skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First: it is a single course, and it does not appear to be a required one. No one is being made to study it. Students are being given the option of studying it.

Second: All manner of art is studied in college, from novels, to sculpture, to film. TV is but another genre, and while it an unfortunate history of being a "low art", a lot of recent tv definitely rises to level of a lot of the films that are studied in college today.

That being said, I'm a little leery of the context in which the show is being studied. The course is on urban inequality. Even though the wire is very well researched, it's still fiction. If you want to talk about the realities on which the wire is based, why not study those realities directly? Why let an intricately plotted work of fiction serve as your primary window into that world? I'd be fine with showing some scenes from the Wire in a course on urban inequality, but I'd really hate to give students the impression that the Wire is the final authority on what life in Baltimore is like.
I don't think it matters if I have an alternative idea. The world is under no obligation to be equitable. Meanwhile: "best effort" isn't good enough when the penalty for failure is someone being hung from a construction crane.

I think a state-sponsored circumvention tool, backed by one or more western governments, would --- if procured properly, which would never happen, and instead would involve Lockheed or SAIC --- stand enough of a chance against a foreign adversary to be worth considering. Short of that, you run right into a very simple wall: once your tool starts to matter, Iran will happily spend many millions of dollars to have it turned.
Disclaimer: I believe 'The Wire' is the greatest TV series I have ever seen

Well it seems to be a class on urban inequality that uses characters from The Wire as examples. The show was critically acclaimed and many of the characters are based off people known by the creators (a Balitmore Police Officer/School Teacher & Baltimore Sun Reporter)

"Our seminar was designed for 30 students; four times that many showed up for the first class last week."
Using the show to promote a class discussing a real sociological problem seems like a good idea.
The problem with the back button is it should not be the sole way to navigate.

It really needs to be split into 2 buttons: "Back" and "Parent" (or "Up"). People use the back button for both purposes. And when you involve Iframes and Ajax-heavy web applications, the context of "back" gets entirely lost and broken.

It's a big problem. There is an HTML5 api to give some level of control over the back button, and this may help to a certain degree. But I really believe it would be preferable to just move these concepts (navigate back and up) right into the web page, or the web application.

There is absolutely nothing preventing web applications from giving a superior navigation experience than a one-size-fits-all web browser buttons.
pot tourism is not what Nepal needs, man. Years ago it was old men and misfits that smoked charas; now you have kids learning the tricks from tourists :-/
A network requires a massive investment to build, it sadly makes no sense for someone to spend that money and then comoditize the market taking the bulk of the profit out if it.

I think any change will be more gradual, each carrier having to relinquish little bits more control over time to please users and other companies in the market (such as Apple and maybe Google who could threaten to withdraw funding for Android if the carriers keep screwing with it so much).
I wasn't really arguing that, though it brings up the fact that if you do it for long enough, it'll eventually become the standard. ;)
Yes. That's why I liked Quake 3 much more than the original Unreal Tournament. It was just so much faster paced.
don, awesome post. hope to see more of you on hacker news
We hear ya loud and clear! SMS outside the US is tough to get complete coverage of, since carriers vary so widely, but it's definitely one of our top requests.
Not any longer. Jazz was once evil, too.
I had a round of interviews at the London office a long time ago, and another one recently.
I think they are improving, but the fact they don't tell you where you failed is annoying. Also, some of my friends say they couldn't believe I had been rejected both times when they compare me to people they know who got accepted.
The problem with compiling an overall $/oz. amount is that, generally, prices go down as quantity goes up. The data will be skewed if a lot of people are reporting $50 eighths (400/oz.) and the price for an ounce from the same dealer is, say, $300. Maybe track the different amounts separately?
The issue with real-time P/L and risk calculation is not necessarily IT but your math models valuing your positions in very hard to value securities.

For instance, a liquid stock such as MSFT is easy to value; just look at the last traded price. Chances are, if you are liquidate your entire holding of MSFT (even if you are a big fund or bank), it'll fall roughly in the range of couple of cents of last traded price.

A fairly illiquid stock such as a penny stock or a stock with relative low shares float; if you were to close your position as a bank, you are probably unloading/covering so many shares that it'll affect the price of that stock significantly. So you need to model that into your P/L model.

Things get even messier with a derivative, because let's say you are trying to sell an option position. Whoever your counterparty you sold your option contracts too, probably has some counter-strategy in which they might hedge their option transaction with an underlying equity or with another option spread at a different price whose counterparty might choose to hedge with an underlying equity position. All of which would in term affect the underlying equity pricing and how the options call/put parity is re-adjusted and then in terms, the pricing of the option contracts you just traded. So you need to model that.

