skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm confused by this comment because I don't think the laws are too lenient, I don't believe in "bully tactics", and I do think that for society to work properly we do, for the most part, need to assist the people with charter with enforcing our laws.

I'm not repeating this in every comment because it feels tiresome, but, like I said, I'm glad this guy is out there pushing the frontiers of our civil liberties, but I still think he's a bit of a douche, and I still think his arguments don't make much sense: his fear of the consequences of answering "business or pleasure" seems irrational compared to the powers the border police already have to search his luggage, the files on his computer, and his body cavities without a warrant.

Incidentally, the principled stand this guy took for not answering questions seems a bit hollow when you consider that, semiotically speaking, he pretty much answered their question: "yes", he said, "I am very much worth your time to scrutinize further."
If you've already taught yourself some stuff, then of course you're going to feel like you're not learning in the first half of a university program. You're not learning; you're waiting for those who haven't already learned to catch up.

That's not to say that you won't learn though. Take a compilers course, or an OS course. Or, better yet, switch into something you don't already know a great deal about, like pure math or physics. This will soon cure you of these thoughts of not learning.

You'd be crazy to not continue with your education if you can manage to do so.
Please find one example in the history of ever of someone doing 1 day --- forget "5 years" --- for responding "great" or "fine" to a border police officer.
Google Instant Is Anything But a Time-Saver
Agreed, we still love Android, and it has higher market share now, but we are seriously considering iOS now (although no widgets there...yet)
Or it's warm because somebody just took it out of his pocket ;)
The team that makes PHP makes quality a higher priority than just about any other language; if something is built into PHP, it's pretty likely to work correctly. (For example, PHP and Python have the exact same problems with threads, and the PHP team says "don't use PHP in a threaded environment" and the the Python people say "come jump in the water is fine")

It's true that everything gets shoveled into one big namespace, but PHP lets you get a lot done with very little bull. There's a lot of crappy PHP out there, but there's a lot of crappy Java, Python, Ruby and C# too. If you approach PHP with some discipline I think you'll find it's an environment that never kills you with a showstopper flaw.
Starting in industry after a PhD doesn't put you any higher on the ladder than a fresh BSc graduate.

This isn't really true, at least in my experience. A quantitative PhD means you have skills - not necessarily practical programming skills, but useful skill nonetheless. A PhD can be viewed as a statistics/ML/numerics expert from day 1 - a BSc needs to be promoted to it. Additionally, spending 5 years working on hard problems means you will be a smarter person. You will interview better, you'll know more, you'll be capable of doing more.

But lets suppose PhD == BS. Which is a better place to be right now? Work experience 2003-2005, PhD 2005-2010? Or PhD 2003-2008, work experience 2008-2010? I suspect that even if the PhD is pointless, current work experience > past work experience.
"Being polite would be to say "Just visiting for fun".

thats not being polite, that is answering the question and thereby opening yourself up to accusations that you were being misleading.

"None of your business" was a simple statement of fact, neither rude nor polite.
Where I attend college, the university has a very good system for allowing students to create their own majors. Your mix of Communcations, Stats/Math, and History sound like an interesting mix that I think would be good for a personalized study program. If you're really interested in the courses you're taking, you'll get much more out of the experience.

Another piece of advice would be to not only choose subjects you're interested in but also the specific classes and professors in those subjects.
How is this different from flavors.me?
I am not an expert, but you cannot lose more once you are out, either. 'cut your losses' and 'pick your battles' also are arts good players must master.
We are doing that, but another issues is you may not even be aware of the existence of these "phantom apps", if the cloner can pay a little extra efforts.
You will also have to account for cryonic tech and ever improving safety standard.
Yes, I have first hand experience with CLEP tests (and some other similar test by a different name, which I can't recall right now). I took 4 years of college level math from 8th through 11th grades to "prep for college". When I started college, after having not taken math for a year, they gave me a placement test and informed me I could retake advanced algebra or take calculus. Being 18, I was not going to retake advanced algebra. I ended up dropping out of calculus. I was so bitter about the experience I did not take another college math class until my thirties, when I clepped college algebra and got waivered into a statistics class based on my 17 year old SAT scores. I CLEPed some other stuff as well to wrap up an associate's degree and not risk having to start over from scratch if I ever got back to college. It still rubs me the wrong way that a bright student would be told to take yet more advanced math when they already had more math (as I did) than most graduating seniors.

I don't know how you would predetermine which professors are still working professionals. I mostly lucked into that situation, in part by taking classes in GIS, which was apparently still new enough to have lots of working professionals teaching it and not so many full-time professors teaching it.
Tornado solves the problem of building web frontends, particularly those with comet features. This problem is not specific to FriendFeed. A number of other services use Tornado including Brizzly, Quora and Hipmunk.

