skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
* http://wiki.kibabase.com/Codename_Subnem - a game development research project. Still ongoing. Second job.

* http://wiki.kibabase.com/Ruby-Warrior - outfit the game with a graphical front-end. First job.

They are only small jobs with very little pay. However, I am just a high-schooler with only a few years of programming experience.
we've been through the eye of the needle several times already. we just had (still have?) the nuclear one. we have what is IMO the biggest one coming up: AI.
For several years I didn't file on time, rather I filed for a 6 month extension. Then I would walk over to the I.R.S. office during lunch and request all my reported income. Those are the forms that I used to file at H&R Block.

This was much easier than me keeping up with all the W-2 forms that arrived in the mail at different times.

I asked the I.R.S. agent why I couldn't just use this method to file by 4/15 and he said that they don't have all the info together until about the sixth month.

I agree with the article but I think the real problem is all the deductions that people tell the I.R.S..
This isn't an American perspective, and I know American academia is pretty different to elsewhere (wtf 7 year PhDs!) but over my life I've found that the rules for admissions into various things were usually just rough guidelines that people take way too seriously.

For example, I have a Masters degree, but I never finished an undergraduate degree (I dropped out). Similarly, though less bureaucratically, there are plenty of other dropouts working here at Google leading awesome projects, despite the 'must come from a top school or have a PhD' image it has.

It's cheesy, but in all such cases, I've seen that the biggest hurdle was getting over the "no you can't because you don't have X", either by trying harder, or by having someone else show you the way (or by dumb luck, in my case).
first of all, the majority of people are inclined to be busybodies.

this is one of the major roots of all problems anywhere.
Why Twitter Wants to Know Where You Are
The first time I've heard that term. Catchy soundbite -- useful as such.
Excellent.. I remember my 90s !
That's the (disparaging) meaning I grew up learning. What else does it mean?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC_Computer
2dBoy was more of an example of smart game developers changing with the times and gating paid. And for a while it was free (as in beer) if a customer wanted.

The reason I doubt it means opensource because that's the equivalent to musicians handing over their source files.

Ultimately those who can adapt, will adapt. And they will inspire others.
No, we have made something to the effect of "interference with any digital protection scheme that can be construed as controlling access to a copyrighted work" a crime or a tort, and we did it 11 years ago.
I'm wondering if we're in a another bust or boom. Probably bust so I'm not eligible. :(
No higher-rank types in Scala, I'm afraid.

As for the monoid instance:

def pairMonoid[A,B](a:Monoid[A],b:Monoid[B]) = new Monoid[(A, B)] {
def empty = (a.empty, b.empty)
...
}
A large number of private space companies (eg masten space) are working on building cheaper spacecrafts. That is the first step. Once we have a way to reach potential off-world colonies more cheaply (and thus conduct more extensive research, create a commercial payoff for creating one etc), establishing one will be a real possibility.
So how do you "launch" a beta, what do you to do interest the relevant startup blogs and generate some publicity and attention for your freshly baked business?

I don't know why you're targeting startup blogs unless you are intending on selling your services to startups (which has its own problems, chiefly that a million other people are chasing after the same $600 dollars in their bank account). Michael Arrington will have, to a close approximation, the entire population of Silicon Valley send him an email today. Your odds of getting even fleeting attraction are low. Should you get fleeting attraction, you'll find your site crushed under a wave of looky-loos who will make disparaging comments on everything they can before abandoning it.

By comparison, the people you made your application for might actually, you know, want to use it. Why don't you target their blogs? Speak to the people you know in their community? (You do know people in their community, right? If not, turn off the IDE and go meet some people in their community.)

I'd also start your SEO efforts, if you haven't already. (If you haven't, turn off the IDE and...) That is a deep subject when starting from nothing, but the short version is think of ways that linking to you will improve the lives of people who don't want to buy your software, then, tell them that.

Oh, and this comment is going to sound like a broken record from me, but launch is not a one-time event. 99.9999999% of people who see your site will not see it on launch day. For someone who comes in on day 4 or day 40 or day 4,000, your site JUST launched. Optimize for their experience, not Michael Arrington's.
When you right-click to mark where the mines are, the browser's popup menu comes up and you have to click again to get rid of the menu, thus eating up valuable minesweeping time. Can that be suppressed?
It might be nicer if you made them say "yes" so that replays could be detected. Pressing 1 makes the same tone every time, so malware on smartphones can easily bypass this authentication method.
Why did you have to buy a new machine? Couldn't you have copied the data to an external disk instead of a new machine, then formatted the hdds, maybe flashed the bios and started over?
As he mentions, if you only ever look at the code through an IDE that does code folding, the long list of imports is a non-issue.
You want more good jobs, spawn more Steve Jobs
As long as they don't rat you out too. Thats the catch.
What if the JVM was one of the reasons you didn't like Java?
H&R Block is worse than that: they don't make most of their income by helping people with uncomplicated returns. They make most of their income by offering "refund anticipation loans" (essentially, payday loans secured by money the recipient has already earned) to poor customers with uncomplicated returns.
A fun experiment with a striking result.

