise and the companies were inadequately prepared staffing wise for the eternal september, with staff unable to keep up the resulting quality of product/support dropped considerably.

From a different perspective the introduction of a free their now makes the toolchain available to those whom could not possibly pay for it - students and countries with weaker purchasing power. (where $xxxUSD is equates to x months/a years wage)
Eclipse Juno SR 2 (4.2.2) binaries have arrived  eclipse.org mirrors
If your startup is in California, where does Nevada comes from?

You see -- those kind of red flags to me would be a huge no-no. Like those Cayman accounts and other accounting practices.

Something is fishy here.
This is such an amazing blog. It's fascinating to read about the sloppy guts of games you spent hours on in your youth.

It's also a testament to Blizzard's dedication to polish, because although I was only ever a casual Starcraft player, I spent more hours on that game than any other game in my life and I never noticed any bugs that betrayed the apparent messiness of the codebase.
Ad-titan Google blocks Adblock Plus in Android security tweak
Though I don't have any metrics on how "commonplace" it is, it is pretty accessible in several urban areas (Portland and other Oregonian urban areas, Seattle, LA and other SoCal urban areas, San Francisco, and New York off the top of my head) and the price is only slightly higher than what k-mcgrady quoted. In Portland, if you're okay with a four-hour window, Safeway charges ~$7 USD. A one-hour window is ~$13.
I am not against your main point but I am sure that Microsoft will provide at least 110% of funding if Google pulled their "funding".
No, but we should. For the masses that don't.
> I wouldn't call ancient Babylon...

You may be right, but this does sound a bit like "no true scotsman" territory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

Really, though, if we all backed up a bit, I think many of us would agree with some of both sides in this discussion, like throwaway's general point that efforts to simplify legal codes could be very valuable, even if we probably don't want to rigidly subscribe to the "someone should be able to easily learn all laws" test.
Having separate add and commit steps has improved my workflow.

If you do an add, followed by a "git diff --cached", you can view what's going to be committed before you do the actual commit.

I've found this workflow to be useful, since it helps see things like debugging print statements that crept in, or unnecessary files accidentally added ("git diff --cached --stat" is useful for the latter).
> Do you browse non-work-relevant websites on your company provided computer outside your lunch hour or other explicitly defined break times? You've "exceeded authorized access".

Not true:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/253581/court_violating_work_c...
>But Chrome's works
Citation needed, pdf.js has performed better for me personally than Chrome's viewer.
Have they tried testing this on dogs, too? I assume they don't do that, but it would be interesting if they did the test on dogs, too.
BW?
To each his own, I suppose. While you were crying I was repulsed by the intrusion of little bits of low value information and the threat of constant mental overhead in dealing with that little floating box. But more so, I'm repulsed by the thought of having to fight my way past other people's little boxes in order to communicate with them. Progress indeed.
I wonder if he's aware of how very FRENCH his first name is.
I agree. Can't you people see the possibilities here? The opportunities? Can't you just appreciate this amazing new technology without resorting to 'people these days' bullshit arguments?

Sigh.
Yes, Django took a solid step to properly fix the underlying issue, rather than apply many small sticky-plasters over several days instead, leaving the same basic vector open in the meantime. In fact, the Django issue reported was posted on HN yesterday and the comments on that posting underline what I just said here.

Remember - Python for Pros, Ruby to pose.
People who only contribute ideas are losers and even bouncing ideas around is probably a waste of your time. Actually partnering with such a person sounds like a total waste of time.

Indeed. I think it's very important to distinguish between "just an idea" guy and an actual valuable "business guy". J. Random Stranger off the street with the idea of "Pinterest + Basecamp For Dogs With Lyme Disease" is one thing... an experienced sales/marketing executive with deep connections, domain knowledge and real world experience in a domain relevant to the idea, is a whole different ballgame.

