skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
College is becoming worth more as a credential than as education. This is unfortunate because it means that students will be less discriminating about the quality of their education, causing the quality of education to diminish. Additionally, students will increasingly care more about merely earning the piece of paper and will be encouraged to take any shortcut possible, including cheating, to obtain a degree.

Additionally, young adults (18-25 year olds) are not expected to be as mature as they would have been say 20 or 40 years ago. Many students view college as a burdensome extension of high-school, they see the student-teacher relationship as an inferior/dominant relationship rather than closer to the peer relationship it should be. They see education as something they need to do rather than as an opportunity to enlighten themselves. They are increasingly enthused by the prospect of receiving a shoddy rubber-stamp education rather than appalled that they are receiving so little educational value from their dollars (also partly because perhaps increasingly it isn't their dollars any more). The combination of this and the above is absolutely poisonous to the quality of higher education.
It's hard to criticize their design decisions at the time. For instance, "m4" and "sh" were likely chosen because they exist on all systems, and "perl" and "python" were not yet ubiquitous.

I have never seen "configure" work particularly badly, and I've had to build some pretty hairy, dependency-ridden crap on Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X. It has held up remarkably well, and many projects are good about providing useful "configure" options. Usually fixing something requires an environment variable or configure option, and not a makefile hack.

There is no question the generated code is practically indecipherable. But you have to treat it like a compiler; no one goes leafing through the ".o" that GCC generates on a regular basis, so why worry about what "autoconf" and "automake" produce? Like any widely-used tool (such as a compiler), you can put a fair amount of trust in the maintainers to not make anything too broken; and if you see a problem, you can file a bug report.

It is also somewhat reassuring that even if the generated result is wrong, it is at least theoretically possible to fix it; just try fixing something that goes wrong in Visual Studio.

I will allow that "m4" is showing its age, and these days it's a heck of a lot easier to Google some examples and adapt them, than it is to figure out how to add a custom rule from scratch. The big challenge for the GNU Build System is to create a modern version that makes new assumptions (e.g. "perl" always exists), and update their methods accordingly.
I'm stoked on my Klean Kanteen Wide Insulated http://www.kleankanteen.com/products/insulated/klean-kanteen...

I brew at home or stop by a coffee shop on the ride into the office and fill it up. It's completely spill-proof so I can confidently stuff it in my bag with my laptop.
In this case, I think the egg (autoconf) arrived on the scene well after the chicken (idiotic, gratuitous incompatibilities).
Looking back the Time Lines when Writing Informative War Essays
War is a conflict situation which is common to past and the present times. Many countries have experience with this horrific situation. Therefore writing a war essay recalls the past and help one to gain understanding on them greatly.
Unfortunately most of his "rant" is justified.

Autotools are exceptionally bad for several reasons:

- They are difficult and not at all intuitive to learn and use. As another poster noted, there are no abstractions whatsoever, so what's stopping me from just writing a shell script that will check for the location of libparadise v3.1.6? This may be a subjective issue, so please check out gtkpod's CMakeLists.txt and configure.in and tell me with a straight face that you'd pick autotools.

- They are well-documented and easily extendable...Oops, no they're not!

- They aren't backward or forward compatible, and almost every other major version has serious regressions. This is a big whoop if you claim to want to produce portable software.

- Configuration is scattered around the build tree instead of one file. Seriously, I don't need this. I have enough of an issue with my current project's 400+ modules, thank you very much.

- Slow. They're beautified shell scripts, after all. But also, they check for unneeded dependencies and antiquated features (checking for an ANSI-C conforming const...OK).

- And last but not least, its "caching" is the most braindead half-implemented feature I've ever encountered since 1984. It's literally cost me hours to discover problems caused by caching the config files.

