skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This seems like a simple matter of having all the tests written under invigilators.
doesn't work with ie8 or below,

looks like it could with some tweaking though.
I sometimes wish that x * y would short circuit on x = 0. Just because you could.
Try using VueScan. It supports a bunch of older scanners.
I think what needs to be more common is very powerful exhaust fans in units/homes. I constantly find myself looking for a way to suck out all the hot air out of my apartment at the end of the day in one fell swoop.
The iPad interface makes me feel like the general public is stupid. It is so terribly inefficient and dumbed down in so many ways that I have a huge incentive to use anything else.
Yeah. I'll edit that in. Thanks.

edit: Never mind. Looks like I can't.
I'm distinctly of two minds about this. On one hand I believe interacting with other people is essential to learning. That studying together, or talking about a text, or hacking on a project together is where the best sort of critical thinking germinates. In that sense I am happy to see some evidence in favor of my hunch.

On the other hand, the course material that online classes are making available for free is tremendously valuable. I've never finished an online course but I have begun to regularly use online course materials as a supplemental resource to books I'm reading and to projects I'm working on.

I'm concerned that enthusiasm for publishing course materials online will dry up if evidence shows it's not a silver bullet for the world's higher education problems. In other words, I'm concerned that expectations are far too high and that educators and institutions are going to lose interest in a fantastic innovation just because it doesn't solve all our problems.
Thank goodness all those oppressive dictatorships didn't know that they could outlaw revolution. Otherwise, everyone would have just sat around twiddling their thumbs because, "Well, it's illegal!"

The fact of the matter is, no one other than a few crazies on the internet think the UK is a tyrannical state. If it really was, you would have unrest similar to actual dictatorships, like Syria and Libya. You wouldn't be able to type out your conspiracy theories, because the internet would be shut off.
Probabilistic graphical models like Markov networks can yield surprisingly complex behaviors, if they're complex enough. I don't have much trouble believing that it's possible.
GitHub Is an Exceptionally Free Place for Open-Source Software
Ask HN: How do you conceptualize the internet?
I'm currently sitting in a class discussion at my university discussing the relationship between the internet and privacy/IP law.

Everyone here are law students and the most common view of the internet as a physical place - the lecturer recently wrote an article asking whether the internet should be seen as a meadow or a series of rooms.

My answer is neither. I don't think that using physical metaphors are going to accurately represent what the internet is and how it works. I think it's actually a bit dangerous once we start making laws off this assumption too.

So my question is, how do you all see the internet? What's the fairest way to conceptualise data, how it's made and who can use it?

I can't help but think that asking here is going to be better than asking the law faculty :-/

TL;DR: How should we think of the internet? Should it be treated as a physical 'place' or is this wrong? How do we explain it to people without a tech background (lawyers, young children etc.)?
Show HN: BitJoy
On-demand image thumbnailing with Thumbor
Failure rates that high are normal at many European universities. The idea there often is "let many people in, but let them fail out if they don't make the cut".

Not everyone is suited to some of the rigours of higher education, and when you make it freely available, more people are going to try it out, and more people are going to fail. I wouldn't call a 58% failure rate a bad thing.
There is no such thing as "Photographic Memory", as we do not even have "Photographic site"

All we have for sight is: A few degrees of focus (~3-5) that we quickly jump around to get an idea of a scene, & then we (very importantly) MAP this data to an internal model.

So, when someone says, they can fill in all the details, they are doing that from an internal model, which was only partially supported by earlier sight. Much of their memory can be wrong.

More importantly, it's a huge misrepresentation to think that the human eye works like a CCD array/sensor/camera.
Robot Revolution: will machines surpass humans?
At the end of the day aren't they likely liable?
For fun, sometimes I'll rewrite JS trying not to use any explicit conditionals (keywords if/else/), and use short-circuiting instead. It's a fun exercise but I know better than to commit the code, I think I'd be dead several times over by now...
During one coruse project we had used Kinect as a Semaphore (the flag signalling) reader.
Most Accurate Self Aiming Robot Sniper (Video) | High Tech Point
The only problem is MIT's news office; "roughly speaking, P is a set of relatively easy problems, NP is a set of incredibly hard problems, and if they’re equal, then a large number of computer science problems that seem to be incredibly hard are actually relatively easy." (It's wrong first because P ⊆ NP and second because it doesn't tell you what's really at stake here.)

I think you could instead say "Roughly speaking, P is a set of easy-looking problems, while NP is a set of problems which can be solved the hard way, by a brute-force search. If they're equal, then every brute-force-able problem is hiding some much easier solution." You could also add a sentence like, "Most computer scientists believe that this is wrong -- that sometimes you can't really improve on a brute-force search. But nobody knows how to prove that negative, it seems to require understanding everything which computers can possibly do."

