skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm honestly surprised so many people in this thread are sceptical or even resistant of the idea of education being transformed by the web, because I have been thinking about it for a while and I honestly think it could be a huge boon to society.

No, Universities aren't going to be completely replaced anytime soon, particularly at the top-end and at the higher levels of education. However, I do honestly think online education is the future, and I honestly think online adult learning can provide a multitude of benefits over a traditional University education.

For one, it provides greater access for many people who otherwise wouldn't have access to a university by reducing hte barriers to entry - whether due to circumstance, expense, or otherwise. This will foster the idea of lifelong learning, where rather than a person going to University for four years gaining a degree, a sufficiently motivated person, would be able to take a high-quality University-level education in a variety of subjects over several years for an extremely low cost while working full-time.

It would also allow people to tailor their learning to help progress in their particular job or area of expertise which currently isn't possible. This could come in a variety of guises - whether people in the IT sector learning more about programming and networking, or those in doing programming taking courses on related areas like statistics, electronic engineering or even business. This would create a group of people with a much broader range of skills that are less likely to overlap, and that would be good for the workforce.

A more solid curriculum would mean more consistently high quality courses taught by experts and good teachers, as well as enabling more dedicated high-quality materials to be made around a particular series of lectures which could be used for many years. This means that people taking courses would no longer be at the mercy of a poor lecturer, a poor course structure, or a dedicated poorly-written expensive book. It may also drive standards up as people have access to materials from good Universities rather than having to rely on worse local institutions.
"Only a select few, about 3% of this country are wealthy"

Isn't that a tautology?
"The copywriting is a little over the top,"

a little?

"Become the next Guido Van Rossum, Matz, Larry Wall or Rasmus Lerdorf by creating your own revolutionary programming language in a few days"

Heh heh!
This is a pretty poor reply to a valid argument.

Either way, I'm more than willing to listen to feedback, and make changes to the trademark policy. As explained in this thread, the policy was developed with the help of the community, and I'll continue to refine and improve the policy based on constructive feedback and concrete suggestions. Unfortunately, so far, I've not seen concrete suggestions -- this entire discussion seems to be pretty trollish.
That is great advice if you are building an enterprise ready language, have no job and a year to devote to reading and digesting all that literature. This isn't an ivory tower book, it's how to bootstrap your own language quickly using open source tools (which is surprisingly simple once you know how, but very complicated if you don't know where to start).

I love when people create small books, video tutorials about complex subjects. They are an introductory peek at what is cool about a complex subject. Then you have the opportunity to learn more about the parts the interested you, rather than buying "Modern Compiler Design" and realizing you have no interest in writing your own lexer or parser.

Not to say the books/sites you recommend aren't great, they are just overkill.
You're right, (1) is useful for the parents that don't want their children living with them anymore, but still feel responsible for sustaining them. (2) has more use from the student's perspective - one of the best things about college is being inundated with smart people.
What restrictions are there, exactly? I'm not familiar with licensing of these products, as I mainly use open source stuff at the moment.
If you've heard of Dojo, jQuery, MochiKit, Prototype, etc you won't learn much here. It's a post of links and summaries of js libs. I found out about two or three libs I've never heard of, and probably won't ever use. Not much substance.
US Postal Service Augmented Reality "Virtual Box Simulator"
CMOs Increasingly Optimistic About Economy, Consumer Spending
The article pops up an advertisment that you have to view first.

Bad form. Because the original article has very little text. I suggest that you simply watch the videos on YouTube itself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHuDvVa7mkw&eurl=http%3A%...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoXCn4Gh_HA&eurl=http%3A%...
Please read the policy more carefully because your comment incorrect. If you make money with Drupal, you can still use the name 'Drupal'. It just means that you might not qualify for the automatic license grant procedure, and that you need to apply for a license so we can provide guidance as what is considered to be fair use of the Drupal name.
Mixpanel: A/B testing to increase your conversions the Eric Ries way
Drupal tm policy: now requires you to get a license just to use the word drupal
No.

Proving termination for programs written in models less powerful than a Turing machine does not require you to solve the halting problem. Programs using primitive recursion, finite automata, and regular expressions, for example, can all be proved to terminate, and can express a number of useful computations.

The problem is that the pickle module is far too permissive. In particular, the REDUCE operation invokes a Python callable with an argument tuple on the pickle stack, which means that 'pickles' are at least as powerful (in the Turing-general, halting problem sense) as Python.
This is so unbelievably backwards. If there are conversations actively going on inside of Twitter or any organization about if it is a wise move to start making money, they seemingly have missed the point of running a business.