So in your derivative pricing model, you might have to consider underlying pricing/volatility/liquidity, options pricing/time-decay/liquidity, futures pricing, currency exchange rates (for an ADR security) and how all of them all interact and influence one another.

And even with the math aside, constructing and consolidating all exchange/quote systems that trade all of these products is a system integration nightmare.
The optimal solution then is to get an infinite number of people on the internet to solve it for you for free!
Dang! I should have archived the source to the Sega FPGA system I made as a senior design project. At the time, it required a relatively expensive FPGA, but that was a decade ago; it would probably fit on an el-cheapo FPGA nowadays.
How about:

Standing roughly between the apparent location of the noise and current apparent location of the light reflected from the jet with the jet flying as close to your elevation as possible, and assuming the jet is flying in a straight line over the observer on a flat plane (i.e. not the earth, which is round) and assuming we can rule out all other factors.
Man, it's the Internet.
The 1 isn't required, it's common to use the item's ID in that position, but if you can ensure unique names or some other property to be unique, you can use that too. Even with the opaque 1 I still prefer this format of URL over the gobbly gook sites like Amazon, Ebay, Microsoft, etc generate.
Damning Zuckerberg IMs confirmed
Looks like there could be some interesting arbitrage opportunities in the north east USA.

I'd be really interested to see data from Europe (but hopefully that will take care of itself over time).
iPod Touch is really interesting from an educational perspective. I am working with two different school districts who are using iPod Touches instead of netbooks.

The amount of functionality you get for the price is amazing. The lockdown nature of Apple products is actually a benefit in this sector.

The lack of competition here will mean Apple have a head start on marketing to children starting in elementary school.
This only proves that the potential employee is competent, with complete disregard to passion. Which is, IMO, much more valuable.
Is your company profitable now? Are you selling your product now? If not, you're just gonna burn an extra $15K out of the gate. I can think of MANY better uses for $15K than on a domain. Can't you?

I am a perfectionist so in theory I love the idea of getting the perfect domain name. In practice, I would urge you to register an original domain name (unless money is no object for you). The perfect domain is nice, but not essential. Do you really need pizza.com (sold $2.6 million in 2008) to sell pizza?

Two final comments:

- You will have leverage with investors when you're making money.

- Helpful guidelines for choosing a domain: see http://davidcummings.org/2010/05/29/the-domain-name-challeng... and http://davidcummings.org/2010/08/07/more-domain-name-searchi...
If you know something well, you can reason about it in real time.

Pressure is an artifact of the interview process that is controlled primarily by the attitudes of the interviewer and interviewee regardless the subject matter.

External references are useful for things you don't know cold. For something basic and fundamental to your job (eg. basic graph traversals, the suitability of a hash or a balanced BST to some lookup task, etc), you shouldn't need them; for something more arcane which is accidental rather than essential to your task, or something relatively advanced (eg. specifics of tries for incremental string operations), a competent interviewer will help you out and supply some information so that he can evaluate your ability to reason, design and code.

None of these things have any bearing on whether or not it makes sense for Google to focus on knowledge of the fundamentals of computer science and systems programming in their hiring interviews.
> Lastly, the unskippable previews really piss me off.

I have a samsung blue ray player too. I usuallly push stop, and then hit the "title menu" (or disc menu? I forget) to skip the unskippable stuff.
I'd pay to see ESR and Zed Shaw pair-programming.
A weaker version of Braid-syndrome can happen if you have a game with quicksave/quickload and use it extensively.
Yes, you're right, the switch statement is a good example of how modern compilers fudge the boundary.

But the main point is that the difference between the generated code and the stuff you write is relatively small, when looking at the assembly that a C compiler generates I have relatively little trouble following the relationship between the two, and I can make reasonable predictions about what will pop out on the other end.

And of course processors are 'richer' than what most C compilers will use, especially when it comes to special instructions that have no equivalent in the C language.

I've worked on a 'decompiler' for the Mark Williams C compiler (yes, that's pretty long ago), and at the time the above still held true, today the boundaries are definitely fuzzier, mostly due to the increased smarts of compiler writers for the optimization stage.

Gcc is clever enough to optimize whole branches of code out of existence if you set it to be aggressive enough and the code was written naively, that's one way of dramatically losing that 1:1 correspondence.
I'm confused, what does Clinton have to do with these programs? Worth noting that Bush Jr. signed a prescription drug bill that will cost $550 billion between 2006 and 2015 [1].

SS and Medicare are programs intended for older people which are funded by current workers. As time has passed and SS/Medicare eligibility has increased, more SS/Medicare taxes from current workers are paying for fewer people's benefits. This problem has worsened as baby boomers have reached retirement age--we've never seen SS/Medicare enrollment like this before.

