skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A 3D Exploration of Picasso's Guernica
Yeah, except it's morally questionable, and it does not benefit anyone else but YOU. But hey, this is capitalism. Who are we to stand in the way of profit.
Ten Questions Science Can't Answer (Yet!)
I slept through a year of Trig because of Aunt Jemima.

That's the best sentence I've seen on News.YC this year.
I think the difference is, in a company where 'consulting' is the only source of income, you need to be good at whatever it is that you do, or your clients will go elsewhere. For large companies where consulting is a side business, than what you describe is probably the case.
Ask YC: Advantages of using an API instead of pulling RSS
I was wondering what your thoughts are on using API's versus pulling RSS feeds.
USA?
The government wouldn't be deciding the appropriate curriculum. They would be creating a measuring stick to compare curricula. If, as you suggest, advanced courses were not on it, then it would simply be useless at the top: 80'th and 99'th percentile students would have the same score.

As for colleges cutting advanced classes, I just can't see it happening (1). If they can find students willing to take it, someone will teach topology (it's better than doing Calc 2 again).

Colleges don't suffer from the same institutional failings as public schools (they have their own unique institutional failings).

(1) Note: I have a few years of experience teaching in college, and a few more working in college math depts.
Macarthur Forum: "Teen Socialization Practices in Networked Publics"
yeap, interesting, but quite old.
200,000 "active users" equals the population of Shreveport, Louisiana.
Without the motivation for profit, what inventions that benefit many may not have been discovered?

Safety pin is a glib example; big pharma may be too far the other way; but why would I invest my time and money to build a better mouse trap just to give it away?
It seems some replied back saying "commerce on the Internet will never work, because people prefer to buy things in stores".

(click on "Show quoted text")
http://tinyurl.com/52gdhr
As a clarification, I could see how this could read as a lame recruitment ploy for that company, and let me say that I am in no way affliated with friendfeed. I just wanted to point out that there are perhaps equivalent opportunities to the Amazon ad going on right now. Sorry to the friendfeed's if that happened.

I can't figure out any other reason why someone would downmod, but hopefully it wasn't because of that.
Even spammers make millions, this guy thinks that because he doesn't understand how online business works, online business doesn't exist.
What about Cornell?

http://youtube.com/watch?v=3P8s6ZkrzlE&feature=related
RSS usually only gives you recent items. API's let you pull the full history... or even upload stuff.
Last minute glitch holds up Windows XP SP3
Looks interesting. I imagine this only works for certain categories (DVD's and video games would be good ones)...for anything where variation in the condition of the item matters, this model will obviously have problems.
Ajax Performance Analysis
Doing it at a cost that people can afford is the issue, especially in the third world.
I come to Hacker News to learn new things. I agree that it's amusing; I disagree that it's useful.

If I saw this on Digg, I would digg it. If I saw it on Reddit, I would grumble to myself about the direction Reddit has taken in the past year and ignore it. Instead, I see it on Hacker News, and I, too, want to downvote it.

If Hacker News is really "stuff, plus anything that has to do with the internet," it might as well not exist.
This article mainly seems to focus on the outcome for the bottom tier of high school students going to college. Top tier students may do much better.

A top student who goes to a top law, med, or business school is probably getting a trememdous ROI on education.

Interestingly, neither category describes the startup crowd. Hackers represents an unusual group - people who are able to study the hardest subjects in college and grad school, but who choose to work in such an unregulated and loose culture that nobody strictly needs a degree at all.

Law or Medicine require a grad degree - and as a result, the grad degree is very valuable (it's a gateway into the cartel that controls these services). Nursing also requires a degree.

Programming doesn't require a degree, but can't be done in any innovative way by someone who isn't smart enough to get a math/science/or engineering degree. It leads to an interesting kind of distain for formal education in a group that often has impressive formal credentials.
Festo AirJelly flies through the air with the greatest of ease
I won't (and can't) disagree with your opinion, and it may be the opinion of the majority of HN.

For the record I did find this useful for explaining social networking in a humourous manner, and I will use to this to teach people new things.

Of course, those people may never fit in HN. I encourage this debate.
You're right. Unfortunately, due to the distributed nature of open-source application development, making that sort of shallow usability integral to the whole system is very difficult. Until there exists an incentive for open-source developers to provide those sort of features, you either won't see them, or you'll get the patchwork quilt that the author was complaining about from Ubuntu.
http://indistinct.org/5-digit%20Commercial.csv.bz2

A small mirror.
I'd interpret this differently: The fact that the industry has converged on the "don't give significant raises unless you change jobs or job titles" model is a subtle attempt -- perhaps even an unconscious attempt -- to implement the "up-or-out" model that the original submission recommends.

