skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's my impression, as gleaned in part from my friend the Polymer Science major, who once told me that she had to spend a lot of time explaining to prospective employers that, yes, it really is a superset of chemistry, she really had taken all the tough chem coursework and really did understand chem:

Get a real major. One endorsed by a department and whose name everyone understands. Do not invent the name of your major. A major is a brand. (Believe me: It need not have anything to do with your future career, let alone what you actually do in your own time.)

When I say that I have a degree in "Physics" people know for a fact that I have formal training in quantum mechanics and electrodynamics, that I have enough math background to navigate Maxwell's equations, and that I've probably seen an oscilloscope before. If my degree were in "Computational Physical Sciences" they would harbor doubts. They would be justifiably suspicious that I was bullshitting them, that I had dodged around grabbing easy electives and had never done any heavy lifting.

You only have to spend so much of your time taking courses in your major, so get one and finish it. Indulge your whims with electives -- go ahead and spread those around; it is good that you want to do that.

As for what to study, I'll adopt my usual advising tactic and tell you to study something hard. Your major is your brand; let your brand be "interesting, hardworking, and smart". Sciences and math are hard. Statistics, mathematics, accounting, economics. Biology, chemistry, physics. Electronics. Mechanical engineering. Linguistics. Dare I say it: Computer science. Philosophy is actually pretty good. Music can be pretty good -- both technical and artistic; takes a lot of hard work and determination; a good way to practice communication and get over your stage fright. Things that make you read and write a lot are very good -- I minored in history, it was great -- but do not major in "communication" (though if there's an elective lab course that lets you run pro-level audio and video equipment, that would be great fun) and do not waste time studying creative writing in college.

(You really can't learn to write like Roald Dahl by taking a course. Very few of the great writers ever formally studied writing, and Dahl appears to be no exception. Great creative writing is mostly about practice -- you must read a lot, and you must write a lot -- and you can get that without paying tuition, though it certainly does take time. Just go read Stephen King's On Writing, and/or the essays and forums on Wordplayer.com:

http://www.wordplayer.com/

and/or Learn Writing with Uncle Jim:

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6710

and save the tuition money for something else, something you can't get on your own.)

Lab courses, for god's sake: Take the opportunity to get your hands on every piece of expensive equipment that your school owns, be it a piano, an electronics lab, or a machine shop.
I'm a fan of parts of the BSD kernel myself. My first exposure was through the book "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System". Then again, dorking around in kernels and the like hold some interest for me.
I've been thinking about this, but really I'm not so sure we're talking about the same number. It's close to one in one thousand to have your first or second startup acquired, maybe, but at a certain level of competence it's not unreasonable to expect a $5m exit somewhere within your first ten startups.
The author mentions how he switched from using Twisted to Node.js. I would be very interested in hearing more about the advantages and disadvantages of this as I am building a service in Python right now that I am using Twisted for. I don't really know anything about Node.js but I have been hearing a lot about it. A couple hangups for me are that 1) I'm not a huge fan of Javascript itself and 2) I'd really rather not mix Python and Javascript together. Note that my app doesn't currently use HTTP and maybe that plays a role in Node vs Twisted.
Sure, but I don't see why this translates into AT&T having the right to put up towers.

I don't either, but apparently the federal government disagrees. The article doesn't cite this "law," however.

If there's poor AT&T service in Harvard Square and customers complain, AT&T can simply direct them to petition the zoning board to allow them to put up towers. That way the issue can be resolved using local politics instead of lawsuits.

More than likely, customers would just jump ship to Verizon instead, which is the last thing AT&T wants.
May I ask what was your associate degree? If you have a 1st B.S. already, is it necessary to CLEP subjects again for a 2nd unrelated degree?
If ajax was ever under-utilized, it would be on a site like this. Great idea. Annoying refreshes.
Like gojomo said, you should definitely get external legal counsel, who has your best interest in mind. Also, the value of your startups assets are worth the investment.
History is a very generalizable subject if you want to understand human behavior. It's also a great exercise in coordinating information and in writing. but it's a more promising subject for autodidactism than others but not a bad choice for formal study.
Which is another American use of sir in that, when someone cuts you off in line, rather than let loose, a firm but loud “Sir” tends to let them know you’re angry and that perhaps they did something wrong. Of course, if “Sir” ends up failing, then comes more interesting dialog. :-)
I've crossed the border a number of times myself. What has been amazing for me over the last several years is the striking difference in demeanor between foreign customs officers and those I deal with coming back into the US, especially at the Canadian border.

Coming in and out of the US through the local major airport -- San Francisco -- my experiences have been mixed coming in. Customs varies between nice and a little bit surly, but never outright so.

