skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I generally find this woman extremely vapid, and basically a con, but I agree with this particular piece. Though it's not exactly earth-shattering news: 'tailor education to the jobs market'. Her discussion of apprenticeships is interesting: I've thought for a long time that apprenticeship would be suitable for coding, rather than endless hours in anonymity in classrooms, and copying your buddy's work to get assignments done (which is the general 'learning' paradigm for most CS students, far as I know)
Exactly. It also breaks an existing, established security paradigm. If you want your users to actually properly practice some level of secure browsing, you have to keep the paradigms consistent.

You can't expect the average user to adjust what cues they are looking for every six months, on a rolling basis.

(Placing "locked padlock" graphics onto HTTP delivered pages is a good example of an abuse of such a paradigm. If your form is delivered by HTTP, it's trivial for a MITM to change the destination of its submission; making the form's destination URL HTTPS accomplishes nothing with respect to such a scenario.)
I have pet projects, but I am not impressed by them. The type of code I write for a one off project for myself is vary different than code I would write as part of a larger project.

EX: I thought the twitter people where idiots so I codded up an outline for a solution that would fix their basic problem. I quickly got to single threaded code that was significantly faster than what they used and reasonable memory efficient so I stopped. However, it's not exactly a hard problem and it's not production worthy so I feel no reason to share it with other people.
We built a system to connect teams via texting and conferencing. http://www.connectteams.com. Erlang provides the web front end, the backend telecommuncations, and the reporting interfaces. All perfect fits.
This is awesome. I love seeing what people can build in a short period of time, and you know that this was just a couple of days.

Good job, Tam.
I'll clarify a few things before I comment, just in case people have misunderstood things.
1) Google Docs will store any file.
2) Google Docs allows you to convert pdfs to docs & edit them.

With this in mind, I prefer Google Docs, as Dropbox, to my eye, has no advantage. Perhaps you would argue that Dropbox syncs automatically. I think we must consider that GDocs are only stored in the cloud, so don't need to be synced.

I would also add that you need to have DropBox installed to sync files (though web access only needs... well... Web Access). So GDocs is just as good in that respect.
According to Gartner Android most popular mobile OS by 2014
> I'm pretty sure that by the time cancer as a result of longer life became an issue (say, around the year 2040-50 in my case), the cancer itself would be easily treatable by other means.

What makes you so sure it will be 'easily treatable' by then ?
Yeah, I'm familiar with that, and it's very much in the spirit of what I had in mind (though not as much so as the Willys). But note that they lost much of that simplicity in the Europa - the version that meets EU safety and emissions requirements - which ballooned the price from US$2,000 to US$6,000.
I looked at Lucandra a year ago, and it had TBDs then - just looked at github, looks like the project has been under active development.
I don't see microdata as markup pollution. It is semantic information that is closely tied to the data it is representing. Rather than just telling the browser you have a paragraph, you can tell it the paragraph contains an address.

And it seems to me that in real world web apps all the markup with microdata could be programmtically added. Create a new object with a microdata schema and get an ORM type object with an HTML write method. This way you never manually type microdata markup anyways.
There is however an opportunity cost for being rejected a 100 times: the time spent applying could have been spent on starting a business or other activities.
Ask HN: To go or not to go college?
I'm currently a high school senior, I'm an aspiring and pretty badass dev and designer. I've built a few apps and I'm pretty sure that I'll be doing startups(most likely my own still) for the rest of my life.

I can't bear working for some big corporation(I've done it once, it's just not my thing) and thus really find no point of going to college.

I could get into a lot of good colleges, yet I really don't want to "waste" 4 years of my life doing a CS degree in college when I certainly won't learn much; I'd definitely learn 3x much being on my own. And if you say that college degrees make it easier, well...if I spent 4 years building awesome things, I'm pretty sure that I'd eventually build up much more credibility than some graduate from Carnegie Mellon.

