skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At no point did I scorn such "shortcuts" - read what I wrote without the assumption that I'm anti-drugs. I wanted to point out that you're playing with complex chemistry, and something as strong as sertraline chloride is a serious choice.

Also sertraline chloride vs something like (as an example) DMT - are very much not the same thing. DMT being a natural, powerful psychedelic used for many years in many forms by many cultures.

I wouldn't compare mushrooms to Zolpidem either, though the effects are similar. One is not like the other. Zolpidem (branded as stilnox at the time) gave me very similar effects, I basically had a ??real-life lucid dream?? within 20 mins of taking it. I stopped immediately.

Either way, to each his/her own - I merely wanted to offer a different perspective. If it works for you, go for it.
What do Democrats have to do with "extreme leftists"? There is no remotely viable Communist party in the US, not even a Socialist party. Extreme leftists do not have any power in the US.

People who don't want to go to college have always had the option of not going. The difficulty is when people want to go but it is not feasible for financial reasons. Some people think it is nice to help others do whatever it is they want to do. There is no 'extreme leftist' conspiracy here.
Thanks for sharing your approach. would love to see maybe an open source version of your framework to use a starting point. I am starting work on customizing CodeIgniter to be slim framework for serving a REST API, and your approach is going to be super helpful to learn from :)
> and wanton abuse of the patent system to stifle competition.

Use (or abuse) of the patent system seems entirely orthogonal to privacy/security.
Maybe I'm a little high on design rhetoric right now, but I see this less in terms of Apple being a privacy/security company and more along the lines of Apple being a user-centered design company. No user wants their data shuffled around and sold, so any company that relies on the commodification of its users' data is inherently at odds with its users' needs.
Three new features coming on Rescale UI Redesign
If that's what made him your favorite, you really need to read his earlier post that really blew up in popularity. It's a great read. http://stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
I think he meant that you can overload operators in python and not javascript... but yeah I agree with you. At the end of the day javascript is still just as, or more, dynamic than python.
This has very little to do with some conspiracy between bankers and universities to indebt students and raise massive capital by massively expanding the university far beyond it's means.

Deep into this article the author hits on what is really at the core of steep tuition inclines. A rapidly reducing share of university funding coming from state governments turning once public institutions into defacto privatized universities.[1]

In this chart [2] UWashington lays out in 2013 dollars that total tuition per student has been around 17,000 for 25 years, however during that period the state contribution was reduced from $14,000 to $5000, while student tuition rose from $3,000 to $12,000

> "This is an important shift in who pays for higher education. In 1990, the state provided nearly 80% of the funding per
student and UW students paid 20% of the funds. In 2011, the state will pay around 30% and UW students will pay 70%." [3]

[1]: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/08/10/private#sthash...

[2]: http://imgur.com/HqVVc0P

[3]: http://www.washington.edu/externalaffairs/files/2012/10/tuit...
Nomi[0] is one startup that does this, tracking locations of customers across participating stores without customers' consent.

It's opt-out for consumers, and in order to opt-out, you must register your MAC address with them[1][2].

I really hope that cycling MAC addresses becomes easier on mobile devices, if not automatic.

[0] http://nomi.com

[1] http://nomi.com/privacy/

[2] Assuming you even know that this service exists (which most consumers don't, because why would the store owner tell them that they're doing this?)
How do you know the up-votes on a StackOverflow answer were not fake/bots/paid for? How do you know a GitHub starred/watched repository is really useful and not some job applicant's astroturfing campaign to make it look like their code is widely-used?
This links to Janet Fang's article in Nature: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html

The thesis of that article is that nothing of ecological significance would happen without mosquitos, but the examples given don't seem even close to conclusive.

We know many species of fish and birds that eat mosquitos and mosquito larvae. From a few minutes of internet surfing, it doesn't seem like anyone knows whether other insects would take their place or and how quickly that would happen.

IANA biologist, but maybe fish and birds can survive a couple months while something takes the place of the comparatively short-lived mosquito? In any case this whole idea seems totally under-researched.
The images you're displaying on the homepage are downscaled by the browser and look horrible. You see this most in small lines, e.g. the carrier name. You should generally not be producing a single high-resolution GIF but instead a suite of appropriately scaled and resampled images.
If a 13 year old responded with such a detailed, well thought out response as to the analysis of a joke, it would clearly never pass the turing test. If the response was "duh, he didnt realize he'd never run out of beer!" Then it might be more likely.
If play returned a reference to the play function you could chain them like

.play('D#5', 1/4)('E5', 1/4)

Just a thought on cleaning up the syntax a bit.
Those two suggestions use the Oxford comma because they are suggestions for how remove ambiguity while keeping the Oxford comma.

