skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm talking about the extreme left-wing bias in the academy - if you want to be a professor at an accredited university in the U.S., it's very difficult to do so if you have anything resembling a conservative slant to your beliefs. To be fair I also should have included professional schools such as law, medicine, business, etc with STEM. It's also not impossible for a right-wing person of exceptional ability to do well outside those fields - Robert George is a famous example. On the whole, though, professors in the U.S. tend to be on the far left of the political spectrum.
Since when is expressing genuine opinion mercilessly downvoted here?
I kept thinking that there was going to be a little more than just "the keyword debugger allows you to debug". Nope.
This cracked me up, so I decided to see if the domain was available. Not only is it registered, the guy is trying to sell it:

http://tungstenalpha.com
Invitation software for social networking platform
We're looking for specific functionality in our social networking website. When users sign up, we want to offer checking their google, yahoo, hotmail address book for a) users currently in the system b) automatically connect with friends currently in the system c) send invitations to those not in the system to join. Can you give a recommendation for how to add this functionality? (prefer to outsource rather than build in house)

Thanks in advance.
Really?

I would have written those sentences as: "Google has too much Power", "Google has 60 billion dollars"

The usage of have seems wrong to me
It's enough that other people could use the limited resource as freely as the person who is actually using it, so no one has incentive to conserve it.
Perfectly valid comparison: both karma rating on HN and GPA are largely irrelevant numbers that have little bearing on how good of a programmer you are. Both numbers would, to the layman, suggest some kind of authority, but in reality do not.

Both numbers are useful for theoretically filtering for the best, but in reality... do not.

Wow, the more I think of it, the better this analogy gets!
What surprised me was that parsing javascript took much longer than downloading is, even on a mobile phone connection! Anyone knows why after all these years we still don't have a way to download pre-compiled javascript?
Bingo! The evaporation of the dot-com boom got a lot of status/wealth seeking drones out of CS departments, but left a lot of the geek-culture asshats that come in thinking that their meager IT helpdesk skills have something to do with CS.

It's the worst with video games: there's the standard "I like playing games, so obviously I'm a CS genius" type that my college friends called 'gamer scum'. At least with the way the big-budget games industry is going a lot of these people are now headed into Art Production where they fit in.
Well, kinda. But not really, sometimes.

L'Hopital's rule says that the limit of the function exists, not the function itself. A removable singularity is still a singularity, just one that's more well-behaved than a pole (or gods forbid, an essential singularity). While the function can be analytically extended to be defined at the singularity, that's an extension of the function, rather than the function itself...

... sorta. Since extensions of analytic function are unique, we usually treat the extension and the function as the same thing. Whether this is revealing a deeper truth about the function, or sloppy notation, is up to the individual practitioner, and the context. Certainly, the definition of the function that has the removable singularity is sufficient to define the function that has the singularity removed. For analysis they're basically the same and we usually extend as far as we can. But for topology, a single point separates open and closed sets, which are worlds apart, and the extended function is a very different beast from the original one. This just goes to show how limits identify the points that are most important to a (structured) set.

However, for the purposes of Wolfram|alpha, I don't fault them for making that mistake. Removable singularities can be safely extended over for the purposes of computational mathematics.
Yes! How to cure the fear of the blank page. One of the first articles that I've found how to deal with this problem.

You can't break procrastination head-on. It's gotta be tricked to defeat it.
Lest we forget, Kerry Conran, got his multi-million deal to make Sky Captain. It was a flop, and Kerry has been silent ever since. We assume nobody wanted to give him a 2nd chance, or he's simply out of ideas.
A removable singularity is still a singularity. If I'm asking for f(x) and it's giving me lim(i->x,f(i)), it should tell me so.
They've shown that random selection is good when there's zero correlation between performance at level N and level N+1.

