skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought they were very clear about this. I came from a low income family, and would never have applied to the Ivy League school I ended up attending if they weren't bragging so loudly of their "no loans" policy. Heck, at least one of the schools even cold called me (one that I didn't apply to -- not sure how they got my number) and started their pitch by saying "no loans policy."

And just to add another point of data: I did in fact get more grants than the cost of attending, so I profited from attending school without having to work. These policies are very real, and at least to me, they were very transparent and are what made me apply.

I don't think there is any attempt to hide it, either: I think the sad reality is that it's just harder for low income students to compete with upper middle class and wealthy kids who attend the nation's best K-12 schools and whose well-educated parents have pushed them academically as best they know how. Ivy League admissions policies try to correct for some of this, sure, but I'm sure it's extremely tough to balance that with penalizing kids who are well prepared due to their wealth. And these kids are astoundingly well-prepared, as I learned in college.
Rapid Prototyping with JS: Agile JavaScript Development Update v0.4
The Shrinking RF Spectrum and Broadway
For those of us who have spent time working in the professional audio-video production world, none of this NYT piece is news, but hopefully the HN audience can be made aware of our struggles. I'll gladly answer specific RF technical questions in the comments.
(Stomp Aberdeen.) Loch Ness. Monster on the map.
Last year's was 8-bit
Awesome! Thanks so much for the kind feedback.
Preventing contagion from Cyprus
Great reads! Thanks!
Lynda.com and Treehouse both do those, but ultimately for me Google searches and blog tutorials generally win out (especially for Linux configuration).
Because users don't understand certificates?
Google windows SDK. Download, install. Sorted. What's hard about that?
>Has anyone been able to intercept another flight they have put into space?

If by "intercept" you mean "put something into orbit with the full intents of building another rocket to take it out of orbit" then yes.

Many times.

And it never gets old.
Think it through, your treating public information as a private key which is hardly secure. You could also use the users email address as the seed for a random number generator which would spit out keys and not involve 3rd party's but that's also unsafe.

After all, what tells the Key Generator that bob@bob.com is actually bob@bob.com and not Alice?
At a fitness center, personal trainers serve the role not just of instructing their clients, but of renewing motivation. That task is absolutely dependent of physical proximity. I feel like this dynamic is being completely ignored in most discussions of online education.
The Economics of Bitcoin Mining
This.

Whenever I've hit challenges when learning to set up things (like recently making the move from Windows -> Linux and having to start from scratch with my dev environment) I've learned the most. Also, it teaches you that you've got the determination to succeed, which at some point you will need to be an effective programmer.
Yeah, I don't think paper Bitcoins are useful for trade. I think they're more useful to keep private keys from getting stolen.
I think 37.89,-61.96 is actually next, although it does take you to your location after that. The trick is to see the comma after the nine, indicating to enter the numbers in the other order.
Poor Haskell trolling.
Mentioning silly languages like javascript which are so far beneath the attention of a true Haskell functional programmer that they would be more annoyed by an errant ant.

Quality Haskell Trolling:
Arguing Monomorphism restriction is a good idea.
Everyone needs to understand that the low completion rates are not as bad as they at first seem. The way to try out these classes for free is to sign up. There is no obligation at all: completely voluntary, no cost, no time commitment and it will not show up on permanent record.

These completion rates are actually more like conversion rates for free trials. As many of us know these are almost always quite low. How many people actually ever read books they "Look Inside" on Amazon? How many people finish long articles on the web? Now many people sign up for paying accounts after free trials of your new website? Not very many.

They are not the same as dropout rates in high schools or universities despite what some online education haters say[1]. Like any disruptive technology the existing players are threatened so you need to pay attention to the source of the criticism.

Instead completion rates are a metric that can be used to improve the class such as the suggestions here. The developers of online classes should and are using A/B testing to improve completion rates. However like almost all conversion rates they will likely remain low.

[1] http://mitsloan.mit.edu/shared/ods/documents/High-Costs-of-F...
I wish I could turn off the bubble sounds and just get sound for the blocks. I'd leave that on all day.
It's a reality that for most people, learning gets tedious after a while. The synchronous learning helps a lot of people drag themselves back into class when they're not really "feeling it."
Go to the coordinates in the eye sockets, and it takes you to another landmark with coordinates.
That's because online education tries to simulate traditional education.

Back awhile ago free online lecture videos (e.g. Berkeley) were simply uploaded to a page and anyone could go watch them without signing up for a class or otherwise jumping through hoops.

This resulted in me watching a few random lectures about subjects I know little or nothing about. Like econ classes, engineering, science, or similar.

This was good because it was short bursts of information without any hassle, commitment, and similar.

These days everyone has locked their content behind sign up/registration pages, and you're expected to commit to a tradition semester of a class in order to get a worthless certificate of completion.