By not giving substantial raises, you're encouraging the best people to work at your company for a while and then quit. You're even giving them a good face-saving excuse to quit. It's far more amicable for an employee to say "I'm leaving because I can get another $25 an hour across the street" than "I'm leaving because I've been here for three years, I've done all I can for you, and now our relationship has become dysfunctional, and you never listen to me, and I'm bored to death". Similarly, it's easier to tell an employee "I'm afraid we have no budget for a big raise this year -- curse our penny-pinching accountants!" than "You've been around for four years, your value to the company is static or declining, and we all just kind of wish you would leave".

Which of these scenarios is more likely to produce happy "alumni" -- former employees who might be willing to network with you, refer other talented people to you, or even come back and work for your company again (presumably at a somewhat higher rate)?

If you expect your best employees to either move up or move out, pay raises are irrational. If you offer large raises to everyone that stays in the same position for five years, you're basically pouring more money into the metaphorical "dead sea". (This assumes, of course, that the "dead sea" model actually applies to your company and your industry. The model should be taken with a grain of salt...)
> The advantage of consoles are standardized hardware

One central part of this is that any given console has a particular GPU that you can optimize the crap out of. Even Apple has many more than that over a 2-3 year period.

Honestly, I can't imagine Apple bothering to go after the gaming market unless they can find a way to collect royalties on the games. Jobs goes after markets only when there are profits to be had.
Thanks Erf

The reason that I think it is actually useful is that although joe six pack may think that facebook, myspace, friendster and second life are all social networks and therefore the same type of product, it is clear that small differences in product management have led to big differences in the real world outcomes.

For example: facebook/myspace (real names/screennames)
second life / facebook /friendster (imagined identity vs real identity)
myspace/facebook (self expression through profile hacks and bling/facebook apps)

In addition, I think that the actual products when verbalised, sound quite ridiculous. However, they have been enormously successful. There is a lesson there.

Finally, the video showed me how fragile the social network space really is as the cycles of innovation change. My perspective has shifted from that of a facebook fanboy to a FB hater a la Matt Maroon, and I now think that facebook is much more vulnerable that anyone would have thought 12 months ago. This video reinforced that for me.

Apologies to those who felt antagonistic towards seeing this here. I think that it eloquently sums up what is often discussed on blogs like Matt's, but in a much more visual way.
See also

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=173159
That is an incredibly patronizing attitude to have. They are 'limited' because they use a very sensible method to screen applicants?

It is very true that not having a degree shouldn't be a bar to employment, but the process of getting that piece of paper does display a level of discipline that is very important when it comes to getting things done. I know that someone with a baccalaureate in mathematics or any of the sciences has had to work very, very hard in order to get that degree, and that they have needed to do a number of things which they considered obvious and boring, because those things were essential to getting the job done.

I know there are people who don't have degrees who have that sort of dedication; in fact, one of my friends fits the bill perfectly. These people will demonstrate their value in other ways, but the majority of people who blow off college are, frankly, lazy and disorganized, and often think that they are much more skilled than they really are. This goes double for programmers, who already have a natural habit of overestimating their abilities.

From the perspective of an employer, I would think very carefully about hiring someone without a degree. I would probably not even consider hiring someone without some college experience, unless they had a stellar work record and about a mile of ironclad references.
My cheap-ass laser printer (a Brother) is the greatest --it cost like $300, it's two years old, and it's going great. My color inkjet has been sitting around for six months, waiting for me to admit that I will never fix its clogged cartridges again, because everything I print works just as well in greyscale.

I suppose I could use an inkjet to print color photos. But is there ever any actual reason to print a color photo at home, besides just being so old that you can't accept Flickr? I suppose if I were a print magazine designer who liked to show off proofs... but then I'd probably get serious and buy a color laser.
Very good article. It very clearly put into words (and graphs) the frustrations I've had at previous jobs. I can mentally map that graph to each job I've had with surprising accuracy.

It also occurs to me that beginning to see this pattern in my career, and despairing at being stuck in this cycle forever, was a major factor in deciding to start a start-up. What better way to "stretch the value apex" for myself?
When.

"When I make it big."
I think the disdain for academia comes from having to participate in the cesspool which 'liberal arts' have become. The words 'liberal arts' used to describe someone who was skilled in both the sciences and the humanities; now it just identifies people who hated real work so much that they opted for the degree program that had 'Finger Painting' listed as an upper-division course.

Ok, maybe I'm being a bit hard on the Liberal Arts people, but when you busting your tail to finish classes that are actually hard, watching people coast through in easy degree programs can be very, very demoralizing; in fact, I was quite bitter towards academia for a few years because of it.

This almost caused me to give up on wanting to get a graduate degree, even though I love the subject, because I never wanted to become one of 'those' people, and the only thing that kept me going is that grad school is a really, really good time to try and start a company.
Hard Work, No Pay: What's the Point?
Actually in my wildest dream I would become a corporate player in space tourism. And even if we don't seams to agree on that subject, I tend to think that it would do much more in the long run for humanity.
I dont know if I'm the only one, but I find it incredibly boring and inconsequential.

