skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with you 100%.

I teach online and hybrid (part face to face, part online) courses. My students tell me they actively choose one or the other format. Some students cannot learn online and appreciate the ability to interact. I try to use the class time we have effectively, to demonstrate, to coach, to give feedback on their work. I save the "lectures" for their own time.

I've taken online courses from some pretty bright people and never felt that they were a good fit because they were simply lectures. I don't learn by lecture. I learn by doing and getting feedback. I do horribly in "traditional" instructor-focused courses, AKA "lecture/test" courses. I do very well in courses where I can apply things.

One thing I think is great about online education is the ability to reach a lot of people. But one thing that's terrible about it, in my humble opinion, is that it's harder to connect with students. My online classes have a cap of 27 students. I can manage a couple of courses like that. But in order to manage courses of 200-2000 people, I just would be putting up content and videos, and I'm sorry, but that's not teaching. That's nothing different than screencasts or books. If I get assessed, I want detailed feedback. I want to ask questions.

And if those questions are being answered by a support staff, then there goes the argument of "learning from the best and brightest" that MOOCs advocate.

I love teaching students hundreds or thousands of miles away. I don't think my role is going away any time soon, simply because I've evolved how I teach. The ones who should be worried are the ones who teach from the textbook and spend 64 hours per course lecturing from the front of the room.

[edit to clarify reply]
ixquick is another search engine which claims to protect your privacy. It has a proxy link beside each search result too.
Interesting talk, thanks.

Are you referring to Moxie's "expanding social choice?" Yeah, it's an issue. I don't feel I'm losing anything in that area by not using Google search.

Or are you talking about Google Analytics' encroaching into the fundamental functionality of a site, beyond mere analytics, so that blocking Analytics breaks the site? To that I would say to a site owner, don't use Analytics. As for me the visitor ... dunno.

We do what we can and what we have the energy for. And while we should use and develop a lot of these technical solutions, we'll get longer term bang for the buck if we restrict the operations of our spies. Make 'em follow the Constitution, in the US, for example.

Except, how would we know? And even if we did, as Moxie points out, now that the NSA is collecting data where Google et al. collects it, other powers and criminals are also doing the same thing at the same places.

So it's a mix, and I don't know how it's going to play out.

But I don't use Google search. Mostly.
Fires are More Frequent in the Model S than Regular Cars
They're not being sued. The band reached out to (one assumes) ask them not to use their material without authorization in a commercial, and the company sued them.
That would be worse. I use the Escape key to stop page loads, and if a keybinding interrupts that expected functionality, I get pissed. Key example: Gmail. I don't know what it sucks Esc to, but it doesn't direct it to the browser.

Web developers should really stick to the accesskey event which accepts alphanumeric bindings, and nothing else. Anything outside of that is likely to be used by the browser. I mean, there are some obvious exceptions (C-b for bold in a WYSIWYG editor) but as a rule of thumb it should be avoided.
The more lottery tickets you buy, the higher chance you have to win the lottery.
> considering that pre-existing conditions can no longer be considered for health-care service

The US is not the whole world.
> This fall politicians and pro abortion started making noise about how doctors that wouldn't participate should lose their license.

That's a terrible example of a slippery slope. It sounds like the slope is so not-slippery that the best they could do was make a lot of noise about how things should be. If the slope was slippery, shouldn't they have easily passed a bill with very little friction?
This is true regardless of whether you're looking at $10 worth of Bitcoin or 10 actual US dollars. If you use actual US dollars to buy something, that's money you could have used to buy more Bitcoin!
Ticket Support Systems are not for Single Founders
I loathe these uses of 'probability':

"2.5 billion people in the world have internet access.
Statistically speaking, the chances that the best person
for us to hire for any position is among the 0.023 billion
people in the New York metro area is unlikely."
I don't think Disney needs to do much lobbying to protect their copyright on _Brave_.
> based on cookies.

Which, if I'm not an intimate viewer of your site, means every time.
And buying more lottery tickets increases the chances of winning the lottery.
Just sent Brian at Coinbase a note about this. I'd use the feature constantly if they added it. It could be as simple as selecting a funding source when you send; your wallet or an option to purchase what you're sending.
Doesn't this make the issue of this information being used against politicians and other public officials by ANYONE immediately oblivious?

My question, is that why should we collect this much intelligence, if it's simply just going to be a disadvantage to our democracy? Surely this has already happened, only with a competing government making the demands opposed to a whistleblower using the information as a shield?
This is an analysis that says companies with messages we "like" can use Calvin & Hobbes in their advertising, as long as they do it creatively. Gross.
How to Buy the World's First Crypto-Equity, ProtoShares
Presumably it's still bizarre for him to experience the phenomenon.
"That makes me feel uneasy about the conversion rate of bitcoins to dollars. What is that really based on?"

