skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am disapointed by their last album (Heligoland) some of the best new songs are missing (All I want,..).
The limits of such calculators are part of thier appeal from an education standpoint, smart-phone allow too much opportunity to cheat. Plus all the classes where such things are needed (trig, calc, ect) you are not normally allowed any calculation aid. TI calculators exist to cater to high-schools and engineers. Engineers are finding better tools but highschools like them a lot. They are advanced enough to teach the math, and if they go around clearing all the memories before each test then it is hard to cheat with. I have fond memories of my TI-83, so many problems solved by brute force code written during the test.
Ask HN: Finding Unique Internships for Young College Engineers
I am a longtime reader/browser of HN but never had "real" content worth contributing until now. Please bear with me if this seems somewhat scatter-brained and vague.

About me:

I am going into my second year for Electrical/Computer Engineering at an Ivy League school (for better or worse). I am a varsity athlete at the school and am constantly attempting to balance academics with athletics.

I have dabbled with Objective-C, C, RoR, and a couple other languages/frameworks. I understand my way around them beyond the basics, but am far from being competent enough to feel confident promoting them as current skills.

The dilemma:

Having attended school for only one year, I am yet to learn the "meat" of engineering concepts. My first year was filled with traditional introductory courses and requirements. That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed my CS course and introduction to engineering lessons. At my school, I am an average student. I pay my dues and study hard. I do enjoy learning here and would not be willing to give up my current situation.

Basically, I want to gain experience in "real-life". This summer, after months of searching, I am working for a small-ish health start-up in Boston. While my official title is iPhone Development Intern, I mainly serve as a translation layer between the product manager/s and contracted development agencies. I've had plenty of time to play with my own code but probably will not have a product to call my own at the end of the internship when I go back to school in late August.

Next summer:

Basically, I am looking for a unique internship next summer ANYWHERE in the US where I can truly learn awesome skills and be able to contribute to something. I would love to relocate for next summer.

I am looking for any suggestions, tips, tricks, or anything else to get me on this path. Where can I look beyond the obvious resources? Career fairs at my school are nightmares. I can wait in line with dozens upon dozens of older classmates possessing 4.0+ GPAs just to have my 3-5 minutes to talk with a recruiter who can't wait to get on her lunch break.

I know I do not have a lot of experience. I am willing to learn new skills in pursuit of experience. I am understand I cannot be the only one in this situation. Where should I begin? Thank you for reading this!

GIST: Young engineering student looking for suggestions or tips on finding a really cool internship next summer to gain "real-life" knowledge.

EDIT: My email is nsw8@cornell.edu -- kind of defeats the purpose of my attempted school anonymity (although I am not hard to track down based on my username).
They wanted to collect MAC addresses. There is, of course, also the question whether they can do that without asking, but that was their intention.
I appreciate your consistency, but you must admit that the consequences of hiring an incompetent doctor are much worse than the consequences of an incompetent florist.
Stories like these deter people from trusting the "cloud." I use QuickBooks for my Biz and no way would I do it online (especially after this). It's just too important to trust to some cheeseball marketing exec.
5 second review:

I visited the site, read the headline (good job there), and then clicked the thumbnails to see larger images of the status board. It is very confusing that some of the images are snapshots of panels with an X in the upper right hand corner, but you have to click off the picture for it to close. Maybe make it so any click closes the picture?
Top Movie Video of July - Despicable Me
Cosmology? Is there a cosmologist's guild I don't know about?
Top Secret America: A hidden world, growing beyond control
I think the progression is interesting.

It starts by visualising what 1 gallon equals using something that people recognise in everyday life ... then shows a lot of 'wow, it really is vast' slides, then moves to 'well, it's pretty small compared to the size of the gulf / how much oil we have in reserve'.

It's not a good example of info-graphics - it's a slide-show with illustrations.
Shameless self-advertising:

You may want to have a look at www.getmetricmail.com (recently also here on HN). We are still in beta but we might offer what you're looking for. If not now, then in the future.
Go to the Windows Phone developer blog(http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/archive/201...) and read all about it. They are releasing a LOT of information on this stuff.
I should say, I don't trust unpaid services. There are a few major ones like Amazon that I trust and use, but there is a definite risk to using online sources. Whereas I can use a really old version of Microsoft Money, I can't use an old version of an online service.
The trailing close paren is becoming part of the bit.ly links. (At least on IE and Firefox, for me.)
What about ffi access? Could I load libmysql.so and use javascript wrapper around its functions or it must be implemented 'in pure Javascript'? ^_^
Thanks for clarifying this. I'll certainly give it some consideration.
OT: Seriously? They embedded a Google Map in a Flash app? How revolting...
Well, right or wrong, it was a little out of left field in the midst of an extended design critique. And saying it was "a force in stabilizing the United States of America" is a little bit overblown.
I like it! These advantages sound very good. But my problem is that these are reformulations of the 'fake' advantages for purposes of marketing to VCs, rather than any substantial actual difference IMO.

