skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some Berkeley students developed a similar service called Ninja Courses[1]. This lets you browse through classes, order textbooks and also shows ratings. (Although all the ratings are submitted by Ninja Courses users, I believe.)

It can even automatically build a schedule for you by choosing lectures and sections that don't overlap, optimizing based on user preferences. For example: do you want more morning classes, more afternoon classes, more gaps, less gaps, some days off... This automates away a rather tedious part of choosing your schedule--something I haven't seen in other similar tools (although I haven't looked too closely).

Instead of shutting it down, the university used it to build an official Schedule Builder[2]. The official version doesn't have rankings, but exposes other interesting information--in particular, grade distributions.

Since then, Ninja Courses has expanded to a bunch of other UC campuses as well.

Just thought I'd share a nice success story to counterbalance most of the others :).

[1]: http://ninjacourses.com/

[2]: https://schedulebuilder.berkeley.edu/
If cryptocurrencies take off, banks are simply going to store keys for people instead of physical money. For the layperson, nothing will change.

However, with cryptocurrency, the gap between how securely a single person vs. a dedicated entity such as a bank can store money decreases significantly.
The big plus of the desktop version is that it works with the media keys on your keyboard.
To take this to a purely business/tech place - this is an interesting market for prototyping contact-lense electronics; maybe in 10 or 20 years the new Glass will just be a contact, but for now this looks like one of the few applications where a sensor and two LEDs (high and low) can provide a lot of user value.
A professor has no pull on an external site. But they can certainly raise a stink within their university.
A "fork me on GitHub" banner is always nice. :)
They're very useful if you want a test case that requires multiple bytes in UTF-8 and multiple words in UTF-16.
You seem to implicitly concede one of my core points: that all this crap is based on appeal to emotion, rather than a rational reason for protest.. if we at least agree on that, I'm glad.

Those industry-destroying innovations tend to take many years to pick up steam, and anyone who's paying attention will likely see the writing on the wall long before it happens. I'd like to think that I'd be able to re-train for a new profession before getting steamrolled, but perhaps I'm too optimistic?

If I was forced to accept a new minimum-wage job, I'd probably be angry, but that wouldn't mean that my discontentment was based in reason.
> This is done routinely by both for-profit and non-profit organizations.

I wonder if any nonprofit, ever, has given a by-the-watt power accounting of the sort some of the people here are advocating

> Where I live, that would pay for the equivalent of 10-11 120-volt 20-amp circuits running at 80% capacity (per electrical code) 24/7.

aka several racks of equipment. My God, the audacity of OpenBSD developers, to ask for help powering this stuff!
so except all those exceptions, there's definitely a pattern!

By the time 5 came, most people were already speculating, and you ought to know as well as I do about how nasty an effect framing can have on nebulous judgements of "good" and "bad".

I'm surprised I got a downvote for the parent post, frankly. You'd think the majority of the demographic here would be against insane pigeon logic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner#Superstitious_pi...
There's Servo from the Mozilla team, written in Rust -- not a pure functional language but an interesting step. (Not that there are strong guarantees it'll be less complex overall, though it may have other properties like memory safety)
Twitter did get a tax break to keep their office in SF. [See here](http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/04/twitter-g...)

>> The payroll-tax break could lead to Twitter saving about $22 million in taxes over six years, the Chronicle said.

I think the gamble was the city would make this back thanks to revitalization or new workers moving into the city. In the near term, there's certainly going to be a reduction in the city coffers for taking care of punchy-guys.
Have you tried to control your diabetes with a ketogenic diet? Dr. Bernstein, a type 1 diabetic since 1946, is successfully managing his condition with it, and wrote a book about it.

http://www.diabetes-book.com/book/mylife.shtml
Or dramatically increase taxes in order to pay for more prosecutors and judges and courtrooms.
"the private language of the nerds' table in the high-school cafeteria, where the kids cared more about being smart than being popular."
Damn right!
It's a museum of the present that could have been.
It is certainly a debated effect, but at least it'd be a starting point for a discussion. As is, the article is "well, for me...". Any further discussion or research is impossible since it is a purely personal anecdote.

(N.B., since on re-reading this is less than clear from my original post: I did not intend to give a definitive answer to any of the items raised in the article. I do not possess the knowledge to do so. I merely intended to point out trivial starting points for research for this article)
Play no, control yes. It's still pretty cool at a party to hook up my laptop to my speakers, and be able to walk around and queue up songs from my phone.
In other words, "we're going to keep this site up for a long time" sounds like famous last words to you. :)

On the other hand, we're a security consultancy, so maybe we have lower, more tolerable standards for "up in production" than Stripe does.