In one paragraph you can explain the gist of P = NP, I think, to a lay audience. I guess many of them might not know what a brute-force solution is, but you might replace it above with "trying all the combinations" or so. (Hat tip to Scott Aaronson for an essential element of this explanation.)
1. Nobody cares about handwriting all day long, quite a niche use (the same as for Tablet PC 8 years ago).
2. Nobody cares about MS Office anymore. There are alternatives (and free) for regular folks.
3. There is no new PC coming and MS learnt that today.
4. I have a feeling that this post is a well prepared marketing pitch...

Peace!
Oxford questions seek to reveal the foundations of quantum physics
This is how you do it in Lua, as well, since it doesn't have a ternary operator.
Watch out for this with boolean values. If you are attempting to memoize a method that returns a boolean, it'll be re-evaluated if the last iteration returned false.
Ugh, `or` is mostly useless in PHP.

That code is identical to:

launchMissiles() || die('failure');
Exactly my point. If Google does work with NSA in secret, then shame on Page and Brin for "doing evil". I cannot imagine how strong and adverse message gov would send out into the world shall they choose to harshly prosecute someone of a Google or Microsoft's CEO caliber.
Donate$1200 And Receive $2900 In Painting Labor
Deleted my comment because you are, of course, correct. (However, I do suspect rayiner was referring to omitting the format string.)
Testing Front-End Developers
Today i was given the task of writing up a test for a couple of new developers applying for a front-end development role. Usually ( most of the times i've been tested ) it has been a boring 'cut up this PSD and include sprinkles some $ on it. However I feel like this is in no way a useful representation of the a front-end developer's skillset and they don't really take away anything from it either. ( if anything it may deter them from the work ). So i wrote up a purely javascript/basic DOM manipulation test that goes as follows:

---------------------

Make a blank html page with a single text input and an empty list.

While you type into this input, every time a user writes an operation, add it to an object called 'OperationHistory' where the operation is the Property Name and the result of the operation is the property. Then clear the input. If there is a syntax error or maths error; the property must be 'error'.

*operation = any basic arithmetic followed by '#end#'. Limit character input to only accept integers and operators.

Every 1000 milliseconds, run a function that will determine the highest result in 'OperationHistory' and append this outcome and the operation itself to the list in the following format:

"the following maths problem :" + operation + " = " + outcome + " yielded the highest result so far."

------------------

...

I guess it's not a great test but i'm purely interested in the javascript ability of the candidates and i couldn't find anything on google quickly that couldn't be solved quickly by looking it up or SO-ing the problem.

Which brings me to my main issue;

Where is a resource of cool nonsense tests that I could give to a budding developer and adequately measure their 'real-world' front-end ability?

OR

Are there any great resources that help out with this sort of thing?
Another example of the amateur nature of Twilio. Good for $30 a month developers but bad for businesses that depend on their phone system.
I think that must be it. And it makes perfect sense how he would hit it. Example: http://ideone.com/MilaUN
Hash based signatures
I think so too, I just have bad reading comprehension and should have known but didn't.
Twilio should really consider a lighter gray color for their text on the white background. Right now the text is simply too legible still! Why, I can almost read it, if I crane my neck and look at the screen at just the right angle. What could they have been thinking? Hopefully they will take this feedback to heart so that future urgent messages like these will be completely obscured.
The better form of this would be

launchMissiles() and die('mutual annihilation");
Buy crossover for Mac from Codeweavers. Codeweavers do a lot of the heavy lifting in Wine, so it's good to support them, plus the UI integration is excellent.

For my personal use, crossover is good enough that I no longer install a windows vm for my occasional windows app usage.
It's not a compiler flag, I guarantee it. Your code was simply incorrect. The only thing a compiler flag might have done was turn on a warning that would have told you what you did wrong (depending on what, exactly, you did do wrong).
Call me crazy, but I tend to think issues like this ultimately serve, if handled well, to improve a company's public standing.

I royally screwed up the embed script testing for our very first customer resulting in their entire site not functioning and a panicking customer on the other end. I ended up writing a 3 page post-martem and apology. We debated a bit internally to be as open as I'd been, essentially admitting basic sloppiness on my part and promising to learn from the mistake if given a chance.

