skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the motivation component also needs to be figured out. There's a huge amount of motivation in keeping up with a real world course, not falling behind your peers, and getting your money's worth.

MOOC's can't really provide that. I've toyed with doing a startup in this regard. Perhaps something like gympact but targetted at MOOC's. I.e., you pledge a certain amount of money that you'll finish a course and lose it if you don't.

Even better if you pledge with a group of people and the whole group loses their money unless the whole group finishes. That way you could harness some major peer pressure.
I think you have a fundamental bug in your model of the funnel. The wide end of the funnel is the people who hear about the site and arrive there no matter what the means. Those who sign up are the ones advancing to the next stage (your clip art only has one stage, which may reflect your misunderstanding). So putting up an immediate sign up doesn't cut the number of people who come in through the top (as the article says) instead it just makes the first stage of your funnel shorter.

Now the aim of each funnel stages is to discard as many unqualified buyers as possible as soon as possible to avoid wasting your (and their) time. But how soon is "possible"? You have to qualify them (give them some content in your case, and see if they engage) to see if you are a good match. If you push the sign up right up front yes, more people may advance to the next stage, but you have no idea as to the quality of the leads (%false positive and %false negative).

Consider the rediculous extrema: you could assign everyone a user id when they first arrive (basically: a cookie!) which would give you a 100% conversion rate. Or you could disallow any sign up at all: a 0% conversion rate. It's easy to see that these boundary cases are useless.

But how do you know that your new approach isn't equally as useless? All that mathematics is exciting but doesn't address the two core questions: how many of these sign ups became revenue generators and how much revenue was abandoned to people who wouldn't sign up?.

TL;DR: You've analysed how quickly you get out of the driveway without looking at how that relates to getting to your destination (say, if you're even turning in the right direction).
For scientific computing with some R or Matlab/Octave background, I suggest the new language Julia: http://julialang.org/

Scientific computing Python community commonly use version 2.x there is the migration step to version 3.x ahead..
sigh, and with this comment thread, Hacker News has completed its transformation into Reddit. Well, that and the multi-day outage.

So, where to next?
Doesn't matter which kind of icing you put on a bad cake, but it can make it look a bit better. Does author suggest we just eat a very small bad cake with no icing on top? Also POJO historically stands for "Plain Old Java Object".
Exchange your Starbucks gift card balance for Tonx Coffee
Every non-trivial app will add enough custom code to a framework that new developers have a learning curve.
Surely it must be possible to have economic development in poor countries without sweatshop-level exploitation.
Seriously?
No one is asking you to memorize a link. You see the anchor text and you click on it if you like it. How hard is it?
You just took nitpicking to a different level.
23-year-old Stack overflow vulnerability discovered in X11 Server
I find this specious: What modern web app isn't minifying/concatenating it's Javascript and CSS source? All of your concerns are easily remedied via a proper build procedure. And we're talking about, in relative terms, miniscule amounts of data for the web. 33 kb? C'mon now.
I was thinking it depends on the style of beard:

My favourite, The Franz-Joseph:

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

A website with lots of different beards (all displayed on the same chin):

http://www.dyers.org/blog/beards/beard-types/

Some of these beards are just so eccentric looking I think a potential employer would not take them seriously.
What about South?
Images appear broken in this article. For a version of the article with working images, see the author's personal site: http://joshuaearl.com/selfpublishing/lessons-learned-from-a-...
Blocking does not prevent him from seeing her public posts, though. She may not notice, but you could still argue it's a form of stalking. And because of that notification, she now knows.
Nephorider a cloud infrastructure application for AWS on MacOS X
I've finished about a dozen MOOCs, even TA'ed a couple and my story is similar. I'm usually enrolled in at least three courses with no intention of finishing all of them.
It's a broken world where the solution to poverty is the exploitation of a generation.
That is a little bit of a stretch- I think it generally makes more sense to people to move from discrete to abstract. But I agree that it's much less linear than how its currently taught.
Getting Done
Disclosure DOs, Disclosure DON'Ts

A 30c3(30th Chaos Communication Congress) talk by Nate Cardozo(a lawyer) of EFF.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSi6PxVBOx4

My take on it? Don't do it, You will gain nothing and can loose everything.
Gah. Must...resist...getting...sucked...in...
> if anything, I've not lied to anybody, so I'd be happy with myself.

Unfortunately, that's not the way police encounters work in practice. Even if you've done nothing wrong, talking to the police can really only hurt you. For example, this re-enactment is based on a true story in which an old lady in Baltimore was convicted of drug possession because some neighborhood children had left a dime bag under her sofa (which she didn't even know about) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7RYH8Py6lY[0]

Just because you think you've done nothing wrong doesn't mean others will agree, especially when it's their job to think you're guilty.

