skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is an official place for people to submit bugs for Wolfram|Alpha, to talk them over, and to vote bugs up and down.

http://community.wolframalpha.com
> If any other field had a cultural barrier to entry like that, no one would stand for it.

I would consider the non-STEM academic fields to be prime examples of ones with massive cultural barriers to entry. However, this does not fit into the standard oppression script, so it tends to be systematically ignored.
I sort of did something similar for my Darts app for the iPhone, specifically for defining the throw model for the "AI" player.

I found it easiest to simulate millions of random dart throws parameterized by throw angle and velocity. I record the slot on the board (1-20, Bull) hit given the launch angles and force of the throw. I let this "simulation" run until I had 50 samples per board slot.

The simulation is run once ahead of time. The simulation results are bundled with the app.

When it becomes the AI's turn, it picks a slot to aim at based on the game variation and state of the game. Currently, it chooses rather poorly in Cricket.

Then it picks a random sample from the sample pool recorded from the aforementioned simulation. Based on the user-chosen competence level, it adds a small, random amount of error to the angle and velocity associated with the selected sample. Finally, the dart is launched using the calculated angles and force.

While the app is Objective C, the offline simulation was written in Python. The whole thing was a blast to write.

Here's an old video of gameplay:

http://vimeo.com/2010432

Skip ahead to around 1:10 to see the AI take its turn.
they have a place for people to submit bugs like this.
community.wolframalpha.com
I really don't get it - for signing up for a computer science degree, you first have to pass through a geek room? Or a picture of Spock will be staring down on you from the wall while you make the check mark for CS? Or what is the problem? I don't think many universities are decorated like that, so I don't see the barrier.

One thing to complain about: maths and CS buildings are typically the most ugly ones of a university (the ones I have seen anyway). Just like in later jobs, where IT is often put into the basement... It's as if architects figure that geeks don't care about their environment anyway, so they can just be caged into concrete monstrosities. However, men like that just as little as women.
I think his point is that the test itself isn't the useful bit. The useful part is that thinking about what to test can uncover bugs.

This is what FMEA (Failure Modes Effects Analysis) does: you assume failures of every part of the system, rank their likelihood and the end effect and see how your design handles it. A good FMEA assumes everything will fail and analyzes the impact. Unfortunately, comprehensive FMEA is expensive and time consuming so it's usually only done for critical subsystems.
Fusion Garage Responds to Arrington Lawsuit
IE9 should be standards compliant by default. A patched version of IE6 however should continue to be sucky by default and use a new rendering engine only with a nosuck tag.
But in Singapore, maybe in other Asian countries too, getting a good grade is not that hard, but it is very time consuming. For me personally it is a choice between high GPA or personal projects, achieving both is almost impossible.
I have personally found especially geeky people to be unprofessional and underproductive. Yes there is often associated geekery around computers, but wearing it on your sleeve and looking down on more well adjusted people is counter-productive. The most productive programmers that I know are physically and socially active. My hypothesis is that this keeps you energetic and on target to deliver useful features to your customers.
A pen is 100% intuitive and can do exactly 1 thing.

What's your point?
Easily deployable software to grab the signals out of the air was probably outside the realm of what seemed possible then

Not for the Russians it wasn't! Nor for the French, who will happily sell weapons to whoever wants them (as we Brits learnt in the Falklands War).
Tetra, the incredibly fast micromouse
Five Things You Need to Know About Social Engineering
Excuse my ignorance, but that this ad blocker block google ads in search results, or rather Flash ads?

I'm asking because, if you push this argument further, you could think that it's good for Google to have all ads served by competitors disappear, to leave only google ads everywhere.
Wow, using commented out Javascript to speed up load times and then parsing and evaling at run-time. That's a pretty interesting hack.
Yea, you could be right. I'm just talking about American Universities because thats where my experience is.
Super Search, A Simple Plugin To Improve Your Search Experience
Young Entrepreneur, The New Drug
Bummer, you might want to contact him directly.
I totally agree with you. I always test layouts to make sure that they don't break when the browser window is less than 1000 pixels wide.

I use a Mac so horizontal scrolling is easy. Still I try to avoid it in my sites since most of my target audience uses Windows or other OS's.
I don't have flash installed in my primary browser (Opera). When I want to view flash, I boot up Firefox and paste the URL over.

I also have a shellscript to download Youtube videos and feed them to mplayer, since my computer is too slow for most Flash video.
Dude, have you talked to hairdressers? I have. When I was younger I'd be surprised at how much they were comfortable talking about. We'd talk about cinema and literature and politics and they'd have an opinion about everything. It struck me how these people, who I'd once thought were emptyheaded, were actually smart, well-balanced people who just happened to love their occupation. Then it made me realize that perhaps I was the emptyheaded one for believing in the idea of the "average joe".

