skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many courses on Coursera, edX and similar sites are supervised while they are live.
If you enroll to a "live" MOOC you actually get most of it, as well as interaction with other students. If you go trough an archived course you don't really get it and that's when the "MOOC" turns from a course to an information source.
Considering that "MOOC's" are supposed to be an online resource i don't see how an in-person supervision can be achieved regardless of the fees.
This is again an issue of miss managing expectations, what you describe amounts to an open university and not an online course.
Open Uni's do offer everything from educational advisers to pre-arranged study groups and access to teachers and TA's but they also come at a cost ranging from anywhere from 50% to 200% of the normal cost of a degree.
People drop out of anything and while MOOC's have a much higher drop out rate than normal education it has much less to do with what they offer and more to do with how people treat and what they expect from them in the first place.
In the course of my job i actually have taken quite a few of them when i needed to tackle projects with an unfamiliar scope for example I've taken several "economics" classes when i had to do a project regarding stock and high frequency trading.
I'm an information security consultant, and although i am quite familiar with traditional finance systems used for banking, i didn't have enough knowledge of how stock trading and HFT works to be able to truly identify critical issue with such systems (mainly in regards to discovering logic flaws, race conditions and similar issues).
So I've found 3 courses i thought would give me enough information and invested the time needed in them. I did "drop" 2 of them but just because they went too deep into economical theories which wasn't what i needed. But i did complete one of them until the end and learned quite a bit from it about how modern day commodity trading works.
But I've also treated the "MOOC" as i would any other course I've started at 9 am, finished at 5-6pm and actually structured it like if i were at school or at working (which technically I was).
People who just consume online courses when they get bored over the weekends or when they have their 2am "life changing resolutions" will never be able to get anything out of them even with all the guidance in the world.
A coach or an adviser will not make any one capable of learning on a bus or at 11pm after a full work day, a gym and a bar visit. There is a reason why night school has higher drop rates than normal school and it's because it's harder. People need energy and the ability to focus on education otherwise it's just a waste of time.
And if you sitting in a class from 6-9 is borderline possible for education than what good will it be when you consume it on a tablet while trying not to make eye contact on the train?
A follow up post is http://www.ianbicking.org/where-smalltalk-went-wrong-2.html (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8797560).
How do I add a new control point? Are you using opengl for the filters?
I was immediately reminded of Kanemura Osamu's rather pointed search for complexity amongst Tokyo's backstreets - many taken while he was working as a newspaper delivery boy.

https://www.google.com/search?q=kanemura+osamu&espv=2&biw=12...
Good call, I'd forgotten Watson -- but I think you caught the idea of what a big and ignorable company could be.
It does appear to be the 90-9-1% rule of the Internet at play, but you might be on to something.

In a more traditional organization you would have architects and other senior development leads plowing the way with a number of subordinates that provide the necessary but dirty grunt work scaffolding around the central architecture. It's not that they're doing more work. Instead they are charging through the hard problems that more junior developers struggle around, but don't have the time to dive deep into tiny implementation details required for large projects.

The interesting data would likely come from these closed sourced projects and complement the data of the open projects. I would love to see that analysis and comparison.
You know what causes bugs in C (besides memory leaks)? Complex or clever expressions that don't reveal their semantics at first glance. As an example from elsewhere in the thread:

return (x > y) - (x < y);

Quick. What's that do?

What will the next person who looks at the code think it does?
Just to be 100% clear, in case anyone who is new to the field stumbles on this thread, this is NOT breaking math or anything. This is a fun, but totally normal result.

First of all, there are quite a few linear time sorting algorithms. Radix, pigeonhole, and counting sort are all linear time sorting algorithms. The popular result that any comparison-based sorting algorithm works in O(n log n) applies _specifically_ to comparison-based sorting algorithms, and not those like the above. So, even if you ignore the underlying mechanics of the OS scheduler and assume sleep works "perfectly", the result would not that unusual.

