skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Working up a few quick statistics:

- Of the people that finished a course, male students had an average grade of 83.8%, female students had an average grade of 82.7%.

- The correlation between the grade of students who finished a course and the usage of supplemental materials is positive, but weak (0.16 for each variable, except for forum posts, which are complete uncorrelated with grade).

- The easiest course was HarvardX/CS50x/2012, with a perfect 100% average grade from all students who finished the course [EDIT: this course has pass/fail assignments]. The hardest was HarvardX/CB22x/2013_Spring, with an average score of 73.3% (the class, unsurprisingly, is about Ancient Greek Heroes)

- The course with the highest completion rate (# completed / # registered) is MITx/14.73x/2013_Spring at 7.48% (The Challenges of Global Poverty). The worst completion rate is HarvardX/CS50x/2012 at 0.07% (Introduction to Computer Science I, note that this is also the most registered course by a large margin)

- All classes have more male students than female students. The class with the highest Male/Female ratio is MITx/2.01x/2013_Spring at 17:1 (Elements of Structures). The class with the lowest ratio is HarvardX/PH278x/2013_Spring at 1.03:1 (Human Health and Global Environmental Change)

Let me know if you have any statistical ideas.
I know this is tangent, but as someone who hasn't programmed Ada, I'm struck by how the superficial syntax of VHDL is similar to Ada.

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHDL#Design_examples
vs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_programming_language#Langua...

Same "use packagename". Same "entity foo is", same block definition by "begin [...] end entity"

Coincidence, or is there a historical reason for this?

Edit: The answer was in the VHDL article itself: "Due to the Department of Defense requiring as much of the syntax as possible to be based on Ada, in order to avoid re-inventing concepts that had already been thoroughly tested in the development of Ada,[citation needed] VHDL borrows heavily from the Ada programming language in both concepts and syntax."
Here you go: https://github.com/davidmerfield/RandomColor/blob/master/ran...
Ask HN: Why did the other portals (Excite, Lycos, etc.) totally fail?
There were a bunch of other portals. Most notably Excite and Lycos. They were worth billions of dollars. Now they're gone. Yahoo reigns supreme. Why?
People are lazy. Anything that works to circumvent that fact should be applauded.
Twitter / elonmusk: Dragon V2 spaceship unveiling ...
VHDL was modeled after Ada.

And yes, the languages look almost identical.
Excellent. I was careful to phrase my comment to only be about my ability to find them, since I was sure they must exist somewhere. $1,600 for a meter-long gold cable is actually not bad, aside from the fact that it's pointless.
That's why VPNs exist. A VPN without an external DNS service is pretty pointless if you're concerned about ISP snooping.
That's a cool implementation. It reminds me of domino logic gates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SudixyugiX4.
My first C++ compiler was cfront and SAS.

It is difficult to think of Ada as a 'large language' compared to everything else. I'd love to see Ada and Modula-3 have a resurgence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-3
Airdog: first action sports auto follow drone
other 360° views: http://www.vatican.va/various/basiliche/index_en.html
Does that friction actually translate into crime, though?

Further, the racial minority most overrepresented in the prison population in the US has actually been here longer than most, including a substantial chunk of the white majority. Shouldn't that imply full assimilation and smaller differences like you mention?
This is horribly pragmatic, but a reason that can contribute to a langugauge's success and popularity comes from how easy it is for new users to "pick it up", "find libraries that they find useful" and build working prototypes for "itches they want to scratch".

I'm making broad generalizations, but as examples, if you wanted to build a program to perform some numerical analysis or maybe build an analytical simulation you could pick fortran and you'd likely find libraries and examples to help you out. If you wanted to build a simple web page backed by a database you could grab php & some of its libraries and you would be quickly constructing web pages. With java you could find examples of tools / libraries for churning through databases and also plugging into various web application frameworks. If you wanted to write a PhD about computer languages you could use lisp :P.
I've found great value in python personally because the examples were decent and more importantly it was easy to see how to build the programatic bridges into the other languages and libraries I wanted to use.
I'd strongly argue that ruby and node.js popularity can be partially traced to seeing the "fun" and / or neat examples that are shown off in tutorials. They show how to leverage the constructs provided by each language's common libraries and the resulting programs are interesting / neat to some number of potential adopters.

