skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The world doesn't need another way to spoon-feed infotainment to well-off people with good academic backgrounds

Actually, that is exactly what the world needs, and the comments here further emphasize that the demand is there. Before these MOOCs appeared on the scene, the resources were almost non-existent. I don't care about school, I just want to learn. A service like Netflix, but with MOOC-like content would be perfect.

It saddens me that Thrun, who I have found to be exceptionally good at the job, is more interested in schooling than learning – but I get it from a business aspect. These results dash the hopes of what Udacity hinted would become their business model.
jclouds 1.7.0 Released With More Support for OpenStack and Rackspace
I don't see why MOOCs are pitched as revolutionary in teaching. They're still fundamentally lecture-based, and lectures are a terrible way to teach. I'm most familiar with research in physics education, where an average intro physics class fills only 24% of students' gaps in understanding.

On the other hand, some professors are experimenting with more interactive methods -- not less interactive MOOCs -- and getting three times better results:

http://www.refsmmat.com/articles/shutup.html
What about it's not greedy but people like you wondering why should I pay 300usd for 24" LG screen made in China while I can pay 250usd for 24" Samsung screen made in Vietnam.
From my perspective, we've been taking security seriously a year+. Our first commissioned audit was in November 2012, and we've had a bug bounty since then as well: https://crypto.cat/bughunt/

This isn't, of course, to say that there haven't been vulnerabilities. But I have to stand behind our mitigation and disclosure policy as being very highly responsible and transparent.

So far, we've had three paid audits, with two more lined up, and regularly reward community bug-finders. We're planning more competitions for Cryptocat Mobile in March and April, with prizes such as iPhones and Nexus Phones. :-)
Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1303/.
Re-read the guidines about accounts less than a year and Reddit. You're right about the flood of MRAs from reddit.

But flag the submissions you think don't belong here and up ote the submissions that do belong here.
OP here: Wow! I did not expect such a response.

I want to offer a few clarifying points: We homeschool. My son likes math but does not like the 'busy work' associated. Mom was wondering if my son just didn't get long division, ratios, and fractions. I was thinking that if he can program js, awk, lua, and objective-c then he can do anything that arithmetic might demand of him.

In other words I intuited a character issue not a cognition issue and wanted other opinions.

Also, I really do understand that programming cannot strictly be equated with math. I purposefully used the word analogy because they are not 'fungible' things. In fact the term analogy connotes that I understand that there is a resemblance in some particulars between things that are otherwise unlike.

I posit that the resemblance is effort of cognition (though, of course, some might disagree that there is even that point of connection).

Another common misunderstanding was that I was asking how much math does my son need to know/learn to be a programmer (or otherwise). We will explore the very limits of his education (sane, practical, healthy limits); that's the whole point of us homeschooling him. Once he hits mom's limit in any given realm we will out source. I hope his current love of math/science/writing will know no parental impediment.
Wow HN.
So much sleep.
Very zzz.
I stand corrected. I thought you needed ES6 for that, but apparently ES5 is nearly enough.

I didn't read about Ractive.js's magic mode. It's not automatic data-binding either, according to the docs[1]:

'Magic mode only works with properties that Ractive already knows about.'

1. http://docs.ractivejs.org/latest/magic-mode

AngularJS works with properties that it doesn't know about, if you use $apply.$scope.
I will say from skimming over the source tree the amount of code in CryptoCat(android) is surprisingly light. This is very refreshing compared to other chat applications which are unnecessarily huge.

Will be definitely going over this later.
A quick and illustrative addendum: There is one place where client side programming is stable and enjoys proven, reliable, and well-worn standards: enterprise applications. If you're ever in need of a reminder for what happens when a group of developers values stability and established pattern over staying at the head of the curve, log into your stockbroker's website, pour yourself a stuff drink to ease the pain, and go learn a new framework.
yeah man -- there is a surprising amount going on here. i think a decent amount of atl folks are probably here on hn as well. get in touch if you ever wanna talk.
> This is a just a nice rhetoric, but unimplementable in practice due to existence of cheaters and free riders.

There's no way to cheat, and if you'd read the article, you'd have seen all the instances that disprove this popular "free rider" myth.

The simple fact is: people like money, and they're willing to work to get more of it. Very few people choose poverty if they have other options.
>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, you 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.

For one, your app can have a structure even with your self-coded solution. That's the job of the programmer, not of the framework. Besides, the framework's structure is not tailored for you app. It's the one-size-fits-all structure its developer likes to think in.