Now I am a little bit older — not much older, mind you — and I've learned how stupid it is to believe that anybody could be at all considered average. In various positions I've talked to a slew of people I'd once have dismissed for their commonality. I don't think I've ever met somebody who I'd call stupid. A lot of them you'd think are stupid until you talk to them and realize they've just got a few stupid beliefs ingrained in them and beyond that are as bright as anybody. The more people you meet, the more you realize how stupid it is to sequester yourself away in an ivory tower or a dank basement, to assume that you're somehow an elite being who other people simply cannot understand.

Hell, that's why I became a writer. I learned that to understand others, I had to learn how others understood me.
I agree. We (Rackspace) have been in touch with Justin quite a bit, and are very optimistic about what this product can offer our customers and our community.
Here's a great article on the subject from Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot founder). http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/11097/How-To-Price-Soft...
Someone who pays nothing is not a customer.
I'm sorry, but your comment really pisses me off.

"I do not know of a single person at the university who could not achieve a 3.5 if he or she only bothered to focus."

This is total bullshit. First, there are many people that barely made it into college (most of whom aren't in computer science/engineering), and no matter how much they worked, could not get a 3.5. Second, by saying "if he/she only bothered to focus," you're claiming that everyone who doesn't get a 3.5 is careless, lazy, or both.

Everyone on this forum could achieve a karma rating of 3,000. And for those of you who don't believe that 3,000 is a fair cutoff, I would challenge you by saying this: I have been on HN for over a year, and I do not know of a single person on HN who could not achieve 3,000 if he or she only bothered to focus.

The reason I don't have a 3.5GPA is the same reason I don't have 3,000 karma: I enjoy both school and HN, but there is a diminishing rate of return for effort. If I do the minimum amount of effort in school to get a 2.75, then work for 40 hours a week at my company, and still hang out with my friends, I really have no regret that I never "bothered" to get a 3.5.

Grade point averages are a result of intelligence, commitment, and personal priorities. Simplifying them the way that you do is both crass and incorrect.
If the Media found out that insurgents used Linux to hack military drones...
Browser Size: Browser sizes of Google's Users
Ask HN: Seen any interesting NLP links?
Dear HN,

I've been doing some reading on natural language technologies -- and it seems like there's a huge amount of potential there! Have you seen any killer apps?
I don't know about axod, but some of us don't have English as our first language. Its not always easy to have perfect grammar that comes naturally to a native speaker, but I personally try to be as correct as possible often going through 4-5 edits and going back to it to make sure that people, other than me, can read what I am typing. Still, mistakes slips through. Its a work in progress, some do better than others.

I waited almost a year before I decided to register an account (this place and other forums) and contribute to the discussion, when I was sure that I can put words together in a sentence that people can understand; only to find out that the best way to write proper English (or any language for that matter) is to write often and make mistakes so that others can point them out and you learn from that.
Past a certain point it becomes "live and let live". I'm sure the things you like are things that other banker might not be able to stand; similarly, if you tried walking in his shoes you'd find how uncomfortable you found them. So from just what you wrote it sounds like you and the other guy found an equilibrium, where you were both happy with what you had.
How to build your startup... or not
How shellfish saved the human race
Google map maker competitions
wow, nice tool.

rofl: http://www06.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=422340980293840234098...

full name:
42 undecillion, 234 decillion, 98 nonillion, 29 octillion, 384 septillion, 23 sextillion, 409 quintillion, 823 quadrillion, 409 trillion, 823 billion, 94 million, 823 thousand and 411...
Perhaps this is just me being youthful and naive, but I'm astonished here at how many people drink and get stoned before every class. I don't think I'd have ever fully believed that idea, of people just vastly abusing substances and still getting their work done, had I not met people who took shots and smoked a blunt in between every class.
You can be a customer of the site without be a customer of their advertisers.
Astronomy pictures of the year
I'm curious: What are their cultural barriers? I'm a Communications major, so I'm non-STEM, and I'd like to know what you think the social barriers are. Sports? Fashion?
not sure i would read the numbers that way @jschwa --- not sure that is what jon's analysis (which is really cool) shows -- and there are a few wildcards with many many more zeros in their wake yet to be cast

(see you tonight :)
Idea: Make this a WepApp with a small application only for the popups. So, it could be used on phones and other systems. + The question would be saved in a secure place and I could add and access them from anywhere. Also, I find the main dialog page a bit clumpsy.. too much differents concepts.. a simple application in the status bar would do the job.

Finally, by using a small application like this, it'd make it easier to add new features and create new type of application that would use the already-existing questions. For instance, an application could ask questions from time to time while another would enable me to play a game with the questions, etc. However, everyone would be free to only use the app they want.