In the 90s when I looked at ada there wasn't much in terms of libraries that I could leverage to explore problems that interested me at the time.

Again, not every language has to be ideally suited to writing video games or web pages to be useful. Ada the language might have outstanding academically interesting aspects. If it doesn't help me solve real world problems I care about though it's less likely I'll invest the time to learn about it.
Ask HN: Is security-related open-source software (unaudited) a flawed concept?
What's annoying me with the article/opinions expressed, is that AAA games should have multiplayer.

I think it's annoying, and I'm always thinking about what would have made it to the game if they didn't spend time and money tacking multiplayer on top.

Obviously I must have a pretty unpopular opinion since all the new games have multiplayer now :(
Intresting nugget, I never knew that. I have done a lot of PL/SQL development and thought it was pretty OK. Not my favorite language, but not the worst either. I do recall the occasional obscure "Cannot generate diana for an object" errors and never really knew what those meant; the Oracle documentation was very vague and basically said it was a "contact support" type of error.
That depends on who the customer is. With NASA there are lots of bureaucratic hoops to go through which raise costs substantially.

Otherwise it depends on how many flights you can get out of the capsule and first stage and how expensive operations are. Assuming that operational overhead is minimal, and assuming that you could get, say, 5-10 flights out of a Falcon 9 first stage and a Dragon v2, that leaves you with a rough cost per flight of maybe as low as $20 million for a manned Dragon and maybe less for an unmanned Dragon. Unfortunately the cargo that NASA tends to send to the ISS is often quite bulky so the cargo Dragon tends to be more volume constrained than weight constrained. Potentially the Dragon could take up about 3 tonnes of cargo, though sometimes they only manage around 2 tonnes due to volume, but that leaves a cost of around $7 per gram, which is remarkably better but still extremely expensive. And note that even though a reusable Falcon 9 could potentially deliver payload to LEO at $1/gram ($1k/kg) or less the extra overhead of delivering actual, packaged cargo in a pressurized environment to a station adds significant cost.

To get back to the other point, even at $7k/kg there is substantial incentive to pack every vessel headed to the space with as much cargo as is reasonably feasible.
> Isn't the GPU just a computer that happens to support more parallelism than the CPU?

Not really. It's like quantum mechanics compared to classical physics.

For instance, "branches" don't work like you'd expect. On a cpu you execute one branch or the other. On a GPU, you get things like both branches execute, but then it just throws away the half that shouldn't have run, but that means you're bottlenecked by whichever branch takes the longest (Or something like that -- the details escape me but I do remember something about CUDA's branching doing weird things). Point being, GPU's are weird. It's nothing like programming a CPU at all.
I love the spirit, but I think it depends on the industry and probably wouldn't work here. Seats on the first Dragon flights will be at a premium, and any goodwill from "I'm willing to risk my own life" would, I think, be overshadowed by "deadweight CEO is taking up space that we could have used to bring someone useful".

But I wouldn't place bets on it. If Dragon V2's first manned launch gets narrated live by Musk from inside the capsule, I won't be too shocked.
> What's the Ada of 2014?