I'm a hacker who uses Unix on the desktop and develops web applications for a living. I stopped using Yahoo/Altavista for search when Google started up and never went back. Both of these companies are totally irrelevant to me.

It appears that MS is moving into the "red giant" phase of a megacorp where they burn all their cash making as many overpriced acquisions as possible before collapsing into a black hole.
This is a really interesting take on the article, but not one that I can agree with.

It could just be the culture at the company that I work for, but when my manager tells me that I'm doing great work, I'm a top contributer, etc. but that the penny-pinching accountants won't let me have a raise then I do take that personally. I'm trying to move up but the company doesn't seem to want to let me. This isn't the way to turn me into an "alumni". Instead I'm going to be bitter at the company that gives lip service to career growth but isn't willing to put its money where its mouth is.

If a company wants employees to say for ten or more years, like they claim, then they need to be willing to pay up. Otherwise I would prefer the "you will be here for three years, then move on" talk on my starting day.
And the largest system built in Scala would be...?
Having read the article, I think the problem isn't that having a college degree is overrated, just that some people aren't cut out for school, and that this is okay, because there are plenty of good jobs that don't (or shouldn't) require a college education.

What boggles my mind is the guy in the article who spent eight years and over a hundred grand, all to end up forty-five units (three semesters) short of a degree? I can understand taking eight years -- that's how long it took me to finish up both of my degrees, because I worked, so that I could finish school with no debt.

Mr. Sob Story wasn't going to college. He partied for eight years, washed out, and now wishes he had made better use of his time. Rather than admitting this and learning from it, he makes the university system the scapegoat for his own lack of self-discipline.
Does anyone know a good resource for searching within an X mile radius given a zipcode?
Insoshi - Open Source RoR Social Networking App
You know, I'd do the same thing. If I made it big, I'd support research into improving crop production and providing medicine to those who need it[1]. I'd also get certified as an RN or LNP, and then spend my time as a doctor traveling in third-world countries. It would be a great adventure, and I'd get to help other people out. Win-win.

That said, I'd save a couple of bucks and pay a visit to the Moon as well. :)

[1] The needy deserve humane treatment; our level of technology could easily provide food, shelter, and medical care to every person on the globe. That said, giving money to people who have demonstrated no ability to earn it on their own is pure folly...
That was Bill Watterson's theory.
Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD died today
Just after this post, my site got approved.
Automatic Patch-Based Exploit Generation
Really? Even if you had billions of dollars, you wouldn't spend a few hundred thousand to take a trip on Spaceship2?
The best part is how the index updates in "real time" as the NASDAQ changes.

BTW, did anyone notice that the SAI25 "advisory board" features VCs who happen to be investors in many of the companies that are so generously valued:

http://www.alleyinsider.com/sai_25_advisory_board

Conflict of interest? How Web 1.0 of them...
are there any web analytics packages that do these sorts of comparisons?

my band played for a crowd of 3500 once -- that felt like a huge mass of people, but it's peanuts in web terms. it'd be fun to see random comparisons to meatspace in your site analytics. e.g., "this week, your site's active users could've sold out madison square garden 8 times" or "your monthly uniques exceed the population of maine."
Uh...the ship left last week. Where were you, man? We'll call you when we get to Alpha Centauri in 2 million years.
At that time pg was somewhat adamant that they were not be interested in funding companies innovating in the 'online dating' space.

I doubt I said that. In fact I used the wretchedness of existing dating sites as an example of an opportunity for startups in a couple early essays on startups.
One Less Reason to visit Thailand?
Best piece I've read on YC.
The problem with forecasting is how its done. Much of forecasting has less to do with the actual material explanations of events and more with observed historical conditions and probability.

A 50% chance of rain means "in all of recorded history, when conditions were similar, it rained 50% of the time," which leaves a lot to be interpreted by meteorology advancements. It does not mean that the "rain trigger" has a 50% chance of being pulled, since as we know, past results do not affect future outcomes in a pure probability, and the past conditions can only be correlated to rain, not directly tied to causation.

Also, I think there's a sweet spot somewhere in between a couple of hours and hundreds of years. Maybe around a month would be good to start.
I may be one of those someones in the MA area. ;-)

Actually, I can think of at least two offers that I may kick myself for not taking up. But if I did, I might kick myself for giving up my own startup. If only we all had 20/20 foresight...
What's hilarious to me is that the headline under "My Mac Mini" is "Tech World, I Am Your Master".

Master, indeed.
You can install the Microsoft core fonts in Ubuntu. I think the package is called msttcorefonts; but if that doesn't work for you, it's in Synaptic.
I still use SICP. K&R is a great too. I didn't get them till the 90's though.

