skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I heard about how productivity was up on npr the other day, my first thought is that research and development are probably just on the decrease.

And even if you could determine that R&D are down, you don't know if that just isn't a good development. Maybe a lot of dumb ideas were being developed before.

This does point out how much information is lost when you look at things in the aggregate.

People talk about public health rather than the health of individuals. Maybe its this sort of thinking that leads to the world of Logan's Run. "see how remarkably healthy our population is? our policies are a success!"
As an EE or CS major, an iPad isn't going to cut it as your portable device. Like others have said, you're going to want something that can run IDEs or hardware interfaces in labs or at group project meetings.

YMMV, but don't obsess over being able to take notes on it in class. In my experience (Computer Engineering degree from Georgia Tech three years ago), professors will move so fast that you'll find a keyboard limiting. Engineering degrees especially are all about diagrams and graphs, and it's just not easy to get those into a computer quickly enough in class. This is less important in CS classes, but you'll shuffle through the same core Calc and Physics classes and run into the same problem.

Also, if you go the EE route, you're going to have to run Windows occasionally. Lots of the specialized lab software, board design tools, circuit simulators, etc just aren't available for OS X. Don't get me wrong - I love my MBP and finished out my degree on the first gen Core 2 Duo MBP running Parallels. But make sure you get something beefy enough to do that, and I'm not sure the 13" MBP is going to be future-resistant enough in that respect.

My advice - figure out how to afford a 15" i5 MBP, even if it means adding $500 or so to your loans.
Agreed, first of all, it wouldn't compile with all those dashes...
Because until you have children, you may think you have all your affairs in order, but once that baby comes, everything is out the window. The down votes are almost certainly from parents.
I think the problem as it currently stands with hiring your own copy editors and marketers and cover artists etc. is the enormous amount of time you spend essentially replicating what publishers already do. That's a lot of time spent not writing, crammed into authors' already busy schedules, which means they put out fewer books, which means Bad. But I do think that's a huge opportunity for startups that ease the pain of decentrallized book production.
Side note: I've seen Food, Inc but I haven't read his books. I thought it was a huge leap for him to go from talking about food and where it comes from to giving nutritional advice in Food Rules.
Try telling that to the singularity folks...
Brussels: euro monster bailout nears $1 trillion
The analysis, overseen by Ronald M. Krauss, director of atherosclerosis research at the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, found no association between the amount of saturated fat consumed and the risk of heart disease.

Considering that this is the conclusion of the study, the article itself seems to soft-peddle the implications, stating in multiple places that saturated fat may be "less bad" than refined carbohydrates. I'm a little mystified as to why the article itself refuses to conclude that saturated fat is not a cause of heart disease. The evidence that it plays a role has never been particularly compelling.
Charging by the image ($1?!) practically guarantees that all the listings will suck. Sellers will balk at the high price, creating paltry, image lean listings. Buyers won't waste time on listings that don't have large detailed images and lots of them. All that you'll end up with in that vacuum is spam.
The biggest single reason for that is the amount of money that the US spends on their 'defense', it is much higher than European countries on a per-capita basis.
Sure see a lot of complaints about Facebook and the App Store these days. Maybe the whole "walled garden" thing isn't as great as it seems.

(Insert analogy about a walled garden where everyone brings their cows to pee. The grass is now greener on the other side of the wall..)
Perhaps combined with another operating system which performs the tasks mentioned in the article? [Taking a picture, and sending it, the ip address, and anything else interesting/identifying about the network (nmap dumps, nearby access points - assuming that it just connects to any unencrypted one - traceroutes, and so forth), to a predetermined email address].
Note that WASH hasn't been updated since 1997. If you're interested in Haskell-based webapp servers, consider Happstack: http://happstack.com/index.html
Having recently graduated with a computer engineering degree, I absolutely agree with this. Buy a small, powerful laptop that can run both Linux and windows, and you should be happy. Personally, I would also recommend the Mac, but Linux and windows are the two you need to be able to run.

Of course, every major university has labs that will have the equipment and software you need, so you can probably get away with whatever you prefer. I was more a software guy than a hardware guy, so I ran Mac exclusively and just used the lab machines when I needed to use Windows software.
http://www.LearnVisualStudio.net has some great videos along with sample code.
Domesticated animals have more fat than wild animals. Maybe wild animals are better for us, than domesticated.
We've found that telstra throttles all kinds of things on the way into and out of Australia. So much so that a simple openvpn tunnel between our rack there and our rack in NJ (USA) makes just about everything better.
Even though editorial, typesetting, and publicity costs may be comparable between ebooks and physical books, the ebook medium overcomes the problem of inventory costs, which, I understand from author friends are substantial. Many books go out of print every year because, although there are still willing buyers, the cost of producing lower volumes and keeping warehouses stocked outweighs the benefits in the traditional book publishing model.

