skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd recommend going because of the opportunities for making important friends and learning things you might not otherwise have had the willpower to learn on your own. Keep in mind you don't have to stay for all 4 years if you don't want to. Stay until you feel you've gotten what you came for. I dropped out 3/4ths of the way, and was quite happy to have done so.
Bitlocker, Truecrypt, dm-crypt, PGP WDE will encrypt your data but leave something unencrypted in order to boot from it.

I'm not advocating against "full" disk encryption. That's what I use. I just wanted to say that the OP doesn't need boot volume verification and that Bitlocker is sufficient for his needs.
This is the problem I have. I have a strong sense of professionalism, so when I code professionally, I put in more effort to meet a personal standard that far exceeds what I do for personal projects.

One simple example, if I'm writing a utility to be used by me alone, I probably don't verify input. I don't do very good error handling (if it crashes who cares), etc, but if I were hiring the lack of any of these would be a serious red flag to me in any submitted code sample.

Of course there are larger personal projects were a little more care is taken, but it is a whole other level of polish that I put into professional work. I would be embarrassed to share my personal projects. That's probably actually a good sign because at least I know it should be better.
Every time I hear about this game I'm intrigued. I read a year-or-so-ago about one of the most powerful guilds in the game being infiltrated, it's armories ransacked, and then decimated in a surprise attack/trap.
I always figured it was best to paste a URL to some code repo.
http://hypernumbers.com - an online spreadsheet which is a native web app - lurching towards a proper launch after a lot of development.

Erlang is a great fit - works well, allows you to build a native stack without any cross-language impedance. Your application is cluster ready from the get-go and allows you to focus on the functionality rather than any of the utilities required to make the damn thing stay up.
One after the other. Five companies at once would probably, finally, kill me. ;)
Text documents are the last thing I would use dropbox for because I have google docs. And I'm a heavy using, paying dropbox user - I don't think you can find many people to pay money for this.
I don't think I ever said you had a limited potential. In fact, you have a lot of potential. My point is that it takes a long time to realize most of it and get to the point where you can write good, useful software (realize in the sense of, "to make real").

The reason I outlined the complexities and difficulties of building software is because you asked why byoung2 said that you'd probably never build something useful. The reason is that most likely you'll give up before long. If you stick with it though, there's absolutely no reason whatsoever that you can't be a great programmer.

I've never taken a formal class in programming. I am proud of what I know and so I do have an ego when it comes to programming. But I am also being honest with you. It's a long road to becoming a good programmer. It might be easier and it might be expedited by the fact that you're older, but it still takes a long time (which can be frustrating!). As I said, good luck!
Of course, DropBox was originally www.getdropbox.com, so they could make the transition too if they can afford a matching domain.
From someone that learned The Hard Way- just do it. Everyone here makes great points, and the connections you make really will serve you well for a lifetime, but also consider that you'll probably have a blast.

Have you visited some of these campuses? ;)
Quackwatch is a useful resource, provided that you realize it is overly conservative in anything relating to longevity science. Historically that has been the correct position, but a more careful approach is needed these days.

Personally, I'm disappointed with Sierra Sciences for associating with TA Sciences - the whole TA-65 thing is just a herb-selling operation with a cloud of hype of the sort that brings the whole field into disrepute. This essentially means that Sierra now gets lumped into the same category and anything they have to say in the future is looked at with skepticism. Which is a pity, since up to this point they looked like a sane group doing good, albeit slow, science.
While true, it's not just correlation that alcohol may be good for you. There's growing evidence that, among other things, alcohol boosts your HDL (good) cholesterol. For one controlled study see:

http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/102/19/2347

The conclusion from the controlled study?

"Alcohol intake increases HDL-C in a dose-dependent fashion, associated with and possibly caused by an increase in the TR of HDL apolipoproteins apoA-I and -II."

Of course, this is different from the author's hypotheses about socializing and loneliness, something much harder to test.
But what is the logical default? Is it to space out vaccinations, or is it to run them all together? There is no "logical" answer to that question, which is why we have to turn to domain specific knowledge.

The fact that there is turnover in medical knowledge does not mean that your personal preference carries the same weight as evidence or even expert consensus.
3 years ago discussion, still valid
Cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov holds the record for longest single spaceflight with a stay of 437 days on Mir.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeri_Polyakov
Sure, you can sign up for a beta at http://insynchq.com
Human ingenuity is no match for entropy
"But here’s the really weird data point: Heavy drinkers also live longer than abstainers."

Really? Really? I don't believe it. I'd like to look more closely at the data that supports this. And it depends on the definition of "heavy" drinking. If it's a regular one glass a day, sure. If it's a bottle a gin a couple of times a week I would beg to differ.

