skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fort Hays State University, in Kansas, apparently without consulting its faculty, “sanctions” courses in composition, economics, algebra and accounting offered by a company called StraighterLine which sells the courses for $99! One encouraging outcome of all of this, however, is that students at Fort Hays, apparently showing more sense than the people administering the college, have been questioning the legitimacy of this partnership and wondering how it will impact the value of their degrees.

I can't believe how much irrational hatred has been directed at StraighterLine, a company working so hard to make education more affordable.

Basically what this gentleman and other StraighterLine-bashers are saying is that no one should even try to offer the same educational content at a more affordable price because it would potentially make richer peoples' degree less valuable.

This kind of protectionism is one of many factors stifling innovation in Higher Ed today.
It's a crappy website. The navigation sucks. It's a hodgepodge of inline and external style sheets. Links to pdfs with no warnings of such. Sure he knows how to invest money, but that doesn't mean his website isn't crap. It's just to show how "frugal" he is. Sure I bet they spend more money on bottled water on any given day than what they spent to produce this unmaintainable piece of crap.
You can avoid Java if you have a team of guys that do write Java, to make Pig work for your dataset. Lots of shops have exactly this - and so Pig allows regular developers across the organization to conduct ad hoc analysis of web scale data - with Pig, you feel like you can 'touch the terabytes.' With the SQL patch, this can extend outwards to regular analysts. Also, you can express an awful lot with what is included in Pig and whats in the Piggybank. But you're very right about alpha. A one page Pig analysis can take me all day - way longer than it should. I am continuously discovering oddities and undocumented behavior, and finding tricks that I have to pull to make my scripts work that I really shouldn't have to.

For instance, once naming schemes get two deep, in Pig 0.6 (admittedly, this is trunk, and its wild out there), you can no longer access the elements. I don't think this is supposed to be the case, but the result is that after every operation that groups, etc. I have to do an extra FOREACH GENERATE name AS name to make the script work. You also have to explicitly flatten all GROUPed results, even if there is only a single item, and this is very confusing at first.

The documentation is also extremely sparse in real-world uses of the syntax. Sometimes, it feels like coding in brainfuck, and I seriously think about switching over to Java and Cascading. But when Pig works, its really damned elegant and fast, so I still do most of my work in Pig. There is no better tool out there for simple to moderately complex analyses of terabytes of data in Hadoop. Pig excels for relatively simple tasks, and even scales to very complex tasks, with UDFs - but once you cross some line in terms of complexity, you're better off using something like Cascading.

Oh, some of you may find this interesting... I built a GUI to sit on top of Pig: http://cloudstenography.com/ In practice, using this for real analysis of data from multiple sources is more challenging than the videos show, but it makes a point about the ease of accessing data - right out to Excel.
Generally considered best practice to put contact info in your profile and keep the thread clean :-)
You had the choice between attacking my statement by citing a few successful public education campaigns (there aren't many) or attacking me.

You attacked me. Wonderful way to convince others about your point.
We should ignore the KKK.

Obviously there will be times they will step out of simply just speech and opinion, and for that they should be punished. If they act out on their hate and prejudice that is. But if all they are doing is expressing an opinion then let them, for it is not for you to judge who shall have the right opinions in this country. If you disagree, simply ignore them, for truth shall hold them accountable and you shall be vindicated without effort. But if you condemn their thoughts then you exhibit fear. For any righteous man would not fear a wrong idea, because reality shall not let a wrong idea prevail. So if you truly believe your ideas are right then let those who disagree do so in peace. Reality shall punish them enough for their ignorance.

Also our laws are designed to encourge only ignoring. Why else can't we just jail them right there? Because there is no thought police, and you shalln't be one either!

EDIT: It may be true that they do deserve all negative actions directed towards them. I just want to make it clear that I do not support the KKK. I think physical and emotional attacks from the KKK do justify corrective action against them.

I'd also like to add that the best way to raise a child is to ignore them when they get angry, not punish. I think that was researched somewhere or something.
The same is true for India and China. Maybe because there are too many bikes here for anybody to really want to steal them.
Yeah, right, and Warren Buffet hand writes his annual reports, which his secretary mimeographs and sends by carrier pigeon to stockholders. Give me a fucking break.
Platform as a Service.

Federation of micro-blogging.
These two quotes resonate with me the most and describe what we should all strive for in our online services:

"Your website design should ask nothing more of the user than a car does. Assume nothing, other than the user will point and click something obvious."

"Skype. Amazon. Ebay. All the big, successful internet plays took an everyday task the user already undertakes, and puts that task in an online context."
Indeed - if you have a website, any website, being able to trivially parse your logs and look at things like top referrers, is pretty neat.
Frank Lloyd Wright.

