skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wished they'd picked a better title for this.

I think it makes an extremely important point though: Online-only just doesn't work in some contexts, and the centralisation and commodification (via revenue models for MOOCs) of research knowledge will drastically hurt the ecosystem of learning and research. Academia, or rather the learning and social environment within, is something quite specialised in many cutting-edge areas that falls out of the domain solvable by market forces. The real problem education innovation should solve is how to create a fluid HE sector that can deliver cost-efficient, quality mass vocational teaching, while not artificially stratifying and dividing incomes purely based on institution. The élite-v-community-college cleavage can't be closed from the top, or purely by new methods of education. There's too much money involved.

What I love about the New Yorker's writing here (and in general) is that it manages so well to explore the problem in a multi-faceted, subtle light, while still retaining clarity and a clear narrative thread, that wraps up just as neatly as a TED talk. Except you have learned much more than just a bite-sized piece of knowledge.
I follow a lot of software mailing lists. I used to use Gmail with labels for them, but it still took a lot of time sifting through to the important stuff, and subscribing/unsubscribing felt like a pain. Also, I would end up never actually opening the stuff that skipped my inbox, filling up my account with never-read emails from lists that I might as well unsubscribe from.

Then I switched to Gnus in Emacs, and for mailing lists at least it is a world of difference. Scoring in Gnus ensures important emails are at the top, unimportant are at the bottom, I can press "c" to mark all as read, almost all frequently used functions require a single keypress, and subscribing to a new mailing list also typically only requires a couple keypresses, and unsubscribing is "ctrl+k".

Real world example: I want to follow any subjects in the high-volume libreoffice-dev list that contain the word "proofreading". I do "^" and search for "libreoffice", click enter to subscribe, enter to open the group and click "I" to add an increase-score-rule ('subject contains string "proofreading"). Next time I open the group, all high-scoring threads will be at the top and I can press "n" to go through them quickly, then "c" to mark the rest as read. You can do this sort of thing with filters and IMAP flags ("stars") of course, but they take so much more time to set up and change and yet only give one level of priority (what if you want certain authors to be more prioritised than others, when talking about proofreading?). If I ever tire of following those subjects, I just ctrl+k on the group to remove it forever, I never have to open an "unsubscribe" page – it's a single keypress, and it's offline. Switching from gmail to gnus for mailing lists was for me like switching from svn to git. Of course, you do need to be an Emacs user already, otherwise you'll probably just be frustrated …
Yup, even after seeing to many weird videos, this is one of the 5 worst I know.
I like a lot about the information presented in this article. I've got the accounts stuff figured out, and reasonably good filters setup. But the rest it handled by mailboxapp.com on my iPhone. Gestures getting through my email is such a win (Later? <-, Archive? ->, Trash? --->). I'm not nearly disciplined enough to go through a "todo" filter. With Mailbox, I can say when I should look at it again, and then I'm reminded about it.

Another thing I've done is the username+service@gmail.com trick. Easiest account filtering possible.
Adding new values in the middle is exactly why it needs to be explicit. If you're pickling them, for example, or otherwise recording them, you certainly care about the values. Auto-assignment is often convenient, but it certainly must never be the only way to do it.
"Bloomberg LP grew up in a different era, when a client of a communication service had no expectation of privacy from the company running it."

The customers might very well have had an expectation of privacy based on the contracts they signed with Bloomberg. Given that Bloomberg's customers are financial companies that have lots of proprietary information to protect, I'd be surprised if their contracts didn't contain some kind of confidentiality agreement.
By defined impression an example is, when facebook came about, what was it compared to. MySpace failed to innovate other than for their bottom line. This is what I mean by a company must continually innovate on their product. Even Google does this through new products.

This may be too general of a statement, but Facebook fatigue, I believe, is spreading. Yet Facebook continues to innovate and acquire new products...Facebook would be better off creating a new method of social networking (is that too strong of a statement?).
I think it depends on what kind of "singling out" is being considered. What the IRS agents did in this case definitely crossed the line. But they should be allowed to scrutinize applications from suspect groups, and probably also be allowed to ask for more information to the extent that they would in a random audit. Further than that should require strong probable cause and warrants and all the other due process that was ignored by the IRS agents in this case.