I'm also surprised the author of this piece implies (?) the cost of setting up and maintaining a physical press is basically zero. Swish offices on 6th Ave would possibly also be less necessary in an ebook-dominated world where there is a more direct line between authors and their readers (customers).
Yeah, but where do permutations and combinations come in? I don't see it at all.
How about a PC laptop + Mac Mini?
Evolution of Facebook Default Privacy Settings [Processing.js Graph]
>I had a 4.7 GPA in high school.

Funny story: my school wouldn't allow you to score over a 4.0 on anything. This meant that if, for example, you blew off a stupid humanities class and got a 'B', you could never have a 4.0. This is great in theory, as most schools should ask for a "GPA out of a 4.0" number, and all would be grand. In practice, they didn't, so my official transcript from the school would always read '3.9', without giving any clue that the GPA's were capped!
I see you attended UIC. Did UIUC reject you, or did you choose not to go there? My experience at the U of I was quite different from your description of the academic world. Sure, most students -- even those in the College of Engineering -- were quite bad, but every single professor in the CS department I met was nothing short of stellar.
Have you looked at Glomation Inc's offerings? http://glomationinc.com/product_9G20.html
The author's post about this is here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/05/07/...

and source code here: http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/facebook-privacy.pjs
So stop reading them. That's the easiest way out, you get some time back that you can use in more productive ways too, and you lose absolutely nothing.
It's too bad that this is the case for facts as well as ideas. Ideally science can turn on a dime when the data is overwhelming, but in practice there's a huge lag.
I've been out of college for the last year and a half so perhaps I'm already ancient, but I'd like to also recommend using a laptop. I used to carry my laptop everywhere I went, should be a lot easier now with netbooks. However, I would recommend using a Mac just because the sheer user experience of the mac (plus the BSD kernel) make it much more enjoyable and friendly experience. You're going to be spending a lot of time in the next few years pouring your soul into your laptop, choose one that makes you the happiest (for me, that was a Mac).

As for the Windows/Linux issue, I would usually do most of my programming at the computer lab or through SSH into a server. The primary reason for this was to be consistent with the grading rubrics used by the institution. With that in mind, your need for windows or linux is generally fairly limited.
More people die of suicide in King County than from traffic accidents or murder
Just wanted to say, thanks for the work you've put into EEVblog. I stumbled upon it while looking for info about the Rigol scope and have been following your stuff ever since. Keep up the good work.
I really have to admire Zed's use of all things lean here. It looks like a bare-bone site with no architecture to speak of, but there seems to be just enough content to create a compelling value proposition. This is an MVP if I've ever seen one. With just a couple hundred words of plain text, he can actually test whether there's a market or not. Very inspiring.

That being said, the name could be a deal breaker. In fact, it almost makes me think that the whole thing was put together tongue-in-cheek. It just screams "a place to buy a bunch of low quality junk."
Yoda Conditions:
if (5 == count)

Folks, conditions != conditionals.
Data Mining Helps Hospitals Pry Fees from Patients
That reminds me of the opening scene of 'idiocracy'.

I didn't downvote you, but I think that there is something missing here. Nobody that has ever brought a child in to the world had absolutely everything in order. And even if they thought they did they would have soon found out that it was not the case.

Then there is the period (pun not intended) between conception and delivery, in which a lot can change.

Waiting for the 'perfect time' is the best way to guarantee that you will never have children, there never is a perfect time, there will always be one more thing to fix.

Instead, if you want children, go for it while you are young, adaptable and have tons of energy. Worry about fixing problems if and when they appear. Try to do the best you possibly can and if you fail at something try to do it gracefully.

That is not a call to go and procreate if you for instance are not able to feed your kids or take care of them, but let's not overdo it on the having everything in order, that's a complete illusion.

My parents had 'everything in order' when they got me and my sister, fast forward 6 years and they had a very messy divorce, there are countless examples like that. And there are plenty of counterexamples too, of people that had a pretty tough life, decided to have children and simply did an amazing job of creating a place for them in the world.
I definitely suspect so, or from children that were born in less than ideal conditions and that did great.
t colin campbell, michael pollan, & Tim Robbins are probably the 3 most important writers on this topic. while the latter two definitely write more to stir reaction, prof. campbell basically published his results in the china study.

basically, all three writers/experts agree that a vegetarian diet consisting of unprocessed foods is the best (although not foolproof) way to ensure that you will lead a long and disease free life.

the modern food revolution is only about 60 odd years old at this point - human evolution cannot keep up with how quickly our food has changed and how quickly our caloric intake has increased. perhaps in 10,000 years we will be able to find a way to absorb nutrients from krispy kreme donuts and pizza but for now its best to stick low on the food chain and as michael pollan say - "Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants".

