skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going to argue this from the point of law, rather than the relative value of faked degrees, and if the university system has any merit by itself.

From the article, it appears like there are no laws saying you can't make an unaccredited university, and start issuing degrees. I may be wrong, but the charges seem to point that way.

The charges against him in the article were:
* Conspiracy to commit {wire,mail} fraud
* Bribing foreign officials

Conspiracy is what federal prosecutors go with when there's no actual crime committed, since it doesn't actually require a crime for a successful prosecution (only that several people intended to do something illegal). It's used as a stopgap to "get the bad guys", even when law isn't really there to support it. [for reference, check out the book '3 Felonies a Day']. The bribing of foreign officials obviously isn't directly related to the "fake" university.

So we go a step further, and look into if it even should be illegal. If I set up cschneid's Drive Through University, I will obviously never get accredited by a proper agency. But I'd probably argue that cschneid's Drive Through U should have free speech to print up paper saying people passed it's program, and have a degree showing that. No matter how bad that program is. It still should be illegal to lie about accreditation status, or similar (but that falls under existing misrepresentation and fraud laws).

I'd say that this argument is parellel to the Underwriter's Laboratory. The government does not mandate or require any electronics manufacturer to get certified by UL (afaik). But many environments require a UL seal to use any electronics, one example being the dorm I lived in. So it's a certification of quality, in the same way a university degree is a certification of quality for a person (by a 3rd party). Presumably, I'd be able to start my cschneid's laboratory, and certify whoever pays me for my logo. Why is that significantly different from a diploma mill?

I personally have a university degree, from an accredited school. But I dislike people taking social solutions (look up the degree & university in a database, say it's accredited), backed by existing laws (fraud, etc), and then turn it into a new set of laws, that restrict free speech. I think to sum up, if I want to hand out bad diplomas, that should be fine, as long as I'm truthful about it. Existing laws cover this environment well, and printing paper should not be an illegal act without an intent to defraud.
This is all summarized from a paper they say was posted "this summer". That's poor fact checking because if you follow the link to http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/users/gambetta/Engineers%20of%20Jih... you'll see a big fat 2007 on the title page for a reason.

That said it is an interesting paper, and I recommend that people read it. I certainly learned something when I ran into it a couple of years ago.
Installing Redis on CentOS 4
Last time this came up, somebody made the comment that you're in the highest category that you have finished everything below. Just because you started with git doesn't make you good at VCSs, but if you have done everything below it as well, you probably are an expert. To put it another way: would you put SVN on the right side of that row?

As an aside, I do believe that DVCSs are somewhat more complicated than their centralized counterparts. This is mostly because they are young and lack the mature tool environment that things like SVN do. As a result, users are forced to understand how they work, instead of relying on pre-defined sequence of work->save->test->commit. If SVN was the new hotness, people would have written reams about the theoretical motivations behind a a centralized server, copying-as-branching, etc. But it's not, so git/hg/bzr get all the credit for being algorithmically interesting. In the end, this means that if you don't want to think about it, go with a VCS that's a little older, and I think that justifies the ordering in the chart.
Having the REPL in a frame as soon as you go to the site is very clever.
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What does this have to do with the article? How did you get so many upvotes? Are you that creepy guy who was banned for bringing up "casual sex" in every other thread?

edit - seriously though... did I miss something? I didn't see the word sex mentioned in the original article, or the word terrorism mentioned in the second article...
I finished watching Ben Stein's "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" documentary. I thought the documentary was good, in that it talked about otherwise reputable scientists/teachers being expelled from their institutions because their name appeared in the context of ID where they did not vehemently reject it.
Even if they didn't support or believe in ID, if they wrote an article merely wondering out loud about it, they were expelled. Interesting part is that in most cases authorities denied that that was the reason for the firing - eventhough their termination letter mentioned it.
Work in a public place (cafe, library).

Alternatively, here's my trick: I have a "work" Pandora station. I turn it on when it's time to work, and I never turn it on unless I'm working. While it's on, it's time to work.

When it pauses after an hour, I can choose either to take a short break -- with the music off -- or I can immediately re-start it and continue to work for the next hour.

It's been a handy bit of mental conditioning.
What would add to or remove from the original matrix?

What I would change:
- add mention of RFCs, e.g. 2616 (HTTP) and 1738 (URL)
> Must be a slow week

Well, it is December 30th so probably likely to be slower than average...
You're conflating IT infrastructure and software product development, and the two are very different topics. There's literally nothing to stop me from writing .NET software using a Mac (via MonoDevelop or virtualization, like VMWare) and deploying it on Linux (via Mono).
That's an interesting take on it.

