skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Betteridge's Law of Headlines says NO.

Katy Jordan did a study of MOOCs recently [0], and it was found that the completion rates are in fact quite abysmal. I suspect that the reason for this is because there isn't much incentive to continue studying.

So this is very much in line with the guy saying at the end of the article: Here's a library, now go get knowledge.

Learning, IMO doesn't happen like this. MOOCs will just perform the functions of a library, albeit far more efficiently. The function of a classroom (not necessarily a professor) is still quite necessary for structured learning. And of course, with a classroom comes TAs and professors... which makes the answer to the question, No

[0]http://www.katyjordan.com/MOOCproject.html
Seriously? I believe you, but if it's taking hours then it seems like the problem isn't as much with SASS but rather the way they write CSS or their build process. If they only recompiled changed files, there's no way it could take "hours".

Even if they recompile everything... all CSS needs to be interpreted by the browser at some point. How much CSS do they have?

That being said, what are the speed comparisons like?
You mention pause+rewind as a killer feature. Another nice feature is the ability to watch at a faster or slower pace (I usually watch 1.5x). These conveniences have made it such that I strongly prefer watching taped lecture to physically attending class. Add to that the fact that you can almost always get a faster response from posting in an online forum (often Piazza for my Stanford CS classes) than attending overcrowded and understaffed office hours. Most of my education has already moved online.

Even if online class doesn't make professors extinct, I think it will certainly make physical class time a thing of the past.
Agreed, additionally its majority that rules.
Presumably things are different in Hong Kong.
The Amiga brings up so many topics and memories for me that it's hard to know where to start.

People who had an Amiga back then may agree that technically and conceptually it was so far advanced compared particularly to Microsoft's offerings, that any comparison of merits vs market success led to frustration.

I had an Amiga 3000, which was pretty rare and one of the first workbench 2.0 machines. It was quite buggy in the firmware and more when we first got it, but Commodore was very good to us partially because my father worked at a private university in the Northeast. They replaced two machines that were fried by NewTek digiview almost immediately for free (The DigiView board was really pushing the limit of the Amiga 2000 and 2500, and had some incompatibility with the 3000 that actually fried our motherboards).

The Amiga also had some amazing software, such as AmivaVision – object oriented visuals scripting that was like a visual HyperCard/PowerPoint, back in 1992.

When Linux came along, I was pleasantly surprised to see that I felt quite at home in its environment since the Amiga had a unix-like directory structure and shell environment.

It's great to be seeing the Amiga get this sort of attention. One can only wonder what sort of computing environments would be common today if it had been a commercial success instead of Windows and Mac OS.
If you don't evenly divide the remaining population of the earlier questions, you'll need more than 33 questions.
Good point. But the margin between cost of goods and MSRP is much larger than 5-10% for consumer electronics. Distributors and retail stores take a large chunk. Nobody in particular makes a large profit, but all those chunks from factory to store shelf add up to a huge percentage, 50% and up. Those are the costs small scale miners will have to overcome.

I am interested to see how the dynamics play out, but find it hard to believe that they will be much different than anything else.

Take home gardening, for example. It's easy to say that it's cheaper, and pretend the food is free, but it isn't. The biggest cost there is time. People are willing to discount the time spent gardening, because they get pleasure out of it. But it's a real cost, and that time could have been more profitably spent doing contract work (for example).

If you sum up everything one gains from having a home garden, will the consumer see a net gain? Probably not. But people do it anyway, because they don't see it as work. They'd rather do that, than fill their time with another job. That's where mining will end up in the long run, in my opinion. And I have my doubts that that sector will be large enough to prevent centralization.

P.S. I appreciate the discussion. Speaking honestly, I'm still close to the fence on this one. I hope my remarks don't come off as rude; I enjoy seeing the arguments made for one side or the other.
I run a small startup at http://easyendorse.com - it doesn't have star ratings, but may be what you're looking for. My email's in my profile if you'd like to chat.
False positives cost more than just money. There are a finite number of ambulances in any given area. We try to staff to cover the false positives we know we're going to get, but there's just no way to predict when we'll get hit out for a stubbed toe and someone with a head cold they've had for the past three days and someone who forgot to refill their prescription for their cholesterol medication and an intermittent ringing in your left ear (I'm not making these up folks... these are just a sampling of the BS calls I've been on in the past week or two).

So while crews are off dealing with those non-emergencies, they are unavailable to respond to things like cardiac arrests and strokes...
You might consider changing the name. There's a new crypto messaging project started by some folks at Google called Pond:

https://pond.imperialviolet.org/

https://github.com/agl/pond

It's pretty much impossible to avoid naming collisions for projects. :-/
A stroked & bored 340. It dynos at 380-390 hp.
It is not an argument, it is a statement of fact, like saying water is wet.

