skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An article I read some time back explored why many terrorists of the Islamic bent seemed to be well-educated, had spent some time in American/European universities, and often had established careers in "the west". The speculation was that some of those who came to "the west" and tried to stay longer term had a hard time adapting. This portion tended to become radicalized. The article further speculated that if they had stayed in their country of origin they would have been happy and not been radicalized.

Of all career paths someone in the middle east might choose, the one their societies/families deem most worthy of the extra expense of a western education is engineering. Engineering + Islam might not be the key to radicalization, rather it's Exposure-to-West + Islam that seems to be the stimulus for radicalization. And Engineering students from the middle east have a much higher Exposure-to-West level than, say, art historians or geographers.
The First 30 Days: Lessons I've Learned From Launching a Design Blog
I used PHP hosting for €1.50 per month. This is with a 500MB database and 20GB transfer per month. And the datacenter is in my country so the websites are quick. For 99% of the websites this is enough. I just picked the first host I found, so there probably are cheaper options.
http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html
Can you tell me a little more about what makes SparkView the hotness? As opposed to just using the default stack?
This matrix is a bunch of crap. The ability to "get things done" is the most important factor of programmer competency. Every thing else is incidental.
Well said, sir! I ought to have emphasized the community aspect more in the blog post, it's really the critical part.
Okay, so I was lost when I read this feature in the RATIONALE section:

Green Computing: mutating lesser bits generates lesser heat.

This is just silly.
Agreed. This attitude is why software has such a bad reputation. People are in such need for software, that they will tolerate horribly unreliable software if it happens to sort of solve their problems. Good software is rarely available, so people just expect it to be bad.

If people started demanding software as reliable as the things produced by other engineering professions (buildings that don't collapse, etc.), then being a good programmer would be strictly tied to making money. But right now, the code is the least important part of software companies. The idea and the marketing is significantly more important. (Hello, Twitter.)

Also, people are quick to associate personal gain with the economic value of a program. The Facebook founders may be rich, but automatic trading systems handle a lot more money (even though the programmers didn't necessarily get rich writing it). Facebook can have as many bugs as it wants, and they will be fine. An automatic trading system can ... cause problems ... if it is not bug-free (and well-written, or written by good developers). But you never hear about that sort of thing from these people; only how their blog makes $10/day and that how they are a genius and visionary for doing that.
The government doesn't directly require a UL label, but the National Electric Code (which is produced by an independent organiztion, the NFPA) does. The NEC is adopted as law by most jurisdictions, so not complying with it means you won't get a building permit. Hence, in a roundabout way, it is required by law. As it stands, you're free to manufacture something without a UL label, but it won't be able to be installed in any building where the plans have to go through a permit process, so you'd have a hard time selling it to anyone.

I didn't read anything in the article propose laws that would make unaccredited degrees illegal. What they said was there should be stricter standards for accreditation, overseen by the government. Right now some accreditation authorities are just organizations made up of a group of diploma-mill like universities who all agree to accredit each other.

For engineering positions in the US government, they usually require that your school be specifically accredited by ABET, which is legitimate. I remember them conducting inspections at my school while I was there to determine that our engineering labs met their requirements.
Or presumably, as in another post here, that engineers tend to be more educated in the west and work more in the west than those in other disciplines, and so have more exposure to the west.
I guess in this instance strapped for cash and time means closed source. From my limited experience, setting up open source software takes more time.
I am doing Getting Things Done (GTD). One part of it is the so-called "Processing" step. That means you gather all your notes, scraps of paper and so on and work it into your GTD-system. I do this at the beginning of the workday and it helps to focus my mind on what is going on in my world. Because I have to think about my notes (What does that mean? Is it actionable?) I have to load the current "frontier" of problems into RAM. On most days this leads to automatically starting to work directly on the problem at hand and getting into the zone.
I used Zipcar for a couple of years but in the end found it too inconvenient for my use case (lots of high-mileage multi-day trips). Since I hate traditional car rental places as much as the author I ended up just getting a car, which has been considerably more expensive (but also more convenient) than the old Zipcar.

Near the end of my time with them, I really felt Zipcar was trying to reduce costs... the cars started getting older, they were poorly maintained, and as the service increased in popularity there didn't seem to be a commensurate increase in number of cars available. I wonder if this was just my local neighborhood experience or if those sorts of problems are widespread.
California’s Central Valley may soon go nuclear
A lot of the O(log N) items were depressingly basic. An undergrad education in CS will get you to O(log N) in basically all the Computer Science categories.

Where are the finger trees? Array-mapped hash tries? Cuckoo hashes? Where's the domain-specific algorithm knowledge, like machine learning or information retrieval or computer vision? The IDE plugins? "Let it crash" and supervisor processes for error handling?

