skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is not really masters vs. PhD in the US, it's MS vs. MS+PhD. Even programs where you do not explicitly receive an MS, it is essentially implied.
Technical and cultural changes in chess
I find that's where reading it on a mobile phone is great. I can read it while I'm out and unable to do work.
Training hackers for an awesome job market
Did you create hckrnews.com? I really like it.

Edit: It looks like it was from @wvl. Wvl, please put contact info on either your website or hn profile.

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=wvl
The point of the internet is that somebody with enough servers and their own browser could easily introduce their own TLDs.
Thanks! Let me know if you find anything that can improve the experience for us all.
Britain's brainiest cemetery
Are your projects making any money yet? Without any other details, I would say that no, it's not practical. Possible, yes, but not practical. If you're at zero dollars today, and you actually have one decent product, I would guess three years to get to 40K. You may get there in 6 months, or you may never get there. Hard to predict. My best estimate though would be 3 years.

My only suggestion would be to start making money ASAP. As soon as you have three months worth of actual revenue data then you'll be MUCH better prepared to make financial projections. They'll still be sketchy, but you at least need a baseline to work from. Every app and website is unique.
Those are beautiful.

I hope you can help me. I don't know anything about Sunflow or Structure Synth. I messed around with something called POV-Ray a long time ago (8 years I think).

What would be the best way to get started with these programs? Should I start with Synth? Something else? And where can I read about how to use them?

Thanks!
Wow, I must try it. Looks like a mini houdini - http://www.sidefx.com/ (and free one at that!)
I don't know any more than the image, but based on this, I say: Good! I'm more than tired of this type of broken security.

I'm interested to see how Google's own sites fare. I've not that infrequently had to put up with the "broken lock" when e.g. Gmail or Apps decides to deliver some of the page content via http.
"Unfortunately, the situation that I'm referring to with children inventing their own long-multiplication algorithm was presented at a talk, so I can't point to the specific results, if they're even published yet, but my contention is based on an academic research study."

I've read that before too, and I'm guessing that there is a cite for this in Alfie Kohn's book The Schools Our Children Deserve. However, it's been a few years since I've read it now so I can't remember if it's actually in that book or if it was Eleanor Duckworth's book The Having of Wonderful Ideas.
This is a very fair view of the scene, and it all rings true. But do remember that it is written by a professor.

Speaking as someone who has been seduced into academia on multiple occasions by my friends who are professors: They are hopeless optimists. This is not their fault. Indeed, it is a precondition for their existence: just as you would not be surprised to find that most of the creatures sitting on top of a high crag have wings and can fly, you should not be surprised that most professors, and especially most tenured professors, are completely besotted with their lifestyle and can barely conceive of anything else. Darwin has seen to this. The academic environment is all about selection pressure.

For example, this essay is by a particularly self-aware and wry professor, so he's able to joke that "getting a PhD costs you a house". But self-critics don't last long if they go for the jugular, so he doesn't point out that, if you wish to continue doing research after your PhD, it's going to cost you another house, and another: Postdocs pay better than graduate fellowships, but still only half what industry pays, if that, and even less if you calculate the hourly rate. And then to go any further you will need to start writing grants, and administering students, none of which is exactly research. Then you probably won't get to keep your job writing grants because it's hard to get the grants, and hard to get tenure... [1]

So, take this fellow's advice to heart, but be sure to also have a beer with a real cynic before spending fifteen years in pursuit of academic nirvana.

---

[1] I never studied CS, so maybe the grass is greener over there and CS is some kind of abundant academic paradise where grants flow like water. But I kind of doubt it.
So what happened to the benzene in the crude oil? Did the microbes eat that too?
This is a classic engineer response. It's not about who does it first, it's about who does it right. We didn't have the technology to implement this properly 5 years ago. I've never seen the Ovi Maps tool you mention, but I'm willing to bet that it wasn't polished enough to make it natural for users.

