skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would think it depends a lot on what you want to do after obtaining your degree. If you want to work for the Government, go for it. Federal, State and Local governments do not care what kind of degree you have, as long as you have one.

If you want to work in the private sector, I would suppose that all depends on your target company. Some HR people see a degree as an accomplishment and do not worry themselves much about the specifics of your degree. Some, however, feel that you simply must have a relevant degree to understand your job even though you will learn almost all of your job duties on-site.

I am 31 and started college about 2 months ago. I work for the state Board of Education and a degree = pay raise. I administer several large Windows domains, do basic hardware/software tech, and plan/integrate networks. The state does not care if I have a degree in computers or gymnastics. I get the same pay raise regardless. They don't care if it is Ivy league or University of Phoenix (which I am doing by the way.)
If you'll pardon the grumpiness, this seems to be more of a "LOL [pic]!" rather than anything particularly hackerish or startupish.
One book I'd recommend is "1089 and all that" (http://www.amazon.com/1089-All-That-Journey-Mathematics/dp/0...).

I've bought copies for friends and family whose maths backgrounds range from school to degree level and they've all enjoyed it.

It's not a textbook, more a conversational account of a few topics the author has found interesting through his life from a young boy to an Oxford don. It's very readable and the author's delight in maths and problem solving shine through
Let's be brutally honest: I do not want to read the work of "everyone". Just the ones who can write well in a language I can read. [1]

In this century, when everyone with at least a smidgen of desire can publish to a worldwide audience, and when anyone who doesn't want a worldwide audience has to carefully hide their paper diary lest someone scan it, the assumption that most good contemporary writers can be found on the web is not half bad, and it gets better every day.

---

[1] there is, of course, always room for a larger variety of people to take up the art of writing well in English.
We're happier when busy but our instinct is for idleness
It sounds like UltraViolet is nothing more than a unified standard for video on demand. In this case, multiple providers (e.g. Comcast to your TV, Verizon to your phone) all know about your purchase and can deliver your movie in a variety of formats. This is a win only if UltraViolet is accepted: not only by the movie studios (the typical challenge), but by all of the content providers as well.

Personally, I'd rather see the TV deprecated completely and handle all of my media through the Internet. If this has to happen via many different content providers, that's fine, and it may be better in terms of competition, but I'm not convinced it's all that necessary. It seems to me that the actual delivery of the video is nothing something that matters a whole lot to the average consumer, as long as they are getting their video now. Thus, it's more important to focus efforts on getting all of the content creators (movie and tv studios) to cooperate. Once you have the content, it's a simple matter to create different streams for different purposes and provide the movie on demand to any device. If all of the streams are essentially coming over the Internet, this is easy to do through one channel.
spin your content and use it for links first.
Total nonsense. BP didn't loose this money, shareholders did. And those shareholders couldn't really all sell anyway. They hold the stock mainly for the dividends.

So this is utter nonsense.
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That depends if the parent was involved in approving the agreement. When I skimmed it last year when I first signed up, I remembered there being some kind of “if the developer is under 18, have a representative of age read and agree instead” clause, but it’s been awhile.
All the people saying it is copyright violation are probably right.

But, I don't think it's worth the effort and money (perhaps you will have to get a lawyer...). If at all, just contact the site where they posted it and report the copyright violation. Describe what you think what happened and wait what (and if) they answer. Most of the time, they won't bother and just remove the text.

Much better use of your time is to write another, even better text for your website.
Twitter's tech problems take a toll on developers
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I don't know about copyright laws and I am not saying copyright is unimportant but from your post, I don't think your site got hurt in anyway. Aside from giving your competitors' a free lunch, why do you care? Especially if your site is the first one when people search for the title or keywords of your article. If you are still #1 on google search and did not have a drop in the # of visits, you might as well thank the competitors. Otherwise, I agree it's unfair.
This isn't the quarter to watch. Next quarter should be interesting to see if "antennagate" ruptures the Apple containment field.
I think there may be some confusion here. If the person truly and skillfully paraphrased your writing, to the point that there are no duplicate sentences between the two documents, it would be hard to argue that it is a derivative work. They have effectively created an entirely new document espousing all of the same ideas as yours, and on which you would not have any copyright claims.
How typical.

50% of something is more than 100% of zero, you know.

Not surprising it failed if you ask me, given the attitude.