It's also depressing that O(log N) for "years of experience" = 10+. A motivated and reasonably intelligent student can get to O(log N) in all the other categories with an undergraduate CS degree and about 2 years of work experience at a good employer.
I think his suggestion #3 (more competition) is sort of the crux of all the problems. Zipcar is the only game in town, doing what they do. If you don't like them, your only resort is taxis or daily rentals (or owning your own car).

The solution is for someone to compete with Zipcar, but that might be made difficult by the sweetheart deals they've made in some metro areas (reserved parking spaces on streets in key areas). Municipalities should keep in mind the dangers of creating a monopoly when they hand out those deals -- not to discourage them from doing it, but making sure that they give any future competitor the same access to the market.
+1 to 1 and 4 (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=956764, and that whole thread is related)

I'd put 1 more strongly - eradicate distractions. When I can't work I try to avoid doing distracting things. Even if it seems like you're doing nothing, keep on doing nothing. Take a nap. If you avoid distractions you eventually start working. If you succumb, you just start the spiral all over again.
I don't even understand what you're asking, Daniel. You should read the article. Like most of what he writes on his blog, it's excellent.
And? Where are all the Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, etc. Virginal Nerd Terrorists? Where are the Sufi VNTs?

That's beyond the silliness of blindly applying American sexual patterns to Middle Eastern societies, of course.

We could more sensibly ask, "Why are radical Wahhabi groups (and those of some sects) so good at/so focused on recruiting Muslim engineering students?", except even that's too broad and dubious a claim. A pool of 400 people (over decades, no less) doesn't strike me as a great pool for analysis beyond, "international Muslim terrorists tend to be educated and have some resources", a point you'd expect.
How do you know that "+" doesn't depend on pi? Oh. Now you see the problem.
The point of the phone is that you're likely to be sitting next to the phone far more often than you're likely to be sitting next to the laptop.
Twisted thinking. He first mentions that functional programs have to thread state they use through the entire program by passing it as parameters to functions. Then he says that imperative procedures can depend implicitly on the global variables they use. The equivalent in a functional program is adding a parameter to all the functions that use the state, and to all functions that call these functions.

He goes on to say this:

> Would you ever intentionally write a method signature that takes 316 arguments? Would you use any library that contained such a function signature? No? Then why are you using tools that force such craziness upon you?

So we're now expecting to get a conclusion, namely that functional programming is inferior to imperative programming, because you get functions with 316 parameters that thread the state through the program. But no, despite setting up an entire argument against functional programming he acts like he's arguing against imperative programming:

> Of course, there is a place for mutable, imperative programming.

I'm very confused.
caffine, cold - at work i drink coffee... its just not as effective

I think it's a function of sugar. Really sweet coffee tastes terrible. Properly sweetened coffee does not give your brain that glucose rush that super-sweet soda does. (Soda can be super-sweet without tasting bad, apparently.)

(I drink a lot of coffee and tea, and it's nice, but sugary energy drinks are something my brain really enjoys the effect of. Not so good for the rest of your body, however.)
I think this is simple and reasonable, and it's usually the particular pain point I usually mention while grinding away on my "downvotes are bad" axe. I think this is better than tags because the universe of possible reasons to downvote something appear to be so large that we'd need a large menu of flags to select from, and also would need to be able to select multiple flags, making scoring posts (which I still think is useful) very hard.
Yeah, but how many other people will be using it? You may be planning on using it for a decade, but you will be in a very small minority. And so to share the output (the very common and portable HTML), you need to add another step to your workflow to convert things. This just seems like too much effort for very little gain.
Good idea and nice design.

I personally feel the name "twidl.it" is somehow hard to spell and sounds a bit strange.
Not true. Getting "things done" while creating an O(N^2) solution, in spaghetti code, to a problem that's already well solved by an external library is horrible.
Um, no. He says it's always been his wildest dream, and then puts it in something he describes as "what I plan on doing over the next fifty years of my life". Which to me, at least, says not "of course this one isn't really going to happen" but "yeah, this is very ambitious, but I'm seriously going to try to do it". Which is ... well, yes, very ambitious.
Your clarification was actually my next point. Many of them were in fields not remotely connected with biology.
In my experience it is the exact opposite.

I think that mostly boils down to what your experience is.

But the GGP effectively encourages people to break both their license agreements and the law.

If you're strapped for cash you also don't get a free ride to go and steal stuff.

If the price of being strapped for cash would be to have to learn how to set up open source software then so be it. But given the fact that you could easily make a business turning over a couple of 100 grand annually using just apache and (forgive me) PHP means that if you choose to abuse an MSDN subscription to be able to use closed source proprietary stuff that you are doing so deliberately.