They also dictate the speed at which you learn. No more learning at your own pace, no, you have to do one a week for as many weeks as it goes on for like it was a traditional class.

And why? Why indeed. Why is online education simulating University education when it actually has no relationship to it? You aren't getting a University qualification by completing a "class," there is no reason why a "class" has to be X number of weeks or you should have to complete the rereq's in order to take it.

Places like Khan Academy have got this right. I can go to Khan Academy right now, click on a video series, watch a few bites of information and then stop when I'm ready/bored. Coursera's class system is just pointless, stressful, and annoying.

If Coursera was transferable then it would absolutely make sense to do. But that doesn't look likely and while that isn't the case they're just making access to learning material more difficult with no obvious benefit to anyone.
Match Review: Arsenal 4-1 Reading
"Awful" is kind of relative.

We are talking about a new model, low "retention" seems to be normal for free clases wich have absolutely no barrier of entry.

I have taken 5 courses, only finished 2 "on time". For the other 3 I downloaded the material, got some exercises on sites like MIT OCW, and finished them at my own pace.
Titan is for open science, not classified research as roadrunner was. Sequoia is the new classified nuclear supercomputer.
Spotify's desktop app is P2P, but their mobile app is server-client. Perhaps advanced users could mitigate the battery life issue in the short run by setting up a "proxy" on a server that joins I2P, while presenting the front-end on a mobile device -- like you would with, say, an IRC bouncer.
Just start talking to people. Forget job descriptions. Send emails to people you would be interested in working with. Let them know what your skills and goals are. A few years ago I was exactly where you are now. I had a liberal arts degree, a bit of coding experience but skills that weren't sufficient for a junior dev position. I got some interviews just hustling and chatting with anyone I could get a hold of, and eventually I got a dev internship at a startup. I've been coding fulltime ever since.

Above all else don't let yourself get discouraged. There will probably be a dozen no's and/or people who just don't respond to your query but the person that gives you that first opportunity is probably the kind of person you want to be working with anyway.
Interesting point. I usually don't mind breaking the build for a few minutes while implementing a biggish change, but I also commit often and can use "git diff" to find out what I changed and quickly get back to a working state.
Left off the "x86" in "modern x86 CPUs"
That's key.

MOOC have organized material and information in classes, but now it needs to also curate "tracks".
The Extraordinary SVD
Fell out of my chair reading those "ordinary usage" numbers. Reading a book for a couple hours drops my N4 by 50%, easy.
Digital forensics aren't as damning or incontrovertible as, for example, Adlai Stevenson's Cuban Missile presentation[1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSV9_J8Csts
What else would you say is good about Cassandra?

I find the datamodel inflexible and often hard to work with for real world use cases. I think the tooling is immature and the hector API leaves me feeling depressed (pycassa and astyanx are quite a lot better).

All that said, I find cassandra to be fast, incredibly fast. 99th percentile on our 9Tb time series store is around 20ms on below par hardware.

Another thing i like is we've never had downtime, not even scheduled. We've had nodes fail, we've had datacentres isolated during disaster recovery tests, yet our cluster has continued on regardless (2 x sub clusters per region). Whatever way you stack it up, that's impressive. Remember with cassandra there's no load balancers or other shenanigans involved.

Garbage collection / virtual machine concerns are a red herring due to the mechanics of a cassandra query (certainly for CL < RF)
Awesome, starred it. I hope you do put it on npm!
No, no. It's OK. I got downvoted for pointing out the bad quality.
> "If anything, low retention is a good thing insofar as it means that the courses are demanding and people who aren't dedicated trickle out."

This. You need gumption to succeed in a traditional university course so surely the same will apply to a MOOC with adequately difficult content?
It was Grossmont High School on the border between La Mesa and El Cajon, CA. It was the same with my son. He hung out with a group that included all the 10 best students by GPA in his class. Except for him, they all went to state schools.
If you like MS conspiracy theories of course, you can pretend that it's a deliberate ploy to break LibreOffice

If they hadn't done the same sort of thing before, it would sound like a conspiracy theory. Since they have, well... DOS isn't done 'til Lotus won't run, right?
BTW, I just saw something about this regarding fuzzy uncertainty.

They made a distinction between vagueness and ambiguity. Both of which might make it difficult to assign a probability distribution among the possible values.

Ambiguous is when the boundaries of the sets are not clearly defined. In the thermometer example, it would be not knowing exactly what temperatures are meant by "cold". Or maybe like the supreme court definition of porn, you know it when you see it.

Vague is when there are clear definitions, but you're not sure how well your data fits into those definitions. For the temperature example, it would be what a crappy thermometer would tell you. It'd roughly correlate (it wouldn't return boiling if it's freezing), but it'd be pretty inaccurate.