[0] This is part of an hour-long video which shows several more cases like this, but for some reason I can't find the full version anymore.
Another option : the haves will offer a tiny share of the economy(which with optimized technology might suffice for a basic standard of living) and zero influence to the have nots and drown them with escapism ,all controlled from above by a strong totalitarian state.

Sound familiar ? if it works so far, why won't it work further on ?
It's perfectly possible to accidentally stumble across SQL injection.

E.g. my street address growing up was 1901 Mayor's Road.
And why the hell should i use a app that is written by know poeple that prooven they have no clue about crypto? Why shouldn't i use one of the many apps that support OTR?
React beginner tutorial: implementing the board game Go
My two cents: the ease of use of a platform is inversely proportional to the speed at which business needs move to remain competitive using it. The more rapidly business needs change, the less time a stable, elegant interface to the platform on which that business is based has to stabilize.

Business needs on the server side do not change terrifically fast. The things we needed to do on the server side has certainly changed over the past ten years, but the changes have been gradual. I struggle to name a single server-side upheaval as violent as the release of iOS or the demise of flash was to client-side. As a result, things are pretty well-understood. Thanks to POSIX and *nix, the operating system interface has been effectively static for at least a decade. Concurrency is hard to wrap your head around as a developer, but once you do you find that the actual tools you use have achieved something resembling stability. Persistence is one place that's actually seeing interesting changes with various database platforms coming into prominence, but if all else fails, you can get a decent amount of mileage out of good old SQL.

Client side programming, UI programming in particular, is where an application's most immediate value resides. As a result, it's where the most competition and development takes place, and so its interfaces and programming techniques are most changeable. Consumer-facing platforms come and go at a consumer-market pace. Platform providers like Google, Apple, and the W3C are constantly struggling to keep ahead of the manic pace both of of consumers' expectations regarding features and businesses' demand for capabilities. As a result, there are no time-honored abstractions like the Unix file system, or SQL, but rather a roiling soup of constant upheaval.

What's the takeaway? Rather than bemoaning the lack of stability in the client programming world, come to terms with the fact that you as a developer are going to have speed up. So long as client-side magic and consistency is a source of competitive advantage for applications, the state of the client-side programming art will continue to change rapidly. Things will get easier and harder as time goes by, but change and inconsistency are the natural order of this world.
Manufacturing from the US is moving to Mexico. The transportation costs are far less. Also, since they have the raw goods inside Mexico, international fluctuations of the US dollar will not influence costs as much.

I don't think Vietnam can compete with China until China stops treating its workers as slaves.
Percona Cloud Tools - MySQL performance insights for your applications
I actually love this option, particularly when learning something new. I actually wish Flask had this with some options to preselect libs.

Padrino uses generators[1] for this and while they might have too many options, something like this for Flask would be fantastic, IMO.

[1] - http://www.padrinorb.com/guides/generators
You are going a dangerous way. As long as your team and code base are small, a self-cocked solution has its advantages. But when you use one of the frameworks, your app gets a structure that other developers can easily understand, because they know the concept. They easily find points where to debug and where to breakpoint.

Using a proprietary framework has none of these advantages. Every new developer needs more time to find his way into the code and that time multiplies as your team grows. Just think about this before starting a new project.
>> First, it's about the same size as Moot as a whole (91kb)

I am feeling a bit of a fool to ask that but... what's the obsession with the code size when it comes to client side JS?

Bandwidth? Well, unless you are running at Google's scale, some extra bandwith is much cheaper than the time spent on writing your own solutions to well known and solved problems (and some of the problems you were not aware of yet).

Performance, since more code - more stuff to execute - will take longer? It's good to have performance in mind and maybe benchmarks will tell you that it's X times faster but what will it be once translated to seconds?
> PHP however is still solving problems

But is it solving more problems than it creates?
>I believe it is a common strategy for (especially) women to exploit this in order to gain some sort of advantage over their partners following a breakup.