I'd really appreciate your feedback on this, since it's a big dilemma that I think a lot of people from HN have experienced.
I'm guessing confirmation bias - if you were to see an HRD photo which wasn't ghastly, you wouldn't guess that it is HRD. Hence, thinking that there no non-ghastly HDR photos.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Grand_Canyon_HDR_imaging.j...

Or better, one photo, 9 exposures:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:StPauls_cathedral_tonemapp...
Worse still, an opportunity is "spent" with each rejection.
So sfgate is just catching up to 2005 news, now? :-)
Nothing I can say will tell you what to do, neither will the rest of the community. This is something I had to learn the hard way, and despite my best efforts you'll probably learn the hard way too.

You're 18. Confidence is essential to success but please remember you only know a fraction of what your parents wanted you to.
Agreed. It's usually the public acting like dicks to security staff. They're doing a job. They're providing security theatre so that idiots feel safer.
Well, did read it to the end. "Lip service" means that those things got mentioned, but not elaborated upon or strongly stressed.
Google's Colossus Makes Search Real-time by Dumping MapReduce
Alternatively you should also check out the GUI guidelines by Apple, Windows, Palm, etc. They give good insight on how to design usable interfaces and interactions.
How to Increase Your Productivity by 500 Percent
We have an erlang cluster that runs all our services @ http://thecadmus.com

High number of processes distributed across multiple nodes with supervisor trees taking care of them all has worked well for us.
It can also simply be a matter of available (human) resources. Remember how the iPhone was missing Copy & Paste? Probably not because they did not know how to do it. More likely simply a matter of shipping priorities and resources. I think the same is going on here.
The Silicon Valley Song at The Crunchies
I worked on a spreadsheet compiler at hypernumbers.com and some backend stuff for vidiowiki.com (video transcoding, file uploading/streaming and some other smaller stuff).

Erlang excels at distribution. People tend to forget its raison d'être is fault-tolerance (not concurrency), so when you set off working on an Erlang application you presume that it will run on 2+ machines. That's why it's great for things like Facebook Chat and Riak. In addition to those, it's also good for writing control and supervision layers, where workers are written in Python, Java, C etc.

While I'm at it, I'd like to plug http://veldstra.org/whyerlang/ It's in a real need of an update, and I'd love to hear any feedback.
A working hypothesis
Ten years ago I had the same thought, and I couldn't have been more wrong. College is 100% about the material you learn in CS classes - more like 10%. It is about the people you'll meet there, the ideas you'll be exposed to, and the crazy opportunities that only exist in a CS dorm room at 2am.

You won't meet anyone in CS that doesn't learn better on their own - fortunately college isn't about the force-fed learning you've endured for the last 12 years.

I can't think of any "I'm sure glad I didn't go to college" stories I've ever heard from any successful coders/millionaires - just "I'm sure glad I dropped out of college" (but you have to get immersed in college and classmates before those opportunities will start knocking).
> It is about the people you'll meet there, the ideas you'll be exposed to, and the crazy opportunities that only exist in a CS dorm room at 2am.

Fair. Say you move to SF and spend 4 years. I'm pretty sure you'll meet more and probably experience a lot more things there than in college. Parties and stuff? Ah, that's great, I'm not worried about that.
I am a computer programmer , working with Android , Linux , iPhone, OS, Networks etc, I have passion for computer. I was in the same condition as you are in, I decided to drop out from university in 7th Semester ( 4th year ). But I changed by decision because of practical reasons, I have two jobs, one Linux Administration and one as Software Engineer without degree, but I decided to continue , am still in 4th year 8th semester, what I advice you is to continue instead of leaving, if you had got a chance to CS degree, I think you should continue.

For sure, people will hire you without a degree, if you have good portfolio and out of the box skills.

I want to share a experience of mine, I was offered a job in Samsung as contract position , and my CV was selected. But I prefered to complete degree before leaving. I think a degree is important, a piece of paper will give you confidence in facing people and employers.

