skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Massive Open Online Courses won’t replace college. It may be part of the puzzle, but there is no replacement for having peers and mentors to go to and ask questions.

However, I think MOOCs will start to replace textbooks. These Courses-as-a-Service (School-as-a-Service?) serve as supplementary material to those already trying to learn something new. Signing up for one of these courses serves a similar function to purchasing a textbook.

Some are doing this better than others. Take Treehouse, which is offers some of the better online programming courses, they offer engaging videos, and projects that go with them. Treehouse is more like a TV show, or a weird YouTube channel than a class.

I read somewhere that about 80 percent of those that sign up for a class drop out (Ill look for the source). That doesn’t surprise me. I haven’t finished 90 percent of the programming textbooks I have. The reasons are the same – I own more than I have time to complete, and I use them as a reference.

EDIT: Spelling
Why split among two campaigns?
Add me to your list as well - I'd like to do something in this space. me@alexmuir.com
The problem we run into there is someone supports 8 gateways (for example) but has 500 customers with 500 individual merchant accounts. They might come away with the impression they just need to pay for 8 gateways. So those folks understand this but we do end up seeming overly complicated for someone who doesn't have that complex use case.
Interestingly enough, discreet mathematics is also math. Surprisingly enough, every single programmer uses that thing everyday.

So math is useless.
Hmmm, why so?
Money Is Wasted On Web Analytics
Good luck with that "global" tax on financial transactions; there are numerous markets in second-tier countries which see this as an excellent competitive advantage, and those countries are motivated to resist pressure to implement the tax due to past histories of humiliation and exploitation by developed countries. The wealthy have a much higher ability to rearrange their lives and businesses to avoid taxes than average people, just ask Eduardo Saverin. As a practical proposal, taxing the wealthy is likely to result in a much less significant result than you would expect.
Was anyone else like "wtf is a one day office?"
Care to quote any section of that page that mentions patents?

"Patent", "Patented", "Pat.", "USPTO", "Proprietary", or "Protected" do not appear in the body of the article.

Also, there is this: "The first thermoplastic extrusion was in 1935 by Paul Troester in Germany." Looks like a decent prior-art claim.
"I have enormous respect for Michael Bloomberg and have rarely disagreed with anything he has done or said..."

I really could not get past this introductory bit. It tainted my opinion of everything Branson said. If Branson has enormous respect for Michael Bloomberg, I can't really muster much respect for him in turn. Which is a shame, because I essentially agree with him on this point--working from home--in particular.

Though I also feel it's any company's prerogative to allow or disallow working from home.
Though that first reaction would also be true of a tampon. You're inserting something that collects liquid in both cases: just one absorbs it and the other doesn't.

Indeed, with the cup, the liquid is retained in the cup. With the tampon, it's absorbed and still touching organic matter (which is why they need to be changed more often).
Bug closed: Won't fix
Please contact your browser vendor.
There is a little problem with the pedantic poster (the commenter at ars)...

Bacteria comes from 'bacteria' in greek, which means 'rod' or 'stick' (walking stick). The fact that some people neolatinized and fabricated a 'bacterium' means absolutely nothing.

If you want to be pedantic, say 'bacterion' and 'bacteria', but then again you would probably write it 'bakterion'.

Wikipedia is not the definitive source for a lot of things, least of all this.
BBC selling Lonely Planet to Kentucky cigarette billionaire
Four months in: Windows 8 adoption is almost at a standstill
Hm, feedback taken. It does however get interesting when you receive a doodle rich PDF in your handwriting though. :-)
The only thing I can see this thing doing that a mobile phone does not is monitor the health of the individual wearing it. That is huge...
>can buy a menstrual cup every year or two

What? They last way longer than that. The companies making them recommend buying a new one every 10 years.
the wiki says they are more environmentally friendly? aren't tampons cotton and biodegrade quite easily.
Surely it's no less ridiculous. But, to step on some touchy ground here...

The executives who approved the logo were very well-compensated tech industry leaders. And if they made a dumb decision then they deserved the finacial pain and community scorn they deserved. Shame on them. But the folks who paid for the blog were mid-level government officials in a comparatively impoverished nation with little local tech leadership or expertise to draw on. They got duped.

Our moral compass wants to draw different conclusions here. Which is the truth? Damned if I know.
"The answer to every article whose title is a question is almost always 'No.'"
Male here. Your partner just needs to grow up. I've been purchasing feminine hygiene products for my girlfriend-now-wife for the last 15 years and have been happy to help her, not embarrassed.

If this is a problem for him now, childbirth is really going to be an experience. =)
Not sure why you are conflating credentialism and vocational training; a big part of the problem is that these two are very different things. That is, students invest 4 years and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and end up with a piece of paper that can get them in the door, but no useful skills.
> Massive Open Online Courses won’t replace college. It may be part of the puzzle, but there is no replacement for having peers and mentors to go to and ask questions.