Personally, I'm more interested in what happens if the correlation is non-zero, and performance at level N+1 has more impact than performance at level N? How does the best promotion strategy change as the level of correlation and impact of being higher up the ladder changes?
And Canadian ones. Where I went to college, a 3.5 GPA for the average person was easily 80h a week of solid work, if not more.

Methinks your experience may be unique to your school.
The essays linked to by the author are much more valuable than his own.

PG's: http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

Perry's: http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/
He's got at least one project being shopped around Hollywood right now.
I'll look at those over the weekend - thanks.
Actually I think the focus on gender is misleading. Excessively geeky environments repel non-geeks, whether male or female. The fact that this particularly results in repulsion of women is just due to geekiness being rarer among women.

Those who say "who cares if non-geeks are repelled" seem to be assuming geekiness and programming ability are strongly correlated, but in my experience they seem to be pretty orthogonal, at least for the type of geekiness which leads to putting up Star Trek posters.
We had a stand-up cardboard Jean-Luc Picard
>"Based on the stereotypes I've heard, I'd say that investment bankers are also outside the "social mainstream" of workers."

Well, they are far more likely to have season tickets for the local sports team than four-day passes to Comicon. They do have a high-percentile ambitious streak that is abnormal.

The idea that socially mainstream people can't work hard is ridiculous. However, it is probably not helpful to bring up racism, as our modern culture cannot handle discussion of racism rationally. "Racism" is substituted in people's minds as "absolute evil", so it's good style to leave it out of discussions except when absolutely necessary.
"chartjunk"
Codenode:  write Python and Sage in your web browser
You can't really it a "bug" so much as "you not bothering to implement what you promised". The issue was entirely predicable, and a workaround would be trivial. When you told techcrunch about the promo, you obviously knew it didn't exist. It's hard to call that anything but a lie.
I did pay the $1/year, and if that was a mischarge I surely wouldn't mind getting my subscription bumped on to 2011 ;)

Looks good so far, hope to make good use of it :)
Grunting for GPA is a well-defined path. You take your classes seriously, study, do you assignments, and pass your tests; that's all there is to it. Whereas independent projects means venturing into the unknown, having to define your goals, and judging your success yourself. The later is a more daunting task.
This happens all the time. Google reviews the sites before the payout and looks for suspicious links, overly exposing ads from many vendors etc etc etc.

They're quite picky really. They're also very picky about pages you dont have controll over yourself (such as user-edited pages..). You can get banned for a comment a user wrote if you're not careful.
Is Twisted + Django really that awesome? I would think that any gains you get from async programming in Twisted would be cancelled out once the computing gets to the Django bit.
Awesome. You guys rock!
The $300 YouTube video that earned a novice filmmaker a $30-million movie deal
I go to Carnegie Mellon. Its difficulty is comparable to MIT and Caltech, which I hear isn't a joke...

Although there most definitely exists those that would say all three are quite easy.
Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but I don't understand what that graph is trying to tell me. If the horizontal axis is x... what is the vertical axis? What does the shaded wedge represent? It certainly doesn't represent "x>1" in any way I'm familiar with. (A vertical line at x=1, with the space to the right shaded, I could see...)
Though they don't really mention it in the post, they use the new Local Storage APIs (which were a reification of Google Gears) to programmatically cache both the application and the user's data, at least on the iPhone version.

In the article they're mostly using 'HTML5' to mean 'not flash' and 'not native'.
Thanks, these are good ideas. I have also thought about making it 'internet-based' in the future, so that using some kind of synchronization the user could use the same data on her desktop machine and on her phone.
Iraqi insurgents hacked Predator drone feeds, U.S. official indicates
GPA is also a measure of compliance and subordination.

Bullshit. No one forces you to go to college. Presumably, if you're there, it's because you want to be. Working hard and getting good grades might just mean that you want to get as much out of the experience as possible.

It might also reflect an understanding that getting a good GPA expands your options. For example, good grades may improve eligibility for more financial aid options, it may open up better grad schools, etc.