Now, I'm not entirely convinced that Google Instant is polished enough either- anecdotally, I've already seen some confusion. But saying "it's all marketing" willfully ignores the lesson we've all been taught by Apple: a revolutionary feature that isn't intuitively usable is no revolutionary feature at all.
TechCrunch Teardown: Etsy, It's Crafty
Education in the 21st century - my view
A comments extractor would also be useful with VT (probably easier to do with sites with a comments and rss feed, but you couldn't get all comments nor their thread.) Also, getting multi page articles on the one page would be cool.
Interesting. If you don't mind my asking, where are you going? For all the schools I applied to, it appeared that the PhD programs required taking classes.
instant is cool no doubt.. but the proactivity becomes irritating after a while
Not sure what you mean as a stream ... is do you mean like Flikr? well Flikr does that pretty well for me: http://www.flikr.com/rakkhi

Blogger, Posturous, Tumblr all can had video and photos. If I want a "stream" can I can add a gadget for that:

e.g.
http://www.bloggerbuster.com/2009/03/simple-flickr-photostre...

http://google.about.com/od/youtube/ss/embed-share-YouTube-vi...

You sound like a smart guy and a skilled developer I would seriously think again. Have a read of this:
https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-startup-ideas-that-persi...

Or don't and I wish you the best of luck
True in my limited experience (EE not CS). The UK PhDs get a pretty well defined thesis topic and graduate on schedule.
The US PhDs don't have a clear finish line until less than a year from finishing.

The "joke" in the US is that if someone says they are six months from finishing it is really a year, if they say a year from finishing it is 2+ years, if they say more than a year they have no idea how much longer.
http://twitter.com/newsyc20 - same here
I check it every ~3-4 hours or so. Usually takes about 15 minutes.

I go through front page and look posts that are interesting to me. Then I go straight to the comments.

If the comments raise my interest in the actual article, I go read that.

On repeat visits, I tend to stick only to new stories, and stories where I saw an interesting conversation developing.

In big threads, I do a CTRL F for "minutes", "1 hour ago", "2 hours ago", "3 hours ago".(would make my life a lot easier, if pg had some way to highlight comments from a specific period...i.e. highlight every comment made within the last [3 hours][V] <---that's a drop down box)
The Geo team has a whole building in Mountain View, I'm sure they'd let him work there :).
He means that the students finish up their coursework during their Masters program, so the PhD work is usually entirely research. Thus during your Masters program, you frequently don't get a good idea at all of how the PhD program is.
PostgreSQL and the Linux kernel sources make great reading materials.
Doing research 5 days a week really wears you down if the people around you doing similar work are assholes.

whoa whoa where do you do research only 5 days a week??? most PhD students i know average 6 to 6.5
Good points - always good to get multiple views. It's worth pointing out that at least in CS, you can keep doing research after getting a PhD by joining industry labs, which shouldn't cost you as many houses.

Re: your footnote, the exact comparison would depend on what field you're looking over from, but no, grants don't flow like water in CS.

In fact, there's been some discussion lately that CS reviewers are overly critical of each others' articles and grant proposals, compared to other fields. For example, in a recent editor's note[1], Moshe Vardi coined the term "Hypercriticality" to describe the harshness of CS reviews. There's a great quote from Ed Lazowska, who called it "Circling the wagons and shooting inwards".

[1] http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/7/95070-hypercriticality/...
Avoiding Implicit Nothing in Scala
Answering a slightly different question: if you're considering trying to solve a problem with a GA, you might first try simulated annealing. For many problems, it will probably converge to a decent answer more quickly, is quite a bit easier to code, and is less resource intensive.
no! it's a lot of fun.
My number one priority is combining multiple pages into one. I'll try to start on that today.

