skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nelson's remarks exemplify a disturbing trend amongst technologists, and especially those trying to reform education: Misidentifying sub-par educational experiences and areas of studies as "the liberal arts," and then attributing insufficient outcomes to the liberal arts themselves.

If he went to Wharton Business school for undergrad, he does not have a liberal-arts education. History and literature are liberal arts, business is not. Yet he blames his lack of growth during undergrad years on the very same:

>My first six months, what did the consulting firm teach me? They didn't teach me the basics of how they do business. They taught me how to think. I didn't know how to check my work. I didn't think about order of magnitude. I didn't have habits of mind that a liberal arts education was supposed to have given me.

Perhaps he thinks he studied the liberal arts because he majored in Economics. But majoring in Economics within a business school is, as Wharton's website proclaims, a specialized, business-focused approach, which the site's copy actually contrasts with "a liberal arts setting." [1]

Such programs can't be grudged for failing to cultivate the mind, as their sole aim is "appl[ying] business methods and economic theory to real-world problems." Business programs will always fall-short of real-world experience in teaching business skills, since one is actually real.

If he had studied an actual "liberal art" like philosophy or history or French, he might have gotten the mental development that his program apparently lacked. I think those of us who truly delved into liberal arts programs, with the accompanying rigor, breadth of study, and dedication to teaching, found them a great boon to our mental capacities.

Edit: Another trend that's been irking me lately: the idea that you can "teach" someone to think through "critical thinking" classes:

>In the Nelson dream curriculum, all incoming students take the same four yearlong courses. His common core won't make students read the Great Books. "We want to teach you how to think," Mr. Nelson says. A course on "multimodal communications" works on practical writing and debating skills. A "formal systems class" goes over "everything from logic to advanced stats, Big Data, to formal reasoning, to behavioral econ."

There's a reason that "Communications" programs have a reputation for being full of fluff. If you want to learn how to communicate, communicate. Trying to "study" it isn't get to help you personally. If you want to learn how to write, write about any subject, and have your teacher tear your work apart. Communications skills are taught through experience. You can't sit down and "learn" writing skills.

[1] http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/undergrad/academic-excellence/B...
Too bad the secushare slides are completely unreadable.

Or is it part of some obfuscation strategy?
Perhaps this HTML/JS/URI/XML/HREF escaping C extension speedup by GitHub: https://github.com/blog/1475-escape-velocity (Improved render time by 20% in their tests)
And here is a donation page (i found the link on the blogpost http://ronniecastro.me/well-fuck-you-lifewise-and-fuck-you-c...)

https://www.giveforward.com/fundraiser/yrv2/we-love-ron
"And don't tell me the American health care system doesn't get in the way of earning a decent living, as an employer and employee."

As a person who has been rejected for having a pre-existing condition, this statement rings true.

I need medicine for a condition I was born with, fuck me right?
I came across https://www.bountysource.com/ the other day.
One of the things I've struggled with on large Rails projects is helping developers understand that they can and should write code is neither model, view, controller, helper or lib. Instead a model ends up with a ton of class methods that are only somewhat related to fetching and storing records. A controller ends up with some crazy query that joins three tables and generates statistics. I would like to see some guidance from Rails on how and where to put these types of things. When I advocate for a service object, I get asked what the parent class would be and where the code would live. Saying no parent class and app/service_objects gets me some questionable looks like I'm not doing it right. Opinionated frameworks are great but I feel like people assume a lack of opinion to mean don't do it.

I'm not sure what concrete steps rails can take, but maybe app/lib for application specific code and lib/ for more generic libraries. Or maybe something less confusing.
It runs well on all my PCs, which admittedly are all Windows. It's just an SVG+SMIL animation. My opinion is that in 2013, it should run entirely on the GPU. But I acknowledge that's not the case as much as I think it should be.

On my box, it uses ~2.1% CPU and ~16% GPU in Aurora.
Rails does not have built-in support for WebSockets, though there are gems.

The simplest answer is 'because nobody has written a pull request,' I don't believe anyone on the team actually uses websockets for anything, though I could be wrong.
> First of all the comment he was replying to was talking about services like housing, transportation, and healthcare, which already are provided by the market and aren't really things the government has any advantage in. As for all the stuff it does pay for, at best it costs exactly the same amount as you have to pay in taxes. But the government spends money on a lot of other things with your taxes that don't really benefit you. So you would save a decent amount of money. And with no competition, the services they do provide cost a lot more then they probably could.

Health care in the U.S. generally costs a lot more than government-run health care in other western countries.
I agree with your points 1 & 2. It's questionable.

to the other point, yes. Securities laws, from what I can tell, are very convoluted. Even experts find it hard to tell when one enters or exits the grey areas. In addition, in 2008, there were other considerations to take. Until, I know better, I don't think the NSA is allowed to use whatever information they have, to prosecute domestic crimes. They may 'tip off' the SEC, etc. but the SEc must gather their own info and evidence. Also, it's not as if the NSA are experts in Securities. They look for physical threats rather than soft threats to the economy/population.