Painting GPA as a measure of how much people are willing to subjugate themselves to the big bad evil system might make for a good punk song, but it hardly reflects the reality of modern society.
Add an 'I know it, next!' button
Would your opinion change if you were presented with evidence that blacks are lazy and Latinos are stupid? Would it then become OK to say that about blacks and Latinos?

Let me provide you with some information.

There is a distinctive American black counter-culture. That culture puts down people who put too much effort out for work and say they are "trying to be too white". To the extent that someone has internalized that culture, there will be a tendency to work less hard.

For many years now the USA has been experiencing something called the Flynn effect. Each generation grows up in a more technological environment that pushes children to learn to think better than the previous, and as a result IQ scores improve over time. The effect is so significant that a person who measured as a genius in the 1920s is likely to be considered borderline retarded today.

Many Latinos in the USA are immigrants or the children of immigrants from agricultural countries. These countries have not changed as much as the USA, so people there have not undergone the Flynn effect to the same extent as most American groups. Therefore it comes as no surprise that measurements of IQ versus ethnicity show that Latinos underperform whites on IQ tests. So by our standard measurements of intelligence, Latinos are (on average) less intelligent.

Now that I've presented you with that information, would you say it is OK to say that blacks are lazy and Latinos are stupid? Hopefully not because it is a hurtful thing to say that makes life unnecessarily more difficult for the many hard-working blacks and intelligent Latinos out there. And it is doubly hurtful because there is just enough truth in it for people to take the stereotype to heart and apply it to people who it doesn't apply to.
I wonder whether the output of Google's Closure Compiler is actually faster to parse if you discount the smaller lexical size.
Ask HN: Why does broadband still suck in 2009?
Is it me, or are providers just completely missing the boat? Does anybody except bittorrent addicts really care about the difference of 10Mbps down versus 50Mbps down?

Personally I want:
- FAST uplink
- low latency
- Even faster uplink

Those of us with high-end Digital SLRs know the pain of staring blankly at our laptops slowed to a crawl while uploading many gigabytes of RAW files to flickr (or other photo sharing sites). Forget about video, I drive to the datacenter and do a local network copy for that.

As for latency, ISPs seem more concerned with limiting torrents than making sure they have even semi-decent peering arrangements. Video chat from SF to Seattle is a jittery, high latency nightmare, because my ISP is more concerned about rolling out and cashing in on VOIP features than running a stable network.

From my experiences, this is endemic. American broadband infrastructure SUCKS. I would expect it to be awful in the country, suburbs, or small cities.. But why don't we have fat uplinks to highly peered ISPs in dense urban areas like San Francisco?
The downside of using LED traffic lights
Enote
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1001680
Haha, hey potatolicious, I just realized you go to Waterloo and I go to CMU. Those are two schools who are bitter rivals in the regional ACM ICPC programming competition.

I just found it ironic and actually quite amusing and figured I'd let you know ;)
most linux users i know, apart from that use centos because it's work-mandated (poor souls), use opensuse, but i am in an odd part of the world (chile).
This is great. I love war stories.
How to Decline Job Applicants?
Believe it or not, there are a lot of talented and smart people who genuinely aren't any good at college.
Because the lists of toolkits verified to work with, may work partially with, and does not yet work with include other major scheme implementations.
A side-effect of the conventional traffic lights (heat production) is now a requirement for the new energy efficient lights. This seems parallel to a bug becoming a important feature in a product.
Meh. If someone wants to turn me down for a job that I'd otherwise be qualified for because of my abysmal academic record, I view it as their loss.
You would be surprised at how many people aren't going to college because they want to.

GPA is a measure of how well you can follow the rules, though in some cases (more difficult degrees such as those in engineering) it also is a measurement of how hard you work.

