skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To be fair, Joel makes that point. He claims that:
"It may be a fine language to work in, but that's not today's topic. I would even go so far as to say that the fact that Java is not hard enough is a feature..."

In my experience at UVa, the weeder class is where they introduce pointers, re-introduce recursion, and do basic data structures, and start people with a language other than Java (C++ and x86 assembly; there is also an option to do the first class in Scheme, but that is only open to some people). Someone here was obviously listening to Joel.

-----

I think that the perils of a "Java school" are reasonably similar to the perils of a "C School" or a "Lisp school", though: you are only learning one programming language. As a CS student who has written nontrivial programs in 5-6 languages, I do not believe you can produce even reasonably competent computer scientists who are limited by the one language they know and cannot think outside of that limitation on their conceptualizing of problems. Although the individual issues with, say, C might be different (you -will- understand pointers), your thought processes are still limited to the one language that you know.

Disclaimer: I don't claim to be exceptionally experienced in those languages, but enough to have hit the "I get how to do basic things in this language" point. I'm reasonable with really 2 languages, and nowhere near mastery of programming.
> and around there it's pretty much assumed that everyone one owns firearms

Well, yeah, exactly. Around campus it's pretty much assumed that people don't walk around carrying samurai swords. That's unless they have malicious intent as it was demonstrated by a lunatic just few months ago. Given the circumstances this has very little to do with liberals, it's just basic common sense.
I did this last year. Literally life-changing. While in school, I traveled every weekend. I spent 3 days visiting a friend in Bogota, Colombia. Incredible experience.

One of the best parts is that you only have to book 3 days in advance, so you can pick when you leave pretty casually instead of planning ahead. You can also cancel any time at least 3 days before, so you can extend your trip if things are going well.

Because of this, it's almost worth it even if you take just 2 round-trip flights in the month.

Online booking now will make things easier too (before it was by phone).
Help I Don’t Know JavaScript
Thx for the support and concern everyone. I've made a smooth transition to Bing, and BOSS is really a back-up at this point. There are other decent providers for what I use it for as well (Entireweb, Ask, Infoseek, etc.) and I am also looking to those for more backup (Entireweb already in place).

Moving to Bing proved that the way I was doing things it was possible to move and not effect the service much, so I'm really happy about that. Of course, the BOSS terms may be decent anyway. We'll have to wait and find out.
by looking at (and sometimes mucking with) your traffic, I can provide you a better service.

That's admirable, but I notice you're a hosting provider. I've never heard of a broadband ISP that wants to use IDS or DPI to provide better service; they only seem to talk about providing worse service.

Perhaps making such things opt-in would work; if the customer believes that it really benefits them, they won't mind opting in.
So, they've not enough minerals?
I don't have time to read that huge article. Question for those who did: If video is counted as video delivered from the web excluding video delivered from torrents because that would count as P2P, then 51% + 23%= 74%

So, if you told me text is not the king medium it would be more real than web is dead. But that wouldn't make it a title for retweeting, or would it?

*edit: a quick search on the content of the article for the word video has only 1 result.
> Does 50MB of YouTube kitten represent more meaningful growth than a 5MB Wired feature?

I'd hate to have to answer that one with a clear consciousness. That particular article, probably not. But wired has had some excellent stuff in that past:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

I wished they did a lot more of that stuff than they do.
How large a number 6 months of savings is depends greatly on your expenses.

But, 6 months of savings does not have to be a ridiculously large number and six months of savings + low paying job can last you for a long time.

How large a number it is depends on expenses.

What would have been 6 months of savings back for my wife and I when we were in our 20s might last us 2 months now. Adding a low paying job would not help much since I'd be paying more in child care than I am earning. Getting rid of the child care I have would make finding new good child care very difficult - been through that already, don't want to do it again.

At this point we have several months of savings and are slowly saving again. But what used to be a good cash surplus fund now isn't.
Thanks for sharing!
We've built a drupal powered site using Varnish as well. With a few tweaks, our initial tests showed ~3000 req/sec! Good stuff!
The objective is to simulate the real-time activities of the brain, not the evolutionary-time activities that were and are acting on the brain.

Continuing from your extension of the fractal analogy, the former is more like an "iteration of the Mandelbrot" while the latter is "how to generate the next frame".

We do not need to know how our human-precursor brains worked, nor do we need to know what our human-successor brains will be like to successfully simulate current-human-brain intelligence.

It seems plausible to me that we will be able to understand how to simulate the functions of the brain without necessarily simulating the physical universe and its remarkable evolutionary unfolding--which seems to be the ultimate level of complexity and one that I agree is far beyond us.
Chasing the next big thing
If you crave money for its own sake you will never be rich.

