skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I mostly disagree with your premise. This is a problem that only really afflicts two college sports: football & basketball, which are not coincidentally the only revenue sports at most schools. Most student-athletes take academics as seriously as their sport(s), and I think the fact that American colleges & universities offer top quality athletic programs as well as academic educations one of the best things about them.

That said, football & basketball are completely out of hand, not to mention the playoff/BCS/NCAA Tournament system, TV/media rights, and the insanity of one-and-done feeder systems into the NBA (I'm looking at you, Kentucky!). Those athletes should be paid and they should potentially be employed by the colleges as athletes completely separately from any academic matriculation.
From my point of view, core expectations are editing document with multiple users, tracking changes, comparing and merging versions and you can list whatever you can do easily with the plain text file. These would be painful when you are doing it with Word.
Microsoft Open Letter to Academic Research Community
> Well, they are getting compensation in terms of free tuition, room and board, etc... these things do have significant value.

Compare and contrast with the money an 18-21 year old second team player at Real Madrid or Barcelona makes and get back to me on the "significant value". Especially when the athletes are being funneled through second-rate degrees to free up their time for sport.
Finally! But too bad this coincided with Google Inbox. :(
Agree 100%. And -- even if they took "real" classes, all the high profile athletes have private tutors, too, who may well do a large portion of their work for them.
What I've gathered is that accents depend on your ability to distinguish phonemes - the classic example is that in western languages there is p vs. b sound - whereas in Tagalog there is also a pb intermediate sound.

If you have an ear for knowing that some languages use that phoneme, you will be more likely to be able to both hear and articulate these sounds (i.e., your aptitude for learning language accents is higher)
I can't wait to try this out. I'm drawing a few parallels to Acompli (when it comes to how Inbox handles attachments) and I love Acompli. Hope they add Google Apps support soon.
The Surprising New Math of Startups
well this explains http://goo.gl/JLPkyi!
oh man, this doesn't give me much hope. I'm visiting China next fall and was hoping I could have a good handle on the basics by then. I'm learning via Pimsleur and right now I can only say strange phrases like "Would you like to go to the hotel with me?" and "How much money?" I'm joking slightly, I've learned a little bit more than that. But I swear Pimsleur targets their lessons at single men trying to meet foreigners.
Also, as a red-green colorblind person I can't make any sense of weather.gov's maps.
Your example looks fine in chrome for me.
This is definitely a phenomenon that has been around for a long time. From a certain epistolary novel published around seventy years ago I quote the following passage:

"If a man simply lets others pay for him, he is 'mean'; if he boasts of it in a jocular manner and twits his fellows with having been scored off, he is no longer 'mean' but a comical fellow. Mere cowardice is shameful; cowardice boasted of with humorous exaggerations and grotesque gestures can be passed off as funny. Cruelty is shameful— unless the cruel man can represent it as a practical joke."
Here's a link to the "article preview" in Nature:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v514/n7523/full/nature1...

I see the article includes an all-star cast of co-authors who have done much of the most important research on ancient human DNA. A review article on ancient human DNA from just a few weeks ago, "Towards a new history and geography of human genes informed by ancient DNA," provides a lot of good background on this topic.

http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2014/03/21/003517.f...
The NBA currently disallows drafting players straight out of high school, but for a decently long era it was allowed and a lot of the biggest stars who entered the NBA at that time were drafted from high school, including Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, and Kevin Garnett.
She could be mistaken for Taiwanese with that accent. In other words she's 100% naturalised.
Gosh! You're so right. The first thing I thought of when I saw the video was the same thing. Show me what the app does Google!
They're not really playing sports at an academic institution... they're playing sports for a business that's got a joint branding contract with an academic institution.
Somewhere buried deep in this "experience" is a way to add twitter sign in to my iOS app. Can you just give me a link to the darn framework so I can download it and drag it into my XCode project like EVERY OTHER FRAMEWORK I EVER USE HAS? Why must I install some toolbar client and inject some script into my Xcode build process. Somehow these things are talking to each other. It got me into this state where it broke my iOS app build. And now im stuck.
For me, the reverse is true.

I would rather trust an app running locally behind my firewall than I would trust lastpass. If the app tries to sneak a copy of my passwords out of the network its going to have to find a way through the outbound firewall first. I have no such protection when using last pass.
The GPG Suite for Mac is not free anymore
http://www.semiprofootball.org/
Why does manual intervention (per se) make your zero-inbox so effective? This isn't somehow magically processing emails for you, it's just automating how those emails are handled after you decide what to do with them.

