skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>'A University's Offer of Credit for a MOOC Gets No Takers'

At glance, most coverage of this is a bit misleading as it leaves out a few key points.

* It's not offering CSU credit so much as transfer credits to be applied toward CSU. That's great if I am already attending or plan to attend a school in the CSU system, but it's roundabout at best and useless (in terms of credit) at worst if I'm not.

* You're required to complete a proctored test via Pearson after completing the MOOC for a certification in order to receive those credits - another complication.

* I wondered why I don't recall hearing about this - CSU announced this option in September 2012, through Udacity. Udacity was only a bit over a year old at that point while EdX and Coursera were still in their infancy, 4 and 5 months respectively. There's much greater awareness of MOOCs today and moving forward.

It's purely anecdotal, but my estimation is that a majority of serious (make an effort to complete and pass the course) MITx students would have interest in a credit option.
Why We Walked Away from an Interesting Prospective Project
Awesome work Flavio! Hope to integrate with Peer5 soon.
https://github.com/Peer5/bemtv
https://github.com/Peer5/P2PXHR
Getting consistently worse results? :) He didn't even mention when matlab 5 started using his 64b only recommendation, the results were getting in-precise and matlab was getting unusable. http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/MxMulEps.pdf

I cannot take a floating point rant seriously without knowing Kahan's arguments. And a crazy requirement to compare it to slow and false debugging code does not really help.
Absolutely not - we're going in the other direction.

"Universal credit" is an administrative project to coordinate all the existing systems. The disability payments you linked to are subject to increasingly stringent processes which end up declaring terminally ill or permanently severely disabled people "fit to work" and withdrawing the funds they need to survive. This has resulted in some poverty-related deaths and suicides.

Jobseekers' allowance is also subject to heavy scrutiny. I've heard that the best strategy if you have children is to declare yourself self-employed on a zero-hours basis: this stops the jobcentre from hassling you as you no longer count as "unemployed", you just don't have any work. You can then claim "working family tax credits", housing benefit, and child benefit.
I really hope you are successful as I've been really frustrated with how the browser vendors are even indicating different levels of SSL certificates.

Checkout how FF renders a standard domain validated cert on a site versus one with extended green bar validation:

https://www.expeditedssl.com/assets/browser-ssl/thumbs/stand...

https://www.expeditedssl.com/assets/browser-ssl/thumbs/exten...

The gray icon might as well not be there as far as consumers are concerned and blue vs green crossing guard icons really fail to indicate anything of use to an end user.

If you want to see a big list of SSL UI screenshots, I have them up at:

https://www.expeditedssl.com/pages/visual-security-browser-s...
I have never heard the quote with the middle section you included "to a laymen in a few paragraphs"

I have frequently heard the quote without that section, that section seems flawed in that a layman would need to have all the underlying concepts explained to them also, indicating that application of the quote would not scale, as more underlying concepts were necessary to include.
I don't think you've grasped the idea of basic income: it replaces welfare.

And yes, I'm pretty sure that the USA is the only country in the world where "People usually live slightly beyond their means".
Enabling Agile Teams to Improve Software Quality
If that were true a conservative based healthcare reform like the ACA would never have been passed by a democratic controlled congress. For better or for worse the left has been much more open to compromise
> [...] it uses JavaScript and WebGL to dynamically draw data with the speed and smoothness of a video game.

Am I the only one who gets poor performance?

When I drag around the first map quickly, I get about 5 FPS, and the "chrome" process on my system jumps to 100% CPU usage (running Chrome 35.0.1916.153). The same with Firefox Nightly (33.0a1), although the FPS is higher here (10-15 FPS). My CPU is an eight-core AMD FX-8320.
>Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, among others, see a “great decoupling” of productivity from wages since about 2000 as technology outpaces human workers’ education and skills. Workers, in other words, are losing the race between education and technology. This may be exacerbating a longer-term trend in which capital has gained the upper hand on labor since the 1970s.