Nelson Elhage is a machine; he ripped through 9 levels in under an hour.
Interesting, I didn't realize that, wonder if/how that differs in the EU
Could be a combination of many factors, but probably in part due to security researchers and black hats alike truly realizing the potential damage Java sandbox exploits could cause, in comparison to exploits for Flash or Adobe Reader, which are much more fickle, not cross platform, etc.
I think what he's saying is that an accuracy of, say, 10 mg/dL on a continuous basis is better than an effortful (requires you to test — and, perhaps more importantly for Type 1 diabetics, to be able to test) accuracy of 1 mg/dL. That's still going to tell you with enough accuracy whether you need to get some carbs into your system, or whether you've put too many in already.

Please correct me if I've misconstrued.
This is a good point, I will have to have a heart to heart with the alpha value.
>>Why don't the people of MountainView and surrounding towns build high-density developments on their own door-step near the employers? Why don't you accuse homeowners there of being 'greedy hogs'?

The issue here is of people choosing to live in San Francisco. If those Google employees wanted to live near Mountain View, and if building development there wasn't possible, then maybe your comment would make sense.

>> Why don't all the people who want to work at Google and Facebook move closer to work? Why do they have to be so selfish to want to live in the city? Why do they expect their employer to bus them to work for free? They're grown ups, they can pay their own way and take Caltrain or drive, and if that's inconvenient then move!

Because it's a free country, where you can choose to live anywhere you want. There's no legal or ethical reason why someone should feel obligated to live close to work.

>> For every dollar that a Google employee does not spend on transport to work, that's a dollar extra of disposable income that can be spent on rent.

If you want to be pedantic, maybe that's an extra dollar that those folks are spending in San Francisco when they come home after work. After all, they are paying high rents to live in San Francisco, so that they can enjoy the city - where do you think they spend their money on food and entertainment?

>> Why doesn't Google, an Internet company, figure out ways to build software and products with distributed teams?! Why do you need thousands of people in the same building? How many people does the average employee really need to speak to face-to-face on a daily basis?

Google can do many things, and they probably have many people working in a distributed manner already. They also have offices all over the world. None of that will change the fact that there are people working there who wish to live in a city that they love. Do you think that if these employees did not have to physically be in a building in Mountain View, they would go live in Lincoln, Nebraska?
I know a Cobol programmer who did (is doing) something similar.
The politics around transportation in the Bay Area (and CA in general) are pretty bleak. BART still doesn't cover the south bay. The light rail in San Jose didn't go anywhere interesting for about a decade. Bus service is horrible.

Sure, want to put more money into that sink, and see it wasted?
TDD.

When you get to work, run your tests. All green? Great! Write some more tests that fail then make 'em green again. Failing? Even better, now you have something to fix.

TDD made programming 5x more fun for me.
Concrete example of where JS has trouble:

String.fromCharCode(0x010004).charCodeAt(0);
=> 4
Rdio, please release your streaming quality figures. I'll return as a customer, I promise - please just be more transparent about this sort of thing.

The reason I say this is because the quality is noticeably worse than Spotify, and I feel they won't release the numbers because they know they can't compete.

I just want some transparency. The UI and experience is beautiful, but the quality is lacking.
Nah, the kerfuffle is about the symbolism. See people know they can't get a job at a tech company, they have to slog to work in horrible traffic to make just enough money to cover the cost of vehicle maintenance, rent and food. While this busses, they carry the kind of person they want to be but aren't, carried in air conditioned comfort from home to work, where they make more money and they don't even have to drive and they get free lunches.

I understand the anger, I got an earful of it volunteering as a big brother for at risk youth during college in south central LA. If a person doesn't have a vision of how they could get to be that person they want to be, they lash out at the symbols of those folks. Trying to convince young latino men that getting $100 a week for being spotters for the drug dealers really wasn't a path toward that life they wanted, even when it clearly was a path to getting some of the things they wanted right then and there.
I switched mostly from Rdio to Spotify. I used rdio since it started, but spotify's radio based off a playlist is great. I get more discovery songs this way. I also have non-english songs that aren't on rdio, but I can add them in Spotify. I do love rdio's new album page better.
In particular, Square's credit card readers use an MSP430 chip to encrypt the stripe data before passing it on the phone.

Their first credit card readers were entirely analog devices, which were very easy to use to skim cards.

Hopefully the latest batches have per-device unique keys (based on some centrally-known KDF) so a compromise of one doesn't re-enable such an exploit.
I have to say that I like this koan quite a bit more than the original programmer koans, which have always struck me as disappointingly shallow and rather more like knock-knock jokes.
A universe made for man
> we just love putting people in prison.

I think this is happening because of a general perception that too many people are "getting away" with breaking the law. It doesn't seem to matter that we're criminalizing everyday life and that many of the folks who actually deserve these penalties are untouchable due to money or politics, the sense of injustice is enough to make you want to just clamp down on everything. This means that for the few people that can exercise influence over the police and judicial system, the upside (votes, funding, whatever) from damaging it further far outweighs the miniscule chance that they themselves will get caught up in its workings.

