jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Indeed, we are using Area 51 to gauge commitment to a particular Q&A site so it does have a certain amount of hoops to jump through. The last time we tried to let people create Stack Exchange sites without demonstrated commitment, most sites did not have enough users to be viable. Area 51 is, so far, doing a great job of identifying the topics for which there is a devoted audience. We also assume that people who are highly committed to Stack Overflow are far more likely to participate in a new Stack Exchange alms therefore we've really built this system for them, the highly engaged, high reputation Stack Overflow user.
Brain dump, I make no claims of continuity :)

Take classes from people on these lists: http://cte.illinois.edu/teacheval/ices/exc_teach.html. Make sure you go back at least a few years because there are several good teachers who don't teach every semester or were on sabbatical. Prof Bailey comes to mind as someone who was on sabbatical.

When you register for a class go to every single office hour and figure out which TAs know their stuff. Only go to those office hours.

Figure out how much the Professor actually loves the textbook. If he really likes it, problems on homeworks and exams will be of the same theme as the textbook. In classes like that you benefit immensely from taking notes out of the book. Note most textbooks are on reserve at Grainger, no need to buy if you dont want to.

If you haven't taken 241 already, just get through it. The department is still figuring out how to teach that class.... it's not the teachers fault. It just doesn't quite fit right and probably should be two classes.

Use 242 as an opportunity to meet good programmers and continue to work with them afterwords. The actually increase in programming ability from the course itself is questionable. Although again, not the teacher's fault. It's a really hard thing to do.

Get involved in undergraduate research. A great starting point is Lawrence's CS498la (undergraduate research lab). Professors are a lot more tolerant and welcoming than you'd think (but be ready to work hard). Note that research doesn't have to be crazy hardcore theoretical stuff. It can be both cool and relevant (studying some sort of HCI problem on mobile devices?).

Figure out who the competent Math professors are for those classes that are required. I didn't do my research here and got bitten by it. My impression is that there aren't very many good sections for Math.

Take a graduate level course in the subject you are interested in. One of the unique things about top tier programs is that you pretty much can take a course in whatever you want. So for example if dbases are your thing, taking 511 after 411 is the way to go. People who have to scale Rails applications to massive sizes need to know data bases very well... you might as well take the opportunity now to get ahead of the game.

Oh and don't leave freshman physics until your last semester. That was a major fail :P

I don't really have any big secrets, but a lot of people manage to miss most of the above. Apologies if you already know it all. :P
You have clearly never driven in rural areas.

Curvy roads, and lack of light pollution in the sky, combined with probable sleep deprivation doesn't make for a good situation. Even if you stay on your side of the road, who says that other guy coming in your direction is doing as well?
Isn't this why the ICANN contract for a TLD should not belong to an American corporation? Logically, it should go a company in Switzerland, who have traditionally handled such things, and continue to be perceived as low in corruption [1] and high in democracy [2], with strong property rights [3]. They tend to be neutral in wars, and are not part of the EU (which is probably a bad idea for an independent TLD.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
[3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Property_Rights_I...
Some examples of the ways TV-style content is changing in the face of the internet:

http://vodo.net/pioneerone - Pioneer One is a sci-fi TV series much like traditional series, except that it's directly supported by viewer donations, and distributed via BitTorrent.

http://www.famicomdojo.tv/ - Famicom Dojo explores the features and history of old Japanese videogame consoles, a good example of "long-tail" content becoming viable.

http://www.youtube.com/show/autotunethenews - Catchy remixes of news and commentary shows on legacy TV. This is what happens when random people can edit and retransmit, instead of just consuming shows.
Because it's about economics.

TV stations are oligopoly. They have a business model that works, it works very well (i.e. makes them heaps of money). As long as it continues to make them heaps of money, they don't feel the need to change to meet consumer's demand. In this case consumers want low price (that's a given) and ability to watch programming at their schedule.

Tweeting how much you like "Lost" or liking "Gray's anatomy" episode on Facebook doesn't change the economics, it just delivers more views for their existing business model.

Piracy, on the other hand, delivers what consumers want (ability to watch any premium content on demand, at any time) for a very attractive price ($0). That cuts into network's revenue and that is the only reason they are even contemplating on-line distribution.

They do it very, very begrudgingly, because change is hard and on-line distribution is harder to monetize i.e. they haven't figured out how to make as many heaps of money as with their current business model.

The only reason they do it is that if they ignore this new expectation of their customers, the customers will self serve via piracy, in which case they'll loose even more.