You can have peers and mentors to go to and ask questions online just as well as you can in real life. Better, in fact, since your pool of mentors and peers is much larger. Take the programming industry. If you have questions about a particular programming concept, library, language, framework, etc. you can easily find a dedicated, knowledgeable group to bounce questions off. There's no reason why this couldn't work in other fields.
Honestly it does, but am an incorrigible optimist :-P I see a 100x or more speed up in science and technological innovation progress. I see progress in colloboration,relationships etc. .
I feel like MOOCs are part of a Universities cost cutting measure aswell as an advertisement for it. Many universities are moving their introductory courses to online. By using MOOCs they don't have to have as many students in class, they can schedule alot more classes to cover more students who say have a day job, and they can get away with hiring less people. The publicity is excellent because it is a good way to get self motivated people interested in the school. Notice that very rarely are entire academic programs put online. This is nothing but good for the university who sees decreased cost and increased student quality (potentially) and increased interest in the school. Once it stops helping the school profit then the MOOCs will go away. I doubt that will happen anytime soon.
That's true, but much of the government support has historically come via education funding. For example, most of the University of California campuses have solid research, but a large portion of their money, which provides the base funding for the infrastructure and salaries, comes from their educational mission: grants from the state educational department tied to the number of students they educate, plus, in recent years (as those grants have fallen) tuition/fees. If we decide that we don't really need to educate people that way anymore, then the University of California system should be much smaller (if it still exists at all), and those researchers are going to have to find somewhere else to research, or leave research and do something else.

If that happened, California could take the money they aren't spending on the UC system anymore, and decide just to fund research directly, setting up a state research institution that isn't a university. Maybe they will; I have no idea.
UW is overwhelmed with demand. They've set up satellite campuses in Tacoma and Bothell to handle the overflow, especially for business courses.

When I went there in 2003-2007 it was still a deal for the quality of education, and my degree was definitely worth what I paid for it (about $5,000-6,000/year) but the price has more than doubled since then.

If I had to choose a university at current prices I'd probably go to Western or WSU instead.
Interesting: CURE International, a major Watsi Medical Partner, is an evangelical missionary organization, delivering sermons alongside care:
http://cure.org/
Real Stories of Simulation Development
I think we're all in agreement here. Early stage investors benefit from trivial successes by passing along the hot potato down the pyramid.
> Courses-as-a-Service (School-as-a-Service?)

When was it ever not a service?
I think the article was probably written when he got really bored and frustrated at his own life and probably was contemplating his statement "why am I living sitting down". A little exaggerated but true.
Ask HN: Am I using C++11 atomic release-consume ordering correctly?
I have recently made a port to C++11 using std::atomic of a triple buffer to be used as a concurrency sync mechanism.
The idea behind this thread sync approach is that for a producer-consumer situation where you have a producer that is running faster that the consumer, triple buffering can give some benefits since the producer thread won't be "slowed" down by having to wait for the consumer.
In my case, I have a physics thread that is updated at ~120fps, and a render thread that it running at ~60fps.

The original C code was made by remis-thoughts and the full explanation is in his blog (http://remis-thoughts.blogspot.pt/2012/01/triple-buffering-as-concurrency_30.html).
I encourage anyone interested in reading it for a further understanding of the original implementation.

My implementation can be found here (https://github.com/p4checo/triplebuffer-sync).

The basic idea is to have an array with 3 positions (buffers) and an atomic flag that is compare-and-swapped to define which array elements correspond to what state, at any given time.
This way, only one atomic variable is used to model all 3 indexes of the array and the logic behind the triple buffering.
The buffer's 3 positions are named Dirty, Clean and Snap. The producer always writes to the Dirty index, and can flip the writer to swap the Dirty with the current Clean index.
The writer can request a new Snap, which swaps the current Snap index with the Clean index to get the most recent buffer. The consumer always reads the buffer in the Snap position.

I am using Release-Consume memory orderings for the Store/Load respectively, and would like to get some feedback from the community too see if I am doing it correctly for this specific problem.

For more detail please visit (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15204578/c11-atomic-memory-ordering-is-this-a-correct-usage-of-relaxed-release-consu).

Thanks,

André
It happens every month, for half of the planet... yet it's taken this long for someone to make a subscription service for it.

I couldn't speculate as to the reason why- I'd be interested to hear if anyone has tried to do something similar and come up against investors who don't "get it", or anything like that.
Since when is "created by the last batch of YC companies" the benchmark for the direction the industry has been moving? How about: Apple spent the last few years making a huge amount of money pushing a new platform for native apps (iOS). Google and Microsoft followed suit with Android and Windows 8. That's been the story of the last few years. The big movement has been towards tablets, and tablets have been a vehicle for native apps.