Of course, that's not to say that a person would have to have been a VP at a Fortune 500 to be a "real business person". But they would at least need some baseline business know-how and a willingness to dive in and learn marketing, branding, positioning, PR, customer development, etc., etc.
I think it's a matter of personal taste. Devise is a pretty large library that deeply entrenches itself in your application and expects you to do things in a certain way. I personally don't think it's worth the added complexity, instead I prefer using standard Rails features [1] to build exactly what I want. But then, others may feel it's not worthwhile to even use Rails and instead prefer to use Sinatra or Flask. Every developer seems to have their own comfort zone in terms of how much control they have. For instance, Linus Torvalds won't even use C++ over C [2].

Omniauth looks like something I would use, though.

As for New Relic, I certainly can blame them for spamming. I realize that everybody's gotta eat, but there is no excuse for them to send me "I wanted to connect regarding your interest in the New Relic trial. So far I have not been able to successfully reach you." after I already sent them two emails telling them to stop emailing me. Annoying anyone who hands over their email doesn't strike me as a particularly ethical business strategy.

[1] http://www.farbeyondprogramming.com/2011/05/rails-user-authe...

[2] http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus
I'm looking to get started with playing around with Clojure web apps. Could you link me to any opening tutorials or explanations?
This isn't how websites are making money, this is how people are making money selling websites. Completely different, and to me, much less interesting.
I found that the most unconvincing part of the video. Quite apart from the point you mention, even in the most-likely-edited video there was a noticeable lag between when she said to take the picture and when it happened, and that is not accounting for the second and a half it takes to actually say the sentence. How would we react if anybody released a camera with a 3 second shutter lag and then advertised it as ideal for photos of action scenes? Then factor in the high probability the voice recognition fails or a network problem occurs or bluetooth disconnects or any other random thing and I can guarantee this is 100% absolutely the worst possible way to try and take a picture of any scene you care about.
Thought control will come eventually.
Speak for yourselve. I'm as beatiful as a butterfly...

... in the larvae stage.
I'm with you. For now pebble is way more interesting. maybe in 2-3 years google glass will have killer apps.
No non-trivial application ever, ever been WORM.
Founder/CEO - TrustEgg - Most financial institutions are based out of a few select states, Nevada being one. Similar to every company being formed in Delaware.
Self-reply: judging by its performance in desktop Safari versus other browsers, this is really the fault of Apple's (closed source, so I can't really properly diagnose) rendering code - the other browsers performed much better.
Excel was cool, 15 years ago
British PM regrets "deeply shameful" colonial Indian massacre
Not aimed at you specifically, but in no particular order...

* Fill out your profile

* List your interesting projects

* Have interesting projects

* Expect to be asked in a job interview, "so, what's your username on hacker news/stack overflow/whatever else" and post accordingly. (statements that are dumb in retrospect are fine; being an asshole all the time isn't).

Again, in no way aimed at you specifically; but I'm constantly reading comments about job search and thinking, "I wonder what he/she is all about", click on their profile and... nothing.
Definitely educational. Sad I missed the start though. I'm hoping somebody caps it for watching later.
Darpa Wants to Help You Survive a Nuclear Disaster
Stupid-EasyMotion: EasyMotion restricted to the current line
Post title seems like it should be, "Refinery is a messy CMS".

Seems like a good portion of these comments are comparing simple code written in (other-framework/language) with a big messy CMS written as an add-on for Rails. Hardly apples-to-apples comparisons, and only tangentially about Rails to begin with.
Yes but native client is conceptually an excellent and secure way to run native code.
Announcing Hackpad API, version 1.0
Thanks for the link. That was a really fun read.
Most personality traits follow a normal distribution: half are more socially awkward than average, half are less socially awkward than average.

I found it surprising and even counterintuitive, but empirical data suggests that on average home-schooled students are still better socialized than students of public schools. Here's one article: it was published in a Catholic journal, but it seems to be heavily cited by secular social scientists and sufficient in its methodology ( http://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/02/001-is-private-sc... )

I'd add that there's also more to socialization than not being socially awkward: someone can be socially awkward, but start a family, be active in their community, and contribute to society through work, entrepreneurship, or academic pursuits.
Obama responds to alleged China cyberattacks
Google Glass: Let Me Get This Straight
When developing Javascript apps locally, I often use SimpleHTTPServer so I can access them through http:// rather than file:/// URLs, which tend to interact badly with the same-origin policy.