It seems like it's caught in a death spiral. And it bothers me tremendously that, as a decent guy, I'm actively afraid of our judicial system.
I just started watching these. About six minutes into the fifty minute talk Theo says "this wasn't our idea." If he's trying to convince people he invented that idea he's going about it in a subtle, reverse-psychology way. (he's not)
Looks like Microsoft is/was also working on something very similar. Anyone know more details?

"Functional Contact Lens Monitors Blood Sugar Without Needles"

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/dl.aspx?id=150832
OpenBSD overall is interesting. The installer alone signals how simple and elegant is the rest of the OS (take a look at the source [0]). A dozen basic questions give or take, and one can have a fully-functional box.

Revenue-wise, the best move would be for a shop like iXsystems, Pair or ByteMark to step up to cover costs. And, any shop that uses OpenSSH on a large scale should be able to pony up some cash to keep Open{SSH,BSD,CVS,{NTP,BGP,OSPF,SMTP,IKE}D} alive. For example, it would be nice to see OpenBSD on Amazon, and AWS might even be willing to fund kernel changes and more to accomplish that.

Finally: check out this handy script which makes it OpenBSD a whole lot easier to get started and complete common tasks. [1]

References:

[0] http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/

[1] https://gist.github.com/steakknife/6120072/raw/shave
> I'd like to think that I'd be able to re-train for a new profession before getting steamrolled, but perhaps I'm too optimistic?

No, you'd probably be able to pull it off. If you have decent math and writing skills, those would transfer to a bunch of other jobs, and I'd bet that you're pretty smart. In other words, you're probably not a representative sample of the population.
I meant to say that maybe having public policy that even remotely relates to these topics is a huge mistake.
"the complex dynamic happening here is a major turn-off (Joyent controls the nodejs repo)"

Can you clarify what off-putting complex dynamic you're referring to?
We just had a ruling a couple months ago, up here in Canada, that a 3-year mandatory minimum sentence involve possession of a loaded firearm was unconstitutional as it is considered "cruel and unusual punishment".

Is such a challenge possible in the USA?
It was originally a much worse Atlantic article, but the submission was updated.
Why would companies that are so afraid of competition that they buy their aspiring rivals for billions willingly give up such a strategic advantage?
that sucks. I love the idea/theory behind CloudFlare, but it just seems like they aren't where they need to be yet. I have tried to use them on high traffic sites a couple times and didn't have luck.

Hoping they can iron this stuff out, because it's a great idea.
Founders, mostly asian and white guys, often get severely depressed, usually fail completely and humiliatingly and occasionally shoot themselves over it.

Women and minorities hardest hit.
Just so I can be super clear here: none of the code in this challenge has anything whatsoever to do with anything Square ships. We deliberately made things less realistic to make the levels more fun, and easier to ramp up with.
There's no reason to turn everything into some "untouchable due to money or politics" angle. There is a simple reason why people perceive that harsh response to crime is necessary: http://www.volokh.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/vcrime500.j.... The violent crime rate in the U.S. peaked in the early 1990's at about five times the per capita rate in 1960. Florida's law was passed in 1997 or so.
> integrating tiny LED lights that could light up

So wait a minute, your eyes will start flashing when your glucose levels are spiking?
So if Miley Cyrus doesn't believe in empirical evidence she's a threat to civilization? Damn. We're in trouble.
According to some people...

The sum of alternating +1 and -1 equals 1 if you stop on an odd, and 0 if you stop on an even. Infinity is treated differently in different fields. I suppose in physics, it's probably treated as a superposition of even and odd, so statistically, you could interpret it as 0.5. And I'm sure that works great for physicists and it fits a number of scientific models. But there are probably other fields involving mathematics that would find this interpretation to be silly and not very useful.
Couldn't agree more. I don't understand why playing music that's been synced to my mobile has to load for as long as it does. What is happening? And why does my synced collection listing sometimes not load while I'm disconnected from the net? It's mind boggling.

I still love the service, but their apps need a bit of love.
If this works, why isn't this same argument used for challenging tickets for using a phone while driving? All the same logic still applies.
Yep, pretty much :).

Also, fun fact: Nelson was our test solver for CTF2. He also ripped through all the levels there in a few hours. But then he got to level8 (PasswordDB, which was source port counting), and was stumped for a few days. He had a lot of hypotheses about the vulnerability, many of which were much cooler than the actual one. Given it had taken him so long, I decided the level was too hard and made it easier by adding some code that would log source ports. (It turned out to still be too hard, so launch day I released a bunch of hints until finally wgrant solved it, at which point I went home and got some sleep.)
I encourage anyone who's avoiding taking part because they don't know assembly or reverse engineering to at least give the tutorial a try, you might just surprise yourself!