I suspect that it would be based on the number of people trying to use Bitcoin as a payments network at any given time.
Had I written "ghetto-monkey copy" your annoyance would be merited; note, however, that I did not.

It is a monkey-copy (of the ghetto variety).
Only on a message board does charging money for a Miley Cyrus track count as "warping society". Frankly, I think society is warped by us not charging enough to deter listeners.
Atom is a superset of RSS (to be more precise, it's a superset of all the different RSS dialects, properly specified).
You're right to ask those questions -- on most sites it would be foolish to optimize for email subscribers at the cost of customers. In this case, however, it was a preview site and there was nothing to buy or download, so the most we could hope for was capturing the visitor's email.
"At some point"

Probably won't go up 10x overnight. Even doubling in less than 24 hours has maybe happened twice in the history of bitcoin.

If you're concerned about your btc position, you just buy more after you spend it. Your probably exposing yourself to about 10-20% risk max. On $10, that's... $2. $2 is not worth supporting the bitcoin community?

Everyone says "nobody will spend bitcoin because it could go up in value." But I own bitcoin, and I'm willing to spend it, and others are of the same mindset, so this really isn't true.
Visiting a Bitcoin mining farm
This is really just semantic. You can play around with definitions and construct all sorts of truisms:

Just because your company ran out of money and ceased to exists doesn't mean you failed.

Just because your company grew very quickly, IPO'd at a high price, and had consistently large profits for many years, doesn't mean you succeeded.
I don't think murder is a better translation, but my thoughts on the bible are best expressed by Tim Minchin's "The Good Book".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr1I3mBojc0
Find it. Fix it.
You reject relative measures and only measure death in absolute terms? You find a world with a trillion people in which a billion are killed in war to be worse than a world with a billion people in which 90% of them are killed in war? Like I said, impervious to facts.
Be right back, upgrading instance on DigitalOcean!
> Space required during initial import: multiply the dump file by 8. For example, for English Wikipedia, the dump size is 10 GB. You should at least have 80 GB space free for the import process

> Space required when completed: multiply the dump file by 2.5. For example, for English Wikipedia, the dump size is 10 GB. When done, your English Wikipedia will be 25 GB.

Ouch, looks like I won't be trying this here any time soon.
Given that MtGox was the dominant USD bitcoin exchange for quite some time, it's a beautiful metaphor.

Except for miners, people who want to support the bitcoin ecosystem per se, and privacy buffs who prefer to buy their bitcoin in ways that minimize traceability, it's hard for me to get excited about using bitcoin to make online purchases right now. If you don't hold any bitcoin and just want to use it as a transfer mechanism, you have to have extra motivation to buy bitcoin and then send it (waiting for a few confirmations). This process takes longer than using a credit card, so generally it seems that one must have additional motivation to use bitcoin (at least in the US).

As a mechanism of money transfer, though, I do find it interesting.
The problem is Facebook seems to want to do exactly the opposite: open up your life to as many people as possible. It's also shown that it wants to monetize your social connections i.e. beacon and endorsed ads. If Facebook was a service like a phone, then I'd have no issue with it, but it has shown that it wants to play a bigger and more opinionated part of people's lives.
What My 8th Grade Science Teacher Taught Me About Life
Here's how George R.R. Martin says he plans to finish Song of Ice & Fire
Thief copies out 11 pages of contacts after stealing man's iPhone in China taxi
this is how we felt as well :S
"Nudge uses Space, a new lightweight object-oriented programming language"

Is this a joke? Space seems to be just a lightweight JSON replacement
http://spaceful.org/
shrug

I guess it's just personal preference... I find this practice mildly annoying, but I'm not likely to join a boycott. For most sites, I'd gladly click through a prestitial ad than pay even a very small amount of money (if the choice were offered).

EDIT: And full disclosure: I run ads like this sometimes (though rarely on the first page load, that's kinda obnoxious). I don't love them because there is definitely a population of people they piss off and I hate pissing off anyone... but it seems like a pretty small minority. They covert really really well. Like, way better than any other web ad type.
> 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.

MOOCs differ from just reading a book on important aspects:

1. You have a teacher break down the content for you

2. You have graded assignments, which helps giving confidence you're absorbing the content

3. Interactive media (video, software) can be a more effective media to explain certain concepts

4. You have interaction with other students learning the same subject

> If most people were really good at self-study, we wouldn't have ever built up institutions of education.

Back in the day, your only chance of having access to knowledge was at institutions, so I'm afraid this is more of a tradition than anything else. Remember that the church was once the source of knowledge too. Nowadays though, people aren't going to college for knowledge as much as for filling a pre-requisite to enter the job market.
The question might also be if the transaction cost to do the deal in BTC is higher, lower, or the same as using a credit card. When you use a CC the seller eats the fees.