A drug case would probably get to the point of needing a warrant much sooner, since a pro-legalization activist isn't usually directly initiating contact with the government, so the government has no business asking for information without a warrant. But if a pro-legalization activist makes public statements about their illegal activities or intentions, it's okay for the DEA to keep an eye on those public statements and to use them to try to get a warrant.
> This plant is more interesting and bizarre than any sci-fi writer's imagination

Eh, not quite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Triffids
Wow, what a sad place has HN become that this kind of comment is getting upvoted. There are tons of interesting stuff in there, very exhaustively commented, and you say "some are interesting, lots are mundane" quoting a single goddamn example. Wouldn't linking the interesting ones be, like, more interesting? What a fucking weak attitude!
Your "examples" as to why the post is "embarassingly bad" consists of one deliberately misinterpreted sentence from a several thousand word review. Bravo.
Wow, this is excellent. Thanks a TON for sharing.
Android has never been particularly open; never in the sense of FOSS. Samsung is in the business of selling devices and their business strategy is winning at the moment. I am sure Google too is looking for business though their scale dwarfs in comparison to Samsung.
Its down for me from india
But realistically 99% of fires are put out by a extinguisher or a pail of water.
Thank for your self advertisment. But from what I understood, that lots of businesses threat few gigabytes as big data. It's about fashion to call yourself "big data" user.
Actual paper: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...

Ed Yong on the same paper: http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/05/12/flesh-eat...

I'd be careful in comparing this to the human genome, both organisms are so far away from each other on the evolutionary tree that it doesn't make sense to do any comparison.
Show HN: first weekend project, find interesting Scala content with Bit.ly's API
This wasn't a criminal investigation and is not comparable to a criminal investigation.

I wouldn't be concerned that a group whose politicians have on several occasions advocated: armed marches, intimidation of the other party around polls, refusing to pay tax, shoot census takers, or preparation for civil war - was "afraid to participate in the political process." I would rather be concerned that it was causing others to be afraid to participate in the political process. This IRS gaffe is covering a history of anti-democratic conduct from the very group beating its breast (even as its groups enjoy the nonprofit status which the IRS gave them long ago).
I grew up on rdbmses and think they are great. I've created numerous pieces of software backed by them. I have long preached the mantra that data is more important than the application. The data will almost always outlive the original application and become shared to others.

With that said, the above comes at a time/flexibility cost (not as bad as it used to be but still there) when building a product that isn't quite sure what it will be yet. In these cases a different data store can be beneficial since the app itself is key until traction is gained, if ever.
Some more background information can be found in this blogpost: http://branchandbound.net/blog/scala/2013/05/launching-scala... Scalabitz was built using Scala, Play and a bit of Akka.
Bs. That happens a lot and result in frustration and inferior research as the student keeps trying to fit everything into that little box of his interests.
I expect routing to become more prevalent in the OSM world thanks to the fantastic http://project-osrm.org/ project.
On a similar note, gmail allows you so put dots in your email address, so when I give my email address out to humans, I use first.last@gmail.com, and when I give it to computers, I use firstlast@gmail.com

I find that this easily filters out machine generated addresses, always works on forms, and if spambots ever get wise to it, it'd be difficult for them to add in the dot at the correct place, whereas taking out the stuff after the plus would be quite easy
"Although Google Keep is a cool web application, and offers a native Android app as well, it lacks text formatting feature and the simplicity of Scratchpad. Keep is not a perfect replacement for the Scratchpad."

I can't say we really lost much seeing as Scratchpad is just an app that uses the Google Drive API, I'm sure someone could make a replacement if needed.

Hopefully Google will make Scratchpad open source if they haven't already for the people that prefer it over Keep.
Commercial quantum computer leaves PC in the dust
Nice read, I always enjoy reading about the grad school experiences of people with similar background to mine.

> The main issue was that I never crisply understood all the use-cases and requirements for the systems I was building. I felt weird making assertions about how people wanted to use something, when I had never operated or used it in the real world!

I think that if you're interested in building systems that actually get to be used <in the real world>, the industry is a better place. Personally, I enjoy doing a PhD because I have fewer restrictions which allows me to focus on the things I really find interesting. For example, I don't have to worry too much about making software user-friendly since it will only be used by myself or a handful of people, I don't have to handle tricky corner cases unless I'm actually hitting them on my data, etc.

You also get to work on problems that will only become relevant in the future, e.g. people who have been doing research relevant to many-core systems for quite some time.
I'm sorry, but heroin is simply not in the same ball game as being a "workaholic" or looking at porn every day. These things work in different ways.
I feel that the concept of the "Tragedy of the Commons" more closely mirrors this aspect of "social intelligence" that the original commenter referred to.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Translating a highly context dependent visual language into a slightly less context dependent spoken/text language with different grammar...