Not to say 50% is not brutal or anything for a contract.
It's about time. Purchasing content should be totally disconnected from the physical medium. Eventually there should be a big database of all content (movies, books, music) and a listing of which ones you've ever paid for. Then, by providing your account details you can access those media from anywhere to download or stream. I've long suspected that this sort of system is unpopular among media companies because they can currently rely on customers re-purchasing all their favorites every ~10-15 years when CDs replace tapes, or MP3s replace CDs, or whatever.
agreed, flagged.
For CS: Firms generally look for CS or a related degree (Maths, elec eng, etc.) - although if you can prove you can program (open source projects, etc.) they may well be flexible. Typically for most degrees you can do a few "open units" in other subjects, so if you did some in CS that would help as well.

For Business/Marketing: Specific degree is less important, although some firms prefer degrees with mathematical content. Again having relevant extra-curricular activities or internships are much more important if your degree is in an different subject.

It's worth noting that most people (~60%) go on to careers completely unrelated to their degree so don't worry too much about it.

Feel free to email me if you want more advice, I used to run a non-profit that did analysis on degree -> career paths in the UK so I'm pretty familiar with the area.
I am doing a startup (putting virtual machines on the web)
This article seems too simplistic and an immature viewpoint to me.

1. People do note if you are interested or not. Speaking all the time mostly equals to being self-centered. Making questions all the time can certainly please a self-centered person, but not those who note subtleties: getting a disinterested or a stock question is the same repelling as domineering.

2. People are adaptive and notice patterns. A good way to be boring is to do the same pattern in conversations. Try to seduct a girl by just making questions to her. (Where do you live; Are you stydiyng or working; etc.) That doesn't work.

3. Those who follow such too simple rule can easily be abused: a lot of people complain to others and search for those who'd just listen. They can never get enough, and what's worse they don't value you.

You have to be able to tell some words of support, but also, to not become a moral drainage to someone, you need to LEAD. This is a complicated thing, so I don't extend it here.

5. Making questions takes skill. Questions may be stupid, irritating, insulting or nerdy and boring. There's no boolean choice, to speak or to make questions, as it is presented in the article.

6. A good story teller is better than a good question maker. This also takes skill and the sense of what's a good place to which story.

For talks as an entertainment, which is my primary concern here, the difficulty is in INVOLVING THE interlocutor's PERSONALITY. Consider 2 questions one might ask:

(a) Do you think Paris Hilton's recent behavior is acceptable? (b) What would you do if you were Paris Hilton? (her father, brother, etc)

The second one lets the inerlocutor imagine oneself in an interesting situation and involves the personality. This thing is rare, I do value it high; too many talks happen in the upper atmosphere without involving you, and too many people don't get it and don't try to involve others, thinking that just smiling or being joyful, or flattery is the key. Though, this also takes skill, and I suppose that if you try too hard, people can get bored even of being _tried_ to involve: we all are good at noticing patterns.
Please don't. Same content from multiple domain names pointing back to the original is against Google ToS, and you might lose your PageRank unless you're Jason Calacanis in which case it's fine.
Your description of this database sounds like an extension of Lala for all media. Is this what you're going for?
Music is a good major. You get exercise in creativity, abstract thinking, and problem-solving. Music requires discipline and practice, the latter in particular being something that programmers and IT people sometimes forget about. The actual act of performing and its associated pressures are generally not encountered in Csci and Math.

But music is definitely NOT a replacement for either. After discrete math, linear algebra, and algorithms, advanced music theory felt like elementary arithmetic. I've never taken any music theory class that was as mentally demanding as compiler design (although with music there is a lot of room to seek greater challenges on your own).

I don't know about business or marketing. But if you do go music I would definitely try and cherry-pick some good classes from those other majors.
A company like Microsoft only releases new software rarely - e.g. in Microsoft cases, patches are bundled once a month. If you report a bug just before the bundle comes out, their earlier possible [1] response is ~35 days, anyway.

[1] Of course, "possible" depends on how much pressure you put on them, which is the whole argument of the Full-Disclosure camp...
What's the damage in monetary terms? Is it worth spending your time and money to get the spun article taken down?
Ah, you raise a good point, as far as I know the Illinois state law hasn't passed state judicial scrutiny, although it surely will have a chance at that in the near future (unless the prosecutors of one particular case punt). Whereas in Massachusetts it is settled law and the only recourse is an appeal to the Federal courts.
"... real sleazebag or a complete idiot" is a bit harsh. He was young and naive. Who isn't at 18? Zuckerberg was born May 14, 1984. This contract was signed April 28, 2003. He was 18 years old. If this contract had been signed a year earlier, it wouldn't matter because Zuckerberg would have been too young to be a party to it. Even though he was old enough to contract, I doubt Zuckerberg understood the implications of that contract (assuming it's real.) Ceglia probably didn't either.
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Three words: only in Perl.
No, it's not binary. I saw this happen to several people, including me.