Fast forward 7 months, the same customer(originally acquired from a cold call) recently introduced us--without asking--to one of the top seed funds locally.
I was under the impression that 'photographic' meant that each detail was captured, as if it were a photograph (vs say a painting or a drawing)
In the Middle East, forbidden literature is best distributed digitally. It's far easier to conceal, transmit, and even produce. There are some Arabic book clubs online that have more materials than most physical libraries. Two great examples are the atheist and Marxist communities. Neither could have thrived so much without the internet.
Yeah the exact same, good to see you're not one of them.
Netflix’s 14 Emmy nominations a breakthrough for online TV
You wrote at the end that you weren't sure why literal values were returned instead of TRUE and FALSE. The practical answer is that literal values are far more useful. The simple answer is that, since the literal value already represents TRUE (or FALSE), returning it makes just as much sense as returning a literal TRUE/FALSE, and is simpler to do.
The modern way to ban books is steganography-like: hide them in a sea of information.
For anyone looking for multiple (redundant) SMS provisioning, I have had not perfect but pretty good experience with http://fortytwotele.com/ over a good few years. I am not connected to them at all, just throwing the option out there. As a bonus, they're European, which means you are better positioned for compliance with EU privacy laws for non-US clients.
This is a real problem with the stackexhange platform, which is fragmenting communities. While there is a genuine reason to do it, I think the decision was primarily based on "business". My opinion, I could be wrong.
I'm a college professor. I'll try to say a little something.

Colleges certainly aren't altruistic.

For the most part colleges, and even more so, research universities, want to be "better than each other". The competition isn't for money so much as for its own sake.

It is easy to find out what colleges think is worth bragging about: visit any of their homepages.

It is important, as patio11's quote suggests, to remember that the interests of different groups -- undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, administration, alumni -- are not necessarily aligned. When I was an undergrad at Rice, in addition to the student newspaper we had "Rice News", rather similar in content to the "news" on university homepages. I regarded this as propaganda and sneered at the "faculty newspaper"; now that I am on a university faculty, I realize that the faculty don't read these newspapers either.

From an administrative level, most everything costs money. You can build new buildings, fancy new dorms, start new programs, poach famous faculty, etc. And so they think about money a lot. Departments don't have to think about where the money comes from, but they are always fighting to get a piece of it.

Professors want good students to teach, time to do research, and to be left alone by the administration. University administrators always have pet projects (at South Carolina it's the "Carolina Core") and it's rare to find a professor who gives a damn about any of them.

You mention "a compassionate job of preparing eighteen year olds for adult life". But "adult life" means very different things to different people, and many professors, certainly including myself, are extreme outliers. So I personally stick to teaching my students math, and trying to get them excited about it -- that is what I am good at.
Between running Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity, and conceptualizing the hyperloop, Elon is the yang to Steve Job's "Focus on one thing" yin.
The follow kind situation is what I think motivates fighting FOIAs:

Depending on your field a research could take a few years to develop a technique. The technique by itself will not produce a very valuable publication, but the results it can reveal could be ground breaking.

In the grant proposal, in order to convince those who are judging of the value of the technique, you detail some of the hard won technique. A competitor issues a FOIA learns the technique and may very well be able to publish the ground breaking results first.

This means years of work and funding have had considerably less benefit then anticipate. It is likely it will be a little harder to win additional grant/funding due to several apparently unproductive years on the researches part.
howdy seth. it's nice to see people calling out skype since i think it likely the service has been co-opted for many years, long before they are listed as having participated with PRISM. i stopped using it for anything but "casual" comms back in ~2005.

as you point out, your focus is on the legal nature of improving the encryption. you mention CALEA, which i'm quoting here for clarity

"A telecommunications carrier shall not be responsible for decrypting, or ensuring the government’s ability to decrypt, any communication encrypted by a subscriber or customer, unless the encryption was provided by the carrier and the carrier possesses the information necessary to decrypt the communication."

you are right to point out that skype, under the current laws, is not likely to be considered a "telecommunications carrier". however, they do provide a bridge to the PSTN and this may be part of the legal issue. i suspect they are referencing the yet-to-be-public CALEA II, which may very well require services like skype to be preemptively backdoored for the FBI, etc.

i see skype's current backdoor situation and their comments that you cite as more of a PR/damage control dance than anything. none of the companies that participated in PRISM did/can admit their participation. everyone who does cooperate with the intel services is going to concoct some reason they "had" to cooperate, whether it's true or not.

to me, all of this PRISM and CALEA II nonsense is a reminder that unless a software product is open source, you're unlikely to have any kind of guarantee or expectation of privacy.
Truecaller hacked
The Silent Cockpit Theory of Time Management
No problem :) I mean that people will buy / try to buy π.com, Θ.com, ☃.com, and even 🍤.com (pi, theta, snowman, and fried shrimp characters, if you can't see them). It's inevitable. Even though you can't really type them, people will buy them because they're weird / unique / well recognized. I'm merely saying it's not a problem.
The plastic tips at the end of shoelaces are called 'aglets'. Their true purpose is sinister....
1. Your first example ends with "C may be a small language, but it’s not a simple one."

By your argument, it feels like you'd say the language is large because you have to understand that rule if you really cared about consistent results everywhere. I agree with the author -- small but not simple.

Platforms differ and it leaks into the language precisely because it is such a simple language. It is simple like HTML 1.0 is simple. It is simple like the Bill of Rights is simple. There are a limited set of rules but there a lot of undefined behavior as a result.