IIRC inbox-zero says you should file all of those to a "next week" or "next month" category and then once a week go through that inbox. This effectively removes the need to do that chore, because you can just say "put this back in front of me a week/month from now."

I don't see why this is any less "device agnostic" than any other method. You can use Inbox on mobile or desktop and they stay in sync; in fact, you can use Inbox on mobile and traditional Gmail on desktop (or vice-versa) and they'll stay in sync as well. (And you do in fact konw if the email is unread or not, since that's a separate bit of status info. You can snooze an email without reading it.)
I don't have a problem with my e-mail workflow, it took a while and much effort to get to that point though.
I only have this anecdote. My wife, two kids (3 & 5 years old) and I have been taking Mandarin classes for the past six months. My wife & I pick up the concepts, grammar/patterns and vocabulary about three times faster than our kids (we are also forced to work harder at it because we're constantly reinforcing the lessons to them, so that inherently biases this analysis). That said, their pronunciation is muuuuuuuch better than ours.
Benefit: REITs commoditize the real estate market. If you're just a regular joe and you want to invest in stock or gold or pork bellies, a reasonably small investment is enough to get you started. Trying to buy into real estate is nigh impossible, though, unless you pool money because the "unit" price is so high.
Well, you could just get a degree in CS :)

In all seriousness, I don't really have any advice about it, except to say, skills pay the bills. Marketing yourself is great but IMO you are better off taking the time gathering expertise in your field. There's a book on this topic called "So Good they Can't Ignore You" that I highly recommend.
Neat idea. If the (evil group) didn't think of it before, at least they'll read it now!
Very surprised to see the Netherlands at 90%, New Zealand at 86%, Sweden at 88%, Japan at 84%, and Australia at 79%. Seems incredibly low for countries with reasonably high quality telecom infrastructures.
Beyond what's already been suggested: Work through the DLI tapes ("tapes"). They're good at throwing varied phrasing at you. For pronunciation in general, find an instructor who's good at teaching Americans how to make the sounds right. There are some mouth positioning tricks that are helpful. http://fsi-dli.yojik.eu/DLI/Chinese%20Mandarin/ for the DLI stuff.
The CSS that you know nothing about
Appraisal of the quality of Zuckerberg's Mandarin: http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/10/22/mark_zuckerbe...
I worked at a movie startup, very similar to this idea, way back in 2007-8. It was my first startup experience, and I knew back then that it was not really an interesting product. We did a lot of cool text mining stuff on movie reviews we scraped (I am a statistician by trade) and at the time provided a way of searching based on emotions and moods. It was kind of neat, but even still - we were making a glorified movie list, which is not a problem anyone actually has.

At the time, our biggest 'competitor' (in our eyes) was jinni.com, which still seems to be doing something similar to what they set out to do way back then.

It's 2014 now, and I still see about 1-3 of these types of sites pop up every year. I just met a guy who has a similar movie list app out in Berkeley last week - no joke.

So, does your product suck? Maybe not. Is it a product solving a real problem that people will pay for? I don't think so. I personally don't see any value in using this site over Netflix, and I'm sure a lot of others would agree with me.

But it is okay if no one likes it - you can get a lot out of making something without it being successful or ultimately useful. I learned a lot working at that movie startup, and I am glad I did it, even though the damn thing fell apart before we could generate revenue. Revel in it, pal! You have created something!
OSX isn't free -- so I don't understand what your point is. If you complaint was your complete computing stack was OSS and now this tool wasn't then fine; but you're not.
"Overall, the Ust’-Ishim genome doesn't revolutionize our understanding of humanity's past. But it does provide some support for ideas that have been previously suggested. And it helps narrow the range of possibilities for a series of other hypotheses. So it's really a great example of the incremental progress that's typical of science."

I liked this as the closing paragraph.
pretty much inspired by PG? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI#t=450
> Can you say a bit more about what's wrong with Ripple's consensus algorithm? Or link to a critique?

https://wiki.ripple.com/Consensus#More_Details

https://ripple.com/wiki/Unique_Node_List

Something like ".... ripple consensus is local, the cost to join is zero, membership is defined by who trusts you.." but I'm forgetting the exact link where this is fleshed out.
My opinion is the Ripple consensus algorithm doesn't yet meet the security claims its stated to in their whitepaper. There's an ongoing discussion here: https://forum.ripple.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=7801#p56432
Well, I agree with you that the rowing/badminton/chess teams probably don't get special treatment. But you don't seem to question the value of "top quality athletic programs." Why do we want them to exist in the first place?