At the end of the day if there is some magic switch Twitter can turn to start generating revenue, they'd be fools to not turn it on. Say what you will about ridiculous valuations, but its a much stronger negotiation card to have in your deck at acquisition time if you are actually you know, generating money, and don't need to sell the company because you will run out of cash otherwise. Until then, Twitter runs the risk of the world basically realizing (or at least thinking) the emperor has no clothes and running out of cash before getting bought by someone still drinking the kool aide.
" it's how to bootstrap your own language quickly using open source tools (which is surprisingly simple once you know how, but very complicated if you don't know where to start)."

You can't "bootstrap a language quickly" using open Source tools unless you already know what you are doing.

Learning how to build a decent language (leave alone an "enterprise ready" whatever that is) language does take more than a few days. Promises to make you the next Matz and Guido "in a few weeks" is outright fraud.

"rather than buying "Modern Compiler Design" and realizing you have no interest in writing your own lexer or parser."

It is obvious you haven't read the book before making this comment. MCD teaches you how grammars and grammer processors work.

Without understanding this you can't use lex/yacc etc properly. Being able to build your own lex/yacc type tools is a bonus.

"they are just overkill."

if you think EOPL, an undergrad text focusing directly on the core of your language interpreter (hint, lexing and parsing are not the core) is "overkill", I have nothing to say to you!

Good Luck with the "build a revolutionary programming language in 21 days" approach!

Coming up next, "Build an Operating System in 21 days and become the next Linus Torvalds!"

;-)
The "hilariously delusional" part is actually covered by trademark law but was added in response to questions from key Drupal contributors. Not everyone is an expert in international trademark law.
Making JavaScript Fast: Interpreting or Compiling?
Inside the world's seed vault: One seed at a time, protecting future of food
No; Marshal and pickle are very different (and I confused things by talking in Ruby terms and referring to Python). Ruby Marshal isn't a virtual machine. Pickle is more like Flash or Postscript than RTF, which is what Marshal is like.
This meeting was a 10/10 for me. Who knows whether I will find his company interesting when I see the details at our next meeting. But so much of my decision on investing is based on the individual(s) that getting a chance for a true connection with somebody where you understand how they think about life, technology, management, etc. is important.

The way I read that, chemistry with the VC is worth a lot more then a good business plan.
Real World AOP Perspectives
It sure sounds like you said "No, <stuff> <stuff> <stuff>, but yes."
Exactly. I have taken 150 credits of engineering & computer science classes in person, and 3 credits of engineering online.

I would never again take an online class, the experience is miserable. Sure there are videos. Sure the professor answers the questions. Sure you have the same book, homework, and tests. But it just isn't the same quality of learning and it isn't nearly as interesting or motivating.
Lehman Brothers, one year on
Almost any format is superior to Pickle or Marshal for interchange.
Linux is actually much more aggressive about protecting its trademark. Random example: http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/15/2149225...

"Australian companies providing Linux products and services may soon have to pay up to $A5000 a year to licence the operating system name (warning: Registration Required), if the patents agency IP Australia grants a trademark application it is reviewing. About 90 companies with products, services or websites containing the word "Linux" recently received letters of demand from Perth lawyer Jeremy Malcolm. Acting for user group Linux Australia Inc, he asks recipients to sign statements saying their use of the word is subject to the group's licence agreement, which has fees of $A200 to $A5000 under a successful trademark application."
He was wrong.
Dirty marketing tricks
Why are you writing this argument? It has been made on the Internet multiple times, and others spent more time writing their argument and explained your point better.
Five surprising spots for new data centres
Any reason why the data is only 2 or 3 years?
I agree with you in principle, that SQL developers are definitely needed, I just think that anyone espousing to be a programmer should be capable of proper database design and programming. Well, I guess the people who aren't are usually not that great at imperative programming either...
YAML is strictly a superset of JSON in its expressiveness, since it allows tagging of serialized objects with a type name. JSON reduces everything to maps, arrays, and scalars, so any type information has to be encoded in (or inferred from) the structures themselves. I also find it to be a bit easier to read, and so prefer it for configuration files or console dumps of data structures.

However, YAML isn't quite as well-supported in the standard libraries of various programming languages, most notably Javascript. Which one to use depends largely on how heavily you expect browsers to consume your service output.
Education is not a technology.

How do you replicate a discussion class? Everyone logs on at the same time in virtual reality at the same time?
To quote the full paragraph:

I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think." The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous, If the meaning of the words "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, "Can machines think?" is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words.

So what he's really saying is that the question "Can machines think?" is too ambiguous since the words "machine" and "think" aren't well-enough defined. We could use a Gallup poll to find out what people think the words mean, and then try to answer the question based on those definitions, but that would be absurd.