It seems to me like fake advantages Passion + Feature = Real Adv One Thing and PhDs / MBAs is simply one way of saying Dream Team. I mean as a marketing term 'Dream Team' is even less substantial than PhDs / MBAs.
Or just see: Allen Dulles

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Welsh_Dulles
Wow, you're on the ball. :)

We have a very convenient way of expressing value here. If the prototype has proven solid enough to support an active and growing user population, then it has value, because it's cleared the first hurdle of software design -- making something people want and can use.

A few iterations on said prototype before bringing in a technical cofounder is also a big plus-point. Those iterations are where you find out whether or not your prototype will be flexible enough to turn into a real product.
"They is so smart!" --> the apparent subject-verb disagreement is just too unfamiliar to most ears.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0 (Mitchell and Webb Look - Homoeopathic Hospital)
I get what appears to be a JavaScript redirect to a 404 on Mobile Safari. Disabling JavaScript made the page viewable.
Discussions here about status boards and, of course, Panic's internal status board.
I have to ask, why not go somewhere that isn't full of bored programmers to offer free programming labor? It seems like you would be more likely to find someone who could really use your work literally anywhere else.
Vulnerability Disclosures Summarized
An upvote, just for the Cleve Baxter name alone. :)
Hey, I know a few of those people in real life! That's neat.
http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/
As absurd as these visualizations are, it does raise the bigger point that it is very difficult for our brains to understand large numbers.

It is difficult for most people to really grasp how much 184 million gallons is, or to tell the difference between $1 Trillion in bailout vs $2 trillion in bailout money. After some point, we just give up and call it "a lot". I think this has very real public policy consequences.

But I'd bet, we'd very much understand if your boss said he was cutting your $100k salary to $50k.
Hi Daniel, thanks for your feedback, it's a big help!

I hadn't realised until I read your comment that the "logged in" features of the site aren't talked up on the front page. When logged in you can see your personal top films based on your votes, and your reccomendations based on films you haven't seen. These are currently only recommended based on their rank, but in future we'd like them to be weighted based on your voting history and a method of matching you to users who voted in a similar way.
Twitter has always included trailing parens in links (even though, it seems more often than not they're not supposed to be). On the bright side, bit.ly ignores them so you still get the originally intended link.

I'm pretty sure trailing square brackets are ignored - anyone know for sure?
Oh, it's not that bad. Some of them are reasonable, some of them not so much. The fact that it was enough to coat San Francisco Bay to a depth of 1/64th of an inch sorta put it into perspective for me. (This did not, I admit, need to be illustrated with a line-art drawing of the Golden Gate Bridge).
Step 1: Get a better job offer somewhere else
Step 2: Accept said offer
Step 3: Give notice at your current job. "Sorry to leave you guys in the lurch, but this amazing opportunity opened up for me, and I just had to take it!"
Step 4, Optional: Offer to come in to the old job for a day or two, on the weekend, to help out, just to grease the wheels a bit, and show that you're leaving on good terms, as a team player.
It's good to see someone admit that they didn't have an advantage in the market place and then built something great.
This is actually useful. Care to share how you implemented it?
Please cite historical examples showing cases where a person with physical gold in their hand, went hungry if food was available in the area they were in.
This sounds like a great opportunity for Mint clones. Implement automatic import from Quicken and get quite a few customers.
elance.com

There are tons of opportunities that you can take on even if you have nothing in your portfolio.
Do what you do but earn some cash doing it.

Good luck.
In that future my car just dropped me off at the door and is going to park itself. Who cares if it finds a close spot? Whenever it does find one, it can tell me how much notice it needs to pick me back up.

The difference in wait between today's "good" and "bad" spots will be a couple minutes at most. Non-issue. More interesting will be regulations regarding drop-off/pickup-points and how much enforcement the legislation requires code to do.

e.g. can not allow double-park.
can not idle for automated pickup for longer than X-minutes.
must download list of acceptable parking zones by date.
must report every automated parking location/duration.
etc
The problem with step 1 is that I was going to leave at the end of the year to go write a book. Maybe I could just say that? I just feel like it's going to look like I am quitting because this project sucks... er... because IS why I am quitting.
Can Honest Tea Say No to Coke, Its Biggest Investor?
Why Postgres? I'm a fan of it, but I wonder why they can't/won't use mysql?

(I'm looking for a good technical explanation, if anyone has one.)
inb4 OP becomes overwhelmed and explodes
The graphic is kind of bad, but their idea is quite sound. If you read the caption, it includes:

> Set side by side, the 184 million oil-filled jugs would cover an area of approximately 1.36 square miles. This amount of 1-gallon containers would be enough for every resident of the 12 most populous US states (2/3 the population of the country) to carry one in their hand simultaneously.