On the other hand, there aren't any better alternatives, so I'll just go cry for a bit.
Maintaining OpenSSH's autoconf scripts over many years now, I have found it best just to discard the pretence that autoconf is in any way consistent and treat configure.ac as a Bourne shell script with some macros on top.
I think it is better to replace JavaScript with a more powerful language like C
>where one of the key features is blazingly fast compilation

Oh come on. That's one of the banal [excuses|priorities] I've ever heard. I was aware of it, I just couldn't believe someone would invoke it with a straight face.

>I would be very interested in understanding why this is NIH as opposed to reasonable management of risk?

When you ignore the prime project that has the most labor, most corporate support and funding, the most data, and the most documentation as a competitor to gcc, and it's BSD licensed, and it's perfectly available for compilation/testing to see if it's appropriate to your needs...

...that's classic NIH.

You've outlined basic FUD fueled by lack of knowledge of the alternatives. Management of risk? The code is BSD licensed, spare me! If you want to take the code and run off with it in the sunset, you're perfectly able to do so. Instead of at least re-using/borrowing code from LLVM, they decided to embark on a rather laborious and difficult aspect of language development themselves with zero input from other projects.

The cognitive dissonance required to believe that when you reach that kind of decision-chain, that what you're doing is anything other than pride/fear/NIH must be immense.

I understand that Google has a fetish for the academic/open source elite in their hiring practices, but that doesn't get them a wholesale license to chuck common sense out the window and disregard the work of all others.

ARM compatibility, gee, that does make depending on other compiler infrastructures tricky since you can't trust anyone to support anything other than x8---- wait a tick.

"An easily retargettable code generator, which currently supports X86, X86-64, PowerPC, PowerPC-64, ARM, Thumb, SPARC, Alpha, CellSPU, PIC16 MIPS, MSP430, SystemZ, and XCore."

--- http://llvm.org/Features.html

I'm not buyin' what you're selling. Was I involved in the production of Go? No, but I've been tracking it since it was publicized and unless there's some detail/issue/licensing matter/temporal rift involved that I'm made aware of, I'm just not going to swallow the notion that it was anything other than NIH muddled by incomplete information.
Http://www.officialbay.com/womens-shox-nz-silver-shoes-p-28248.html
Here's a quick iPad stand solution proposed by Russians:
http://san-teh-nik.ru/2010/07/01/ivantuz-santekhnika-na-sluz...

Sorry, just couldn't resist.
For the record, the 'varnish guy' is also one of the main people behind FreeBSD:

http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/

Varnish is a pretty good example of how far you can push a unix box in terms of network performance, one site I work for/with serves up billions of images daily using varnish without a single hickup.

If phk criticizes something it's usually worth listening to, he really knows his stuff.
>> I think this document is either omitting the important details or it simply doesn't address the namespacing problem correctly. Remember when Prototype.js had a document.getElementsByClassName? Fun times when that broke.

Interfering with other modules' exports is not possible. But modifying the properties of arbitrary objects is just as possible as ever. Modules are all about fixing scope, not about locking down objects.

To put it differently, the document is not a module, it's an object. The module system has nothing to do with it.

>> How would one access a module declared in a <script type="text/es-harmony"> from a <script type="text/javascript">? It's a pretty realistic scenario (e.g. say you have a non es-harmony codebase and you want to add a es-harmony library)

This is accounted for in the design. The global object is not in the scope chain of Harmony code, but it is still available to Harmony code via a standard binding in the standard library, and the Harmony modules are made available to legacy JS as module instance objects in the global object. So communication is available in both directions.
Intervals for project management, Backpack for quick notes, MailChimp for email, AT&T :( for telephone, Verizon for DSL, and SBWH for VPS.
Hosting: Slicehost, Amazon AWS (EC2), Time Warner Cable (a couple of servers sitting in the spare room in my apartment)

And, er, um, that's about it right now. We're really not far along enough to need much more.
width: 52
cells: AAAAABgAAABgAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABwAAACIAAAEEAAAEEAAAAgAAACIAAABwAAAAgAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAAAAHAAAAIgAAAAAAAAYwAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGAAAAGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Yes it does from inside the UAE. Thanks for the hint.
Isn't it a 90ies thing, when there were not just a few different Linux distributions, but several competing Unix systems? Solaris, IRIX, HPUX, AIX, Digital Unix, plus Linux, *BSD, and various and sundry other minor players.
Scraping bird poo from the inside of large outdoor bird cages. While the birds scream and flap from above, I wear a rain jacket and scrap the cement floors with a putty knife. This was my first job and lowest paying job when I was 10. It was also only 3-4 hours a week.