In my friend's case, for example, his data speeds were incredibly low, and he was unable to log onto the 3G Microcell base stations.

I suspect AT&T has custom settings on their end for particular classes of devices, and haven't matched those settings correctly. Could be as simple as not matching the IMEI number, or could be enabling HSDPA/HSUPA, I don't know.

But for me, him, and a couple others, AT&T had to push a reset (phone screen shows an unusual "Ok to power off" type message you only see if they push settings and a reset), and afterwards, speeds shot through the roof.
The hard part will be getting past resume screens and other less sophisticated filters. If I picked up a resume and it was 80% about music, I'd probably skip over it, but if it was 80% relevant and had music, then I'd think it was interesting and read it more carefully.

It will also be vital for you to have a persuasive cover letter.

Finally, when it comes down to it, you have to have the required technical skills -- so take some CS classes, and perhaps find interesting ways to combine the two.
You seem to totally ignore historical data - i.e. you install software that had 300 vulnerabilities last year, then assume it will get hacked. Restricting yourself to software with, say, at most one vulnerability in the last five years helps a lot. (Yes, I know this can be "impractical". But then you deserve what you get.)
Same here. My former boss would draw diagrams and algorithms on the office windows all the time.
That is a very cool idea, Peteris. I wish you the best of luck!

A question, though: how do you plan to monetize it? Without a business model, it's a web app, but not really a startup.
...but theoretically you could enable another way to move money from one bank account to another without charging 20%+ interest rates and exorbitant late fees, no?

Like a debit card, a wire transfer or a check? Or like setting up online bill pay to pay off your credit card in full every month?
I thought the monetization was pretty obvious. I also mentioned it in the post. We're simply going to take care of your virtual machines (host them and make sure they always work) and give you awesome software to work with them!
I'd like to see all of this go towards Opera's "peernet" style of interaction (which I got over-excited about before, http://alicious.com/2009/opera-about-to-change-the-world/).

Basically I'm thinking that a browser-server holds your facebook style profile and mediates access to files on your computer (like photos, videos, or anything you like). Your profile could be minimally cached with a lookup service (like linkedin) which would redirect to your browser-server if you're online or provide an "user is offline" page at other times.

Various services could cache your locally held content.

Basically a decentralised version of FB where each user has their profile on their own computer - like the move from file repos to (torrent) trackers.
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Philip Elmer-Dewitt of Fortune (if you'd like some reading on the subject) does a rather amusing quarterly piece in which he compares analyst predictions of Apple's performance with observed reality. If it happened once or twice, that would be understandable; such predictions are complex and difficult to make. But the track record is so consistently and so universally bad that I find it difficult to believe there's a truly rational process behind it; sooner or later, folks should be noticing the disparity between prediction and reality and trying to fix their process.

Apple's stock price seems to behave similarly; if any company not named "Apple, Inc." announces a new product which receives good reviews, generates high pre-sale demand and looks to have a high profit margin, that company's stock price quite predictably rises. But if the company happens to be named "Apple, Inc." the stock price almost invariably drops (go look at charts for AAPL on and around the days of major product announcements and launches). Perhaps you're aware of some deep principle which explains why this is rational behavior on the part of investors and traders, but I certainly am not.
They should count themselves lucky if they're not also charged with receiving stolen property. ;)
> They have effectively created an entirely new document espousing all of the same ideas as yours,

IMO, that describes the situation well

> and on which you would not have any copyright claims.

That is also my understanding, unless I could somehow prove that they violated my copyright in the construction of this work. For instance, if one could prove that my copyrighted content was fed into a spinning algorithm to generate this new document, I think you could argue that it is in fact a derivative work.

But it's kind of an academic question anyway, as it would be very difficult to prove that in the first place, and likely not worth the time and trouble if you did. It may even require new legal precedent to win that sort of case, but I'm not that familiar with the entire scope of copyright law.

Just as an intellectual exercise, suppose I fed one of the Harry Potter books into a spinning algorithm to come up with a book about Larry Kotter, a pupil at the Cowpimple Academy of Sorcery. If my new book is just substituting synonymous terms in the original work, I'm pretty sure I'd lose a copyright claim. But how different would it need to be to become legal? To become undetectable? Suppose I was synthesizing multiple works for my spun article? How sophisticated would my spinning algorithm need to be before it really was creating new works?
oops, my intended link was http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_ITALY_DRIVERLESS_O...
Have you seen http://www.spoon.net/? It seems very similar to the StackVM idea.
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The use cases are exciting, I see a lot of potential for education purposes. Good luck!
I hadn't seen spoon.net! Now investigating!
*Many
Dup - comments are here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1509187
I hate to be a picky grammarian, but I would really appreciate it if this person would learn the difference between countable and uncountable nouns.

http://rwc.hunter.cuny.edu/reading-writing/on-line/countable...