Yeah, not really. Capital gained the upper hand through systematic lobbying/corruption of government and trade policy. It wasn't robots in Wisconsin that took American jobs, it was Chinese, Mexican, Vietnamese, Guatemalan and other factory workers in factories built with American money.

This article is not really supposed to be a serious analysis of technological trends. It's mostly insinuation (wealth inequality is getting worse and robots are getting better. coincidence?), anecdotes about robots and a survey asking a bunch of experts what they think will happen in the future (this has never been a reliable way of predicting the future).

Now for the really interesting question: why does this article exist?

This article decrying the 'new luddites' exists for mostly the same reason why somebody paid a bunch of money for this advert:

https://i.imgur.com/VZAEg5b.jpg

The reason this meme is really pushed, in both adverts like the one above, talking heads on TV and editorials like this (hastily researched; mostly cribbed from the output of think tanks) is largely to keep workers afraid and insecure.

Insecure workers keep their head down, don't strike, don't demand raises and work overtime without complaint. All of these things are good for profits.

This isn't to say that automation won't make job roles obsolete, just that its purported effect on net job destruction (i.e. jobs lost - jobs gained) is likely to be significantly overstated for very clear political reasons - keeping the working classes disenfranchised.
Likely nothing relevant - you just can't revocate it, but it should still give you the speed boost.
That's because commoners had no rights. So foreigners would mix up with the commoners, who cares?

Now that every single person has rights, accepting them in your country also gives you a responsibility towards them.
They sure are in some way or another. But 'distraction-free', as a term for editor (and, as well, editor for writers) means ability to go full-screen, so nothing can distract you (like news in another tab). But having a blank paper wasn't what I wanted, I wanted distraction-free editor with nice picture on background, like space nebula when I write scifi novel about space travelling and galactic battles. TypWrittr is a synergy of it.
Morgan's "Building an Optimizing Compiler" recommends doing a "spike" method: http://www.amazon.com/Building-Optimizing-Compiler-Bob-Morga.... The idea is that you should write enough of each stage, from the front-end to the back-end, to get one feature working. Then do the same for the next feature, and so on. That way, you have very early insight into how the stages fit together.

Ghuloum's scheme compiler tutorial essentially follows this method: http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/11-ghuloum.pdf. It starts with emitting x86 machine code for constants, then unary and binary primitives, local variables, conditionals, heap allocation, procedure calls, and finally closures. It helps that Scheme has little to no parser to speak of, but it is straightforward to extend the technique to a language that does.
Including https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness - a curated list of curated lists of the best of Github and elsewhere (found there as the month's coolgithubproject)
Which Technologies Do Startups Use? An Exploration of AngelList Data
That's a nice concept, but even with HTTPS the GET string is often leaked (e.g. referrer strings, tracking URLs (like Google's prior to this)).

It is technically encrypted in HTTPS traffic but it isn't treated with very much respect so if you actually have access to all of the HTTP and DNS traffic surrounding a request you can often recover pages viewed.

Additionally, in a lot of these countries computers come pre-installed with a government root CA which they can use to impersonate sites like Wikipedia (although the USG does this too!).
If there are Russian soldiers in Ukraine supporting rebels, the actions of Russia are without question much worse than any of the actions taken by the US.
(YC 12) Tilt and ESPN change the Fantasy Football game
And several other effects, like N-rays, filed by some under the category of "pathological science" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological_science).

There's also that nice graph of measurements of the speed of light versus time, in which experiments tended to reproduce the results of (erroneous) previous measurements, due to confirmation bias.
Slain General in Afghanistan Known for Technical Skill
I'm sure they keep using it and that's ok, of course. But deepdown you want your projects to be widely adopted. That provides motivation and renewable workforce given that at some point the "elders move to greener pastures".

