skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I dropped out this year and feel awful about it, despite being way better off.

During that time, I've quadrupled sales in my ISV and have made a full-time living of it, and I now have no debt and decent savings. I'm no Mark Zuckerburg, but it's not a bad start.

But I still kinda feel like a loser without a degree, even if I don't think I'll need it. Especially since I paid so much for the first couple years. I applied to another school (public this time) to transfer, just in case I come to my senses.

I think there's credit bubble in education just like the one in housing. Lots of easily available, subsidized money for student loans, even if the rates aren't great. Plus it's a platitude that there's no sacrifice too big you (or your family) can make to get a college education. So even reasonable, well-meaning institutions have totally wacky prices, just as a reaction to market forces and a desire to stay "competitive" building fancy new stuff.

This sounds really crazy and tin-foil-hat-ish, but sometimes I think that there's kind of a "educational industrial complex" if you will that's benefiting from this weird (hopefully temporary) situation, and I feel icky supporting it just because I'm afraid someone will judge me wrong without the piece of paper some day. One of the reasons I quit my job after I quit school was because I hate that feeling of knowing you're being fucked over a little bit each day because you don't have the balls or resources to do anything about it. I feel like school is that kinda situation now, and it shouldn't be, because there's a ton of good things about college and I want to finish.
Definitely. 4chan feels significant to me. The beginnings of large-scale ad-hoc self-organization?

(I, probably along with other people, suggested moot to TED.)
The problems, documents, workflow, problems, types of people you need involved, etc are radically different in these three cases.

How so? In the web site case I need a person who can code and person to do art/design. In the instance of a game guess what I need a person who can code and someone to take care of the art and design. The only real difference seems to be a matter of scale. Every project in the software development world consists of two things content and code.

The capabilities of the languages are different, and therefore the proper design and structure of software is as well.
Hey guess what the properties of wood iron and stone are just as different and require different designs or do you think the sears tower could have been made of wood with out a change in its design?
Ask HN: Review my FB App.
I made a "thats what she said" plugin for facebook. I saw around 500k people interested in it(there are a lot of "We want a thats what she said app" groups) so I decided to build it.

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=371323550620
Clickable link: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=371323550620
I loaded the ROMs from my mac mini via the web sharing feature of OS X (Apache). All the ROMs I tried worked the first time. Some ROM formats may not be supported; the ones I used had a .nes file extension.
http://mixergy.com/thrillist-ben-lerer/
They spend even more money on advertising.

Check it out, I just looked up Pfizer's 10k for fun: http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/financials...

If you check out their data from 2006-2008, they spend about 16% of revenue on R&D. They spend about the same on marketing, though in 2007 they spent 23%, which drags the amount up a bit. But...

They spend 30% on SI&A, which stands for "Selling, Information, and Administrative" purposes. This includes "Direct selling expenses are expenses that can be directly linked to the sale of a specific unit such as credit, warranty and advertising expenses. Indirect selling expenses are expenses which cannot be directly linked to the sale of a specific unit, but which are proportionally allocated to all units sold during a certain period, such as telephone, interest and postal charges. General and administrative expenses include salaries of non-sales personnel, rent, heat and lights."

So, you can't _really_ be sure of what they're spending on selling, because it's mixed in with non-sales personell... but bottom line is, they don't spend that much on R&D, not compared with what they're making, anyway.

And they wouldn't have an incentive, but I'd argue that they _shouldn't_. Something as important as drugs should really be one of the legitimate functions of government. If I ran things, I'd be throwing out patents, but turning up NSF funding.
Have you actually worked in this field? As a quant?
You could probably actually buy two Ferrari F430s once you take into account all of the student loan interest.
Like sfk, I don't think its popularity makes it any more valid, though similarly I also don't mean to single you out. Linking and sharing information is undoubtedly one of the foundations of the internet, but at the same time identity/anonymity is important. Backtype provides an interesting consumer service, but at the same time its plugin is destructive to maintenance of identity.

If you're drawing from HN, separate it clearly from the comments left on at your blog and somehow summarize, emulate, or eliminate threads. Otherwise it's damaging to all around.
Channers do love their 'ghost in the shell' kind of apperance.
django, git, celeryd, mongodb, redis, tornado, appengine, superfeedr, phsb, and opencalais come to mind
Kids aren't going to understand decorators or list comprehensions. They aren't going to get the point of doc strings.

Define "kid." I know middle schoolers who could get this stuff. I reject the idea that loops and functions are "easy" and other various language features and concepts are "hard."

There are some things which are going to be out of reach, but it's not going to be the same for everyone, and what those things actually are might surprise you.

And seriously, how are list comprehensions difficult to understand?
And how many people didn't go to college with aspirations of doing something great and failed?

I wasn't really trying to make a point past pointing out that the comment I was replying to didn't really say much.
I stand corrected.