The environment provided for the slime molds doesn't seem to record mountains and lakes etc, so they can't be expected to choose the same system.

When we find that engineers and nature have arrived at similar solutions, I think it's the engineers that we should marvel at.

Even soap bubbles organize themselves to minimize surface area. http://www.soapbubble.dk/en/bubbles/geometry.php and apparently Centuries ago, architects discovered that experimenting with soap bubbles could help them define the most economical form for the actual structure. http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3407500197.html
GPSD Project won the first Good Code Grant by the Alliance for Code Excellence.
I thought the attackers were exploiting Internet Explorer vulnerabilities. Does anyone have the specifics of how U.S. intercept requirements aided in this?
Years ago I tried to implement a simple CPU architecture in Xilinx Verilog on a Spartan3 where the aim was for it to be pedagogically simple inside and out, with extremely concise and expository HDL source.

I failed pretty miserably: It took me several rewrites before I got one to even synthesize, and dozens before I got it to place+route onto the physical chip (fucking traveling salesman problem!). I never got my CPU's JMP instruction to work correctly within my self-imposed ideological constraints, making it rather useless.

It took me a while to realize that the fundamental problem with my design was hidden asynchrony, despite having a clock.
It has never been difficult to use another browser on Windows.
Hehe. We picked up the car of our gym teacher and "nudged" it over between two trees, such that there was no way of getting it out except for picking it up and moving again;-) Ah the good old days...
That's called dual trading and there are already regulations in place that prohibit the scenario you described. A broker must execute his clients' orders before his own.

In any case, most high-frequency operations are only trading for themselves.
Cassandra 0.5 released
Timer stops when you mark all mines with a flag not when you uncover all safe squares. Also, left+right mouse function is missing (reveal all squares next to current one if mines have been marked).
If you're going to be that paranoid, the phone can't do it; the malware could simply record your voice saying "yes" and replay that recording as needed.
Made one really good point:

In B2B there is higher risk of product being "devalued" by the free offering -- since business buyers don't expect free as commonly as consumers.
TurboTax can download my W2 from ADP (our payroll provider) and get the rest from my previous tax return. Then it submits it all via e-file

(This isn't an ad for TurboTax since I assume all the other packages also do this)

In the end I didn't have to type a single thing this year. Just click continue and a few radio buttons. Which I assume is what it's like for most people with simple returns.
I think this statement is far more ingenious than you are giving it credit for. I think that you could interpret this to say "I like women sexually, but not socially or mentally".

Now, I'm certainly not saying that this reflects his feelings, but that phrase certainly made me chuckle the first time I read it.
I'm blown away. I've been working on something virtually identical to this for a few months, and Quix does pretty much everything I had wanted.

It's very nicely done, and I love the config file option.
Coming from Denmark I can tell that you that we do get pre filled Tax papers. Often there is nothing to change.

The fraud part has nothing to do with whether they can prefill papers or not. In fact even if they do make mistakes they will often catch them a year later.

So it's in your interest to make sure the numbers are correct.

Most often they are.

Also if you think about it. The investment the IRS should invest in getting a system that makes it possible to do this would be an investment easily paid back.

Having a incremental tax system it do require you to tell your expected annual salary up front as this will affect how much you are taxed. But it's all pretty automated theses days.
That's why there are websites like http://www.screw-paypal.com

They have been exposing PayPal for the theieves that they really are for over two years now. I say SCREW PAYPAL. Regulate them as the bank that they really are and be done with them. More oversight!
My own story is pretty similar to the article's, except s/graduate school/Google/.

I've found that people tend to discount the past pretty heavily, at least in America. Nobody cares if you were lazy five years ago, as long as you've worked hard in those five years and have a record of concrete accomplishments to show that. If you went to a community college and then finished undergrad at Harvard, people will see the Harvard degree. If you went to a state college for college and then went to MIT for grad school, people will see the MIT degree.

The hard part is getting into Harvard or MIT or Google with that past record.

I think the important part for that is to not let your current circumstances define you. If you've been turned down for that dream job and have to work on CRUDscreen enterprise apps to pay the bills, it's really easy to sit back and get comfortable writing CRUDscreen enterprise apps. If you want to give that dream job another try in the future, though, it's important to continue working as if you got it, either by doing your current job to the standards of the dream job, or by keeping your skills sharp with side projects outside of work.