Twisted has support for many network protocols while Tornado only has support for HTTP (client and server). If you are doing something other than HTTP, than Twisted might be the better choice.
"Do you have anything you'd like to tell me?

/me activates qik on Android
/me tagging qik stream with #copwatch
/me looking both ways, leaning forward, stage whisper

I could use a blowjob
I don't think that searches are ok for him according to item no. 9 from his update:

Moreover, the existence of the right of privacy is usually based on whether people have a current expectation of privacy in a certain situation. To the extent that people decline to assert their right of privacy, it slips away. Lack of vigilance by citizens begets more government power.
GA and GP are powerful methods for machine learning, but other methods are often a better use of programmer and computer time, particularly the Support Vector Machine.
Shoulda been 'Ask HN Googlers', and the answer'd be 'no comment' either way.
This was a great event. My business partner and I came in from out of town to check it out. Almost every talk was great, lots to learn. Chris Wanstrath had some great insights into viral growth, Bob Metcalf was very funny and produced some wonderful advice, George Bell started Shark Week, And Kiva's video has me totally convinced that you can distill something complex very effectively with a simple demo video. Watch their demo video, the technology rocks. Never been to anything like this before, great experience.
3 Free Tools to Help You Get Inside the Head of Your Customer
Item B would take a lot of time if it would be applied to all citizens like it was applied to him.
Can't speak for everywhere, but from a British point of view, it's probably the opposite. Personally I basically only use Sir when I'm telling a stranger off. I guess it depends a lot on the tone of voice used. :-)
Do articles like this always emerge at a certain point in the boom bust cycle or tied to politics? Because it seems like right now the societal "noise" has peaked, and the 3/4 populace needs a refresher.
This article seems to confuse real-time search (producing results from web pages put online moments ago, such as news articles and twitter feeds) and Google Instant (search as you type results using Google Suggest).
They're investigating lots of crimes. Drug smuggling, for example -- they know it's happening, but they don't know who is doing it; and anyone entering the country could have useful information about it or be a potential suspect.
Major in something practical.

Do something that will afford you plenty of lateral freedom (so you can take that calligraphy course a la http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc#t=4m28s) but that will give you some skill you can make money with on the other side.

If grad school is your goal (you didn't indicate so I'm only guessing) then a purely theoretical degree is fine; you'll satisfy your intellectual curiosity while demonstrating that you have the chops for higher level thinking. Otherwise, please please get a degree in something more specific.

The business of designing your own degree makes me nervous. On the one hand you can use it to show you had the industry to do something off the beaten path. On the other hand it's this thing no one can easily relate to. If I tell you I have a degree in Economics you understand what that means (that I'm no economist is besides the point!). But it comes with certain expectations about the materials I studied and the manner in which I was trained to think/solve problems. That signaling goes a long way with employers and/or clients and you might pay a price if you get too creative.

Also you never, ever know where life circumstances will take you. Best not to get a chip on your shoulder. Not saying that you have, just saying that I've seen it happen; we entrepreneurs get it in our heads that "none of this matters... I'm starting my own company when I graduate." You might be 100% right, but best to find out when you get there.

One final thing: Don't take anything I've said too literally. A year in the Business major doldrums got me overly concerned with doing something more pragmatic (again, I think this is only natural of we entrepreneurs) so I added Economics to my CV and rushed my schooling to finish a year early. Looking back that was so foolish... I should have lightened my course load and finished on time with my buddies. That would have given me plenty of opportunity to explore more interesting classes (like softer stuff in communications and theater) while using the extra time to get my business off the ground. You know what they say about hindsight.

Good luck either way. You sound like you have a good head on your shoulders so I'm confident things will work out for you.
Don't worry about it. I was in a similar position a few months ago when I, a python programmer, was offered a perl position. Eventually you just get used to it, and you might even find things you like. I've stopped being as much of a language snob. Some features and most syntax are just decorative, and you'll adjust. The whole giant namespace thing would bother me a lot, but hey its worked for other people before.
The robots were awesome but they kinda failed to demonstrate anything about cpus or gpus.
30 minutes is less time than I've spent actually entering the country through that same airport.
History for history's sake seems like a mistake. Studying the Civil War or the history of China or what have you will likely not teach you information about business you can use. It is likely most relevant history has already been incorporated into classes it is most relevant to.

e.x. in my introductory class to digital logic, we learned about the history of logic on the sidelines.

Now, if they have a History of Business, that is very clearly relevant to your interests- go ahead and take that.
Solving magic squares

I wrote a solver (conventional style) in Ruby that could solve squares in about 30 minutes, and I was pretty pleased with that, so I challenged a friend of mine to beat me.