What's the logic behind that? I see a lot of people making this claim (probably unwarranted).. where exactly is this coming from?
"Idiot proof" icon design Fail
Squeezed Books is only for business books, which are inflated in the first place in many cases: they could be restated in a few pages if you take out all the case studies and repetition of the Key Points and so on and so forth. Even if it's a novel, good idea, you can't sell a 10 page book, so they have to add enough stuffing until it's big enough to sell as a book.
A modern day California gold rush. Funny how history repeats itself.
He's trying to argue that those million lines of code have
to run on hardware which is poorly understood at best

He may be trying to argue that, but that isn't the central thesis of what he is arguing. His central thesis is that

[The brain's] design is not encoded in the genome

and that's just patently false. There's only one single blueprint for the brain and that's the genome. That the ways in which the blueprint is being read, interpreted and carried out are not in the genome does not detract from the fact that the genome is the blueprint. His arguments support the thesis that a blueprint is not enough. The objections to Kurzweil that I list are a summary/rephrasing of the arguments Myers provides. But he starts out by saying "No, that isn't the blueprint" and none of the arguments support that thesis.
Ottawa Plumbing and Heating | Ottawa Home Heating
Reddit CoFounder Dips Back Into YC With Travel Startup Hipmunk (YC S10)
It isn't illegal because it directly relates to the job. MMA does not when you hire a developer so in that case it would be illegal.

And woe to you if you do not hire a female programmer that thinks she's more qualified for the job you posted than the guy you ended up hiring, especially if at first glance they're both equally qualified and the rest of your team is guys.
But you don't need to write the whole interpreter to understand how that small python program works.
Company site: http://www.hipmunk.com/

Crunchbase profile: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/hipmunk

Launch announcement: http://blog.hipmunk.com/hipmunk-launches
Why A Brush With Death Triggers The Slow-Mo Effect
The comment you're replying to is pretty inflammatory. Bravo to you for responding in a rational fashion.

About home mortgages — it seems like it would be hard to apply the preferred-share-like structure I described to home mortgage financing. Your house doesn't produce profits that you could share with someone, does it?

Maybe you could sign over a fraction of your total family income in exchange for help buying the house: say, one third of your income for twenty years. But that would still be pretty risky for the investor, even more risky than investing in a hotel, where they have a plausible reason to believe that their investment will produce results. (And I have no idea whether it would be legal, either under the shariah or under civil or common law systems.)
Patrick Smith (who flies commercially for a living, and writes the excellent Salon column 'Ask The Pilot') has issued an open challenge to any and all sim enthusiasts (with deep pockets).

He claims that any non-actual-pilot will be unable to land a commercial airliner in a full-motion simulator, given the controls mid-cruise. Whoever loses the bet gets to pay for the simulation time (ouch!).

If I had the money, I would take his challenge in a heart beat! I am open to accepting funding ;)
The icon should be a tire (from the angle that makes it a circle: O) that's a little flat on the bottom. I think everyone would get that.
he seems to be using DNA as a measure for the amount of
irreducible complexity that needs to go into a system that
will end up with the complexity of a human brain.

Before an Irreducible Complexity crackpot uses that argument: this complexity is of course not irreducible. It just takes millions of years and the reproduction of the exact mutations and variations in circumstances to reproduce it exactly. A shorter time period, different mutations and circumstances could lead to something akin to this amount of complexity.
That would be funnier if elephants were not, in fact, perilously close to being extinct, especially in the wild.

This thread is like a demolition derby for metaphors.
What could possibly be lost by reducing 'War and Peace' to a 20 page summary?

I suspect that nonfiction is often more palatable to summarization than fiction because its main purpose is to convey facts. I don't think it's a coincidence that so many books start as magazine articles but then don't quite have enough material to sustain 200 pages of information. This is part of my problem with The Shallows: http://jseliger.com/2010/06/28/the-shallows-what-the-interne... , Rapt: http://jseliger.com/2009/08/16/rapt-attention-and-the-focuse... and some other books.
High-School Prior Art
On his Mixergy interview, Kevin of Wufoo said they sell "the least" of those, but of course that isn't saying much. He might have said more, I don't quite remember.
Where did I say that? At all?
I don't see your point at all. The fact that you want the bandwidth you were supposedly "sold" is the very justification ISPs give for throttling the traffic of, say, spammers, or torrenters. Why should those practices make for a worse experience for everyone else? (edit: particularly if they are illegal?)

Again, I'm for net neutrality, but you do it a disservice with that argument.
That's what's so beautiful and elegant about it. When "executed" it evolves, so it maintains itself.
well, the IDS would be primarily to protect the rest of the internet by noticing when your box becomes a zombie (and decrease costs associated with handling abuse.)

Unless you are one of those people who expects me to leave your box online after it has become compromised and is spewing abuse, the ids, assuming I use it how I say I'm using it to just detect compromised hosts, and assuming I'm careful about false positives, won't hurt you.