Second off, in the comments there appears to be considerable time worrying about the technicalities of the scheduler, the nondeterministic nature of sleep, and so on, and whether this really implies linear time bound. IMHO these are not worth worrying about because we already have linear time sorting algorithms. It's fine to assume the scheduler adds no significant asymptotic cost here, even if we know differently.

Third off, remember that all of these sorting bounds assume machines of the Von Neumann architecture. In particular, this model assumes constant time memory and constant time comparison operations. In cases where you're comparing really big numbers, these bounds get worse. This is easy to forget, but worth remembering just since we're on the subject anyway.
Based on what God has revealed. I am convinced by the scriptures (the Bible) which includes eyewitness testimony of the things Jesus said and did.

If anyone is genuinely interested, I would suggest you read the gospel of John, and decide for yourself if you believe what it says.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%201%20&ver...
Sadly, the somewhat lengthy Wikipedia entry for Sleep sort was deleted. Here's archive.org's version:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110622073615/http://en.wikiped...

Reading through Wikipedia's existing pages for other esoteric sorts makes me laugh as I did when reading Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's various entries for scientific theories (e.g. Bistromathics)...There's Bogosort, Stooge sort, American flag sort, and my favorite, "Gnome sort", named thusly because "that is 'how a gnome sorts a line of flower pots'" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnome_sort
In my experience, art invokes several ideas at the same time. Nigel Pitman explored several in these pictures, and VieElm pointed out another. Unlike most jokes, it is satisfying to spend time with each of the ideas.

I'm no Thomas Struth, nor had I heard of him before this article, but a couple years a ago I took several pictures in a similar spirit, of which I uploaded four: http://thyrsus21.deviantart.com/gallery/
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2657277

Pretty sure it's been posted a couple other times, but I'm on a tablet at the moment.
Talking about art and explaining it to each other is the most awesome thing about it! Honestly, I’m unable to comprehend your viewpoint on this at all.
Homepage critique and hope we didn’t build something no one needs?
Hey there, we're a small team trying to make a big customer service software that does everything the business owner would want. You probably know software such as Zendesk and UserVoice, which are designed to address customer service requests.
We've created Helprace, (http://helprace.com) which does the above and offers a feedback community to the business owner on top of that.

Issue 1:
We don't know if people actually want a feedback community. We had ONE customer who encouraged us to develop it.
So a user, would you want your questions & ideas be publicly visible, in other words would you go through the trouble of posting it? Would love to hear your take on this!!

Issue 2:
We just launched our homepage today. Upon visiting,
-What do you think it can help you with
-What’s the number 1 reason that is stopping you from buying?
-What’s your biggest concern about this product or service?
-Is there anything that is confusing on this page?
http://helprace.com
Feedback on Onklick Solutions – Web Design and Development Company Mumbai, India
Dear Viewer,

We are a new Startup and looking for Feedback on our website. http://www.onklicksolutions.com/

1) Look around the home page - what is your initial impression of what you see?

2) Think of something you want to find on this website. Now try to find it. Did you find what you were looking for? Was anything confusing?

3) Are you encouraged to contact us? Can you tell us why (or why not)?

4) Go to search engine of your choice and find one other company that offers a similar service. Compare the two companies. Which on do you prefer? Why?

5) Please share any additional feedback/comments you may have.

Please send your feedback to info@onklicksolutions.com with your name and email id.

Your feedback is valuable to us. Your Feedback will be reviewed and posted on our upcoming Onklick Wall. Looking forward to hear from you.

Thanks and Best Regards,

Team Onklick
If the hair is gone, it is gone. The best thing to do is to focus on a topic you really like, that you can throw yourself in to, and this will help you forget about the hair. Think about what you feel you have a need to do, be it political, artistic, scientific, educational, charitable, or technological. Once you have found something that is very important to you, set about doing it. Along the way, you will meet people and you won't be worrying about yourself but wanting to share whatever it is you are doing. Don't forget to dress formally and remember that there are plenty of examples of well known, successful, bald men, Prince William comes to mind.
No, but I haven't read any science fiction since my teenage years. (Sadly, because I would like to... just don't have the time.)