He had an unbelievable ability to create building designs that blended perfectly with their surroundings. I've never seen any architect achieve a better harmony between man and nature. Wright's most famous designs are Fallingwater: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallingwater and the Guggenheim Museum in New York: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_R._Guggenheim_Museum

Many of his design ideas were beyond the technological limitations of the day, but Wright never let that slow him down.

He was unquestionably one of the greatest minds of the 20th century.
We're running into this right now. Our development lead is struggling with some of the finer points of an application of graph theory and a lack of formal training in both the theory and the algorithmic complexity of working with graphs is biting us in the ass.
> - compilation is slow

What I've learned is that people don't really care about full builds when doing large projects. The separation into header and source files means that when you change a source file, only this one has to be recompiled. You only do massive rebuilds when modifying headers.

In case of D, when you modify a module, the change can possibly propagate indefinitely. Even when you just change the body of a function and think the modification should be isolated, consider that the build tool must assume this function may potentially be used at compile-time to generate code for other modules. The changes propagate as far as they would with .h files (unless the build tool can do semantic analysis or make unsafe assumptions).

To this fact, add how DMD only outputs template instances into one object file when compiling multiple modules at the same time. If you're lucky, at the next incremental build it will output them into the same modules. If you're not, you end up with unresolved references. This template emission method is an optimization - the alternative is a lot of bloat that object files generated by C++ compilers suffer from. I agree with Walter's position that what DMD does should be the default. And it is possible to make a good build tool that deals with this issue. I've tried doing that for DMD-Win, but its case, such a build tool is currently infeasible due to toolchain issues.
I think all of the test & measure stuff we talk about so much in the web context -- A/B testing, analytics, etc -- would revolutionize the world if it were applied with one tenth the dedication by human institutions which are not teeny little web startups.

This isn't to say that we have the patent on The Scientific Method. However, there are darn few organizations which seem to have it written into their DNA. Toyota does, famously. Imagine what would happen if your typical big-city school system did. ("First order of business: we had 37 A/B tests running in first grade classrooms last week. 31 of them did not lead to substantial results. Let's hear from our lead statistician about one promising innovation, which improved vocabulary retention among our lowest performing quartile of black students by 15%...")
You'd be surprised at how many places don't dig at all into graph theory as part of the their CS coursework.
I think it's telling about that conference that the scammer company was given a panel spot.
If you try to write for an audience of intelligent 17-year-olds, you may, possibly, manage to successfully explain to a professional in your field.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/kh/explainers_shoot_high_aim_low/
Most College Students To Take Classes Online by 2014
Here is my prediction: it will take academia 10 years to stop teaching Java 1.2 and start teaching, say, Scala. It will then take industry about 20 years to realize that Java is not "the best" anymore.

So for 30 years, everything other than Java 1.6 and C# will be "niche".

(Sure, there are plenty of non-Java shops around. But anywhere where software is not the primary concern, it's the default. It got that way because of marketing and an easy word to Google, not due to any technical merits. So the new languages that are competing on technical merits are probably not going to win in industry, only among the handful of programmers with a clue. Just sayin'.)
Exactly right.

There is also the language == word on your resume' issue. If something new and cool comes out, people will resist it because they will have to give up their "10 years of Foo experience" for "1 year of Bar experience". Sad but true. (I just say on my resume, "X years programming experience". Except I don't really know how to pick X, because I have been programming since I was 5 and writing useful programs since high school. Slightly different than going to a Java training class and showing up to work everyday for a few years...)
The Pragmatic Bookshelf Challenge: Write a tech book in a month
Well, some percentage of the "can get away with being uninsured" demographic actually can't ... they just don't know it yet.

Well, yes. Being uninsured is a reverse lottery--you gain a modest benefit with a small chance of an extremely negative result. For the demographic in question it's quite possibly a positive expected utility anyway. I think it's unfortunate that people who do need health insurance are potentially excluded from being entrepreneurs but I can't really fault YC for not tackling the issue.

And hey, if it frustrates you sufficiently--if at some point you do launch a startup and get a hefty cash-out, you could put some of that money toward lobbying the government on issues that would make entrepreneurship more accessible to a wider demographic. Seems like something that could have a greater positive impact on society than a lot of other causes...
Seems like it's going to be interesting: http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23pragprowrimo
I'd like our government to do more to help rather than hinder folks like Carl Malamud and the others at http://public.resource.org
Very first thing I tried as well. I really expected to find something there as I would seem that any googler that thought far enough to hide such a thing in a place as arcane as robots.txt would surely finish the prank...
I play some of those games in Facebook, and while I don't fill out anything that wants me to pay a dime, they do seem to work exactly as he says. And the eagerness with which Zynga, et al copy every other game and then try to out-advertise their way to success comes across as amoral, too.
Well, there is definitely a strong distinction between "programmer" (a trade) and "computer scientist".

