skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Any analysis that assumes that whole generation of students and their parents are stupid is suspect. So, two remarks:

* Wealthy students are probably choosing more comfort over price. Less wealthy but good student might have different preferences. Wealthy and good student are not synonyms.

* All things being equal, I would find it rational to choose school with better tv. All things being equal is important there.

You school, or schools in general, seem to be trying to attract the most wealthy students. Whether they are proxy for good student or not does not matter. Even if they would be the best students ever, it would still be just a coincidence. If it would be about quality of attracted people and quality of graduating people, schools would not be so eager to save on professors, adjuncts and so on.

I think the whole thing has less to do with students and more to do with administrators incentives. They seem to choose short term grow over long term whatever all too often. Preferring quality of tv over quality of staff is preferring visible effect now over hard-to-see effects in long term.
The difference is that for iBeacon to track devices the user has to download an app related to the beacons and give permission. MAC address tracking happens without the user giving consent.
Black Swan Event  "reality check"
Strongly disagree. The relationship, while it can exist in some areas is by no means universal and certainly not linear. In many cases privacy may be invaded for no end user utility and in others utility may be possible without any privacy costs. Of course some things cannot be offered with privacy fully preserved.
> Google, for openness and transparency

I don't really see it. They have released some stuff as / contributed to open source, but so has Apple.

By transparency, do you mean their real name policy?
- I don't see how constructing a database of cell tower locations violates privacy. They are beacons used for finding the user's location when they have location services turned on.

They were storing location history: http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/mobile/04/20/iphone.tracking/in...
Show HN: Dominus – Multiplayer browser strategy game made with Meteor
DON'T play this game
In many cases, HR.

However, it is often a soft requirement. When comparing two resumes for an entry level position, the college graduate gets the benefit of the doubt. Four years as an assistant manager at Burger King, Subway, and a call center is seen as less valuable than a BA in lit.
Since this chat bot passed the low bar set forth, do you believe that it is intelligent? Do stage magicians perform real magic simply because they fool the audience?
Is it not possible to track devices based on their Bluetooth MAC?
Swift impressions
> Why should I have my movements tracked in a store when I'm not using the resources offered by them?

To answer your question directly, one of the advantages could be that they can optimize the store layout better so you don't have to walk as much to find what you want.

(There are other disadvantages and advantages, by listing one of them I don't exclude the existence of others, but I can't cover everything.)
I think that's the "easy way out," in a way. Sure, it's not easy to provide the services for free, but it also doesn't particularly excuse them.

Like Netflix vs. YouTube. Netflix fights for your ability to stream HD videos comfortably because you pay for the service. YouTube crams a perfectly-buffered, crisp HD ad down your throat before leaving you with a video that might stutter or fail to load even at 480p. Sure, people can't complain when it's free (though they do), but I think it really limits what an experience can be, and I don't consider that particularly user-centered.

Anyway, just my thoughts.

Edit: Fixed some parallel structure
So, this is dated 2008.

That gives about 5 years to create and tune the most amazing AIML ever, and create a brilliant engine. Or maybe the recent results have just been PR'd a bit too hard.

The fact that for some situations we don't know wherher we're talking to a bot or a human really just tells us how awful online communication is. That help script the human is following? It sucks. The script the salesperson is following? That sucks too. Most people's use of online communities to communicate? Urgh.

I'd be interested to see what the results would be if very smart people collaborated / competed to create a Dr-bot. Tell it your symptoms and it knows enough to send you to a pharmacist, a doctor, the ER, or call an ambulance. Because in the UK we uave telephone lines that are supposed to be able to do that. They were created to stop people going to A&E if they didn't need to go. The phone lines end up sending more people to A&E.
You can set a custom getters and setters, but I wouldn't call it operator overloading. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

So...

> var x = {}
> Object.defineProperty(x, 'value', { get: function() { return 1 }, set: function() { console.log('set') } })
> x.value
1
> x.value = 2
set
> x.value
1
Well it should be a requirement.

Where I live (Alberta, Canada) a 4 year degree is a bare minimum requirement to teach, most have an education degree which, in many Universities, requires a BA before you can get into the education faculty...
I'm with him on the arcane rules about Array copying — IIRC, when you modify them such as to change the length but not otherwise.
Mosquito: World's Deadliest Animal
This is terrible.

You can't argue that universities charge more because they are able to, which is common sense, and also argue that we tried the free market (whatever that means) and it was part of the problem. E-gads, what a mess.

People today have roughly the same amount of money as they did 30 years ago. The cost of college education in terms of the amount of money people directly and immediately pay has not changed. It's not like we all became millionaires. What's happened is that we switched from grants to loans, which was supposed to allocate more risk on the student and banks, then we made sure that anybody that wanted a loan could get one, so there was no immediate penalty for making a bad choice.

