skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hahah, no. The Web is shit. You know how many web-based educational tools there are? You want to know how many of them are any good? Close to none. None are even close to the PLATO system or offer anything like the TUTOR language.

Videos, lecture notes, and reading lists do not cut it.
On the one hand I'm tempted to tell you to forget about it, it's a bad idea for many reasons.

On the other hand it would help to have an object lesson in how not to do something like this, so if you do go ahead with it please keep a careful diary and do it online so that in the future if someone wants to do something like this we can point them to the guy that proved us all wrong or use it as a warning on how not to start a business.

I know this sounds harsh, but if you simply run the numbers you have to admit that with the playing field so diluted that your chances of making yourself stand out above the rest of the players are very slim indeed.

Oh, and a 1 time registration fee of $2 will bring you on the order of $1.25 or so after all transaction fees have been taken off. There is a reason why even trial subscriptions are $3.95, after all the costs and chargebacks and credits have been taken care of that about breaks even.
Receive and reply to SMS messages by email
Hey, I'm the author of the book. I agree the marketing site is not perfect, I'm still looking at ways to improve it, sorry if if it sounds like a scam.

Any tips on improving the copywriting or anything are greatly appreciated!
I'm not saying eval does scale, I'm just saying it's not evil. Of course, if I want to actually manipulate the parse tree, I should parse the string first. But if I don't need that kind of power, there's no sense in contorting my code to fit into the awkward metaprogramming constraints of <language>.
These guys own a big chunk of the world hair market: http://www.zimbio.com/TTD/articles/16/Hair+offering+at+tirup... . As long as superstition and India's population remain stable, at least supply shouldn't be a problem :)
An arduino universal remote: record and playback IR signals
SSRN Electronic Library
A very good competitor I must add. Full linux experience, Multiple customizable desktops, Multitasking.
You need to fine-tune your sexism detection algorithm. The word "slut", just like the word "bitch" and "asshole" and "cock", are used to insult someone regardless of their gender/sex.

Its usage here is very appropriate.
Also, to serve as a stepping-stone from childhood (living with your parents) to semi-adulthood (doing your own laundry) without having to worry about the "making money, paying rent, and not getting fired" just yet.
"Your advice is good, but you're being a snob. The complexity of a simple compiler is not that high. "

Sure reccomending someone work through SICP chapters 4 and 5 (enough to write an ultra simple compiler/interpreter) is "snobbery". ;-)

So be it. :-P

That doesn't mean this book (referred to in the original posting) isn't a scam. It is.

Any reccomendation on the internet (including mine) is worth only the electrons it consumes. Caveat Emptor!

I've worked through the books I reccomended (and was careful not to reccomend great books like CTM which I have no experience of).

This is the best way I know how to get this knowledge. I am not claiming it is the most efficient method. feel free to provide better paths.

If that strikes you as "snobbery" , bleh to you ;-)
By the way, thanks for the book suggestions - some great ones there that I have yet to read!

CTM is good, it covers a lot of theory of programming techniques and IMHO a must read for anybody interested in programming language design. Oz syntax is a bit quirky and weird, but the language seems to be quite powerful and very flexible, supporting many varied types of programming. I have not read all of it yet, but most - not exactly light reading :-)

I will definitely check out the other books which you mentioned though.
Erlang for Java Programmers
A few tips for developers making the switch from an imperative language like Java to Erlang.
My response to that, and I got this from some movie I can't remember, is that I prefer to think I create my own luck. Let's hypothesize that opportune situations arise for all people at various times. All things being equal, only a select few people, like Bill Gates, or Mark Cuban, become significantly wealthy. I feel this may appear to many to be luck on the surface, but that there was actually a lot of unseen maneuvering and positioning (i.e. hard work) going on behind the scenes possibly for years which allows such individuals to capitalize on their lucky opportunity when it presents itself.
One reason they aren't very good is that Blackboard Inc. makes a business out of suing anyone that tries to enter the market.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Inc.#Blackboard_lega...
I think they will. I'm not saying it will happen overnight, but it certainly will be in the future for the average person.

Right now, we have a bias against online learning since we think of it as a low-class experience or for people who didn't go to "real" colleges. But I think this is a lot like online dating. It used to be that people who met each other online were the exception. In 2000, if you told a friend that you met your significant other online, it carried a heavy social stigma. Nowadays it's still there, but it's less. In 20 years, there likely won't be one at all. The same applies to education.

I had some terrible professors in college (especially for intro classes). I'd go sit in class and we'd go over chapters in a book or we'd just be bored out of our minds. Imagine if the Dalai Lama was teaching your 30 hour class on Buddhism or Michael Chabon was teaching you creative writing, and Michael Beschloss taught you American History. Imagine if this caliber of teachers was available online. Would you think that this was a worse experience than a traditional college? If you only need one teacher to teach all your classes about a particular subject, you get the best you can get.