Thanks.
My advice: If you have something better to do -- you are hot to trot to join the military, travel the world, launch a specific product you are currently working on...etc and it is do-able in the here and now -- go do that. If you do not have something better to do, then go to college. You can always quit should something better to do come along.
Recent discussion here about microdata: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1673623
Looking at it again, it's probably a good idea to extend that one-liner a little bit by throwing in a sync command, just to make sure that all zeroes get written to disk before deleting the fill-up file:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/free_space_eater; sync; rm /tmp/free_space_eater
To my ear, you've already made up your mind against it. Moreover, you seem to have a very negative attitude towards college (waste of four years, learn three times more, build up more credibility than...).

If that is your mindset, I would say don't go to college simply because you're so set against it. I started college straight out of high school with no goals and little interest in it and quickly dropped out. Eventually, I went back (about two years later), graduated and then went on to get a PhD. But my first semester as a college student, I failed or did poorly at everything since my heart wasn't in it (and I skipped almost all my classes). If that's where you are, I think a year off is better than starting with a negative approach.

Having said all that, I wish every day I could go back to school and spend my days reading, writing, learning and shooting pool (how I spent most of my college/grad school days).

Edit: remove overly long thing about a typo that's now fixed.
They say it didn't in their test subjects over one year, but to me as a layman this is very weak evidence still: cancer takes time to develop (and framing their result as "260 person-years" as they do is a case of the mythical man-month), and I don't trust drug developers to design and report their trials in an unbiased way.

I'd expect increased risk, too.
I am too, not sure why you are being downvoted. I'm interested in finding out what a "landmark style" influenced by using gimp instead of photoshop looks like exactly.
I use Dropbox to back up my "My Documents" folder, as well as a bunch of other folders. Can't do that with Google Apps.
Thanks for the advice and for noticing the typo.
Ask HN: Would you build a startup with "LOL" in its name?
Hi HN folks,

we're in the process of finalizing an idea for a bootstrapped startup. Today, finding a nice name came up. As we're headed for a pretty crowded niche, we're looking for something with strong branding potential. While brainstorming, "lol" has come up.

Our name would consist of what we do, prefixed with "lol". So, if we were to do an email service, our name would be "lolmails". In our particular case and context, it would be an awesome fit and definitely help attracting early adopters.

We're sympathetic to the name, but a little bit afraid that we could frighten more "ordinary" customers who might have bad associations.

What do you think?
It's easy to see that being innocent doesn't eliminate any moral dilemma over answering questions. Most people are innocent! By answering questions, they're helping the police stop wasting time with them.

Be thankful that we have the right not to answer questions, and, yes, be thankful that crazy guys like this are out there demonstrating that right. But then remember the social contract and your obligations as a citizen; if the police are asking a reasonable question, you should answer.
I'm currently based in NYC, but thinking of moving to SF. I'm looking to join or start something though I could care less about the title I'm given. I don't code per se, but have an excellent sense of product, marketing and biz dev. I've raised angel and VC and sold one company. I can get shit done. A recent side project of mine is http://eat.ly. I'm open to whatever and have a few technical folks who'd join the right project I was involved with. Email in profile.
it's also largely irrelevant to the many people here who type faster than Google can serve them results
You're hanging out on the wrong forum if you think anybody here is telling you to go to college for the parties...

As glorious as the SF scene (more specifically the Palo Alto crowd) is, beneath the surface they put more weight into your foundation than your skills ATM. And put this concept to the test, when you get a 5 day vacation - go out there. Meet as many people as you can, and ask the "will you hire me now/why not" questions that your alternative plan would have you ask in 10 months anyway.

Even in the land of SV-coders, people with degrees get paid a lot more than simple HS graduates. Having that degree opens doors, having mad skills gets short-term consultant work. You won't/can't/shouldn't believe that until you experience, so go test this "you'll meet more and probably experience a lot more things there than in college" theory. I'll happily provide 4-examples to the contrary to every 1 you find.
I like the idea to, but querying searchyc.com for 'ask hn' ends up being much more effective. The concept is great, and I'm sure the execution will keep improving.