Obviously, I like what I do now more than that job. But I am not currently working in tech.
You don't have an email in your profile, but I do have some questions. Any other way to contact you?
There is no question the generated code is practically indecipherable. But you have to treat it like a compiler; no one goes leafing through the ".o" that GCC generates on a regular basis, so why worry about what "autoconf" and "automake" produce?

Actually, object files are nothing but undecipherable. They are machine code, well documented by the architecture manuals and the ELF format. There are also tools to introspect them (objdump, ld, etc.), which, believe you me, is done on a regular basis by a lot of people.
http://google.com 2.7 × faster (1198 ms / 3191 ms) than https://google.com
I don't think it's that expensive -- seems like it would be pretty useful in a warehouse to check up on things. Still cheaper than flying an engineer in San Fran to the UPS warehouse in Kentucky.

I think people are assuming it will be used in the way Arrington used it -- remote presence. It's more useful as a way to survey places that you normally don't want to hang around in due to danger or noise, such as noisy server rooms, giant inventory/shipping warehouses, buildings that are in the middle of construction, outsourced manufacturing facilities in china, chemical plants, water/sewage sanitation facilities, chip manufacturing clean rooms, etc.

When my dad worked for Monsanto, he had to drive 60 miles out of his way to the chemical plant just to look at pipes, knobs, and dials to ensure that the manufacturing process was properly replicated -- that would seem like a perfect fit.
One thing that bugs me in Vim ... Emacs has language-aware indenting rules, Vim does not. Emacs has editing modes that do stuff in the background (like running the interpreter/compiler to check your syntax), Vim does not. In Emacs debugging really works, in Vim I tried in vain to get something working.

All these things add up, and Vim may be efficient at copy/pasting/editing plain text, but on the whole I'm a lot more productive in Emacs.

Of course, Emacs's learning curve is so bad that sometimes I just wanna' give up and pick something else, like Textmate ... but then when I'm trying Textmate or anything else, I start missing Emacs ... in Emacs you can even undo-changes only on a region for fucks-sake, how can people work with that brain-dead undo functionality in Textmate is well beyond me.

It's a curse :)
Facebook Acquires Social Travel Startup Nextstop
Change countries. However, I've noticed that boycotts don't have the desired effect, when the market is too big. This probably applies to countries as well, so look out for number one, and get out anyway.
It's a British law thing so most commonwealth countries have this.
What the World Cup Can Teach You About IT Management
Traditionally education system has been creating employees. Time to change that to create employers.
Free-as-in-beer software advocates controlling your own fate, and this is one of the times when that is really quite useful. You might think a feature is "good"; but if the maintainer does not, your feature could just go away.

With free software, you can go back and download some old version that does work the way you want. You might sacrifice other updates in the process; but even then, it is theoretically possible to fork the older version and merge in new features. Many people obviously won't go that far, but it is certainly more control than commercial software will ever provide.
I feel bad for the guy. I would buy Tesla stocks if I had the money.
It's quite possible that his attention was focused elsewhere, like say on Tesla and SpaceX, and that is why he's getting divorced now.