However, when I drive or fly to Canada? Canadian customs is amazingly friendly and welcoming -- even when crossing at odd hours like 2am when on a road trip. However, coming back into the states, be it dealing with customs at the border (major and minor crossing) or at the airport, I sometimes ask myself -- "why do I live in this country?"

Customs has a hard job and dealing with a lot of people friendly to rude during the day does take a toll. However, often times, these are the first people that someone coming to visit the US encounters. I would hope for a good first impression, but unfortunately that isn't always the case.

Going to Europe this winter it will be fun to compare and contrast again.
Given the vast number of iPhones I see in Harvard Square every day (probably about 40% of all visible phones), I don't know if Verizon is necessarily the logical end here.
We need more people like him, just to remind us of the absurdities we pretend or choose not to see every day.

Is The Exile online somewhere, at least partially?
liquidity of my co-founder is an interesting issue. We've discussed dissolving the LLC all-together and porting over our TMs and other intellectual property to a new wholly owned entity. This way we could both divvy up the current LLC's assets in a way that is acceptable to everyone.

Ex: They would maintain possession of a majority of the hardware for example I would get more cash based on the depreciated value of those hardware assets.
I keep thinking "thanks for pissing them off so they will be angry by the time they get to me, who do not have the option of not answering their questions.

Incidentally, is it really a crime for non-US citizens to lie or whatever to a US federal agent when you are not on bona fide US soil? It would seem that I am not in a US jurisdiction since they haven't yet allowed me to enter the country...
Snobbery is defined as looking down on anything you consider inferior - for example in social classes, you can have middle class snobs without them thinking that every other class (including the upper class) are worse than them.

So no, I'd disagree with your definition of 'snob'.
I am sorry, this is not being polite, this is grovelling. If you are going to do that, you might as well just answer the question.

Respect goes both ways, he was not rude, and did everything correct. Your way is just absolutely disgusting, you seem to feel the need to apologize for doing nothing wrong. You are begging to be left alone. You have no need to explain your reasoning here.

Why would you apologize in this instant?
And if you can't guarantee they're disabled (e.g, if you're writing code to be used by other people), undo them at runtime as early as possible.
Depends what order he learned them in. Maybe he already knew syntax from C and classes from Python before learning C++.
Person Search with Recorded Future
Free Software Foundation Offers Grudging Support to Google in Patent Case
I never understood this argument. Client side javascript and server side javascript aren't really the same at all, it's not like you can re-use your client side javascript on the server. The only benefit I see is that you don't have to context switch between python and javascript, but the only time I can remember this affecting me is when I forget to type semi-colons.
While node.js has some appealing characteristics it doesn't seem to solve the main problem with realtime web apps -- coordination between the multiple client side view states and the server side state. It's easy enough to hack together communication between these two layers but it always feels a bit half baked. Something like etherpad should be the new hello world app.
Turn Your Windows 7 PC into a Wireless Access Poi
'Flying' submarines plumb hidden depths
I'm mostly talking about the engine, chassis and transmission section. Whether the whole entertainment or "lifestyle" sections are superfluous or not doesn't event matter, as this really doesn't increase maintenance costs or makes the car itself that more complex. That's pretty orthogonal to the basic design. You could revamp a Model T with DVD players if you'd want to. I'm not saying that we need all that all that added stuff (AC, sound etc), but that even the essential components nowadays require a high level of complexity.

To get a reasonable amount of safety, you have to be either very cleve or apply huge amounts of brute force, i.e. build a friggin tank. Which probably still won't be as safe as other vehicles, neither for the car itself nor the one it hits. And the fuel economy will be utterly atrocious, especially if you want to keep the engine simple and user-maintainable.

I'd like to be proven wrong, but I think that it's simplicity, safety, performance – pick two. Maybe not even that, depending on current laws, standards and morals. I doubt that even something like the VW Beetle or the Citroen 2CV would be feasible today. You'd either end up with a gas-guzzling tank or a not-quite-car like the Vespa Ape, if simplicity is a constraint.

Again, I'd like to be proven wrong. Then at least I know what car to buy next.
The british army stick with a 10year old version of the land rover for the same reason - you don't want to be in a ditch in Afghanistan trying to fix a computerized engine management system with a hammer.
The New Robot Snakes
I'm not of the opinion that my expectation of privacy is diminished at the border. My expectation of privacy is diminished at the border, because the Supreme Court ruled that it is so, definitively.
What Adobe could learn from The Flying Wallendas
The Exile is freaking brilliant. I can proudly say that I read them since around the beginning, the year 2000. They were brutally honest and never cared about who they might offend or the bridges they may burn or how this might look on their resume. In short, exactly what you want in a journalist.