See some review of this in this NPR piece: http://www.npr.org/2011/07/13/137789065/why-prosecutors-dont...
Themeforest wants to be free.

http://xkcd.com/1228/
We have wasps around our farm and a fair bit of traffic, I was seriously seriously concerned about someone getting stung and going into anaphylactic shock. I looked into getting some Epipens. They are over 100 bucks a pen, and they don't have a long shelf life.

Turns out a more economical solution is Benadryl. Cheaper, you can smash it up, pour it in water and force it down someones throat if they can't drink.
It's not an unwarranted assumption given all the other things our government forces us to do with our money.
While their games used to be even more Scheme-based than they are now, AFAIK they do still use PLT Scheme (at least as far up as the Uncharted games, haven't read too much on the tech under The Last of Us) for the sort of traditional scripting one would use UnrealScript or QuakeC for.
True, though historically in the U.S., the FBI has been the agency where those kinds of abuses show up. The foreign intelligence agencies have had more of a culture of viewing domestic affairs as petty and beneath them.

Trusting a three-letter agency's cultural norms isn't very solid protection, admittedly.
This is considerably more interesting to me, thanks.
If I am parsing you right, it sounds like "innodb_log_flush_at_trx_commit = 2" is what you would recommend for a majority of production environments.
Are you thinking of Media Player Classic? Mplayer/Mplayer2 use their own bundled ffmpeg as VLC does.
This is probably a bit OT, but it makes me sad that flat shading as an art style has been abandoned in games. Ever since pixel shaders and normal maps gave us shiny plastic-y objects, developers haven't looked back.
We don't currently have any C extensions distributed with Rails proper for maximum portability. For example, if this were included by default, Rails would no longer work on JRuby, and a _lot_ of people use Rails with JRuby.
Rather than a gem for both, what I'd personally prefer is generators, because it makes all the code explicit - I always end up customising them to some extent (particularly devise, usually I use their generator then customise), and it'd be nice to expose things like the mailers that devise sets up for password reset etc (again something almost every app requires). Will be interested to see what the Rails team comes up with though.
With 4.0 we included app/concerns, so that should help open up your conversations a bit.
Besides, I have lot's of e-books in various formats (like DjVu, PDF, ePUB, fb2 and etc.), and I doubt e-readers support them all. Having a dedicated e-rader for each format is not an option. General purpose tablet handles such cases much better.

About "criminality" of breaking DRM, this nonsense is really annoying. More people should support campaigns like this one: http://fixthedmca.org
7 Lessons Every Young Entrepreneur Can Learn From 'Shark Tank'
Thank you - unless I comment in my own submission I never get a prod someone has commented.

But I must admit its not clear if that 35 bn prices in my concerns or not
Do I think our actual government could do a better job of figuring out what to spend money on? Yes. Are there things I wish it did not spend money on, and other things I wish it spent more on? Absolutely. Is it possible that, if the government spent money on exactly what you or I thought was ideal, it would be raising fewer tax revenues and spending a lot less? Sure.

So what should we spend our money on? This is a policy question, and fortunately one which (however indirectly) we each have a say and a stake in. That is also what makes answering it a very messy process.

But answering it presupposes the principle that taxation by democratic government is legitimate. This is the principle which thecodeore was casting rhetorical aspersions on, and that I was defending.
Microsoft is Working on a Cloud Operating System for the U.S. Government
I don't have cancer, though I've lost those close to me.

I do have a (currently) incurable disease. (I do have an extremely mild case, I must admiit) Many my age with CF are too busy taking medicine and staying alive to do much with a career. Others are on the verge of needing transplants. Others still have been gone a long time. I pray of course for the best, but one day, it might get me.

I have things I'm passionate about. My hope would be that those around me help me fulfill my visions and goals in life, through my struggles and recovery. As the article is written, this wasn't something the cofounder was forced into, but something he jumped into with plenty of options and I'll presume they are passionate about.
I concur that something needs to happen on queues/background jobs. Right now I've always gotta go setup Resque/Redis to make basic background stuff happen and keep the app snappy. Its not a huge pain, but it seems best-practice for lots of types of tasks.
Are you willing to spend money to get your problem solved? If so, you could purchase mine (see my profile) or some other developers time. If you aren't, then you just have to wait. Google employees are salaried which means their tasks already are decided. Volunteers contribute in areas they think are interesting and if they don't think your problem is interesting then there is no reason for them to spend their free time solving it.
iPhone development, and application development in general, essentially is near 100% interfacing with libraries though. Even if you can add a new library to your project in two days, that work most certainly will be to tie the new library to the existing libraries that you have been building upon from the start (the iOS SDK, in this instance), and thus that work would theoretically still not be exempt.