BTW, I think you were my phone-screener for Google, so maybe the article's point about having someone on the inside pulling for you has some merit.
It's much more difficult to have malware on your computer and on your phone at the same time from the same attacker. But it could be random, do whatever the instructions say (sometimes 1 means yes, sometimes it means no).
Also, GUI applications are generally stateful, so while you might generally get the same behavior from, say navigating to an options dialog, you're not guaranteed the same behavior - especially since the creator hasn't made any effort to get the same behavior from the same actions. (The web can the problem of statefulness but at least on the web you're supposed to avoid it).
I think the personal connections angle is often under-appreciated by those who simply see the formal rules and bureaucracy.

For example, if you can get a job working at a university, that can make it a lot easier to get into a postgraduate course than if you're some stranger walking in off the street; and it can end up cheaper, or even funded through part-time work, etc. This is the de facto angle my girlfriend used to get into an economics PhD program at LSE, starting in a relatively low-level research position when getting out of the boring banking sector before the proverbial hit the fan.
Windows 3.1 Online -

like Windows 3.1, but more Ron Paul.
Has anybody figured out how to set this as the default search engine in Chrome? Crome doesn't seem to like javascript: links as search engines.
I agree with your comment that qualification X isn't necessarily needed, but it has it's limits of course. If you want to go into academia or a professional field such as medicine, the qualifications can be very rigid. Sometimes you can get away without a lower degree (e.g. bachelor's), but pretty much always need the terminal degree (doctorate).

As far as long PhD's are concerned, I think it's a difference in funding structure and expectation from some other countries. For one thing, when you hear that someone was doing their PhD for 7 years, that almost always encompasses master's work as well, even if they weren't awarded a master's. I am most familiar with how physics grad school works in the US, where the average PhD takes 6 years. Generally students who do get a master's on the way to a PhD get it after 2-2.5 years, so they spend 3.5-4 years on their PhD by itself. Another big difference from how things are done in the US versus what I know of in European universities is the way students are funded. Most European students I know are funded by the university/government and given 3-4 years to complete their PhDs. After that, they have no more money. In the US, funding is secured by the grad students themselves by essentially being hired by a professor as a researcher or working as a teaching assistant for a professor or the department (or possibly winning a fellowship from a government agency). Often this funding is on a semester to semester basis and in principle can last indefinitely. The fundamental nature of research means that it can last a long time when external constraints, such as funding, are not in place. I think my university had a rule that you had to graduate within 12 years or so.
I've seen people who were able to enroll as non-degree grad students for a semester or two and then be admitted.
Keywords: Anger
My undergraduate GPA ended up being a 2.6. I ended up admitted to 4 graduate programs this last admissions cycle. My professors apparently wrote some excellent letters of recommendation for me.

I thought I'd mention that since the article (and others) mentions that it's harder to get in with a low GPA these days. This may be true, but it is still possible.

Your professors should know you after you finish taking classes with them. Preferably you should also be doing research with one (or hell, more) of them. Showing a professor your research potential is the quickest way to change your letter from "smart but lazy" to "smart and hardworking, but stubbornly doesn't care about the mundane class stuff that none of us really think is that important for research anyways."

As an aside: If you're interested in doing graduate work in security, please contact me. (My e-mail is listed in my profile.) We're always looking for good researchers and if you're good, we'd be interested in your application and it's possible I can poke someone on the admissions committee to make sure your app gets looked at thoroughly.

Also: Apply broadly. I had success at a few programs, some ranked higher than the one I'm in. I'm where I am because I followed funding and I wanted to be near the Bay Area.
Growing oragans out of the body
While not technically high-tech, I found this amazing.
Unfortunately this route means you don't get any funding. Taking a research position at a university might be a better path for someone with financial constraints.

But yes, I've heard of people doing this too and I can imagine it working. Professors who know you like you a lot more than professors who don't know you.
A bust is not the end of the world. There are many ways to get where you want to be.

About halfway through grad school I thought I might need to move for family reasons and thus had to apply to grad schools all over again. Having completed an MS by that point and a lot more research, very strong recs from people I had worked with extensively, etc., I got into every single program I applied to (including the top one in the country). I think my undergrad GPA was probably of little interest by that point, since they had a record of grad school performance. As it turned out I didn't need to move...
It isn't a great time, but I made it through last year with a 2.6, so if you're determined go for it.
This is a documentary which explores the math behind self organization & self regulation. http://www.documentary-film.net/search/watch.php?&ref=27...
I just published my first Android app today. The development and publishing experience is far better than on the iPhone. Java on Mac/Windows/Linux instead of Objective-C on Mac only, easy testing on your own device instead of paying Apple and screwing with certificates, published apps show up on Android Market in minutes instead of weeks.