Smart people aren't universally smart. They're smart at the things that they choose to be smart at. I know a few brilliant people that are geniuses at their chosen field and yet wouldn't notice if their spouse went off to Vegas without them.
I think there are different kinds of leadership. There is the kind you describe. Then there is the kind where you are someone who can't be ignored simply because you are technically better than others around. When I'm in an amateur opera, I have my music memorized before the other people know their notes, and I never miss my part. People notice. When I'm taking a night class I say my opinion out loud whether it's what the teacher wants to hear or not, and I got 100% in the last 4 CS course I took. That's a kind of leadership. I'm not as smart or talented as many people on this site, but I do think I have tasted more failure, and am more terrified of underachieving, and I want success more badly than many of the rest, and you can bet your ass I have more free time. I am never ashamed of who I am, and I will meet you face to face, give you my real name, and look you in the eye. While other people were out doing "fun" things last month, I released my first two iPad apps and made 1200 dollars. It's not that much, to be sure, but give me some time, and it's a nice addition to working full time as well. Give me a few years, see if people I'm working with look up to me, and tell me I don't have the personality of a leader. I think I still won't be good enough for women though. Do I have a chip on my shoulder for this? Yes.

I don't have any hatred for women. I just resent the fact that I am nearly completely unattractive to them, being the person I really am and strive to be. I look around on online personals sites and I'd be thrilled to get a relationship with at least 1/3 of them. In nearly all other areas of life, you can view the genders with symmetry, but someone who thinks low status males like me are playing in the same universe as almost any woman has just never been to an online dating site. There, yes, we might as well be different species.

Yes I do think I'm hot shit, thank you very much, and I intend to prove it. Overcompensation? Fuck yes. Being more of a technical leader is something I want for my own terms, quite unlike being a phony who pretends that traveling gives me some stupid emotions that it doesn't. I hate airports and I will say so if asked. In that sense, having money and success will be my personal "protocol" that will allow women to discover the real me deep down. And I'm not really so bad, despite occasionally displaying my worst qualities, such as in this post:)

For me, online dating is indeed an absurdly negative experience. Compared to a more equal environment, I do feel its pull to make me cynical and less happy to be a human being. I will see what kind of women I can attract in a few years, and the good part is that I only need one, and I will appreciate the hell out of her when I find her.
> for every bad experience like Elon's you will find 4 good experiences (my parents have been married for 40+ years).

You are mixing up duration and quality.
Only one person online :(

Anyone wants to chat?

(The fact that I had to select a Topic before I could chat wasn't obvious to me even though I read the system message)
Facile snarky one-offs are sugary and lacking in intellectual nutrition, thus, popular.

Persistence, hard work, testing, all the sweat required to make something meaningful? Gross.
Please dont break compatibility when it is possible to avoid it.

js is coming to the server quite nicely, most modern browsers support it well too... Even microsoft starts to take the web seriously with IE9.

I am not convinced mozilla fondation is in its role breaking compatibilities when avoidable
> I know what entrepreneur who had a prenum and divorced and remarried the same woman TWICE. Got soaked both times even w/ prenup.

That doesn't sound too clever to me. Once bitten twice shy right ?
There is actually fairly solid economic evidence that the "Bush tax-cuts" were extremely damaging to the economy precisely because the cuts were not made with corresponding reductions in spending.

I find it interesting that the Republican party advertises itself as fiscally conservative while obeying none of the tenants of fiscal conservatism such as maintaining a balanced budget.

Keysian economics (use gov't spending to boost the economy out of recession) only works when there is a corresponding cut in spending after exiting the recession. In other words, over a period of time there can be deficits but only if replaced with equally large surpluses. A consistent state of deficit spending is unsound and unwise, to say the least.
Being an assistant in a winter coats shop during summer holidays. I was 13 and it was my first job.
I was bored all day because we never got any customers - this was in a seaside town and you can imagine that people do not tend to go buy winter coats during summer while they are going home from the day at the beach :)
Very cool, I guess the next step would be to give it a decent sized screen for 2 way communication.
+1 for vuvuzela. Frankly that's the only output port it needs.
Construction crew on a group building a golf course. One day my job was - literally - to walk around and pick up rocks and sticks and what-not. In the 98 degree heat and sweltering humidity of NC in the summertime... with no shade to be found. For not much more than minimum wage.