The ads are still strange though.
Ask HN: Applications or best practices to ensure data security on a Macintosh
I'm a relatively new Mac user, and I'm taking my Mac traveling for the first time.

I'm very interested in how other people keep data secure, backed up, and protected in case of theft.

Do you use Filevault? Some kind of security application? Mac OS native tools? Rsync backups?

Looking forward to hearing about how everyone is handling this.
The only problem that he actually mentions is:

Also, many students fail to connect what they learn in one class to what they learn in another. Thus, we often see students with high grades in algorithms, data structures, and software engineering who nevertheless hack solutions in an operating systems class with total disregard for data structures, algorithms, and the structure of the software.

That is to say pass fail grading of programs, grading should be similar to an English class how you express it is just as important as what you express.
It's clever but your job search may be difficult given your ideal job description...

http://www.scientificblogging.com/rogue_neuron/creativity_cr...
I've worked in a wholesale nursery where I was in the middle of the paddock all day. Obviously there wasn't coffee there. But yes - most offices (and retail) have some form of coffee.
One of the rows of data in that link provides the total carbon emissions (the row titled: "Carbon dioxide emissions (CO2), thousand metric tons of CO2"). Dividing this number by the population of the US and Australia provides a very similar result to the Wikipedia article. The per GDP data is another row entirely. Maybe I'm confused, as I don't look at stuff like this much, and I've only given it a cursory glance ... but this data doesn't look to be backing up your original argument either.
Metaplace to shut down in nine days, delete everything. Jscott somewhat unhappy.
Sad thing about this is there is some developers at Microsoft right now working on this, for as many possible hours per day all through the holiday just to fix and remove the features. They couldn't have waited until January 4th to drop this?
This reminds me of Andrei Sakharov, the father of soviet nuclear bomb who became an anti-nuclear activist later in his life.
OOP makes writing bloatware so easy, you don't need to think, just reuse someone else's classes, and this is what they teach in CS 101.
Ironically the author is one of the creators of the problem.
Except it's is the only field that believes CS an SE are the same thing.

You don't expect a mechanical engineer to know the chemistry of a steel melt, and you don't expect a chemist to know about engines.

Yet in CS we either teach the detailed chemistry and expect the student to pick up the engineering themselves - or we teach just engineering without explaining what a metal is
I think you are mistaken. In my reading, the series has data for both GDP and per capita. Each individual page shows only one or the other. It is not per/per as you imply.

http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/Metadata.aspx?IndicatorId=28&...

Follow either of the links to 'Metric tons of CO2 per capita' and you'll find numbers very close to Wikipedia.

(in any case, could you delete one of your responses so that replies aren't scattered?)
Hey White House, where's our broadband stimulus money?
Brilliant! You should link to your submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1010887
Define "planetary suicide." I'm sure that the Chinese leadership isn't too concerned because their patch of Earth is well-positioned to whatever chaos will ensue. I'm sure the sub-Saharan nations, Australia and perhaps even the Indian subcontinent would beg to differ though.

A two degree centigrade difference, real or imagined, wouldn't be a big deal to a modernized China, nor would it be a big deal to those of us living in North America.

What's more is that China is blessed with regards to natural defenses. These same natural defenses also lead to isolation. The Chinese paid dearly for their relative isolation in the 19th and 20th centuries. But if all havoc were to break out in the rest of the world, then they'd do comparatively well in their present state.

It's all just politics, plain and simple.
Maybe I'm one of the slow coders, but for sizable problems, I find that thinking about the problem on paper speeds things up greatly: I don't waste a bunch of time re-writing my half-written class as I discover it's not what I want. (Not writing in C++ helps) I'm thinking of things that require a few classes here, rather than a large algorithm.
I didn't say doing three things a day would work for everyone, but im willing to put my name on the line by saying its more effective then auditing 100% of your time. See this post: http://blog.liferemix.net/lazy-productivity-10-simple-ways-d... - I take no credit for the concept. Many smarter people have already shared this concept.

As per the joke - no im annoyed as I need to explain my pun. Obviously, its impossible to be productive and not achieve anything. I was writing an oxymoron (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxymoron) and also using satire to bring to light, what I believe are flaws in common "productivity" knowledge. Honestly, did I really need to explain this. anyone?
I agree - i removed the plugin. It worked better when most of the conversation around my content happened on FriendFeed, where the conversation was much more fractured. HN is different and FF is dead so I decided to remove it.

Thanks for your feedback
While you say infectious as a bad thing, I see it as a great thing. If I choose to release something under the a permissive license, why shouldn't I ask you to share your contributions as well? I don't get what all the fuss is about lately with the GPL haters--most of whom rely on it everyday.
Is it also possible that slightly higher temperatures and more rainfall could be less of a negative in China? There are a lot cold areas there that could become more fertile. The bigger problem in Beijing is simply the air quality, I felt the need to wear a mask. The direct perceptibility of that phenomena is more likely to drive action on air pollution.
There should be a way to merge "duplicates" posts by people with karma above certain threshold. For example, this could have been merged with Chris Dixson's post from this morning.
> I'm not accustomed to seeing police carrying anything more than a holstered service pistol.