In modern society you are expected to go to college in the majority of cases, it is now the norm.
Facebook Hit With FTC Complaint
Report Scammer Online- Russian Scams| Online Scams| Dating Scams
Hairdressers spend their lives putting people at ease by talking to them about whatever they want to talk about. There is no wonder that the profession attracts people who like talking about a wide variety of things.
Hence "usually."
There was no transfer of copyright here though.
So if you want to increase the number of women, you need to cut back on the amount of geek culture in CS environments... 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?

The implicit "we should cut back on the amount of geek culture in CS" is where the article gets some blowback.

The original article said that women avoid computing because they are intolerant of geeks. The "solution" is to make computing less geeky, rather than to make women more tolerant. Huh?

If white people avoided basketball because they don't like black culture, we'd tell them (rightly) to suck it up. Yet somehow, the author of this article is comparing geeks to racists.
So first they take monolithic code and modularize it. Then they bundle it back into a single piece of code. Then they do this:

<script id="lazy">
// Make sure you strip out (or replace) comment blocks in your JavaScript first.
/*
JavaScript of lazy module
*/
</script>

<script>
function lazyLoad() {
var lazyElement = document.getElementById('lazy');
var lazyElementBody = lazyElement.innerHTML;
var jsCode = stripOutCommentBlock(lazyElementBody);
eval(jsCode);
}
</script>

What if my JavaScript code looks like this:

var x = "hello /* world */";

I wouldn't do it this way. Instead just bundle all your code into a single file and optimize its caching. No HTML5 needed: use HTTP headers.
Would be glad to hear an alternative. I havent been able to find a payment processor for Mexico.
Reading this reminded me of The Homework Myth (see http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/hm.htm for more on that).

I'm not looking forward to arguing with my kids about doing homework. Particularly when I know how useless it is.
You missed the point of the study. The things they put in the geek room are things that college students associated with CS students.

Therefore, thinking about the "stereotypical geek" is virtually guaranteed when being put in the geek room. The study doesn't say "are geeks really like this or not" it is more about what an outsiders perception of geeks is.
A good argument for self directed learning. I was home schooled a number of times and you're just replacing a class room with your living room and a teacher with your parents; the material is all just as rote and redundant as the school material.

The difference can be likened to working in an office and telecommuting from home. Both are work, just different environments. There are obvious benefits of telecommuting over cubicle working and those benefits can generally be applied to the homeschooling situation. More time with kids, kids get to learn from the one on one focus of a nurturing parent, they get to play in their own backyard, etc.

I like his arguments, they are sound. Project based learning generally provides more hands on knowledge with a focus on being inspired to do what you are doing rather than being motivated (big difference between those two terms).

I'm a self directed learner, an autodidact (technical term). I've been pursuing college level Rhetoric, Formal Logic, Mathematics, and computer science. Industry experience has served me well too; but I do fall behind from my University bound peers in theoretical foundations - unless I spend an enormous amount of time delving into all the topics that are given at Uni. Discipline is also another toughie with this chosen path, it's taken me about three years to get down a solid routine that I know I can follow. Waking up early is a key to it.

I generally spend three days a week on personal projects that range from my ideas for web applications, my personal site, writing projects, electronics hobbies, &c.; with two days a week dedicated to book study. Every day for about an hour I do a Mnemosyne session (spaced repetition program) providing timed cards for vocabulary, math, postulates, etc.

Sadly, I'm going to need a part time job or part time contract work soon so I can have some expendable income. I'm living off of passive income ATM but I pinch pennies left and right! No money to go out snowboarding, sailing, partying, etc.
I am guessing economies of scale make it hard to compete with local cable monopolies. Next time I move I'm thinking of ditching cable and just getting faster ADSL for a bit less money, since I do not much care for TV. I entirely agree about the lack of choice for upload speeds.

Would love to hear from those with ISP experience about the logistics involved in setting this up. There must be a better way.

Some interesting background information on stimulus $ for rural broadband: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iK8SjjFiVf...
I guess this is the key part:

>
On an iPhone 2.2 device, 200k of JavaScript held within a block comment adds 240ms during page load, whereas 200k of JavaScript that is parsed during page load added 2600 ms. That's more than a 10x reduction in startup latency by eliminating 200k of unneeded JavaScript during page load! Take a look at the code sample below to see how this is done.

