skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Would quotas be illegal for a private university?
Okay, so I got it half right. They've made the consumer of services and payer for services the same (themselves) and thus they have the proper incentives. This is a bigger win for the startup ecosystem than I had previously thought.
How do you think they are going to get all the data to analyze your facebook account?
ATableView: UITableViews for Android SDK
This is all a very sad state of affairs obviously. I think, though, cautionary tales do have some value - and hopefully allow a small silver lining to the accompanying cloud.

In this is, as the post outlines, an important lesson to founders from the sales/marketing side to not oversell yourself, not just to others but to yourself. This is part of the reason many VCs are reluctant to back companies founded by pure sales people, because such folks will oversell their own ideas to themselves and not look as critically. You MUST get to grips with fundamentals. You MUST understand the financial details of your business and not hand that responsibility off to someone else. I would also argue, though many disagree, that you MUST understand on some level of detail the engineering behind your product, even if you are not the level of coder your engineering team members hopefully are.

Pitching ability is necessary but not sufficient qualification for success as a startup founder. It's a very sad situation when someone pitches so far ahead of the curve they feel like they have no way out. Depression and despair is a frighteningly common situation to find yourself in as a founder. Help yourself by owning knowledge of all aspects of your business and THEN let the subject matter experts own the deep dive and the execution on those.
The GP said:

"I find the whole idea of borrowing money for investment purposes a little strange. Isn't that basically just gambling?"

which is exactly what my comment addressed. One can debate what investment strategies colleges should use, or how much risk they should take on - probably less than these people did, I don't know and I don't really care either. The GP was throwing around populist blanket 'debt = bad' rhetoric, that's the point I was agitating against.
Anna Patterson, one of the Cuil founders, previously worked at archive.org and built an early search engine over their archive (named Recall, IIRC). According to her LinkedIn profile she currently works at Google.
OK, so that's costing you $200 a year, instead of $25 on Flickr.
Whoa I can't believe there is more than one smackfu
People need to get out of this habit of embedding view/template in the backend code. It's impractical and problematic in any situation where there's division of labor.

Otherwise interesting web framework, makes me want to look into MoonScript.
> Kickstarter being used by well funded celebrities who just want to minimize their risk to zero seems wrong to me. It should be for startups and good ideas that can't get funding elsewhere.

Why not? This movie is a product, and the funders are the consumers of said product. If the product project meets its goal, the consumer gets its product, and Zach gets rich(?). If the project doesn't meet its goal, then we can assume there isn't enough demand for said project.

Sounds like a typical business. Kickstarter isn't an investment hive.

I don't know much about Zach or his work, but the project is already almost at $1m (50%) funding with 29 days left. Pretty impressive demand, so far.
His shirt is off-center.
Pizza hut on XBox
Doesn't this just mean Spark will have a little less money to actually invest, thus will need to invest at slightly lower valuations to get the same returns, and companies will accept those lower valuations because they no longer have to pay the legal bills?

Of course that's a huge simplification, and I'm in favor of reducing sneaky terms that can take entrepreneurs by surprise, so I'm not complaining.
Is there any compelling reason (aside from money...) that others won't make the move as well?
“Harvard College welcomes talented students from all backgrounds, including Asian-Americans… The admissions committee does not use quotas of any kind.”

....but we do value diversity :)

and that's the same thing. It's unfair to Asians but then no one is entitled to being accepted at school A or B, and more than SAT scores and GPA should be at play.
Well, if minorities are being positively affected, then majorities (in this case, Asians + whites) must be negatively affected.