We took a trade with tremendous uncertain future returns -- which degree I should get -- made sure everybody could get whatever they wanted, then pushed any pain far out into the future. Then we piled on by making the entire scheme immune from bankruptcy, taking out any risk that creditors might face! It's like we just kept the grants, but forced the student to pay for his own grant in terms of future debt. It's a incredibly terrible job of policy, no doubt, but the free market has nothing to do with it. If anything, it's a nice little experiment on how screwed up you can make a market before some kind of feedback mechanism kicks in. We took the purchaser out of the mix, then we took the lenders out. The only thing left is the political system, which seems wedded to the policies that led us here in the first place. Continuing down this road of idiocy, next up we should try to take the political system itself out of the mix. Perhaps we could have a constitutional "right" to an university education?

I will agree with the author that colleges charge more simply because they can. That's the way selling stuff works. You charge more until you start selling less. I will also agree that reporters (and some essayists) have great difficulty actually looking at the problem honestly.

This is the tragedy of our times, this indentured servitude we are placing on the next generation. Somebody is going to have to be a grown-up here and tell people what they don't want to hear: it is not in society's interests to guarantee the funding of little Junior's degree in underwater basket weaving. I don't see that person or party on the horizon, but here's hoping they show up soon.
Battlefield is EA, not going to happen.
Can I get a tldr? Where is all this money ending up?
Only if that $N cap must cover a minimum of near 100% of the salary could that even have an impact, IMO.

Without minimum coverage it's just a subsidy that will drive the cost of college up even more since every student would be able to afford a minimum of $N. It's virtually identical to the current loan landscape.

Example (broad strokes):

Student Grant / yr Minimum Coverage
$5,000 100%
$10,000 98%
...
$50,000 90%

Couple this with removing government backed student loans for undergraduate altogether and now you've got a reasonable out-of-pocket maximum spend per student per year. In this table it would be $5k for a $50k school - if the school wants any gov help they have to manage their own tuition costs.

Obviously this would be sort of a disaster at first and these numbers are probably silly, I have no clue what the process of coming up with these numbers and adjusting them (somewhat less than 1200% over 30 years) would even look like.
On the user's devices.
I'm slightly confused by your wording but I think the functionality you're referring to is already available via Object.defineProperty's "get" and "set" options: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
This doesn't seem like much of a milestone to me. If Ray Kurzweil wins this bet against Mitch Kapor, that will be a milestone: http://longbets.org/1/
Big corps would be hard pressed to be "good citizens" or bear anything resembling respectfulness. They're a multitude of individuals with often conflicting interests who are all given the general direction of going for profit. Maybe an exception could be a big company where a founder who really puts his grand vision/values above anything else is still in control, which is not the case (or has ever been for Apple.)
This just translates Python syntax into JavaScript, assuming a direct translation is possible.

Neat, but a more compelling post would compare with CoffeeScript and check build times, high-level syntax, and features like generators, list comprehensions, itertools, functools, and so on.

Edit: why the downvote? Am I incorrect about something? If so, I'm genuinely curious to know what I'm overlooking here.

Edit 2: I went over to the github page and it is in fact a 'transpiler', though it can run self-hosted in node, and the features list includes both list comprehensions and
yield (i.e. generator functions). It looks like the itertools and functools libraries aren't supported yet, but doing so really wouldn't be too difficult. CoffeeScript is a direct output option too.
Is it just me, or does this guy sound a little like James Mickens, the hilarious Microsoft blogger? http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2013/12/24/10484...
> It's less visibly intrusive, but the effect is the same. Our instincts aren't very good at reacting to effects we can't see

Absolutely true.

We should also consider the underlying causes of certain emotions, and whether or not they should be warranted.

Many phobias are unwarranted fears, so the goal is to eliminate the emotion rather than the underlying source. But the decision to _try_ to eliminate the fear can only be done after identifying and confirming that the fear is indeed unwarranted and unhealthy.

On the other hand, if the emotion is warranted, then it's completely valid.

What I'm suggesting is that human emotion serve as a really good indicator, but they cannot be taken as the absolute truth. It's best to investigate the actual facts and come up with logical conclusions. So neither trusting emotions blindly, nor ignoring them completely is the best course of action, but something in between.
More good news for open source and Linux.

Valve is probably the most influential single entity in PC gaming, for them to embrace open-source to this degree is massive...
> I'd say Google is for control as much as Apple, I'll concede openness vs. privacy which both sound like something spouted out by a suit.

Naturally they are both vying for leverage. To borrow a line from The Lords of Strategy, "the key way to think about competitive advantage is to think about how to design ecology in such a way to achieve goals you’re trying to pursue" [1].