Maybe you'll still have to go sit in a classroom if you want an Ivy degree (Up until somewhat recently, they primarily functioned as a way for America's elites to meet one another and network. This would become their primary function once again.) But why wouldn't a top state school like the University of Virginia offer a world class online program of lectures created by only the very best professors to every student at a fraction of the cost online (especially if it saved the taxpayers money)? If one had to weigh the cost of getting a degree at the University of Virginia for 3k/year or 50k/year at Princeton, that would be a very easy decision for many many people.

I also wonder which lower "upper tier" college is going to break from the ratings game it wasn't going to win anyway and start selling their degrees online. They'd be the prestigious low cost alternative and claim a massive market share. It seems to me that there's a considerable first mover advantage for a school that jumped on it. There's also room for foreign schools that are already heavily subsidized by their governments to offer these programs abroad inexpensively.
Universities don't sell education, they sell degrees. The education part is just an opportunity for them to get students to drop out, netting them money without inflating their degrees. People who actually want to learn have been doing it better on the internet than in the classroom for the past fifteen years.
College Humor dudes grow up, move back in w/Barry Diller
No, but clicking buy brings you to paypal.
The US Government Adopts OpenID
_Full linux experience_

Sounds scary.
CTM is a great book, but not about programming language implementation so much as a tour through the big ideas in different programming paradigms. I can't recommend it too highly - it's one of the most readable textbooks I've seen, and it's refreshingly non-dogmatic about the subject material. Usually, language books are heavy-handed about OOP / Lisp / FP / whatever being best, but CTM's thesis is that, since they all have strengths and weaknesses, it's most practical to learn what they do best and how to use them in a complementary fashion.

It covers declarative programming, functional programming, several concurrency models, logic programming, object-oriented programming, dataflow programming, and probably a half dozen things I'm forgetting. The book uses Oz* , with major asides using Haskell, Erlang, Java, Prolog, and probably a couple others.

There's a draft PDF floating around, but if you like it, I'd highly recommend buying the book. (Same with SICP.)

* Which seems like an interesting language, though I've never gotten it to build on OpenBSD, so I've done exercises in OCaml, Lua, or Scheme instead.
6B in revenue and not a dime of profit.

If you want to see creativity in Hollywood, watch the accountants work.
R has a strong set of machine-learning algorithms, both official and contributed. There's a list here: http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/MachineLearning.html
"By the way, thanks for the book suggestions - some great ones there that I have yet to read!"

You are welcome! I had to work through some really awful books before I put all the pieces together and stumbled onto the good books.

Even most good books omit some crucial piece (E.g EOPL , as good as it is, doesn't say anything about how to write a garbage collector/memory management infrastructure, SICP doesn't deal with lexing/parsing or type checking and so on.)
Monitoring logs may not BE security in the classical sense, but it should be a security enabler. Things like:

* why am I seeing ingress/egress traffic to an IP I thought was firewalled?
* why am I seeing triggers to IDS signatures on hosts I thought didn't communicate in/out to the internet?
* why am I seeing web traffic bypassing a content filter/proxy I thought everyone had to use?
* why am I seeing router/switch VLAN/routing errors that could expose more of my network?
* if I continue to buy all of those technologies, how do I monitor them to know that they are functioning/doing their job/reporting any exposure?
* how do I know if I've been exploited/exposed?

If you use it right, it isn't just a post-attack/exposure response and investigation system, it can be an early warning system, and an aid in your normal incident response techniques. If you do get exposed (which unfortunately does happen to most organizations - whether it's a simple policy violation or a worm infection or worse), it can help with containment (who is still infected?), patient zero identification (when/where did it start?), and mitigation itself in some cases (though that's not always practical or possible).

For a lot of people/teams, knowing really is half the battle. A lot more are strapped for resources and using a tool to extend the IT team does enable better security in that it enables them to focus their time somewhere other than monitoring.
I know, but I have to keep fighting the good fight sigh
DC App Store
It's the job of economists to predict stuff like that to actually prevent it.
Why is the Apple Store Down?
Why is the Apple Store Down?
I never had it that way. Lived with my parents through college then went with make money or no rent.

1) Colleges DO NOT filter out bad students. I know good and bad programmers who graduated out of my college.