Having not really touched assembly that much before, I found the tutorial to be an excellent introduction. I'm now battling with level 4 after thinking I wouldn't even get past the first level.

Great work Matasano & Square!
Totally agree. Don't know how the doctors say.
Reduced accuracy would be offset by frequency of feedback. The current model requires active input; you have to go and prick your finger. With a passive input, you could get a general idea all the time, which is especially important considering that a low blood sugar can sometimes affect your mental capacity.
> Odle said he had not been planning to cite Abadie for wearing Google Glass, but that he did so because of her reaction to his questions. "She got a little argumentative about whether or not it was legal for her to wear them," he said.

At first this sounded pretty vindictive, as though I could hear the officer ending the argument with "fine, we'll let the judge decide!" But after a little thought that sounds like a rather reasonable reaction.

Clearly there was some confusion about the legality and technically it did qualify as a "monitor", so some sort of legal precedent would be necessary to adequately end that argument, and the only way to get it into the courts was to issue a citation.
Don't look up Enumclaw, then. (I actually met a nurse in the army reserve who introduced herself as no really a civilian nurse in a hospital in Enumclaw. I spent the rest of her deployment not asking.)
I went through the tutorial. Seems very cool. Disappointed that "password" worked though - I thought it would show me how to read the value my input was compared to instead of just matching the string (and lucky guessing).
Lose 20 pounds -- and your sanity -- using this one weird trick!

I suspect this kind of reasoning is useful in some fields for some particular kinds of infinite sums, but for the particular summation problem as stated, as most people understand it, this is rubbish.
A kindle probably isn't a huge safety risk/weapons risk, especially with a new shell. Plastic vs glass screen, etc. some kind of kiosk to load books.

I'd be ok with e readers sold nearly at cost, and books sold very in expensively as well.
Berkeley's also trying to expose more things via an API: https://developer.berkeley.edu/ (it was primitive last time I tried it, but still a nice initiative to prevent the scraping that most sites have to resort to right now)
I and some friends made a similar piece of software for our university. They reluctantly started emailing us CSV dumps of the course schedules but eventually stopped. It's surprising how resistant to technology a university with a reputation for engineering can be.
I was going to say this! Ketogenic diet is the best and most stable way of eating for pretty much anyone. Fat is a much better source of energy than glucose.
Because if you are holding a phone to your ear you are by definition using it. Glasses could be just hanging out on your head though. Perhaps if you drove around with your phone strapped to your head with a sweat band you could make the same argument.
It's not clear to me whether this drives the price up or down. Sure, naively, it's more supply therefore lower prices. However, it does lend an air of legitimacy to Bitcoin and will likely raise awareness as it gets played out on mainstream media.

In other words, it will likely affect both the supply of and demand for Bitcoin.
Will End Of Net Neutrality Bury Internet Startups?
Attracting readers case studies
Looks like some pretty solid CSS with one exception: you are changing font size and colors for the default figure tag. While it's not a common tag, it is used elsewhere. This may cause issues for some users, causing them to have to prefix your selectors.
Wikipedia says the sum (1 - 1 + 1 -1 ...) diverges.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandi's_series
Responding to these points.

1. A chance but a good one? What promise do you have that bad families want to keep their children home anyway? Even making that choice suggests a lot of love for their children-it is a sacrifice after all.

2. How? Students in the US routinely score poorly and the system continues, teachers aren't fired, nothing changes really.

3. Why is this necessarily a good thing? Just having a degree doesn't make you qualified to do anything useful. I've interviewed enough software engineers with degrees from great schools who can't seem to program at all to say this is true.

4. On what basis? Also shouldn't parents be more aware of than you?

5. Parents can expose their children to that in any number of ways.

I don't homeschool but these arguments are naive at best. My guess is that in Germany the average school is better than in the US but freedom means people potentially make choices that you don't like. That's part of the package.
From friends in state prosecutors offices in a couple of states, I understand that there is a professional incentive to try cases on a fairly regular basis. Even though the office as a whole benefits from plea bargains, it's trial work that is apparently most respected and taken into consideration for promotions and the like.

I personally find the German system preferable, I think there is something very sick about a system that has so many cases it is in danger of collapsing under its own weight. Rather than striving for efficiency short cuts, like rampent plea bargaining accomplished via the lever of over harsh trial sentences, we should step back and figure out why there are so many alleged criminals to begin with.
According to the Wikipedia article [1], it equals -1/12 (R), except the R is written a rather fancy script.

Now, I'm no mathematician, but I'm betting that (R) is important, and affects the true value of the -1/12, and probably should not be omitted.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramanujan_summation
Because someone got a big bonus when it was finished. Was it the person who made it or somebody else?
Switch to a ketogenic diet.
> which requires a high percentage of a second watt.

It's requires 1/3 of a watt. For every watt of heat you need 1/3 of a watt of cooling. (For typical A/C's.)