Mucking with the traffic is /much/ more difficult to do without damaging the service. However, there are many cases where if you muck with the traffic you can allow high latency high bandwidth bulk transfers without messing up your low-latency traffic as much as it would otherwise... e.g. it's possible, with traffic shaping to maintain better customer experiences while overselling your pipe.

this positive is realized by the customer through lower prices in markets with competition. obviously, the home broadband market is not one of those markets, so I don't know how much difference it'd make there.

If you notice, I'm a provider in the server space, where there is a lot of competition.
Forget Afghanistan, These are Needed in Detroit etc.
This is exactly what I was thinking.

Actually, if that last shift took 35 years, the next one of that magnitude will be even faster.

This is Kurtzweil's fundamental insight: exponential growth is faster than people realize. We consistently underestimate it because our brains are pre-disposed to think linearly.

If it takes you 1 year to solve 1% of a problem, your brain feels like you're 99 years away. In reality, you're only 7 doublings from completion.
Silverlight required - guess I won't be watching that, then.
Ask HN: Plans for/existing Stackoverflow-style sites with a different focus?
I'm yearning for a Stackoverflow-style community for the sciences. That'd be sweet. Does anyone know of such a site? Or maybe one in development (as I'd sure like to get involved)?

Thanks!
I used past tense relative to our times, sorry. Does it really matter though that France turn wasn't before Poland?

Anyway, in 1938 Germany and Poland partitioned Czechoslovakia in the same way Poland would be handled year later. At this event Polish minister Beck said that Czechoslovakia is not a real country anyway, giving tacit approval to total German occupation. No one however would claim German incursion could be avoided if not Polish participation.

It was nearly identical situation in 1939, only the scale was bigger and some shots finally fired.
> HN also rabidly follows a guy that sells bingo cards.

HN rabidly follows a guy who tells us he sells bingo cards, and who actually sells bingo cards. It's interesting to hear him talk about it, because when he tells us about a challenge he overcame, it's a legitimate challenge to his actual business.

Is "Max" telling us the truth about his actual business, and telling us actual lessons learned and challenges overcome, or just spinning clever tales? BlackwoodHolt seems to think it's mostly clever tales, and Max hasn't done a good job of dispelling that yet.

I, too, would be interested to hear from someone who ran a successful porn site. But I wouldn't want to hear lessons about making a living on bingo cards from someone who actually made their money at porn and only had a tiny bingo card business on the side.
People seem to consider it immoral to want to get rich too much. People are answering in a defensive way.

Every other post here preaches the importance of true happiness, family, friends, health, etc vs money.

I find this tiring. Imagine going to a website dedicated to the playing of tennis at a professional level, opening a post called "How do I win?", and having people stress the importance of enjoying the game and protecting your long term health versus focusing on the narrow and shortsighted goal of winning.

I for one think there's more than enough hours in the day to both get filthy rich and be a happy, well adjusted human being, as long as you're smart about how you go about it. Ask yourself: does that idea seem offensive?
as for privacy policies, what I'd really like is to use a privacy policy published by a trusted body such as the EFF.

In my perfect world, the EFF would publish several, modeled after the 'creative commons' licenses; each policy would grant different levels or different kinds of privacy, and the meaning of the policy would be fairly well understood by all parties just by stating the name of the policy.

edit: I don't mean /legally mandating/ these privacy policies... I'm suggesting something like the system in place for managing copyright (or,uh, left) - the idea would be that if there are standard policies, you won't have to read each policy all the way through for every service.
It doesn't directly encode the structure of the brain. Development is required.

Your Java program doesn't directly execute on the CPU, compilation and interpretation are required.
That's just my point. You've taken what would otherwise be perfectly natural, and made it seem sinister.

For example, my grandfather (still alive at 92) likes to talk about growing up in the Depression. He tells about going to school carrying his .410/.22 over/under. He'd leave the gun in the coat room for the day. While riding home, he'd hunt for rabbits or squirrels to take home for dinner. That was just common sense.

So what was perfectly natural for my grandfather would be looked at differently today. Now, a kid forming the shape of a handgun with his thumb and forefinger is considered evil behavior. But it's only a model of what was benign, civil behavior for my grandfather.

BTW, I despise the phrase "common sense". In current usage, it seems to have become a euphemism for "I can't provide a rational argument, so I'm just going to wave my hands". My usage above was sarcastic, for that reason.

EDIT: spelling, clarity
I completely agree, the point i was trying to make with those examples was that those people are up front in how they made their money. Mark is not, he either outright avoids the question or claims that he is doing niche applications and revealing them would destroy his business.