He came back an hour later claiming he had code that could solve it in under 10s. He'd written a genetic algorithm that solved squares on my machine in about 6s and in only about 30 lines of Java (less than my Ruby). I was pretty humbled
PHP isn't super low level, but it is for a server side language. Much of its standard library is just a pretty thin wrapper over the C, and since it's often used without a framework, the code 'feels' lower level.
More to the point, the degree to which any human wants to hurt another depends on their emotional state. Impoliteness tends to destabilize it's recipients' emotional state.
You'll be be fine. I've found it very easy to switch from/between C/C++/PHP/Python. Perl on the other hand...
Seriously? Don't get me wrong, I could imagine valid reasons to use PHP. But the quality of the language itself is at the very bottom of that list. I don't usually hear PHP advocates making that case. Usually it's a combination of "the language isn't that bad" and "there are a lot of libraries for PHP".
Introducing SQL Server CE 4.0 CTP
Looks neat, but the HN links are incorrect. I've already informed the creator.
Language snobs, as a rule, are people that have not programmed in more than one language, or that somehow think that their chosen superior tool makes them superior as well.

Nice to see that learning a 'crappy' language like PHP got you on to a more even keel in that respect.
People will probably hire you without a degree. But, you'll be looking for jobs that want you for the skill set you currently (iPhone / Ruby) have rather than for your future potential.

At the end of your CS education, there are a lot of jobs open to the "new college graduate" that will likely never be open to you again. It's the one time that you can be missing both the necessary skill and field experience and still get hired. Examples: finance, game development, "big 3" MSFT/Google/Facebook, etc. If you want to work in any selective places later, you will have a hard time getting past the first level of "experienced industry candidate recruiting" without your college degree, much less get your resume into the hands of a hiring manager. You will perpetually be a slave to only getting interviews at jobs where you have performed very similar work in the past.

Of course, if you have some amazing idea, want to start a company, and feel it's time-sensitive, go for it. Depending on the university, you can return after 5 or so years without your credits expiring, whether the company turns out well and you cash out or it crashes and burns.
Amen.... I've started to use more than one language, and it's made me a better programmer and far more understanding of how different languages approach problems.

PHP does have problems, but it's easy to pick up. I don't know that learning it will make you a better programmer, but a good programmer can definitely make it solve problems efficiently enough.
Not having a degree is the type of thing you will be reminded of at nearly every turn in your life. Even if it's a pain in the ass to get one, I imagine it'll be an even greater pain explaining to employers at that you only left because you didn't like it. Then you'll have more convincing to do before said employer believes you're up to snuff with other, degreed candidates.

There are more shades of gray for someone going into their first year. If you're already halfway done I tend to think it'll be to your advantage to set your jaw and grind through your last year or two.
If you define quality as 'orthogonal naming of functions' and 'elegant constructs' then yes, PHP has its flaws.

But it's been absolutely bullet proof in production for me and when I did find a bug I've had a patch within 24 hours straight from the core devs.

They do take quality serious there, they just don't define it as language elegance.
I would thnk genetic programming might make more sense. Have you looked into that?

I'd love to hear more about your approach. Email me? I thought of using GP for the tron google challenge but it was too slow to launch that java thing they give you to run the players.
Any new language you learn will make you a better programmer.

Try picking one that is as far as possible from the ones you know and then try building something useful in it. That's the fastest way to broaden your horizons.
Or when you want something from a stranger. "Excuse me sir, have you got any change..."

(And similarly with the leafletting, cashiering, tour-guiding and door-holding occupations I've had in the past. You want people to feel important, and you're in a subservient position, so you elevate them verbally. Basically, when you're a Baldrick.)
Actually if you "hover your mouse over the cards to see the hands that would be dealt" you'll see that the opponent gets quite a good 'second best' hand as well. Lot's of things like '4 of a kind' beats 'full house' action. For some reason the author doesn't state this is one of the requirements but it must have been.
Here's a fun example. Matz (creator of Ruby) contributed a chapter to Beautiful Code (the O'Reilly book). In it, he uses this example of a Rake task as his example of a beautiful piece of Ruby:

task :default => [:test]
task :test do
ruby "test/unittest.rb"
end

Let's see what that could look like in CoffeeScript, assuming a similar library:

task default: ['test']
task 'test', ->
ruby 'test/unittest.rb'

Pretty nice. Running that through the CoffeeScript compiler produces this JavaScript:

task({
"default": ['test']
});
task('test', function() {
return ruby('test/unittest.rb');
});
- rent a bunch of servers

- do it on a GPU
China submersible will go deeper than any others
Technically perl, not PHP, but now all I see is arbitary syntax. It's nice.
Google’s Big Tease on Tablets: Android or Chrome OS?
Can you learn PHP and be successful with it? Absolutely. Do you want to? As a Python programmer who's had to do PHP from time to time, I can say it isn't terribly fun. If I were to make a decision based solely on the programming language though, I wouldn't choose a shop whose main language was PHP. Again though, that's assuming that I was just basing it on language. I've found choice of programming language to be one of the less reliable indicators of how good a company would be to work for.
If we fix aging, perhaps people will be in less of a hurry, and be safer in the process.
>I plan my family time, NOT the lazy teacher.