Alcohol is insanely destructive. Whilst no doubt this study is picking up on correlations between lifestyle characteristics which would explain these results, there's no doubt that booze is bad for you. It rots your brain, wrecks your liver, makes you depressed and makes you violent.

It's mental that for £20 I can pop into any off-licence, corner shop or supermarket in the land and buy enough alcohol to literally kill myself. It's a factor in 100s of thousands of deaths a year (UK) via heart disease, liver cirrhosis, car accidents or violence. It costs the NHS and police forces 10s of billions of pounds a year. It turns town-centres into virtual no-go areas on the weekend. It ruins lives.

Yet for some reason not only is it legal, it occupies a cherished position in our culture.

Edit: just to clarify, i'm not a prohibitionist. I think alcohol _should_ be legal. Personally I love booze and having a few. But our stance on alcohol versus our stance on other drugs (pot, coke etc) is just utterly illogical, non-sensical, even I would argue, immoral.
How do you measure that rate of "becoming worse"?
I highly doubt an OS or an application would be writing to the unencrypted boot sector or an unencrypted boot partition.

At some point, some partition somewhere will need to be unencrypted, otherwise the system cannot boot, since the decryption programs are typically too large for a single boot sector.

I'm not advocating against "full" disk encryption. That's what I use. I just wanted to say that the OP doesn't need boot volume verification and that Bitlocker is sufficient for his needs.
I think it's a great idea. Makes Google docs much easier to access from other applications. It could really help in the corporate world where a company wants to migrate to Google Docs and legacy services need to be supported or to reduce training requirements.

It's no dropbox killer, but it serves different requirements. In fact, that title is link bait-ish. Nevertheless, it looks to me like it could be a viable product. I'd use it.
check also http://antirez.com/page/cachetest
I highly doubt an OS or an application would be writing to the unencrypted boot sector or an unencrypted boot partition. First off, the OS should disallow that operation without elevated privileges. I don't know if Windows or OSX follow that guidance.

I'm not advocating against "full" disk encryption. That's what I use. I just wanted to say that the OP doesn't need boot volume verification and that Bitlocker is sufficient for his needs.
Consider the social aspect too; college can be good social training and put you in touch with people of the same mindset as yourself.

I've been out of education for nearly 3 years now and already have made good use of such connections.
Who told you that you won't learn much in college? Don't kid yourself. Right now, you don't know what you don't know (as has been pointed out elsewhere.) Skipping college is hamstringing yourself for no good reason. Like it or not, having a degree is like building a personal brand. It says that you have some base knowledge and the ability to complete a long-term project. Unless you have something better lined up right now, I wouldn't skip it because it is difficult to go back in your late 20s when you realize you've made a mistake.
Android's GC is very aggressive. Further, pretty much everything is an object, so it's constantly being worked.

I would save judgement on Windows Mobile 7 until it really is running various apps and doing active day to day work. A fresh Android phone is very smooth. Once you have it checking all of your accounts, have twitter and facebook feeds and dropbox running, rdio in the background, etc, the demands on the GC are much higher.
Learning from StackOverflow.com (Video)
Excellent public transport in Moscow??? It's so untrue, I just assume you don't live here.
The full study is available online, and is linked to in the article. Their definition of "heavy drinking" seems to be more than three drinks per day, which seems like a reasonable definition to me.
cool, I know so little about materials. Time to watch one of these day.
What on earth constitutes an "agile syntax"?

I thought there was fairly universal agreement that while javascript has many strengths, its syntax was not one of them.
I saw a comment here once which makes lots of sense -- find a programming exercise you find interesting and show it as an example. You a) show interest in developing your skills b) show your style and c) don't have to worry about showing something which doesn't belong to you.
But without a "fancy iphone app", how can I read my documents on my iPhone? Also, will that combination work on Windows? Or on computers you have very limited access to (e.g. the iMac in the meeting room that is hooked up to the projector)?
Instant Suggestions x15 (for Chrome)
This has been covered many many times. The consensus is almost always "yes, go to college."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=528863

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1636275

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=198732

There are many more but ycsearch and Google are failing me at the moment.

Short answer: a degree is an easy way to weed out candidates. Also, if you're going to college to learn C or iPhone development or other "trade" bullshit, you're doing it wrong. You should be studying computer science. Anecdotally, I've never met a good systems developer without a degree-equivalent. The people without CS degrees also seem to be universally weak on theory: discrete math, computational complexity, proof construction, relational and abstract algebra, graph theory, and (amazingly enough) calculus.

Edit: You don't have to major in computer science, I was simply stating that you shouldn't expect your university to teach you objective c. That's the kind of thing good hackers pickup in a weekend.

Edit2: Seems Ptacek is an example of a systems developer who didn't get a degree. Looks like he had to duplicate the effort of learning the systems stuff anyway so, meh.
Sometimes Google apps behave just weird for me. Spreadsheet occasionally doesn't load, it's generally unusable on my mobile, etc.