There is an implicit assumption in your position that copyright based compensation is the only method of compensation. It isn't. It wasn't even the dominant method until the last couple of centuries when technology made it feasible. Now that technology has moved on, our economic systems need to keep up.
"I'm surprised at the negativity here. There is nothing conclusive about this test and from what I've seen it does a pretty good job. So one guy got some bad indicators that proved to be nothing, who cares?

My father did 23 and me, without giving any family medical history and it concluded that my father was at a much higher risk factor for things that his mother was ultimately afflicted with. So, it works to some extent."

In both cases. The plural of anecdote is not data, and it's singular form is equally vague.
Copyright is not a divine right, it is granted as part of an exchange. Part of that exchange is that the copyright is granted for a limited time, after which the public can use the IP how they want.

If Disney and friends can change the deal to suit themselves, why shouldn't every consumer follow suit and make similar self-benefiting changes to the copyright deal and copy/consume Disney material without paying?
And outside of the LISP family, Algol was also much more expression-oriented and orthogonal than the languages it spawned.
Yes! 1.5x is fantastic! It solves the impedance mismatch inherent in human speech. 90% of what is being said takes 5% brainpower to process while the remaining 10% takes 300% of available brainpower. If you have to listen at 1x speed you are either bored and sleepy or falling further and further behind, sometimes both. The pause button solves the falling-behind problem and 1.5x speed solves the boredom problem.
Lots of CEOs want to rubber stamp things in SMid companies even if they're actually not doing the cost/benefit themselves. This page probably comes in handy for the CTO/MGR who has to get that rubber stamp from the CEO. (that's my guess at least)
No, answering randomly is not okay. You will not be able to reproduce the bit string if there is a random answer any more than two source texts with a single bit changed between them will produce the same hash.
DOTDIW, I guess.
Can't you create a Page to use as a pseudonym? I admit the whole UI for Pages is clumsy and inconsistent, but the feature exists. You can wrap your Real ID with a layer of anonymity using a Page, as is the default approach for YouTube (allowing YouTube commenters to keep their old handles).

But in general, it seems clumsy and not very well thought-out or designed. A feature meant for allowing company websites is hacked into pseudonyms.
And that's a perfect way to differentiate themselves from SF/SV, much like how many of the most prominent fashion startups have been born from NYC. :)
Wow that is a the saddest ponzi scheme I've come across so far... it really makes you wonder how bad our educational system is if our ponzi schemes are getting so poorly designed and managed.
Bitcoin Black Friday: Why Namecheap is Participating
And since a given IP address can be legitimately used by many different devices, human beings, or organizations in a short timeframe, it's hard to see what this would look like.

Maybe if we could go back in time, we could add a new field to the Internet Protocol that indicates a unique endpoint ID for IPsec purposes. Two hosts desiring to communicate would exchange endpoint IDs, and an encryption "session" would only apply to the IP+endpoint combination. That way it's still possible to implement UDP and TCP on top of IP, but it doesn't necessarily solve the case when different TCP or UDP ports on a single IP address correspond to a different machine and the port-based router should not be able to decrypt the traffic.
Yes, playing catch-up with Ruby Sass has been difficult (the sophistication and subtlety of some of Sass's features are impressive), but we're hoping to make some big leaps by the end of the year!
Another tip is trying to find a generic programming library to get rid of some of the boilerplate tree traversal you will end up doing. Dunno about the Ocaml ecosystem but for Haskell you could use something like Uniplate or SYB.
I more drawn to assembly languages than OO languages.

Less granules to deal with. :)

I welcome limitation. It is what fuels my creativity.

I make no attempt to persuade others to mimic my personal tastes.
NudgePad: an IDE in Your Browser
I really dislike sites that have broken CSS that is fixed by JS. I either disable CSS to read them, or I just close them.
"Never show anyone. They'll beg you and they'll flatter you for the secret, but as soon as you give it up... you'll be nothing to them..." Quote from the prestige about magic.

Agree - I consider myself a social hacker... and I'm constantly tempted to show off my methods... but I try not to. A trick is more impressive if someone doesn't know they are being tricked.

And if everyone does it... it looses its magic.
Divorce rates did indeed rise quickly after WWII, but they peaked around 1980 and have been going down ever since.

Most of the rest of your points are subjective and verging on nonsense.