I read it as a father desperately trying to make sure his affairs are in order so his children can have the benefit of what he worked for.

My father (a teacher, so not a rich man by anyone's standards) made quite a few unusual financial moves, quietly, before he passed, to make sure my mother was in a safe place financially (who, given the social norms of their time, never really dealt head-on with the family finances prior to his death). The rest of my siblings and I had already moved on to build our own lives, he wanted to make sure his wife was cared for when he couldn't do it himself.

That you'd so easily begrudge a dying man looking out for his family at the end of his life without reading more than a soundbite in an article like this says more about you than about him, I'm afraid.
Well, apart from the fact that your "proposal" is incomplete and obviously not thought-through in the slightest (to put it politely) we also already have a canonical way to represent relational database schemas; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Definition_Language

Moreover the problem with database schemas has never been to represent them or reflect on them, but to migrate between them.

See http://www.post-facto.org/ for an interesting approach (presentation by the author: http://hosting3.epresence.tv/fosslc/1/watch/128.aspx).
I need to make a to-do list (on paper, preferably) of the specific things that I need to get done

Then, I do them in order. Doing them in order is important- otherwise, I'll waste time procrastinate by trying to figure out what I should do next. If I do them in order, disregarding importance or difficulty, I don't spend half my time debating over whats next.
It was posted as a direct answer to a question that came up recently. The example of reposting links that have been posted before I learned from another HN participant who opened up a "new" thread just yesterday. Some eyeballs never reach the bottom of the page.

But, yes, if I were to post about your metaissue on the Feature Requests thread

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363

(which is perhaps an even more rarely noticed link at the bottom of the page), I might suggest some way to periodically "bump" threads of high reference value such as that thread itself or the page (re)submitted in this thread, as is possible on sites on which recency of last post is the primary criterion for moving threads to the top of the main page. Lacking that interface feature here, another user discovered a work-around for drawing attention to classic webpages of likely interest to new HN readers, and I noticed that the page submitted here would also likely be of interest.

Have a happy New Year.
Uh... CL, Clojure (JDK), Haskell and Erlang are all different platforms, too.
My own startup uses C# and the MVC framework. I also have a windows service (.net C# as well) for some data processing. My main reason for choosing it was development speed (it is what I know best) At my day job I work for a consulting firm that does sitecore CMS implementations for large sites. In addition we developed a CMS for displaying data visualizations for data oriented sites. The biggest benefit of .net for me is the tool set. Visual studio is very solid, intelli-sence makes me a productive programmer, and plugins such as Red Gates Profiler make me a fast debugger.
Here's an alternative 1x1 matrix:

[ build something that people will pay money for by any means necessary ]

Much easier to remember.
You obviously have not read the paper that they are summarizing. Else you'd not have brought up a point that they addressed directly and came up with strong evidence against.

In different times and places there have been many terrorist organizations who are supporting different kinds of causes. Engineers are significantly overrepresented in right wing religious ones, and are virtually nonexistent in various left wing ones.

Were it a simple case of selective reporting and economics then you would not see a correlation between the profession involved in the terrorist organization and the cause that organization is for. But there is a strong correlation, and therefore something deeper is happening than us noticing engineers because their skills and economic status make them useful to terrorists.
I also think that the question is no longer about which theory is true.. Its about which side do you belong to and how stupid can you be to even raise the topic of ID.
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Maybe it will be in a few years when my generation has supplanted the current generation of decision-makers, but not now.

A short story:

My company has recently taken a liking to buying lots of netbooks for our roadwarriors. This is...fine, I guess. In my ideal world, they would all be running a stripped down linux distro with fvwm, thunderbird, firefox, and tn5250 (damn you, IBM)...but this is how the conversation went when I brought it up.

"Well...", the boss says apprehensively "I don't think so, they're not really familiar with that so let's just stay with what we've got"

"But there won't be anything different! I will make it look and feel exactly like what they're already used to. It will be faster, easier for me to fix when they're on the road and just simply better in every single conceivable way!"

"No...just leave what's on there on there."

"Fine...are they going to need MS office?"

"Yeah"

"Okay, you know that the license for that is like $300, right?"

"WHAT!?"

"Yeah, $300...as in more than we're actually paying for the netbook. Can I just give them thunderbird for mail and openoffice for office?"

"How much does it cost?"

"It's free."

"Free? Yeeeaaaaahhhhh....I don't think so."