I don't like Dropbox though - it doesn't really seem to guarantee the safety of my documents - what actually happens if my connection drops mid-sync?

I went Zoho way and I'm really happy with them. If you go for the business account (there is a free one), you can get the needed document storage, online editing, own domain handling, etc. It's pretty cool.
iPad, Therefore I Am
Not popular enough, but popular enough.

(You should have made this into a humorous poll.)
Upvoted only because I agree with your comment about down-voting. I do wish PG would separately display up-votes and down-votes.
I'd assume that anyone receiving code "from the internet" could quickly determine this was the case with a few minutes' time on Google.
While this is a good case for prioritization, I would argue that Google has made a mistake by allowing the fundamental interaction model of the phone to suffer from unnecessarily poor performance, either by taking less-than-full advantage of the GPU or (less likely?) not dealing with the problem of “heavy garbage collection” that is cited by the first project member to respond on the linked thread.

Copy and paste functionality is nice, but smooth-as-butter scrolling and near-instant responsiveness, a la iPhone, (or lack thereof) arguably define the experience.
Okay, seems a lot of people misunderstood what I meant.

There is no such thing as full disk encryption, at least in the "full" sense of the term. There will be some unencrypted partition somewhere that boots the OS. TPM is designed to verify that this partition has not changed from a trusted configuration. I wanted to say that OP does not need this level of security, which is why Bitlocker is a viable and free and fast solution for him to use. (And the security current implementations of TPM provide are questionable right now.)

Applications should not be allowed to write to this partition without elevated privileges. The OS shouldn't be writing to this during normal operation either. Sensitive data should not be put on this partition, and as far as I have heard, Windows has not done anything like this.

When I say "data", what I refer to is the C: drive. With Bitlocker and Truecrypt, the C: drive is encrypted. The Users folder should be encrypted. All the bazillions of temp directories should be encrypted. The hibernation file is encrypted. Even Program Files is encrypted.
Diddle, a Data Definition Language for people who don't like to type a lot
The calculus one is a strange one.

I don't know what maths education is in US high schools but in Australia I learnt differential and integral calculus in high school. It wasn't required (it depended on what courses you chose) but most people who went into science and engineering did it (along with physics and chemistry).

There's two ways to look at this problem:

1. There are a significant number of college dropouts who founded massive companies (Bill Gates springs to mind). There are people who are so driven that college is a waste of time for them. A certain amount of luck is required too but luck rewards persistence; and

2. There is everybody else.

If you're asking "should I go to college?" you probably don't belong in (1). Those in (2) should go to college.

Remember too that for every success story in (1) there are a hundred stories of failure and a dozen success stories in (2).

It should serve as a cautionary tale that at the time something like Google could never have been created when it was without a solid theoretical foundation.
It's primarily b2c, but website/webapp owners will have the possibility to embed our service to add value for their users.
Do both...college really isn't that tasking...especially the first couple of years. At most you'll be spending 20 hours a week in class(more like 15-18), and 4-5 hours a week on homework(more like 1-2). That leaves you a shitton of time to do startups.

Startups tend to be slow to get off the ground. The # of companies who go from 0 to millions within a year are few and far between(especially if you are bootstrapped).

So use the 4 years of college as your cushion to grow your business. It's the best time to do it, since you don't need a job to pay for your rent/food...everything can be paid for with loans that you won't need to start paying for 4 years...and when you do start paying, the amounts are tiny.
Froggy's Last Story
Photoshop scalability : challenges in parallelism
Okay..take this test..

You have a set of music files that you want to search on a mobile sd card..

The pseudo code and math to do this is what?

Hint: Most programmers take 7 days to figure this out..

If you can come up with the code and it works, than odds are you only need a 2 year degree..or less..

Note: Question is right from an interview with RealNetworks...the interviewer could not come up with reasons why his assumptions would work(they do not) and thus I declined to interview further..as most texts have the wrong assumptions about this..
And if you don't care about sharing documents with anyone other than a select few.
We handle all file types and in-file deltas as well as deduping.
Terrible name. Not much bothers me, but you might want to change the name in order to not offend many people.
I think that way you laid down your thoughts asking for feedback pretty much tells you what deep down you really want to do. What are you looking for is just confirmation from other people.
I was really moved by this story, which in some respects made me think of Henry Darger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Darger). How many of these weird creators live close by among us?
Inaccurate title. It's like Google Suggest, not Google Instant.
Ask HN: Does this exploit still work on Chrome 6/7 and Firefox 3/4?
How to write an analysis essay
There are basic elements to writing an essay. These elements need to be adhered in order to execute well written papers. Writing an analysis essay will be a difficult task if you do not know the basic elements of writing this type of essay. With knowledge you will be able to submit a good analysis essay.
I watched sodium video. Guy dropped a chunk of it in water and told that it is going to explode. Duh. Had been impressed had they bothered to tell what exactly was the reaction and why was the heat generated. Instead they laughed, and laughed. btw, I understand basic chemistry so I dont really need explanation.
For the last 12 years here in New York, USA, I developed, tested, published in professional journals, presented on the US professional meetings, US patented and in-lab prototyped three separate cost-efficient thermo-chemical technologies and advanced ceramic products. All technologies and products relate to more efficient electricity generation or transmission and end-use; all of them will provide significant Environment protection or cleaning and are very profitable. Now I rather intent selling or licensing these innovations than getting investments.
I will appreciate any help and advice.
Thank you,
Dr. Anatoly Rokhvarger, www.rokhv.com (sorry for unprofessional web site); aerokhv@aol.com
Because men earn more money and tend to have bigger feet than women?
Totally go.

