skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How are you going to develop good professors if you only engage them as temps?

That's one of the key things that separates a great university from a teaching college. Investments in the long-term careers of research professors. Teaching is just one of their responsibilities; they also research and publish. Same for their grad students. That takes subsidies that come in part out of undergrad tuition.

So sure, if you cut that out you're going to have cheaper tuition. But if this model were actually adopted on a wide scale, you'd also dry up the supply of great professors.

As an exceptional case it might work, but only by exploiting the investments of other institutions. Very "silicon valley libertarian" in that respect.
I don't think the question is useless, but rather very difficult to answer. We simply don't know enough yet to answer it, but might someday.

As for alien life, I expect if there's anything out there, it's probably intelligent, redundant, and efficient. Who knows what form that could take? It might be robots, or computers, a mesh network, or something else entirely. Whatever form it takes, it'll be limited by the constraints of the universe (or multiverse, or whatever "reality" is).

A lot of people's ideas about aliens are molded from television and movies. Historically we've had humans playing those characters, severely limiting how "alien" they can be. While very inspirational and valuable, it has the negative of potentially pigeon-holing peoples minds.
Solving Blood shortage across the country
And SecureApt [1] didn't exist until 2003.

[1]: https://wiki.debian.org/SecureApt
well, yeah, but in a college, you're not just brought together to be in some sort of self-primping club, but you also do things like "work collaboratively on projects" and "pursue a guided learning track".
Wow, have got some unresolved personal issues to respond that way? It's not about privacy and posting, I left facebook too, it has not much to offer and I find it a waste of time. There are better options to connect or spend time online for a 30 year old, it's as simple as that.
Ummm...why not create disposable (or reusable) testing strips or something instead?. You can carry them in your wallet/purse and you don't have to rely on the bar/club to buy new glassware.
No, in Canada you never need to open your books at any size.
This is really neat - already knew everything here but if it ramps up I'll be coming back.

For those who want to dig into pixel shaders, I recently wrote a tutorial going from no-knowledge to intermediate on this very topic:

http://ivorydungeon.net/2013/zero-to-glsl-spectrum-analyser-...
HN - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6159240
Twitter Prepares to IPO
Looks like a terrifyingly buggy SecureRandom implementation that results in only 31 bits of entropy when seeding:

http://armoredbarista.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/randomly-faile...
Robin Hanson and Tyler Cowen have had a lot of interesting discussions on the role and extent of "signalling" in higher education. I think Hanson takes the extreme view that it is mostly signalling, rather than skills (human capital).

Obviously we see that at some level. "He's a college man" doesn't have the cache it did in 1920.
I remember an Australian study into drink spiking found that out of a pool of women who claimed to have been drugged, not a single one actually showed evidence of drugs other than alcohol. Now the definition of "drink spiking" includes having extra spirits added to a regular drink, or maybe just drinking too much.

A true urban legend that makes good headlines in a society prone to moral panic (not to say it never occurs, but the prevalence is grossly, hugely distorted).
Pandora’s box: How one indie musician has fared with digital music
Carr's response to Sporkin:

I am the author of the original blog post. I'm not sure what exactly Ms. Sporkin read, but although she accuses me of "countless errors," she doesn't actually specify any of them. The AAP numbers on e-book sales growth that I used come from AAP reports on 1st quarter book sales from 2009 to 2013. Yes, they are current year vs. previous year numbers, which is precisely how I describe them in the text and chart. And yes, they are for the overall e-book market, which seems a reasonable way to illustrate overall trends in that market. I agree, of course, that examining segments of that market would also be useful. Nick Carr
Facebook is so insignificant to her that she wrote an article about it.
I write ruby and javascript all day, and while I make plenty of errors, I find that they are rarely related to types. What are you working on where you regularly run into these? I hear this argument often enough that I assume there is something to it, but I struggle to understand it.
I was speaking from a US perspective. I think we lag. We probably could import that tech of course ... and I was really grasping for under subscribed fields. Any other suggestions?
I would not be surprised if a factor was mixed in for the "most rapes go unreported, especially date rapes," estimates.[1] Given these figures, either the 3% conviction rate or the 46% reporting rate, a person could take numbers that may or may not already include these adjustments and apply the most helpful. 10,000 x 33 = 330,000, might as well round up to 400k.[2]

I'm not saying that's what happened in this case, but abuse of confidence intervals is an common problem, even among those with good intentions and little idea that what they're doing is misleading.

[1] http://www.rainn.org/get-information/statistics/reporting-ra...