Outside of that, my dad was in the logging business when I was a kid, so I worked summers during high-school helping him cut down trees and load them onto a truck to haul to the paper mill. That was more being outside, doing hard physical labor, in NC, in the summertime. And I'm not even sure I got paid, now that I think about it... :-)
nah, I like it.

heard someone once saying things people experience are like a piece of string that passes between their ears and is gone. You need to make sure you provide a knot in the string so it doesn't slip through so easily, and the person remembers it. The cartoon duck and the name are that knot.
Nonsense, Elon Musk was already a millionaire from the sale of zip2 to Compaq in 1999, he married in 2000.
A good complement to the recent drowning-related post. In fact, it's the "prequel". Worth a read, followed by a warm bath.
I stumbled across this in my data from a survey of study habits vs performance in medical school. I didn't know it had a name at the time. Think of this from an employer's point of view, or a client's. Your employees (or contractors) think they're awesome, and thanks to the fundamental attribution error, you assume their confidence reflects competence. But, oh, how wrong you are.
I am a math person as well but my love of literature and social sciences in general is not because I was forced to learn about them in high school or college. In fact I started to enjoy literature, psychology, philosophy and social science when I was left to my own devices and wasn't forced to write a paper right after I had finished reading something. The pace in science courses was almost always to slow and the pace in social science classes was almost always too fast. Universities were designed as cookie cutters and they are now starting to see the effects of that model.
Understanding Windows Azure Storage Billing
Are night owls generally more intelligent than other people?
My point exactly. It just seems backwards to force feed people information if they are not motivated to actually learn it so it shouldn't be surprising that people are studying less now that they have ways to pursue other activities. There is no way you are going to get anything meaningful out of something if the only motivator is punishment in the form of a lower GPA. On the other hand, if you are actually interested in learning something because you want to learn it then the knowledge you gain automatically spills over into other areas and your knowledge grows organically and not according to some template designed by a committee.
Thanks for the reply. The recommendations are awesome, thanks! I've put off picking up SICP for awhile, will probably do that soon.
Sorry: We just launched it today. So the traffic is not there yet. But I would take an advice on how to build the traffic.:)
Ok let me rephrase that for you:

My parents have been happily married (to the best of my knowledge) for the last 40 years. If they are not happy, they are damn good at hiding it and goes way out of their way to make sure the kids never find out
Working at the Baskin Robbins in the mall that was the scene of Dawn of the Dead.

Much, much less.
Telemetry has come down in price and has gone up in capabilities in recent years.

For instance:

http://www.mksinst.com/product/ebaratron.aspx
Our lives are full of quests.

Correction: MMO's are full of chores!
Hope you have a good penis filter in place.
My uncle just spent a few weeks in the hospital and now has a few more weeks at home recuperating. He's suffering wildly from boredom. Could this be a solution for that?
This uses iframes to pit websites against each other. Twitter breaks out of iframes and so do other websites.
Great to hear opinions. However, the point isn't if one could produce a great app right now, it's if the time invested in doing so, especially if it's on a narrow implementation space, is worth the opportunity cost of doing the more "heavy" stuff like statistics, algs, etc.

I do agree with the sentiment though, and I'm definitely going to be coding whenever I can!
Your character becomes more powerful and capable of doing more and more repetitive grinding!
Drop out nation: Has the GED done more harm than good?
> interests that women find uninteresting - programming, reading history, reading economics, sports. Thus when I talk with women, I make sure to only talk about the 5% (design, architecture, society, relationships, psychology, travel)

Wow... are you sure that all women are so homogeneous?
Per the article, his wife proposed after he made his first fortune.
Harvest for time and expense tracking.
Your instructions say to select a topic and then hit "Start", but the topic list is inactive until the user clicks the Start button.

It took me a little while to decide to stop following the instructions. I don't know what that says about me as a person.