Just noticed you are in Israel. I was there last year, loved it.
If you've figured out a way to make eating and shitting voluntary, you should just write about that. The sales will be enough to ensure you never have to work again.
There's a plugin at bottom that will red margin new comments since last visit: http://hckrnews.com/about.html
this is a pretty uninteresting problem in the grand scheme of things... it's a great one for first or second year CS undergrads, but front page of HN for the past week? ..the ACM archive has more interesting problems than this.. or check out a personal favorite-- http://mathpuzzle.com/
I really like this - can you make an iPhone application that does google maps instant search?
seriously, the best CMS is Drupal. Wordpress isn't a CMS, it's a blog engine.
Is Steve Huffman the designer? I like the simplicity of both of his sites.
As others have said, it can be.
He certainly isn't making any of the situations up in those comics.
But of course, the good parts of grad school aren't as funny - so they don't show up as much in the comics, but should help balance out all the despair.
For reference, here's the classic list of 36 known human competitive results produced by GP: http://www.genetic-programming.com/humancompetitive.html
Does anyone else have a good tutorial or recommendation?
Bill Gross gave a TED talk a few years ago where he discusses how they used genetic algorithms to design a solar collector and a subsequent stirling engine. Theres not much on the details of what went into creating the program, but there were a few interesting pictures of their progress along the way.

http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gross_on_new_energy.html
Good article, nice balanced view of both sides.

I have always had on my someday list to do a PHD in developing a quantitative model for information security risk using power laws because I believe it is something that is badly needed and something I am passionate about. I started to explore the problem here: http://rakkhi.blogspot.com/2010/07/security-return-on-invest...

Could I do this online while doing my full time job?
What are some universities that are quite cost effective and would support this type of online / distance learning model for a PHD?
I don't honestly think that Factor suffers from the same problems enumerated here at the end of the day. I used to dally in Forth in the form of Mops and PowerMops, and my problems were basically the same as those enumerated in this essay. I've tried to get into Factor multiple times; this past time I succeeded, and I have been writing increasingly large amounts of code in my spare time that seem to flow okay. I might even start releasing some of it soon. I think the differences can be chalked up to a few major things:

Real locals. Factor locals are not penalized; they perform the same as a data stack. And while another comment correctly notes that Factor programmers prefer to avoid locals, I'd point out that locals are also used in many places in the standard library. Factor's preference is not the same as Forth's near-insistence.

Higher-level combinators via lambdas. Part of why they have that attitude is that Factor's higher-level combinators are very natural if you're coming from a functional language. A lot of its combinators are things like "run these pile of lambdas against this one object" (kind of a reverse map) or "append all of these lambdas with this extra operation or datum" (think of currying). These are VERY different in practice than dup/swap/rot. I still have to pause and think a lot while I'm coding about how and which to use, but it's getting better. The main hurdle is simply not forgetting anything.

Rich data types. Being able to have a single element on the stack that is an array, or a class, or an expandable vector, or a hashtable, or what have you, GREATLY simplifies things compared to Forth, where I'd have to "just know" that the two top things on the stack entering my function were a pointer to an array and its length or some such.

Much better error reporting. With richer data types comes much better error messages. You didn't just read random crap from memory because you read the stack effect in the wrong order; you tried to call + on a hashtable. Combined with static stack effect checking, and I find that debugging my Factor code is usually about logic, whereas at least half the time, my Forth code was about getting the stack effects right.

----

I'm not saying Factor's perfect. It's not. I use more locals than the core team does in my code, and I'm not currently convinced that's wrong in any sense. But I also get a lot of mileage out of the higher-level combinators, to the point that I can write concatenative code without feeling like I did in Forth that I'm doing the processor's work for it. It feels a lot closer to any high-level functional language, where I'm just composing functions, not jiggling the stack.
September 11th
I'm a Django fan, but in defense of this guy this is a pretty insignificant thing to post to HN.
Oh wikiHow, where would we be without you?

http://www.wikihow.com/Cook-a-Great-Tasting-Steak
Mark Zuckerberg's Interview from 2005 (GigaOM)
Node.js, Unix based OS and MongoDB (NUM) are the new LAMP
Do professors drive talented eighth-year students to drop out by making crazy demands on their time?

This is a pretty rare occurrence. The talented eighth year student, I mean, not the professor making crazy demands on time.

