skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Discussing whether college education is worth it is an inherently controversial topic here on HN, I think, and here's why.

First, because most would agree that getting degrees in a technical field are more justified and warranted than non-technical fields. So you're going to get two totally opposite conclusions from the folks dissing $100k history degrees versus the folks praising $70k electrical engineering degrees.

Secondly, software and business degrees are probably among the two fields where you can arguably gain the exact same knowledge and skills outside of college, free or very close to it, and at your own pace, and be just as qualified to work in industry. Unlike say medicine or chemistry or physics, etc. But here on HN software and business are probably two of our top most interested fields among readers. So we know a lot about these fields in particular. And the readers here should be very aware how easy it is to access and use free and independent resources and techniques to teach themselves in the areas of software and business. But with software and business in particular we have two camps, each further split into sub-factions, and they are all essentially right when it comes to their positions. Yes, having college education is better than not. Yes, college is too expensive. Yes, you can learn most things on your own. Yes, having that piece of paper WILL help you in the long term. No, of course you don't actually need it (with exceptions like doctors, etc.) All of these positions seem in conflict, but they're not, and that's where the controversy comes from. Because everybody is right.
As with everything else in life, college is a perfect example of "you get out of it what you put into it" or garbage in/garbage out.
Barnes and Noble bookstore chain put up for sale
Let's Do Some Science: Zed's Test Stack for poll vs. epoll
I most certainly don't forget, (I have a degree in this :)) Stalin's purges happened long before the Soviet Union's collapse and actually precipitated its high-point. Not to mention that the economic difficulties of collectivism actually preceded the atrocities. The Soviet Union found out extremely early on that centralized economies don't work. During the first wave of collectivization, the economy collapsed and millions starved. (This is on top of the economic difficulties already afforded by the war and revolution.) Lenin was forced to institute the NEP which was a limited free market system in order for the economy to recover. The purges themselves were responses to the failures of collectivization. They targeted scapegoats such as the Kulaks (who, if you take Soviet policy as any kind of guide, were a sort of fictional minority group,) in order to distract from the deeper problems with the system. You can actually poke through the early Soviet economic history and see a pattern of attempted collectivization, famine and revolts, loosening of market controls, and finally recovery of the economy. The history of the Soviet Union is actually a pretty strong condemnation of extreme collectivism.

It's not like the USSR was unique historically. China, Vietnam, and North Korea also attempted similar systems. Of the three, two have effectively admitted defeat and are now pursuing progressively free-market systems while the third hasn't, and is a Hell-hole as a result.
And you're specifically allowed to use JavaScript since it comes with the system.

Yes and no. In native applications, you can use JS, however its very limited; 10MB ram max, combined with 10s execution time before your code gets killed.
You must have either been worked to death or extremely incurious. I've lived all over the world and currently spend my time between Sydney and NYC. I moved here on a shoestring, ran a startup for the first year and half I was here, sold my share and went on to contracting (at startups, go figure!) and am about to launch yet another one.

I have mates that live in Bushwick (20 minutes from Manhattan on the L) that get by just fine on ~$400/week. I live in SoHo (in a bloody duplex, no less) and pay less than you did for your 500sq foot apartment.
well, if you decide to drop the money to get a pilot's license, you can do a whole lot more, as you can now operate it under a different class of aircraft.
not a new law, but I don't think you should be allowed to kick field goals in overtime in NFL football. Such an easy way out the majority of the time, getting within the 30 is basically death.
Jesse Schell - Follow up to Dice talk on the "Gamepocalypse"
Topcoder style crowdsourcing for startups
You can click through on the chrome to get back to the homepage at any time.
A CodeIgniter based Control Panel for ordering and managing SEO services. Has mailing list management, task list generation, status updates. Pretty sweet.
"Front End / Web Software Engineer"

I'm having a bit of a time wrapping my head around this particular job title, is the ideal applicant a front-end developer or a web software engineer? The description is heavily in favor of the latter, and makes a passing reference to abilities in creating user interfaces.

While on the one hand, I understand the financial merits of wanting a staff member to maximize their contributions by wanting a front-end developer who can also double as a back-end developer, but at the very least shouldn't the job requirements be just as balanced? Or just go ahead and hire a person to focus on user interface and ensuring the integrity of effective user engagement, and having someone "build libraries"?

Maybe I missed the memo why this is such a popular trend.
From the other side:

Comparing and contrasting research results is almost impossible. Even if a lot of research happens on Linux there is no way to compare and contrast the results as researchers, most of the time, base their work on completely different base kernel versions. We talked about this last year and I have to admit that neither Peter nor myself found enough spare time to come up with an approach to create a framework on which the various research groups could base their scheduler of the day. We haven't forgotten about this, but while researchers have to write papers, we get our time occupied by other duties.