The thing about just admitting you can rewrite a sentence to be un/less ambiguous while keeping the comma is that it simultaneously admits that you can rewrite a sentence to be un/less ambiguous without the comma... which puts us back at aesthetic arguments.
This confirms earlier results reported by people trying out the bot:

[2008-10-12 08:41:03.468] local sent: I'm feeling well thanks, have you had
breakfast this morning?
[2008-10-12 08:41:11.890] remote sent: Nice to hear that! Do you like the
weather?
...
[2008-10-12 08:42:43.078] local sent: what is your native town
[2008-10-12 08:42:51.593] remote sent: The weather is always as bad as you
think it is. I do believe that the world just a mare reflection of our
thoughts...

It's just context-free, tone-deaf exchanges like that the entire time. I'm having trouble distinguishing this from a run-of-the-mill chat bot. Is the only difference here PR? Or was bad grammar and spelling actually enough to fool someone even though the bot clearly didn't know how to react to simple questions?
> Get rid of the government loans.

I'm going to make an argument I imagine many here will disagree with: perhaps the solution to the cost problem is to have publicly financed post-secondary education?

Imagine this: the US government tells colleges it will pay $N per semester on behalf of any student who meets certain qualifications to attend that college. Colleges would be free to refuse to accept this, but with the exception of the Harvard/Yale type schools, any college that did refuse the public tuition would cease to exist because nobody would go there. As long as we can come up with a value for $N that keeps colleges funded without making them rich, it would work. I would submit that the ideal value for $N is much lower than the current average tuition.

How do you pay for this? Take it all out of military spending. There would be plenty left over, I assure you.

> Another side of effect with less graduates is that maybe we can get rid of the college degree requirements

I would argue that there are definite benefits to a more educated population. Just because a certain group of people are going to end up with jobs in a field that don't really require post-secondary education doesn't mean that society as a whole isn't better off when those people are more educated.

I'm of the opinion that many of the problems the US faces right now are more or less the direct result of an uneducated body of voters.
I'd rather fund all of those things a thousand times over just by cutting a small fraction of funding to the world's militaries.
I've heard this about substitute teaching.
The planes had to go somewhere. It's known that they took off, they flew towards to towers, and there is no trace of them afterwards.

This person is claiming that their calculations show that planes flown into the towers wouldn't do what these planes allegedly did. I am suspicious of people who make claims like that in the light of simple tests like those above.
It comes down to at least two things:

1. Easy (to acquire) debt drives demand

2. Education is still "Made in America" thus it cannot hide from the real devaluation of the dollar
__getattr__ and friends allow to customize the getters and setters.

JavaScript is in the process of getting similar capabilities with Harmony proxies, but the spec has yet to be finalized: http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:direct_proxie...
MailRipper extracts attachments, extracts the text from those attachments and converts the document attachments to PDF. Also MailRipper doesn't require any programming, MailGun does.
The FT brought up a similar contrast two weeks ago when discussing Apple and Google's smart home strategies. They speculated that Apple is likely "to emphasise the privacy protections built into its smart home system... Apple considers privacy a key advantage over Google...since Google relies on targeted advertising as its main source of income" [1].

This will be an interesting competition. Google, for openness and transparency; Apple, for control and privacy.

[1] http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/1bef71b8-e433-11e3-a73a-00144...
Why should I have my movements tracked in a store when I'm not using the resources offered by them? They should feel lucky to have me in their store and provide service, not Orwellian surveillance.

My other beef here is that this is just another way to further dumb down and make retail employment completely mindless.
I would have shown the example with em dashes instead of parentheses as that was the point of the sentence.
Javascript (6) has those in the form of Proxies [0]... Coming soon! I think that they cover the set of features you indicate anyways.

However, you can already hack them in and there are multiple js projects that let you compile ES6 down to ES5, proxies included.

As other commenters noted, python is not "more dynamic" than javascript. You can easily transform python code that does unusual metaprogramming stuff to javascript code that does similar metaprogramming stuff but looks significantly different; basically all languages that support runtime-eval will let you imitate all other metaprogramming features in a somewhat verbose fashion.

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
There's also the semicolon.
Can you break down the numbers for #1? If Stanford is $60,000 how much if that is the actual sticker price? How much of that is being given to other students in free financial aid? As a follow-up, how fucking INSANE is it for someone who can't afford a school to take out a loan to pay for that school and a portion of that loan pay for someone else who also can't afford to go? For me to take out a loan to pay for someone else is fucking ludicrous.

