skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sigh, algebra based non calculus physics is cargo cult science much in the original sense that Feynman started the meme. No one outside of education does it this way, or as I like to put it, there's a reason Newton invented the integral calculus to develop classical mechanics and why Edison couldn't compete with Tesla (self-taught Edison didn't have the math to do polyphase AC, which was the only practical approach back then).

Anyway, I feel your pain, I came out of my high school not having learned hardly as much as I wanted to or needed. At least I had some good to great math teachers until my senior year (that was a literal life saver along with a summer school course on a UNIX V6 machine). Senior year was a total loss with no insurance, or "It's a bad sign when JROTC is by far your most interesting and useful class."

How well have you learned your math? That's a key foundation.
Web Laureate Classic: "by myself sometimes good old hard work isn't enough"
Ooh! I have a question. Do you know what the situation is in Seattle? Is it so odd, with water separating cities and neighborhoods, impacting traffic, and a corporate empire in the eastern part, that it's hard to make out? Would it have been easier to see the situation you describe decades ago?
Pass CCIE SP
This section includes the entire CCIE SP written exam blueprint (exam objectives) from the Cisco website and indicates the corresponding chapters in this book that cover those objectives.
I use LaTeX for most word processing, because I find it gives me control over the right things, and automates the right ones at the same time.
Adelaide is a big exception, since it is bordered on the west by the ocean, and the east by the hills. All the prestigious suburbs are around the city, with the North and South regions having the worst places. The most prestigious places are to the south and east, then north, and lastly west.

Sydney, the further west you go, the worse it gets. The population center of Sydney is actually 10km west of the city. Pretty much all the nice suburbs are either East, or North.
Free & Open Source Portable Apps for Web Developers
Huh. I'm not sure whether to agree or disagree with this. On the one hand, I learned a lot of interesting CS stuff (algorithms, complexity theory, cryptography, parallel computing, compiler techniques, operating systems design, etc) while doing computer engineering in a university in Singapore. As far as I know, the CS courses in both the older universities in my country also teach the same things sans the hardware stuff we also learned in CE. These are useful things to know which would have been very hard for me to learn outside of university, and we're not MIT.

On the other hand, there are a lot of other sources of accreditation available here that conduct courses exactly like those Zed mentioned. In those cases, I would have to agree that it's not worth the money to take those courses. Then again, they're usually not called CS over here. They have names like Business IT or some such. IMO, you cannot call yourself a CS course unless you teach, you know, CS, which is pretty much the case here. What's the situation in the States? Are there a lot of courses teaching you how to code Java billed as CS?

p.s. of course I've forgotten most of the CS stuff that I've learned in university, but just knowing that they're there if I need them and gaining the big picture How Things Work was worth the time spent and makes me a better programmer.
And New Jersey to the west
This dude rocks!
As a Brit-in-the-US, I don't know that much about the history of US city growth (sorry!). From a quick Google, it seems Seattle has a potted history of urban planning, with perhaps a greater focus on beautification/planning than many similar cities: http://www.seattle.gov/planningcommission/docs/Introduction%...
Seattle's interesting. The traditionally more-affordable and more-diverse neighborhoods have been rapidly gentrifying, and are—for the most part—pushing minorities north and south.

I just found this interesting (and hideously formatted) PPT deck from the University of Washington that explores the topic further: http://faculty.washington.edu/morrill/papers/Gentrify.ppt
I've always imagined the effect would be like mixing paint. English + German + Golf + Math = #04DE04
My take, for what it's worth:

I was a major nerd through high school. We got a great teacher my Sophomore year who taught us all the basics of algorithms, and gave us enough freedom to pursue our own interests. I taught myself 8086 assembly language, and thereby grasped pointers in a way my classmates couldn't.

Fast forward to college. I wasted my time for four years. The most memorable CS things I learned were i, j, and k as iterators (in other words: some accepted formatting which makes reading each others' code easier), SQL (not well, and how hard would it be to pick this up on my own?), and finite automatons.