More to the point, you've been trained think that is normal, in countries where guns aren't legal, the very sight of a gun would strike fear into people.

I remember traveling to the UK from the US as a kid with my family. In the airport there were police holding fully automatic rifles. That scared me. I had never seen something like that. I was thinking "WTF is going on in the UK??". I of course had no idea that the UK was supposed to be "gun free".

The only time I remember seeing police/security people in the US with automatic weapons (in person) was at the airport right after Sept. 11th. I have seen police holding (semi)automatic weapons in several countries now. It is much scarier than the standard holstered pistol you see in the US.
I also thought the design was a significant problem with the site (and I am a designer/developer). It's dark and cramped and the header is really uninspiring to me.

I seems like StackOverflow for fashion newbies more than Digg. If it's largely occupied by the hapless, you might want to elevate a few users (beyond the concept of points, etc) to some sort of style-leader designation. And maybe add Gravatars - it really lacked personalities and imagery.

After reading the piece, however, my interest was in seeing the pitch that went out to blogs. How easy was it for them to give you coverage? Did you provide stats, incentives, quotes, ready-to-go screen caps, etc?
The consumer and business smart phone markets are converging.

What is the difference between a "business smart phone" and a "consumer smart phone" anymore? Smart phone's used to be inherently business focused due to their higher cost and complexity, but the iPhone and Android have brought smart phones to consumers.

Thus I don't believe we have a "business smart phone" market any longer; instead we have a "smart phone" market.
why its human nature to judge. Its your right to judge me and tell me im wrong. I throw these (my) ideas out there to be judged. If you don't want to be judged just close your eyes...now
The only value I have received from college is knowing that I don't need it to succeed. I dropped out and went back to finish in between startups. If you do go, enjoy your time there, drop in on interesting classes, and most importantly meet as many interesting people as possible.
oh and btw, if you're worried my ideas threaten the concept of your app - https://procrasdonate.com/ - don't worry they don't.

I think its an awesome app and has the potential to actually cause people to do less auditing.
Former Morgan Stanley Coder Gets 2 Years in Prison for TJX Hack
College doesn't pass the smell test to me. During the housing boom everyone was saying, hey, easy money, housing is a sure thing. That just doesn't smell right, and sure enough, the system was being temporarily propped up. College is the same way. If everyone is taking out 80k to get shit faced for 5 years it just doesn't smell right. Like housing, the system is being propped up in large part due to low interest rate loans among other things. Certain professions that have government backed monopolies (medicine, law) might be alright. But just like your housing deed, most every other degree won't hardly be worth the paper it's written on.
I don't think openID was really that big of a problem(the login page has a bounce rate of only 1.59%). There is a non-openID login solution in the works, so that shouldn't be a problem in the future.

I think the lack of registered users is mainly because you don't need to register to ask/answer questions. The site is 99% useful w/o registering. The only feature they don't have is voting.

So pretty much the only people who end up registering, are the super active users, who want to dive in, and participate.

We aren't really focusing on registering users, the goal is to make it easy to create new content, more content = more ways for Google to find our site.

Basically at this stage it's a SEO play, the goal is to become THE answer site for fashion/style questions.
Sure, except the process still hasn't been made abosultely safe when it comes to thorium.
The api will be free for most people. If you use it for revenue generating transactions or it is core to your app (wouldn't be useful without it) we ask for a revenue share (but no up front fee). Otherwise, as long as you don't hit our generous usage limits, it is free. The one exception is that contact sharing apps aren't allowed yet, although we have a plan to allow that in the next release.
environmentalism offers salvation and a complete belief structure for many people

Environmentalism is but one piece, but you're right that we're dealing with a religion here. Moreover, the narrative of sin and redemption is not a coincidence: progressivism (including its environmentalism subset) is not metaphorically a religion; it is a real, living (nontheistic) religion,* the clear intellectual descendant of mainline ecumenical protestant Christianity. A century ago it was the WCTU and the YMCA; today it's NOW and Greenpeace.

*If a nontheistic religion seems like a contradiction in terms, the problem is merely linguistic; English lacks a good word meaning "all religious beliefs minus the supernatural stuff". Whatever you call it, a nontheistic religion can't help but show its roots: a nontheistic sect of Hinduism, for example, would still be identifiably Hindu, despite the absence of gods; it would likely lack a sin-redemption narrative, but would probably include some sort of caste system.
yes, im young and possibly creative (debatable) and do work at a startup...but unfortunately not in the vallley.