What's really "wrong" with the Loebner Prize is that it's a very simplified Turing test (five minutes of conversation) which doesn't promote the development of actual thinking machines any more than a paper airplane competition promotes the development of transcontinental airliners. Eventually somebody will write a chatterbot which is capable of fooling most of the judges into thinking it's human for the duration of a short conversation (if you've read the transcripts they rarely go on for more than a dozen lines or so) but it will be a bunch of clever tricks rather than an AI, and a serious attempt to figure out whether it's intelligent (e.g. by telling it a story and then asking it basic reading-comprehension questions about the story) will quickly show that it isn't.
REPL in eMacs? Looks like Lisp to me.
I guess it was, "no, it shouldn't be, except that the pickle module is broken by design."

I.e., data structure parsing should not require a Turing-complete language. If it does, your serialization format is broken.

But yeah, I can see the issue with my original comment.
There is no invention that will replace great teachers.

There is no invention that will replace working with a team of peers at your level on a difficult problem, and finally figuring out the solution and everyone LEARNS from the moment.

There is no invention that will replace learning how to jump into many group projects over 4 years and get used to the social dynamics of that situation.

The only thing technology can do is get the lecture part of the class conveyed to you at home. But my value from college is 10% from the lectures, 30% from the book on my own at home, and 60% from all the intangibles. I've learned a hell of a lot more at 2am in the study lounge with my friends trying to crack a problem than at 10am sitting in class listening to the lecture.
Ask HN: Stock data question (again)
Hi everyone,

I posted a question a few days ago, but judging from the responses, I don't think I phrased my question properly.

I'm loonking to purchase historical stock and financial data that would cover every public company for the past 20 years or so.

For my purposes, querying a external source like yahoo for a single stock at a time would simply be way too slow. I would basically need to run mapreduce on the entire data set looking for certain patterns.

Does anyone know where I can purchase this type of data set? I'm guessing it tens of gigabytes in size.

Thanks
I really like the model. There's a whole bunch of small things that individually aren't worth it, but together becomes a much richer experience that a devoted reader might pay for.

Particularly, I like the idea of providing a better reading experience for subscribers. That seems like the kind of thing that you wouldn't value at first, but after you have it becomes hard to give up.
Pickle isn't a data structure parsing system, though. It's a system for dumping out and restoring (parts of) the state of the Python interpreter. If pyasn1 allowed code execution or method invocation, you could say it was broken by design. You can't say that about Pickle.
I think it's fairly in jest. Marc-Andé Cournoyer is a pretty smart guy. I'd say that this is most likely a nice light overview. That being said, I haven't read it, but I have looked at his code on GitHub.
Coding Emacs's M-x in Lisp
The writing on my screen is nytimes.com.

The format may change but the content will survive. Most newspapers will fold but the important ones - NYT, WSJ, Washington Post, Financial Times, and 1 or 2 per city will still be profitable in the future.
How Much Cellphone Radiation You’re Getting
Lose 120 pounds in six minutes!
Thanks for the reminder!

I have been trying to decide what app to make next, and you have given me the answer (or at least reminded me of IMVU interview on mixergy a while back http://mixergy.com/ries-lean/)

Following the IMVU method I plan to add a few made-up product links at the top of my site (with madeup screenshots) and see how many clickthroughs I get for each one. This will help me decide what people are looking for.

Awesome.

Edit: I wonder how I can use this analytical, A/B testing approach with everything in life. I'll have to keep a notebook.
Steve @ Apple keynote--iTunes 9, new iPods (w/vid camera!), 50M iPhone + iPods
Steve Jobs at "It's Only Rock & Roll"
Why are they any more likely to be corrupted than any other file (including your python sources or .pyc files (which use another serialisation scheme, marshal))?
Hook up javascript to URLs using bjorn
SmakNews.com after 3 months of launching will get 700K UVs
I agree with you. In a perfect world, the person with the most knowledge would get the job. But my point is that knowledge is very difficult to judge and universities offer, however flawed, an objective proof of competence.

Related to the problem of flawed proof is the competitive barriers that have been erected to limit who can offer objective proof (a degree).

All other factors being equal, if you were a new mid-level hiring manager at a 200 person company would you hire someone without a high school degree? A college degree?

In the real world, the answer is no because, just like hiring me as an oncologist, it is seen as too much risk.
I'd ride anything if it could hover, even a guy.
I don't view it as derailing the thread at all. Alternate interfaces to see a collection of shoes seems quite clearly within bounds to me.
Looking into the future with Cassandra
$40 is a pretty hefty price for a jest, especially one that's only 44 pages and could soon get even more expensive.
I am a fan of the model as well and applaud them for pushing for this.. just paves the way for other bloggers to test out the model if they do well with it.
Creating a new programming language is trivial. I just invented one called "awesomepython". It's just like python, except that the keyword "and" is replaced by "awesomeand", "if" is replaced with "awesomeif", and so forth. The compiler is one line of awk.