Re: web apps sucking--many of the issues you mention are solved on iOS/Android, and can be solved by backup mechanisms like Dropbox.[1] Some of the issues you mention are imagined (OS vendor deleting apps from your computer). Finally, you fail to address the actual point, which is that web apps suck at what they do. The most popular and commonly used web app is probably Google Docs, and it's total shit. It's so shitty that I'm pretty sure AbiWord in 1998 was a better product than Google Docs circa 2013. I can't remember font rendering shittier than Google's PDF viewer in the last decade, and that's going back to GTK 1.x here. It's a cute trick that's helpful in a pinch, but it still sucks compared to even shitty native Office competitors.

[1] It's telling that arguably the most well-known YC company's product is fundamentally based on making it easy to integrate native apps with cloud storage.
https://hall.com also supports WebRTC based video chatting and private channels.
GitHub hooks have been implemented but as of yet there isn't a
proper web API available.

It definitely seems interesting though.

Edit: if something slick on top of vanilla IRC would be sufficient you could check out https://grove.io as well.
> If a four-year degree represents nothing more than vocational training, why bother requiring one when a two-year degree generally suffices?

Because a debt-laden employee is a docile, loyal employee?
If you need the job badly to meet your basic obligations, you'll probably make fewer demands on the employer.
Well, it was rather bizarre way to close the article, which to me seemed like more of a summary about what MOOCs are and how Academia is threatened. He never really makes the case for why MOOCs are bad, which is why it was startling to me to hear his opinion against them at the end.
ACL based firewalls are the foundation of real network security. I'm not saying every server needs to be running its own firewall. But these security measures need to be implemented at some level, whether it's at a network level or on an individual machine basis.
John Thomas Financial: The Other Side of Wall Street
From what I've read about menstrual cups (which is strange because I also don't have a vagina...) they are not usable with some contraceptive implants.
Lunr.js - Simple full-text search in your browser
Buying one of something will be more environmentally friendly than buying 100 of something most of the time.
Inverse slavery won't happen because the minority will simply leave. This is what happened in Eastern Europe before the fall of communism, and what currently happens in places like Cuba and Venezuela. This is even happening to Western Europe right now; I've personally met several intelligent, ambitious 20-something French expats who indicated that they have no intention of returning to France due to excessive taxation and lack of opportunity.
And you can type your mail instead of doodling it.
Rob Pike on How to Become a Systems Programmer
The irony in this "What Schools Don't Teach" is that none of the people portrayed got rich programming.
settled for $500, not bad.
Buffett tells Cook to ignore cash complaints, buy back stock
I think it's more of an issue that developers consider their options to be SQL or NoSQL when the option of using both often is a great choice. You can pick the best technology to solve individual aspects of the system.

For example, the current system I'm working on uses Oracle and Mongo, the previous used SQL Server and Redis. The main theme is to use a relational database for the structured data that we need transactional support for, e.g. orders, then use a NoSQL data for unstructured data and caching.
You're turning one false dichotomy into... I don't know the word for it, but while how it scales can be part of choosing a database system, it definitely is not the main difference between the relational and noSQL models. How your data storage will scale is an important but tangential topic that should be addressed as complementary to deciding which class of storage will help you most effectively and efficiently model your data.
The Promise and Peril of the 'Data-Driven Society'
Improve your sleep cleverly with this simple app
Have some troubles sleeping? This simple tip + app can help you.
Employers like the current setup because they can make sure people aren’t playing Minesweeper all day. And people still feel that face-to-face conversations have higher information density.

But if holographic teleconferencing becomes mainstream, then I could see a lot more knowledge based work being done remotely. That has downsides as well. Why employ an American, if you can get a qualified person in say, Poland, who speaks fluent English, is willing to work in your timezone, and has the equipment to virtually be around in 3D?
Yes, at least like 5 times a day :)
Speaking as a customer of theirs, it's already impressively fast. :)
Smoothing 3D prints with acetone and without patent violations
And a big HN welcome to the Pets.com of the second internet bubble!
If by "throw in the towel" you mean "work diligently to find ways to replace workers with technology in order to remain profitable," then I fully agree with you. Heaping more burden on employers simply accelerates the process. It's all going to the same place in the end, so we're just talking about adjustments to the rate at which we get there anyway.
Send data to StatsD/Grapite from inside a Chef Recipe: http://bit.ly/12nFoWu
This IS great advert for Linux. It's just that newbies are not this ad's target audience.