Second, while using a framework might has some benefits for a slightly larger team, when you go even big it loses the benefits again. In fact a lot of the big companies are using their own framework (which they self-coded).
Launching a massive project with that exact same structure soon. No problems at all. Feels so flexible.
And it isn't impossible to write code:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/codea/id439571171?mt=8

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/python-programming-language/...
I currently use Tasypie.

Would I gain anything switching to Django REST framework?
Great to hear that you switched to older and audited code. Could you explain what relationship this app has to the javascript version?
Very true.

It's still better than the option of maintaining two separate codebases, i.m.o., though.
congrats ben and matt!
>There's the title link on the HN page, and when you (I) hover over that, all I see is the link, no human-relevant text

The _title_ is the human readable text. You're not supposed to go reading the link itself for human-relevant text.

>What I'm looking for is reputational clues. (medium.com) after the link is not enough for me, because there's nothing about medium that tells me anyone associated with them will be worth reading; membership is random with almost no gatekeeping

You saw a link for an article on HN and you didn't click to see it because of a lack of "reputational clues" in the URL link?

I like reputational clues too. If only there was some kind of social bookmarking site, where a community of people with some common interests could vote for articles, and you can read their _titles_ and see their vote count and go click on them.

A man can dream right?

>There's just not enough to go on, for me. Whoever the writer is should at least think about making themselves more identifiable; the same for medium users in general.

A nice-to-have as a URL requirement that you have blown out of proportion. You're using the web wrongly.
Looks great!

Do you have full support for numpy, scipy, matplotlib, pymc, and pandas?
I disagree that these are simply "books" and cannot supplement courses. There are many college students who simply attend lectures, turn in homework, ask a few questions and take their tests. MOOCs provide everything you need to have that experience virtually. I agree this model does not describe everyone, but I believe this is more an issue of motivation than resources.

Going back to the comparison with textbooks, there are a good number of people who could teach themselves subjects purely out of textbooks if they were motivated. But even after mastering several subject in this way, your employment prospects and marketability are not significantly increased. Instead, people do their learning (online or in person) under the umbrella of a College, who can offer them "credit" / verification to the rest of the world, which in turn increases employment prospects and marketability. The MOOC product does not offer that benefit upon completion (they give you a certificate, but right now it is not respected at all and therefore does not give the desired effect), so only those interested in the intellectual knowledge have motivation to complete the MOOC courses (not surprisingly, a very low number of people).

But I think if they give it more time they / the market could develop products that provide value for completion of these courses. Maybe some sort of independent service that tests and certifies completing students (i.e. what College Board has done for high school courses with the AP program). They could even track combinations of courses students complete to ensure a rounded knowledge of a subject area.

That is just one idea off the top of my head, but the point remains that this is an economic issue of motivation and benefits for completion, not an issues of resources.
The Tribal Framework Mindset
I call it a "bizarre blind spot" because it seems like there's a silent consensus to never talk about this basic fact. It's a bit surreal attending SciPy and hearing all of these people talking about scientific computing in Python when almost every single person in the room spends the vast majority of their time and energy writing C code.

I disagree that the separation between implementation and user-land that's enforced by two-language designs like C/Python or C/R is socially beneficial:

1. If your high-level code doesn't perform fast enough (or isn't memory efficient enough), you're basically stuck. You either live with it or you have to port your code to a low-level language. Not impossible, but not ideal either.

2. When there are problems with some package, most users are not in a position to identify or fix those problems – because of the language boundary. If the implementation language and the user language are the same, anyone who encounters a problem can easily see what's wrong and fix it.

3. Basically a corollary of 2, but having the implementation language and user language be the same is great for "suckering" users into becoming developers. In other words, this isn't just a one-time benefit: as users use the high-level language, they automatically become more and more qualified to contribute to the ecosystem itself. It is crucial to understand that this does not happen in Python. You can use NumPy until the cows come home and you will be no more qualified to contribute to its internals than you were when you started.

These benefits aren't just hypothetical – this is what is actively happening with Julia, where almost all of its high-performance packages are written in Julia. In fact, I never realized just how important these social effects where until experiencing it first hand. The author of the article wrote:

> It turns out that the benefits of doing all of your development and analysis in one language are quite substantial.

It turns out that it is even more beneficial to not only do development and analysis, but also build libraries in one language. Of course, Julia has a lot of catching up to do, but it's hard to not see that the author's own logic implies that it eventually will catch up and surpass two-language systems for scientific computing.
Have a go at editing the `Utils` section.
For judging what is good coffee, I'm gonna go with the taste of the chefs of those 3 star restaurants, rather than with icebraining on hacker news.
What do you use for the models and routing?
That's correct. From Ripplelabs.com:

"Because Ripple’s new architecture does not require mining [to reach consensus], the creators of Ripple faced a choice: exclusively distribute XRP via mining or diversify distribution methods to include useful mining, business development, funding third-party developers, and hiring talent at Ripple Labs, the company responsible for improving upon and promoting the Ripple protocol."