It is not a fallacy, but it is a speculative risk.

And, it is treating BTC as "an investment" or "a store of value" rather than "a medium of exchange".

So it is a subtle but important change in a person's view of why they would buy and hold BTC. Whether it is the right view, no one knows at this point.
Pond is probably more than 6 months old, and is an important project. If I were in your shoes, I'd just change the name.

Hopefully, in a couple years, we'll know Langley's Pond by a different name: "email".
How an infuriated mom chased revenge-porn lime-king Hunter Moore offline
Real world example: our project was taking almost 1 minute to compile via Ruby (all CSS).

Using sassc (libsass) that went to 5 seconds.

Development was where we saw real gains, different sections that would take 4-6 seconds to compile, went down to <500ms (our asset watcher is smart enough to compile only blocks of Sass files that are associated, not the entire site's Sass). Meaning that in the time it takes you to switch to your browser and refresh, the Sass would be compiled to CSS.

Made my devs life much, much better!
If you send a letter to someone threatening them with legal action, they will often initiate legal action to have the court decide if your legal action would succeed. I don't know what the Beastie Boys said to GoldieBlox, but the EFF article mentions that GoldieBlox was worried that the Beastie Boys would initiate litigation right at the holiday season, leaving them without a commercial. GoldieBlox decided to ask a court to decide earlier.

There's nothing wrong with this. It does point out an interesting lesson, though: never explicitly threaten someone with legal action, they might very well take the opportunity to pre-emptively sue, and if you were just posturing you'll now be spending a lot of money on lawyers. (This is why letters that are pretty much threatening to sue will instead say something like "We trust you will stop injuring us. If you do not, we reserve all rights.")
Only ~1/3 of population would even be able to answer a question like "Was the second letter of your first girlfriend's middle name between A and M?".

26% of global people are pre-teens; and approx half of the remainder aren't dating women.

Not even going into the fact that the social concept of 'girlfriend' isn't universal, there are multimillion cultures where the relationship stages of going from strangers to family are split differently, and none of those stages can be equated with western 'boyfriend/girlfriend' relationship; e.g. you may like someone but not be dating (so no girlfriend) and then move directly to engagement or marriage; or many other possibilities.
I think this article (in which mainstream economists prove themselves the most "disruptive" of all) also makes that point very well

'supporters of free market like private property, and patents and copyright are intellectual “property”. Hence, strengthening them is ideologically and politically consistent with the general principle that “private property is good for growth” ... [But patents are] not a “property” right but rather a “monopoly” right'

http://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/2012/2012-035.pdf
Followup: I hear you. I disagree. I've appreciated many of your other comments. So you and me are cool.

I would only ask that you consider that we're all stuck on this rock, with no instruction manual, and no way off, just trying to get through each day the best we can. I have one of those crazy cousins that brought all the badness down on himself. But none of us like seeing him suffer or exploited. Because he really didn't know any better.

Peace.
I like this a lot. I hope this avoids Chatroulette syndrome.

Any plans for that?
People learn in many different ways, and therefore I dont think you can make the sweeping statement:
"Learning, IMO, doesnt happen like this."

I have always been someone who prefers self directed learning to the classroom (this coming from someone who spent 7 years in college / grad school), I think MOOCs are great and I get as much out of them as I did many college classes. I found the freedom to study any topic whenever I wanted to very liberating; I ended up studying more. Some MOOCs are certainly better than others, but you could say the same of regular classes.

There is definitely no replacement for office hours with professors, but facebook groups, community TAs, and Skype actually close the gap more than you'd think.
FDA Orders Genetic Testing Firm 23andMe to Halt Sales
The fact that Bitcoin transactions are broadcast to the entire network should tell you that you are way off. Think of all the work that goes into processing a VISA transaction, and then imagine if tens of thousands of other payment processors had to do the same work.
Clarification: I hope this stays unmarred by overly pornographic self indulgence. (Didn't mean to down on CR directly so harshly...)
For anyone arguing that there is some causation behind a startup's success besides "luck", I challenge you to prove it.

It is not easy to prove causation.

For example, startup says "We did X and this was the direct cause of Y", where X is some random thing, and Y is "success". That is difficult to prove. And startups never say that. They just say "We did X." Maybe they also say they believe this was crucial somehow to their success. But they never try to prove causation.

Of course, no one demands anyone to prove causation when it comes to the actions and the success of any startup. The scientifc method does not apply here. We are happy to listen to someone tell us about what a startup did, about their eventual success and then let our imaginations make the supposed causal connections.

