skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Feel free to not trust it, but it does indicate whether the message to be send will be encrypted or not: in the current version, a padlock will be locked or unlocked on the send button. If you receive an unencrypted message from another text secure user, it automatically detects the other party is using text secure and offers to initiate key exchange.

The billing criticism is fair and warranted; currently if your sending over SMS, the first message can only contain 60 chars due to protocol overhead, so you often end up with short messages costing multiple SMS.

There is a way to verify keys (manually!) but no indication that you have verified them.
The point has also been made that ambiguity is a functional property of language, because it is more efficient from an information-theoretic point of view: context also provides information, but a purely unambiguous language would have to express that information anyway. Ambiguity also allows reusing words and sounds. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027711...).
I've always been confused about open-source projects that go big on marketing themselves.

Building a good community around open-source projects holds obvious advantages as you'd always need contributors to push the project through its future generations.

As far as I can see, Kivy is supported by a group of independent developers. Kivy (as a group) must have spent money in marketing the product, launching developer contests, publishing books on Kivy (I've seen a couple books on Kivy by O'reilly), and other stuff. I'm just curious to know in what other ways, apart from the need to grow the community around your project, does marketing your open-source project help? And is the money put into marketing the project contributed by the creators themselves?
> no library, no dining hall, no gym—and students will use city parks and recreation centers, as well as other local cultural resources, for their extracurricular activities.

I commented on another article that this is an interesting solution -- externalizing certain costs of higher ed. It's a very effective strategy, and even makes sense on the large scale (civilization-wide) for everything except libraries, probably.

> They don't intend to compete with state flagships, but with liberal arts colleges.

Right. That's why I think it's interesting.

They don't compete on price with larger and/or state schools, but do compete on methodology.

They don't compete on methodology with (most) liberal arts colleges, but do compete on price.

It's a unique niche -- students who value liberal arts and can afford college but cannot afford/don't want to pay for a traditional liberal arts education. I'm not surprised they're initially targeting foreign students, seems like a pretty small market in the US at the moment. E.g. most students who are inclined to attend a liberal arts college are also inclined to prefer physical presence of instructors.

> Which state flagships are impressive without reference to programme?

State universities with a wide range of very strong programs: Illinois, Texas-Austin, Michigan, Washington, Wisconsin, N Carolina (Chapel Hill), and many others.

All of these schools out-rank Harvard in CS, for instance.

> but being better than a respectable college with no real national brand seems doable.

All of the universities mentioned above have national and international brands in several areas (I think my list is CS-skewed). I don't think Minerva will ever really compete with these schools, even if it is widely successful.

WRT regional colleges: I think that physical presence of full-time faculty is a pretty substantial benefit. You'd need higher-quality, full time faculty and really good technology to compete with even a mediocre but physically present tenured faculty member (tenure as a signal for "has experience teaching" + not ad junct/over-worked).

For this reason, I think that online programs which aim to compete on price without sacrificing quality face a pretty substantial HR problem. Training isn't enough -- faculty have to be available for office hours, need time to develop new curricula, etc.. This is probably not possible without hiring high-quality faculty as full-time employees.

As "coast-snobby" as academics can be (actually, this isn't really true, but accepting the article's premise...), I don't think anyone would turn down a tenured position in Nowhere, Indiana in favor of teaching online courses, especially if the work is contract-based.

That said, it's always possible to compete with larger universities if you define your scope. You'll see this in the recruiting materials of any university -- they choose a set of things they're really good at, and say "we're the best (small print: at the combination of a,b,c,x,y, and z). E.g. "student travel" is a metric used by Minerva.
Why are you considering 0^0 to be the limit of the function x^x, rather than (say) 0^x or (e^(-1/x))^x?
I think we have the rivalry part pretty much nailed, especially in London ;)

Really eager to see more on the collaboration side - societies working together to support the greater community: traditional CS backgrounds or not.
Scrolling doesn't work in Firefox.
"Education and mathematics ... graduates in those subjects get jobs by merit rather than network or credential at least as often as in CS"

How could that be, when virtually all education jobs require either a teachers' certificate or a doctorate (depending on the job), both of which are credentials?
Esperanto was designed first and foremost to be learnable, it seems to be quite successful in this regard whereas it's not a strong point of Ikthuil (as it wasn't a priority). With "ought to have looked", do you mean in your own opinion, or are you referring to some of Esperanto's original goals? I always got the impression that learnability and ease of use were bigger priorities.