I actually don't remember reading this anywhere, it just seemed an obvious idea. The idea that humanity would expand into a Type III civilization and near light speed is very old, probably dating to the work done by the British Interplanetary Society on interstellar travel. I don't have citations handy, but I remember reading a critique of generation ships which basically boiled down to "if you travel less than 0.9c, you can expect someone else to leave after you do but arrive sooner." Applying the same logic to other civilizations just seemed like common sense...
really insteresting
There's a great book, Psycho Cybernetics, written by a plastic surgeon, on how to actually "embrace it".

All that said, the two people I know with hair implants have never looked back. It's not cheap, but your appearance is with you all day.
This is by the same person that was behind "The Nebula Device" and "Nebula 2" and "Nebula 3" at Radon Labs.

Oryol is a great new take on some of the core concepts of Nebula 3, but in a C++11 environment and being able to rely upon more modern compilers, libraries, etc.
Drain on the home planet? I think your model of how this would occur needs updating. Let me give you a hint: Earth represents a minuscule, tiny, not even worth counting fraction of the resources readily available in the solar system.
As well as embracing the bald, embrace what bald gives you. Do you know how long it takes me to get ready in the morning? Minutes. Do you know how many times I look in a mirror? The answer is often "none", because nothing much can really change! This is so liberating in so many ways. I'm up, I'm out. I'm free.

Wearing a motorbike helmet without worrying about messing up hair? Check! Travelling extremely light on holiday because I don't need any product, shampoo, etc.? Check! Coming out of the ocean and in to the bar without worrying about what my head looks like? Check!

I'm another "shaved at 27 and wouldn't want it back". I love being bald. Just make sure you keep it a good bald - don't let it grow in to half an inch long fuzz if you know that doesn't look good. Don't be lazy. Me, I shave with a battery powered electric about once a week. Takes me ten minutes.

Another tip: I find collared shirts suit bald men better. Depends on the shape of your head, but for me a t-shirt makes me feel a bit like one round glob of human torso, whereas a nice collared shirt gives the whole upper part of my body a bit of character. Or a t-shirt with a blazer. Or find a hat that works - I love the flat-cap style. YMMV. But be conscious of it, it'll help.

It is what it is. Make it yours.

And yes, Meetup is gold. Remember: everyone else there is in the same boat. Nobody else knows anybody either. Everyone is aching for someone to dive in and start the conversation. If that person is you, you're already miles ahead. Have fun with it!
The Beginning of Amazon Echo Reverse Engineering
Loving my Echo so far. Noticed that if you go to this page:

http://echo.amazon.com/#settings/dialogs

And enter this code into the JS console:

$(document).ajaxComplete(function(){console.log($(".dd-title.d-dialog-title").first().text())})

You'll get the last said thing in the console.

Obviously this could be pretty useful! For now I'm pretty tired but tomorrow I'm going to try to hook it up to my Hue and my Nest and possibly my Roku...
A short time later they started checking Referer headers; but as I pointed out to them, sending a fake Referer header is easy, so that only helps against the most careless attackers. I suggested several options for solving this, and they chose the simplest: Use a cron job to delete all the generated graphs every minute.

If I'm understanding correctly, I think this problem can be elegantly solved with Macaroons: http://research.google.com/pubs/pub41892.html

And it's relatively common issue with auth on the web. I think Facebook has (or had) this problem too. You can generally right click and "copy link" to get a .jpg URL, and send around people's pictures without any auth.

Basically the problem is when there are two web servers, a "dynamic" one with auth, and a static one that serves images. The static one is often a CDN.