On a side-note, to have the background service running effect, plug-in in firefox or chrome could also be a good idea - or as a home page.
Interesting. I can't watch the video right now, but I hope it gets into the details of what they actually do.

http://revenuegrp.com/ is just a few pages of hand-wavey marketing speak. And the fact that "Payday Loans" is one of their key verticals doesn't inspire confidence.
"I've only run into a handful of software companies who have a hard grade cutoff anywhere. None of the big names (MS, GOOG, etc) do it"

Isn't Google notorious for requiring a 3.0 or better GPA?
http://www06.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=50%25+of+%2860%25+of+...
This is just a list of links. Is there anything in them that's worth reading?
The message I read here (which might not at all be what you wanted to say, mind you!) is: "Nongeeks don't want to be geeks because geeks are smarter."

I think the truth is closer to: "Nongeeks don't want to be geeks because geeks are perceived as lower status."

And the solution would be for our culture to expand and embrace more things, to reflect "normal" society in its diversity and lack of a hive mind.

Of course, then we wouldn't be geeks, would we? The message I read here (which might not at all be what you wanted to say, mind you!) is: "Geeks should stop liking what they like, and start liking what everyone else likes instead." ;)
Free Will and Ethics
> You cannot completely throw out GPA because it is a measure of something.

Of course you can. Nobody is saying the GPA doesn't measure something, the question is whether or not it measures something relevant to the hiring decisions of your shop. From what I've seen, there is actually a negative correlation between grade and employability.

> All I'm saying is that, at a target of 3.5, it doesn't preclude you from accomplishing other endeavors during your university years.

Yes it does - from personal observation to boot. My peers in college with the 3.5 GPA were almost all considerably less capable than the people who stayed up late hacking and sacrificed marks as a result. There were a couple of outliers (who were an absolute joy to work with), but they are also exceptionally rare.

The question is whether or not believe what it takes to get the grades has relevance to what you do after graduation. I'm firmly of the opinion that it does not: every major skill I've ever learned that has helped me become a better programmer has not come from a classroom or the lips of a professor. Classes were really just a nice supplement to the hacking I was already doing, not the other way around. Like a great many other crafts, practice makes perfect, and while a small minority of the population can make the grade and hack a lot, the vast majority cannot. Deliberately placing yourself in a pool with a very few number of good candidates, and a flood of academic overachievers, is not an optimal hiring strategy.

In hindsight though, this filter is not precisely a bad thing. From past experience, the companies that have hard grade cutoffs are also the ones I do not wish to work for - so perhaps it is a good idea that the industry seems to have segmented itself this way.
The first part of this article just seems like a good argument to home school your kids. I'd imagine a home schooled kid with a nice SAT score would probably do quite well dealing with college and then just fine after college. I've never been asked for my GPA and probably wouldn't continue talking to a company that asked for it.

That being said part of the point of starting your company is to not worry about stuff like that.
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=994075
Micro-benchmarking the gt200 gpu
They interviewed me :P (no, didn't get the job), My GPA was about 2.8 at the time. Also, if Google has a mark cutoff, it is not made public (suggesting that there are circumstances where they will ignore a low grade).

NVidia on the other hand made their intentions very clear, and basically said to not bother if your GPA was below 3.5, right in the job description.
Companies are treated as singular nouns in American English and as plural nouns in British English.
I can't believe the negative comments about this article. It seems to me to make a rather obvious point fairly well. People tend to migrate towards comfortable social environments, and creating a mess associated with a particular stereotype will tend to attract people who fit that stereotype, and repel people who don't.

Computer science stereotypes revolve around geek culture. That culture is very male dominated, so will repel women a lot more strongly than it repels men. So if you want to increase the number of women, you need to cut back on the amount of geek culture in CS environments.

This seems to me to be obviously correct. But it seems that saying it makes a lot of people upset. Why? Are you afraid that you won't be allowed to be a geek? Do you look around you and get upset at the thought that someone might want you to clean up? What is it?

Let me go farther. I've noticed that many geeks don't want non-geeks around because they think non-geeks are less intelligent and would water down programming. Well certainly there are a lot of dumb people out there. But I've known lots of dumb geeks and smart non-geeks. In fact I'd guess that that geeks are smarter on average than non-geeks, but geeks make up only a small fraction of the really smart people out there. And furthermore I find the average smart non-geek more interesting than the average geek.

So from my perspective broadening the base of people in CS would be a good thing.
Freakonomics: The Wait (where mass transit fails)
I haven't used privoxy in a while because I don't want to globally block ads and I want to have site-wide filtering system which is easier in extensions and a bit of a work with privoxy. There are supposedly better alternative to privoxy someone once mentioned, I can't remember it.