I do manage a team (of 8) very creating and talented developers and designers. I don't force my ideas on them - in fact i let them work however and whenever they want.

The reason why I don't like time management - it focuses on time rather than result. Tim Ferriss explains this much better than me. 80% of the work you do will only result in 20% of the product. Therefore most of your time is actually wasted. To fix this, one needs to focus on results and efficiency rather than time. Pick the three most important tasks (which more often than not aren't the most urgent, suprisingly) and tackle those.
Learn Python by writing games (free book)
I share chancho's experience and I graduated in 2007.
I bought this quite early. It is a truly beautiful game, with perhaps less fun gameplay than I would have liked, but I don't regret my purchase.

Here's a weird note about games as opposed to other software: games wear on the user quickly. For example, I pre-ordered it while it was still in the open beta (for pre-orderers), and not quite balanced or "finished" yet (to the extent that any software is every finished). I played it before those issues were quite hammered out, and had "consumed" the game prior to it being officially released.

This might have relevance to people who are hoping to use the "release early and iterate like mad" strategy for a videogame. (Then again, considering he got my money at the full sale price, I guess he can't be too poorly off for it.)
RIMM will see its market share eroded by Google, Apple, and Microsoft over the next 5 years. So will Microsoft. I think Microsoft, in the next 5 years, will need to buy RIMM to stay in the mobile sector.
MagicPrefs, extra Magic Mouse gesture support for Mac
"You’ll end up spending your entire day “being productive” without actually achieving anything."

it was a pun (an oxymoron to be exact). Im sorry im so unfunny.

Whats wrong with doing things that don't lead you towards your goals?
You've ignored Rapidshare (and other clones)
no thats not the point - sorry if i didn't make it clearer. I love my job and love working.

my point is people get too caught up on time tracking, goals, gtd etc. Im wondering if they will look back in 5 years and go - sure I got things done, but did I have fun?
What does it mean for a job to be "democratically run"?
Blackberries on all networks are having problems
i added that bit to the start of the post.

I know what you mean about the design, a redesign is definitely in the plans. Just didn't want to spend that extra time redoing the design, instead of launching.
What this (title) makes me think of is having and environment/tools that don't get in your way. Not so much a large step (e.g. a significant compile), but the small actions you're constantly taking.

A UI (editor, file manager, etc) that doesn't hesitate while it composes menus or context. "Intellisense" (whatever your flavor, if any) and references that are immediate.

When I work on a slower system, such small pauses accumulate into a "mental stutter" that changes the level of my overall performance. It isn't that I don't think -- a lot -- but that when I manage to form something in my head, I want to get it down with a minimum of of interference and distraction. Those pauses can be the "thousand cuts" of the death of that inspiration.

Perhaps that's one reason I still prefer to design on paper. There's nothing between me and my ideas except the speed of the pencil, and my ability to flip between pages (that have strong visual landmarks).
I went to college, didn't take it as seriously as I should have (dotcom daytrading era) and joined the Army afterwards. I really would have gotten more out of college if I'd gone into the Army first. Saw a lot of young 18 year olds who did it right and are now in college... Grad school was a far better experience for me...
There is a great utility called "LittleSnitch" that is a must have for the mac. It alerts you of all outgoing TCP connections. It lets you know what programs are calling home.
We can but dream. Icculus was working on an Unreal 3 port to Linux (on the desktop), but appears to be on ice for whatever reason.

Latest news about UT3 on Linux:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzI4N...
While you say infectious as a bad thing, I see it as a great thing. If I choose to release something under the a permissive license, why shouldn't I ask you to share your contributions as well?

For this simple situation:

What if I want to be freer than the GPL? What if I want to release my next project with a BSD license so that even commercial users or people who want to keep part of their source private can use it?

The GPL is not very suitable for commercial applications. How many fewer people do you think would be using GCC if not for the special exception that allows you to produce GPL-free binaries?
> I live in Oregon, where we have a constitutional right to be naked in public.

Interesting, but Oregon is rather progressive, which is why I think I'll eventually end up in or near Portland. I live in Arizona, it sucks.

> Malls are private property, not public property.

A bad example perhaps, substitute "the mall" with a stroll down a public street, in most states you'll be arrested.
It looks like the hard work is done by a different script, mobidedrm by Darkreverser, and this script just pulls the file path out of a running instance of the Kindle PC app. I presume the Kindle app is creating a temporary file on disk which mobidedrm is then able to reverse, rather than decrypting the original file, otherwise there'd be no point in writing a Win32 debugger in Python. (It's also pulling out a couple of more bits of info.)

The technique is very sensitive to the version of the Kindle app. It's currently using the hash of the executable to choose which breakpoint locations to set and hook, which are hard-coded virtual addresses.
Wow, single point of failure for the lose.
Awesome interview and quite detailed.