I do not think it's unreasonable to question, as does the OP, whether "luck" is a proper explanation for the success of a startup. If it were, then that leaves startups free to make their own rules instead of believing they must do X in order to produce Y. And I say that is fine. The fact is, doing X might not bring about Y for every startup that does X. Clearly there is more to this than a "formula", whether it is the YC's or someone else's.
I don't get it, either. I guess it's supposed to be Space:JSON::CoffeeScript:Javascript? But it seems less useful: in their example, the user clearly wanted to create an array of colors. What they got instead was a map with colors as keys and empty objects as values.
[EDIT] I should have said "significant other", not "girlfriend". Even then, it doesn't work -- but at least it's more inclusive :)
If they were smart they wouldn't be paying their customers to install their spyware, they'd penalize them for accessing their site without installing it. For their own "security".

That's probably illegal though. I hope.
I love writing by hand in my journal and sending cheesy postcards to my friends, so this is very interesting. Looking forward to the Android version!
Thanks!

Just moderating with care and possibly a trust system where good users are given additional privileges.
What's the main target market for this kind of thing?
I think Mozilla makes a sound technical argument... but it's stilly to pretend ad blocking isn't also a political issue on some level.
RequestPolicy is a little bit of all those wrapped up into one plugin that does whitelisting.

https://www.requestpolicy.com/
Edited. Should have said "encoding language".

Here are some examples of space in action:

- http://sender.nudgepad.com/demo.html

- http://nudgepress.com/

It is very useful. Happy to answer questions about it.
I don't think the incentives for politicians are really there, at least not on an individual levels. Most politicians at a national level do not rely on their government salaries for sustenance, so the obvious incentive to be re-elected isn't there. As for the incentive to be re-elected due to desire for power, that's a more promising idea, but even then, the rational ignorance point means that the getting re-elected is not the same as "being judged by the people as a good servant of the people."

As for the evidence that governments work, despite a satisfactory economic model for why they should be expected to, I don't personally see the evidence. I see a lot of evidence the support the claim that governments are overwhelmingly likely to exist, but not that they are the "best" way to organize society (for any given definition of "best").
Really like this. Looking forward to using it.
And consequently from that project: https://npmjs.org/package/grunt-sass

Since I'd guess most people interested in the node version will want the grunt one.
Ridiculously detailed Carnegie Mellon machine learning parody of online scam ads
Worked remotely in 2 different distributed teams (US, Europe, South America, Africa) for the last 2 years.
Can't imagine coming back to the office job.
It's really good idea to build your company with that in mind.
That red on my monitor burns my eyes! ouch.
If others were willing to spend it wouldn't that bring the price and volatility down? It seems it is in very high demand and commanding a high price because (most) everyone is hoarding, no?

It's like buying something with Apple shares, sure you could.. but you are paying transaction fees each time which doesn't make financial sense.

Finally I think there is a mental hurdle with the value of ONE bitcoin being worth so much. I know it is silly, but if a bitcoin was worth 10cents and people hand thousands of bitcoins I bet there would be more flow
Looking forward to having you be part of it! :)
Don't ignore the 10% discount that Namecheap is offering.
I tend to agree, but to be fair, some of this would be mitigated if the market were truly free. For example, the lack of competition issue would be largely resolved in the absence of patents that grant long monopolies to single companies.
I'm sure I'm not the only person who's spent more time than they should trying to decide whether rebuilding sass would take longer overall than just waiting for the ruby one to finish compiling something :)

Thanks for this!
Sorry, that was an old example. Will throw a better one up there shortly.
It's sad but so much of the law works that way in practice. And it's very hard to fix.
True. But there are certain elements that vary greatly between specs (or rather, between spec and... suggested format?). For example, the `person` construct, the `text` construct, etc, which are rather inconsistent and flat in the RSS spec. If it were all fire–and–forget, I could rest at ease knowing it's a superset, but most differences are not additive.
Every tiny change requires a recompile. On a really complicated site, that could be 30 seconds or more. And CSS is a >visual< language, that looks subtly different in all browsers and eventually requires a lot of 'stabbing in the dark' to find the perfect compromise.
You can try the low-space import. There are instructions in XOWA at home/wiki/Help:Options/Import. It takes longer (8-10 hours) but only needs 35 - 40 GB. (which is still a lot).

In the end, you're still going to need about 25 GB for English Wikipedia. If you want something smaller, you can try one of the other wikis (for example, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, etc.) Each of these are generally about 5 GB.

Hope this helps.
ffor Fpga implementatios, check out the Minimig.
Completely understandable and it's a fair point people might undergo unnecessary surgery as a result of a false positive (like having breast tissue removed preemptively after false positives for chances of contracting breast cancer). 23andMe is a nice idea, but you can't beat an old fashioned regular trip to the doctor and blood test to check for these things.