Blocking google text ads with privoxy:
http://www.willamowius.de/privoxy.html

The thing with privoxy and most other good ad blocking extensions/software is that you can edit the filter list to block almost everything you could possibly think of. So no matter whatever your argument is Google can not stop you from blocking whatever ads you want to block, regardless of the operating system you use (yes even Google Chrome OS, which is a debain/ubuntu based system. Emphasis on Ubuntu because Canonical/Ubuntu developers actively worked on it prior to the official Chrome OS announcement. Not to mention Chrome OS is opensource and you can rip it apart and do whatever you want to do with it).
I should have added that I'm just as turned off by "geek" culture (which I see as being characterized by a rather obesssive interest in a few pop-cultural artifacts which are really only slightly interesting) as I am by any of the others. I'm a scientist, not a programmer, and this is part of the reason.
Improving MapReduce Performance
The Harry Potter Economy
Based on the stereotypes I've heard, I'd say that investment bankers are also outside the "social mainstream" of workers.

EDIT: Okay, I sort of see your point. My feeling is that if you consistently work long hours you definitionally put yourself outside of the "social mainstream," because I was thinking of "social mainstream" as "the set of people whose non-work lives are fairly similar to the median".

Whereas I think you're using a definition closer to "people who aren't 'weird'/'losers'". I don't think that's what the original commenter meant, but it's possible. And if that's what he meant, I think you could be right.

[/EDIT]

For the record, I don't (necessarily) agree that geeky people are more likely to do good computer work than non-geeky people. I just think that it's a valid point of discussion, and that in particular comparing the quoted comment to racism instead of addressing it is both incorrect and incredibly obnoxious.
That sounds extremely complicated. I don't see the need to emulate checks electronically, when there are good solutions today.

Scandinavian business and personal users have no problems with transferring money using online banks. You can even get the invoice electronically and just click a button to pay it, and the amount will be automatically transferred at the due date. I have heard rumors that checks are sometimes used in B2B, but I expect it to be in a very limited set of cases.

I remember some old people who used checks in the stores when I was a kid (many, many years ago), but I doubt the stores would even know what to do with a check if they were given one.

Edit: I did a search and found an article from 2006. The newspaper suggested that people should have a check book in case of problems with the electronic system (many don't carry much in cash). They interviewed the CEO of a major bank, and he wasn't even sure that the bank gave out check books at all :-)
Indeed, some copyright infringement IS fine: casual whistling of a tune, quoting passages of books for reviews, copying the cut and fit of stylish trousers, things like that.

Since copyright is enforced by the state, for the purposes of advancement of art and science, we have to draw a balance. "Copyright" isn't state-policed money to be given to an "artist" and his/her/its heirs for ever. Copyright is supposed to entice people to create more stuff, by allowing a small monopoly.

If and when that monopoly becomes too costly to society, the state gets to revoke it. Like it or hate it, the GPL doesn't really have that kind of cost to society. GPL'ed code is open for people to build on, to create with.

Beyond that, "GPL" is a license, not a copyright. Actions against entities under the GPL are not really "copyright" suits, as I understand it, but rather contract suits.

To sum up: you're hoping that people forget what purpose copyright has, and you're hoping that people don't understand the difference between "copyright" and "license".
By design, the average GPA should be close to 2.5. Most schools try to modulate the difficulty of their courses to maintain a C+ average year-to-year. In my engineering school, they had a schedule of expected class averages for each year in the program; professors that wanted to assign significantly higher or lower grades had to justify their decision to the department head. After all, if the class average is 3.5, there's no headroom for above-average students to distinguish themselves.

However, I agree that any individual who wants to put in the work can probably achieve a 3.0 or better any most schools. Most people just don't want to do that much work.
Well we've only heard of this happening when there's a chargeback/claim & they had to pay the claimant. Not sure if its happened just because an account was shut down for 'risk management'
Still, we prefer to keep as little $ as possible in PP's hands.
I can't speak for anyone else, obviously, but I sequester myself away in a dark basement because I enjoy it, not out of some idiot notion that I'm smarter than other people.

It's not that other people are stupider than me; it's that other people aren't me. I am under the obligation to act the way they act in the same way that I am under the obligation to have the same favourite colour as them. That is to say, I am under no such obligation. I happen to enjoy different things than they do; is it any surprise that I act differently, then?

Otherwise, I largely agree with you, I think.
This is fixed now - large deletes won't block the world forever: http://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-494
Sumerians Look On In Confusion As God Creates World
From my highly anecdotal experience, I think the proportion of interesting to uninteresting people is equally low in any given profession. Most computer people focus on crappy sci-fi, most medical people focus on crappy drama, and most women tend to prefer crappy drama to crappy sci-fi.

I love computers, mathematics, and technology. I think I'm pretty good at it. If I stumble on an interesting problem, I prefer to stay home and work on it than to go out. But I can't stand being around most computer people. They drive me nuts with their ridiculously limited interests and a moral pedestal glorying their severely limited subculture. In most other professions people are on average equally boring, but at least they're not on a high horse.