To me, that's powerful imagery. Too bad their infographic doesn't reflect that idea.
How exactly does a non-technical co-founder start earning revenue or have over 10K users? Someone must be doing their development? While this situation is possible, it seems unlikely.

Also, why do you get extra equity if you have raised VC funds. To me the point of a business is not to raise VC funds but to make money.

I also dislike the 'has significant experience or connections'. If you polled every single non-technical co-founder, I'm sure they would insist they have both those things. That is not really quantifiable.

I don't think this really makes sense and this will apply to only a very small set of start-ups.

I hope no one uses this...
Not that incredible really. He inherits all those powers after all.
I know a few people who have a startup that's based on the biggest mess in the world, that took off like a rocket when it was launched, and pulled in a big pile of funding.

Problem is, now they need to change direction slightly, and they can't, because their codebase and underlaying data model were built without anybody asking the question, 'So, can we fix this later?'

I'm all for throwing a rough prototype together that's buggy as all hell and lacks features, but don't build bits of it that you can't easily change later. This isn't really as hard as it sounds, but it takes foresight from somebody who's built a lot of crap over their career and seen how their bad decisions made things fall apart. :)
Makes me wonder about budget cuts...
Unless my maths is very much off, if you made the oil into one long cuboid 1 atom across, the length would be 88 light years. I was kind of disappointed by this, I was hoping it would be longer than the known universe.
The banks' contribution to the economy has been overstated
For fun, I re-ran his million-digit calculation last night. What took three years starting in 1987 took 2:21:09 (2 hours, 21 minutes) on a 2006-vintage PC* and 1:38:55 on a 2010 laptop.

I got the same termination message (pass 2415836).

* Intel Core 2 Duo, model E6420, 80386 execution model.
Intel Core/i7 Q720, x86-64 execution model.
Have you read this? -

http://unixwiz.net/techtips/be-consultant.html

It's about consulting, but it applies to freelancing as well. Good discussion of rates and what people really want in terms of service and deliverables when they hire you. Very good article, there's been discussion here on HN about it too if you go to searchyc.com.

Other things to think about: Elance, Odesk, Rentacoder, or other sites that let you make some cash would be smart to look into, and look at OSS for an option to do some interesting work with smart people.
Better, as a programmer, to work for a programmer. This way he's more likely to get a modest-sized project where the "customer" actually understands what he's asking him to do and how long it would reasonably take.

Also, a much better chance of making useful contacts by working for some of the entrepreneurs here than by sprucing up the data entry system for your local used car dealer.
I'm hoping to use Node as my defacto replacement for all server side development.
Unix geeks will note that the term "super user" has gone mainstream -- it's used to describe a handful of Dept. of Defense officials who have the utmost top secret clearance.
It is not the addressed value which is being incremented, but the pointer itself. There is no ambiguity.
http://github.com/blog/678-meet-nodeload-the-new-download-se...
World Landmarks in 3D
You sure?

<img id="ssImage" src="http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/CNBC/Sections/News_And_Analysis/... width="600" height="400" align="left" border="0">
It is interesting that this is streaming-only.
Not everyone on HN is a bored programmer.

However, for someone new to freelancing like me, it may be easier to work with people who are at least familiar with the development process, just to get a tighter spec from them. I'm also looking for to network with people who regularly need web development work, and HN looks like the best place to find people like that.
yeah, but they are now no longer really tinker-able, or even fixable, because so much of their operation cannot be discerned.

So when they do break the headaches are much bigger.
I think it's a fantastic idea. I've oftentimes looked at the last commit date on a project and thought "Okay, is this abandoned, or has the owner just not pushed in a while?"

Github might also offer the ability to indicate the new canonical repository, for the case where the original dev has stopped working on the project but other folks have picked it up.
A couple months ago I wanted to get rid of an old Dell printer. My uncle gave it to me for free so I thought I would just give it away for free on Craigslist. I had a total of 9 people contact me saying they were interested in it. Many people expressed skepticism and asked "Does it work?" and "Why are you giving it away for free?" Out of those 9 people that contacted me saying they were interested, 0 actually showed up to pick it up. One person even asked me if I could "deliver" it to their house as they "really wanted it" but were too sick to come pick it up. I wasted so much time dealing with these people.

After realising this wasn't working, I re-listed it for $5 and the first person who contacted me actually came and picked it up without any issues.
"So what's the answer? Revolution?"

Haha, no, not in this day and age. People in power these days know you have to keep the public sated to prevent revolution. People with family and jobs who live in relative safety and have a reasonable amount of income aren't going to revolt. And the public shouldn't initiate a revolution anyways because the cost becomes too great with a society this size.