The ostensible point of university is to develop a student's mind to solve problems -- preferably in the real world, though humanities programs insist that paying $50k+/year to read poetry is just as valuable an investment. Even if you take that assertion at face value, I'm not sure anyone, anywhere pretends that playing basketball prepares the student-athlete for anything at all. Almost none of them have a chance at a professional sports contract. Most will graduate with useless majors, having squandered their youth and their health on pointless competitions to throw a ball in a hoop. It's STUPID. Everyone involved is wasting their time.

I'm all for athletics in colleges. I played intramural sports and enjoyed it, because nobody pretended that it mattered. But I really don't see a compelling case for the subsidy of organized college sports... which, like someone pointed out, is really just a a subsidy for professional organizations.

And it's not just the pointless waste of time and money in college sports. The argument for college as an institution is getting weaker and weaker as free online alternatives get better and better. Aside from getting drunk and cheering against UMichigan, what compelling features does Ohio State University offer versus Harvard's courses on edX?
these issues do not get noticed in India because for majority of Indians the attention to and addressing fundamental problems (food, shelter, health) are of utmost importance for time being.
Families used to live together, so when you moved to a new city, grandma came with you. What's new is splitting a household into many households, such that "leaving" is actually possible.
The main issues with this is the fact that the speeds reduce quite spectacularly as you get further from the node - while at 50m you might get ~400 to 800Mbps (depending on the quality of the lines), by the time you're several hundred meters away you're back to the tens of megabits...

It's got to do with how the low quality telephone cables attenuate high frequencies. They're typically thin wire (0.4 or 0.64mm gauge) designed for a voice signal with a bandwidth in the kHz ranges, and then these DSL technologies use tens to hundreds of MHz, which works to some extent over shorter distances but the higher frequency you go, the more quickly attenuate over longer distances.

Then you have electromagnetic interference between different subscriber's lines, which can make a huge dent in performance (literally as high as 40-50%). Vectoring is a technology that tries to model the noise and send signals to cancel it out to reduce this. It's fairly effective, but not completely.

What you get is the requirement to basically have a node, fed with fibre and electricity (unless they're back-powered from houses, which was suggested for G.fast) that only services a dozen or so houses. With the cost of the capital works required, it's debatable whether it's not worth spending the ~$800-$1200 per house (this is actuals from the Australian NBN rollout) to just complete the fibre all the way, which could then in the future be upgraded to 10Gbit without any capital works (just swapping the terminating hardware in the exchange and at the customer premises - no requirement to touch any of the cabling).
So, my thing about Pimsleur is that I assume they intend for you to supplement it. For instance, given what you've learned already, you can probably say, "I would like to order two beers." but CANNOT, if you rely solely on Pimsleur, say "I would like to order seven beers." Because they teach you some sentences and what they mean but don't teach you basics.

Languages are vast oceans of meaning and composition -- 90 hours simply is not enough for Chinese (or any language, really, reality itself is too complex to describe with a system that simple).

I'd recommend learning the characters using Heisig's Remembering the Hanzi (this should take about 100-200 hours), and then shifting to HSK (which should be pretty easy post-character learning) + full sentences.

If you like Pimsleur, keep with it, although I get made fun of for sounding like a northerner a bit from using it for pronunciation help when I was beginning. :)
WTF google? You get me interested in a product. I download it on my phone no problem. But then when I go to open it I'm told that it is invite only. I missed this detail in the blog since it isn't mentioned until the end. Knowingly allowing me to download a program I can't even use? This is a perfect recipe for a 1 star review. How it has so many 5 star review is beyond me.

Oh well, I still really want to try it. So I clicked the invite link that makes me use gmail (the app I'm replacing) to send an email. However, it's not a standard mailto link but a link to https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox?compose=new . Seriously? Now I have to type in an email address because Google failed to use one of the most primitive features of HTML. So far my email experience has only been less convenient.

Anyway, I uninstalled it from my phone. I'll just wait a year or so to see if it flops like several of there other products and then maybe install it.
FTDIs own website says their chips are used on medical devices:

https://twitter.com/JohnnySoftware/status/525092883125506048

Let's hope that all the manufacturers are 100% certain of their supply chains, from top to bottom. And that there are no bugs in the driver that might cause inadvertent bricking.