Creating a language that's actually good for something is a very different sort of challenge...
MySpace lost to Facebook because MySpace is a quagmire of anonymous accounts whereas Facebook accounts tend to represent people.

Good design is good, but good usability is better. Name a classified ads site that has a better design than does Craigslist. Now name one that has more traffic.
Ok, the syntax does not exactly lend itself to clarity. If you're going to be parsing why not add key:value pairs so you don't have to use the back tick? Something like:

{@ users ?
before: "<div id='users'>Users<ol>"
each: "<li>{fullname}</li>"
after: "</ol></div>"
else: "No users found" @}
Good thing they tell you what Keyspace is or a link to find out. The only links are ones to the corporate website.

How are you to know that you are downloading a video game about finding the key to unlocking space travel?
Title far more interesting than actual article.
Regardless of how insecure pickle is, it is the perfect module to learn how easy basic data-persistence can be in Python through serialization. I don't get articles like this, maybe it's cause I'm still learning a lot, but I don't see the value of posting some inference a module or library already explicitly states in the manual or documentation.

Regardless of my opinion, pickle is a great module to get you going in Python and even better for scripting and storing basic data-sets on your local machine.
Wow, thanks! You'd be amazed how long I spent looking for the advice which probably took you a couple of minutes to type.

That's an interesting observation, touching on the education discussion - that the bottleneck in advancing individual learning/human knowledge questions is still that of finding someone who knows the answer. Universities provide one solution by creating a "critical mass" of smart people nearby that you can go to for advice. And although maybe my academic network is lacking, I couldn't quite get the same quality of advice reaching out personally as what you gave. StackOverflow and news.YC help [1], but didn't quite give me the solution I was looking for either (until now).

If I was convinced I could consistently good advice from a service, I'd pay well for it - upwards of a thousand dollars a year, I'd imagine.

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=451655
Here's what I found:

Courtesy of Yahoo finance, it is possible to bulk download historical prices data. This script, borrowed from pycurl retriever-multi.py example, fetch series for several tickers at a time. It uses urllib to fetch web data, so it should work with a plain vanilla python distro.

http://code.activestate.com/recipes/511444/

Here's a neat way to download stock data from Yahoo, perhaps into a spreadsheet (so you can play with the data):

http://www.gummy-stuff.org/Yahoo-data.htm
"Creating a new programming language is trivial. I just invented one called "awesomepython". It's just like python, except that the keyword "and" is replaced by "awesomeand", "if" is replaced with "awesomeif", and so forth. The compiler is one line of awk."

Coffee all over keyboard! Damn you!! :-D

Hilarious! Upvoted! Now to clean that spilt coffee!
Simply put, the restriction is that you cannot profit from it. I use all the 'Express' stack to develop at home. All free. Including the XNA lib.
Diagnoses are psychiatry's star signs
Is Gmail ready for business?
Point taken. Added some explanation.
"They report plans to increase spending on social media efforts by more than 300 percent in the next five years, increasing their marketing budget allocations for social media from 3.5 percent to 13.7 percent." This is what I call incredible opportunity to have a profound impact in the world as long as all of us (entrepreneurs) deliver the services that will provide results. All that I can say is "what recession?" This is an exciting time to innovate!
My version of how to gain meaningful feedback in a similar way to dogfooding is participatory bootstrapping. Essentially it's in-situ prototyping (i.e. with the end-user, whether they're an office worker, a dentist, a shop attendant, etc), using participatory design techniques.
I really like the idea of refining the questions and their mapping to the answers. If the results increase in accuracy, we may find statistical predictors for how the meiosis and sperm-race play out. Macro-level predictors for micro-level behaviors help us come up with new hypotheses to refine our models.
For a secure alternative to pickle (with the same API so a drop in replacement): http://home.gna.org/oomadness/en/cerealizer/index.html
http://mtgrares.blogspot.com/2007/09/mtg-forge-20.html is an mtg ai project, unfortunately it doesn't have fireball or ivory tower for some reason :( Firemox and incantus are the major projects i'm aware of. Personally, I like playing multiplayer.
I must be out of the loop, but I was surprised to read that Guillermo del Toro was going to be directing this one. Peter Jackson is still closely involved, it seems: http://derhobbit-film.de/facts.shtml

I wonder how much the different director will influence the movie.
Virtualization will Drive the Next Network Revolution