The data is here. Common? You decide.

http://www.sp2.upenn.edu/ortner/docs/sorenson_doc2.pdf

The available information about restrained persons typically
has been documented within the context of assessing the efficacy
of restraining orders that were issued because of domestic violence. A random sample of 200 defendants in domestic violence or
civil protection orders in San Diego during a 10-week period in
1990 (Meloy et al., 1997) indicates that most (72%) were men, and
that the average age was 38 years (range 15 to 70 years). Caucasians
predominated (57%), but there were substantial proportions of Blacks (22.5%) and Hispanics (17.5%) as well; ethnicity
was unknown for 3% of the defendants. (Whether any of these
groups were disproportionately represented is unknown; rates
were not calculated.) A total of 11% had at least one contact with
the county’s mental health services agency. A study of all 663 men
against whom civil protection orders were granted in Quincy,
Massachusetts (Klein, 1996), also in 1990, found an average age of
33 years (range 17 to 70 years) for the defendants. Half (49.5%)
were not married, 46.6% were married, and 3.9% were formerly
married. Almost 80% of the defendants had a prior criminal
record within the state; more than half (54%) had at least one prior
record for an alcohol or drug crime, usually drunk driving.
Information on defendant ethnicity was not reported.
The primary, albeit not the sole, focus of the present research is
the person to be restrained. Such information can help increase
the effectiveness of violence prevention efforts, which is not a
small consideration given the history of violence among
restrained persons—about three fourths of men against whom
restraining orders are issued have prior criminal records (Isaac,
Cochran, Brown, & Adam, 1994; Klein, 1996), and nearly half
have committed a violent crime (Isaac et al., 1994).

Results indicate
that about one fifth of the restraining orders are to restrain someone of the same gender as the protected person. It is not possible
to ascertain with the available data whether these cases represent
violence in gay and lesbian relationships or heterosexual pairings
gone awry (e.g., to order the former male partner of a woman to
stay away from her current male partner) or an unrealized relationship, as is often the situation in cases of stalking. Further
research is needed to address the nature of same- and opposite-
sex pairings in restraining orders.
In my experience, using a framework and learning design aren't mutually exclusive. Learning a framework often requires studying its source code and grokking how it works, there's simply no better documentation.

Granted that may not be quite at the level of designing your own complete framework from scratch, but imho it's the happiest middle ground between personal skill development and standing on the shoulders of giants that FOSS has enabled.
>Not using a JS Framework? Congratulations, you've just built your own ad hoc JS Framework. Suddenly, anyone who joins moot will have to invest tons of effort in your custom framework instead of being able to hit the ground running.

That's the framework party line. Not necesarilly true. For one, somebody not familiar with, say, Angular would still have to get to know Angular (a huge task in itself) and then your application code too.

Why not just have them understand the application code only? Since it's tailored to your application it also omits needless features and workarounds for framework issues.
> If he phoned a radio station while she was listenning it, would he also go to jail?

I doubt it. The radio is a public forum that has nothing to do with her. As long as he doesn't mention her at all, it should be fine. (I assume; I'm no lawyer.)

Similarly, he can have a blog, and her accidentally stumbling upon it should not count as a violation.

Sending any kind of email directly to her, however, is direct contact and probably a violation of the restraining order.
Security Vulnerabilities Found in 90% of Top Mobile Banking Apps
Thanks for sharing. I want to add this tweet from ‏@dhh: 'Orchestras use blind auditions to avoid hiring on pedigree, age, gender, etc: http://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/5903.html - It's the ultimate look at the real Work'. I think it make totally sense in the current society we are living today.
It cracks me up that all of the early comments on this thread are so insistent that course completion shouldn't be a goal. Anyone who has taught a college course can tell you that self-reported satisfaction rates are useless as an educational metric. Everyone "wants" to learn, but almost nobody puts in the effort. MOOCs have provided this hype-driven bubble where the people who "want" education get to pretend that they're learning without actually doing much of anything.

Course completion is a valid goal, and an important number. The point that I'm making is that a 5% completion rate is still a success, when multiplied by the massive number of people enrolling.

For an individual, if you watched the first three videos of linear algebra and stopped, you didn't learn the subject and can't honestly claim you took the course. If you finished it past-deadline but did all the exercises, you're probably ready to take the next course.

Udacity and Coursera are a step forward. Perfect? Far from it. Ready to replace Stanford? No, not even close. Is the world better with them than it would be without them? Absolutely.

Education, in technology, is there mainly to give you a root set and confidence. If you actually want to get into machine learning, you have to start reading papers anyway. That goes whether you're a graduate student or a DIYer who's been in industry for almost a decade like me.
So when OP says none of the popular framework works for him, he doesn't want to be locked in with another framework, he created his own MVC framework Motto. That sounds contradicting. You now locked into your own framework.
The Philippines would also be a great place for manufacturers to look at.
Cryptocat's private chat uses OTR. Our group chat function uses an open and studied multiparty protocol. Generally, our security bugs have been implementation errors much more than protocol design errors.