Apple monetises device sales. It fiercely protects those sales by ensuring everything one does in its ecosystem is done through its devices. That fortification gives it more freedom with user data, which it can play against Google by encrypting and anonymizing its users' activity.

Google, on the other hand, monetises its access to user data. It fiercely protects that access by ensuring everything one does in its ecosystem runs through its servers. That fortification gives it more freedom with devices and standards, which it can play against Apple by encouraging modularity, adaptability, and customisation.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Lords-Strategy-Intellectual-Corpor...
This again? They were storing location history as to more easily pinpoint the user's location without having to maintain a constant connection with a GPS satellite. They weren't storing it and sending it off to the NSA, your local police, or their own data center to mine it.
Oxitec are the ones to follow in this space. Really awesome work: http://www.oxitec.com
I'm pretty apathetic to the whole issue. I'm a lot more worked up about the fact that these things are already fair game when it comes to private corporations. As someone who isn't hoping for some libertarian, trans-national world order based on the internet, I'm a lot more worried about how private companies can abuse that data than how the government can do so. Yes, the government can throw me in jail and private companies can't, but the government has little reason to want me in jail. Meanwhile, private companies have a lot of incentive to access that data and screw me over.

I think the libertarianness of the whole digital privacy movement is losing a lot of potential supporters. If the restrictions on government surveillance were bundled together with restrictions on corporate surveillance with a consumer protection angle, I think you'd get a lot more people on board.
or perhaps:

explanation-for ((make-sentence-flow) (momentum, syncopation, rhythm-and-pattern)) (...)
> one of the advantages could be that they can optimize the store layout better so you don't have to walk as much to find what you want.

But stores do not want to do that. Stores know you want a pint of milk and loaf of bread. They put these two items far apart which means you need to walk past all that other stuff, this increasing the chance you'll buy something else.

Tracking technology isn't going to ne used to make my experience nicer unless that translates into more money fornthe store.
> Without minimum coverage it's just a subsidy

Sorry, I was unclear: the idea would be that a college that accepts the $N tuition would be prohibited from charging the students attending any additional tuition.
Many Bluetooth LE devices (including iOS 7) do something similar -- otherwise you'd be able to track people by all of their BT LE devices which are constantly advertising their existence. They cycle their advertised MAC addresses every 15 minutes or so (and some provide a "random resolvable address" which you can use to find out the physical BT MAC address after pairing for easier reconnection).

From my office in downtown Los Altos, I can currently see a FitBit Flex, a FitBit One and a couple of phones -- the randomized MAC address is all that prevents someone bad from tracking them (BTLE scanners/phones are cheap!).

I guess you could still use the 15 minute MAC to track people through a train station or other semi-public space (to gather metrics on where people are coming from and going to). If you had a lot of antennas then you could circumvent the MAC cycling by linking devices in the same area with the same name and similar RSSI...
Hello Richard.

These Europian law makers have this most ambitious idea for all personal information on the corporate websites to be editable by yours truly. Wikipedians go as far as to claim that one can not validate authorship over the Internet. If you cant offer the user the right to vanish it follows that you shouldn't be data mining the person let alone distribute it.
One thing that tends to be more or less ignored: The defenses that banks deploy to protect themselves against the bad passwords that they force their customers to use are not intended to help the customer, very much the opposite, they are a vulnerability in themselves.

Specifically, the tendency to lock an account after a few wrong login attempts is effectively a DoS vulnerability for the customer, as it allows anyone who knows your username (which often even is just the account number, so essentially public information) to trivially prevent you from accessing/using your money.

Their only focus is on preventing third parties from accessing my money, but my interest is not that third parties can not access my money, my interest is that I can access my money, which means both not having it taken by third parties, but also not having it taken temporarily by the bank who want to protect themselves (if the bank locks me out from my account, that's functionally equivalent to them taking all my money out of my account for a day or two (or however long it takes to reactivate the login) - while I am locked out, I can pay just as much as when there is no money in the account).
I'd like sources on SEO being a "muti billion dollar industry". Tens/hundreds of millions, maybe. I doubt multi-billions.
jcalvinowens: That makes way more sense (sorry, can't reply)
No, you misunderstand iBeacon. The sole purpose of iBeacon is to let handsets detect it, not the other way around.

In order to for it to be used to track users, the user would have to run an app that detects the beacon and then communicates back to the business. In other words, the user has to opt in to tracking.
There are inbuilt time delays to prevent rapid replying.

You can bypass this by clicking the "link" link which should bring up a reply box.
>while I am locked out, I can pay just as much as when there is no money in the account

Being locked out of online banking doesn't disable your debit card or your paper checks, does it?
If you have discoverable mode on, sure. But typically that's specifically user-activated and only lasts for a couple of minutes.
Actually looks quiet interesting. I know the main competition for games of this genre are O-Game and tribal wars. The former offers that you can pause your account and be invulnerable to attack, but not gain resources nor queues process (build). And Tribal wars doesn't.