The thing I'm most impressed with is the awesome domain name.
If I'm being perfectly honest, it wouldn't have surprised anyone if at any time he had to spend the rest of his life in jail. He's not someone I was ever particularly proud of knowing, and in fact, the only impressive thing about him, ever, was that he carried that card around.
Great post, seriously. I'm putting the headline somewhere where I'll see it daily.

Also, just FYI, there's a typo in the title:

"If you’re aren’t getting rejected on a daily basis, your goals aren’t ambitious enough."
The Student Loan Bubble: Deflating Just a Bit?
Holy crap that looks good - now on my Amazon queue. Thanks!

I'd definitely prefer prose to poetry, I've never seen poetry used in business.
Also, apply now anyway (I kick myself frequently over thinking I'd save $40 and not send my app into the longshots). Better to have the "I was accepted but I don't want to go" dilemma than "I changed my mind, want to go, but didn't apply in time so now I'm going to a local tech college" situation.
This only seems like a good idea for larger organizations. The idea would be to share a pool of server resources among many working groups with assumptions:

1. server utilization on average would be good

2. seldom have the situation where everyone wants to do large runs at once

At CompassLabs we use Elastic MapReduce: great because we can use a large number of servers for a few hours, and the price is right. On the other hand, large companies like Yahoo run their own large Hadoop clusters (just as an example)

So, this seems like a good idea only for large organizations.
The St. Paul's photo is the best example I've seen so far of HDR done right.
Thanks for your feedback. It makes sense. I'll be applying to UF.
Because it's highly dependent on scope? Like, if I wanted to template each list item in an array, I could use array_map with another template function, but here I would have to keep re-assigning a variable in a foreach.

And it seems to be unclear on how you'd pass array and object members to it? It seems very much to encourage variable creep?
I stopped experiencing this once my device was upgraded to Android 2.2. It's much smoother. I'm not sure if this is because of the JIT or some other new feature, but I'm guessing you've used older versions of Android.
Are there areas outside of applying for jobs, biz dev partnerhips, etc.. where this works?

Say you are a programmer, how any opportunities do you have to get rejected 100 times
The Tornado philosophy is to use blocking for fast operations and async for the occasional long operation. Tornado applications compensate for blocking by running several instances of the application.

Twisted is theoretically better than Tornado because everything is async in Twisted, but Tornado is more practical because it's easier to write straight-line code than chains of callbacks. The cost of Tornado is that you need more memory on the frontend because you run more instances of the application.

In my previous comment, I listed some real life comet applications that use Tornado. What real life comet applications use Twisted?
> Uncompressed it's probably in the 20TB range.

That seems a little low to me if you're starting with an 11TB archive. Doesn't gzip usually shrink HTML/text down to more like 1/5 or 1/10 the size of the original, rather than less than 1/2?
I think everyone of those points is dependant on some underlying assumption that its possible to have some snippet of code that makes it possible to evaluate how good you are as a developer, which at least to me sounds about as crazy as judging develop productivity by lines of code.
Summary: the author of the article speculates that moderate alcohol consumption leads people to socialize and not be lonely. People who are lonely are more likely to die from "just about everything." There's no actual study done here -- the author only references other studies. This article is about the author's hypothesis.
The real GDrive is here
Depends on your use case. If you want to share documents and you don't mind google's version of the word/excel/ppt, it's a good way to go. For files in which the application is on your laptop or has complicated directory structures, dropbox is better. Google has cheaper storage -- 20Gb for $5/yr last time I checked. I think Dropbox is something like $10/month for 50Gb. Google Docs is good for simple documents, but the rest of the apps are pretty bad compared to MS Office. If you're a powerpoint ranger, you aren't going to want to use Google Apps, you're going to want to put your PPT files in dropbox and use Office.
Can you please do a body {height: 100%; margin-bottom: 1px;}
Starting a business, is ofcourse, another way to get rejected. I think this post is more about leaving your comfort-zone in the face of fear or anxiety, and not so much about getting a job.
I'm interested in knowing the typical hiring process you go through when looking for work if you don't do any of these. Do you only offer to write code on the spot then to back up your experience?
It's the downside of all GCs, and I've yet to see one that alleviates it.