Another very common occurrence, mostly absent from PhD Comics, is a professor failing to kick out an untalented/unmotivated student in their second or third year. The result is that the student wastes 5 more years in the fruitless pursuit of a PhD, eventually dropping out due to neglect by their adviser.

Getting to a tenured professorship is a tournament. Many apply, but only a select few will win. The problem is that very often, no one tells you when you were eliminated. They just let you carry on as if you still have a chance.
India’s $35 Tablet is actually the Hivision SpeedPad, A Chinese Tablet
With regards to GAs, it's good to keep in mind the comments from Russell and Norvig's AI book:

"At present, it is not clear whether the appeal of genetic algorithms arises from their performance or from their aesthetically pleasing origins."

Furthermore:

"Most comparisons of genetic algorithms with other approaches (esp. stochastic hill climbing) have found that the GAs are slower to converge."

The discussion at the page below is very enlightening as well.

http://books.google.ca/books?id=8jZBksh-bUMC&lpg=PR8&...
Utah.
That was quite gimmicky.
The answer shows my bias, I suppose, but I alternate between Plum (a feed aggregator that I am building) and Fever, which is great, but doesn't work even remotely how I want it to, and I hate that it's a self-hosted application that I pay for. It's worth the money, to be sure, I just really don't like the model as it applies to me.
I'd say this has been around for thousands of years. Cults and religion have these undertones built into their belief systems.
Ask HN: Ideas for weekend projects?
I'm wondering if anyone knows of any idea pools for weekend projects, or if anyone has any small projects that they haven't implemented yet. I have a lot of down time over the next two weeks, and I would love to put the time to good, creative use. Note, I'm not looking for startup ideas, although the two are obviously not mutually exclusive.
This is clever. Who cares if it's copycat? I bet you if it was slickened up slightly it'd be a perfect fit on Google's stable. I think transition animations and auto-zoom would help.

And how about this for an idea: Why not split up the boxes in two, one for city and one for address? It seems this might work better with a box for general tuning and one for fine-tuning. Just a thought.
Following the hype: Twitter Instant
A while ago I stumbled upon a stack-based language called V: http://code.google.com/p/v-language/

On the very first page is V's version of the quadratic equation problem:

[quad-formula
[a b c] let
[minisub 0 b -].
[radical b b * 4 a * c * - sqrt].
[divisor 2 a *].
[root1 minisub radical + divisor /].
[root2 minisub radical - divisor /].
root1 root2
].

|2 4 -30 quad-formula ??
=(-5.0 3.0)

From what I understand, V encourages the use of local variables; it is also more of a high-level language, like Joy, as opposed to being close to the "bare metal" like Forth.
Norvig's Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years is what I normally recommend people read if they really want to learn how to program.

http://norvig.com/21-days.html
But, but, but, Bruce said we needn't worry about things that are uncommon enough to be news.
Check out readability: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/readability-browser/id3755428... Note, its bookmarklet applies some type of stylesheet, no redirection of page.
Fun with paint guns, but they take quite a while to get on with it. The key points take a few seconds, and even they aren't very illuminating, just fun:

One paint gun is slow:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtGf0HaW7x4#t=2m53s

Painting with many guns simultaneously:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtGf0HaW7x4#t=8m12s

Slow mo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtGf0HaW7x4#t=9m02s
google maps on my android phone does this type of instant-search recommendation and i always thought it was stupid, too. i just typed in "1218" on it and it's trying to recommend me "1218 grand-saconnex, switzerland" (i live in the united states).

if it's going to do search recommendations, it should at least do a regional geo-ip/gps lookup and offer suggestions i'd probably be driving to.
I'm not so sure that's what he means. If you look in the comments, the OP says "Ah yes. I should have pointed out that this article only applies to PhD programs in the US (in Computer Science). ... A UK PhD, for example, is rarely seen as equivalent to a US-based PhD, precisely because it is so short and does not typically involve coursework."