Sounds like a complicated mess.
Maybe they can fix MariaDB to use something other than ucontext (which is no longer part of POSIX) or i386/x86-64 only asssembly for co-routines.

But they probably won't since this is Google, and it "works just fine on Linux"
But the zombie idea is an interesting thought experiment. If the zombie isn't conscious then it also (likely) rules out the quantum hand-wavery of the OP - since any physical quantum effects would be replicated. It draws out the distinction pretty well.
The problem with all of these is that it needs a buy in from the biggest providers like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. With a wide consortium, working towards an open standard that didn't have any insecure backwards compatibility, was just as easy to use, was decentralised, and was open source for all to see, this could work.

The beauty of such a move is that there would be a huge economic benefit, as companies across the globe would start building server and client software to sell to as massive growing market.
> And assume you buy ebooks at the rate you read them, so when you read one ebook you buy one ebook.

Not in my case at least. I buy e-books irregularly, only when I need one, or interested in particular one and etc. I don't buy just for the sake of buying another one. Also, if there is a sale on something, you can buy it to read in the future, just because there is a good deal. So I don't think constant buying rate for e-books which is equal to the rate of reading is a good general assumption.
http://xkcd.com/1240/

that is all
> When we get into a field, we do take a point of view, and raising controversy is a symptom. Fortunately, there is what’s called the charter school format that lets you try new things. The system is good at shutting down the ones that don’t work and replicating the ones that do. The big actor is government. If somebody says somebody is too big, it would be strange to point to us.

What a load of shit. What Gates is trying to do isn't using a small number of charter schools as a laboratory for discovering news approaches to education that are more effective, which was the original idea of charter schools. Rather, he is trying to replace most of the public schools for low-income minorities with privatized charter schools, and he wants to be the one person who gets to create the criteria that determine whether a given school is doing well or not.

Here are the actual criticisms of his agenda that the article is likely referring to (with an added quote on his malaria work to illustrate the point):

http://pastebin.com/XUxCmdiN
Run the U.S. government like a start-up incubator
apngasm - FOSS Animated PNG tools and APNG standardization
Self-maintained groups and incentives based on performance. It would be interesting to adopt this in the tech area: the amount and quality of your unit tests means you get paid more.

You can also do code analysis: look at branching factors; code duplication; runtime performance; etc

This might be hard to implement in a company setting; but it may be easier to apply with contracting work.
I haven't used Rails 4.0 much yet, but I know that I really dislike the default HTML generated with the Rails 3.2 scaffolding generators. The markup is kinda ugly, too verbose and the use of form_for just bothers me. I always use simple_form myself and form_for just feels old and like a bad default.
Ah, yep; it actually works quite acceptably in Firefox. Very unpleasant in Chrome and Safari, though.
I know someone who can't get coverage due to her psoriasis.

It's like she's an un-person the way she's treated.

It was also sad that I as a European wonk knew that pre-existing conditions are covered under Obamacare, and she as an American didn't know. Although I don't know how much it'll help her.
According to Mike Hearn's comment over at the Bitcoin forums[1]:

> You should not assume that using OpenSSL directly is safe. On Jellybean+ the SecureRandom provider is just a shim over the OpenSSL RAND_* functions and Jellybean+ is also affected. However TLS connections are OK.

> I realise there's going to be a lot of questions about what exactly is going on here, but I'm not on the Android team and can't talk on their behalf. It's up to them to document exactly how the RNG is broken. Suffice it to say, if you aren't sure if you're affected, you probably are but you are welcome to send me a private message detailing what you're doing and I'll let you know.

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=271486.msg2911376#ms...
Thank you for your comment - I totally forgot to mention Roger Penrose in the article. My friend actually also brought him up with David Chalmers.
For others, here is a short video on some of his ideas:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WXTX0IUaOg
In the US, you have options. I have Cystic Fibrosis. My state offers a "high risk pool" for those denied. Also, as part of the Affordable Care Act, preexisting condition insurance was made available for a very reasonable price (enrollment was closed after a period of time, however). Next year, all limitations for preexisting conditions are eliminated: (except if you already have an individual plan you pay for, you'd have to get a new one):

https://www.healthcare.gov/what-if-i-have-a-pre-existing-hea...
Really depends on the scenario, but for most web stuff, I'd tend to recommend a setting of 2, if the data durability caveats were acceptable.
I think it's pretty professional and clear. I don't know much about video editing, but as a normal person it looks nice.
I don't understand the crux of this fellow's argument. If we can engineer and then print a fully functional cell, one which perhaps performs a function radically different than found in any natural organism, then what we're doing is no longer synthetic biology -- it's nanotechnology. In this case, we're building nanomachines, not cells.