Macaroons are basically a simple technique for decentralized auth, involving HMAC chaining. In this setting, the static server would first give the dynamic server a macaroon M authorizing ALL pictures.

At serving time, the dynamic server authorizes the user for a particular request. That request will have an <img src="acct123.jpg"> link. The dynamic server will take the macaroon M, and add a CAVEAT that the file must be "acct123.jpg", yielding Macaroon M2.

The client gets the restricted macaroon M2 with the HTML, and sends it back to the static server to retrieve the .jpg. The server can 1) verify that M2 is derived from the original M, and 2) read the caveat from the dynamic server, proving that the user was authorized for the image acct123.jpg (and only that image). The HMAC chain is constructed so that the client can't remove the caveat and get access to all pictures.

Basically what happened is that the static server DELEGATED auth logic for its resources to the dynamic server. In figure 2 of the paper, the static server would be TS (target service), and the dynamic server is IS (intermediate service).

The static server still needs extra code for Macaroons, which existing CDNs and static servers don't currently have. It would be cool to have an Nginx plugin that does this. But the key point is that it is preserving the original intention behind the static/dynamic split: performance.

In less performance sensitive context, you would have a web server perform custom auth logic, and then just read() the static file from disk and serve it over HTTP. This is likely to be many times slower than say Nginx. With the Macaroons, you can authorize ONCE in the dynamic server, and then PROVE to the static server that the auth decision was made. So all the .jpg requests can be fast and only hit the static server. The HMAC calculations are just hashing so they are cheap. It is symmetric crypto, with the shared HMAC secret.

The paper has some other use cases and is definitely worth a read. I'm thinking about using this technique for a project. I'm interested in opinions from crypto/security folks.
No.

My views are not based on any "leap of faith". A "leap of faith" implies that a person is believing in the absence of any evidence -- and that is by no means true of me.

Eyewitness testimony is used every day in courts of law. It is one of the most common forms of evidence used to determine the truth about things that happened in the past. I am convinced that the New Testament contains multiple eyewitness accounts of Jesus, the things He said, and the things He did.

My faith in Him is based on those accounts. I believe it is God who made sure those accounts were recorded. I was convinced by the evidence given in those accounts. I understand that there are many who have either never read the accounts, or read them and were not convinced by them to believe in Jesus.

Again, to anyone who is interested in knowing what Jesus said and did, I would invite you to draw your own conclusions after reading the book of John: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%201%20&ver...
Yes, and those were both my points :)
What is your point of view about so called “Moral Policing” in India
Best Countries for Business
It's not only MSFT it's the game developers as well, XboxOne supports offline mode for game that support it same goes for the PS4 and the PC.
All platforms have games which are "online only"(yes even on Steam).
So while i don't know what took so much "figuring out" mainly because it's a feature of the console you should blame the publishers that put all the "online" features in the game in the first place.
But then they only followed their consumers who want to share every achievement and headshot they make on everything from facebook and instagram to the gas station bathroom stall at the 300 mile marker on i49....
This is not "linear time" in any decent sense--we shouldn't conflate the number of elements with the size of the elements (in this case, O(max element) is actually exponential in the input size!).
And similarly, with all due respect to you, I am convinced that you are definitely wrong.

(I'm not being snarky, here. The "with all due respect" phrase in entirely sincere).
Another testable variation of this is the gravitational effect of voids.

Yes, the only problem might be that we don't yet have a good explanation for dark matter so it would be hard to know if a void with mass is due to a Type III civilisation or just a local concentration of dark matter. A spiral galaxy with a perfectly spherical void would be pretty hard to explain as anything other than the result of intelligence.
What its like to work in a fortune 500 company?
I highly recommend the 4 minute video below to help cope with the issue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qanDVZHliw
Why do you believe the Christian Bible is the Word of God when other texts(The Quran, etc) similarly purport to be the One Truth? These other texts also include "eyewitness testimony."
Think of something like the "Human Brain Project" [1] scaled to what it could become after evolving/improving/growing for 3.2 billion years..