Take Go for example. Its creators helped a lot of people to write easier network software. Maybe they even would have preferred another syntax, but got over that and just used a syntax that most programmers would perceive as familiar and easy to learn. To me there is a lesson in this too.

Also this is an interesting text about the subject
http://axisofeval.blogspot.com.br/2010/06/letter-to-young-pl...

(And I love Clojure, Ocaml, Factor, Lisp, Erlang... so really the lesson is for me)
Must Watch: A Drowning Crow Is Saved By A Vegetarian Bear
GameObjects.lab.detector.rate = 1000000

GameObjects.lab.reputation = 1000000

dc = document.getElementById("detector-events")

setInterval("dc.click()", 100)
Guesty (YC W14) is looking for its first UI/UX designer
When do you ever see someone paying with "green stamps?" All the states and territories moved to EBT cards some time back. Your story about seeing a woman hop out of her "Escalade" to pay with food stamps reeks of Conservative Racial Dog-whistling.
but don't hacked particles taste terrible?
I would love to see the comparision of these Linux hypervisors and BSD ones, like Jails and Bhyve...
> People usually live slightly beyond their means.

There've been brief periods in US history where that was true (where the savings rate was negative), but that usually been when there's been an economic downturn [1] in the wake of stronger economic times, and in any case relies on credit availability or savings to make possible.

A drop in guaranteed minimum income or basic income doesn't mean welfare automatically reappears, it means that the standard of living drops for those dependent on the GMI/BI. But that's what you'd expect in a broad-based economic downturn -- the mean standard of living drops.

(Even if you keep GMI/BI at the same nominal level, lower productivity will increase the inflationary effect of GMI/BI, which will have the same net effect as cutting the nominal level -- its just that price levels will go up rather than payments going down.)

[1] which may include an "effective" downturn for most people during what is in aggregate terms an expansion, but where narrow distribution means that most individuals/households are making less with a small class making all the gains.
The way compilers works at CMU is by the end of the first lab you have a fully functional compiler lexing/parsing -> code generation for a subset of the C0 language. With each subsequent lab, you implement more and more features of the language. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fp/courses/15411-f13/assignments.html

This is definitely closer to what is described in this post than most compilers courses, but not entirely the same.

I agree with the post in that the current common method of starting with _just_ parsing/lexing is wrong. It's a shame that the first part of the compiler you write in these courses is, in my opinion, the most boring and least relevant to compiler theory. CMU's method of giving you the whole, although fuzzy, picture within the first two weeks wasn't viewed as wrong by me, my lab partner, or anyone else I knew who took the compilers course. In fact, everyone I knew who successfully completed the course highly recommended it to everyone they knew. This is a pretty good measure of success for a course.
Declaring someone an illegal immigrant doesn't necessarily make him go somewhere else. Especially if he is from some country where employment is even harder to find. Less so if we're talking about well-educated or at least skilled immigrants. They tend to go where they are more wanted.

The small, rich countries in the north have a lot less problems with controlling immigration, owing to cold or wet borders, low absolute population and low population density. These countries only recently became attractive to immigrants. They may even be able to deport most of the illegal immigrants.

Germany for example can't expulse illegal immigrants on a grant scale. Justified public outrage about "German mass deportations" would even be the least of problems. It's just logistically and politically impossible.

That's why I say that immigration is almost impossible to regulate effectively with the means available to a democratic nation. You'd need some kind of STASI to hunt down hundreds of thousands of immigrants. Nothing would be worth that....
Sure the US wants a trial, but it's important to note that in Espionage Act cases it'd basically be a show trial. Whistleblowing, intent, public interest, even constitutional defenses are inadmissible [1]. In fact the prosecution does not even need to show even that leaked information could have been potentially harmful. If Snowden did go to trial, his only hope would probably be either be a media circus (this did not seem to help any of his predecessors) or jury nullification. [2]

[1] https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/blog/2013/12/if-snowden-r...