Way to go, FTDI.
Native advertising is so much more indirect and intrusive, I can't see how it could "trounce" search advertising in as dramatic a fashion as your charts suggest. Native adverts will definitely increase in prevalence, but search advertising still uniquely shows ads to people as they're actually looking for something.
SFO is rife with nimbyism and local politics preventing things like this from happening.
So you're saying you're against beta releases?
Dropbox directly lied to users about privacy and stated they could not access your data. When this was pointed out, they made up excuses for lying and acted rather snotty about it (on HN). They also had that little "don't check passwords" incident, which night indicate more serious problems. I'd trust Google engineering over Dropbox, but Google is also evilly anti privacy so it's not much of a win.
It's a known issue, been around since retina MBP was introduced; see:

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=136555

For me, I have no problems with Chrome when running an rMBP with a external display, but once I switch to the built in retina display, performance suffers significantly.

I switched to Safari a few months ago despite preferring Chrome because I couldn't stand Chrome's poor retina performance.
That means absolutely nothing.

Looking at the lowest level of college football, there are only 11 active roster NFL players from a D3 school. [0]

There are 1,696 active NFL players, that's a 0.6 percent chance of 'making it', at the lowest level of the game.

Again, absolute and utter career suicide because of some moral grievance.

[0] - http://www.d3football.com/interactive/faq/general#14
It's just looping the tutorial for me, clicking 'skip tutorial' just goes back to the beginning.

(Safari on Yosemite)
Show HN: Get anonymous feedback from your friends
No. A simple resistance heater is more efficient if all you want is heat.

But the best desalination units use a membrane not heat.
FWIW: Closing and re-visiting fixed it.
They seemed to be focused on Europe originally, but now have flights in the US as well. Las Vegas - SF for $50, not bad.
Google managed to ride two subsequent waves: web (not pc which came before) and mobile. Between Glass and Magic Leap, they're well on their way to catch the third wave of virtual/augmented reality.

And native adverts, really? Let's hope this is not the grand industry of the future. Not for Google's sake but for our own.
We are talking about Twitter here. They can't avoid collisions even inside their own company:

https://www.twitterflight.com/ and http://flightjs.github.io/
One major flaw in this thesis. Advertising marketplaces where the bids on eyeballs are competitive in theory will always continue to increase as long as the businesses in those markets continue grow. In other words, if the market for cookies grew it at 6% every year, and thus the number of searches for cookies grew at 6% per year, it means that as long as Google continues to hold a static position, they can increase the bidding for cookie keywords and thus increases revenues there without ever increasing market share. IBM and MS on the other hand have to continue to convince customers (i.e. sales) that their product rule. This is really costly.

The author suggest native advertizing will eclipse search. Really? This like saying Infomercials are going to replace prime time TV dramas.
Worlds first hoverboard
Hmm dude, everybody here who is not a native English speaker knows at least a second language on top of his mother tongue. I'm French, fluent in English and conversational in Spanish and German and I don't think it's so impressive.

Chinese on the other hand is a bit tougher because the writing is so different.
What cards mean for the future of social web content
Thanks for the review. Would be great to get an invite and try out the product. gsharma at gmail
You know what electronic part is hard to find these days? Variable capacitors! At the caps needed to make radios. Sure, you can buy them in bulk or at ham fests, but I've found it frustrating as a hobbyist.
Maybe his wife who chose not to even take his last name, went out to get some D with other guys. Thinking it meant "D"rinks
One thing this is leaving out is that IBM existed, and was very successful, long before mainframes. The company has existed since the 1880s for christ's sake. Additionally, during the mainframe era it had a number of other successful products, like the selectric typewriter. The history of IBM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM) is pretty damn long.

If you pick your dates right it's easy to find trends, but the real world is much more complex. HP, for instance, has taken a long, meandering path to where it is. It doesn't fit on a simple chart with simple graphics.
Native adverts are why I turn off my iPad's wifi when playing games. I wish there was a way to use the notifier switch as a wifi switch. You wouldn't believe how much things improve. Advertisers just don't trust offline views, and probably for good reason.

I'm looking for a subtler approach though. Some way to keep browsing, keep things like app store accessible, but disable ads.
Thousands of Credentials Stored in Google Play App Binaries
Why EBay Inc.’s Billion Dollar Investments Are So Smart
Wow, well that site was designed by a bunch of dicks. If you scroll down too much to read the article it throws a whopping great big nag screen at you insisting that you register (for free) to continue reading. Then, when you close the wretched thing, using the provided X, it just dumps you on to their home page.

It's like they thought to themselves 'How can we do a paywall but replace all of the users usual disappointment with utter irritation?'