How is that novel? The effect is the same as ever, whoever is part of the majority takes the hit.
There's a Starbucks in NYC where there's often a guy with a Mac laptop wrapped in newspaper and a line of empty drinks on his table and beside the window. I wonder how much he spends per year and how much time he spends at that Starbucks. Then I want to see what he's working on and how much Starbucks money he could have used for an actual office (though I doubt he wants one).
Do you think discrimination by public institutions is not bad?
Assuming you are just responding to the title (because I don't see any evidence otherwise), what about "Asian" is not "a group they belong to before [...] an individual"?
Didn't notice anything. You got a good eye.
I've often thought about this as well, but I don't really want to keep buying drinks and snacks and load up on the calories. (And I can only drink so many low-calorie plain coffees without shaking...) There should be a way of paying shops for my use of the table space. Then everybody is happy and I don't gain weight. Maybe that would break the "folksy ambiance" for their other customers, though...
Technicly this also lowers valuations. Which assuming the percentages stay the same is generally a good thing.
They accept government funds and grants so I think that the government can force them to do almost anything.
1. DataFrames themselves? Well, I think they'll get interesting when they can 'know' about high-level entities like cities, countries, zip codes, ip addresses, etc. Basically, everything that Alpha knows and can compute about, we want Mathematica to know and compute with.

2. I used Go because I am very productive in Go and like a lot of things about it. Goroutines are neat. Java is fine, it's just very boilerplatey, and I'm not practiced enough at it to get past that. And I don't see why we can't develop a GoLink as well.

3. Probably not the whole stack, at least in the beginning. But we'll get there. We want to make it really easy to spider websites and so on.
The one I use[1] is startup-oriented, located right downtown (which is effectively the nexus of transit in this city), and has drop-in desks for $125/mo and full time desks for $275/mo, which I think is pretty reasonable. I definitely feel for people don't have something like it, it's pretty nice.

[1] http://startupedmonton.com/
The attitude of companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter is: if the product isn't addictive or useful to Billions of people, its not worth doing.

Hence there are vastly more resources dedicated to assimilating eg photos and games into their ecosystem, than into something computationally innovative.

This is IMHO a huge mistake, since they could instead be introducing simple forms of programming that takes you on a continuous curve from using the product, to developing for it. There is a huge hunger in the masses for better forms of programming.

This point will probably become obvious if the Wolfram Language is successful.
It's taking advantage of non-public Facebook data, which is closed anyway. So, your data is now being used by two places instead of one. More open.
Fall 2013: Now hiring Supernatural Ruby Gods for our new startup!
>It's unfair to Asians but then no one is entitled to being accepted at school A or B...

Uh huh. Substitute "Blacks" for "Asians" and somehow suddenly it's no longer okay.
I don't think this has ever been challenged in court, so technically I guess we don't know.

But "In the 30 years since this ruling, public and private universities have crafted affirmative action programs consistent with Bakke's requirements" [1], so I assume it probably would be, otherwise they wouldn't go through the trouble.

1. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/supremecourt/rights/landmark_regents...
That is similar to what github pages is. The limitation is just that the file must be in github pages and you can only get to the current file in the gh-pages branch.

https://raw.github.com/documentcloud/underscore/master/under...

won't work but

http://documentcloud.github.io/underscore/underscore-min.js

will.

Also it looks like there is already a workaround to get to raw pages: https://rawgithub.com/
Buy bottled water. And tip generously with every drink.
Reminds of this article:
http://blog.wavii.com/2011/12/29/your-mileage-may-vary/
They're not directly using quotas, but they get the same result by putting less emphasis on test scores and grades.

There is a real argument that test scores are easily gamed, and that studying for the SAT for 2 hours a day because your parents made you, doesn't necessarily translate to success in college/life/business.
> It has been stable for a good long time. Which is nice if you've got a giant repository of old code that you dust off and run from time to time.