Anyone looking for sources or more info i recommend the following:

The China Study - T Colin Campbell
The Food Revolution (Or Diet For a New America) - Tim Robbins
The Omnivore Dilemma (Michael Pollan)
Healthy At 100 - Tim Robbins

one last note - Diet for a new america was written in 1988!!! This information has been out there for decades - politics and misinformation has kept it relatively out of mainstream media and on the sidelines but the statistics and information is out there for those who take the time to look...
Man Allegedly Used iPhone App To Meet, Have Sex With 14-Year-Old Girl
Nobody eats tons of dates or parsnips. Multiply the index by how much of the food you actually eat.

Plus mixing high glycemic food with other food will flatten out the curve.
Christian Louboutin Ernesta T-Strap Satin Sandal
Walden has already been mentioned, another source of inspiration/warning maybe the movie 'in to the wild'.
Remember, these are averaged numbers.

The Australian broadband market is highly segmented according to speed. Until quite recently Telstra Bigpond was offering a 256Kbit connection labelled 'ADSL broadband' with 512Kbit and 1.5Mbit connections priced significantly higher. The idea of an 8Mbit or 20Mbit connection would be almost science fiction to their traditional customer base.

Now that FTTH is coming into play in some areas and Bigpond's market share is dropping, higher speeds are becoming more affordable but there are still a lot of people on those lower speed plans. I suspect this is what is skewing the graph labelled 'ISP', more than any selective throttling by the ISP (though I certainly wouldn't put that past them either).

The comparison to other ISPs is not entirely fair either because their customers tend to be clustered in areas where the ISPs have their own hardware in Telstra's exchanges and can therefore offer higher speeds and attractive pricing. Elsewhere in the country, Bigpond and lower speeds are both much more prevalent.
Craaazy. My school gave you + .125 for honors, and + .25 for AP courses. This would be added after the division... a 4.0 for an A and a 3.0 for a B, both AP, ends up as ((4 + 3) / 2) + (.25 + .25) = 4.0.

Oh, and everyone over a 4.0 gets reported as valedictorian.
If you fire someone who can't understand basic programming concepts, the mistake you made was hiring that person.
The author said "live a _comfortable life_ and save for daughter's college". He chose _not_ to live a comfortable life and he should be chided for this.

Even if he could not save for his daughter's college, there are always other options available: scholarships, working while attending college, starting a community college and transferring (I did this for undergrad and paid my way through graduate school).

I voted you up (because your question deserves attention), but "only families with two six digit incomes and significant savings should have children" (what you need for a "comfortable life" while saving for a college educate) is a very scary argument to make. Note, I am _not_ saying families shouldn't hold off on children until basic financial situation is stable: you should still be able to provide a healthy life for yourself and your children, etc...
To save everybody the trouble of looking, the 500 billionth digit is 8.

Personally, I have a side project to calculate the first trillion digits of 1.
Intro CS: "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" assignment with porn titles
Or: the people that really think they have something worth selling (i.e. not spam) will take pictures and pay to post a few of them. This could actually make it easier for buyers to spot posts from serious sellers. The number of pictures may indicate the seller's confidence in the product. Of course, there's still the potential for spammers willing to pay to post pictures, but at a dollar each I don't think the margins would be anywhere near, say, email spam which costs virtually nothing.
E.g. search for "Buck Adams".

Email from prof:

"I need to apologize to everyone in CS 367 for providing data sets
containing offensive material. I had not looked at the contents of the
large and huge data sets until well after the assignment had been
released. Had I realized what the data sets contained, I never would have
used them. I am sorry that this happened.
"

Full assignment:

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~hasti/cs367-common/assignments/p5/...
if anyone is worried about insulin resistance from carbohydrates you can just start taking cinnamon everyday. It prevents the development of insulin resistance even on a high fructose diet: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15002064
The Hilbert Hotel
I'll bet there's some billions of people on the earth that feel the same about you getting all uppity with your running water and your antibiotics and whatnot.
Why were you surprised, then? It's already been coined.
Long interview here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luMpyS3mmLY
Except, the most significant layout and typography issues involved in book design and usability have been studied. A basic example would be in the use of fully justified text versus ragged right: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1286700 .. that topic not scream "design" to you, but it's all part of producing a high quality book. So are choosing the right typeface(s), the right text size(s), page layout, and more.

Authors and book designers who have high production values aren't all arty-farty designers who just want things to look cool. To many, just getting it right objectively (versus the subjectiveness of design as "art") is important, and there are ways and means of doing that. For example, the average Edward Tufte book shows a high level of attention to detail in matters of underlying design and usability, rather than pure aesthetics.