2) The student community formed is also very important. Student communities really foster creativity and help students encourage each other. Online you are alone, isolated. This is a general problem of online human interaction, you are more alone and isolated than usual.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

In various forms:

Never underestimate the bandwidth of
a station wagon
a 747
a St Bernard
carrying a load of
tapes
CDs
floppy disks.
You can start by playing with the ASM library. It's a java library to parse, generate and analyze JVM bytecode. Here's the official guide: http://download.forge.objectweb.org/asm/asm-guide.pdf

While learning how to use ASM you will also learn about the instruction set of the JVM. It also includes a disassembler that, given a .class file, outputs the java code necessary to generate that class using ASM.
Debugging Django in Production Revisited
"Which car will get you the lowest return or allow me to negotiate you below the expected sale price?"

in a sense yes. however I would like to add my placement on value for certain features are unique to me. I wanted them to at least try to give me some offers. Say well we have this for that. but refuse to say any thing on what they were sell. with a real-estate agents they realize ever customer values to many things at different levels. ie a young family values location to schools. A competent builder might not place much as much importance on newness...
this is what I wanted a salesperson for the value they add to me is finding me a product I could be happy with. instead he immediately tried to "find my price" but I had no price for the classification as wide as vehicle.

in they end I ended up getting an used SUV. something I never thought I'd do having a small car for years. with out going into details certain aspects of my life valued 4x4 vehicle and until now with the over supply of used SUVs I never considered owning one.
Your example is a bit off.

The N word or its variations has not lost its sting when in the context of its original use. I have been called the N word by people who meant to degrade, and let me tell you, it causes some powerful feelings within me, even though I know its just a word.

When a derogatory term or phrase is altered by the people it references, then that use is considered almost a different word. Weird, but true.

For instance, women call each other the b-word jokingly when referring to themselves. homosexuals don't bat an eye when another gay person calls them queer or worse.

This article brings up an altogether separate issue.

When people make light of illegal/immoral activities, such as scamming, (or closer to home, marijuana use, unusual sexual behavior, or a host of others) then the community at large is effected, for better or worse. Praising the scammer in movies, conversation, and song is keeping the scammers going.

Ostracizing participants in immoral/illegal acts, as a contrast, would kill this threat to the image of Nigeria as a whole. An example would be the crack epidemic of the late 70s and the 80s was as much killed by the perception of a "crackhead", as it was by any program or increased education.

Now think of the image of a "weedhead". Its an almost positive image, and one of the reasons that the marijuana user community is growing.
I think this harks back to the war between the philosophies of idealists and theoreticians versus engineers and pragmatists which seems to constantly recur in the technology sector and is probably best known as "Worse Is Better".
IMHO your execution stinks way more, and is itself sloppy to boot. I found your design neither visually appealing, nor usable. And the drama-queen wording of your title was uncalled for. Your credibility has been diminished.
As other comments point out, the university/college institution is not purely about information, learning, or research. In fact, before World War II, they really weren't about much that was educational at all. They functioned more like social clubs that molded adolescents into young women and men.

Post-WWII, many institutions took on new roles because they were either the only ones that could or because it seemed like a natural fit. Colleges seem like one such institution with research and technical training being good examples of how they did so. This worked great for a while.

Today there are a number of alternatives that can probably do these things better. As a result, colleges seem to have three options, in descending order of difficulty: 1) adjust to compete 2) revert back to their earlier-condition or 3) cease to exist. I think we'll see examples of all three and probably a few hybrids.
It's always down right before a new product announcement. The annual iPod press event is today.
The Loebner prize completely misrepresents Turing’s paper
Nice, worth it alone to find out about pickletools (something I've needed on many occasions but never thought to look for).
Mentoring in open source communities: How you can help
I am sick of these articles and their sappy homeowners. You gambled and lost, plain and simple. You risked your future and your families. You do not get to pull your chips off the table when your number does not come up.

Default on your house already. Push the housing market lower. I sold my house 4 years ago and am ready to pick up yours at a realistic, but all be it "lower" price.

I happened to play the game correctly. Yet somehow you feel I should pay for your mistakes with higher taxes and bailouts - thanks jackass.
I disagree, if they are pre-selecting the best I would venture its because this gives them the numbers that will increase their perceived value- they're in the business of making money and advancing their brand, or rather simply, like any institution, they're in the business of being in business.
The good news is that it looks like they won't be able to do it any more.
I learned a long time ago to simply not care what my family and friends think, or how they judge me. After all, none them are entrepreneurs, have studied business, are programmers or hackers, or even understand anything about the startup culture in any sense. So why subject myself to the criticism of a bunch of amateurs? I’m looking to be critiqued by pros like Paul Graham and the YC team. I’m looking to be subject to criticism from those whom have been there, know what they are doing, and can offer me constructive feedback to improve my idea. It would be like going to my barber because I’m having chest pains. Not a bright move. Since all my barber could do, would be to shape me up and make me look good for my next doctor's appointment.
Ruby's Marshal library is not quite as blatantly insecure as pickle (it won't do any string interpolation on load), but you shouldn't trust any of these facilities: you're essentially passing data to a very weird variant of eval().