I think CL is one of the few languages that I can see myself using for a decade, continuously, without having to go back and refresh pieces to conform to the latest version & compiler. Not only that, you can essentially reprogram it to keep up with advances in the field.
Cool, sounds kind of like bitdeli?
Specifically this image:

http://wavii.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/hadoop_too_big.jpg?...
More progressive still would be funding startups that disintermediate lawyers and the billable hour system.
I laughed at that as well. Mine, back in 197x, took weeks. My son's, bought in 2009, took the same amount of time...
Even for completely private businesses that receive 0 public funding, there is stringent anti-discrimination laws already.
"Somehow you morphed that"

The three arguments against were the discussed social interaction which was pushed pretty strongly, another claimed problem was credit was not available but when it was offered students wouldn't take for-credit classes (what does that mean, if anything?) and Blivens strange quote about minds needing to be built instead of stuffed.

Based on experience in classrooms, where the usual 90:10 ratio shows 10% of the students are 90% of the interaction, and even the most biased claims showing at least a quarter of the population is introverted, that would indicate the percentage of people who prioritize social interaction must be somewhere between the two fairly ridiculous extremes, lets say 90% to 25%. However actual success rates are staggeringly worse, like single digit may as well round down to zero. So as simple engineering guess, the cause of failure simply cannot exclusively be lack of interaction. If that were the case, a more realistic failure rate would be 50% or so because probably somewhere around half the population cares about that based on examination of extreme claims.

That leaves the article with little more than the usual "we all know the correct way for humans to live is to be extroverted, and clearly radio lectures / internet lectures are not an extroverts paradise, so lets marginalize the introverts and pat ourselves on the back for figuring that out to be the failure of MOOCs, how lame of them not to cater to our talkative desires as the masters". Eh, lame.

Whatever the distance education problem is eventually correctly identified, its not going to be social interaction. Look at another technology that's completely non-interactive yet tremendously popular... watching TV.

I suspect the true answer is likely to revolve around peer pressure and motivation. No one knows or cares if I drop a class or skip a video lecture, but if it went on my permanent facebook/google record, well, maybe I'd follow up... As for motivation I would agree that if possible to attend, sitting in class might be slightly better, and its so easy to attend class "somewhere" that anyone with the slightest spec of motivation is probably already sitting in a physical classroom leaving very few motivated people left for online classes. Not no one, just very few. Now those theories could have improved the article.
I hack at a coffee shop with some frequency, and have built a sufficient rapport with the staff that I feel I can get honest answers out of a few of them.

Starbucks aims to be the "third place". Home, Work, Starbucks. That's what _they_ want, they want to be inviting, they want to have good wifi, new stores should have very convenient power. So it's not like they didn't plan on this happening. But they do have numbers to meet.

- They do complain about people who buy a small coffee then site for five hours. (so keep buying)

- They seem less concerned with what you're buying, more concerned with you doing it with some frequency (unless it's the cheapest thing on the menu)

- If you have a loyalty card, your free refill appear the same to them as if you bought something, so don't feel bad there.

- They hate people who shout into skype, listen to music through speakers, or take over multiple seats (just as much as you do)

- Leave 10 minutes before closing.

- Tip.

I think there's also work that cafés can do to better manage their space. I look at patrons in two camps: campers and drinkers.

Campers show up laptop and stay for a long time.
Drinkers want to come in, buy a coffee, sit down and drink it, maybe with a friend, then leave.

Having seating targeted at both groups helps them make effective use of the space. My old starbucks had nice bar-style seating facing a window. Narrow ledge big enough for a paperback and a coffee, not big enough for a laptop. This fit in a lot of patrons per square foot (compared to a full table & chair). "Campers" could fill up appropriate seating, then "drinkers" could show up and still see great seats for themselves. Drinkers who came early often saw the nice seats by the window and filled up there first, leaving more tables for campers.

My current coffee shop only has seating that works for campers. So the place can fill up with the laptop crowd, a drinker can walk in then walk back out. Or it can fill up with Drinkers, and lose campers the same way.
I think because it's actually a pretty high risk proposition for property owners. It means a lot of unknown people coming and going through commercial (not retail) space and all the insurance, theft risk, vandalism risk kinds of concerns that come with that for a landlord. Usually in a city with a growing and vibrant tech industry less risky tenants can be gotten who will probably pay more.
Baristas and coffee shop owners use plenty of free services on the web, so let's just think of it as a symbiotic relationship.
The author seems to imply that sublime does not qualify as a "serious" editor, and offers a link to quora as explanation, but the article there doesn't address what Sublime is missing at all.
>But I don't understand how "does not use quotas" translates into equal treatment.