[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/07/would-an...
Sorry, but this needs a lot of work. The UI keeps wiping out my search criteria and going to the default of Wakefield, MA 75+ miles. As it is, this is unusable.
While it's true that most reactionless drives break some of the most basic physical laws, that's not the case for all of them. An Alcubierre drive is a good example of a propulsion method that works within the current laws, yet does not emit anything.

The idea that the designs they tested (and EmDrive) would be reactionless is exactly why everybody is so baffled and excited by this. If they are, they must have some way to maintain those basic laws, through a process we don't know about yet. Aside from the practical uses, it could lead to a whole new physics to study.
*ANSI... the box-drawing characters aren't ASCII.
11 Apps that would turn your Grandma into a Pro Web Surfer
Australia's metadata debate is an utter shambles
Yep, my thoughts exactly.

Doing something like this would be about more than just receipts as well - it would be a step towards taking ownership of your transaction data so rather than it being owned by a variety of banks, it's all centralised in one place.
I think Tea Party has lost all meaning. For me, it started when Ron Paul ran for President in '08. Forget the rhetoric for a second and just look at the bills he sponsored:

- Make college tuition tax deductible

- Don't tax SS income

- Don't tax tips

- Bar surveillance of protests

- Make sure members have time to read legislation

Most everyone I've met thinks these are good ideas.

Anyway, what was inspired by a man that wanted to keep taxes and government power in check was commandeered by low class opportunist like Palin and other neo-cons. This was helped along by the press. The neolib side like MSNBC and the neocon side like Fox News were all to happy to reshape the message. They did this because at the end of the day, neither of these groups liked what the Tea Party originally stood for...less federal government power.

Still, you're point stands. I believe in Adam Smith's invisible hand and I think Ayn Rand's concept of good intentions with unintended consequences can and does lead to disaster. Though, dismissing them as stupid is a little childish.

Full list here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_legislation_sponsored_b...
HTTPS doesn't hide which page you're visiting, does it?
I think the reason books/courses spend so much time on lexing/parsing is that finite automata, etc, are very broadly applicable concepts, more so than the later material.
I disagree. It's not that I don't think that secure websites are preferable, but instead I see Google's growing influence being able to shape the web the way Google wants it to be, and them being perfectly willing to use that influence. You can argue that the things they are doing now are making the web better. But are we assured that this will always be the case?

What happens if this influence turns completely and more directly self-serving? Such as, Google adwords customers are given higher organic ranking, weighted by how much they spend?

At first glance it might appear that such a scheme would work against adwords, but it really wouldn't because the ad-click advertising just doesn't work for a lot of us, but organic search does.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and all that.
What's next for the Raspberry Pi?
The "national" level will always matter. It's a problem of governing and risk management. Different regions have different problems, and the bigger an organisational structure, the more complicated. The hierarchical system with different levels of legislation and regulation at least works.

In some sense we are already working towards a global government by claiming human rights to be universal. Out of that endeavour there will (in the far future) emerge a central authority or assembly which effectively enforces human rights and free trade.
Even more cheaty:

GameObjects.lab.data = 100000000000000

GameObjects.lab.money = 100000000000000
One can go further still and differentiate between "science has a reasonably accurate model" and "science has a standard way of describing and characterizing an effect."
Here's an example: vouchers vs. one size fits all public schools. They're not opposites; vouchers just free up resources by using market forces to prevent good money to go to bad schools.
If the tool is really good then someone will make it "user friendly" sooner or later

I disagree. User-friendliness is like security: it's not something you can paint onto the system afterwards, it's a more fundamental property. There's certainly value in building experimental systems and tools to explore ideas, but at some point you have to consider the question of getting the ideas out to the wider community. And the key to that is pragmatism.

People clearly aren't as stuck as you think; tools like Ruby or node.js or the cambrian explosion of javascript frameworks show that. But those have traction because you can show people your own rapid success with them.