BTW: people don't think of downloading music or movies as stealing (even if you put it in quotes). It is illegal but so is making a mix tape for a loved one or copying an Arnold's hit "Commando" on VHS tape from a neighbor. People have always engaged in some form of copyright infringement. The only thing different today than in 1985 is the scale of those acts which ballooned to a point of causing major drop in sales. The act of downloading a song today is, however, the same as act of a teenager in 1980 copying an album on a tape from a friend. The "stealing" of music of movies has always been a normal and accepted part of life (well, at least as long as there was an technology to do the copying).
There was an article on here recently about how in general the more agressive the lawyer is, the less case they have. Potentially the lawyer is bluffing. It a tragedy, that you have to shut down. This sort of thing makes me wonder if there is a market for a decentralized webserver. Sort of a bittorrent but for web pages that would allow you to get around some of the patent claims--in a way. The profit value of this would be that as traffic increased on site the added users would handle some of the load. Essentially auto scaling without the added hardware costs. Potential issues to get over is how to get the browsers to support such a thing. Could websockets or even existing JSONP work through it?
I am a Shopify partner through 3 years, paying 20% of my revenue to Shopify, and every time I have been in contact with "partner support" it has been, to put it mildly, an underwhelming experience.

You have to argue your way through an army of outsourced supporters who are equipped with nothing but the public Shopify docs, until you get to a real employee who concludes it with a "sorry, but we can't help".

Some of my issues:

1. If you're not American, you will be forced to hand over 3% of your 80% revenue cut to PayPal. (Unless your MRR cut is >$30k)

2. Sometimes Shopify just kills features, which merchants and partners rely on. Sure, we get a notice that the API will change - but how does that help, when there is no alternative way to achieve the removed functionality? I was lucky enough to get through to someone who knew someone at the dev team, but the response was once again "sorry, you're not a priority".
While the 2nd stage is 18 % of the rocket by weight, it only has one engine. The booster has nine. Engines are by far the most expensive part of the rocket, or used to be. (ULA says that engines make 65 per cent of the total cost of their first stages.)

> If reusing rocket was so profitable, there is a high chance someone else would have done it before.

AFAIK it is only like 10-12 years that computers and engineering software got good enough to simulate everything that happens in a rocket engine, sloshing of fuel etc. Cruder simulations were available before, but not good enough for that.

SpaceX engineers did most of the design and testing on computers. It took them only a few tries in the real world to nail the first landing.

Earlier pioneers would have to try in practice, which would mean a lot more failures and a lot more money, with a possible deadly incident in between.
I saw a movie about that once - think it was called "planet of the mares".
I like the article. It describes my observations from previous BTC bubbles.

A point the author makes is that within a bubble, markets can turn irrational. And additionally that they can sustain this irrationality for some time.
Alright, I'll bite. I donate quite a bit of my income to FOSS projects (which is pretty low due to living in the third world, so it's not a lot of money). I would gladly donate specifically towards Firefox development, but they are not spending donations on Firefox at all, and I would rather spend that cast (which I don't have a lot of) towards some other technical goal like Wayland infrastructure development, instead of wasting it (as I see it) to advance some social goal in the US which is completely alien to me.

I should also add that I never disable any telemetry in Firefox or anything that helps them earn a cent or two (as long as it does not abuse my privacy too much, and there were not a lot of those during 15+ years of using Firefox exclusively.)
I am so tired of this “marketing” angle, as if anyone having different priorities must be an idiot manipulated by the communication department of a large evil company. It’s been a trope since the 1990s.

Also, nobody is immune to advertising, so you can take these comments as seriously as the “sheeple” ones.
At this point I'd be willing to try a hippocracy.
That’s not how liquidity works.
What is a good alternative to Shopify for a small webstore? I don't want to pay a 20% cut.
Note that the article is about innovation and performance gains in general-purpose processors slowing, and about the increasing shift onto specialized computing engines by those who seek further performance gains for specific workloads.

This was foreshadowed with the Netburst not being able break 4 GHz in 2004-2005, and CPUs having to shift to multi-core. This bought "classic" CPUs more time, but CUDA showed up in 2007 and GPUs went from strictly specialized computing engines to general-purpose (in research, if not yet in the home). CPUs have also been steadily gaining SIMD extensions.

Now GPUs are showing promise for NN workloads, but in environments where the stack is tightly controlled, NN co-processors are showing up. This is because tightly controlling the stack has the benefits of being able to optimize and harmonize software and hardware, and interop outside of the stack (and in some cases, stack longevity) is not a factor.

The article isn't truly about how more and more computing environments tightly control their stack, but that mechanism does play a part in the design choices that result.
You may be right, but at the same time his niche success is much closer to "what I'm looking for" than the latest SEO-trick-de-jour.

While I'm impressed by the ability of people like Rank and Greywolf to identify and exploit new-found SEO techniques for short term profit, with the knowledge that Matt Cutts' team is going to be hot on their trail as soon as anybody notices, I'm _significantly_ more interested in Patrick's longterm sustainable business strategy.