This is almost entirely the Linux kernel's fault. The development pace on the kernel is quick and very few things are guaranteed to be stable. By the time my group had worked out a patch a release block was finished. I gain almost no benefit from sending this to LKML and I hear it's never worth the flames my colleagues get when you haven't done enough "work" for them. The worst was a colleague having to defend his patch from a paper to the kernel team. Who cares? The devs can take it or leave it, we don't have time for that crap.
I pre-ordered it, so I hope it's good. I disagree with Bezos on the array of devices bit:

Bezo’s projects that in the future, people in society will fulfill their needs through an array of devices.

+ Kindle for reading, smart-phone, laptop, tablet PC

I think the future will shrink the length of this array; that is, the iPad is a step in this direction, and the Kindle is behind. I'm getting it because the devices aren't up to what I want yet, and I want to reduce the physical space my books require.

If the iPad was a better reader and had a better battery life, I would have gone with it.
Question: as the ATR is going higher, so would the proportional time spent in poll or epoll, no?

So if you have a thousand fds, and they're all active, you have to deal with a thousand fds, which would make the difference between poll and epoll insignificant (only twice as fast, not even an order of magnitude!)?

This would make the micro-benchmark quite micro! Annoyingly enough, I think that means that the real way to find out would be an httpperf run, with each backends. A lot more work...
Am I the only one who gets a little befuddled when people refer to software developers as 'engineers'? Not that I feel software devs are undeserving or unworthy, it just doesn't seem to fit and confuses me.

Their appropriation of the word 'engineers', as if the type of engineer they are looking for was the only kind of engineer, also kind of offends me.
Prostitution, for fun and profit - Critique of Freakonomics
Male.

I almost didn't bother with a response since it should be obvious by my handle. But then I remember years ago on Yahoo! chat when I had a handle ending with the word "Man" and (allegedly straight) guys would still try to cyber with me. So now I take nothing online for granted :-)
Going to IPv6 isn't going to be easy
MTRAN: If Lisp Where Robots
#1 and #2 sound like dickhead moves to me. I don't think of any webapp I've ever wanted a part of badly enough to "beg for an invite", nor do I think I'd ever want to trust my financial information to a company that has so much raw contempt for their users that they would even consider making potential users "beg publicly" for an invite.
Protecting System Information with Syskey
Do you split your time evenly, or spend a little time in Sydney, and a lot in NYC? (My sister lives in Melbourne. Someday I'd like to spend winters there, instead of here...)
I wonder if Amazon would have any use for them?
Why we need failure
> It reminds me of a more classist version of the famed "Seattle chill":

Yikes, when I was reading your description of Boston my mind was going "this man is describing Seattle".

Don't let the locals fool you - the only people I have ever met who've denied the existence of the Seattle Freeze are the Seattle natives.

If you want a fun, energetic atmosphere full of interesting people, stay the hell out of this city. I personally am planning my daring escape... but I also hate cars.
Start here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
Thank you for referring me to The Philosopher's Zone. I had not heard it before. I listened to 4 programs last night. I did not get as much from it as I do from most of the In Our Time episodes. Having just one person to interview does not seem to lead to the same quality of discussion as the panels of experts tha Melvin finds. I am not saying every IOT is a gem, but I learned from and enjoyed IOT more. But, I have listened to most of the IOT episodes and I can't get any more back episodes. They now hide IOT behind Flash and I have better sense than to install that program.
Good day
The article is about how you judge other people. Debating the merits of one idea against another isn't judging anyone, so it's not relevant.
Mostly NYC at the moment since I'm buckling down on the new project. Wintering in Oz is a fantastic lifestyle though, I must say :)

For the next few years I'm living three months in Oz and nine months in NY, though spread out over the year.
They seem to think they're more interesting than they are. That approach might work for getting access to a beta for the next Valve game, or a preview of the PlayStation 4 or whatever. But for this site? Bah. I've lost interest already.
I doubt that most men are self-aware about their own thinking.

http://web.mit.edu/fnl/women/women.html
The headline refers to an 8 minute segment in a 45 minute chat from DHH.

I've only watched part of the talk so far, but it is a very persuasive piece of advocacy for Ruby. DHH is a smart guy, but he seems to have had relatively light range of language experience prior to discovering Ruby.

One of his examples is the ability to use 'unless'. Big deal, this is an ugly and non-intuitive (for me) perlism. I appreciate others may like it though. Despite this, I was still motivated to pull down my copy of 'pickaxe' and leaf through it.

Keep in mind though, he's arguing just one perspective. Personally, the Cocoa/UIKit apis on iOS 4.0 are incredible, and have reawoken my desire and motivation to 'just code'. Objective-C rocks, because you can write nice tight C code, and yet still have pretty wide-ranging abilities to pass objects around, easily make a view into a control immediately giving you all the extra stuff from responders/controls.