Personally, I don't have much faith in the idea that you can make people's communication more precise and concise by designing the language in a certain way, just as I don't think that politically correct language leads to meaningful change. This is simply because I don't believe than language can drastically change the way people think (linguistic determinism, strong Whorfianism). Esperanto is very similar to natural languages in its (im)precision, which might just be the level where humans naturally converge to if left to their own devices.
What are the functional equivalents of off-by-one?
Morse code keyboard
Folding with the wrong initial value. Recursive functions where the base case is improperly defined. Stuff like that I consider 'functional off-by-one' because the student understand the general shape of the correct solution but gets a detail about iteration/recursion incorrect at the boundary.

edit: oh, also, I guess literally off-by-one errors are also possible in any language that allows any sort of side effect, but that's kind of a stupid degenerate case :-) (edit: possible, definitely not popular... wrong word there, sorry).
http://bordeaux.craigslist.fr/res/4620086358.html
Worthless article. It doesn't say a thing about working conditions.

When a data scientist has to work 80 hours a week, 52 weeks a year he will earn ~50 an hour.

Don't focus on money.
I wish them success but college without the usual trappings of college exists. It's called co-working space.

I spent a few months in a co-working space partly to learn new language more efficiently and partly to get out of the fall-into-lazy-mode-when-in-home mode when I didn't have a full time job.

As I was sitting there typing away on my Macbook Pro, reading manuals, watching tutorials on youtube, and feeding off of the intense energy of fellow 'coworkers', it hit me that the ambiance was much like being in a library in college. It felt much like being in a library when I was in college and even better, there was no restriction on food/coffee/beverage. I felt like I was in college again. And I could walk away from my computer without worrying about someone stealing it during the 5 min I was gone.

And I was paying only $300 a month (although I thought it was a bit over priced...). I recall I was paying nearly $10,000 a year (many years ago though) just for tuition. And I don't know about most of you but as a student of a large public university system, I had barely any useful interaction with actual professors.

I really think for someone young with enough time, discipline and motivated to work in the internet/tech industry, having one year membership in co-working space would do wonders. And it barely costs $3600/year plus your normal living cost (which would be free if you stayed with parents).
One realises how confusing and complicated are the standard notations when one implements a programming language. You would prefer Lisp/Scheme or RPN notations, but they both scare away a lot of people, who prefer "natural" notations. People don't realise that they probably hurt them as much as they help them.
More bad advice.

Dude STOP messing with the CSS global namespace - i/e stop advising people to change the default behaviours of ALL forms / divs site wide - it has FAR REACHING implications that you're not passing on to unfortunate readers of your blog.
How the Domain Name System Works
If I understand it correctly a lot of the geometry effects build on the ability to do texture reads in the vertex shader (OpenGL calls it "vertex texture fetch"), a not much-noticed, but incredibly powerful feature of modern WebGL implementations.
The reason it is so powerful is because one texture can be used as a write target for the fragment shader and as a read target for the vertex shader, essentially creating a feedback loop that lives entirely on the GPU.

Not all browsers support the feature though (check the MAX_VERTEX_TEXTURE_IMAGE_UNITS constant). Mobile devices could be problematic too since most (if not all) OpenGL ES 2.0-era devices don't support it in hardware.

Still this is one of the most impressive WebGL demos I've seen. Fantastic stuff.
As a project wears on, standards for success slip lower and lower. (xkcd)
CERT UK’s First Quarter: Sinkholing Success Marks New Era in Cyber Public Health
Anybody knows of any app built for iOS using Kivy ?
> Kivy (as a group) must have spent money in marketing the product

I don't think kivy (as a group) does anything except recently the contest, and things like maintaining a g+ account, mailing list, posting on hn or reddit if something intersting happens etc. - were you thinking of anything in particular here?

> launching developer contests

This was funded entirely from sponsorship, you can see the list on the contest page (http://kivy.org/#contest).

> publishing books on Kivy (I've seen a couple books on Kivy by O'reilly)

Publishers commission books because they think they will make money, not because kivy pays them to - actually, I don't think any of the core developer team have been directly involved in kivy books.

> and other stuff

Honestly, not really - I can't think of any other expenses except small things like powering the website server.

> I've always been confused about open-source projects that go big on marketing themselves.

I don't think kivy is really big on marketing itself - if anything, maybe the opposite. I've wondered before if its relatively unknown status (compared to phonegap etc) is at least partly because we don't advertise much, though it may just as well be that more people are interested in html.

Things like the developer contest are great to build interest and get the word out that kivy exists, and as you said yourself have obvious advantages in maintaining and growing the community - if this is 'going big' on marketing, I don't think that term is very meaningful.
Watch Debian transitioning to Perl 5.20
Number 4 is somewhat misleading. I'd say gov't and public interest are both appealing options, regardless of the pay. You can get the advantages of the public service loan forgiveness program and, in some cases, some extra soft benefits. For example, my wife gets two official paid weeks, and extra time when the judges take time en masse (i.e, Christmas), so her two weeks is in reality four or five.

