skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think people want to learn modern languages because they want to be able to create things tomorrow if not today. It would probably be hugely valuable for me to go back and learn the languages I should have learned as a kid, but theres a sense of urgency and expiry. I have more commitments, so I have less time to learn. The time that I have to learn, I have to use productively. Oh how I yearn for those summers as a kid, where we had days and weeks to ourselves.
Why Java? Although similar, C# is easier and more flexible now.
Hey a search insider, cool.

I want to thank your department for the advance search sort on the left hand side, totally non-distracting and much easier to drill through than clicking the tiny advanced search link.

But please stop adding more distracting stuff to search. Like backgrounds, animated interactive logos, menus that fade into view only when you move your mouse, instant results flashing and distracting you constantly. A design like google.com circa 5 years ago seems to have been quite popular for all it's simplicity.
The article has quotes from a number of executives or business owners who suggest college isn't necessarily the best way to go.

But the reporter doesn't ask them if they would hire someone without a degree.
Militarized Skateboard with Caterpillar Track
I mentioned a few reasons at the bottom, notably the type of things one could make with Java.
I have two problems with it

1) It makes search slower on my slow netbook (all these DOM operations aren't free, you know). So while I type some long phrase, Google does all these meaningless searches (that I don't even look at), and slows down the browser tremendously. (I use Chrome on the netbook).

2) I cannot turn it off. I tried. I went to "Search settings", selected "Do not use Google Instant", saved the settings. It's still on. When I go to settings again, "Use Google Instant" is still checked.
New Book: Creating Interactive Fiction With Inform 7
My definition of what is "good for you" is whatever optimizes your utility function—what you consciously, rationally like, for whatever reasons you like it. This is a multidimensional quality: feeling good is highly weighted in your personal utility function, for example.

However, the quantity users report on user-satisfaction surveys—"which is better, in your opinion"—is basically whatever your subconscious heuristics tell you is better. If you were consciously presented with the choice before your brain had become entrained to either alternative, you would perhaps respond differently. People don't "like" things that are unfamiliar, even if they have more benefits, and could normally be convinced of this—this is why people react negatively every time Facebook changes its UI, and why New Coke would only have worked if there had never been a Classic Coke to compare it to. People "like" addictive drugs, fatty foods, etc., even when they know that these will decrease their net happiness over time.
Consider finishing your degree but with a different concentration, like statistics (always useful), or physics (awesome).
Perfect example of how we've become a soundbite nation. Nothing is presented in context anymore. Post-modernism...isn't it great?
This is an only slightly related observation, but coding is something you generally have a knack for. Half the kids in my CS classes don't qualify as coders in my book. If you get to your fourth semester in a CS program, and you've never programmed in anything but Java, you obviously don't have the drive to teach yourself something just because you find it interesting.

Back to the topic at hand. With some exceptions, if you haven't taken the plunge and taught yourself how to code by now you probably don't have the interest and drive to get good at it. As I said, there are exceptions. Some people catch the coding bug and off they go. But otherwise, it's just not their thing.
I'm the author of YouTube Instant. You're right - the last two days have been the most exciting of my life! I'm still high on adrenaline from the whole ordeal. I never expected my little hack to make it this big, and for that I'm grateful.

I just finished recounting my last two days running YouTube Instant here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1683100
The Mona Lisa looked a bit like Patrick Steward in a wig.
I agree with the "a major is a brand" sentiment, but getting a degree for its paper value is only one of several reasons to get a degree, and I think the paper value of a degree, to an entrepreneur, is minimal. (With exceptions for businesses where the core competency is technology transfer.) Obviously the OP has chosen to focus on skills, which is a valid approach. It's also worth noting that "cheap city college" is a crap brand, and the OP must know that, and doesn't seem to mind.

Riffing on the "brand" theme, I claim that Linguistics is a crap brand, and I agree with you that Communications is a crap brand (although some CMNS students I've seen have learned a LOT in a what-you-make-of-it way). Philosophy has highly variable brand value depending on who you're talking to.
You are correct!

I even ran into issues when Google automatically blocked my server for making too many repeated requests to the search suggestions endpoint.

However, I rewrote the site to query YouTube directly for search suggestions, eliminating the round-trip to my server. Now, all the magic happens in each visitor’s browser, so it’s faster and Google can’t block it.
I must say, you've made a neat and clean website. Very inviting.