In true/false values, maybe 0/.5 and .5/0 could be construed as ambiguous, while 1/.5 and .5/1 could be construed as vague.
Your statements here are just nonsensical. And given that your account was created the day of this post, and hasn't commented on anything else, it's hard not to read this as simple trolling.
Stanford creates biological transistors
It was an idea from a reddit thread. I getting hammered in this thread, and I don't if anyone can see this. but the Backupify thing was a misunderstanding. It's okay to use World Backup Day!

I had some trouble with scammy companies and I wanted to protect people from thinking we were endorsing them. That's all
I use CrashPlan, though there were some issues when I tried to restore deleted files (my fault, really).

They offer a 30-day trial. If you try it, like it enough and are willing to wait, they often have promotions for the first year (for Black Friday last year, it was a tiered discount depending on how early you signed up).
Paul, yes I did. I have a degree in journalism.

Plenty of startups will take you on as an intern with little to no experience. If you put your reputation on the line and give them a few months of your time to figure it out and build something they need, they might hire you full time as a junior engineer. Shoot me an email if you'd like to talk more about this zack@zackshapiro dot com
I just want to say that these schools do already try to make it fairer. I was a lower income kid who did absolutely nothing of interest every summer (I couldn't even get a job: my town was dead in the summer as it was seasonal employment), never left the state let alone country, nor did I have a special recommendation letters or a perfect SAT score after my one, unprepared attempt. In a few core metrics, I was certainly less qualified on paper than many other applicants, yet I got accepted into all top tier / ivy league schools I applied to.

I completely agree with you that the odds are still grossly in favor of the wealthy kids (after all, they don't want to penalize you for being rich), but from my own experience, I do believe these schools are earnestly trying to control for these disparities by looking at what you do to excel with the resources available to you -- not simply what you do in absolute terms.
I am definitely considering making a desktop client. I can re-use all the backend code but will have to make a UI from scratch, so it won't necessarily be soon.
This is the "sunk cost fallacy" -- see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs#Loss_aversion_and_th...

If it's cheaper to build (or rent) and run a new supercomputer, then it makes sense to dismantle the old one.
What's with the passive aggresive comment? I don't appreciate that.

I also didn't say that I guest write for a C# blog, why did you quote me saying such things?
I think you hit it right in the head with the synchronous nature. It's ignoring a great feature of the new medium. Ignoring it would be like putting an encyclopedia online without links.

I wish the author would have discussed Udacity.
It's missing one slide: "it's more important to be happy than productive". Crossing stuff off your TODO list with maximum possible speed is not the end goal in itself.
I've found quite readable and relatively high level description of memory management and command submission in Linux drivers for Intel GPUs.

http://blog.ffwll.ch/2013/01/i915gem-crashcourse-overview.ht...

This (plus some low-level register poking) is the stuff you would need to implement in your GPU daemon. Actual generation of drawing commands, compilation of shaders etc is performed by applications.

The overhead should be in the order of few context switches to the GPU server for each frame rendered by any application (in Linux it's few syscalls instead of context switches). Probably not terrible.
squandering that the current generations are built upon.

What is your basis for determining what constitutes "squandering"? Does wearing machine-washed clothes qualify? Buying new clothes so you feel good about the way you look? How about using a dishwasher to wash dishes? What about having a pet dog? How about building new homes, spacious enough so you have room to pursue hobbies and keep rooms from being cluttered and overwhelming?

For example, the "vast quantity" of food "at low prices" you describe exist at the detriment of someone else in the world.

You have offered no evidence to support this. Ad hominems ("extremely simplistic and naive") won't cut it here.
I think that it describes a lot of hackers/nerds/etc. :-)
I don't think this is the way things work anymore. I went to a top private high school. My research into college admissions and applications centered around Google and online forums. I don't think I asked my counselors about anything.
I found it quite amusing that in both countries people work really hard to exaggerate threats from the other country thousands of miles away while what most citizens care are broken health care, environment, getting a job and nonstop increasing taxes. I believe in China most of the attacks were for getting funds from the government. Not sure if it is the same in the U.S. but it does sound similar.
I tried this. Overnight my feed became unrecognizable — full of posts by bots and (subjectively, of course) awful people. There was no detectable rhyme or reason to the user selection, and the service doesn't appear to employ even basic heuristics to weed out obvious spam. On the bright side, I was able to report more abusive Twitter accounts than I normally do in a month.
The hard truth is that the student gets out of a class what they put into it. I have finished 3 Coursera classes, two of which gave certificates. All three were well worth my time, but I worked my tail off to complete the challenging assignments. I found the support staff (TAs) helpful in the forums. Life does get in the way some times but all three coures had at least a week to finish an assignment, typically two and the option of applying late days on quizzes.