While I might be prepared to go out on a grey-hat SEO limb for an idea of my own with only a marginal chance of success, I'm _much_ more cautious about risking Google blackholeing any great ideas I've got, or any of my clients' sites...

I guess what I'm saying is that "excellent writing and marketing" _is_ a magical SEO technique. It's not a $50k/month affiliate scheme or a $2k/day Adwords trick, but I suspect Patrick's BCC is a properly valuable business that someone might sensibly buy off him one day. I'm not so sure I'd ever consider buying a quick moneymaking website off Rand or Michael...
A very well-thought out site and a good implementation (I've just tried it). I'm going to use it.

I'm a single founder and whilst I've never reached a point with stratospheric income, the businesses that I have built in the 15 years I've been an entrepreneur have been great. I've enjoyed life. For me, being a single founder has always meant quick decisions and I employ people to compliment me. I'm not a 'finisher' - I'm an ideas person - and so I needed to employ people who would keep me on track and help me finish. There is no right or wrong way in terms of the number of founders, my opinion, and indeed I have both seen and experienced that having more than one founder can lead to disagreements. Good luck with Historious. I really like it
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't a tiny drone above you taking pictures.
Wouldn't atomicity come from doing things on per-commit basis?

Also, you're not taking into account the things that Git does give you that typical databases don't, like branching and merges
He has mentioned how lacking some of the tools are -- he once referred to Google Website Optimizer as "the devil" IIRC.

Whether Patrick has the inclination to work on tools like this, I don't know. I think it'd be a good idea for him to write a book, too, but he pooh-pooh'd that idea on TechZing because there's just not enough money in it.
I see it as an opportunity, a generation ago here in Australia it seemed the standard thing to do was to save up, go buy a house somewhere and settle down there for a long period of time. Given how much harder that is to do now it encourages you to see more of the world, live in different places get a better experience.

One of the problems in Australia is that a high immigration level keeps the market "bubble" going, makes the rental market hell to though :/
First, I agree that it'd be silly not to use thread-per-CPU non-blocking I/O.

However, I don't see why it'd be tricky in a threaded server. The thread gets an fd to recv() the incoming data from, and it popen()s an ffmpeg process then loops to recv() and write() the data until done.
"....cracking a problem that's basically tractable by human intelligence, if human intelligence could work on it for a few centuries."

This is a very common fallacy: assuming you can trade time for quality. i.e. every hard problem is solvable assuming you spend enough time on it (even infinite).

This is not true. Some problems are not solvable by some people no matter how long they spend on it.

That's the difference between genius and non genius, a genius can solve problems that others simply can't.

Just because you make an AI faster does not mean it can solve the problem. Some problems will be beyond the ability of the AI no matter how long it works on it.
I was out in the Arizona desert with a friend, and he was walking a few dozen feet ahead and he scared some javelinas out of the underbrush. They took off running past me, and it was a little unnerving. Panicked, not-so-bright little creatures, who knows what they might do?

Another friend of mine told me of a night he was camping in Georgia, and a wild boar came sniffing around his tent. Said it was the worst smelling thing he'd ever been around, and was a bit scared not knowing what it might do if he startled it.
My attempted point was that my dreams are small. :-)

I'd still write code, but with better weather that allows some othet hobbies -- and no stress. Maybe I would hire a few people and start a business. Not a big difference, really.

To get real change in what I do, I'd need a bilion so I could emulate Musk. I doubt I'd be good at it.
As a curious outsider, I have to ask why are you giving away the recipe to your secret sauce ? I mean, there are several of your competitors such as zencoder , etc. that could easily copy this idea and implement it . So why would you blog about implementation know-how that made your product cooler and enabled you to command premium pricing ?
The point is that the machine itself is more secure, not the whole ecosystem around it. Nobody claims that Chrome OS will somehow decrease (or increase) the probability on server-side attacks.
When I make a list of the things I'd like to do, but aren't, money is never the main barrier. It's things like... well... courage, faith, trust.

I've actually had enough money at one point to retire (living on passive income), and it didn't make me happy at all. In fact, I stepped back from life a little, and it made me less happy. For me, in my present level of "spiritual wisdom" (for want of a better term), needing money seems to be a helpful motivation.

I also observe what so many people do who make a lot of money do: keep on doing whatever it was they were doing.
Better, just leave it on a road somewhere. As if it accidentally fell off. I'm guessing that it was magnetic.
there's a 2.9s configuration option
They did this for the Y too. I would have liked a quick run through of the interior and other accessories they show on the website. But it's fine, not everything is finished yet. For example, the Model Y has a 7 seat option and we know nothing about it. All we have is one photo with the seats down.
Don't Teslas have some sort of collision detection that will automatically apply brakes in case of an object in the road?