What would really get me to try it out is a video link on the first page. Just like the one on the play (Java) website. It should like play, show a jquery/ajax update. I've wanted to learn php (and a framework) for a long time, this could be it, if you give a short 10 minute demo.
I have completed 8/14 CS classes so far, but I understand what you are saying.
I remember going back to the site a while after submitting my solution. I'd been so happy that I'd given you the solution for the largest number of players yet, feeling like I had made a real contribution, and was somewhat disappointed to see that you'd surpassed it many times over. I am again restored to happiness, knowing that my contribution played a part in those solutions. Thanks for letting me know!

---

Also, you are right; "brute force" appears to specifically refer to exhaustive search methods. It was a poor word choice on my part.
"Questionable" whether lawyers can sue 14,000 P2P users in 1 court
On why I'm getting a dog, lose my ego and just effin do it for my company.
Is anyone else giggling like a small girl at the way HN'ers, who are usually privacy nuts (see: any discussion about Facebook), are freely giving away their exact location?
Queue patio11.

I remember Patrick commenting on this issue a few months back. His comment was insightful and, from what I remember, he concluded that Demand Media was indeed profitable.

His SEO knowledge lends his conclusion credibility.
What's up with the constant usage of compact()? Isn't it as icky and avoidable as its inverse, explode()?

Starting off the 'Technology' tab with supported OSes and servers couldn't be a good idea: those familiar with PHP will understand that incompatible with a system on which PHP is supported is a bug, but compatibility within PHP is obvious.

That said, the event system is interesting, and might be a good rethink of the Drupal hook system.
USA, West Coast, a great deal.
Thank you for this, hadn't thought about that before.
"The unemployment rate among those with bachelor's degrees is at an all-time high....this year, with the national rate of unemployment at 9.6 percent, unemployment for college graduates has risen to 4.9 percent -- more than half the rate of the general population."

What the article doesn't say: the unemployment rate for people without college degrees is neary twice as high (source: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/06/business/econo...) Everyone is hurting, but college grads are hurting far less. Especially for

It's nice to know that the Washington Post won't let a few inconvenient facts get in the way of a good headline.
I agree with this strongly. I was a PHP programmer for quite some time, a good one at that. I started itching to move away from PHP beacause I knew of its weaknesses and the expressive beauty of python. Long story short, I am now a web application programmer that solely uses python.

The argument that language choice doesn't matter, it's the engineer that matters, is very valid. I'm an excellent engineer in both and produce high quality working code in both. But python is clearer, more fun, and right.
If you let anti-semitic cranks rant freely, then you know who the anti-semitic cranks are. Likewise, if you let sex traffickers openly advertise on Craigslist, the vice squad knows where to find them. So the case for free speech on both is similar.
Chinese woman 'sues cinema for wasting her time'
Official site of the Mars500 experiment: http://www.esa.int/esaMI/Mars500/index.html

I'm a little surprised to see that none of their crew have actual space experience.
One hopes that most university students are living.

Degrees are absolutely required, for some people and some vocations.
In low-ball America, employers and shoppers pay less, and everyone suffers.
Yes I am sure that is one of the reasons too. But I do not see that much of Ames's freelance stuff either.

But then again he could have taken an office job to pay the rent.
I remember reading somewhere that only a small percentage of Jeep owners actually take their vehicle off-road. Someone high up in the organization suggested that they no longer build Jeep trucks to withstand off-roading so they can sell them for a lower price. The suggested didn't last long - kudos to the people at Jeep for sticking to the principles that make their cars unique.
Haskell (omitted) probably comes in somewhere at the top :)
Thought I saw somewhere that they were defining an ad impression as one which was on-screen for 3 seconds during an Instant search. That would seem to imply they're extracting some value from impressions alone.

Could've misinterpreted, though.
Okay, why are you going to school? To learn some things? To get some paper? Both? To party? Oh, actually, let me break the "learn some things" down... To learn some job-applicable things in classes? To learn some non-directly-job-applicable things in classes? To learn about people who think differently from the people you met in high school?

All of these are good reasons to do post-secondary education. Lots of them are compatible with each other, too. But if you don't care about some of them, don't optimize for those things. With that in mind...

A lot of people are talking about the on-paper value of your degree, and you appear to be interested in that. I'm not sure that's actually right for you; it appears to me that you're on a career path where no one will ever care about your degree. Moreover, even in careers where the presence of a degree matters, the nature of that degree might not; some jobs just say "must have degree" on them, and that's that. Some jobs do care, but those are rare rare rare. So, I doubt that you actually need to focus much on the paper value of your degree.

That said, let's talk about the paper value of your degree. First, school choice. I'm a Canadian, I assume you're American, so this may be wrong, but I think that cheap US schools ("cheap city college"?) have very low brand value. (As I understand it, for a first-world country, the range of brand value in schools in the US is very high... some very very high-brand-value schools, and some very very low ones, and a whole range in between.)