/me facepalm

"Boss, do you understand that our mailserver, our fileserver, our firewall, our DNS server, our webserver, our database server, our VPN, and just about everything else other than the iSeries are all running on free software?"

"Just get office"

-----

So what is my point with recounting this little conversation I had? Openoffice might be a threat in the "college student looking for something to write papers with" market, but it isn't going to be a threat in the corporate world until it costs almost as much as MS office and changes its name.

People who don't know anything about a product will just look to the price. "This burger from McDonalds costs $1.29...the one from Applebees costs $12.99...the one from Applebees is surely better." and so-forth.

I really wish there was a version of OO that I could buy for $150...then I would finally get to start using it and wouldn't have to deal with Outhouse anymore.
On the contrary in France, many of my professors were either anarchists or communists and for some had chosen to become professors because they didn't want to contribute to 'loathsome' corporation.

That's probably the reason why, while the theoretical teaching in my university was excellent, my teachers lacked the experience in industry and were not very practical... On the other hand, in the US, the professors often had practical examples from when they worked and were less perfectionists and more pragmatic.
They're already benefiting from the money you've earned, but that doesn't mean they own it in any meaningful way. You have complete control over your assets, you can refuse to support your kids and they can't head to Vegas and gamble it away.

As a general rule we tax assets when they change ownership, maybe because the benefit to the recipient cushions the pain of giving away part of it to other people.
An article the states something that we all know. I think the smartest people knows when to act dumb.

As a comp sci master student who also go out on weekends sometime to clubs, I have to say that women are not turned on by the occupation of a programmer.
Everyone has the "luxury of choice," but it inevitably comes with cost.

I speak from personal experience -- I know the .NET stack very well, and am very familiar with the LAMP stack from my days with PHP, but I've only dabbled in Ruby and Python. Before starting work on our startup, I considered writing it in Rails, but the reality is that it would have taken me much longer to get to market. We hit the market at a very opportune time, and were able to ride a nice wave of buzz to sustainability. If we'd waited another couple of months (my guess at the added overhead of learning Rails), we may have missed our window.

The same would naturally apply to someone who already was well-versed in, say, Rails -- it would make no sense to learn .NET unless there was a very compelling reason (say, you were writing a Windows desktop app).

Not to mention that the first app you write using any technology you don't understand well is going to suck. If I'm going to base my livelihood on a product, I want it to be as well-written as possible, so I'm going to go with what I'm best at.

Also, it's absolutely not true that you're locking out Linux and Mac developers when you write .NET. Some of the best .NET developers I know use a MacBook Pro as their primary machine.
What can I find out about you if I know your email address?
"My sister is building an E-commerce website with Asp.net and I should say it's really pain"

I should say this points to inexperience first. ASP.NET has taken huge steps in making development/deployment simple.
As I said, it is a common misconception, but you do not get direct access to the table you just created in this case. Ets sets up a process which manages the table and all manipulations on this table go through messages to that process. It's all nicely wrapped behind an API that hides these messages, but they are there nevertheless. A value that has to be obtained via message passing is not a global value. There is code in the way that is controlling access, verifying legality, and in general it compiles to a whole array of stuff, as opposed to the true global variable case which can be represented by one memory save.

You have to be careful to think about this clearly. The defining characteristic of a true global is not that it can be obtained in some manner from everywhere in the program; by that standard even in Haskell everything's global, as there exists some organization of the program that would permit access of a given value from everywhere (though it would be one hell of a bastardized program). The characteristics are that everybody has direct, simultaneous access. If "ets" tables qualify as "global variables", then so do values sitting on a MySQL server; in erlang the difference between a MySQL value and an ETS value is pretty minimal, you access both via message passing. This is not a useful definition of "global value".

Now, it may still turn out that even with this level of access, it is "too free" and still subject to a reduced amount of the pain that global variables can bring. Haskell is a constructive example of a language that implicitly makes that argument and further distinguishes this case. But we don't benefit from failing to discriminate between a managed value that the manager permits anything to access the gate (albeit still in a managed fashion), and a completely unmanaged global value. They do have some similarities, but nevertheless, managed variables are nowhere near as bad as truly global variables.

If you're not careful and you come at this with fuzzy enough thinking, you'll end up spinning yourself into a tizzy where everything's the same. In fact what the situation is is that there's tens or hundreds of ever-so-slightly different cases and terms that try to cross the language barriers often have some issue, but there's still some broad patterns we can find, and if you find yourself just smooshing them all together you're going to find it hard to pick the right tool for the right job.
Here's an exceptionally good hypotheses explaining why western educated Muslims tend to be radicalists:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/18b/reason_as_memetic_immune_disorde...
It's not about those wasteful car drivers "externalizing the costs of their personal choices." Please!