The memorable non-CS things are vastly more numerable. Anthropology, physics, philosophy, and mathematics.

Ten years down the road, I've found that most of my career has consisted of a) finding and fixing bugs and b) gluing code together. I have devised precisely one original algorithm (I don't mean simply writing fresh code, but writing an original algorithm). An awareness of computational complexity has been necessary, but a deep understanding of algorithms has not.

Here's the kicker: getting a job without a lot of algorithm and puzzle talent proves difficult. Of course, I find this hilarious in the face of my career experience. If I were brilliant at algorithms and puzzle solving, I would have been terribly, terribly bored for virtually all of my career. It's been my experience that interviewers tend to overestimate the complexity of the tasks their team faces each day.

So, I would advise a young'un who already has substantial computer talent to pursue education in a different area. You'll meet more interesting people, develop your character, and have the option of a very different career path if you tire of software or vice-versa.

Of course, all of this goes out the window if you truly want to be a computer scientist. But it seems to me there are at least ten well-paying "code gluing" jobs for every one research scientist position, so I hardly see this as defining necessity for a career.
It seemed true in Washington DC. Northwest DC (Georgetown, tourist spots, etc) was considered better than Southeast DC - albeit recent real estate developments in the past couple years. Same thing with East Palo Alto although there has been some major improvement happening in that area. Can't be true for all though.
Porn sites has more pageviews than all those combined, and I guess FarmVille has more views than Wikipedia. So what, looking for a different planet to live? =)
Hmm downvoted, must be because I was about 15% out - CarbonPad is 809cm^2 whilst iPad is 460cm^2 face area; sorry about that.
I just read this article and checked to see if someone had submitted it.

I think shaking the death-rattle for Microsoft is a bit premature, but I find it interesting that at some point in a company's growth, making a truck-load of revenue every quarter isn't sufficient.

Microsoft has a wonderfully lucrative cash cow that allows them to not be successful at their other endeavors (with success for this argument being defined as a similar market share as their primary business).

It reminds me of the starving artist dilemma, as in, if you live a comfortable life without the danger of starving, are you as motivated to make it.

I flip flop about whether I believe in that argument, although at the risk of using a statistically insufficient sample size (my own personal experience), it would seem to be true.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1173226
Two Dudes You Need To Know: How Allan And Steve LessConf'ed Atlanta
> an entire new city, was built by unskilled laborers working for dollars a day.

Let's see if it's still standing a couple decades from now.
Job postings (and HR reps) often lie. Google claimed they needed a full transcript for anyone with less than 5 years of experience, I said "Sure, but it'll take 2 weeks to arrive, and my other offer is getting antsy", and they promptly forgot about it.

It's usually better to apply anyway and let folks reject you if they really don't like what they see, rather than taking job postings literally. They're really just guidelines.
Donald Knuth Interview 2006
Stumble out of bed, shower, put on whatever I can find, zombie walk to the train, go into the city, stop for breakfast (coffee + egg sandwich), sit down at desk, chow time.

Sip coffee, start catching up on tickets/news/etc, and the day begins.
The difference between Mountain View and Sunnyvale is negligible in comparison with the difference between Palo Alto and East Palo Alto though.
All of this is hindsight. Every piece of equipment has "problems". It is just a matter of how many failures happen at once. A bit like airliners.
Tech Innovator in Japan Sets Its Sights on China
Iterating Elements in boost::tuple, template style (C++)
2010 Best Selling Cars
Web programming in Scheme with LAML
This is right, good iced coffee is made differently and one could imagine that the production costs are different.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/dining/27coff.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iced_coffee#United_States

What the market will bear is one factor; the production costs of iced coffee are another. Both could be relevant.
A valid point, but I would hesitate to agree with this until someone can put together the numbers of how many rigs fall under this "it's a problem, but it's not a risk so go ahead anyway"

In terms of the Horizon, the reports I'm hearing basically state that every single major safety device on the well fit this category.
This is a discussion of what the market will bear for Fair Trade branded coffee, not what the production costs for iced coffee are.
This guy open-sourced his work when he threw in the towel, are there drawbacks to that? Do many failed startups do this as well?
I'm curious why you ask users to run Safari / Chrome and not Firefox or IE8? Are you writing your site against webkit specifically?