You don't understand it because it doesn't translate into equal treatment. "Diversity" is a legal dodge they use to keep out Asians and whites and accept less qualified people of other races. It's a de facto quota system that would never survive a court challenge if you rearranged the races a bit.
How I Escaped North Korea
True, but that also fits within the prisoners dilemma. The way the rewards are set up, you generally should defect if you think your opponent might defect. If it is an iterated prisoners dilemma and you think they will start defecting, you come out ahead if you beat them to it.
Yeah, that's data you see in your report.

You have to opt in to being a data donor for us to store any of it.

Otherwise we just record basic anonymized statistics -- like number of friends, sex, age, etc... and throw all the detailed stuff away. Our privacy policy has more: http://www.wolframalpha.com/fbfaqs.html

We also encrypt with public keys like there's no tomorrow.
That's a lot of junk that doesn't have a lot to do with Python.

Take a look here at my dotfiles to see how to use Rope/Ropemode/Ropemacs to get a Python-aware Emacs environment with the goodies that entails:

https://github.com/bitemyapp/dotfiles/

Edit: Try to ignore or not be daunted by the other directories, my Emacs setup is well maintained but very old and has over 400,000 LOC.
“My problem is [email digests] get lost in my inbox”

I have a Smart Mailbox set up in Mail.app that all those digests land in, that way they’re not mixed in with all the email that I need to act on.

“The feature is really interesting to me however. I personally don't use tumblr, but the inherent "repost" feature about it seems really attractive. Maybe I should look into automatic posting to tumblr.”

The Feature is a selection of articles that people save to read later using Instapaper. The Tumblr connection is Marco Arment, who worked at Tumblr and created Instapaper and The Feature.

You can set up Instapaper in such a way that whenever you mark something ‘Read later’ (from the web or a RSS client like Reeder), it’s automatically added to your tumblelog. You can then peruse your tumblelog whenever you feel like it.
>doesn't address what Sublime is missing at all.

Being a fully programmable work environment.

Edit: I used ST2 for about a month. The Python was neat but it's going to fade away eventually.
Did your 2012 Strange Loop talk touch on the technology you used? Do you know if the video of the talk is still going to be released?

https://thestrangeloop.com/news/strange-loop-2012-video-sche...
If "you" didn't lie to some reviewers and pay others I'd be able to.

This isn't a case of a game that doesn't age well, the thing just didn't work. Even after fixing the servers it's still defective by design. Worse, EA deliberately lied about this and their coordinated responses show widespread and high-level involvement.

Anyways, thank your lucky stars I can chargeback, it's a lot cheaper for you than any of the other (all legal) things I'd do to get back at someone who knowingly sold me a defective product. Hiring a PI isn't that expensive...
Honestly, I don't encounter many Forbes tech articles. But now that you mention it, if I think back some of the worst ones I've seen were indeed Forbes. I'll know to steer clear in the future.
Yep, that looks similar to what I was building.
I think you just confirmed my point.
I actually looked at the sfml source once to find out why vector*.x/y wasn't returning an lvalue in .net. Only time I can think of though.

turned out it was an issue woth out it used Properties.
+1 for three metaphors in one sentence
>"Diversity" is a legal dodge they use to keep out Asians and whites and accept less qualified people of other races.