And now, I'll get to the major. Normally you don't get to name your own major. There are exceptions to this, some of which are high-prestige. For example, Will Shortz does love to brag about his degree. But in general, if your major isn't a "real major", it's a joke. Also, many schools have a "not-really-any-major" option, which may be called General Studies, or something like that. Or, my school has an option to get a degree with no major, but two "extended minors". These nothing-major degrees are all very low-prestige.

But remember, maybe you don't care about the paper value of your degree.
I want to see something significant built with the framework. That's what gets me to try something new.
Tratamundo de Hispacio
Don't see why they'd need it. It's not like they're doing space walks during this time, and the real goal here is to gauge survival / mental change. You're also possibly better off testing someone who hasn't had prior training, so you can better measure how new training will effect them during the trial. It would probably also make developing a measurement for finding which people shouldn't go on a trip like this before they actually do so a bit easier, as it'd be similarly less tainted.
Can for an article, got a paywall, left with my dignity.
http://expressjs.com/ is a good web framework for node, if you can get over the fact that their docs all assume that you know Ruby and have used the popular templating engines in it.
Every country is different.

In Tokyo I was through customs so fast I wasn't sure I was through.

Last time I entered Jamaica I was shaken down. After going back and forth for a few minutes I realized it was a shake down and simply asked him "how much?" $50 later and I was on my way. To make a long story short I had brought a few gifts for friends who were meeting me there and the customs agent claimed I was bringing items into the country to sell. Um yeah, I'm selling 4 towels?

In and out of Costa Rica was interesting. When I went I only took a backpack and surfboards. They didn't say much entering the country and only checked out the surfboard bag. Leaving the country they searched everything multiple times prior to leaving (once at security then again plane side). They were all very polite though.

Admittedly I don't do a lot of international travel but I've never had any problems entering the US have always answered the 1-2 questions with yes/no and "I'm glad to be back."
Perfect lesson in creating great linkbait.
So I did this last summer and it was the best decision I've ever made. I was miserable at NYU and already had some work experience. I waited til the summer and sent my resume out a lot and ended up with two entry level offers at startups. I took the better of the two, and a year and two jobs later I'm at a really good company earning much more money, and much happier in general in life than I was in school.

But an important consideration here is learning, and that too has substantially increased. When I was in school I felt held back: there were a ton of projects I wanted to work on that I simply didn't have the time to because I would have to take bullshit like Spanish. Now I'm surrounded all the time by programmers, and ones who are much much smarter than I am, and I get to absorb tons of knowledge much more quickly than I ever did in class. And instead of paying $100k over the next two years, I'm earning $160k with much more control and overall happiness in my life.

It's pretty crucial you have a fair amount of experience "for your age", and definitely don't do this without an offer on the table. But if you get to that point, and you've got a decent offer, I say go for it. TLDR: Because I dropped out I get paid a lot instead of paying a lot, to live a life that's substantially better, and I'm learning a hell of a lot more. Win.
Great post. You have probably saved me quite a bit of research time.
Android vs iPhone definitely reminds me of PC vs Mac. It will be interesting to see if things play out the same way in the long term.

I'm planning to do some app development stuff and my thoughts were that maybe in the long term Android will be the bigger market simply because of the variety in Android phones from cutting edge to mid-priced (and eventually I expect to see some cheap low-end Anroid phones).
No Original Research means that Ben Joffe can't write the wikipedia article about it.

The more general rule of Verifiability will be greatly aided by dead tree, yes.

But even once that's accomplished, establishing Notability will be difficult, I think. I guess if the Harvard professor writes it up, and then the NYT reporter writes that up, that might do it.
Could you either dual license it (eg, GPL and proprietary licenses) or GPL it and run a business around it? (Not saying this is what I'd do, just stating that there may be a fourth alternative).
Just up vote please. Replies are for adding to the conversation. If you are just going to agree, that is what the up vote is for.

Note: I do realize the irony of this post. I assume this is a new HNer and I hope to help educate him and all those who happen to read it, instead of just down voting him.
OK, I'll bite: He has singlehandedly built a lot of incredibly useful software. He's awesome.

Why are we linking to his wikipedia article? Am I missing some timely piece of info?
I'm sure there's great uses for these things, but currently they're a solution in search of a problem. This is wishful thinking:

"The last data point, annotated with text and a dot tells the reader the value, allowing them to intuitively set the scale for the rest of the graph."

If the HTTP return codes is the killer application for sparklines, I couldn't say. I'd have to wonder, though, if this were a mission critical issue: Would you do the same thing?
It's unnecessarily convoluted but correct, eg "accept the loner [as] a mentally sound individual" is a legitimate construction and "[K]now man" is a pun.