Surely, the best we can do as a community project is open up our code for more volunteers and experts to help and take a look. :-)
No support for Azure? :(
It seems cpu.shares allow a proportional amount of CPU to be allocated, but LXC may use up to 100% of all idle CPUs. You can't specify a hard-limit of "only use 1GHz when I have a 2GHz CPU" apparently (according to here: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.containers.lxc....). So I guess that could mean that if the containers are using 100% of all CPUs, there wouldn't be resources left e.g. for monitoring on the host? Anyone got any experience with this?
Glad that they're taking security seriously. It's a sharp difference from how they used to do things[1]. However, I'd still like to see either an explicit bug bounty (there's one implied here) or a paid audit.

[1]: http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/03/here-come-en...
>Regarding your second comment- you're correct of course, but what makes this a "blind spot"? After all, if the user is writing code in Python, they're doing scientific computing in Python, regardless of what the Python library calls behind the scenes.

What he means is, they can't expand the core primitives provided for them in Python itself, so they are constrained by what's given if they want performance. Unlike with, say, Julia.
can you give some screenshots or videos of the fingerprint showing mechanism?

My biggest concern with cryptocat is that this info is kind of hidden and not bubbled up to the user.

In the web version, the way its handled makes it possible for the server operator to replace who you are talking to mid-conversation without warning unless you click a fingerprint button before and after every message you send which nobody is going to do

I know there is an issue for this on the web version ( https://github.com/cryptocat/cryptocat/issues/463 ), just wondering if the mobile ones take a different approach.
Anecdotal evidence, I specifically grew a beard in 1994 in preparation for a contract interview. I was 24. I got the contract.

A friend (25 years old) tried to get a contract clean shaven, eventually gave in after multiple failed interviews, grew a beard and got a contract. He had a real baby face.

'Young' Age perception is a real problem when contracting. Less so after the first contract.

Of note I still have my beard. I rather like it.
An ARDUINO Yun Security Guard | Open Electronics
You suggest there are massive lay offs in China now because factories are moving to Vietnam? What are you talking about?
I always find frustrating when there is so little content on a link. Although it's linking to other articles, the author could have elaborated more...
That would be an awful situation to be in.

I very much hope that someone in such a situation would be able to submit some evidence showing that it was not them that sent the message. Unfortunately, suing for wrongful arrest takes tome and money and might happen after the person has spent time in prison and lost jobs etc etc.

Do you know anything that can reduce the number of spouses being murdered or hospitalised by their spouse, and that could reduce the need for court procedures, and could reduce the miscarriages of justice, and that would cost less than the current system?

I'm not being facestious either. UK has removed legal aid for famy court proceedings and so people have to muddle through this with no legal representation. It takes ages and is weird and stupid.
Ah, the coloring 17x17 etc. thingy.
From a purely letter of the law interpretation, you're not wrong (at the moment). What you're missing (and the reason that you seem to have to respond again and again with this type of comment) is that we're in the middle of redefining what the word "contact" means, and that heavily influences the spirit of the law.

When restraining order laws were written, contacting someone took at least a modicum of effort. You had to write a letter, or type an email, or pick up the phone and dial a number, or take the time to travel to visit someone. It was a process that took premeditation. You simply couldn't contact someone with as little as a button press (that may or may not even make it explicitly clear who you're contacting). In fact, the law explicitly has exemptions for contact that was not premeditated, such as running into someone accidentally in public.

However now we've got systems that intentionally place people in contact because it increases revenue for the service running it. They've made it so easy to contact wide swaths of people in a completely impersonal manner that my cat could "contact" people on Facebook by walking across the keyboard.

So the real question people are asking is: does an automated online service sending an email with my name in it to a person constitute contacting that person. I'm not sure it does. By the general attitude in the thread, it seems a lot of people are also hesitant to call that contact.

So sure, you're right about this constituting contact in current law, but what we're seeing is that current law has not kept up with social perceptions of what people think of as contact. This means the law is probably going to change in the next decade or two. Hell, it might even change right now because of this case.
They only open-sourced them once their value to Id was approximately zero.

It's still a really cool thing to do, but neither Id (or any other game company I'm aware of, anywhere, ever), has released their game as GPL while they were still making significant amounts of money from it (which in practice means within the first couple of months, for almost all games).
+1 to the "high course join, low course completion" crowd.

One thing that I did at work was establish a betting pool with two other co-workers on the Coursera C++ course that finished in December - completers would collect from non-completers. That is my one Coursera completion.

I'm pretty sure that attaching betting pools to MOOC sites would make a major difference to completion rates for participants.
Call me crazy, but PHP JSON manipulation is maybe second to node.
Not true for all courses (on Coursera), most of them will stop letting you access the videos after about 1 month from the course completion.

However, you can download the videos once the course is finished.
This is what graduate school felt like for me (when it wasn't crushing my soul). :-)
That particular problem was solved, see:
http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2012/02/17x17-proble...
and
http://www.informatik.tu-freiberg.de/prof2/publikationen/ISM...
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