Point being: my generation is paying a large chunk of taxes that it will probably never benefit from, as SS/Medicare will likely occupy too large a portion of the budget and would thus need to be scaled back (or closed down).

[1] http://www.cms.gov/ReportsTrustFunds/downloads/tr2009.pdf
Usage Driven Design
If the jet is flying in a straight line over the observer then the angle to the jet and sound both would be the same, ie, the jet is approaching directly at the observer (or leaving), so there could be no delta between the sound angle and the light angle.
I did this once when considering applying to ITA. I got bored in the middle of the puzzle and went to work for someone else instead.

(They wanted me to do, "using any language, write an IRC-like client and server". 10 lines of code these days, but still not interesting to do for free.)
Evan Miller's Finance for Founders
The Zune isn't available in Europe...
I actually have one of these sitting right next to me as a i comment along with a original manual.. Too bad i don't have a TV to hook it up to :-(
I think that he isn't going to answer. He has got distracted.
checking that they closed the box.
I use a 17" MacBook Pro for coding with Divvy to manage the screen real estate. I keep a browser, TextMate and Terminal open. Occasionally I will have a PDF open as well if I am learning something from an eBook.

I also have a 30" Cinema Display that I use, but more often than not the portability of the laptop and the fact that I need to rearrange my windows when connecting the 30" display often prevents me from switching over to it.

I have found though that the 30" display works well for pair programming if you enlarge the text in Terminal and TextMate or if you lower the screen resolution to 1920x1200.
Something I learned in a journalism class relates to this: "I'm going to give what is probably a very contrarian view here: scientific studies show that Caucasian features allow for a higher standard deviation than Asian features."

Don't just claim "scientific studies say X;" cite studies Y, Z, and A. I'm not saying that your claim is wrong, but it sounds implausible to me, and I suspect that, if such studies exist, they probably indicate that whites find it easier to differentiate other whites and Asians find it easier to differentiate other Asians (I'd be curious: are such studies done solely in the United States? If so, they'd be worthless).
Unrelated comment: thanks a bunch for the speed optimisations pushed into the ruby mongo driver :)
This is a well-intentioned but terrible idea.

This idea fails even on its own, since it presumes that URLs have structure, even within a particular site. So if you want to add a new page, even a one-off for a special occasion, then you have to start thinking about where it fits in your ad hoc URL/navigation scheme, too. Also, if you want to redesign navigation, you have to change all your URLs. URLs are brilliant because they are separate from navigation; that's a feature, not a bug.

But it's also philosophically wrong. The URL -- a simple string that can be used to fetch any resource -- is the single greatest innovation of the web. A simple string can pass through literally any human communication system. Speech, print, text messaging, anything. A URL is not an inherently intuitive concept so it is not all that usable. But it's necessary. Training users to recognize URLs is vitally important, or we are back to relying on AOL^H^H^HFacebook to provide navigation tools.
Oh come off it. There is no cloud cover, the earth is a flat plane, the flight path is level, and we're assuming standard temperature and pressure. Lightspeed may be neglected, and the observer is at rest with regards to the earth and atmosphere. The jet is making noise.

Pedantic people who can't do back-of-the-envelope calculations due to "underspecified" problems piss me off, partly because I used to be one of them. ;-)
Do you have more information about those findings?
I don't hate the bar, I hate the lack of a button to easily navigate up to the parent directory.
I agree with the distractions part. If I need to focus, email is closed as is twitter. Growl doesn't help either.
This isn't a matter of corruption--it's an issue of public choice (or public economics, whichever you prefer).

What politician would scale back SS/Medicare when retirees are one of the largest voting blocks in America?

Governments also don't necessarily experience more corruption over time. Just look at overthrown dictatorships. If you said democratic governments, like the US, I'd agree with you, since the accumulation of wealth shifts power around.
Behold. It's called PC+Windows+Stem
Yes. Make reasonable assumptions and document them.
Or Canada. They even sold the original Zune here, then pulled out when the Zune HD was released.
I confronted Jason Fried about this at last year's Startup School, and I think I figured it out — because they avoid adding features to their products, writing serves as their real creative outlet. He told me that anyone at the company can freely post to the SvN blog, and it appears that they do.
> it would be preferable to just move these concepts (navigate back and up) right into the web page, or the web application

By web application, I presume you mean for example google docs, rather than a browser.

This would make it even less consistent, wouldn't it? Some pages/apps wouldn't have these controls, or they would look different or be in different locations across different pages/apps.

"Back" and "Up" are virtually indistinguishable for an average user. Hell, I'd be surprised if I could give a good description about the difference, and I know computers inside-out.