I'd argue that beyond arithmetic and maybe a basic understanding of functions (e.g. f(x)), most "programmers" need to know very little math. But they also tend to produce shoddy, inefficient code and look at problems as "moving bits around".

Computer Scientists on the other hand need to have spent some time understanding the theory of computation. Calculus is one way of computing things, so is lambda calculus, and turing machines, and formal grammars, various algebras like regular languages, etc. Slinging code is just another way of computing things to a Computer Scientist.

Given this, most typical programming trade jobs are approached by Computer Scientists as a computation problem (or at least an application of a computation theory) vs. just hauling electrons about. This gets you something both qualitatively different in their code output as well as quantitatively different.
Regional conflicts. And the idea of countries, in the first place.
I'm assuming that's true. Using the data they had from a third-party for turn-by-turn would have cost them extra. Thus the decision to build their own.
>I think the study of mathematics is very helpful to a programmer in both the general sense of improving their overall thought processes and in the specific of helping with certain types of problems, but it is not necessary for most.

This is true. Most of the absolutely best developers I've ever worked with were Math majors. The second best were Physics majors.

They had long since forgotten most of their formal training, but they knew how to think about problems in the right way.
The lack of a successful "education campaign" does not mean that education is a bad idea. It just means we haven't done it right yet.
Microsoft could afford to have zero sense of direction, and innovate nothing, as they had (have?) a defacto monopoly. No other company can afford to be so rudder-less.

Novell has been lost at sea for years, as Spitfire says, not from lack of sail or wind, but lack of direction. If you don't know where you're going, no wind is a good one.
Ok. “… has lost all its meaning …” just sounded to me like it was all downhill since 1788.
I don't have any evidence of users disliking sliders for ratings nor do I claim to. I only said I "think/believe" (as in imho). But for a fact, sliders takes more time and energy - both physical (you have to hold your mouse button) and mental (you need to think more about it) than selection buttons. Thus unless the use case calls for it, users are less likely to prefer it than buttons. Some use cases may be user settings that have more than a few choices or selecting from a number scale.

Now, the new steepster slider definitely calls for it since he uses 100 points rating scale. However, you have to look at the alternative, which for a product rating is normally a 5 point clicking UI w/o a slider. Thus, you have to look at both solutions and see if this new rating system that requires the slider is "better". If the number of user ratings does not decline, it would show that users are not bother by the slider, which means the steepster slider may be "better" for your product rating. But if a typical user finds the slider too troublesome and not bother with leaving a rating, would this new system be better than a simple 5 start system with a better distribution of samples? Steepster may have logs that shows that there isn't a decline in user ratings, but that is only 1 company (sample) with unique sets of users. Before another company follows, I believe it may be wise to ponder or do some testing/research on use of sliders vs. clicks for ratings.
There is a good possibility though that the universe is inherently complex in certain aspects for our brains.
Human brains are evolved to survive in the part of the physical world observable by human organs, not to comprehend the essential forms of the universe.

E=MC^2 could be just an aspect of reality that happens to coincide with the way observable physical world works.

Maybe a different math for describing the universe written by an alien intelligence with different sensory organs could be simple for them, not still incomprehensible for us. And that alien intelligence is just a jackpot hit in the evolutionary possibility space (and the jackpot may well have never been hit).
The conference was on Virtual Goods Summit, and Offerpal gives you Virtual Currency to buy those goods, so thats the reason she was on the panel.

I can see people paying 1 USD to earn 100 Virtual Coins, but they should be made aware that it's a 1 way route. I also think having offers/surveys for users is OK to earn Virtual currency, but as long as it's made clear enough to them that they are getting themselves into a recurring charge of $10.99/mo.
I think calling this a "scam" is a bit strong. Exploitative of people willing to cough up real money and sign up for questionable offers in order to earn completely intangible goods? Sure, but I don't know if that qualifies as a scam.

Still, without getting hung up on the verbiage, I agree that it's unfortunate that they're trouncing all over the other developers who won't partake in these tactics.
Tracking Down A Subtle Analytics Bug
The affiliate industry is rife with this, too. Ringtones, etc are essentially financed by reverse billing fraud (the "sign up for our free trial and you'll be billed $9.99 a month without being able to cancel"), and with the way CPC advertising works this tends to crowd out all other advertisers because if you're a fraud you have staggeringly higher LTV than legitimate businesses, meaning you can afford to outbid them.