The biggest thing I noticed were the clueless forum posts by students who obviously had not read much of the provided material. Two of the classes had material similar to ESR's "How to ask questions the smart way" and this was largely ignored. I think we are seeing the fall out of the distraction of modern society. Sadly, tl;dr doesn't work with complex technical material.

That said, it was a privilege to interact with motivated fellow students. Their input in the forums helped eliminate misconceptions.

By the way, the statistics for our Data Analysis class were similar to those from the OP - from the instructor: "There were approximately 102,000 students enrolled in the course, about 51,000 watched videos, 20,000 did quizzes, and 5,500 did/graded the data analysis assignments."
Heidi Roizen Calls Me a Cockroach
I really like your idea of "reaching" here. I think that in the MOOC model, the role of the MOOC is to help the professor extend their reach towards the students. I think the MOOC should bring the content marketing & designe experts to the table with the professor and help put together the front-end of the class.

Part of that means helping the professor craft every email to the class to maximize engagement. In fact, the professor probably shouldn't even be doing _any_ of that administrative stuff. The MOOC should handle all of that, including the skills required to "extend the reach towards the students" as you aptly put it.

I think Coursera and EdX can do much better at using their design and content marketing talent to make these classes more accessible and successful.
For me this is always the hardest part of REST. Do people use cookies for this?
What about working on your projects before work. Make the job that you're not interested suffer a little bit rather than the project that you're passionate about?

Can you switch jobs? There are so many companies that need even just a passable engineer. If you're not growing and learning in your current role, maybe it's time to find a new one?
I'd just keep track of the usernames who say that, wait until they reveal their identity elsewhere on HN via a "Show HN" or something, then ask them publicly to explain what their stance is on protecting their users' data. When they give the famous cookie-cutter response of, "Obviously we care." then you can hit them with, "but did you not say 'meh' when this same issue came up a few months ago?"
I disagree that it cripples the other points. I just think that a lot of people try to find all of the failure points before they start. You can't start without having a bit of direction (I reference a book to use in my first post) but don't think about where the road will end up, just get on the road.
It's interesting to read articles like this since I came from bizarro not-so-HPC world where "we" (academic department) didn't pay for electricity (the university did!), so there was no incentive at all to retire obsolete hardware. Right up until I left many months ago, I was running jobs on a cluster made up of 84 servers on death's door, each with dual-processor (not dual-core!) Nocona Xeons or Opteron 240s.

"Oh, but there's a cost to support obsolete hardware!" Yeah, sure, but the person supporting everything was me, and I was a constant cost to keep around whether I supported crappy obsolete hardware or shiny new hardware.
Countries don't usually engage in espionage on behalf of private entities, with other private entities as their target, with explicit economic goals.
This will stop trying to build at the first compile error.
I followed a trail starting at a skull in Amsterdam, and ended up at a red revolver.

Edit: Coordinates of revolver: -5.06,-64.36
I email myself my shopping list. I also email myself "Great Websites" that are now archived forever, and I can just go back to Gmail and search for it. I think I'm inefficient.
That'd be interesting. Might be a fun weekend project to build. Get both people to apply, maybe add a 1m video portion? Match on language or age or years of experience perhaps?

Sometimes when you're learning something you need some hand-holding. I think it's a major weak point in the process of learning to code. Just googling for answers isn't always the answer.
I agree. Codecademy can be useful you just need to recognize its limitations.

Does Thinkful use mostly freely available sources from the web as a way have students learn the material?
But top schools like that admit (and I'm completely making this number up, based on average class size for a school like that) on the order of tens of thousands of students per year, combined, and most of those are not going to be "rural kids". For the kinds of kids the article is talking about, the price of tuition at Stanford is basically irrelevant.

The more interesting question is, what kind of financial aid can they expect at your average state university?
My wife also wanted to take that Introductory Human Physiology course. She's a freelance medical translator, so improving her knowledge of that subject matter will have a direct positive impact on her career. She's not among the people who Daphne Koller said "never really intended to seriously take the class in the first place" - she bought the suggested books ahead of time, marked it all down on her calendar, and planned out time to work on it.

What she found was that the course was way more difficult than the description suggested, and proved to be well above what she could understand with her current background. She watched the first video and found that it was going to take way more time than the course description predicted, because she would have to try to fill in a tremendous amount of background knowledge that the teachers presumed. On the plus side, from the course forums she found about resources (videos, etc.) that were more at her current level, and has been working through these.

The comments made elsewhere about the synchronous model for these courses is probably right for her case - she had to wait a number of weeks in order to find out it wasn't the right class for her. This is what you expect when you're in college, at which point you either drop the class and maybe find a different one to take, or tough it out in a class that's not as interesting or useful as you'd hoped. I hope online courses can do better than this.