Readers should care about book formatting and design at a basic usability and readability level. You might not want pompously "designed" books, sure, but having easily read type in a usable layout is paramount (in the sense that a Web surfer wouldn't like to read beige text on a yellow background). Sadly, it seems not to be as big an issue as it could be as the jaw-droppingly bad typography on the Kindle demonstrates: http://redubllc.com/2009/01/a-typographic-critique-of-the-ki... - http://qwan.org/2009/05/17/kindle-typography-goes-craptacula... - http://www.teleread.org/2009/05/05/kindle-page-layout-and-ty... (and oh so many more)
The two aren't mutually exclusive. Just because you understand how to derive a formula doesn't mean that it's not useful to memorize it.
MIT is free if your parents make less than $75k/year.
It does seem a little silly, though that could be said for most things that haven't been tried before. Couldn't you just combine a bunch of pictures into one huge image? Or if size is limited, you could just have an image that has a URL of an external picture gallery. I applaud thinking of a revenue model early on but I would think there's a better way..
or a netbook, which would be cheaper and very portable. and if doing the CS/EE route, you can run a cool OS like the rest of the crowd: Linux
"Run amok" means "to go awry." [1]

I think it's definitely running amok.

[1] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/run+amok
I'll save you the trouble. The trillionth digit is 9.
Honestly, I may have 'C problems', but I also have code that can be read by normal human beings.
Labs aren't a great solution, either. Do you really want to have to leave the comfort of your own room to do homework?

When I was in school, the lab was a great place to do homework because you could bounce ideas off your peers.

Our labs might have been different thought; we had a Linux cluster where the CS students hung out. The fact that the computers ran Linux was enough to keep most non-CS majors away, so you could ask anyone in the cluster something about CS and be pretty sure they'd be able to help.
I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe.
Yes, but figuring things out on your own are lessons that stay for a lifetime. Having someone tell you stuff is easy come, easy gone.

Learning by doing is not all bad, even if it is a bit slower.
Ask HN: Is unconventional computing popular?
Are people excited and interested about the possibilities of things like autonomic computing/amorphous computing and other non- Von Neumann style systems?

There seems to be a lack of coverage in geek news, despite a healthy academic community/journal etc and I was wondering why.

I've got my own reasons for not being enthused about the current field, but I am curious what other people think.
I value ebooks less than I otherwise would because the DRM makes them scarily impermanent. I have no faith at all that, five years from now, the ebook I buy today will still be readable. You might think I could replace my reader even if it died, but what if the reader's entire product line dies out? (That's not exactly a thought experiment: Every reader prior to the Kindle died out; the Newton died out; even very successful platforms like the Palm died out.) What if the software becomes extinct? What if the publisher goes bottom-up?

And given that the net cost of buying the book used, reading it, and then selling it used is so small (or even smaller, if it's the kind of book one can find at the library) it's hard to justify the ebook. Frankly, if it wasn't for the superior physical experience of carrying, handling, and storing an ebook nobody would bother with the things. Even the crappiest trade paperback I own has an order of magnitude longer shelf life than any DRM system.
Although there is reason to be concerned about Microsoft abusing patents, Microsoft really isn't the Big Bad Evil Transnational Bully this article makes it out to be.
How does the lack of a citation in a laymans article suggest much better research is needed on this issue?

You are arguing that "Perhaps that was a very unrepresentative group of gifted students and this result will never be replicated". Well perhaps not. Given people doing research are not as stupid as random people on the internet think they are, and that experimental results are a better source of knowledge than blind statements on forums, I would put very low priors on your assertion.
How about no laptop? In my day (which was less than a decade ago) we got through undergrad just fine without having laptops. Pah!

Seriously though:

a) Take notes with pencil and paper

b) Give presentations sans powerpoint (your audience will probably be grateful), and

c) Work on your projects at home.

You can be "that weird computerless guy". I foresee problems only if there are group assignments.
I don't think I qualify as 'gifted' by any stretch of the imagination, but I did teach myself electronics, how to program and a bunch of other skills, it is more a matter of persistence than talent in my case.

I do find that it helps though once you've reached a basic understanding of a subject to search out other people to help broaden your perspective, it also helps tremendously when you get stuck.

Learning by doing stuff at your own pace is quite satisfying, but it is not good to be doing this 'on your own' forever. You run the risk of getting stuck on a dead end road.

I think plenty of the crank scientists out there are 'autodidacts' that never learned to communicate with others. That's a fairly easy trap to fall in to, if you are your own teacher then there is nobody to tell you that you are dead wrong before you've dug yourself in too far to back out.
They did that at my school too - though not for English. It was a total crock. The underlying reason seemed more to keep the troublemakers and overtly "dumb" kids away from the others, rather than to seriously accelerate learning. In the UK, there's a fixed "National Curriculum" and so there's no point in them teaching above it (or even off of it - we entirely skipped set theory, for instance, as it wasn't on the NC for that year).
Dear HN: Please make this a simple Flash game