Most people have no choice, because of how the entire country has chosen to invest in infrastructure. Which is to say, it has chosen not to.

American physical geography and sociopolitical geography forces car driving.
where is the linear algebra to combine it all into a single value? Some HR executive would pay big money for that.
Establishing a rhythm helps. Make a cup of tea every time you sit down to work. Light a candle. Turn on a certain style of music.

Me I like juggling as a warm up.
here is an example..
The movie got 3.7 on IMDB - the lowest I have seen yet. I think the movie is not badly made - it been punished for being sympathetic towards (not ID but) people who believe in ID
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1091617/
A look into the life of a Product Marketing Manager
There's nothing wrong with Mono, but neither Mono or MonoDevelop are drop-in replacements for C# and VisualStudio.

VMware is not an adequate solution for day-to-day development. There's a performance impact, significant memory overhead, and running Windows inside Linux/Mac OS X is not any more accommodating to users familiar with a UNIX environment than simply running Windows natively.
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I think a lot of people missed the article that this one is replying to:

http://prog21.dadgum.com/54.html

That article's main point was that functional programming doesn't work because deep in the bowels of two otherwise-pure leaf functions, you might want to make their behavior interdependent. In an imperative language, you can do this through adding a simple global variable. In a functional language, you have to change the signatures of all the callers to add this new parameter.

A lot of people pointed out that in a real program, you're asking for massive maintenance headaches if you connect two independent leaf functions through a global variable and make their behavior interdependent. In that context, this isn't a strawman, because somebody actually did suggest structuring programs this way.

Make a silly suggestion, get a silly reply.

I think both authors would do well to focus less on individual languages or programming paradigms and more on writing actual large-scale software systems. Because the imperative, OO, and functional worlds basically converge on that point: don't do that. You don't want the behavior of apparently-pure functions to change based on hidden, undocumented state. And once you document it, you might as well add it to the function signature, which is your "executable documentation" anyway.
Something that often helps me: split into smaller tasks, but also prioritize. What is the most important thing I could do to get my work a step forward?

And by "forward" I mean "more usable" or "more releasable" rather than "cooler". That's important :-)
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If the cost is too high to bear, then you don't have a luxury of choice.
Dissenting from your opinion in what I hope will be a civil, constructive manner, I agree with you that once in a while I get downvotes solely because I am expressing an unpopular opinion. But that is rare. And I don't shy from expressing minority opinions here on several issues. I don't get a large number of downvotes at all. My two comments with the largest net number of downvotes were (to me, in hindsight) comments that I could have written more clearly with more effort at relating them to the main concern of the thread and adding new information to the thread. On the whole, I think most downvotes are adding quality of expression to the site rather than subtracting opinions from the site. There are a lot of strong opinions here, not all of them in unison, and a lot of those opinions get expressed here.

By the way, it's an EMPIRICAL question whether downvotes or posting disagreeing replies does more to discourage expressions of certain opinions. It seems to me that someone thin-skinned enough to cease posting his opinions because his comments get downvoted (rather than reconsidering how he comments and seeing if he can improve how he comments) might be just as discouraged from posting minority opinions if he sees a lot of replies that disagree with him. If a person has courage of his convictions because his opinions are based on evidence and careful thought, there is little reason not to come back here and express the opinions, even if his comments don't get a huge number of net upvotes.
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I took some code recently and ran it on Mono and only encountered one issue, which was a Mono bug that has now been fixed. MonoDevelop isn't a drop-in replacement for VisualStudio which is a good thing since VS is bloated and MonoDevelop isn't.

I have been writing .NET code exclusively in VMware for 5 years now, 2 years on Windows and 3 years on a Mac. The performance impact is there but it isn't a deal-breaker (especially if you have a fast HDD and enough memory (6GB)).
christ. i know this place is related to yc. but sometimes the constant emphasis on making money gets a little tedious.
It's not supposed to be realistic, he says it's his wildest fantasy.
@psranga thanks! a frontpage redesign is coming next week to REALLY explain the site at first glance

@george - thanks for the tiny points, :) 1. we have that in mind. 2. we are thinking of just displaying the toolbar all the time with an explicit collapse/expand button.

embed code and import from URL + webcam will be coming soon.
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