And, while our case might be an exception to the general outlook for families of two newly minted lawyers (2012 grads), her government job also enables us to lower our payments since we can contribute to an IRS 457 plan to defer compensation and lower our AGI, in addition to her retirement plan. So, that helps keep her payments lower during the required 120 payment period, while enabling us to dedicate more to addressing my law school loans.

Finally, I don't think even most government and public interest jobs are competitive in the sense that other candidates are the reasons why people can't get these jobs. Admittedly, this will be the case in more sought after positions, but there are many government jobs that don't have serious competition, where you are competing against a few other applicants. A lot of the time, the problems with people finding these jobs have to do with character issues from their past. Government jobs, notably state attorneys general, district attorneys office, or other governmental posts affiliated with law and enforcement, do scrutinize the background of the candidates more than others. So, any mishaps in character would cull you from the pool. But that's not competition, because you could be the only applicant and you still not get the job.
I think you have to improve the description: "aims to supply a simple solution for using MySQL." doesn't really make sense, because I can just use MySQL directly.

Is this some kind of connection pool / load balancer?
It's really only the vocabulary which takes from European languages, because the grammar is schematic, very regular and simple to learn. Broadly speaking, you have two options: 1) you select a specific group (e.g., European languages) and sample from their vocabulary. 2) you sample from ALL the world's languages, or generate completely random words (effectively just as hard to learn).

In the first case you have privileged one group, but in the second everyone loses ... In the second case you create an additional barrier because there is a large amount of new vocabulary that everyone has to learn, while in the other anyone who doesn't know European languages will have to learn some of its vocabulary, but that might be useful to them anyway, so it clearly seems like the better option to me.
I think people are missing the incredible achievement this story is.

At this point, Caesar was pretty much an unknown, and had to leave Rome to escape Sulla.

However, the ransom arrived from Miletus and, as soon as he had paid it and been set free, he immediately manned some ships and set sail from the harbor of Miletus against the pirates

Think about this. Somehow, this unknown person, on the wrong side of the Mediterranean Sea, known to be in debt, and known to have lost to pirates once before managed to persuade those in Miletus to let him command their ships to go up against the pirates (who presumably they knew well, and probably had some kind of informal agreement with).

Once he had the ships, he defeated the pirates (which is a huge feat in itself). Then he delivered them to the governor, and once he had decided the supreme ruler in the region wasn't going to do what he wanted he executed them himself.

That's not really that different to someone hijacked by Somali pirates raising a ransom, going to Kenya, raising a navy and going back to wipe them out. Even Rambo wasn't as impressive.

The scary thing is that Caesar was just getting started. Genghis Khan and Alexander may have been more impressive commanders, but I think perhaps only Napoleon rivals Caesar in terms of sheer self-drive.
> ...there are several groups of sounds which the non-francophones do not distinguish, while the francophones cannot understand how they may be confused with one another.

In linguistics, these are called allophones:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone
Yeah, for sure! It's great to see a lot more events happening now. There's a pretty great Facebook group of all the 'Hackathon Hackers' in the UK too: https://www.facebook.com/groups/hackathonhackersuk/
Scientific Method, Socratic Discourses. Debate everything until you're blue in the face, examine every precept or "given truth", question every fundament.

True from false you can divine with the above, but only within the constraints of what we know and can know - this is the epistemological route.

Right from wrong is an entirely different topic, and is an ethical and moral question. A good starting point for considering the very definition of "right" and "wrong" might be to read or read about Kant, Plato, and Aristotle - but ultimately what's "right" or "wrong" derives from the very subjective societal norms of whatever cultural context you find yourself within.

There's essentially nothing which is considered universally right, or universally wrong - you get to figure this one out for yourself.
That would be atrocious! You need to flavour and enjoy the reading, just the same you enjoy a nice drink, or a good cup of coffee, or you take the time to make coitus a never-ending engagement.

Just enjoy it.
Enterprise will keep on using Oracle, not for being that its a great product. But nobody wants to takes the risk of migrating to the alternate platform, which doesn't have immediate payback. And mostly, in lot of enterprises nobody rewards you tasks like migration, which don't have immediate payback.
Verizon Innovative App Challenge (US middle schools and high schools students)
Engineer turned law student here.

I am just finishing my term as a summer associate at a top IP boutique. I deal with patents everyday and it is literally soul crushing at times.

Especially with software patents, it is the most ridiculous thing I have ever spent time on. After I get called to the bar, I am going back to my programming roots. Unfortunately, I've been rusty while attending law school and basically have to relearn everything.