It does seem likely that it is GC issues and not whether the GPU is used or not: The visual choppiness is completely inconsistent, lending itself more to brief thread stops for GCs than to any sort of CPU starvation.

On the bright side, it is far less common on 2.2 than before. It still is by no means a deal breaker, but pretty much every user of both the iPhone and Android makes note of the much more consistent smoothness of the former.
It actually would be really helpful if you got honest feedback about why you were rejected... this has never happened in my experience; rather, you get some sugar-coated rejection like "we were all very impressed with your background and skills, but do not have a position that is a good match for you."

Of course if that were true, and your resume was not embellished, you would not have gotten past the first screening.

This is probably done for liability protection: any really honest reasons for why you were rejected could be used as fodder for a lawsuit.
I think there is some truth to that. When I am new to an existing codebase, in under an hour of reading code I can gauge the experience level of the coder.

Of course, a tiny snippet of code would not be as useful.
In my opinion, one of the main reasons people like the iPhone/iPad is the look and feel including the icons, animations, transitions, etc. The fact that iOS has included hardware acceleration from the very beginning speaks to how important the user experience was for them and using the GPU allowed them to provide a faster, smoother user experience.

I have to admit that the user experience in Android is severely lacking and is no where near as good as iOS. Let's hope this gets addressed in Gingerbread both for the core OS and for third-party apps.
These studies that whet the appetite for 'sin secrets' are entertaining, but that's about it. I favor reductionism. Maybe it's not forced brain evolution or African-plain-life recreation. Maybe it's because when you drink you tend to eat less, which is, good.
I just keep sensitive data on an encrypted volume and use soft links. Last year I wrote up how I do this for OS X: http://markwatson.com/blog/2009/10/securing-your-mac-laptop.... Really simple idea, works for me, and the relative amount of data I need encrypted is small.
Yes, true-crypt. Not perfect (See many critiques here) but great especially for worrying if my computer got stolen.
I agree wholeheartedly regarding Paglia (shrill, splinter-cell culture warrior), but at the risk of repeating myself, this time with more detail:

Matthew Crawford wrote a pretty famous book about exactly this thesis, _Shop Class as Soulcraft_. Unlike Paglia, Crawford's ideas are based on time actually spent in the trades --- as an electrician and as a mechanic. Unlike Paglia, Crawford's idea isn't simply that the elite schools are out of step with the jobs market, but rather that our alienation from the trades and crafts are inherently worrisome whether or not the money's there for them. Crawford can point to captive consumerism, the plastic and disposable nature of the goods we buy, and the degradation of self-reliance as consequences of the trend towards "knowledge work"; he's not simply suggesting that more people become tradesmen so he can be left to his cushy academic job.

I don't love the book, but consider it as having been worth reading. It's also clearly just one in a line of similar books going back several generations (it may stretch back to the Transcendentalists). For people like Paglia and Brooks to write as if this is an insight that they just recently achieved is disingenuous.
Cool, I like it. Seems like it could save some time typing, although it I don't you should use this unless you understand what is happening under the covers.
thanks for the tldr.

btw tldr
Four years is not so long. You certainly at least learned what you DONT want to do for the the rest of your life. And four years experience with one employer looks better on a resume than four separate one-year jobs (unless you were a contractor) and also better than four years of unemployment.
Seth Godin: This is broken
I'd drink to this.
Interesting points, thanks. You'd be surprised at what high-profile company I've encountered this.
Sidebar for gmail that recommends quora responses based on email content
So, does the author now get a handsome six-figure job offer from Y Combinator via Twitter?