There may indeed be a bunch of shit in the App store, but it has everything to do with crappy programmers writing crappy software, and Apple's lax enforcement of UX standards, rather than any enforced choice of programming language. Does he really think that programmers write crappy programs because Objective-C is hard?
Seems perfectly normal to me.

Is your argument that the only people who are allowed to be called "engineers" those who have a degree with the word "engineering" in the title?

Via Wikipedia:

"An engineer is a professional practitioner of engineering, concerned with applying scientific knowledge, mathematics and ingenuity to design and develop solutions for technological systems problems. Engineers design materials, structures, machines and systems while considering the limitations imposed by practicality, safety and cost. The word engineer is derived from the Latin root ingenium, meaning "cleverness"."
Sure I will extract some out in a follow up post.
The USENIX association (http://www.usenix.org/) has some industry-focused conferences.
javascript:var x = 0; while( x<100){$(".unicorn").click(); x++; }

Copy that into the address bar to see the entire thing without clicking :)
Excellent point. Why would you blog, tweet, etc. about a site you haven't even used yet. What kind of loser demographic are they shooting for?
Judging by the number of comments on this post it seems that people don't care about privacy anymore.

Just a thought.
That's a great 404. Woohoo triple rainbow! It can be done if you click long enough. I feel happy now.
Weewar.com
The thing is, what the author describes is science. They implemented a bunch of different options, evaluated them experimentally, and came to conclusions. But, they just use their conclusions to inform how implementation should proceed, they didn't tell everyone else about their conclusions. Publishing those results would be interesting to academics.
Amazon has typically refused to acquire any company that would expose it to nationwide (or even Californian) sales tax.
It must be nice to have a life so luxurious you can't stomach working a dead end job for 2 months.

It is interesting to me the different notions of pride people have. I would lose all my pride if I had to take out loans to survive. It seems you would lose your pride if you ever had to take something less than you thought you were worth.

It has been impressed upon me my entire life that self sufficiency is the greatest thing you can achieve.

I am genuinely curious to know (you and the others that are cripplingly depressed when life doesnt go their way) -- Why would you be in a crippling state of depression?

This is eye opening and like a field course in psychology to me.

EDIT
I'm not going to baby anyone. It's pathetic to skate by on loans rather than your own hard work. Grow some balls, stomach your problems, and power through it.

My goal in life is to be the rock of stability that people can cling to when times are difficult. If that means ignoring my fears like they aren't there, then that is what I will do. If that means serving french fries to people that are more rude than you can imagine - saying horrible things about you just because you work at mcdonalds - then that is what I will do.

But please do answer my above question. I learn more with every comment that is made.
EDIT
Can RIM stay relevant with an already outdated flagship phone?
Agreed, but in this case I actually believe them. As soon as you've got two layers of management that probably is the first to go out the door.
"So not only can you NOT leave your day job for a startup, you typically have to wait 2 (or more) years before being able to freely work on any projects."

If this is true then how does moving job generally work in NYC? Presumably people there aren't expected to work for one employer all their life or take years off in between jobs?
OT, but could there be anything more irritating than a giant "Feedback" button that hovers over the text you're trying to read?

How about if you clicked on it to give feedback about the feedback button and discovered that it didn't actually do anything except hide the embedded videos? OK, you win, I guess that would be even more irritating.

(Same behaviour in Safari 5.0.1 and Firefox 3.5.5 on the Mac, if anyone is interested.)
Interestingly, I met many people in SF who had signed contracts that disagree with this law.
Not isolationism, just having a standard we go by -- which is supposed to be the Constitution -- so we don't get into ill-advised conflicts. If war is only fought when declared, we know what we're getting into. Is it really a necessary strategy to be in Korea for 60 plus years? Do we really need to be in 150 countries? While running record deficits? I don't think that's isolationism. I think such questions are common sense.
Not fearing and not needing to fear are two different things. Confidence can help get you jobs, but without competence, you will have a hard time keeping it.
How to improve logical thinking?
I really apologize if it sounds kinda stupid but as the title says, I'm having a lot of trouble getting my brain to think deeply and logically.

For example, if I encounter a challenging mathematical or computing problem, after a few minutes when I still can't figure out the answer to it, my brain just "gives up" and won't think anymore no matter how hard I try.

Another one is when I encounter a complicated for loop, it seems that my brain can iterate and imagine only a few loops and "gives up" again right after that. I can't make my brain think deeper. This makes reading other people's code a bit hard for me.

Reason I ask is I dream to be a good programmer someday and work in a good company. I know that a lot of them require you to be good in algorithms and problem solving, which is why I'm very worried right now.

Has anyone else been in this position? What can I do to improve my thinking?
Writing MS-PST parser to centralize all my emails over the years in a single database: http://github.com/niravthaker/slibpst
"Front-end Developer" or "FE Engineer" are pretty standard titles these days. It essentially means you deal with the whole web stack (from Apache on up to CSS/JS) on servers that talk to a backend API. Your code typically won't deal with accessing databases directly or creating APIs.