Synthetic biology's appeal is that it leverages nature to do all the heavy lifting -- we don't have to engineer functions from the ground up, but only find similar designs in nature and then tweak them for our purposes. Furthermore, in synbio, we don't actually have to build anything, but only design it. We let nature -- which can assemble cells extremely efficiently, through a process it has been refining for the last four billion years or so -- build our systems for us, once we've translated them into the language of genes. If we have the ability to build our own nanomachines from the ground up (understanding, of course, that the cell is simply a specialized nanomachine built by nature), there's no need to constrain ourselves to the limitations inherent to nature's design. At that point, there's no reason not to divorce ourselves from the "biology" part of "synthetic biology."
thanks for the input
A Drinking Glass That Can Prevent Sexual Assault
The same applies to any other email client; it has your data unencrypted, so if you can't trust it, you're screwed.
Frankly, Penrose's thesis that consciousness stems from the quantum effects in microtubules, and the pseudo-"proof" based on a scammy reductio-ad-absurdum showing that consciousness can not be a computable function, are one of the biggest piles of horsesh*t in this whole field. I'm amazing he hasn't lost all credibility from such kind of deceitful thinking.
> I am not sure if aid and scholarship are the same thing.

At most Ivy Leagues it effectively is. Harvard also has a 'no debt' policy, so that aid really does have very few strings attached. The Crimson article you linked to uses data from 2010/11, whereas I'm using the latest figures from the admissions office.
PLT Scheme, or Racket as it is now known, is in use in the Last of Us: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users/archive/2013-June/058325....

A bit of insight into the use of Racket here (scroll down): http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.racket.devel/6915
Out of the box support for websockets that's hopefully not based on event machine.

https://github.com/ngauthier/tubesock is pretty close but it needs better support for channels. Basically, I want websocket-rails style auxiliary functions minus the custom controller part.
... by 1991.

"According to Bloomberg, the company had sales of $21.7 billion last year ..."
In fact one of Rich Hickey's very first demos of Clojure was ants.clj which uses agents to simulate the ants. While not a game but rather a simulation it includes many elements that would also be present in a game. A literate version of ants.clj may be found here: https://github.com/limist/literate-clojure-ants/blob/master/...
Reminds me of http://mod16.org/hurfdurf/?p=12 .
Here's the lighting style of our current project: http://hitboxteam.tumblr.com/image/42563981451
I am generally sympathetic to this point of view -- I am not against sales taxes, and as someone who has been in shrink-wrapped software for most of my career, I've had to deal with sales tax pretty much forever (and it's not a big deal, unless you have to deal with WA's per county rules)

In this case, though, they are charging sales tax on some services (that's what the law is about). It has to do with services tied to "goods" or pre-written software. So, integrating, customizing, installing, etc.

I believe that this is the area that might get amended or clarified soon (I have written the MA DOR about it, as I know many have). They need to clarify the line between bespoke and pre-written but customized a little better.

Also, I've heard a few time (but don't know if it's true) that this law is modeled on laws in 24 states. If true, then a lot of people on this list are probably supposed to be dealing with this already.
Breaking Bad's Moral Lesson to Civilians
> I only have 2 contacts that I can use PGP to communicate with. Usability is the issue.

This is why Bitmessage is so promising. Everything is encrypted and anonymous by default. The PGP/GPG setup is a huge barrier. With Bitmessage you just need to install it and it just works.
The NSA now does intelligence collection for the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies.
In California, lawyers bill hourly and in the $300-400/hr range.

But your right, we should look to Congress because they are actually quite productive. Majority of them have a background in political science and law.

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42365.pdf

http://www.senate.gov/CRSReports/crs-publish.cfm?pid=%260BL%...
Not that I know of besides the one auto generated by YouTube.
> We need politics. We need laws to regulate both government and corporate aggregation and handling of private information.

Really? Look around and tell me how that's been working out for you lately.

The top priorities of any human organization, regardless of nature or origin, are: (1) survival, (2) growth, and (3) expansion of influence.

The only way to solve the politics problem is to solve the people problem. In the US we have generations of fat & happy sheep, living off the short-term benefits of inflated currency and credit bubbles, blissfully and willfully ignorant of what goes on around them, so long as they don't miss an episode of American Idol.

So excuse my cynicism, but good luck with that.
the video, if it is self-made, is really good. possible the one or another scene i would make a little different, but generally it´s awesome.

some further thoughts: the cookie should be a surprise, and nothing which is getting usual... with such small things you can surprise your customer again and again.

when it comes to your landing page:

- please make the button clickable.

- make the "try now"+ zip code entry above the fold + video smaller

- add a price table which looks more professional

- add a discount / free trial to the first order

- add the notify me directly after zip input, if service not available. if you get featured somewhere in a huge magazine, you will use thousands of potential leads here.
the "seriously?" bit irritated me for some reason. yes, it's serious. yes, life is bigger than your startup.