Also, supporting all the different sign languages and their spoken counterparts since the market is small enough that you better go international early, unless you want your product cost (close to) five digits a piece like most accessibility hardware.

You have more problems to solve than "just" isolating the signs (which the next generation kinect probably could help with) and applying labels to them, but it's certainly a worthwhile challenge, both in effort and in result.
Show HN: Minutes of Meeting, for individuals
> And if you have technical risk, you'd better be an expert at it, before you start.

I can't second this one enough. Our startup heavily involved video recording, which I thought was a solved problem. It turned out not to be at all.

I ended up learning a lot of really cool stuff about Flash's crazy edge case bugs (I should attach a microphone to a connection with a null hostname to get the activity levels? Sure. I should wait with attaching a camera until I've detected a greater than 0 activityLevel? Sure. I should sample connection speeds and run a regression analysis on that data to find the right bandwidth/quality settings? Cool, but seriously?) and the various flaws of the media servers out there (So I don't have access to the packet stream with Wowza, but in Red5 I need to rewrite the way audio and video packets are interleaved because when uploading high quality video on slow connections Flash delays video packets until the end of stream? No problem.)

In the end even though our startup wasn't about video but about interacting using video, we spent 90% of our time on the video part. That's a lot of energy I wish I could've spent on building the business instead.
Markov Chain Monte Carlo and the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest
Confusing indeed. No, the vector tiles are "just" small extracts of global data that then get rendered to standard png files again. Vector means vector geodata here.
Ok, glass – new Google Glass concepts
I had some spare time this weekend, so I created some simple concepts for Google Glass. What are your thoughts on the soon to be released device?
Do psychoactive drugs affect behavior, or not? If they do affect behavior, then can we say that everything people under the influence do is simply their own choice? At least we must say that it is their choice under-the-influence, which might have been different.

Some people have an easy time quitting tobacco. Others don't. There are real differences in how the drug works on a person and fits into their life which aren't captured by phrases like 'you just can't be bothered'.
Who said it was non-side-effecting?
I... I think I saw this a few hours ago and thought it was a screenshot.
Does anyone know how much indexed data Google has for their search? (Not the size of the database) I'd bet it wont be over a few hundred TB - Something that can fit on most desks in the not too distant future.
That may be his point. My point is that he stitches together falsehoods to evoke emotional responses in his readers.
push doesn't have to be non-side-effecting.
You are allowed to modify shared state, as long as it is a TVar (shared memory that supports transactions).
Nice testing! I've done a TON of video compression and I agree that flash is cpu intensive, but I believe depending on the compression algorithm for mp4 (i.e. baseline, high, ultra, etc.) it can draw more power on the end user's device, but I think it's negligible when compared to flash.

Side Note: HTML5 videos may not use alot of power for playback (gpu), but try video compression (cpu) on a mobile device...HA!
>>No. The math notation that is used across all branches of mathematics is consistent and unambiguous (the notation of formal logic, naive set theory, etc). <<
Nonsense. Actually, ambiguity starts with basic arithmetic.
Take multiplication for example. We have several kinds of notation for it. Which is inconsistent. In the case of juxtaposition, it's ambiguous because two or more juxtaposed letters don't necessarily imply multiplication. And I'm talking about arithmetic only. Then, ambiguity only builds up. Cross product, Dot product & crap.

>>>Being able to say 'group' instead of 'set with an associative binary operation with identities' is essential <<<
OK, but the word "group" should be used for no other meaning...

>>>The reality is that you are not the target audience of their communication, and they are okay with that. You should be too.<<<
As you can see pretty much anyone is the audience of some math and its inconsistency and ambiguity. It just varies the level and the amount of it.

>>>The weirdest assertion that you made is that high-level programming languages ought to be as close as possible to human languages. The two categories of languages exist to communicate fundamentally and widely different groups of concepts. Words represent categories of analogous concepts, and the relevant categories in human life are nothing like the relevant categories in programming. In Haskell, 'functor', 'applicative functor', and 'monad' are highly relevant categories. They pop up everywhere and can be leveraged with great benefit.<<<

False. Computers and software are mainly used to emulate some real world stuff (objects, actions etc.) and to help people with real world stuff in a more automated way.
They aren't used too much to prove theorems or some other math stuff. And pretty much no one cares about proving the so called "mathematical correctness" of a program - a concept that doesn't even make sense in most cases.
Old misconception among FP advocates, even Dijkstra himself admitted that he was kinda wrong about how computer would evolve and what they'd used for. But the associated misconceptions live on.
A language close to human language also helps avoiding errors. That's why you won't see functional languages in critical systems, but rather languages like Ada which is probably the closest programming language to human language. The claims of clarity of FP languages are pretty much at odds with the evidence the real world provides.
BS. I think the opposite happens a lot: the student tries to "be interested" in what is hot or has funding/an interested adviser, they wind up unhappy and ineffectual because its all just pretend.