For the universities I applied to, you are still required to take classes in the PhD program. Even if you already have your Master's and decide to go for a PhD at another university, your class credits may not transfer (in fact, I was told at a graduate visit day at UMD that they don't accept credit from MS programs other than their own), so you might even have to do the required coursework all over again while going for your PhD.

Personally, I was able to find a graduate research assistantship my first semester here at UMD, whereas most of the incoming PhD students are in teaching assistantships. I feel like I'm getting a good taste of how research/the PhD program.
That is a matter of definition. Another way to look at that "small individual programs" and "minimal interoperability" are just a historical side-effect of iPhone (hardware, software, and licensing) limitations.

With iPad, nobody forbids you from selling an office suite as one tool. In fact, Apple's Pages for iPad may be an early example of this, with its limited charting capabilities.

Looking ahead, I would hope that we do not go that way, but that, instead, evolution will be towards a component store, where editors are sold, and viewers are free downloads (backed by the app store, something like Opendoc on iPad could be a killer)
Yes, hckrnews.com is me (email in my profile).

I use it to read Hacker News -- I leave it on the 'all' filter and scan the new items a couple times a day. The browser extension lets me see which comment threads I've read that have new comments, and then highlights those new comments for me. At the end of the day, I'll usually filter it down to the top 20 to see anything I might have missed.
Don’t Waste Money on a New Computer for College
Lovely renders!

Btw, how do you combine SS with Sunflow? (link to a blog post/how-to would be helpful :))
I just use spamgourmet.com.

My procedure is usually:

1) go to: spammysite.com

2) register as: spammysite.[username]@xoxy.net (or one of their other domains, they have a bunch )

3) get up to 5 emails from the site, the rest just get erased ( you can up their limit on the site, or set an exclusive sender )

4) enjoy life free of spam from that site
The value of quality, useful tools cannot be overstated. Just be wise in your choices and understand the expenses involved other the life of the tool.

Don't buy cookware with teflon, as it will eventually wear off (nevermind the toxicity), but buy quality heavy duty stuff. I have a set of decent stainless steel cookware and a fair bit of cast iron, where the "non-stick" coating can be renewed (if not maitained) for the life of the item.

Good knives (cookware or otherwise) are a very valuable asset. Invest in a quality set of water stones to maintain them (I prefer Shapton "glass" stones), and you'll have a useful tool for life. I'm still packing a Swiss Army knife and fillet knife I've had since I was a kid.

Tractors and horses can be valuable, if put to good use. However, both require maintenance and fuel. Hand tools and other human-powered devices can accomplish quite a bit and are much cheaper to maintain in the long run.
What's the largest program you have written in Factor to date and what does it do ?
I do believe the U.S. Can Spam act actually requires the unsubscribe process to not require the user to login.
I would like to focus on the first 89 days (if I make it to YC 2011 winter). I don't mind running a "status" operation during those initial three months.

I can also live with the possibility that I will have to run my company from The Netherlands for a while (months, years, forever) after that.

What I can't live with is the chance of accidentally messing with immigration law during those three months.

The big question then is: does Y combinator fall under the restrictions of the Visa Waiver Program?

I've heard people claim the whole Y-Combinator program can be seen as "seeking investment", but there's also a coding aspect to it.

My plan would be to work as a single founder, doing part of the work myself and hiring others outside the USA through Elance.
Untangling Consumption Value and Investment Value of Higher Education
Can I use Caml instead of Node?
Yeah it is Zackattack's
i often wonder why this week in startups doesn't hit hacker news more often. perhaps what jason says about haters is true.
Hahaha, if that would better suit your needs
5 Filters I Use to Consider Startup Investments
Vetting new ideas on a budget of $5
I agree. Sunflow renders look fantastic, but is it also dead in the water? Last build is from 2007. Yikes.

Maybe with all of the hubbub over GPU ray-tracing at SIGGRAPH this year it's time to see development re-ignited?
I was referring more to the UI design aspects of it - on a small touchscreen, the interface design should be different than an application written for the desktop.

Larger touchscreen friendly buttons, smaller fonts, more tabular displays of data, etc.