Philosophers tend to write this way. It's just that it's not punchy and to-the-point, like business writing or advertising.
Forcing a background for all logged-in users is kind of a small mishap.

Adding a huge new search feature that pretty much renovates the workflow of the UI is a much larger, and harder decision.
Kind of useless without the actual source code, isn't it?
Jewish group opposes ground zero mosque (AP) | US National News Updates
Advertisement-like: Yes, but also contradicting high resolution graphics by creating a Mona Lisa that looked like an 8-bit game avatar.

Impressed with the effort to build it: Yes, but I think nVidia has a large budget for such pursuits.

Parallel performance shown: Yes, but without making analogies between the giant gun and GPU clear (more titillation than articulation).

Insight into parallel performance: No

Oversimplified: Yes

cma posting this link http://i.imgur.com/TvOip.jpg was cool, and this brought to my attention that although the video may not have sparked any insights, it could provoke the HN community to bring insight into the topic. The video also caused me to try and imagine something more insightful. The slow motion shot could technically be considered "insightful" since in real motion we could not see what the slow motion gave us access into seeing, therefore this could be called "in-sight-ful," no?

This also made me recall an invention I thought of for fun...a wall climbing robot (vacuum?) that has a schematic of the dimensions of the building it is climbing in its bot-brain along with a graphic it is to spray and it goes to work until finished as if the building was paper and the bot a printer.

In a community like this, a cool/fun/entertaining piece of in-formation that may not provide great insight but can be enough to spark creative powers regardless.

Maybe not 100% of the time, but in this case, for me, I think it provided something and provoked me to want to share my first post at HN. Thank you :)
Or kernel/compiler/AI hackers on one end and clueless Java school grads building "enterprise grade software" on the other.
oh, I was just feeling snarky when everyone built their responses.. Nothing critical of the few people who went through with building what are actually some pretty nifty widgets.
Android doesn't use the GPU for its UI
For communicative purposes, rhetoric is an amazing field of study. Many of the texts I used in college were crap, but Jay Heinrich's "Thank You For Arguing" is pretty phenomenal as far as being a quick and accessible primer to rhetorically-charged language.

I'd also suggest a good creative writing course (I'd pick prose over poetry, but they're your classes now); the workshopping process did a lot for me as far as developing a critical eye toward language. One could only hope that it would do the same for you.
Well put. I've seen many people who will be quick to jump and say Java|C++|PHP|Ruby|Python|C# is the BEST AT EVERYTHING EVER because the Internet tutorial they took told them so. These people are so common that having opinions on a language is something that you actually need to be careful what remarks casually about, lest you be branded an uninformed idiotic language bigot. Most languages in wide use are there for a reason, but that doesn't mean any and all opinions on them are invalid.
I posted this info as a comment on the guy's blog (still awaiting moderation), but I thought you might find it interesting too, the point being that amazing things are possible with JavaScript and node.js, but if you're thinking single-file scripts with a tangled nest of callbacks and prototypal inheritance chains+constructors that are hard to keep straight, well ... there are better ways ......... :-D

As a JavaScript developer working with node.js (and client side scripts too, of course), I’d like to recommend a couple of related things:

Joose3 — an object system for JavaScript which allows truly classful programming; use it to implement all sorts of meta-programming magic with ease:
http://joose.it/
http://openjsan.org/doc/s/sa/samuraijack/Joose/3.011/lib/Joo...

JooseX.CPS — a continuation-passing-style "trait" for Joose classes which helps prevent your asynchronous code from turning into "callback spaghetti":
http://joose.it/blog/2010/08/02/asynchronous-aka-non-blockin...
http://openjsan.org/doc/s/sa/samuraijack/JooseX/CPS/0.11/lib...

Joose is open source, works with both node.js and in browsers, and there are various ways to install and leverage its libraries, e.g. npm:
http://github.com/isaacs/npm

This isn’t an advertisement. I started exploring node.js in early 2010, and my "discovering" Joose was a real boon as I was looking to do some complicated things that seemed daunting when trying to express the concepts in terms of prototypal inheritance.

Not everyone finds it attractive, but I’m always happy to spread the word in hopes that Joose can make someone else’s life and programming projects a little less stressful, which is what it's done for me.
Unfortunately, they've been moving away from sticking to that offroad capable mantra across the product line.

"In 2004 Jeep started using a special 'Trail Rated' badge on certain Jeep vehicles to mark that that vehicle trail worthy according to Jeep's specifications." [1]

[1] http://www.jeepfan.com/tech/trail-rated.php
It's inverse is extract(). What's icky about using compact()?