It isn't just affiliates, either: many shareware developers have inadvertently caused their customers damage when their payment processor tacks on high-margin low-value items as a rider to transactions. I covered this on my blog here:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2008/03/09/regsoft-scam/

In addition to the outright fraud discussed in that example, many payment processors will do things like offer customers $10 for "download recovery" service, where they promise to keep your download on file for a year so you can get it again. This obviously costs them essentially nothing. That isn't zero value (I suppose, theoretically, the shareware developer could go out of business and stop offering downloads), but it mostly takes advantage of unsophisticated customers who THINK they are buying "Get my software back if my computer melts" and are unaware that almost all shareware authors will do that for free.

(Wow, I'm finding myself agreeing with Arrington.)
I love it that to the right of this post was TechCrunch advertising for "make $1000/day from home!".
It is working quite well in VirtualBox OSE under Ubuntu. I am able to access ActiveX and Exchange 2007 easily, and it seems to be performing faster than the XP Pro session I previously ran.
Look, you share an appallingly common ignorance of American history and law. Okay, fine. By why in the name of all that defies ignorance and stupidity would you equate life and liberty with Bandwidth for god's sake? Seriously.

Bandwidth: 15/dollars a month.
A farmer's field of dreams buries climate change war
Statistical Learning as the Ultimate Agile Development Tool (Peter Norvig)
Why do you assume that you get the whole L1 code cache to yourself? I would think that on a real desktop system you would be lucky to get even half of it.
Great. More insurance scams to pay high monthlies for.
One vote per registered person for elections, alleviating the need for the Electoral College. And maybe even representative government?
I think you've missed how the computer world works, sure people still program in fortran but that doesn't mean it is still at the same working extent.

cobol -> c++ -> java actually happened pretty quickly and I'd expect when a useful alternative proves itself in a few niche senses on large scale a new language will be adopted and everyone will have something else to complain about.
Most of the Internet == Wikipedia?
This doesn't remind me of the 90s so much as the 80s when Microsoft was paying developers to write software for DOS. When the dust cleared in the OS war, Microsoft had a tipping point of software written for DOS, so whenever someone was choosing an OS, they chose DOS/Windows because nothing else had the variety of software available for it. They built their monopoly /then/ abused it. Google's just in the building stage, though they're interesting because they're constantly pushing the boundary of their monopoly.

Any history students see comparisons between Google and Carnegie Steel in terms of vertical integration throughout their industry? I do, though I don't know enough to describe it in great detail...
The L1 cache is only 32 (or 64) kilobytes. One program's time slice lasts at least a few milliseconds, easily 100 times longer than would be necessary to fill up the cache with that program's code data.

The OS can't dedicate parts of the L1 cache to different applications (the CPU doesn't offer any feature to allow it to do so), nor would it be a good idea to do so.
so a cheap iphone or droidphone...
It's funny, Novell used to own the server space lock, stock and barrel.

They had mindshare in small business owners. Think fo that! Florists knew who Novell was. They were the guys who did the software for your backoffice server. But they threw it all away by not innovating.

They could have continued to own the low end by continously making things easier and building on success. Instead they're a hasbeen with a corporate accounts only sales policy - I just tried to buy suse linux from their website,
no dice.
Incidentally, the comments at Techcrunch include an important post from James of HotOrNot. Search for "We ran offers like this".
Why?

Really, please explain.
I'm afraid you genuinely make no sense.
I remember looking into the question of gravitation transmission before. As far as I could amatueurly determine, gravitational transmission is an unanswered question. This is to say, if the sun "dissapeared" would the Earth feel it straight away (because spacetime had been altered) or would it take as long as the time for light to reach us because gravitrons (if they exist) could only travel as fast as the speed of light?

I'm aware of the whole limit on information transmission so I assume the latter, but I thought it was still unanswered.
One of the reasons that mathematics is so vast and powerful is because people have focused their efforts in specialized areas. If math weren't so broad that a single person could understand it all then it would be pretty unimpressive.

I disagree the characterization that mathematicians don't try to broaden their horizons. Like scholars of any subject, mathematicians follow their interests, which often take them to places never expected to be. To me, that fits the bill for "broadening horizons". And if they don't seem to move far outside of their focus of study, well, I say it has to be this way because mathematical material is often so dense and precise that it takes a very long time to understand what's going on in any one subject.
marginal utility. hell i'd be satisfied if people would just accept supply and demand.
dll errors under windows. Oh well. Let's hear it for shit engineering.
Indeed. And yet, while trolls get downvoted to pale gray happens, entire threads getting their comments downvoted as far doesn't.
Detained
Who the heck says someone's point is "shit, doubleshit, and bullshit" when sitting on a panel at a conference?

Thinking about it, this might explain their attitude towards users...
^^ This. The guy is trying to convince himself that if yahoo plays by the old school rules, everything will be ok.

In truth, this is likely exactly what yahoo should not be doing.