Please post more meta questions. This is important.
"Never hire an A student unless it is for taking exams"

I understand the idea they're trying to get across but that's a terrible saying
When net neutrality backfires
It is kind of difficult to copyright a 500 year old piece of art. BUT you can control access to it.
Thanks for the kind words — and even more for your feedback. Couldn't have built what we have so far without feedback from folks like yourself. Keep it coming and we'll keep making the product better!
These are contextless gnomic utterances, which are not prima facie uncontroversial and therefore mostly useless to us. Why should we care? We want reasoning here surely, and perhaps some supporting data rather than a set of rules from somebody with financial acumen but it seems limited social insight. I suspect this author Mr Taleb has an ego of gargantuan proportions.
Sadly, the DoD doesn't require Ada anymore and many software failures can be attributed to bugs that Ada would have caught at compile time. If I were doing flight control software it would probably be Ada checked with Agda.
Looks like something worth charging for and that my business would use. I like to be charged because:

* I like to see that services I use have a viable business model (e.g. standard SaaS tiered pricing signup is a good signal to me).

* I don't want to be using a service that is flakey (usual problem is they become uneconomic to run, although your current problem counts too!).

* I want somebody with an economic incentive to help me if I do have a problem.

* Trust is important if I am installing something - I want your business to have strong visible incentives to be trustworthy.

Perhaps find a friend (go halves or something) that can set up exactly the same thing using a payment model and a different domain that looks more business friendly?

If paying, I would definitely like a more anonymous looking domain for use when diagnosing problems with our corporate clients.

Above said, I will definitely by trying it (suitably sandboxed!).
Designing for your design’s death
I use Ada everyday developing a predictive dialer and contact management system for call centers and it's web-based front-end. Interest has been steadily growing since I started with the language in 2006. One, possibly useless, indication is that the #ada channel on freenode used to hover in the single digits and now regularly hovers around 70. People regularly enter the channel asking how to get started.
> Hill liked the concept, of course, but Fox thought that the price, $25,000 per game, was too steep. [...] Our last stop was ESPN and the reception was decidedly different.

So interesting to see that FOX balked at the seemingly low $25k but ESPN didn't flinch and insisted on exclusivity for games they didn't even have rights to. Telling of how the networks viewed themselves and each other, but also how important it is to find the customers that are the true believers.
Its not the injection that makes it expensive. Its the years of legal costs.
"The ◊ character is called a lozenge. In Pollen, the lozenge is a special character that marks anything Pollen should interpret as a command (rather than plain text).

How to type a lozenge:
Mac: option + shift + V
Windows: holding down alt, type 9674 on the num pad
Ubuntu: ctrl + shift + U, then 25CA"

That's an unfortunate choice, imo. Pollen looks great but I wouldn't want to have to type that character all the time.

Sorry to nitpick, I think everything else I've seen (so far) is very encouraging. Looks like something halfway between Markdown and LaTeX.
So, one is only allowed to ponder your relationship before the Almighty Creator while one is in the Sistine Chapel? Or am I not supposed to be distracted by the beautiful works of art?
While I appreciate the need to respect others who may want some peace and quite while worshiping, this is total hogwash. One can ponder one's relationship with their creator ANYWHERE, not just in some small made up room.
In crypto, its justified. Crypto is like flying a plane. You can't do it just because you read lots of books and try really hard. Extra smart people have very little advantage over those of average intelligence. Most importantly, due to the nature of the beast, the first mistake is the last. It doesn't matter if you get everything right for 99.9% of the flight and only make a mistake during 0.1% of it, the result is still a 0% success.

Pilots are also a bunch of elitist snobs. I wouldn't fly with anyone else.
I had a cousin who worked with Sportvision at the time. I recall he had mentioned that early on, the support team for the line was comprised of classic nerd engineers who couldn't care less about football. And ironically, they had somebody's dream job of being sent to every single football game being covered by the line tech.
Twitter stops using Helevetica Neue in favour of Gotham
Welcome to the Fastlane
I've written an in-house visualization program in OpenGL that runs on Mac and Windows. These articles just make me laugh, especially the bit where they talk about cross platform being a myth, then follow on with the virtues of DirectX.
A really important thing for data-vis is generating distinguishably different random colors. It'd be great to have a library that produces series of distinguishable, pleasing colors.
Compared to what? Unaudited security-related closed source software? That's not an improvement.
I know, it's frustrating.