The answer is deceptively simple. Develop a theory of change (work backwards from your end goal to discover the steps that need to be taken) and devise a strategy that takes into account the dynamics of power. The problem is that this is very difficult. You have to be very disciplined, you have to abandon your personal life goals, you have to find people to help you, and you will almost certainly have to do something out of line with your ideals (such as manipulating people or temporarily acting like the people you are trying to be rid of).
I would take a proven entrepreneur over an MBA and a proven uber-coder-geek over an MBA any day of the week, and most VCs would too.
Almost any web-based tracking tool would help bring order to your chaos. It doesn't particularly matter which one, as long as everyone uses it. There need to be penalties for not using it. Alternatively, one person can be designated as the 'point person' for keeping it up to date, summarizing the emails and updating statuses as appropriate. If one person has that job, it might make the transition for everyone else easier.

I'm currently using redmine for projects. It gets the job done right now. You may have specific in-house skills or needs which may point you to another tool.

There might be some resistance to it - as in "we don't have time to use another tool!". But how much time has been lost when documents go missing, people have different understandings of the project status, and (verbalized) deadlines are missed or ignored? Likely far more time than it will take to adopt a single issue tracking tool.
Canadian Citations -- Mid-Year Updates
Say what you want about the quality of reddit overall, this is a pretty good resource.
Me too, we're hoping to get this in soon
Beat me to the comment. I was thinking the same thing.
This is a horribly edited article. Almost every 3-sentence summary includes some typographic or grammatical error.

Some interesting companies though. Glad to know I'll still be considered a "young" entrepreneur for a couple more years. :)
Yes, that's annoying. I glossed over this in testing but I'll make sure it's seen to.
However, I would like to maintain good terms with this company and get good references in the future

Before this project, would they have had good things to say about you? Then those should still apply despite the coincidental timing of your resignation with a really crappy project.
If we're being technical, capitalism != free market, though the terms are often used interchangeably. Capitalism means the rule of those with capital (in this instance, corporations) while a free market is a system which guarantees the free exchange of goods.
I'm always happy to outsource a few braincycles if it helps me to focus on the core of the app I'm building. I took him up on the offer.
interesting idea, though in keeping away from feature bloat, wouldn't it be much much easier, and just as effective to put that information in the read me?

I realize the you said they don't want to but the info there, but why? If you really wanted to abandon the project why not just close the repo, which would shift all your traffic to another fork?

If github implemented this feature, I wouldn't be upset, but it seems very single purpose. Maybe a status flag, so the author can not just say "abandoned", but "up to date", or "active" though again, all of that can be seen through the commit history.

Just my 2 cents.
> However, Phelps likely wouldn't be able to swim as quickly through thick crude oil as he could through clear, fresh water.

Actually this is not true: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1418001

And: "clear, fresh water". As if "non-fresh" water would make any difference.
Actually, now that I think about it, if the only goal is to decide on black or white text, steps 3–4 aren't really necessary. Just undo the gamma compression (1), take a weighted sum or linear RGB intensities (2), and then pick a cut-off for Y of 18% or 18.4% (or whatever you prefer), about at mid gray.
Admittedly, the warranty implications of jailbreaking iOS-based devices aren't a secret. However, blaming the user for hardware malfunction (and subsequent damage) seems a little out there.

Sorry, but I'm with Apple on this one.

For all we know, the unauthorized software is disabling the fan and churning the CPU up the yin-yang.

You want Steve's support on Steve's hardware, you play by Steve's rules. It's that simple.
Maybe terrorists were communicating using spam! That would rock!
"Port Android to Windows Mobile & WebOS"
Hey, I sent you an email..
There is a place for the "compare to everyday measurements" info-graphics. But as others have pointed out, it doesn't take a genius to understand that one gallon of oil has the same volume as one gallon of milk and 184 millions of anything is still pretty hard to comprehend.

And what are they trying to show with the boats? These boats don't even represent known quantities (eg. size of a football stadium, milk container etc.), they only show that some catastrophes were worse, some were less bad.

The stadium misses the point, just as the oil reserve by comparison. A comparison of the affected surface area in the first case and a comparison of the production of Saudi Arabia during the same time-frame would be much more useful.

Now, the bumper-to-bumper of trucks and the SF-bay graphics are not bad.
I'm not sure whether it's easy to recognize complex things such as playing two notes at the same time or recognizing guitar chords. In fact, I think it's quite hard. For voice it should be a bit easier, as it's only one note at the time.
I actually can't legally use elance.com, odesk.com, etc. due to silly reasons. It's also not easy to get started there without a portfolio and rates are way low, not just at first, but always.

I actually found the first "free" client on elance, contacted him outside of it with a demo of what him wanted for free, and integrated into his website for him. I've gotten his trust and confidence in my abilities without any portfolio whatsoever, and a small paid job as well. So I think the "free first time" method is valid. I'll just have to wait and see if this was really a good idea.
Try posting at http://www.reddit.com/r/favors .