I don't understand your slight against teachers. Preparing homework takes time and effort if it's to be a proper part of the curriculum of learning to be set. Even if it's an afterthought it still has to be marked and assessed and recorded (in the UK it does).

Surely the lazy teacher would just say "for homework tonight watch TV" or some-such.
It would not be possible in a 'shop' situation.

For one, everything would be bolted down with the bolts torqued to spec, instead of just strong enough to hold things together for a demonstration run.

Also things tend to rust and taking oxidized stuff apart without breaking it takes quite a bit of time and preparation, sometimes multiple days (if the part is precious enough, for instance on classics it can definitely be worth the extra effort).

Then there's the accessibility of parts, this is a ladder chassis car, which means that the chassis and the body are two separate parts. That makes for a vehicle that is very easy to disassemble at the expense of a higher weight (and so reduced fuel economy) higher manufacturing expense and less safety in the case of an accident.

So you'd never ever get this kind of performance in real life situations.
Google AI Challenge - Planet Wars - Now open for submissions
I'm not sure I understand what your argument is. That there aren't major showstopper bugs that make PHP unusable due to various segfaults? Sure, that's true. But do you mean to suggest that such things exist in greater quantity in other such languages? You say the PHP devs have a sharper focus on quality than other languages; can you provide and kind of evidence for those claims? Not just good response time by the PHP devs, but systemic failures in other languages that go unaddressed, as well?

PHP tends to be at the bottom of the "language quality totem pole" because as a language it's pretty low quality. The PHP interpreter may be fine as a piece of software, but that's a completely separate matter from being a quality language.
http://twitter.com/hntweets
Don't forget that this is not a unibody car, but a rolling chassis. The crumple zone concept does not really work for a rolling chassis because it transmits the forces in a completely different way compared to a unibody with subframes.
Switching languages, for me, has usually been a matter of remembering syntax, some minor differences (such as how arrays work, what things are built-in, etc), and the patterns in each language that naturally arise from those two. Of course, things get more complicated if the language itself is structured differently (eg: Javascript), but there are a lot of underlying concepts that carry over (scope, stack, OOP, etc). In short, it just takes practice. If you're "advanced", you should be able to pick up on it pretty quickly.

To get a feel for syntax and how PHP works (especially == and reference/value), you should read the docs. They're a breeze and provide lots and lots of examples. The user comments are generally incredibly helpful and will notify you of caveats that you might need to be aware of.

You'll also want to start off by learning how to build objects in PHP, how associative arrays work (they are great), and how to use __autoload() to include classes on the fly.
Some URL fiddling produces
http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Repository/getFiles.asp?Style...

A little easier, but I'm not up to the masochism required to go any further. :)
Magic quotes is also worth a mention. It's bound to throw anyone coming from another language for a loop.
You watch too much TV.
Some great advice and life lessons in the post, thank you. I must say I'm not interested at all in grad school, so I might have some concern for that.

On the other hand, with the ignorance of youth, I'm not really worried at all. I've never really had any problems getting jobs when I've applied for them. Businesses are usually impressed with my biz experience for a young person. I imagine I would be immediately ruled out of a lot of hiring processes though.
EVE Online player steals $45,000 worth of ISK in massive investment scam
In Japan, these kind of games have been popular for at least a couple of years.

One I know of is "Keitai Kunitori Gassen" where players check-in to different regions of Japan to get points and take them over. They have enough money to advertise the game on the trains. The interesting thing is they have hardcore users who will travel all around Japan to check in to locations. This actually ties into part of their business model, where they are paid by businesses to hold special events at certain locations. A couple years ago, they said they could get a couple thousand people to go to a location just by holding an event there.
Pretty much my plan - have you ever read Masters of Enterprise by H.W. Brands? One of my favorite books of all time by far.

I think the history is most interesting on a really localized rather than general level. That's when you can get into the nitty gritty of what influences people and how people rise in power.
I didn't know what age "third grade" means. I'll assume you're USA-ian (other nationalities don't tend to think there's is the only one on the web!).

From Wikipedia: "In England, the year of school that is the same age as 3rd Grade is Year 4, which is the fifth year of school."

Classic.

Personally I don't think homework should be mandated for young children (< c.11 yo).
Magic quotes has been disabled by default for several years. All you need to know about them are: disable them if enabled.