Other than that, it's a great looking site. However, I found myself leaving quickly since there was no data on rentals near me (or in my state, for that matter.) I suspect this will be your biggest challenge moving forward.
From Desktop To iPad: Productivity Apps That Will Make Your Head Explode
I thought the point of the article wasn't about the merits of a CS degree, but rather if someone is a pretty sharp person that already knows how to program, should he/she go to college for the experience and to learn about all that other non-programming knowledge out there. I say, hell yes, the more exposure to knowledge the better, and chances are they will be drawn into CS classes because it truly interests them.
Many of us build our web apps as a side income, so as long as it pays for itself, is enjoyable, and has potential we keep plugging along. So, I'm curious - what do you consider a failure?
Just a quick nitpick - I've known people to be not particularly impressed by the Halting Problem.

The real result, if you want to wow someone, is Rice's theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem): 'Not only can you not decide halting - you can't decide anything else either.'
This is obviously a fake, a joke, a prank post, a troll, etc. Just read the comments.
I always figured I'd do that - I entered as a physics major and spent six semesters as one - but ended up graduating in CS and really wishing I'd done CS from the beginning. I wanted to be a physicist, I didn't want to do physics; conversely, I didn't want to be a computer programmer, but I liked to write computer programs.

If I were giving advice to incoming freshmen (which, I guess I am, since there're bound to be some reading), I'd tell them to try out a whole bunch of different courses, and then major in the one where the homework makes them come alive. Because when you end up spending a good chunk of your life in a field, the important thing is that you enjoy the day-to-day work, not that you enjoy the trappings of success. (Of course, you should probably keep an eye on how marketable the field is - I don't recommend choosing a major just so you can get a high-paying job, but if you find you like CS and you find you like Beowulf, being a programmer will net you a much more comfortable life than being a Beowulf scholar.)

Incidentally, I also took the "don't take courses in subjects you can teach yourself" approach. It worked very well for things where teaching myself involved reading a book, like history or economics. It worked not at all for things where teaching myself involved working out problems, like statistics and linear algebra. I suspect CS is closer to the latter than the former.
Oh, you were being sarcastic. I honestly just thought you were being an idiot. Sorry.
New Group: Functional Programming for Embedded Systems
I can't speak for the other cities, but East Beijing actually is much wealthier than West Beijing.
The wonders of docosahexaenoic acid
While it's hard to know if the distribution of any given city is the result of this trend, St. Louis is certainly a great example - East St. Louis is tied with Opa-Locka, FL as the most dangerous city in the United States.
On math? I gave up a few years ago, borrowed some math texts from the library and taught myself up through single variable calculus. I still take the math courses at my school because I need the credits to graduate.
Web Start-Ups Offer Bargains for Users’ Data
YouPorn to offer HTML5 video tag support
I can confirm it's attempting to be a tiny CL subset. It has function namespace, symbols, simple numerics macros and backquote.

But error detection is non-existent: (ASSOC) crashed it, since it didn't check for arguments even.

It's at best, a Lisp reader, not interpreter, even if it does a few things right:

(mapcar (lambda (x) (+ x x)) (list 1 2 3)) ==> (2 4 6) :-)

[Edit:

No need for speculation, here is the actual article describing this; submitter should have linked it, instead of just the repl

http://www.solve-et-coagula.com/?p=8

]
You'd have to catch up before you can pass them. They have features, capital and business and sales skills that you lack. Time to pivot (read up a bit on Steve Blank). Find a different market to apply the work completed to date. Another critical question is: "How good is your understanding of the customers' needs?" Talking to your potential customers is the best way to figure out where to pivot to.
Certainly seems a smug industry, based on this article in Advertising Week: "Memo to Steve Jobs: the IAd Is No Miracle Worker"
http://adage.com/digitalnext/article?article_id=144050

paraphrased: "Jobs says online ads suck? We've got our best people working on that suck, I'll have him know."