[2] This guy says 400k, but we know that less than half are ever reported, so it's probably closer to a million. And so on.
It's not blame. It's advice.

Same as telling someone to lock up their bicycle to avoid it getting stolen, and not leave the GPS visible in the car.
Can you host the demo for us to check out?
The Link Between Lock Picking, Entrepreneurship, and Harry Houdini
If enough people are looking for a way to create APNGs--that is, if there's demand for authoring tools--then the people who produce the authoring software will be incentivized to add support for the format on their own.

At first, it won't matter that it's difficult to create APNGs; like animated GIFs, one of the core strengths of APNG, given cross-browser support, is that they're inherently viral--you just right-click-save one to your desktop, and then you can stick it into any other app that expects an image (upload them to Imgur, drop them into Tumblr, use them as emoticons in a message in Gmail...) and they'll "just work."

The majority of people won't be authoring APNGs--just like the majority of people aren't authoring animated GIFs. Instead, most people will just be taking and resharing other people's APNGs. It could take a half-hour with ImageMagick to generate a valid APNG and it wouldn't matter, as long as you can take "translucent_pusheen_dance.png", stick it on your blog, and have it loop its cute little animation in full 32-bit RGBA glory.

As long as the original creator of the animation decided they would be better-served creating an APNG than an animated GIF, then everyone else will share and spread that APNG. But only if they can see it in their browsers, of course. The original creator won't care about the hassle of creating APNGs--we go through lots of hassles, as web-developers, to get things into arcane formats (e.g. spritesheets) so that clients can experience them slightly better. The content author's only consideration will be how many people can successfully see it, vs. what the quality of the thing they'll be seeing is. As soon as APNG can be seen in every browser animated GIFs work in, it'll be equal on one criteria, and beat GIFs hands-down on the other. But not until then.
Whether the sale of customized software is subject to sales tax or exempt, you're going to have "industry specific things like this".

This sort of software is in something of a hazy middle ground between shrink-wrapped software on the shelf and IT consulting services. Taxing it may seem dumb to us when compared with other states, but probably seems like a reasonable move to at least consider to most.
Ask HN: How to handle more than 1500 moving divs?
Hey,
I was looking for a way to move/pan/zoom ALOT of divs!
I wrote a litte test app with a SVG element:
http://pmtesting1.meteor.com/

but I'am not really happy with the Performance of that Demo.

Some tips would be really nice!

Thanks!
> Maybe some people want to drink excessively

Just because you want something doesn't mean you get to have it.

> comments like .. drank too much .. are misguided

You missed his point completely. If this cup solves a non-existent problem it won't help anyone.
Some guy on /g/ is developing a scheme gamedev library. https://github.com/davexunit/guile-2d
Whats my best option for moving to and working in the US?
When searching for Testacular help, you used the terms: Testacular -testicular.

Now when searching for Karma help, you use the terms: Karma -Testacular -testicular.

Fun world we live in.
I can remember in the 90s being part of a team where Software Lines of Code (SLOC) was a monthly metric. Highest won a bottle of champagne. People actually stopped writing loops. It got a bit crazy.
Cool, but hate the justified text. Makes it harder to read :/
App Idea: Create an app that will monitor your facebook for events/invites and email you about those only.
Looking at the two additional requests, they do currently have the utmni parameter, marking them as non-interactive.

However, the top comment references Google Analytics events on scroll that don't appear to be there now. One of FastCo.Labs folks also made the following comment:

This made me curious as well. It turns out there was a
technical change made at around the same time that is
going to account for some of it. We're running an
experiment now and will update with results.

I don't see the update from him. Given all of this, I would guess that they were triggering events incorrectly and have since fixed it (the article is 3 months old).
I hadn't considered the extra-high heat used in bar-grade dishwashers. I was thinking about how great a solvent alcohol is.

If these were single-use plastic glasses, I think that would be a best case scenario, but then you're pretty much limited to ballgames.
Chemo really is an awful thing to put a body through. Toward the end of my treatment I was able to scroll through email once a day before having to go back to bed. I wrote about my recent and ongoing experiences with cancer on my blog awhile back [1]. Your footnotes are a a pretty accurate summation.

[1]: https://www.petekeen.net/cancer
Because this is automatic, and doesn't require that inebriated people maintain their own quality controls.

With a strip, ignoring the fact that it's a socially awkward thing to do, when are you going to test your drink? Before you take every single drink? I know people who have been drugged this way and they swear they never left their drink alone.
It's going to be great when users post APNGs with a first 1/30s frame that shows Mickey Mouse's face and a second permanent frame that shows hardcore porn. And your moderator uses a browser that doesn't support APNG, so they just see the innocuous frame and have no idea about the rest.