The book I used the most in the 80's was Chaos by James Gleick. I spent months coding up his mathematical models in basic on my 286. Good times.
Wesabe Founder: "So, what are we doing wrong?"
Kiva - a "good" non-profit on a profit trajectory
Stories of the early days of personal computing are ones I find particularly inspiring because these entreprneurs did what they did in an industry that didn't exist yet and in a climate where there was far less of a startup community in terms of investors and other entreprneurs to show you the ropes. These guys didn't surf the wave, they made it.
Living in the Cloud
So is anyone here up to the challenge? Eh?
> preparing the way for Mac OS X-based gaming

What?

OS X has all the tools necessary to host game development, let alone the consumer side of gaming. It ships with full fledged OpenGL (even going so far as to give non-shader-enabled cards shader support), and even help pioneer some really nice GL extensions that make game dev easier. You can use virtually any programming language you would ever want to build games with (sorry, no DarkBASIC...).

My MacBook can play World of Warcraft and Half Life 2, and that is more than I could ever hope to build as an indie developer. All of the other "pro" machines, and the iMacs, have come with good discrete GPUs for a long time now.
Click North Please
ericb, your comment about mental processing speed and speed of communication makes me think you would enjoy "The Mote In God's Eye", by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. I thought their concept of an alien race was quite original.

(Anybody else reading this, human or alien, may also enjoy the book.)
My understanding is that McKinsey & Co. operate on this model and Google (among others) hire like mad from among the ranks of McKinsey almuni. Interestingly Google seems to be leaning towards the "up or out" model, as well, among their business folks (but are the opposite with their engineers, and do everything they can to retain people).

I'd be curious to know about any development shops that go this route. It makes sense to me, but I'm an outlier (I've never held a full-time job--I worked part-time while I was in college, then started my own business, and did some long-term contract work, now I'm on to another business). I don't see much sense in working on the same project for life. Then again, I've been involved in Webmin for 8 years, and there are plenty of areas I still find interesting...so maybe it's just the ability to flit around between various areas of the project that matters to staying "self actuating" as the article puts it.
Your view of how this works wouldn't be all bad.

However, the original article was talking about standardized testing modeled after the test used in primary and secondary schools. This includes the government setting minimal, uniform standards, and has often led to cutting "advanced" or "peripheral" material to concentrate on teaching "fundamentals" (i.e. the stuff that bores the smart kids to tears). Schools that don't pull resources from other areas to concentrate on teaching to the test may see their funding cut, because their students don't do well enough on the tests.

When you talk about the positives of having standard tests, be careful what you wish for, because what shows up may not be what you had in mind.
Hivelogic - Regarding Backups
The census will generate that database for you:

Go to http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/DCGeoSelectServlet?ds_n...

Click "All 5-Digit ZIP Code Tabulation Areas"

Click "GO"

Click "P1. Total Population"

Click "Add"

Click "Next"

Click "Start Download"
There is a legal HTML'd version of the missing chapters here:

http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/smalltalk/bluebook/bluebook_im...

I also vaguely remember the ACM releasing the full PDF of the book if you signed up for a free account. It was posted on lambda-the-ultimate at some point.
If only we all had 20/20 foresight..

Yeah, not nearly enough of that going around.
I would have to agree; I was surprised how entertaining this book was when read it a few weeks ago after it was mentioned on DadHacker.
I'll second "Smalltalk-80 The language and its implementation". You can get the implementation chapter online now: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/64
"Programmer's Guide to the 1802". My initial answer was "Godel, Escher, Bach", but I suppose that is only tangentially a computer book.
-m
Spoken like a man familiar with the problem of induction.
Don't worry I got us covered. I agree with this guy and have chosen such a problem.

I'm targeting the problem of medication adherence. It's a 100 billion dollar problem. There are 435,000 people in the USA with HIV. Medication adherence at between 70-90% is the biggest cause of disease progression in people with HIV, because at this level, the disease is most likely to mutate. There are 1.5 million new diabetics each year. Diabetics who adhere have 33% less hospitalizations. Hypertension and high cholesterol are two others that have great benefits from more adherence.

Adherence is such a huge problem that a solution would have the same health effect as a blockbuster drug across disease types. The best part is, you don't have to resort to advertising. At 20$ a month (very cheap compared to the costs of non-adherence) we make 1 million dollars a year off every 4167 customers while solving a huge problem in an industry that has been unable to solve it itself. A couple studies that show our protocol is effective, improves outcomes, and is cost effective, and every insurance company and government healthcare agency becomes a potential client. With such a base of customers using our product, we can then innovate the hell out of the patient facing medical market.

This problem falls through the cracks. I think we can solve it, get great financial results, and lay the groundwork to solve other big problems in healthcare, and we are developing that.
Starting Up in Recession