> There is absolutely nothing preventing web applications from giving a superior navigation experience than a one-size-fits-all web browser buttons.

Except for the users...
Exactly, we aren't incorporating the volume discount when we scale up smaller quantities of weed. This is because we really just don't know what the average margins of sales between different quantities.

We could display the averages in each quantity, but it would lack enough sample size. Plus having one nice round number is easier to visualize. I think the final .oz average probably within +/-10% accuracy.
The Beermat Entrepreneur
Also, like the article mentions, it has abstractions that you can't get rid of, like the stack.
I think these are good ideas to get a different view on candidates who love problems like these or see one that they are willing to do the problem set research about, but for this reason, should not be a "requirement" for candidates.
You still run the risk of being sued open source or no.

I don't think the shield of LLC liability or open source license disclaimer will necessarily help the guy there (as people can still personally sue him), but I can't see it hurting.

It's also important to distinguish between liability and errors and omissions (what tptacek called professional liability insurance). Make sure if you do buy insurance, it's the right type. Each type protects you against claims only of a certain type.
The Wire is based off multiple people's journalism careers in the city of Baltimore. It's fictional, but it's fiction intended to synthesize David Simon's worldview about the failure of institutions (of all kinds) in modern American cities; it's a more effective communicator of that message than his raw reporting would be, and that raw reporting is clearly fair game for a class.

If it makes you feel better, check out _ Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets_ and _ The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood_ --- both great books, as gripping as The Wire, and used throughout the series as source material. Both totally nonfic.
Second the pomodoro technique--it's almost weirdly effective. That said, I haven't tried it yet with anyone at work--but for solo stuff, it's been amazing.
We're running MongoDB in an extremely write heavy environment (web crawling). Another solution for the write issues is to split out a single write connection from all of the other read connections and MongoDB gives the reads execution priority before the writes (in principal, in practice and in my experience it's pretty close).

Again this debate comes down to how you structure your data and picking the best model for that and then figuring out how/if you can deal with its idiosyncracies. The single server redundancy issue has been beaten to death and for any production application should be planned in from the beginning regardless of the database.
Anyone here read this and have anything to say?
As a Canadian, I'm still jealous of the wireless options you guys have. Sure, we can have an iPhone on all major carriers, and we can tether too, but I still feel like the rates and plans you guys get are more competitive than ours.
But are they happy smart people?
Hmm, it's hard to agree with this. I think you're equating success in world tournaments with professional level of play, which may not be the case.

As a case in point, consider the recent FIBA World Campionship: Turkey played the final with US and gave it a run for its money (at least at the start of the game). Serbia was awesome, too. The US Team didn't even make it to the final in the previous three times (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIBA_World_Championship#Results). Now, that doesn't mean that the level of basketball in these countries is better or on par with the one in US. It just means that the very good pro players see this as a waste of time and money (and chance to be injured) and don't go. I bet a similar reason applied in the case of baseball.
Audio interview: Max Howell from Homebrew on The Changelog
Ha, yes, there are but attempting to exploit this market tends to result in an arrest while driving through Missouri or something.
Hmm, it's hard to agree with this. I think you're equating success in world tournaments with professional level of play, which may not be the case.

As a case in point, consider the recent FIBA World Campionship: Turkey played the final with US and gave it a run for its money (at least at the start of the game). Serbia was awesome, too. The US Team didn't even make it to the final in the previous three times (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIBA_World_Championship#Results). Now, that doesn't mean that the level of basketball in these countries is better or on par with the one in US. It just means that the very good pro players see this as a waste of time and money (and chance to be injured) and don't go. I bet a similar reason applies in the case of baseball.
Clicking on the previous directory name takes you up a level. And tab completion works in the bar for going forward.
I solved one of their puzzles and mailed them the answer, must be decade ago now. Did not even get an acknowledgement e-mail back.
Personally, I wouldn't want to work there, either, but for different reasons. I don't want to work at an organization where I can't get to know everyone there, at least on some level.

Even the marketdroids.
The thing I like most about your post is that you never advocate locking human beings in a cage for smoking vegetation. You are "anti-marijuana" in the sense that it does not fit your vision of an ideal life, and that's all fine and good. I could argue similarly against eating too much fried food.

When people drag in the use of force, that's when discussions like this turn venomous. Using force to "protect people from themselves" only serves to erode people's awareness and sense of responsibility for their own choices, not to mention fostering violent organized crime.
The costs associated with starting an LLC vary from state to state, but usually side jobs don't rise to level of needing liability insurance. If your side project is big enough to be a lawsuit target, then it isn't a side project anyway. Build it into something more, and form an LLC, or just get some kind of business/manager's insurance.