The problem with this reasoning is that it presumes that GPA + test scores is the definition of merit. These schools say this isn't the case. They want the stand-outs. If you are a part of a group that all has perfect GPA/SATs, then that simply isn't enough anymore. Cluster analysis is a valid technique to identify outliers.
Haha, fair enough. I used to read the print magazine though. Maybe it was because I was younger, but I remember it being alright.
If this kind of practise were done against Blacks, Aboriginals, LGBT or women instead of Asians, would you still say it was ok? Instead of universities, if it were some restaurants in your neighborhood practicing policy akin to this, would you still say it was ok?
A coffee shop I used to work at semi-regularly [1] had a sticker discreetly placed next to the power plug, under the table, requesting that you spend around $5/hr if you're going to stay for an extended time. Seemed like a reasonable rule of thumb. I also like that it was done more as a "friendly reminder" / request, not in a heavy-handed manner, like the places that give one-time-use wifi codes that expire every hour.

[1] http://www.cafeugly.com/
Dude, did we read the same article? White students are favored over Asians with better scores. Asians are being penalized for being Asian.
Over represented by what metric?
Or solve the actual problem by divorcing the media event from the developer conference, thus removing the ridiculous incentive for everyone and their mother to get a ticket for 2 hours worth of content and denying the rest of the week to people who could actually benefit from the sessions.
To clarify, my definition of savings refers to "payments you would not have had to make". Regardless of the proportion of principal to interest, the payment is still the contractual amount you have to pay each month. If you have a fixed minimum payment, any extra payment you make is not impacting the amount due next month.

To your point, yes, next month's payment has a higher ratio of p:i, but you have not "saved" anything...yet. In the end, the extra payments you make are just going towards reducing the maturity date of the loan. You are correct that the relative impact of making these extra payments early on does have a tremendous influence on the total interest saved over the life of the loan (and determines how many minimum payments you will chop off the end of your term). I didn't make that clear in my initial comment.
This makes no sense. This kind of sloppy thinking on a topic like this does nothing to further the discussion.
According to a comment I saw on IRC, it already is (as of today).
> The problem with this reasoning is that it presumes that GPA + test scores is the definition of merit.

So let me get this straight: GPA + test scores don't show merit, but race does?

> These schools say this isn't the case. They want the stand-outs.

So let's accept less qualified people just because they're doing better than even the lesser-qualfied people of the same race, even though there are perfect candidates we could be choosing instead?

I think you (like many Americans) are completely misunderstanding the point of affirmative action.

It has nothing to do with "encouraging diversity" or anything like that. It's trying to right a historical wrong, discrimination against certain groups based on race. "Diversity" is just a nice word to use to appeal to emotion so they just use that, but it's irrelevant to the purpose of affirmative action.
If white and Asian students are the majority, they should be selected against based on their proportion of that majority. I believe some are suggesting that Asian students are being unduly discriminated against when compared to white students.
As long as we're being meta...

You responded with 32 words to a 37 word post so that you could quibble about a single word, or 3% of that post. While preaching on the righteous subject of "intelligent discussion," no less. So if we're going to complain about empty calories, I'm pretty sure you're winning that game.
It seemed to me that they were publishing negative news articles about Bitcoin non-stop while the price was climbing. I have a Google News Alert for Bitcoin, and (if I remember correctly) almost every day there would be some negative headline about it from Bloomberg. I then looked up what kinda website it was on Wikipedia, and it turns out they make up 1/3rd of the global financial data market. That kinda confirmed their motivations for me.

I might still be wrong of course, perhaps I should have made more clear that it was my opinion and not really a fact. To me it was like a fact, but now that you make me think about it more objectively, I realize that I can't really say for sure.
No, I invented most of the technology over the last month.

The naive Bayes and corpus wrangling was done by my colleague Etienne Bernard: http://www.wolframscience.com/summerschool/2012/alumni/berna...
Here are some photos of their hardware (business insider claimed their local setup held 7 petabytes in the article circa Nov 2009).

http://static.businessinsider.com/image/4af8564f0000000000e6...

http://static.businessinsider.com/image/4af84e320000000000b7...

http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/4af880fe00000000009...

http://www.businessinsider.com/cuil-office-tour-2009-11#cuil...