That's okay though, because I'd rather do it and become an example to other people so they won't make the same mistake I did.
It is not impossible! The only thing that seems to be impossible is to get people here to actually consider a technical solution to spelling reform [1]. I have posted this and it has sunk without a trace [2]. To not try is a defeatist attitude - what is the point of technology if we don’t use it to solve problems that people think are impossible.

[1] http://www.cutspel.com

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8158579

Edit. Sorry for the tone, but I am feeling rather annoyed that a post saying that something is impossible gets more attention than a post that demonstrates the impossible is possible.
If data science is statistics on a Mac, one needs the coin for Retina gear and artisinal sleeve cases.
There's likely some bias here because stories about hemp tend to get better media coverage than other similar discoveries.

At any rate researchers can get it easily enough, so I highly doubt we're in some kind of lack-of-hemp-induced dark age.
I've never seen this site until now, but it reads like a downscale version of xoxohth.

Strats (quants) can make that, but there's hard-core PhD/pedigree bigotry in a lot of financial institutions (not all). There's also false signaling. A lot of jobs are advertised as strat positions but actually in the back-office IT bonus pool. You have to know what questions to ask to flesh out whether it's a real quant job.

Data scientists (outside of finance) are in the same range of software engineers. There are thousands of programmers trying to distinguish themselves as data scientists because, in most companies, it means "software engineer with the right to work on the most interesting stuff". The title bump and the status signal that it implies (no story-pointing meetings for me, I'm a data scientist) are, alone, enough to motivate people, given market conditions.
Their secrecy is a turn off - as well as the people who are orbiting around the company. Do we really want the ideologies of the likes of Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld - people who have extraordinary track records of not doing good in the world - to be involved in the next generation of health care technology innovation - particularly its control and application? Kissinger-doctrine style politics and healthcare do not mix.
To the max!
This is one of the lowest quality sites on the internet. Econjobrumours is a cesspit of rumour, innuendo, lies, racism and sexism. I swear it might as well be 4chan.
Finally, something useful with WebGL. So far we've seen lots of techdemos, but WebGL being so far behind the state of the art, it's like watching techdemos from 10-15 years ago but in the browser, with glitches.

But this is something I really want to see. WebGL and GPU acceleration being put to use in the Web proper. Not just a box of 3d graphics inside a web page. Plotting neat 3d graphs with nice shading, fast and smooth rotate and zoom, etc. While you could probably do this using Canvas or SVG, you probably couldn't match the performance.

Now I'd like to see this technology being used outside of tech demos. Some real world data plotted this way.
ISS earth night photos Crowdsourced For Science with Crowdcrafting.org
You didn't ask for my opinion, but I'll give it anyway. We need cheaper batteries, period. That's the limiting factor to wider spread adoption of electric vehicles.
If you just want to get rich, a few points of a serious company would do.

She could have cashed out a long time ago and been very rich. The reason her ownership is important isn't the substantially inflated valuation and digits on her net-worth, it's the control it enables to steer such a young company long-term.

Getting rich doesn't come down to counting every single percentage, it comes down to creating a lot of value. If you do that, whether you own 14% or 40%, you're going to be rich.
AirEnergy Is An Upgradable Wind Turbine You Can Keep In A Backpack
Understanding the Rosetta Flash vulnerability
It sounds like it might help make otherwise complicated things (sharding) easier by pushing the logic of how to shard into the config.

If I'm reading that correctly... the description could use clarification on the benefits. I'd use HAProxy I only wanted to proxy/balance read queries.
My experience with the tech scene in the UK leads me to believe that it is the class system which has to be broached in order for this to be broken wide open. Too often in English society clear class division is used to keep people out of touch with each other - I saw very clear examples of this in the hackerspace scene, wherein I noticed with great dismay the typical 'sterotype-casting' of individuals, whose technological prowess was not insignificant, working against them. The idea of "dirty student techies stinking up the lab" was far too prevalent - even in the hackerspace scene. British culture takes too much pride in its classist attitudes, as embodied in much of its culture, and I think this definitely works against any effort to build a broader community.

Generally, I'd hope that the 'tech classes' rapidly dissuade themselves of any of the so-called virtues of British classism, but this isn't something thats necessarily on the table. Too often, bigotry and prejudice gets in the way of technological progress; this is very much the case, in my experience, within the UK tech sector.
Do you have a source for that?

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule

"The exception [that] proves the rule" means that the presence of an exception applying to a specific case establishes ("proves") that a general rule exists. For example, a sign that says "parking prohibited on Sundays" (the exception) "proves" that parking is allowed on the other six days of the week (the rule). A more explicit phrasing might be "The exception that proves the existence of the rule."
Here is the source: http://online.wsj.com/articles/academic-researchers-find-luc...
Sweden Solar System Photos