Automatic fallback to a normal static PNG is a terrible idea. If you want an animation format, give it its own extension and MIME type. The only reason why it works for GIF is that it's basically assumed to be animated nowadays, and it started out with animation support (as far as the web is concerned).
Liability is a nightmare in bars already. I can only see most bar managers buying these if forced by an outside agency.
True, but so are most op-ed pieces. It's a given that this is going to be one person's opinion and not necessarily everyone else's.
RAINN's numbers only cover the US, as far as I can see, and the US is only about 5% of the world's population. So if we extrapolate naively from your numbers, we end up with 160,000, which is a lot closer to the figure from the article.
Suspected lethal nerve agent discovered at JFK was just nail polish remover
It is disgusting victim blaming. Now also on HN. Yay.
Consciousness can be modeled, and the brain can be modeled. The models can be correlated, and this is useful to us to get on the same page about what constitutes reality as a picture of "things hanging together in harmony" (compossibility). Consciousness is most important to us as a set of observation statements about us, and it is solely up to us to decide how to interpret those statements.

This can be done for other species, and this will tell us whether or not our thought-patterns are actually indicative of right-thinking, thus deserving to be repeated across larger regions of space-time.

I recommend a read of http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/369939.Philosophical_Foun....
If you mean the demos in the coquette github repo, check out:
http://coquette.maryrosecook.com/

and: http://coquette.maryrosecook.com/demos/advanced/

And you can see a demo of the game I made with coquette here: http://sethvincent.github.io/BlockSnot/
It could be worse -- from the 1940s through the 1970s Ivy League and Seven Sisters universities required incoming students to submit to being photographed in the nude, as part of a bizarre experiment in researching human body types. The result was a trove of highly embarrassing photos of people who went on to reach the highest levels of business, government and the arts.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League_nude_posture_photos for more, and http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/up-against-t... for the story of one student who went through this process, Yale graduate and talk show host Dick Cavett.
style / laziness?
You can already do that with the website, under the Notifications section of Account Settings.
Fully agree. Of course alcoholics are very good at coming with excuses and explanations about how it's their right to drink and the rest of society has to pay the price.
I would probably round up some local thugs, give them guns, and rule with an iron fist. JK. But you know someone would.
Yeah I know... I'm trying to figure out a way to keep it justified without all the gaps due to random content and unusually large words.
Ask HN: Depressed HN
I'm fairly new in HN and I have realize that it's fairly common post of people depressed, and even a case where a guy wanted to commit suicid.

My question is why are hackers so depressed? I frequent some forums and I've never seen this amount of people seeking this kind of help. Is it because HN is so evolving that it is the first place to come in cases like that?
Scheme's a very decent language too, but so far I haven't found any scheme implementations out there which are anywhere near as good as Lua—small, portable, highly efficient, robust, easy to integrate [with the "underlying" program], well maintained, good and active community, etc—for this space. The most popular scheme implementations tend to be enormous, despite the language's historical reputation as a "small" language.

Lua's a great language, but the amazingly good implementation is as much (or more) a factor than the language itself.
I think David Chalmers would agree with you wholeheartedly:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

Even Patricia Churchland thinks there is a lot here. Philosophers of the mind have dedicated their whole professional careers and lives to thinking about this.
I thought the article was very well written given her age. I do hope "Ruby Karp" is a pen name though. If not... Poor girl!
Why is that the every statist I encounter always believe those that want to live a life free of coercion and institutionalized violence must be a teen?

I am more than likely your Senior, it is infact youth that believes that government is required for a functional society, that government some how makes society better with age comes the wisdom to understand the true evil of government

>That said, there are a number of externalities that you're not thinking of. The simplest is: without a government, what's to stop someone from walking into your house and killing you? Every incentive says they should: free money, no consequences.

Watch this...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbNFJK1ZpVg
Yep, and most kids don't realize that Instagram is owned by Facebook. It seems these days Instagram and Kik are the big things. (I teach middle school children).
Reading through these comment, I get the feel that many people feel that this kind of observation is wrong in some way. I'm confused about this, since it seems like it's built on the solid social contract that we are free to observe anything that happens I'm a public space. I actually just wrote about this subject this morning.[0] The possibility that I might be observed in public has never bothered me, and I'm curious to hear what other people have to say.

[0] - http://xwl.me/md/erj28mbe62ap193
Because everything has an opportunity cost, however small.