My previous employer chose C over Ada for all their projects, and they paid for it when you looked at the overruns and additional moneys spent on testing and analysis tools that Ada provides as a language feature.
For real. WASD would be a huge improvement.
Doesn't www.enigma.io do this?
I've been looking for Waldo for hours now. No luck.
Well... most large ins cos have these lines. Allstate, Farmers, State Farm. If you have a house, call your agent they will get you a deal that's a small business rider on your homeowners ins. If you don't have a house... call the agent you got your car insurance from.

Or google "Small business general liability insurance <your city>" There are probably a boatload of brokers.

If you're in SoCal or PHX... I'll give you a couple of names of good biz brokers

if you are employees of your own company and you pay yourself a paycheck (not a shareholder distribution)... you may want to consider a PEO so you don't have to get Worker's comp... that can be a pain in the ass...
Led light bulbs are considerably more intense. It has to contain a power supply, heat sink, and more LEDs than just the one that gets put into the single led, and all that needs to be interconnected on a chip.
Now you know how the non-Bay Area folks feel when there's a cool app that only has listing or presence in SF :-)
These are not the type of LEDs used in modern light LED light bulbs. They produce a tiny amount of light (maybe 5 lumens each, with a 60W equivalent requiring 800 lumens), don't work well with a heat sink, and aren't particularly efficient. Separately, a lot more goes into an LED light bulb than just the LED.

Here's a teardown with cost estimates for a recent 800 lumen Cree 60W equivalent, where they come up with an $8 Bill of Materials for a bulb that retails for $13: http://electronics360.globalspec.com/article/3212/cree-ba19-...
Converting a Project to XHP
It was ridiculous. These languages are now all dead, because they never gained the mindshare compared with the languages that were free, which eventually led to their decline. That's the point.
Sun never decided whether it was in the hardware or software business. They made outstanding hardware but made software that ran on good-enough x86 commodity boxes. Niagara was way ahead of its time and Solaris was probably the best Unix you could get. The worst error, IMHO, was to kill the workstation business. If they wanted people to develop for SPARC, the only way was to put a SPARC machine on developer's desks. We write software on the machines we have on our desks. If my machine is a x86, I probably won't be very interested in exploring an architecture I don't have access to.
You say that retrieval isn't a big deal, but relative to what?

First, is Orion actually designed to land on ground? Wikipedia says water. Sounds like they were debating it for a while and eventually chose water. That means ships and salt water exposure and all sorts of fun.

Even if landing on ground, parachutes don't steer too well so you need a pretty big empty area to recover in. How far is that going to be from Florida? How long to ship the capsule back, make sure nothing broke, and prep it for flight again?

It sounds like SpaceX's plan is to land Dragon back at the launch site, at which point it will be ready to go again almost immediately. No need to arrange for long distance transport, no worry of things being jarred loose by the impact of landing, and no need to worry about all the places salt water will get.

As for yacht versus cargo ship, Orion is only designed for 21 days in space with people on board. Longer missions need a separate habitat module. It doesn't really sound much more capable than Dragon. Add in the likely vast disparity in cost between a Dragon launch on a Falcon 9 and an Orion launch on SLS, and that Dragon will probably be flying routinely for years before Orion makes its first manned flight, and I start to wonder if there's any point in continuing to develop Orion now.
Self plug. Autumn.js will do this if you pass it the same keys both times. Or it will do it by default if you call it with no arguments. https://github.com/nluqo/autumn
Not a "library" but possibly worth a look:

"Picking a range of colors": http://wiki.tcl.tk/38935
At the Minneapolis Institute of Arts they're very clear about this, as is the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I'm sure many others. Outside the U.S., I don't know.
In reading up a bit on NASA's Orion capsule, a parachute landing on ground with air bags to cushion the impact was apparently a serious option for a while, before they decided to go for a water landing instead.
PlaceAVote – Stop Giving Your Vote to a Politician
these guys stealing articles from other site (without adding any references). The original article (in Russian): http://habrahabr.ru/post/223361/
> It's either there's a standard... or there are no standards, and each go its merry way