But once again this is an issue of when to eval the code, not when to load it. Put the script tag at the end of the page, so that it gets eval'ed after most of the page is already built.
'k, I see it now, thanks.
'Walnuts are also an excellent source of omega-3 fatty acids': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walnuts
1) Why did Verizon lobby broadband competition out of my area?

2) Why do I have to pay Verizon (oligopoly with Comcast in my area) $100 to get a static IP address?

3) Why does the fine print way down in my Verizon FIOS license agreement forbid me to hook any kind of server to their network?

4) Isn't the Internet supposed to be a MULTIWAY communication channel -- not just some kind of enhanced television network?

5) Look at how much Verizon invests in lobbying to understand how much they hate real competition and how little they care about providing the kind of service we'd really like to see.
It seems to me that the fact that your friends referred to fellow students that weren't as clever as them as "scum" would seem to confirm another of the unattractive stereotypes about geek culture.
It doesn't matter if hairdressers are smart well-balanced people for the point of the original study to apply to them.

If most people think hairdressers are ditzes, then that will turn people off from becoming a hairdresser.

Just like if most programmers are fairly normal, well-balanced people doesn't matter. What matters is what a teenager trying to decide what to do with their lives thinks a programmer/hairdresser/any other job "looks like"
Hmmm, a valid point. So by trusting the user's own judgement, I could make the user experience simpler and faster. On the other hand it is a temptation to cheat, which might be a problem for some users... Maybe there should be an option in the Options dialog to turn this feature on, so that the temptation to cheat is there only if the user explicitly turned it on...
Netflix Spilled Your Brokeback Mountain Secret, Lawsuit Claims
IMDB reports that 2322 movies were released in 1939 alone, is it really surprising that there were a handful of good movies among them?

1980 for comparision, IMDB lists 6007 movies (8000+ if you include TV movies), and contains modern (popular) classics such as Stir Crazy, Superman II, Empire Strikes Back, Airplane!, The Blue Lagoon, Ordinary People, Urban Cowboy. The Shining, Caddyshack, Raging Bull, Friday The 13th, The Fog, The Blues Brothers.

Hmm, looks like 1980 was a much more 'classic' era than the 40s for hollywood, but you wouldn't have heard that from film buffs in the 80s.

Hollywood has always been a great abuser of the 'sling lots of shit at the wall and see what sticks' approach to 'greatness', they're just slinging a lot more shit these days.

Even if we take a really contemporary year and do the same study, we see a pattern of greats no matter what year, take 2005 at random:

Batman Begins, Sin City, V for Vendetta, Revenge of the Sith, King Kong, Brokeback Mountain, Harry Potter/Goblet of Fire, Serenity, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Mr & Mrs Smith, Wedding Crashers, Munich, Saw 2, Hostel, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Madagascar, Pride & Prejudice, Land of the Dead.

Ah, but the movie buff will point out that they're not established classics like Gone with the Wind, or Wizard of Oz. Not yet, anyway.

Edit: Btw, for 2005, the number of movies was 28,000+. Is it any wonder that there is a lot of formulaic stuff in there as well?
Speak for yourself. Almost everyone I knew in high school (typical upper-middle-class kids) in the first part of the '00s when I was there was forced to go to college. Their parents had groomed them from an early age for college, and no other options were on the table.

In the same vein in which they aren't forced to go to college, they could get up and leave the country if they wanted to, or go get a sex change, or hang themselves in the closet. Certainly they are physically capable of doing such things, but they aren't exactly likely, either.
Out of curiosity, why was it necessary to be in beta for over two years? Doesn't seem like the technology would take that long to develop.
this looks pretty damn cool - thanks for posting it. i've been meaning to switch to python for numerical work, this is finally going to push me over.