And anyway, I'm not sure why an all metal grill would be worse than the grill guard (cow catcher) already present on a lot of trucks.
I find it awesome. Kudos to Tesla for willingness to experiment with form and functionality. The car industry nowadays is all too predictable and boring. Great job Elon.
Thanks for your comments. A bit of fresh air. Really, I don't think that demonizing CO2 is the objective. Demonizing oil and other petrochemicals seems more likely. I think we are in a CO2 drought -- we know the planet (including corals) had an explosion of life at the 700+ ppm CO2 level.
You haven’t given any good reasons to back up your claim. You don’t make any specific points ;)

It sounds like you made your comment before the presentation was finished.

This is also ignoring the fact that most luxury pickups and SUVs are also impractical gas guzzlers

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2015/04/28/what-does-your-wo...
This piece contains quite a good canvassing of the current socialist political climate, but it appears lacking in discussion of Climate Change and it’s relationship with a revival of anti-capitalist movement.

I have a lot of problems with Capitalism theoretically, but in practical terms it’s most unquestionable error is in the role it played in decades of Climate Change inaction and ecological destruction. Foster Wallace decried the existential emptiness of capitalist consumer society, and yeah that sucks, but if left alone by activists Capitalist systems would quite possibly destroy the entire planet or if we’re lucky only kill hundreds of millions of people who had no part real part in the system’s insatiability.

Some left thinkers I respect a lot are saying we might be choosing between socialism and ‘climate justice’ for the third world, or eco-fascism.

With Facebook recently installing Breitbart in their ‘quality news’ section, I’m not happy just fence-sitting and letting capitalists reorganise society in response to our climate emergency.
This is strange. There's still nothing about this on their web site.

It's very suspicious when a Bitcoin exchange claims problems on the deposit side and stops processing withdrawals. Nobody trusts a Bitcoin exchange in trouble, with good reason given the history. On the other hand, it's 6:30 AM in London, where Bitstamp is, and their staff is probably not in yet. Bitstamp is still processing trades; they haven't shut down their trading engine.

Most merchants who accept Bitcoin do so through Coinbase, which sells on Bitstamp. Coinbase only holds a working float of Bitcoins. When Coinbase can't unload incoming Bitcoins, they start refusing transactions. So most Bitcoin e-commerce will stop within hours if this isn't fixed rapidly.

On top of that, Bitcoin, after being stable around $315-$320 or so for weeks, suddenly dropped to a low of $255 in the last 48 hours. Right now, it's around $270. Something is going on.
>The claim that the Chinese Communist regime "is not bad and should be supported" is horrific and evil

Goodness me. Where exactly did I say this? There was no attempt at a moral equivalency in my post. What I was trying to convey was that in any serious discussion of the US Government, a driveby, one-line post reminding us all that certain US agencies do unquestionably bad things and are answerable to essentially no one would be treated the way it deserved to be: as a single data point in a larger discussion, and essentially worthless without more substance or an attempt to connect to the larger discussion.

Heresy suppression. On the Anglosphere internet of late November 2019, it is unquestionably heresy to say anything non-negative about China, especially on Hacker News, as your response so aptly demonstrated (again, no one in this thread has expressed anything near uncritical admiration.) You've mistaken my identification of something as heresy for support of the heresy, I think.
Does responsible disclosure really make sense for design flaws like this? Any motivated attacker would have already noticed it too you'd think.
It's not that hard to find a set of more "curvy" parentheses from a different font to put in, or just make them more curvy yourself! Font editors are widely available and very easy to use especially if you're making small adjustments like this. I remember decades ago I manually "slashed the zeros" on most of my system's fonts using a hex editor, after a particularly bad misreading incident...

B612 is open-source too, so you don't have to worry about any copyright issues either.
To the degree that low value work activity cannot be outsourced to areas where the wage is more closely aligned with value, the “gig economy,” the “shadow economy ,” or firms small enough to be exempt from min wage then it will be supported by systems of cross subsidies best implemented by large corporations. The work will get done at a cost not too different from the value created. Outlawing low wage work is like outlawing drugs—it feels like the right intervention to folks who like interventions and like any barrier is only effective insofar as human ingenuity has limits.
You're already visiting web pages that are directing your computer to access servers somewhat arbitrarily. You're running quite a bit of other people's code on your computer.
>the compromise itself had nothing to do with the Electoral College's creation or design

Then what were they compromising on? The formation and continuation of the US Government. Without the compromise there is no Electoral College.
What about irregular scheduling? Surely that can have a big impact on ability to find/keep other work I imagine.
Trucks are trucks. Cars are cars. Their use cases have virtually zero overlap.

That being said, a lot of trucking could be replaced by freight trains or by ships, depending on which part of the world we're talking about.
Do you have a citation you can offer up with more solid loss numbers? It looks like Melvin alone has lost at least $4.5 billion dollars on the GME short trade, and Citadel/Point72 provided ~$2.75 billion in capital to Melvin.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-retail-trading-melvin/mel...