In my experience, OpenGL walks the middle line. There is certainly a core set of functions that (almost always, discounting buggy drivers) work. But the core set doesn't span all the critical functions you need for what modern game players would consider a performant game engine (such as hardware synchronization to eliminate "tearing"). So game engines will need to factor in the GL extensions, which put us in the "up to third parties to follow up" world. It's a frustrating environment to work in; you can't really ever trust that your code will either succeed or fail on any given hardware configuration, and you're stuck playing whack-a-mole on bug reports that you lack the hardware to reproduce.

> As for support of the latest features on my old Geforce 7600, I guess I should accept the fact that they cannot be implemented efficiently

I wish it were that simple. That, I could deal with.

I've worked with a card that had a bug in the GLSL compiler. A particular sum simply wasn't compiled, and we had to work around the problem by multiplying by 1.000000000000000001 to force the compiler to generate the bytecode for the whole calculation (the fact this trick works is something one of our veteran engineers "just knew would work," so we got lucky). There is functionally no chance of that software bug ever getting patched; card vendors don't care about older versions of their technology, and even if a driver version were out there that patched the bug, you can't trust machine owners to keep their drivers up-to-date.

More frustratingly, as I mentioned elsewhere, I've worked with cards that implement things that should be high-performance (like stages of the shader pipeline) in software, just to claim they have the capability. Since OpenGL gives you no way in the API to query whether a feature is implemented in a reasonably-performant way, you either do some clever tricks to suss this stuff out (F.E.A.R. has a test mode where it runs a camera through a scene in the game and quietly tunes graphics pipeline features based upon actual framerate) or gather bug reports, blacklist certain card configurations, and keep going.

Old cards not being as powerful as good cards I can deal with; if we could simply say "Your card must be X or better to play," we'd be fine. New cards with bugs and under-performant cards that lie about their performance to clear some market hurdles are the maddening corners of the ecosystem.
Yeah totally, having some experience with 3D motion tracking and green screens, I was thinking: wow, it's so smooth and so perfectly tracked, AND cuts between player/grass so well. I know how finicky it can be to key out elements, so it is quite amazing that whatever algorithm they have in play can do it so well (is there a jersey color that's close to grass color lol? Wonder what the edge cases are).
Am I the only one who has to live without, or am I choosing for everyone? Do you mean there's either an internet or automobiles, but the existence of one means the other never did?
Sadly, "around the clock" makes for a sexier story. I'm reminded of a previous job where working late and being super busy was worn like a badge of honor - while 75% of the day was filled with meetings. Also, many people didn't take much vacation time until the last half of December, because they were just too busy all year long to take it beforehand.

"Hey, how's it going?" "Super busy!"

I don't miss that part of the culture.
Regarding easiest vs. hardest, while I'd tend to agree with the conclusion, the logic is just plain wrong. Final course scores depend more on grading structure than anything.

Many of the best courses use mastery learning. You can keep trying until you get it. This usually leads to 100% averages, actually quite well-deserved, since all students learn everything.

Heroes was a course which encouraged different levels of participation. It's probably the best MOOC ever run, but explicitly designed so you'd get out what you put in, and to accommodate all levels. Many students chose to put less in.
What I believe he means is that if you have an OpenGL driver that implements the ENTIRE specification (correctly and in a performant manor) then you have basically all the features of a modern DirectX 11 card available.

The problem is that many OpenGL drivers implement the base OpenGL specs and then a couple of extensions here and there. Because of this you can't rely on what's available and you end up with something that's more akin to a mix of many previous versions of DirectX: some advanced capabilities but many basic ones missing.
Drones Get A Messaging Network Aptly Called SkyNet