If Google can attract a critical mass of customers to Android devices, I suspect large numbers of iPhone developers will be happy to jump ship.
An audience with Brian Eno
Tim Bray, Ted Leung, Cliff Click asking hard questions bout STM/MVCC vs other concurrency mechanisms;.

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/Technology/Concurrency/

http://www.sauria.com/blog/2009/10/05/the-cambrian-period-of...

http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/...

http://blogs.azulsystems.com/cliff/2008/09/jvm-language-su.h...

http://wiki.jvmlangsummit.com/pdf/36_Click_fastbcs.pdf
It might also work to be in only one class, allowing you to still have your normal job, etc. I think the main thing would be to show the department/professor that you can cut it at the university.

If you can get a research job and take class(es), you're practically a grad student already :)
What's the point of finding a new system if no one else uses it?

Believe me, I've "been there, done that." We've tried numerous PayPal alternatives at our non-profit, including MoneyBookers, Google Checkout, etc. The one that brings in the donations is PayPal simply because it makes it the easiest to part with your money. It doesn't feel like your giving real money away, just points!
Could you setup your own webpage somewhere that just calls the same javascript function? Then have Chrome point to your site as the search provider.
Review of PTCL EVO Wireless Broadband.
Where's Bomberman?!?
From a quick glance at the bookmarklet it seems that the way it works is it forwards the queries you type to quixapp.com.

Can anyone who knows javascript confirm?

Beautified copy of the bookmarklet source here:

http://paste.pocoo.org/show/169181/
Check out the media player, there's some gems in there (like the Sesame Street skit).
I am not sure of the details. For all I know, it may involve speaking to a live person, and in so doing may be a red flag for an audit. I've just heard about it...
Consider the Netflix and AOL search data, where people could (maybe) be identfied from "anonymized" data. Or the facebook gaydar thing.

http://33bits.org/2008/09/30/law-review-article-about-netfli...

harvesting emails, that is an established business model called...
Despite the title, this article has nothing to do with Steve Jobs.
His other entry on what to put on your grad school application is pretty good as well:

http://3dpancakes.typepad.com/ernie/2009/12/reading-phd-appl...
So are the populations normalized to one Long Island?

And on a totally unrelated note, sometimes Rhode Islands are used as units of area. I knew a girl in college that told me she grew up on .53 RI ranch in Texas. I had no idea what she was talking about, then she explained to me that RI = Rhode Island. I think they used a small plane to get around.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measur...
Actually, it is not trivial to programmatically extract plain text from a PDF in a consistent format. In many cases it is easy, but the PDF format is visual first and content second, resulting in plenty of opportunities for Captcha-like problems.

Despite that, PDF, especially PDF-A, is the superior format for preserving published content.
re: launching

I soft launched http://newsley.com in November via comment here on Hacker news. I wasn't interested in a big splash, but I was really interested in getting a couple of beta users that could give me some good feedback, and that's what I got. It's a good crowd to get some feedback on what's broken and what works.

Since then, I've posted a few more links here in the comments, and prakash posted a link in one of his comments on a thread regarding economic social news sites (thanks). I've also posted a link asking for beta users on Craigslist San Jose, and I've posted a couple links in economic blog comments where appropriate.

Traffic stats so far for 2 1/2 months: 1200 uniques, and close to 5000 page views.

My future marketing plans include buying some more beta users off of Mechanical Turk at $0.05 a pop, and using a $100 credit I have with Adsense. I have a hunch, I'm going to get a lot better traffic with Mechanical Turk than Adsense.

re: funding

The scuttle butt in the Valley is that funding is slowly starting to flow again, but it's still pretty hard to come by unless you have traction. Traction == customers signing up and loving your product and possibly revenue.

I'd focus on making your users really really happy, and slowly build up a customer base from that rather than go for a big splash and hope that things take off.
Get the most out of Test::Unit
I don't get it...

It's this just a variant on the shortest path problem. Even a bad solution is going to look similar to a real rail network. There are plenty of good, easy algorithms to solve this, much faster than waiting a day for slime to grow.

Confused as to how this got in Science & Wired. What am I missing (I didn't read the Science report, so maybe there's something there?)
Especially since there is already a JavaScript-based QBasic engine: http://ajaxian.com/archives/qbasic-on-javascript
Politicians do not care about what their electorates want once they are in office. They will make the decisions they feel are appropriate until it is time for them to seek re-election.

Phone calls, letters, etc. are all just things for them to stew on. Ultimately, they can make whatever decision they want. Volunteer for political work and you'll see: letters will be tabulated and counted to favor one position or another, and at the end of the day it's just a number for the senator or representative to glance at for a few moments when considering what position to take, which in the end will almost definitely be the one handed down from their party.
I found this blog post to be far more useful than (the cited) Daniel H. Pink book, Drive.