As far as I know currently TW nor O-Game allows for troops to be garrisoned outside of their home hexes. Let alone combine armies outside of their hexes (to combine arms).

There are some newer ideas that are fresh to the genre here. It will be interesting to see what develops.

:.:.:

One question I would like to ask is if hexes hold finite resources or infinite I.E.: If my workers father from a hex, and another player also gathers from the same hex, will they also gain the same number of resources as me (provide the same number of works (at the same level))?

TW and O-Game have a system where resources regenerate so players can economical challenge each other.
Read the whole post. I'm not just trashing the left or "Democrats". I'm critical of all political factions on this issue and point out that the most evil faction (the corporatists) is the only one that got what it wanted.
> If neither of us refrain, the numbers become increasingly meaningless and we're left with no way to demonstrate our credibility.

I disagree. It simply means that raw follower count is no longer a usable metric to determine credibility.

There's still tons of other signals that could be harvest. Like PageRank, it seems like a better system would understand the value of each follower (instead of just counting followers/links).
> In this chart [2] UWashington lays out in 2013 dollars that total tuition per student has been around 17,000 for 25 years

If true, that would make UWashington a shining beacon of frugality and equality (or a really low-end university). That tuition has been massively outpacing inflation is something I have heard from too many different sources to dobut, so the question is: Is UWashington lying in that paper, or is exploding tuition something that affects only a small number of universities (and thus students), and in the latter case why don't students switch to cheaper universities?
> The state of development of the various GNU/ Linux distributions has reached a point where everything "just works".

Not really. I'd argue it has actually gotten worse in recent years, unless you enjoy using ancient hardware.

Support for 802.11ac chipsets in particular has been bad in my experience: Intel only works properly with very recent kernels, Broadcom and Qualcomm/Atheros tend to be buggy or they don't work at all. Or they're just barely working and essential features like, oh, using the 5 GHz band, are missing. And these are the three vendors whose chipsets you'll find most commonly in Laptops at the moment.

I guess it's possible I was just very unlucky.

OP also mentions Bluetooth, which I would agree is a bad joke on Linux. The whole stack seems to be garbage.

And of course, if you have a Laptop with anything other than Intel graphics, you might as well not even bother.

All of this – except maybe the Bluetooth part – is of course mostly a problem of hardware vendors being indifferent or even hostile towards Linux, but that does not change the fact that very often it does not "just work". You need to pick your hardware very carefully.
> I've seen this too, but it's not a new phenomenon. This has always happened behind closed doors; LinkedIn merely makes it public.

Yep, we had an engineer who spent 40 hours a week going around and building social connections.. Where did he find the time?
I'm not sure what you're point is, becauae on first read it looks like you're agreeing with me? The whole point of the quote was that contrived sentences aren't good examples.
It's Slate - you can pretty much expect "#1% #wealthgap #taxtherich" by default.
The only thing missing from this is a reference to the mathematical theory of harmonic analysis, which provides a way to calculate the exact eigenvalues (or modes) of these systems (well at least a linear approximation to them). In particular, there is a lot that can be said about such systems (formally defined by a self-adjoint operator on a Hilbert space) beyond simply simulating them.
They Hack Because They Can
Maybe in an hour, when my units finish moving, I'll check back and see if I can figure out this game. But probably not.
Most anyone that requires a BA in a specific field will accept a BA in a different field if you talk to them.

It's a filtering mechanism that lets them reduce their applicant pool so that they spend less time and money filtering unqualified applicants.
Really interesting - the view from two or three years ago that Local was where it was at I felt even over here, and it is still a dream for many. It's just not something that fits with the one big server farm and the whole world connects to it.

Local will be solved not by one company winning it all, but by mesh networks redefining how we talk to each other - from hubs to meshes. Reflecting reality again.
The other interesting and recent "Python in the browser" project is RapydScript - https://github.com/atsepkov/RapydScript

Unlike PythonJS, it does not have the goal of being 100% Python compatible, but instead takes the CoffeeScript approach. So, like Coffeescript, you get (mostly) clean Javascript output, no huge library dependency, runs nearly as fast as Javascript, etc.

Check out the "ants" demo - http://salvatore.pythonanywhere.com/RapydBox/default/editor

I've been playing around with both PythonJS and Rapydscript, and I like both. Different goals. PythonJS can output to Lua, too - so there's the whole Python in LuaJIT angle which could be very interesting as it matures.
In addition to that, this man was illegally staying in his office overnight. The fact that he used his office's resources doesn't make him clever, but something else.