On you third point, that's true but in theory those costs should not have increased 12x in 30 years. That would be remarkably hard to justify.
I love that we use words like "astroturfing" to soften the behaviour of people (corporations merely being a collection of people acting as one).

We used to call it "lying" and "deception" as in "The cable companies have been lying and being deceitful about the net neutrality issue".

<sarcasm> So glad we have improved as a society </sarcasm>
This comment is like a bad parody of the excuses in the article.

1) So are all the stats that say that students are paying more, and are graduating with more debt, lies?

2) Blaming poor people is the latest trend in elite apologias. Same with the real estate bubble, it's the poor people that blew up the economy!

3) Student orgs, TAs and tutors are a totally new thing that didn't exist before tuition exploded, oh wait.
I had made a twitter account a long while ago but didn't really use it. A month or two ago I decided I wanted to start using it again but I had somehow started following 2000 people. I couldn't find a 3rd party app for unfollowing that didn't have me sign up for something so I used document.getElementByClassName(unfollowButtonString) to click all the unfollow buttons at once. Regardless of that hassle, finding and using inactive accounts is probably pretty easy for the people selling these follows. I imagine they just try passwords leaked from other services or applications or hire people to make fake accounts.
I also can add that a individual is minority in one place, but opposite in another.

I would probably be a minority in Pakistan, or mainland China, or gazillion other places. Nobody would give me any special privileges there, mind you.
Labcase – Open Device Lab in a case.
- We still don't know whether or not the companies on the PRISM slides were participating voluntarily or even knowingly.

- 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.

- iAd is a joke of an ad network, and stores a negligible amount of user data compared to Google's. It's also relatively easy to reset tracking on iAd, for the few apps that do use it.
From the first article, it mentioned that we have eradicated similar disease vectors like screwworm and melon fly before, so what have been the environmental impact of that so far?
What? IME Apple devices are extremely polite about refusing/deactivating IP addresses that are already in use.
timbre.js (also from this person) is pretty cool too.
http://mohayonao.github.io/timbre.js/

This weekend I used it to make a white noise generator for studying, etc..
http://www.noisemachine.co
I can confirm problems in Firefox. It does work in Chrome, however.
So stuff which appears to be spam is bounced, with a return message.

On reflection, this does seem like a better system. I had imagined a silent fail as per other popular e-mail hosts.
My JS knowledge isn't great. In python, I can do operator overloading such that `obj[item] = value` does something completely different than assignment. Is that possible with JavaScript?
Interesting reading, both the article and the various responses across the web. It isn't "new" that mountains erode and become the valley floor, one need only walk along the alluvial fans in Death Valley or any mountain valley to see this happening. There are also examples of sudden changes where large sections of a mountain, in the form of a mud slide, slide into the valley floor below. The claim then that this is 'unnatural' is not supported by the evidence, the tops of the mountains will sink into the valleys, its only a question of time and agency.

So when this occurs naturally, if it is slow enough, it allows for top soil to form, and re-form, as the mountain shifts. If it happens to quickly in nature, or by humans, it results in a lot of exposed rock. However, if you look at the Mount St Helens eruption area, you can see that having these sorts of events (even when they happen naturally) one can reasonably quickly (30 - 50 years) achieve a nominal level of topsoil and a return to fecundity. If humans are the agency for the erosion, they can also accelerate the creation of topsoil by pre-staging components which are normally provided by bacterial colonies. That results in a much faster return to equilibrium. Some examples of humans speeding the recovery can be found in the remediation of various strip mining sites around the world.

Bottom line is that it seems like a lot of work to create flat, and futurely arable acreage but if they have the resources to do so, knowing in advance that is what you're doing gives you a tremendous advantage in building your 'soon to be underground' infrastructure before you cover it up with the material from the mountains on either side.
Google probably also sees themselves as user-centered by providing advanced services for free.
> Would it be accurate to describe it like this: the consumers' interests are to be rational, less easily manipulated and "unhackable", and being tracked is a threat to those interests.

In my view, yes. Being rational is by definition the only way to make my life better. The harder it is to be rational—to perceive the truth through all the layers of bullshit and manipulation—the less I trust my own conclusions, and free markets in general.
"guaranteed pay back to the banks"

Not as of June 30, 2010: part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act AKA Obamacare was using the profits from those student loans to fund it, the government is originating all "guaranteed" loans after that date.
Great idea; if public outrage forces police to stop using Stingrays then grocery stores can start buying them instead.
Have the same problem.
Even if I'm using either Chrome or Safari on my Macbook.
> thus it cannot hide from the real devaluation of the dollar

The trade-weighted U.S. dollar index [1], published by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, shows a 1.2% annualised decline in the U.S. dollar over the past 10 years. This is sufficiently low and hedge-able as to not be a key determinant in this pricing process.