I really have a problem with effectively encouraging people to break the law in a public forum, even if the manufacturer of the product has some hidden gain from this behaviour.
I don't think they're turned on by room-temperature IQ construction workers (not saying they all are) for their occupation either. Maybe the problem here is that you're talking about your occupation. If you meet a secretary or a doctor in a bar, do you want to hear her rattle on about her daily routine?

This could be related to the problems very intelligent people have getting laid. Their interests are less accessible and more focused, and so their conversations are more boring to people who don't share those interests. Whereas everybody but the stupidest people can easily follow along in a reality TV discussion.
I enjoyed it, good fun, one small bug report. Though it might be a working as intended:

If a trap is triggered and cleared after clearing the room a second shield recharge is triggered. It's a fairly easy way to get full shield again after some of the tougher rooms as it's fairly obvious which are trap tiles.

Lots of lovely little touches in it.
In San Francisco, there is a competing service called City Car Share. There was also FlexCar, which Zipcar absorbed.

I was initially a member of City Car Share because they had better prices. Also, they kept giving me bonus deals for cheap day long car rentals. I ultimately switched because Zipcar had far more locations and better cars.

As a counterpoint to this article, when I lived in San Francisco I had an amazing experience with Zipcar. Cars were always available and there were locations everywhere. There were cool cars like BMWs and useful vehicles like trucks. Once I ran out of gas on the 101 and Zipcar sent someone out to help, no questioned asked. The guy on the phone acted like it was Zipcar's fault that I forgot to fill the tank!

I've been less pleased with Zipcar in NYC because there aren't enough cars near where I live. However, there is so much public transportation, I've not had as much of a need.
1. <p if="condition">Foo</p>

2. HTML encoded by default

3. <li each="var foo in bar">${foo.Name}</li>

4. Client-side rendering: http://odetocode.com/blogs/scott/archive/2009/03/12/client-r...

5. conditional attributes (kludgy syntax, but better than Webforms VE)

6. Content "spooling". You can create a partial that registers a script tag/script specific to the partial, but only if it hasn't been registered already. Partials can also spool content to any other content area.

6a. <script once="jquery" src="...">

The video quality of this is a little rough, but here's a good overview by the guy that started Spark, Louis Dejardin: http://whereslou.com/2009/06/24/spark-releas-and-presentatio...
As a guy just about to graduate from a BME program it's anecdotally just not the case.
Students Ace Textbook Physics While Struggling With Basic Understanding (video)
What about rendering heat-maps client-side using transparent canvas? Projects like this one and gheat (http://code.google.com/p/gheat/) are great, but running tile-servers is a bit of a hassle...
He misses a few points subjects like computer graphics, computational geometry, understanding of databases (did he mention this?), numerical simulations, GUI design, general math skills, compression algorithm, heuristic algorithm, etc

That's what just comes in my mind..
Ask about HN: Caching in place?
I've noticed that the site has been behaving erratically lately. After posting a comment, sometimes I see the comment I replied to with the "reply box" instead of my comment. Sometimes when I click "threads", I see very out-of-date information. Sometimes I see the version of the page for a non-logged-in-user. This happens with the front page, too.

All this suggests that there is some sort of bug in the caching mechanism, or something. Just thought I would bring this to pg's attention (and am wondering why the caching is now necessary, too).
Agreed - there were some comments about putting in railings; don't do that. The falling is good and adds to the challenge if the player can clearly see the edges. Find some way to make them stand out.
The first chart fails to correct for time (I'd generally expect more people to be using any service in 2007 than 1999, so the raw numbers don't tell me anything).

It is difficult to compare growth rates in the second chart because the two things we want to compare are stacked on top of each other. It's not clear if the growth rates are similar or different.

The third chart similarly fails to illustrate its point. It's not clear if time spent online is remaining constant from year to year--increasing time spent on Facebook does not necessarily decrease time spent on Google. It's also unclear if search engines and social networking sites are competing for time--it seems straightforward that what Google sees as successful (users find results quickly, spend most of their time reading linked sites) is not what Facebook is trying to optimize (time spent on facebook.com).
The 4 Metrics of User Acquisition and the Customer Bull’s Eye
@plastk

Thanks!
I hate the name "American Freedom Alliance" for an organization whose goal is to control people through religion. It should rename itself to the "American Brainwashing Alliance". Not quite as catchy, I guess...
The reasoning is because its an unclaimed word. loosely based on the words tweedle (twitter and photo in harmony) or twiddle (idly play around in twitter).

It also is easy to say. "You should twidl that" after taking a photo that begs to made fun of.
Except it hardly ever is an issue. I can't remember last time I came across a situation in any of the languages I use that support global variables where some function depended on some global variable without the docs making a huge fuss about it. It was certainly many years ago.
Part of the craft of programming is expressing a computation or interaction as simply as possible.