I won't argue that the system sucks a great deal, but the fact is that things are improving and have been for quite a long time.
mcxNow crypto currency exchange is shutting down for a period of time
No problem, thanks for your work on Sass! I suggest linking to the website from the GitHub repo, I hadn't seen it.
The write bottleneck for traditional databases has never been the write-ahead log, with group commit and a battery-backed RAID controller you'll have a hard time saturating the disk with log writes. The bottleneck has always been random I/O induced by in-place updating indexes based on B-trees. You don't need to be in-memory if you use better data structures. TokuDB and TokuMX are proof of that.
I believe svantana was merely trying to differentiate ANNs from magic, not ANNs from other ML algorithms. Indeed you are correct that machine learning as a whole could be seen as function fitting.
Ask HN: Help Me Get Glass
To be fair, I'd expect a lot of coverage in the news for male founders / CEOs -- Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, Ellison, etc... and less coverage of actual male developers.
I keep a bookmarklet around to destroy elements on a webpage for this very reason. http://jsfiddle.net/6jbJc/

Stuff like this, where flash is being replaced by html5+javascript, is what has me worried about Firefox removing the "disable javascript" checkbox from prefs (yes I know it can still be turned off in about:config but that's unacceptable). When we make javascript ubiquitous, these dark UI/UX patterns are only going to get worse.

Furthermore, why doesn't Firefox allow me more control over the data that's sent to and from my machine? The functionality that plugins like Disconnect and Adblock Edge have should be mandatory user preferences. There should never be a way for things like Flash LSO's and Evercookies to stay persistent in my web browser cache if I don't want them.

And we're still waiting on third-party cookies to be blocked in Firefox by default. That's been pushed back so much that I wonder if they faced too much outrage from advertising companies to make this happen.
It's not really a syncing protocol - a syncing protocol is something more like FeedSync (formally SSE)[1].

This looks more like an API for a feed reader type application. From a quick read it looks mostly ok for that (although I'd question why...)

Out of interest, why not implement a read-only version of rfc5023/AtomPub[2]?

Anyway...

I'd suggest you get rid of the "Article" Object, and use the Atom "Entry" object instead (or possibly a single-entry Atom feed if you are in XML mode), serialized as JSON

The "Fetch" call should probably take a "since date" as an option, instead of just "since id". It should return a JSON serialized Atom feed, not a custom object.

https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ABDERA/JSON+Seri... is a pretty decent JSON serialization spec for Atom

Notable omissions: no concept of tagging or saving articles.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeedSync

[2] http://bitworking.org/projects/atom/rfc5023.html
This is really sad, because it was the leanest and the meanest exchange out there. Not to mention the incentives.
well, btc mining involves sha256(sha256(x)). Not being a hardware person, I don't know if the designs of the asic miners can be re-used to just compute sha256. Maybe, maybe not?
For my part, I don't consider college education to be exploitative or inefficient.

People pay for the time and effort of professors who are very knowledgeable and have extraordinary teaching ability.

I also think MOOCs have great potential, not because college education is bad, but because MOOCs allow the best educators to reach even more people. I don't expect the top-end of education to change much, but I hope that MOOCs can raise the overall quality of education.
I could buy them on DVD too instead of iTunes.

If you buy them on DVD or Blu-ray you will be bombarded by advertisements, and they were probably unskippable until Disney added a skip button and called it an invention (AKA "Disney Fast Play").

No advertising, no privacy-destroying user tracking, just cash in trade for a product.

If only that were the case. Does iTunes state in its privacy policy or EULA that purchase and playback tracking data is not recorded or reported to content producers? What about consumer devices (connected Blu-ray players, smart TVs, etc.) that report back to their masters like the recently discovered LG smart TVs?
It's hard to take this seriously when you're making up your own authentication protocol-- and one that uses MD5 at that.
It's my belief that the MOOC, and online education in general, are something of a fad. It's new, and therefore interesting. But we've always had correspondence courses, and libraries where you can go and self-study almost any topic under the sun.

Online makes that easier (you don't have to leave the house, or type up papers and mail them in) but fundamentally, online education still requires a lot of self-discipline.

If most people were really good at self-study, we wouldn't have ever built up institutions of education. The real problem with undergraduate university environments right now is that the perceived value has fallen dramatically as tuition rates have skyrocketed. The universities and providers of easy financial aid are to blame for that.
I think it's an important point that the GoldieBlox video is directly attacking the message of the original song. To way oversimplify: Modifying someone else's copyrighted work to make a generic point = Satire, not fair use, not OK; Modifying someone else's copyrighted work to specifically contradict the message of that work = Parody, fair use, A-OK.
Seconding this unpopular opinion.

A site I was consulting was getting a depressingly low number of email subscribers, so we tested one of these modal popups that prompted the visitor to subscribe... It worked wonderfully. To minimize the annoyance we set it to pop up only once for each visitor (based on cookies).

It wouldn't be so popular if it wasn't effective.
> Medicine is complicated. It's also a very poor fit for free markets, because it tends to be filled with monopolies and because free markets require informed participants and the extreme complexity of medicine makes that impossible for most.