Your broader point stands, however. Education is a non-tradable good. This amplifies the effect of local idiosyncrasies, e.g. non-dischargeable federally-backed education loans, in a way which would be arbitraged away for a tradable good.

[1] http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/TWEXBp
How will you make sure of that, though? Only a tiny fraction of smartphone users will bother to connect to your wifi, and it'll be a skewed sample.
Thanks for your comment - it's great to get some real insight here.

#1 and #2 raise a lot of questions and I'd love to hammer it out a bit more.

Total financial aid is increasing (#1), but that makes sense given that the number of low-income students is also increasing (#2).

The better metric is financial aid per low-income student (not just per student, since that is also expected to increase given that low-income is a higher percentage of the class each year). Is that number increasing year over year? If so, shouldn't that lead to a decrease in tuition, not an increase?

---

At my university, I'm convinced #3 is the real driver of tuition increase. The number of administrators and staff is increasing spectacularly, but from the student perspective, it's not helping anyone but instead increasing frustration (e.g. if there's a problem, we're stuck escalating through more people until we reach a Dean who can actually do something). Thoughts?
Same thoughts here. People were complaining that it's not fair to judge the bot available on the web[1] because it's an older version, but it seems like more or less the same version used in this Loebner contest. I don't know for the most recent one, but I can't imagine it's changed an awful lot.

[1]: http://princetonai.com/bot/bot.jsp
Well I don't use Wordpress and easily survived the HN homepage (third position) on a low-end Intel Atom-powered server... but I suppose you might also turn on caching if you really want to stick with the good ol' Wordpress...
How is that more secure than a typed password?

(edit: that's not a rhetorical question, though I indeed don't see how it is)
It's only a sign of ill intent if nobody does it. If everybody does it (because it's on by default) then it's normal.
> You are by far in the minority by having access to FIOS as well as another cable provider. Most consumers only have a single broadband provider (and if they have only one, it's almost certainly not FiOS).

The point of the anecdote is to look at how far we've come in 20 years. We're in a very connected area, but we've still come a long way in 20 years. There's lot's of places that don't have FIOS now, but those folks also didn't have DSL in the late 1990's. The average U.S. connection, according to Akamai, is 10 mbps. That's a huge increase over what it was even 10 years ago.

> The question isn't what people use today, given the resources they have available to them - it's what they would choose to pay for if they had access to a faster, more reliable network.

The prevailing trend is a massive growth in demand for wireless broadband, with limited growth on the wired side. Unsurprisingly, that's where companies are investing their capital.

> There is no way that you can convince me that consumers have more choice nowadays for cable than they did 15 years ago, or for mobile phone plans than they did 15 years ago. Competition has dramatically decreased in both markets.

Consumers don't have more choices for cable or more choices for wireless, but I think they definitely have more choices for internet accounting for all the different ways of accessing the internet. In 2000, in the northern VA area, we had 256 kbps DSL run over Bell Atlantic's wires. There were multiple ISP's, but it was the same wires and same basic service. Today, we've got FIOS, four different LTE providers, DSL, and Cox cable, not to mention satellite. Not everyone has so many choices, but I think the folks that don't have many choices today had even fewer choices back in the day.

> [2] I can't imagine Con Edison operating in NYC without the heavy regulation that is is subject to; I see no reason that ISPs should be any different.

Con Edison is in a totally different sort of business. In the last 20 years, telecom and cable companies have gone from dial-up and analog cable to DSL, digital HFC cable networks, and in some cases fiber. What's happened to Con Edison's infrastructure? Nothing besides basic maintenance. People say that telecoms should be regulated like power or water companies, but totally ignore the fact that power and water companies are using the same infrastructure they were using 50 and sometimes 100 years ago. Growth in electricity demand has been stable if not decreasing for decades. Growth in internet bandwidth demand has been exponential. Heavy regulation of the sort that's appropriate for a power company is not appropriate for an industry where we expect private companies to invest billions a year in keeping up with new technologies.
I've just read through the sample chapter (ch1) on the book's page and found the style entertaining. Just Excel basics but obviously laying foundations for later chapters. I found I could duplicate results on LibreOffice ok as well (pivot tables close enough, solver works in same way, conditional formating clunky and limited to three ranges).

I've ordered the book.
It's not really transparency when what they have on you is far more extensive than what they show you. 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.
But definitely contradicts a "good citizen/respects you" persona.