We'll see...
Setting Up An Android Project Build
I think it's odd when online television shows have the same advertisement at every commercial break.
Read the original content, it's a troll thread from Reddit.
http://hackerne.ws/item?id=1391630
It's a bloody shame she didn't end up as a Darwin Award contestant. On street view there is a walking path 20 feet from the road.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/361483/screenshots/streetview_29994....

Upvoted just for the irony.
Great! If you now do calculus based classical mechanics and electrodynamics to cement it (you'll need some more calculus for the latter) you'll be in great shape. Ask if you'd like some book recommendations.
I certainly can recommend Ubuntu based on my experience. It has worked on virtually every bit of hardware that I've tried it on. You could always run it under VmWare if you want to retain your Windows environment. You might want to consider CygWin as a way of doing *nix on top of Windows. But beware, C/C++ programming under CygWin has some incompatability issues.
Yep, it's similar over here in Hong Kong too, though a bit more complicated and the directions are different. When you go up north of the Kowloon Peninsula into the mountains, there's a lot of commuter towns built in valleys, where you can find surprisingly cheap housing. Now, the thing about valleys is, wind direction depends on time of day. In the daytime, the sides of the valley get hotter than the centre, so winds blow out of the valley, making the air nice and clean --- but no one's home to enjoy it because they're all off at their jobs in other districts. And at nighttime when the sides of the valley cool faster than the centre, winds blow down into the valley. Just in time for the people coming home to enjoy everyone else's pollution, PLUS whatever they generate locally. Car exhaust is one obvious source, but cooking exhaust is a surprisingly big problem too --- you'd never think of it until you live in a place full of 50-story apartments, closely packed together, where everyone comes home at about the same time and cooks up a stir-fry for dinner.

Conversely, the most expensive houses (aside from the ones up on hilltops with nice views) are generally on the south of the main island. You've got mountains to your north and the ocean to your south. So in the summer, when prevailing winds come from the south, you get a clean ocean breeze. In the winter, when prevailing winds come from the north, you get all of mainland China's factory pollution plus all of Hong Kong's car and power plant exhaust blowing in your direction --- but you're protected by the mountains, so most of it goes around you and blows out to sea.
The Arabs at the time had preserved a good portion of the scientific researches of the Ptolemaic Greeks, who were able to determine latitude (and I think longitude somewhat with many astronomical observations over time), so the relative locations of some key ports may have filtered out to some European cartographers at the time. The ability to observe latitude was possibly seeing limited re-discovery in Europe through Arab sources. For sure by the early 15th century Portuguese navigators could easily observe latitude.

But I believe these maps were created through dead reckoning. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_reckoning William Clark created a meticulously detailed highly accurate map of the Missouri, Snake, and Columbia rivers through dead reckoning, with the aid only of compass and sextant for latitude. (Lewis & Clark made some detailed observations for longitude, but the calculations were not performed until after the expedition was over and had nothing to do with Clark's map.)

I'll bet these maps originally had nothing to do with normal navigation (i.e. for commerce) accurate maps were for a long time military intelligence assets.

Great Britain employed a network of spies employing dead reckoning techniques to map out areas of south central Asia the British did not have access to (for military/intelligence purposes). Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim deals with this historical episode.
Another good one:
#229: comcast.net - online games
This is the main study on the onion futures question. Just be careful, others subsequently came to more mixed conclusions.

http://chla.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=...
Not posting this to encourage people to use it -- I just recall a lot of people mentioning porn as a big barrier to the video tag taking off.