But [edit, should have said this to begin with] pickle isn't an interchange format. It's not supposed to be secure. Python already offers a myriad of good interchange formats. Interchange isn't pickle's job, and if you use it for that, you've made a serious design error.

Ruby unfortunately blurs the line here by using Marshal as an interchange format in some cases. None of those cases are insecure by design (they all allow code execution by design), but the usage does create a confusing precedent.

You're better off with ASN.1/BER than you are with Pickle or Marshal as a file or protocol format; that's how inappropriate Pickle is to the task.
The Javascript Libraries That Shape The New Web
Um, newspapers haven't been dismembered. So, I'm not feeling inclined to believe author's punditry re universities.
Why? They're acting as a provider - and they already verify your email, credit card, bank account and anything they can think of - so if they want to then assure other people that you are you, then surely that's a good thing?
Hmmm - very scant on the details but overall I'd say yes, it's a factor. Like you said, if you deploy on RoR and I don't have it, I'm not likely to buy/use you because it means adding some "system" that I don't know into the mix.

That being said, here's an example of a company who has taken such a problem (Apache on Windows) and completely hidden it from the end user (or at least made it not a big deal): http://www.visualsvn.com/server/

Any .NET developer can now share SVN repositories without the fuss of installing and configuring Apache.
In most fields you probably still need to go the library (and you certainly did 5 years ago even for something like CS), but point well taken.
1. Counter-examples, taken from an offspring's acquaintance:

a. Student 1 slacks off in high school, finds that his one choice is a middling state school in New England. Once there, he gets to work, makes good 1st semester grades, transfers to a better school in that region, will presumably graduate after four years of college.
b. Student 2 starts at a good school in the mid-South, transfers after three years to a better thought of school in the mid-Atlantic, will graduate after five years of college.

Both, however, show as having failed to graduate at the school where they started. I suspect this could have something to do with Stony Brook's anomaly--the better off kids transfer to a school they prefer.

2. No doubt there is a problem for the poorer kids with money.

3. Increasing the percentage of students with a college education is well and good, but a blunt instrument. Better to improve secondary and collegiate education.
Two-Face said that in the Dark Knight referencing his coin with a "Heads" on both sides.
Universities have erected enormous barriers to entry such as accreditation and state-sponsored scholarships that will severely limit competition. Furthermore, a college degree is not merely a certificate that you have knowledge, but an objective standard of proof. This piece of paper, not the knowledge, is what will keep large institutions in business.

As an extreme example, I’m a cancer survivor who has spent over 5,000 hours researching my type of cancer. I have a science background (MS in CS) and I have spent some serious time in medical libraries and online forums during my recovery. I am convinced that I know my specific form of cancer as well as my oncologists does. It would be interesting to compare scores on a standardized test covering the narrow topic.

Now, how many people would be willing to trust me as an oncologist?
I think the driving force will be the demand for cheaper education as Zephyr mentioned. Tuitions seem to be nearing a point where someone who could swoop in with something quality and more affordable would do great- the only problem with that being that brand seems to play so strongly into the college decision. I think this makes projects like the Open Yale Courses very interesting.
Bigger companies often have a policy allowing only certain languages. For example I think Google only allows C/C++, Java Python and Javascript (source: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rhino-on-rails.html )
AI Researcher Ben Geortzel's review of Jeff Hawkins 'On Intelligence' (2004)
Not as scientific as A/B testing actual conversions, but here's what some people think of the 2 designs. Still collecting answers, but so far a slight preference for the original Zappos site.

http://pickfu.com/F7C7WI
A Tour of Soviet Supercomputing (1996)
"Current implementations of this are shit" has never, ever been a tenable argument against fundamental technological change--even back to the days when firearms were a new thing.
> College classes are not one-way broadcasts, they are interactions.

Some are; some aren't. There are some college classes -- intro (100-level) courses at big state schools -- that are pretty much just broadcast. Some really big lecture halls even have TV screens so you can clearly see the lecturer (who more often than not isn't a professor, but just a grad student forced to teach the class in order to pay for their own education) from the back rows. If you're doing that, you might as well just watch a recording, and if you can do that, why not just watch it on your computer?

I don't see the Internet eliminating labs, seminars, or Socratic-method classes, or just about anything else where there's genuine classroom interaction going on. Unfortunately, there are a lot of college classes that involve nothing close to the sort, and could easily be moved online. I say "unfortunately," because the real solution ought to involve making these courses not suck and have them take advantage of being conducted in-person, rather than just moving them online as if that's the way things should be.
Dogfooding considered solipsistic