I guess you believe HTML is complex because you have to understand CSS these days to do anything.

2. I find it interesting that you use what is clearly an edge case and then argue that because they are common it is not an edge case.

The example of "int foo(char x) { char y = x; return ++x > y; }" is almost the textbook example of an edge case. Seriously, don't trust me. Ask around and see if you can find 10 people who know C well that would consider this mainstream (excluding embedded developers).

There are countless serious bugs in real world C code because (a) there is so much damn real world C code and (b) it doesn't exactly protect from shooting yourself in the foot.

My experience working with a big program that ran on Windows, 2-5 flavors of UNIX, and VMS (both DEC and Alpha) is that the bulk of the real world errors in C code do not have anything to do with undefined behavior across platforms. They have to do with memory management (null pointers, buffer overruns, etc) and poorly written macros.

3. I agree with you that adding optimizers introduce a whole set of things you have to hold in your head that push you into 'large' territory. Just like programming on a GPU makes you rethink everything about how you organize code and writing for embedded code has its own set of rules.

But how does that make the language large?

My point is that a language that says "we manage memory on your behalf inside of a VM" is doing a lot more for you.

Boy, are we beating this thing to death or what...

...

I like C quite a bit but I wouldn't want to make a living programming in it today. I drop back into C when I have a compute kernel that needs it but 99% of the code remains in C#. C is small but too simple for the problems that I'm solving today.
In 1982 some nutjob went around to supermarkets and pharmacies and put potassium cyanide in Tylenol bottles. Johnson & Johnson responded by issuing a recall for ALL Tylenol products nationwide. This incident is anecdotally credited with having directly led to those paper or foil seals on over-the-counter pill bottles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tylenol_murders
Considering that sign languages regularly invent signs, e.g. for names, I doubt that. The interpreter might find out that there is a name at that place, but not know what the written equivalent of that name is.
Where the text was on the page, certainly. I'd know that I was "a subjectively short space from the bottom of the page, left hand side of the book, somewhere in the middle." I never had any external associations with books -- probably because a bomb could have gone off when I was reading and I wouldn't have noticed. (Something which my wife reliably reports has not changed.)
> Secondly

That was a load of bullshit made-up excuses back then and it still is now. Call traffic does not need to go through Microsoft servers. Making it go P2P even in the presence of NAT/firewalls at both ends is a problem solved several years ago. You have to make a conscious decision not to support that and the reason will not be a technical one.
Internet in a box
Computer vision ASL recognition is actually an old field: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~thad/031_research.htm
Agree to what you said. Right now my mind is too distracted to think about what I want to do in granular level. But yes, doing something meaningful is always top of the list. It helps me get motivated to think that what I'm doing will help others.
My understanding is that the failure they're referring to is among those paying the $150 to take the course for credit. I agree with your point (presumably many taking the course, free or otherwise, aren't college students) but this would be an important distinction.
"Moonwalking with Einstein" is a great book on memory and memory competitions, and actually featured an overview of people who have "photographic" memory, people who can memorize the longest sequence of numbers, and a person whose temporal memory is only 15 minutes.
printf("%d", 2 && 1);

seems to work OK.
If you came to the comments to check whether this is worth your time: it isn't. Incoherent vaguely malthusian rambling dressed up with technobabble.
Nobody is arguing complete all-knowing recognition of human movement. It's just recognition of a sign for "table" being table and a sign for "hat" being hat, etc.
Imagine this: services like amazon take over all the dead-tree book market. The government cracks down on piracy, and eliminates that way of getting books. A few big players end up controlling all the books on drm'd electronic devices.

The future could be an easy place to ban books.
Lisp didn't resurge because SBCL started being developed again. SBCL, although I like it, is still relatively little used, in the overall scheme of things, a scheme which includes Clojure, elisp, Racket, Clisp, Chicken, TinyScheme, Guile, Arc, MCL, and so on. Lisp resurged because new hackers started using Lisp again, maybe in part because of pg, but I think in large part because they didn't get driven away by Erik. Lisp companies are comparatively irrelevant.

comp.lang.lisp was very important prior to the founding of Stack Overflow, EmacsWiki, and so on. It was a lot more important to Lisp than any Lisp company, and maybe more important than all Lisp companies put together.
Very true so far for us. Our iPad game got a really nice review on the Canadian show 'Reviews on the Run', and that day I think we had only a handful of Canadian downloads (and American). Nothing out of the norm heh.
For the 44 to 24 percent of students who passed the course, this was not a failure at all. I don't see why they should be denied access to education because the likelihood of failing the course is higher. Online courses should be offered cheaper than regular on-site courses to take the increased risk into account, but that doesn't mean they should not be offered at all.

Many price points, many products.
The Chokehold of Calendars