Functioning governments (at least, modern "state of the art" republican democracies) also require informed participants, and the extreme complexity of government makes that impossible for most voters (not to mention irrational; see "rational ignorance" on Wikipedia). People often accurately point out well-known inadequacies with markets, but I've never seen an explanation for why people expect republican democracies, which are themselves public goods, to be exempt from the same market failures.
This is great as compilation in ruby really is painfully slow for anything substantial, but I wonder about the choice of an independent project vs. forking the ruby compiler and optimizing the bottlenecks with C extensions. Might that allow you to fix the most serious issues without having to worry about maintaining feature parity in a completely separate code base?

In any case, nice work. I look forward to trying it out in my next project.
Which courses have you taken? I've completed the Machine Learning course and I'm currently taking Cryptography 1 from Coursera. They both have been great.
I am with you. This is objective information about your own body. The government wants to block it because it assumes you can't handle the information.

Ridiculous.

They are not selling any proposed cures. No snake oil. Just information derived from your own DNA.

And the story speaks WELL of 23andMe. They had a bug. Someone reported it. They fixed it. It's a great report.
I'm aware that bitcoin will have trouble succeeding if people don't start using it for normal transactions, but I wouldn't spend any bitcoins right now due to the price volatility. That $10 I use to buy a domain name could turn into $100, or maybe even $1000 dollars at some point.
This makes me wonder if there's some kind of fantasy football for startups played behind the scenes by some people.
It's unclear whether he's getting better than random results. You're assuming the consequent.

It's well-known that the most successful startup in a group of startups is likely to earn more in profit than all the rest combined. We're here on HN talking about PG because YC has been the most successful of all incubators. However, there's always going to be one incubator that significantly outperforms all the others as a result of the distribution of startup success.

I don't know enough about how well PG's investments have done to make informed judgments, but only a very select few people are likely to have that info. I suspect those people have also done their due diligence to figure out if YC is a value-add compared to other incubators (it should be possible to do this without a convoluted double blind experiment), but anyone who's not them really can't say for sure that that's the case.
The Gender Pay Gap in Jeopardy! and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?
It's worth watching the first link to the news desk portion at the end where they introduce the CD-ROM as well.
> Katy Jordan did a study of MOOCs recently [0], and it was found that the completion rates are in fact quite abysmal. I suspect that the reason for this is because there isn't much incentive to continue studying.

No, it's because there is no burden to sign up, nor disincentive to dropping out. Thus, you get lots of people who sign up for them just to watch a few videos or to see what the course is all about, but they have no real buy-in.

According to a talk I saw by Andrew Ng, 43% of people who submit the first homework on Coursera go on to finish the course. That's actually a remarkably high completion rate IMO given the scale of the classrooms.
If you're using Google Analytics you can look at bounce rates and time-on-site. You can also track video actions (start, stop, pause, etc) with event tracking.
Bitcoin will become real money
Kids Bombed During Live TV Interview in Damascus, Syria
The text on the Reportr website looks kind of off on Windows.

Google Chrome != Windows
I sure hope it does. I have paid entirely too much for my predecessor's CUDA lessons through the premium NV charges for their cards.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure NV is entrenched at this point. My AMD card and my resolution to port everything I needed to use lasted about 3 months, and that was without any CUBLAS dependencies :(
Yeah when I saw this I was immediately reminded of these threads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6300856

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6658995
Would you kiss a stranger wearing a 'Kiss Me' shirt?
Filmed at Chapman University, we brought our cameras to see how many people would be bold enough to kiss a complete stranger.
If you think any non-negligible fraction of people infringing copyright are looking for education or inspiration, I have a bridge to sell you.
This is a no brainer. Eat chocolate, save lives.
Interesting to note how similar they are to the real "gender pay gap", most commonly claimed to be 77% [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap_in_the_United_St...
Let's get down to brass tacks—is there a ruby gem which can use this and drop into the Rails asset pipeline to speed it up? If not, what would be the best way to get that started?

Edit: found this: https://github.com/hcatlin/sassruby -- Looks like it's not quite mature enough, but promising!
Or they could end up having zero value, so there are plenty of people looking to spend some of their btc. It seems unwise to spend all of your btc at this point, but if I had a bunch I'd be happy to spend some right now.
Just to throw it in there. Accounting rules more or less matches repair rules. Especially for buildings, there is a defined schedule for the exterior and water/gas pipes maintenance, which is something like every 10 years for the exterior, and every 30 year for the pipes and other basic structures(a quick link in english [1]).

And after 50~60 years there is a major overhaul of most buildings that could cost the same amount as just scrapping and rebuilding everything (which is the prefered solution). It may seems short compared to other countries' building repair schedules, but earthquake resisting buildings are build with very different norms, like more "moving" or bending parts, possibly flexible pipes which won't last as long as other rigid materials, elevators which will cost a lot more to maintain that basic ones, etc.

Also as years go by architects are better at designing resisting buildings, and after 30 years there is a gap in the materials and technology used, which can justify a hefty premium on new buildings.

[1] http://japanpropertycentral.com/2013/08/large-scale-repairs-...
Notably: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/sass