You can still find them at:www.exiledonline.com but unfortunately they do not write articles as often and are a mere shadow of their former selves.

I think that the one and only truth that they were never able to admit is how much the drugs they were taking non stop would affect their brains, and I feel I see some of the effects in their rather reduced output nowadays.
Yahoo Mail to get 'Minty' freshen-up
Dictionary.com seems to see my point of view as being valid:

"a person who believes himself or herself an expert or connoisseur in a given field and is condescending toward or disdainful of those who hold other opinions or have different tastes regarding this field: a musical snob."

Regardless, if avoiding languages I consider inferior make me a snob then I'm happy to proclaim myself a snob.
I think it would be a lot better if it only displayed, say, 4-5 images max by default and of larger size.

Since default google image search is slow, they need to return a ton of results. However here, since the user can refine results rapidly without their hands leaving the keyboard, I think you should only display 4, MAX 7 so they can scan all the results in a single isntant rather than performing multiple scans.

Maybe have JavaScript to cycle next 5 images binded to arrow key without leaving keyboard.

The human mind really only has visual memory for 5-7 objects at once, you should design it with this in mind if you want it to be truely instant.

edit: another idea easier to implement. If the user types an exclamation mark as the next character, you instantly remove this from the query box. Treat it as a "Show Next 5" Indicator and load the next 5.
Very true. Unlike the 99% of other economics majors on this campus, I thoroughly enjoy the subject.

I know what I want to do after I graduate. I'm moving out to San Francisco. Do you have similar plans? I'll be back on campus next Saturday if you'd like to meet up for lunch.
PHP On Pie takes a fresh new approach.
Hey everyone. I've been creating a "social application framework" called PHP On Pie over the past 2 years, mainly to streamline my own work with social media applications and also to re-use code and help my developers get up to speed quicker. I'm open sourcing it under the BSD license and hopefully others among you find it useful. If you do, feel free to contribute back to it.

I came up with its design after using a lot of other PHP frameworks, including Cake (RoR clone basically), symfony/agavi, CodeIgniter, Kohana and Zend. And drupal. I think PIE really tries to take advantage of the PHP way, and make things simple. If you want, you can drop classes from ZF or PEAR into it and they "just work". Anyway if anyone wants to get involved, drop me a line.

http://phponpie.com
Heh, Vancouver is a long way from Ontario. Otherwise that's a sweet offer :)
To answer my own question:
http://exiledonline.com/the-exile-archive-page/
Database Compression on Graphics Processors [pdf]
I was working at home, listening to a local "shock jock" morning radio show when they mentioned the first crash. I flipped on CNN on my computer's tv tuner but mostly listened to the radio. When the second plane hit, it took a minute for everyone to clarify that it was a second plane. One of the guys on the radio show said, within 30 seconds, 'this is the work of Osama bin Laden'.

Everyone in our office, near our airport, was told to go home about 10 minutes after the second plane hit. We were weeks from filing for an IPO, but that never happened.
Patent Office Admits Truth | Things Are a Disaster
No, I'm saying there were only about 2 comments in the whole class to begin with, so those would obviously be lost. I don't remember having any issue with any variable names, even locals, so it's possible that I had to patch those up if there were any.
I am looking for a technical co-founder, either based out of bay area or India. I have a business background. Doing whatever it takes to make things happen, is something I consider as my strength. Currently, I'm the only founder, and have built a basic working prototype with the help of hacker friends (who cannot join the team full time right now).

The app is about leveraging our social graph. The idea has been validated, and I'm planning to test out the app with real users in a month's time - currently some bug fixing is being done. I'm also planning to apply for YC October batch.

I'm looking for a hacker who shares the entrepreneurial passion, is ready to work hard and do whatever it takes to build a successful startup, is open to ideas, has a sense of humor and an appetite for the early stage pre-funded startup roller-coaster ride. Also, someone who has experience building a consumer / social app from scratch - even if it's a fun side project, but having built something from grounds up is a huge plus. Being able to communicate, set right expectations and meet them is important.

I'm reachable at mattshapiro77 at gmail dot com
You are going to have to learn what the shifted '4' and the unshifted ':' keys on your keyboard do. You might start practicing to build up those muscles.

(I just learned Python to give App Engine a spin. All my usual languages use semicolons, I finally stuck a little clay on the key to alert my brain when I pressed the semicolon.)
I just started playing with BRL-CAD last night. If any of its developers are reading this, I have a number of ideas for things that can be improved significantly...

A) Don't make me create a database when I fire up MGED. Start me out with an empty one and don't worry about it until I try to quit (when you can prompt me to save it). If I open my own database and the automatically created one is still empty, you just discard it.