When you get a job and really get paid; you can be flexible with what you work on. When you go get a PhD, you should have some idea of at least the area you are interested in, you can be flexible within that area, but you should at least have one.
Adobe Fireworks Extensions & Commands for Web Designers
Thad Starner, who now advises/works on Google glass has done a lot of work on exactly this - american sign language recognition.

Also interesting is, in many cases signing something is much faster than speech or typing. As our pattern recognizer get smarter, there is a small possibility that signers see a greater benefit than the rest of the population.
What is the difference between a pharmacologically mediated 'psychological' addiction and a pharmacologically mediated 'physical' addiction? It is all physical. Of course marijuana is not identical to heroin, e.g. in withdrawal symptoms. But withdrawal is not the only way that habits are sustained and this does fail to demonstrate that every addiction to a drug other than heroin is simply 'yours to walk away from' or (as other posts have suggested) equivalent to any repeated benign behavior. Even if a drug like alcohol or cannabis is generally benign and can be used in a disciplined way, that doesn't mean every problem involving a substance other than heroin is trivial.
Interestingly enough, "äiti" is actually a (very old) loanword of Germanic origin. The original Finnish word for "mother" is "emä" or "emo", deriving from the Proto-Uralic "*ämä". "Emä" and "emo" are still in use in poetry and in some compound words in a figurative sense, for instance "emolevy" (motherboard) and "emäalus" (mothership).

In modern Finnish, "mamma" is one of the words used colloquially to refer to one's grandmother (cf. "granny"). In some dialects, it can also mean simply "mother". These usages are probably loaned from Swedish where the formal words for mother and father are "mamma" and "pappa" respectively.
Backdooring IBM mainframes by abusing FTP extensions
At lognormal/mPulse, we have boomerang set up to send a beacon on page load and on page unload. The unload beacon tells us when someone has left the page. If they go to a new page, the next load beacon overrides the previous unload, else the unload tells us how long they stuck around.

It's been pretty reliable. All current browsers will make a GET request in the onbeforeunload event (onunload in Opera). Firefox is the only one that blocks the next page's load until a response is received, and Opera is the only other browser that handles the response though it doesn't block while waiting for it.

Our primary motivation is to measure session engagement (bounce rate, conversion, duration, pages, etc.) versus average page load time across the session.
To each his own. For some splay trees is a revelation, for others - it's Algorithms 101.
I'm sorry, but LDAP does this on a much larger scale for free. Nice idea, however wrong way to go about it big time.
The reason that people are berated for suggesting inherent differences is that there's so much more to the story. Almost nothing derives purely from genes; it's a complex interaction of genes, epigenetics (environmental and hereditary factors other than genes that control which genes are active), and socialization.

Males and females are treated extremely differently from birth. Literally, in the very first day. Thus, it is nearly impossible to actually prove scientifically that a significant difference comes from genetic and biological factors. The socialization is a confounding factor that's impossible to separate out unless you're willing to do a study where you raise kids in isolation from society so you can treat them identically.

And even "inherent" differences are often easily overcome with social solutions. There's research to suggest that the difference in spatial reasoning is societal.[1] Furthermore, I believe I saw a study suggesting that even in our society, if you put everyone through a proper course teaching them spatial reasoning, the women catch up to the men. So society can choose to eliminate "inherent" differences by devoting a few resources to something that helps one group catch up to the other.

Furthermore, it ultimately doesn't matter that much. Western society has decided that we want equality between men and women. If that's not happening, then we've committed ourselves to make it happen. There are currently differences between men and women, largely from socialization. Since our society was largely built by men, it unsurprisingly is oriented toward having successful men in it. That doesn't mean we throw up our hands and say, "well, this is how our society is structured, and our society socializes men to win in that structure. I guess equality is inherently impossible." No. We find ways to reduce gender socialization (see: radical schools in Sweden). We find ways to restructure society so that there are fewer barriers to some groups' success.

1: http://lesswrong.com/lw/7fk/gender_differences_in_spatial_re...
Looking at Twitter it seems to just be down in India
Also: a lot of people seem to think the number of records is the complexity.