Utilitarianism, as well as "just good horse sense" suggests that finite resources should be allocated to solving problems that cause greater sum harm than lesser sum harm.
:) smartcasm
I agree with most of your comment, but I disagree that $20k/yr is a "reasonable tuition" for what Minerva's offering.

State schools. They rock. And they're (relatively) cheap. For example, in-state tuition at the University of Texas is about $10k/yr.
Taking the bait: Apache HBase
What’s silly is the parent’s (hypothetical) reaction. It’s as if they would take a kid out of school for being bullied in class, instead of trying to solve the actual problem.
I'm very impressed by the smoothness of the Julia-Python interoperation they demonstrate here. The IPython implementation (IJulia) has made a lot of progress since then and is really cool.
Damn, that was a dead pool moment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company
Congrats on the vid.

I'm interested in the use of 477 key phrases in the keywords meta tag. Is keyword stuffing no longer penalized by Google?

FYI https://www.getwashio.com/ brings an "Insecure information" / "Connection Partially Encrypted" warning in Seamonkey / Firefox. Not a major issue but might irk some visitors.
CSS is thought out for it to be possible to implement a fast layout engine. This requires a few concessions. One concession is that it (mostly) requires that layout defined by a partial document is the same when the document is complete (to allow for documents to be laid out on the screen as they come in from the slow network).

A placement: middle, without a rigidly defined height, would require the layout engine to know about document information after the element requesting a middle placement.
Good joke, beautifully executed. Well done!
Puffin Browser
> "[Cohen] has lots and lots of customers. And he delivers all of his goods in unmarked trucks, so that's how he stays secretive. C&S... does not have its branded trucks as other companies, like Sysco (SYY), its competitor, would so he's able to stay under the radar."

This makes no sense. "Under the radar" from who? Joe and Jane Average on the street maybe, but stores that are making orders are going to have reps dropping by, and the suppliers are going to KNOW that if Store A is carrying product XYZ, and it's not getting it from (e.g.) Sysco, it's coming from somewhere else. I can't imagine unmarked trucks keep C&S off the radar from anybody who actually cares.

Edit: On re-read, maybe it -is- supposed to be stealth from Joe and Jane Average. Initially I thought they might be attributing "stealth" to the success of C&S. I guess they really just wanted to be quietly (to the public) doing their work. In that case: great job invading privacy Daily Ticker. "Nobody's Business" indeed.
> Am I the only one who thinks mirror test is stupid?

It's pretty reliable, and the scientists who measure it have a number of ways to be sure they're witnessing what they think. One way is to put a colored spot on an animal's forehead in advance of the test. If the animal looks in the mirror, sees the spot, and then reaches to his own forehead to remove it, we can be pretty sure he grasps that he's looking at a reflection of himself.

But as to the outcome supporting or not supporting some theory of consciousness in animals, that's a different story.

> On the other hand, it's trivial to make robot pass the mirror test, indeed necessary in the environment where mirrors are common.

That's certainly true, and it's a good argument for the limited significance of the mirror test in ideas about consciousness.
> Professors get flexible, short-term contracts, but no tenure.

At a place like MIT or Caltech, almost all the professors are also researchers. Undergraduates have a lot of opportunity to get involved in that research.

What research opportunities will be available for Minerva students?
All I can say in response to this is that design is easier said than done. We didn't copy, we came to the same conclusions. I'm not saying those are the only conclusions, but we're not human-computer interaction theorists, we build practical things. Sometimes practicality trumps purity, and sometimes purity trumps idealism.

If you're criticizing us for not being perfect and not innovating enough, I can't argue. But don't assume (I am explicitly rejecting the claim) that we simply love OS X and want to make our own free version of it, or that we treat Apple as some sort of standard of "proper design". All I can do is invite you to come down to the trenches with us and see what it's all about. I think you'll find it's harder than you might imagine.

P.S It absolutely would not have been easier to find better categories. Those categories are the result of the manual naming tens of thousands of Debian packages going back a decade or more. We give users the option of browsing (as has been the tradition on the Linux desktop for the last 7+ years) by the traditional categories, or by using a free-form fluid list.

P.P.S Frankly, I find your dismissal of our design efforts mildly insulting, though I know you only meant to provide constructive and thoughtful criticism (which I appreciate, at any rate). A bit of constructive criticism for you would be to avoid assuming that because something seems like an obvious solution that it must have been the first or easiest solution. This can come across as arrogant and belittling, and has the tendency to undermine the constructivity of your feedback.