Maybe if someone creates a porn site that only uses HTML5, it can become the killer app needed to make people upgrade browsers.
You have to ask yourself what is your real goal?
Making such prototype is 5-10% of the overall task. Market that kind of product and commercialization is the rest of it. If you truly want the product to come to market I would try to find potential customers and than try to close a first round of angel investors. Following than would be to build up a small team, continue product development and so on. You can see it is all in the execution towards the goal and that closes the comment with the same starting question. What is your real goal?
Apparently #135 (game2.com.cn which is in fact a gaming site by the looks of it) is porn.
I guess the truck-load of revenue isn't sufficient because investors still expect Microsoft to push fresh and innovative products. They certainly have the people and the business units to do it (look at all the ideas that Microsoft Research goes through every year).

The question is, how do you get a really original and fresh idea at Microsoft to make it past the cannibalistic obstacle course we've all heard about? Surely MS has the spare cash to throw around to "test" ideas like Courier on the market, so why don't they? It seems like a much more sure thing than Zune. Then again, perhaps that experience has made them more risk-averse.

If you were Ballmer and wanted to promote stock growth, what would you do -- if you could try anything at this point?
A HN feed with the article's content
I've been using this for months now, and I was wondering how many of you know about it. It's the only way to read HN through your RSS reader. Many thanks to Nirmal Patel.
I like that I can completely rebuild the UI however I want. I also find tab thumbnails to be a nice productivity boost, totally worth the vertical space they take up (to enable them, just drag the bottom of the tab bar down). The native mouse gesture implementation seems snappier than the Firefox plugin I tried (haven't tried in Chrome).

tl;dr: Features and configurability.

That said, Chrome has its own strengths; it's a good browser, and it's the one I use on the rare occasion that something doesn't play nice with Opera.
This is true. But as more and increasingly complex webapps are written in JS, JS performance becomes more and more important.
The real mystery is why regular coffee is so cheap in the U.S., compared to say, France or Germany. I think Americans have just come to expect regular coffee to be $2 maximum, and react irrationally when it is any higher. But iced-coffee is a different beast, where market forces work more normally, and so it is priced on par with lattes and other drinks.
Really? They're impressed by Rice's theorem but not the Halting Problem? I find that surprising, I would expect someone unimpressed with the Halting Problem would simply view Rice's theorem as an obvious consequence of the Halting Problem.
With regard to microsoft I think these days that Project Natal is going to be huge.

If they play their patent cards right then that might very well push them back to the top of the list.
San Francisco shows both trends -- South San Francisco is poorer, and so is Oakland to the East (although there are lots of other non-weather-related reasons for Oakland).

I've never understood why South San Francisco is quite so neglected while commuter cities like Redwood City do so well. It's literally the next-closest town, why is it not super-expensive there?
you want your life to be like a sitcom?

Regardless, try your local technology user groups.
It's not just Lisp. Language advocates are the snake oil salesmen among computer scientists. Case in point: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bnnoh/fast_auto...
If there's an active linux user group in your area that's usually a good bet for getting plugged in to the local events calendar.
This article was posted (and extensively discussed) yesterday in the comments on the other Deepwater Horizon story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1389647

The WSJ also has a lot more detail on how the rig was being run prior to the accident:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870402620457526...
Which for smaller cities is most people
I love you; you pay my rent.
Next Sesame Street Is Digital: Michael Levine On 21st Century Learning
Am I the only one that thinks mayonnaise is the most disgusting food product ever? (OK, ketchup is also pretty horrible too.)
For an even better "window on the web" experience, grab the "iCab" browser. For reading Hacker News, switch on the "open links to different domains in background tab" option.

In addition to desktop style tabs, it also offers "offline" mode caching (visited pages are saved to a local cache so they work when you tab back to them or re-run the app, even if you've gone offline), ad blocking, and more.
Amazon 1997 Letter To Shareholders [pdf]
Detecting URLs in a Block of Text