[1] humanbrainproject.eu
We have plenty of ideas for how that would work. Are you familiar with a Dyson sphere? A Type III civilization is just a Dyson sphere around every star in the galaxy.
You cannot have more than 10 years of experience in Rails
Then wouldn't that person be a liar?

All and all Jesus said he was the Lord. So I think it is actually rather tight - he was correct, he was incorrect and aware of it (liar), or he was incorrect and not aware of it (lunatic).
Cut your hair to suit the baldness. Shave your head. Don't let your hair define you. It really doesn't matter. Women don't care. If you're confident in yourself and project that you'll be fine.
Meh, it's a long way from saying that "we don't know how the O2 could have been produced except by life" to "the O2 was produced by life." Just look at the current debate about methane on Mars.
FWIW, the Quran does not include eyewitness testimony in the sense you are speaking of. It is taken literally as the word of God. Although some parts in it ascribe certain quotes to certain people (e.g. Jesus said so and so, Mary said so and so, etc.), but the witness here is God Himself.
You have to realise this is one of things in life that eventually goes at some point (for most people anyway). The hair, the teeth, eye-sight, the natural tight skin and the natural glow on it, the knee, the strength, losing people around you on the way - the list is really long. It's normal. It's just us - the human machine - getting older and showing the sings of wear and tear after years or use. Things go like this till eventually we meet the death. That's how it has been, that is how it's gonna be.

I wish I could put it in a better way, but this is just what it is - accepting it and moving on. Focus on things that you get with age - wisdom, charm, knowledge - a of it, experience in relationships, and ability to avoid mistakes and help others avoid them too. Knowing what matters and what not and then prioritising life accordingly is what we can do best that people younger than us usually can't. So that's there.
I don't entirely agree with the assertion that you cannot charge for content. E.g. "It is probably harder to make a living selling lectures than it is as a journalist, and it has become nearly impossible to live off journalism."

I made a substantial chunk of change this year delivering training. The difference is people can directly connect training to revenue. In my case I'm teaching Scala, where my course attendees either need it for their job, and know that getting Scala on their resume will open up some very well paying gigs. In this situation people will pay for a directed introduction to a topic, and also to clear the time on their schedule.

The problem faced by good Universities face is that they are teaching foundations not ephemera, and most people have difficulty connecting the dots from learning, say, mathematics, to revenue. Which is a real shame, because foundations are far more valuable in the long term.

FWIW, our Scala courses try to sneak in foundational material while no-one is looking. :)
I've update the blog post with these, but here they are in this context as well:

* A more detailed follow-up to that post is here: http://blog.lfe.io/tutorials/2014/12/03/1828-erlport-and-pyt...

* There's now an even easier way to use Python from Erlang/LFE that wraps ErlPort: https://github.com/lfex/py

Also, the original post was re-blogged here, where the code is much more legible: http://blog.lfe.io/tutorials/2014/11/21/1508-erlport-using-p...
Genuinely curious, how do you put so much acceptance into the Bible, when all four books (John, Matthew, Luke, and Mark) have anonymous authors?
It's code smell because you're subverting the type system, and your program is not checked to be type-safe.
Yea, it's linear time for n where n is the largest number—pretty sure it's unbounded in terms of numbers of elements.
Don't have a screen capture, but several insightful comments on the blog disappeared. Wtf?
What is your definition for a closed MOOC?
Google's end-to-end email encryption
Collecting, yes. Storing, indexing, warehousing all meaningful communication, movement, and transactions of all humanity indefinitely - that is the new and condemnable part. I call that absolute power.
Re: whois.

There's a need for extremely private registrations that still have a feedback channel. A guy I know has such a registrar, but I doubt there's any means of contacting any site's operator for technical, legal or other matters. (The whois postal address always lists somewhere Europe, but there's absolutely no published details. So it's a registrar that's about as private as allowable.)