Now, somehow the original point (http://prog21.dadgum.com/54.html) has missed its mark. The original point was this: that for certain kinds of interactions, an imperative solution with shared state solution is vastly less complicated and preferable to a purely functional solution. This is because in some cases the purely function solution will litter a whole hierarchy of function calls or an entire set of data structures with additional data, but the imperative, stateful solution will not.

Now, obviously the problem with imperative is:

"...that state gets threaded everywhere, and you can't look at any function individually and know how it will behave."

But what is the problem with functional programming? That you can't look at any bit of state in the program unless some other part of the program has explicitly given it to you.

Now, I'd say that 95% of the time I'd rather have that problem than the problems that come with state - like having to worry about call order semantics, reentrancy, etc etc. But dammit - 5% of the time I'd rather use the state and be done with it!

And more generally speaking, 100% of the time I'd rather have a concrete example of something that is implemented simply today than an abstract idea of why something might be complicated in the future.
The section on "verifiable computation" is interesting: http://www.enchiladacode.nl/technology.html#verifyable

"Every ID of an Enchilada Value is calculated by taking the SHA1 hash of the Value's contents."

The docs suggest that this can be used in a consensus protocol. Many nodes can compute the same result, and quickly test for equality by comparing the ID. Seems nice to have this built-in to the language, but I have to wonder:

a) Why SHA1? Why not a member of the SHA2 family?
b) If you're creating a distributed system and want to implement a consensus protocol, a hash ID isn't really sufficient. Who is going to end up using this feature?
you could make a great-looking documentary claiming the earth is flat, and it would likely do equally badly. The whole ID movement depends on manufacturing controversy by claiming that gaps in our knowledge constitute evidence for an alternative theory, which is fundamentally unscientific.

Universities dumping staff who put their names to publications which they know will discredit science is not a big deal to me. It would be different if ID advocates were presenting evidence that contradicted the findings of cladistics or so, but their arguments are metaphysical rather than evidence-based, and ID is not so much a theory as an objection to Drawinism. In the case of Expelled, things like the juxtaposition of Nazi concentration camps with discussions of Darwinism mean that the film ultimately amounts to a giant reductio ad Hitlerum argument, and the fact that it involved professional camerawork and editing doesn't alter that fact.

The only way the film belongs in a science museum or archive is if it's filed next to exhibits about the church burning Giordano Bruno at the stake for asserting that the sun goes around the earth...with Expelled being a depressing example of the burning mentality, rather than a heroic defense of the victims. Darwin himself was highly skeptical of eugenics, objected to slavery, and valued humanity's capacity for empathy and education which he viewed as part of evolution's outcome rather than as constraints upon it.
Up until recently MonoDevelop wasn't really mature enough to be used full-time.
I did not know that. However the article you pointed to says that they made it to convey a very serious point through humor. Since I have never seen that point made more effectively, kudos to them and I'll continue to recommend the video when the underlying point is appropriate.
I posted this on the other site, but I figure I might as well copy paste my comment(since it took a few minutes to put the data together):

I'm not sure, but I think startups.com is beating answers.onstartups.com

onstartups has an alexa rank of 27.5K, but that's shared with Dharmesh's actual onstartups blog.
startups.com has an alexa rank of 29.5K, and that's all them.

And yeah I know alexa rank is worthless, but it's a useful indicator when it comes to comparing 2 sites.

then we have users:

startups.com has 2055 users.
answers.onstartups.com has 1687

then we have # of questions, onstartups has 928, startups.com has 3943.

then you have page rank, startups.com has PR of 5, onstartups.com has PR of 0.

and finally you have level of activity:
onstartups: 29 questions updated in the last 24 hours(either asked or answered)
startups.com: 29 questions updated in the last 5 hours

So by every metric onstartups is getting creamed.

I think this is a perfect example of what Jason talked about on the video, since both Dharmesh and Jason already made their bucks, they don't really care whether the site sinks or swims. While for startups.com guys, they see it as their opportunity to make it a big cash cow, so they try to go create content to make it grow as fast as possible.

With my site(i use the same platform), I'm going for a mix of both. Build up content to drive traffic, but try to focus on quality, so that the traffic that does come gets a positive experience and just might register. This is why every question gets thoroughly researched and answered. Sure it's slower than spamming the crap out of my site with dumbass fake questions like startups.com guys...but at least I don't have 1246 unanswered questions on my site.

Well to be completely honest, I do spam my site a little with fake questions. But that's because as a brand new site, there is really not that much traffic yet, and I don't want my users who like answering questions to get bored.
A doctor can casually drop something into the conversation about all of the lives he's saved or kids he's helped and instantly score points. That new webserver is slightly less enthralling to the uninitiated. It's easier to turn some kinds of work into an interesting story than others.