If he was upfront like patio11 (the bingo card guy) i would never of done any digging. However everything i've seen from Mark seems like a calculated manipulation to be viewed in a certain way.

patio11 appears to genuinely be here to share. Marks actions appear to be about building an audience for some unknown future purpose (ebook?,conference talks?,who knows).
I'm picturing a lot of guys who sold everything they have to move to SF to become a start up founder / rock star. This is not unlike moving to LA and being a waitress to tread water whilst trying to make it big in Hollywood.

I don't think this comparison is wholly valid because there is only a limited number of people who can be media A-listers at a particular time, and a large number of people who reach the apparently low threshold for at least the possibility of being a rock or movie star. From there it's mostly luck and serendipity.

By contrast, the number of people with the technical skill necessary to be a great hacker appears to be far lower; the returns to that skill far higher, even if the startup fails; and there appear to be a nearly infinite number of desires that people have for products to make their lives better. There are somewhere between 400 and 600 major movies greenlit every year.
This is like saying that the entire universe can be simulated by using a fundamental theory of physics as source code.

It's (to some extent) true, and potentially interesting philosophically -- but completely meaningless from an engineering perspective.
Yes, you entirely miss the point. They do it by throttling my traffic in order to supply others the bandwidth that they have bought.

Whereas I have just as much right to my bandwidth (the bandwidth that I paid for) as they have for theirs, which protocol is being used is irrelevant.

And you can't compare spam to torrents, spam is illegal, torrents are - surprise - not.

So, ISPs will have to rely on statistical modeling to determine how much they can oversell, not on throttling.
Compare your life to Pixar (video)
why do people fear their talents? it's the same.
First officers of larger aircraft do their training in a sim - it's just not feasible to do solo pattern work in a 737.

With enough time in a realistic aerodynamic model + cockpit setup, on a modern aircraft (that has a high degree of automation already), in favorable weather conditions and a long // wide enough runway I think it's probable you could fly the bird to a safe landing.
Pencil Sculptures by Dalton Ghetti
For this kind of art you have to be extremely precise and very creative.
Founder of SutherlandGold Group here. I would just add that every start up really needs to pitch a story that is relevant to things that are already in the news. As reporters and editors here already pointed out, the media is just too busy covering trends of the day to drop everything for every start up pitch that comes in the door.

The secret to great coverage in the media, is really building a great story about your company, yourself and your product before you ever pitch anything to the media. Founders really need to focus on how what they are doing or building is disruptive and powerful and delivers a really worth value proposition to the intended audience -- consumers, advertisers, publishers or whoever will buy your product.

Almost 10 years ago, I led the team that launched Honest Tea. Our story then was about a founder who was mentored by an MBA professor and the two joined together to build a great company that was recently acquired. Ten years later that story is still being written about the company.

So think about all the elements of "your" story before you pitch anything.
Clojure has that.

Clojure is built on abstractions. Most operations in clojure source code convert to calls to java interfaces. For example, a simple function call (map foo bar) compiles to a call to .invoke() method on map, a java object that implements clojure.lang.IFn. Similarly, all of clojure's datastructure operations boil down to calls to objects implementing the java interfaces clojure.lang.IPersistentCollection, c.l.IPersistentMap, c.l.IPersistentSet, etc.

To add a new datastructure, simply create a new class that implements the appropriate interfaces, and you'll get literal syntax support.

To answer your question, Clojure records are named classes that implement IPersistentMap so they're a drop-in replacement for "normal" maps, that also implement an additional interface so the compiler can generate java field lookups to access items without the cost of a hash lookup.

For example

(defn foo [map]
(println (:a map)))

(defrecord MyObj [a])

(foo {:a 1})
(foo (MyObj. 1))

Both calls work exactly the same, except the MyObj doesn't have hash lookups for the fields defined in the class.
Totally different thing. The java program encodes each decision and computation that it performs directly.
>"The book "The Millionaire Mind," Thomas Stanley looked at a variety of wealthy people and found that..."

I haven't read that book, but it sounds like survivorship bias. Eg, there were likely many others who also owned businesses who failed to accumulate enough wealth to make it into his sample of the 'wealthy'.

Question is, what is the proportion of those business owners to the ones who end up wealthy?

For example, it could just be that getting rich has more to do with living way below your means and saving alot early in your career, giving you money to invest and long enough horizon for that investment to pay off, regardless whether you invest in your own business, the financial markets, your education, etc.

But research like that will never answer the question correctly if it only looks at sample of 'survivors'.
I just knew that guy had to be a PhD candidate. Verified and yep, he is. Doesn't mention his major, could it be EE?
Quora has a lot of science questions/answers. Quora itself is not focused on a topic.
How about a privacy policy review entity?

Something totally independent of both business and government run as a non-profit that reviews the various privacy policies, notices changes (by spidering them periodically) and alerts users to those changes and their consequences?

You could also issue a 'badge' or a widget that you could include on your privacy policy page that gets served up from the reviewing institution.