XRP is currently distributed via the "Computing for Good" program:

"We’re giving away XRP in exchange for donating computing power to scientific research via World Community Grid. Anyone with an Internet-connected computer or Android device can participate."

link: https://www.computingforgood.org/
Here's some similar research on race: http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873

White sounding names get 50% more callbacks then black sounding names when sending out identical resumes.
I was threatened with a ban on computers at high school from my middle school.. because I had copied game demos to other user's accounts. [They gave me their username and password]

I also figured out how to access the middle school's library database without a login. [That wasn't secured, nor did it require a password]

Also, nearly got in trouble with the IT administrators at my high school because I found out how to send Novell messages.

I was a very bored kid.
Encrypt all stored cookies on selected operating systems
The other big benefit of popular frameworks to businesses is that they're more likely to reach maturity faster with more people using, fixing, and contributing to them. With frameworks, bugs, security holes, and performance issues - especially the hard-to-find edge cases and gremlins - once solved are solved forever (more or less), whereas every time you start your own new framework you have to deal with that again.

It's probably best for a business, if you want to give your employees experience architecting a framework instead of just using one, to standardize on something like Angular.js/Ember/React/etc and then encourage/incentivize your employees to become contributors to it. Almost best of both worlds - benefit from using the framework, and employees get valuable experience, resume builders, and connections. Only thing they miss in that scenario is architecting a framework from scratch, which is something only your early employees would have gotten to do anyway.
However, that is gnuplot (I think), not R code. I have not been clear with my question, since I was talking about this parent comment:

R may still have an advantage when it comes to plotting simplicity
I vastly prefer R's plotting capabilities, even if I don't generally use ggplot2.
"then what avenues are left to express technical ability"

I dunno, maybe actually solving problems for clients instead of playing endless rounds of "my JS is smaller than yours"?
Thanks for posting bushido. That was great.
Algorithms researchers may be employing the mathematics of computing depending upon the particular subject and scope of study. That body of non-CS academics (mathematicians, physical scientists, and engineers) who use mathematics daily as a primary component of their research are doing math when they write programs--but not necessarily the mathematics of computing.

Almost everybody else who writes programs isn't thinking in terms of mathematics, be it of computing or any other thing. Asking "what level of mathematics is this equivalent to" is therefore kind of a nonsense question--it has no real answer, because it implies there's a legitimate comparison to be made when there isn't.
What's your anchor?
Not comparable, I would say that a computer is a broader term than telephone.

Nowadays, telephony is just another application not a device, so an iPhone is a computer that does telephony as one of its primary tasks and your desktop is a computer that does telephony via Skype.

I don't worry about where the lines are drawn because the lines are mostly arbitrary and imaginary.
I know that I use python because of how easy it is to code. I can focus wholly, totally on the logic of my code without ever worrying about if I misplaced a semi-colon or left out some weird punctuation.

Python frees me to code and not worry about things that get in the way of coding. That's why it's eating other language's lunches, the freedom is almost intoxicating.
For things that only need a one or two line command set, Python and R are probably similar. Once things get a bit more complex, matplotlib may not seem as "friendly" to those used to ggplot.

But this about perspective. Coming from a Python background, I would rather stay in Python and work with matplotlib, seaborn, or even ggplot.py, than try to work my data management code into the R model.
It looks like they might claim: "object-dispatch style routing"

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see a substantial improvement over Flask's (or even Werkzeug's) approach.
For me, Python has everything I need, among which there are many things that R or Matlab have not. If I should summarize what makes Python so suited for the things I do (and did when I was still doing research) it's the following:

Python is an easy to use scripting language that can be integrated with number-crunching C/C++ code and for which a scientific standard library _with a vibrant community_ exists.

Also, I haven't written a piece of 2.x code in half a year, which is of course only possible because scipy and matplotlib are 3.x ready.
But it is educating more people for less money.
Well there was that whole thing where the biggest companies in the industry plead guilty to a massive price fixing conspiracy over many years and paid hundreds of millions of dollars in fines…

http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2008/November/08-at-1002.html
Probably not, all of the developed countries went through a sweatshop phase at some point in their past.
Universe as a Quantum Computer
Fair enough. And interesting, I hadn't thought of some of this.