>> learn 3x much being on my own

I doubt that. Part of it is the mindset of school. For 4 years of your life, you will have no other obligations than to focus and learn. It is "liberating" in the sense that you know you're there to improve your self and your talents.

You can buy textbooks, but you can't buy the experience of going to school and meeting a diverse set of interesting people your age.

For me, University was a formative stage of my life. I don't regret going at all. It also forces you to learn things that you may not have thought of learning, things that you learn to appreciate later.

You may not want to work at big corp now, but there may be a time when you have to sell-out, even for a short period of time out of pragmatism.
Too much clutter. There's so much stuff on the screen that I can't read any of it.
But now we are several steps removed from the outcome of interest. We can postulate the following:

EtOH -> higher HDL -> increased reverse cholesterol transport (or another HDL function) -> reduced risk of cardiovascular disease.

But there is a problem here. While higher HDL epidemiologically correlates with reduced CVD, the only clinical trial of a drug that purely raises HDL showed increased mortality. Now, the trial was complicated by off-target effects of the drug, but my point is that we actually do not know if raising "good" cholesterol is good!
I actually wrote a long (somewhere ~15 pages) paper on him in the style of the CACM for an intro CS class. It turns out I've worked on a bunch of his projects (FFmpeg, QEMU) so I thought finding out more about him would be really interesting. It also includes a short interview. If anyone's interested I can post it.

Edit:
PDF: http://commentout.net/media/fabrice.pdf

Fair warning: I remember there were still some spelling and grammatical errors in the final draft. The writing style is also a little fractured because I co-wrote it with my roommate. The interview is cited but not included raw. I'll see if I can find it in my email.
Jabber - no matter its signal to noise ratio - is no substitute for credibility earned via demonstrable expertise and/or success.
Insync works also outside of the Google Docs folder so complexly formatted docs are just fine :)

If you are a premier edition user, Google Docs allows you to keep document fidelity.
My Motorola Droid doesn't stack up against Apple, but I've played with both Apple store and current-gen Verizon phones, and the current-gen Verizon Droids are just as responsive as Apple hardware. I'm not sure this GPU thing is much of an issue anymore.

To be fair, my experience with them is mostly playing with them in the store, but as you say, that's where it counts. In day-to-day usage it tends to be less of a big deal. You adjust how you use the device.
Shot in the dark, foot size is correlated with overall size, which is correlated with childhood nutrition, which is correlated with socioeconomic status
that isn't a well defined problem.
Yes. Or that's at least the professor's theory.
I could see how you might be able to compete with Dropbox on price. Google storage is a lot cheaper than dropbox. Dropbox 50Gb is $120/yr (last I checked). Google will sell you 400Gb for $100/yr.
Any high school senior who self-describes as a "pretty badass dev and designer" desperately needs more education. College is not the only way to get that education, but it is probably the most fun. You have the rest of your life to work, make money, launch projects, etc.

Especially if somebody else is paying your way, college is a small window of time where you can be entirely devoted to learning and growing. Meet people like you and people who are not like you but you still respect. Maybe instead of a doing startups, you find a field of research that draws you in. Or maybe you discover that philosophy is actually what you want to study and you spend the next four years trying to understand what it means to truly live a meaningful life. You can still keep programming on your own time and leave college if a great startup opportunity comes along.

If you are very, very intelligent, my advice is to go to the best school you can afford, not for the education but for the relationships you will make. It is a wonderful, humbling experience to walk around the grounds of Stanford, MIT, etc., and realize there are thousands of people just as smart as you, just as competent, just as lost and searching.

Whatever direction you take, put a large X on your calendar one year from now. Reevaluate your decision. A year of working full-time or a year of college will give you much, much more perspective. I'm glad I went to a great college, but I would have appreciated it more if I had spent a year in the workforce beforehand.
Facts and explanations about the Albanian language
or user experience or anyone other than geeks using it, yep, sure is a dropbox killer.
Extreme Skydiving – Wingsuit Base Jumping