I beg (plead!) of the submitter to update this to read "Too Many Things That You Want To Do?" to prevent the regular wincing that results from reading the grammatically ugly version.
Nice. I'd suggest demoing Windows XP before the Linux OS - not only is it more widely recognizable but there may be more users who have old desktop XP (or 98, etc) apps that could use your software.
Apparently I'm blind.
This is interesting - do you think a RIM or HP (Palm) tablet would make the same in-roads if the functionality/aesthetics were good enough? Is the iPad a social marker or is it filling a functional need?
Redis-backed performance monitoring for Django
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I don't know about this application, but I haven't yet seen one achieve the goal they all share, and that's making the result of aggregating all those sources not seem like cacophonous noise. It seems to me that the moment you stuff all your feeds in there and connect all those accounts the content just kind of stops to matter, there's too much of it and I lose interest in reading any of it.

Content needs exclusivity, at least in my opinion. That’s why I still use feeds for notification of new content and I always consume it on the original site.
Ask HN: telecommuting from another country
Hi, I'm a guy from Buenos Aires(Argentina). I'm looking for a job but in my country there are very few places where Django is being used. I could learn PHP and MySQL and get a job quickly but it's not my idea to work with a language I don't like.

I'm considering the possibility to work for some US company but I don't know if this is possible. I think I've a decent english level(I hope so :) ) and I've been programming with Python/Django for 2 years.

So I would like to ask you if is it possible to work this way. If you hace some experiences it would be great to read them too.

Meanwhile I'm working(with Django) in a few web apps that I hope to finish soon(learning how to deploy).

Thank you for your time.
Mariano.
I can see a few use-cases where this can be quite useful especially if easy to use.

To me the more interesting aspect of it is the - Complete open-source , idea-open and source-code open. For a startup looking for funding (applying to YC) , this is new, i wonder how it would gell with the investors.
Thanks for pointing this out! Spoon seems to have found a nice niche in hosting up individual applications. StackVM right now is more about the entire operating system and geared towards hackers for the time being, but we may pivot into other areas. There are a lot of potential niches in this domain which is part of the reason why the problem is so exciting!
I don't know exactly. What's a tiny bit of link juice worth? What's a tiny edge in Google ranking worth?

If it is simply sending an email, then, sure I'll spend two minutes doing that. If I need to engage a lawyer, no it's probably not worth that.

But again, my bigger concern is that if this content is now part of a spinning database then it's not one spun article, it's hundreds.

This hasn't happened yet, so maybe this just borrowing trouble I don't yet have, but even as an academic legal question, suppose this sort of sophisticated plagiarism happens to your content on a broad scale: can anything be done about it?
Some people do this virtually. They delete their facebooks or myspace pages, and go invisible so nobody can contact them except through email , phone, or meet in person. I'm afraid that in the short term, finding out how many people care about you is great, but if you regularly seek attention in such a serious matter, its like the boy that crys wolf, people will grow tired. Be Careful.
Would you provide the relevant ToS for that claim please?
Yes. And Monads are also a special case of Functors (and of Pointed Functors). Interestingly, Functors and Arrows are different generalizations of Monads, and neither is a generalization of the other.

I also agree with Parsec being the killer application of Monads. In a purely functional setting Input/Output and similar things suffice as a motivation for monads, but that won't excite any Java programmer. But using Monads for a parser, like Parsec does, would also be a good idea in Java.
Looks really impressive, congrats. I don't really see why it is called VM though, did you actually implement an emulator? How does this differ from online remote desktop solutions (say logmein)? Also if you want to reach beyond the geek community you might want to focus on a few of the ideas instead of the many ones that you currently have. For example, making the screencast great or making the demo of an application on a StackVM great. If you don't come up with a particular use case you might need to compete with giants like VMware or XEN.
I was skeptical from the title. My first thought was "isn't this what EC2, and every other VPS provider does?" I have to admit, your pitch won me over - this looks interesting.

On second thought, you did say "web", not "internet". I'm so used to people treating the two as synonymous that I didn't make the distinction myself. So I'd say make that more clear.
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Very interesting!

Assuming that you will have reasonable pricing and a fast connection, I would be very interested in using this service for my own startup.
Believe me, I won't, but note that the "same content from multiple domains" problem is precisely what spinning sets out to solve. It's not the same content, certainly not at a superficial level.