SciPy users are certainly doing scientific computing in Python, but it is surprising to get that attitude from the developers.
Still not a very funny response to the recent death of eight people.
Young Superstar
Cryptocat for Android is particularly unfinished so far. I would be surprised if you don't find bugs inside. Cryptocat for iPhone is currently a lot more mature, but similarly still needs peer review.

We have a commissioned audit for both apps, but it won't be starting for another two weeks. Thanks SO MUCH for your interest. We rely on security enthusiasts for comments and advice.
The fact that something happened due to economics doesn't mean there aren't other ways it could happen.
As much as I like scikit-learn and pandas, Python likely won't be replacing my R code for quite some time, and I'll continue to hop between the two of then.

R is, first and foremost, a language for statistical analysis, and that's really where it shines. Python is getting better (it used to be "you want to do...what?"), but it doesn't have nearly the package infrastructure R does for advanced statistics. It is, for most statistical computing tasks not even on the radar for a number of my colleagues.
Haven't played that game in years. Got to 20 until I messed up. Do you have an statistics?
It also works for names that sound "white" vs names that sound "black" or "ethnic". Because racism is also still a thing :(
2) Skin-in-the-game

This is much different than money. My first thought would be lifetime support costs and future autonomy.

My other experiences with consulting is that while consultants "just want to code", for their bill-ables and deliverables are much more important than well-written code.

In particular, this is expressed with agencies / consultancies scaling. In order to continue profit margins, agencies must hirer lesser experienced and cheaper consultants as the number of projects grow. Without billing for training, this results in a very disparate deliverable.

A final emphasis is that consulting often doesn't result in tested code (healthcare.gov) because the client isn't often isn't willing to spend the extra money on a product that should be deliverable (and huge assumption, but bug free)
Wow, this looks really nice. One thing that isn't clear is how I get the information out. so for example, if I'm building a recommendation engine, is there some kind of api that my webapp can use to get the information (sorry, new to all this).
That's not a fair question. A fair question is "how often do you purposefully buy a more expensive product when the marginal expense product exceeds the marginal benefit you derive?".

Nothing exists in a vacuum.
I would suggest that is a fault of process not programming.

If there is a need to upgrade then obviously you need to do it. However if your pipeline doesn't touch unicode, and your upgrading to python 3.3 purely for unicode, then its a massive waist of man power.

programs are a tool, nothing more. If the tool works there is no need to change it. infact its can be very expensive, especially if noone knows how to use it.

For example, most people don't need a pneumatic drill for their DIY. Yes it might be much more flexible, and really really fast. But the cost of maintaining it, and training to get the best use out of it is prohibitive.

However if you own a garage, hand tools are far too slow, and there are is a rich pool of talent to use you fast powerful tools.
20!? I can't get past 11...
+1 react, I also believe it would satisfy OP's need. React is going to take over the world in the next 5 years
It doesn't seem like Thrun put a lot of effort into popularizing the approach either. He gave 1.5 years and a pilot program to affirm a product that undermines years of ingrained ritual and validity? It doesn't seem like he was ever interested in changing education.
The article supposed that's what he did, and it probably is.
I personally think that the problem with banks is that they do so much more than what they are supposed to do. The only thing I need from a bank is a place to "store" my money, and possibly make transactions.

That's all, that's what a bank is supposed to do. Also no interest rate, my dad used to be a member of a group here in the Netherlands who wanted to create a bank of their own too. I never really understood it, I was just 10-12 when it was most active, but what I understood from it was that there would be no interest rates. You might try searching for it on google, it was called CMN. There is a Dutch book about it written by Hank Monrobey. You'll have more chance of finding that than anything else about it.

Here is a link: http://books.google.nl/books?id=2uTzrLOGfGwC&pg=PA104&lpg=PA...
Easy Datetime and Timezone Manipulation Python
I really liked the 7 habits of highly overrated people [1] article that you mention, but I would also encourage people to not ascribe all of those activities to overrated people, by default.

If you read in the article he even concedes that very effective people do many of these things, which is why it is an effective cover for incompetence.

Now, I know what you’re thinking — that might actually be productive. And, well, it might be, nominally so. But do you notice that you’ve got a very tangible plan of action here and there’s been no mention of what the project actually involves? A great way to appear useful without being useful is engage heavily in an activity completely orthogonal to the actual goal.

So if the goal aligns with the plan of action and there is "overcommunication" there could well be value added.

[1] http://www.daedtech.com/the-7-habits-of-highly-overrated-peo...
We switched form Tastypie over to Django REST Framework, and are overall pretty happy. Cleaner, clearer code that's easier to work with.

Plus, it generates a browsable api that you can explore via the web, without any extra work. Which makes life a lot easier, believe me.