Sure, you can put Ubuntu in your mom's laptop and she'll be up and running in a breeze, but hey, she's won't be reading Hacker News.
I think not, at least not until Completion rates rise, and they become more structured, that said I've become a pretty good dev using some Moocs and online courses like Codecademy, CodeSchool, RubyMonk, TeamTreeHouse -- so there is a lot of areas that can be disrupted, but the end-user must be very dedicated to learning, cause being online --there are distractions EVERYWHERE...case in point, I was just watching a video at EDx, then thought hmm...wonder what's going on @ hackernews lol... I still think classroom learning is hugely important though, as it's a great place to talk with other-like minded people, network, and grow... but I can definitely see things changing with moving from 4 yr degrees to programs like DevBootCamp.
WANNABE'S INFILTRATE THE BAY
So, I've read a few articles related to this new reality series called "Start Ups - Silicon Valley." A lot of people from the tech community seem to be rather offended that the show decided to glamorize the business of entrepreneurship and the tech industry on a whole. Most people felt that there would be a flock of wannabe's infiltrating the Bay Area which would result in an off balance in the tech culture that has been so carefully orchestrated in this particular community. In my opinion Silicon Valley should be excited about this new possible influx of raw young talent. It could be a great opportunity to mold people by the masses so that they can really appreciate the culture and get involved in the business of technology. Shows like this have the potential to peak the interest of people all around the world. Yes, it may be over dramatized but it's purpose is for entertainment and truth be told, it has the potential to make people want to learn more about the industry. What are your thoughts? Does Silicon Valley need new people with fresh and different perspectives or should we send these wannabe's running for the hills?
I am glad that someone who knows more about language than I do can make a sophisticated sounding arguement that I can regurgitate to make myself sound smart. Who cares if it's correct or not, I can belittle a lot of people with words like these.
This gave me a truly awful, slow-motion, Quentin Tarantino mental replay.
That's a believable number. But I also imagine that the curve flattens considerably before topping out: Sweden probably wouldn't get a lot of additional revenue out of that last 5-10% in tax rates. If you were picking the "right" level of taxation, you'd presumably want it to set it somewhere near the point where the economic cost of the taxes was equal to the benefits of the government's use of the revenue, and not at the point of maximum revenue.

A 70% marginal rate is not outrageously far from where the top bracket in California will be if Washington decides the best Social Security reform includes lifting the payroll tax cap. Today's effective top marginal rate in CA is ~52% in Fed+State income taxes and another 3.8% for the high-earner Medicare tax. If SS goes uncapped, adding another 12.4%, your $1M earner is hitting 68.2%. I'm dispensing with the accounting fantasy that the "employer-paid" portion of the tax isn't actually a tax on the worker.
How can she say that sharing gesture on the video is intuitive? And why is this app copying Clear just for the sake of having gestures all over the place?
My anecdotal experience with homeschooled kids (my son is not old enough yet) is that the lack of 'forced' exposure at school is more than compensated by the habit of indulging and exploring one's curiosity. Especially because it applies not just to social aspects but to any area of knowledge, activity and culture. By the time the child's direct interests and background start showing their limits (9-ish years old?), they will have plenty of opportunities for interaction outside that circle (extracurricular classes, sports, travels, etc). Homeschooled does not mean hermit.
Interestingly, I have come across at least a couple of people who took great pride in being extremely literal about what they are saying.

One person explained that he did not want to be misunderstood and thus will always speak literally. (He, unfortunately, seemed to expect other people do this too. Which didnt happen all that often. Ergo misunderstandings)
More to the point, throwing away one of something every year or ten is more environmentally friendly than throwing away seven of something every month. Provided the one thing you're throwing away isn't horrifically environmentally destructive.
This is really wrenching, and beautifully done.
I just had to check which rules apply to some other words, like 'stadium' and 'forum'. Turns out that both 'stadiums' and 'stadia' are valid plurals of 'stadium' while 'forums' is the preferred plural of 'forum', although 'fora' is not incorrect.

[1]http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stadium#Noun
[2]http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/forum#Noun
For some reason it's not working in last Arch's build. Manual "useradd" is such a pain in the ass...
Basically because a proper X.509 implementation requires a CA to be in place first, so you have a place to submit a CSR, but there is no CA, so you're forced to self sign. I've written a rant on the topic here:

http://www.rubygems-openpgp-ca.org/blog/gem-signing-x509-and...

I've been trying to get people to sign with OpenPGP because that can be done first and then you can put an authentication system into place after the fact. You can't do this with X.509, if/when a CA comes into play all gems would need to be resigned and republished.
Hindenburg mystery solved after 76 years
I just showed this to my girlfriend and she was like "wtf would I need that for?". Seeing that in our basement we have like a pallet of tampons and pads I understand her. Buying this stuff in mass just seems cheaper and smarter.
Join Exec as a full stack engineer to build the future of local services
That's how I felt about the line where he recommends only allowing the deploy user to connect from a certain number of white-listed IPs. That's great and secure until you get a phone call while you're at the airport or on vacation, and then you hope that you can SSH into a machine at the office just so you can tunnel through from a white-listed IP.
Would Google fall in the "fox" category ? They created significant stuff in various domains ...