Don't think of FE vs BE as HTML/CSS/JS vs server-side code. It is API client vs API server code. Architecturally, these stacks tend to be completely separate.
China-made “Apple Peel” Turns Your iPod Touch To The iPhone
No, my argument is twofold:

1) Fallaciously or not, I typically associate engineers with the physical world. As I am familiar with them, engineers typically design tangible things.

2) I commonly hear of math and cs degrees being considered very closely related, and math is not engineering. It is vital to engineering, and I have mad respect for mathematicians, but a mathematician is not an engineer, hence why he is called a mathematician.

2.5) do cs majors really apply science? I thought it was almost entirely math and logic.
Well, that explains why I haven't been able to reach TwitPic via my Slicehost-hosted proxy.
I think Apple realizes the importance of the jailbreaking community (at least, some people at Apple do - do you doubt that 20 year old Steve Jobs would have jailbroken his phone?). I imagine they're simply uninterested in an arms race on that front.
If there existed, and I could afford, a device like the iPad (a tablet), with the Kindle software, an electronic paper screen (something like Pixel Qi), and was substantially lighter than the iPad, I would have no reason to own a Kindle over it.

The only reasons I can think of to buy a Kindle in addition or instead of this device would be:

1. I couldn't afford the device, but could afford a Kindle, and read enough to justify buying one.

2. I was rich enough to wan't something like a Kindle in every room, or one in my office and another at home, so Ididin't have to worry about keeping it with me.

3. I saw the fact that the Kindle only allowed me to read books as an advantage which helped me to focus and avoid distractions.
How Amazon Just Trumped Apple and iBooks in the eBook Wars
To the surprise of almost no-one, Amazon updated the Kindle recently. It’s thinner, more sleek looking – and, most importantly, cheaper.
I just went through this process to select a recurring payment solution for my enterprise SaaS service, http://SharedScore.com

After evaluating the options, I went with a merchant account linked to a free business checking account, Authorize.net (http://www.authorize.net) as my payment gateway, and Chargify (http://chargify.com) as my recurring payment processor. So far I'm loving it and it only took a total of 4 days (including Sat and Sun) from setup of the business checking to first dollar processed. And the monthly cost isn't much at all (covered by 1 or 2 subscriptions).

Here are some points I learned along the way:
- There are a number of solutions available. This is a good feature comparison:
http://thinkvitamin.com/dev/reoccurring-billing-for-web-apps...

And here is a good cost breakdown:
http://blog.glendenin.com/chargify-vs-spreedly-vs-cheddarget...

-I found it very easy to work with an Authorize.net reseller. There are many hoops to jump through, and they help speed the process.

-You'll probably need to include the CIM (customer information manager) feature of Authorize.net to support recurring payments. It is an additional $20/mo, but it eliminates the need to store data (read: no PCI headaches).

-It is a lot easier if you already have a site up and running, because they are going to verify things like cancellation and refund policies, terms of service and contact info.

I'll be selling mostly to corporate buyers, so Paypal Payments Standard wasn't an option. Payments Pro may have worked, but I had heard some horror stories about funds being frozen, etc. So, I decided to go the "difficult" route and setup a real merchant account. Good news: it wasn't difficult at all.
Motorola and Verizon team up for TV tablet
Skyhook plans to use patents to corner market in location data
Land of lisp available on ebay?
http://cgi.ebay.com/Land-LISP-Paperback-/320568366203?cmd=ViewItem&pt=Non_Fiction&hash=item4aa35d147b

From what I understand this book is not out/shipped yet so how can this be for sale? Is this a scam/deceptive business practice (maybe they intend on shipping it once it is in stock...?) or am I missing something?
Experimental Foursquare Recommendations
>Plugging all "known" holes in your security is still a lot better than being ignorant of them.

Know that the moment an advisory is out, the bad guys are using automated tools to scan for vulnerable hosts. Plugging known holes is the minimum standard; otherwise you will be compromised in days if not hours.

the vast majority of malicious activity is completely automated, each compromised system being used to compromise other systems. This means that there is a truly staggering number of attackers, and that you will be attacked even if you have nothing of value to take.

this is why watching the security mailing lists for your software is important; even a weekly upgrade schedule may not be enough.

The rest of the sysadmin jazz, eliminating unused programs and stuff like that are really shortcuts to reducing the number of programs who's security problems are your problems. There are holes we don't know about in everything, so the fewer programs you depend on not having holes, the better off you are.

It's good practice to sit there with 'ps' and google and figure out what every process does and how the system responds when a process is killed (especially important if you are on a linux box with an aggressive overcommit and not enough swap, and thus oom-killer issues.)