B) Let us print without having to go through three different programs.

C) Autoformat the size of your prompts so that you do NOT have to resize them to read the prompt.

I'm sure I can find more later, but this is what bothered me in the first few minutes. I'll have to read a lot more documentation, it seems, before I can get much further in actually using this thing... It's hard for me to accept that a tool that's been used for 30 years still has so many rough edges.
Japan launches first GPS satellite
I've travelled internationally maybe a dozen times in my life. I've never once had an issue on re-entering the country. In fact, I've had a grand total of two "incidents" while traveling:

1) A security agent in Amsterdam gave me some (understandable) stern looks because my passport had gone through the wash, and was very much worse for the wear.

2) In Warsaw, I misunderstood a security agent and ended up getting a large man with a gun mildly excited (which in turn got me a little excited...). Tip: If a security screener says something in a language you don't understand and waves towards your bag on the conveyor, don't just assume it means "Take your bag and and go," it might mean "Step away from the bag"
This may be lower-level, with all the explicit type conversions, but it doesn't look much more complicated to me. Maybe I'm fooling myself?

variable a variable b variable c fvariable discriminant
: b^2 b @ dup * ; : 4ac 4 a @ c @ * * ; : s>f s>d d>f ;
: -b b @ negate s>f ; : /2a a @ 2* s>f f/ ; : f. f>d d. ;
: quadeq c ! b ! a ! b^2 4ac - s>f fsqrt discriminant f!
-b discriminant f@ f+ /2a
-b discriminant f@ f- /2a ;

Usage:

: kragen@inexorable:~/devel/inexorable-misc ; gforth quadeq.fs
Gforth 0.6.2, Copyright (C) 1995-2003 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Gforth comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `license'
Type `bye' to exit
2 4 -30 quadeq f. f. -5. 3. ok

I'd dispense with the floating-point nonsense altogether, but ANS Forth, like C, only defines a square-root routine in floating-point. It's a little more code to define in Forth than in C:

variable n : improve n @ over / + 2/ ; : far? - abs 1 > ;
: sqrt dup n ! dup if begin dup improve swap over far? while repeat then
dup dup * n @ > if 1- then ;

But that hardly seems like a strong recommendation.

Edit: someone else's cute Newton's-method square-root is at http://jasonwoof.org/sqrt.fs --- it looks quite a bit simpler!
Groupware is an extraordinarily difficult problemin this respect, especially if you want to handle the rare edge cases. The problem with maintaining multiple client side view states to be the same has a great deal of intrinsic complexity due to the very weak guarantees provided by network communication (if you want any kind of responsiveness whatsoever.)
> For some reason the author doesn't state this is one of the requirements but it must have been.

Not necessarily. I think this is just a consequence of the way the cards get reused. Cut one card later, and SB now has many of the same cards as dealer had. Many of the same cards as a good hand isn't necessarily a good hand, but it's certainly more likely to be good than from a random deal.
Trying out TonidoPlug
I would recommend studying philosophy, not so much so for its content but for the opportunity to learn to write well. You may have noticed that many philosophers seem to write poorly. It turns out that writing about philosophy is pretty hard sometimes--getting difficult ideas and complicated reasoning across in a clear manner is fantastically difficult. And while becoming a historically legendary philosopher may require having fantastically innovative philosophical ideas more than it requires being able to communicate them well[1], being a philosophy major generally involves just learning how to write well about existing philosophical ideas and perhaps making various arguments about them.

Also, it turns out English is a waste of a major--while there are English majors who are good writers, you'll run into just as many, if not more good writers in college who are not English majors--and plenty of English majors who are very poor writers indeed. If you want to work on your writing chops, find writing intensive courses in history and philosophy. (Studying literature doesn't teach you a think about how to write literature, it teaches you how to criticize literature.)

On the quantitative side, you want statistics more than you want to worry about other types of math. How much can we infer from how much data? How do you set up an experiment to collect valid data? Is a difference of x really a difference? You're completely at sea unless you can answer those questions. You can easily be a huge success in business and in life without understanding calculus. Being poor with statistics will make things much more difficult.

Finally, business classes vary by quality--classes like accounting which correspond with an actual set of skills are sometimes worthwhile, but some business subjects aren't worth taking classes in (MIS, management) and others (marketing) lie somewhere in between.

[1] It turns out that if you misunderstand Hegel, you still have a potentially interesting set of philosophical ideas to work with, even if they're different from the ideas Hegel was trying to convey. So it's no impact to a philosopher's stature to write unclearly, just an impediment to one's original intent being understood.
"it's not like you can re-use your client side javascript on the server".

The other is more appealing. The wins for client/server code share are for things like field validations and templates.