If someone's rapidly delivering high quality publicly usable applications with a novel technique, people will notice.
I could swear at least one of the years Peter Lee taught it they worked backwards, but maybe my memory is off.
I note that the HTTP spec covers the leaking of referers:

"A user agent MUST NOT send a Referer header field in an unsecured HTTP request if the referring page was received with a secure protocol." http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-5.5.2

and that's how browsers implement it too.

DNS doesn't give the page you were on. Whilst some systems might have a government root CA on it, it's still quite possible to remove that - it's pratically impossible to remove ISP level monitoring.
A drop in guaranteed minimum income or basic income doesn't mean welfare automatically reappears, it means that the standard of living drops for those dependent on the GMI/BI. But that's what you'd expect in a broad-based economic downturn -- the mean standard of living drops.

Translation: The poor can no longer afford food, because there's no welfare program and their guaranteed minimum has dropped.

Maybe they entered into a predatory loan situation where they can't simply break their contract and have to keep paying a monthly minimum, so there's not enough money for food + payment each month.

Maybe it's a standard loan situation, and now their car is repo'd because they've missed a bunch of monthly car payments. "Just sell the car and get a cheaper one!" Nobody's buying it because the economy is in a downturn, which is why the guaranteed minimum dropped in the first place. So now they can't get to whatever employment they decided to have for themselves, which further reduces their income to a level that they can't even afford food. And then there's no welfare program to turn to. So now their family is in an oh-crap situation and there isn't any government solution.

There are all kinds of corner cases which the current system handles. Any new system has to have fallbacks so that the poor can still feed themselves. Not "feed themselves in an idealized scenario where they don't have any existing debts."
Sure, but I'm just offering you a service so that you can get back to your normal life and be productive =)
I'm running centOS. Thanks for looking into it, this is really cool, as I'm always checking HN in between spurts of writing code.
Rights? Like what rights? Like the right to go anywhere I want to without the need for stupid papers?
It does hide the page you're on and all the headers & content too.
That Time I Tried to Figure Out How Teenagers Use Twitter
You don't think anything of those 300 innocents getting shot out of the sky?
That was my first thought too. Dan might as well be wearing a "LEGALIZE LSD" t-shirt.
HD images from 200 miles up
This is super useful / timesaving.
Not this.

A minimum income means that it is in everybody who doesn't works interest to raise it, which is what will happen (because that is what will win elections) which will cause more people to not work, which will further the pressure.

This will banckrupt any state that starts down that path, assuming you set the initial income about what 10% or so makes, which is typically enough to swing an election.
I had the opposite reaction. I found him laid back, fun and refreshingly unaffected. Not stilted or 'canned' as so many speakers can often seem, myself included.
"u" is an acceptable replacement for "µ". I've never seen "milimili" (mm) before.

You can spell it out, like "91 micronewtons".

You can also use exponential notation like 91e-6 N or 91x10^(-6) N.

To be fancy you can copy-and-paste unicode characters and write 91×10⁻⁶ N.
Sorry, I was just excited to see Angularjs as one of the components to make this game.
Do you have any interest in starting your own thing? Perhaps since the pay is good, you can "leave work at work" and you dont seem like the daily work is burning you out, could you start a side project of interest and work to grow that?
Ask HN: Looking for a place in SF, 2 nights. Founder of Needle.me here
Hello everyone,

I know there's plenty of websites where to look for a place - and I've searched - but would be cool to find a place with someone who's interested in the things I do.

I'm the founder of Needle Vinyl, an iPhone app about vinyl records (already in App Store). I'll be there to visit my brother, for a work lunch and random fun.

If you feel that it might works for you, message me! Email in my profile here.

I'll be in SF from the 13th to the 15th August, so basically it's 2 nights, maybe one since the 14th I might be to a friends house.

Best!
Filippo

The morning of the 15th I'll have to take the bus to LA from Caltrain Station