skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But they've missed the true comparison.

The question isn't: "Would a London cabby using satnav software without having learned the city do better than a London cabby who learned the city?"

The question is: "Would a London cabby using satnav software do better than one without - both having learned the city?"

In other words: Assuming good satnav software that knew current traffic conditions and historic average speeds of the roads, with an easy interface to offer multiple routing options that are easily changeable (for instance) - wouldn't that be helpful to a cabby vs. a cabby that didn't have that extra tool?

I don't think it's fair to compare human+tech vs. human-only performance with no tech. Better to compare them with tech, since the whole point is that technology is available and used.
All of these dire predictions of better technology dumbing us down are getting tiresome.

People who are lazy, and wouldn't bother memorizing a route anyway, will be helped by something like SatNav or Google Maps -- and yes, probably use them as a crutch. But it's better than them not being able to get anywhere. Me? Having instant access to a birds-eye view of every road in my city (Los Angeles) has given me the tools I need to memorize many routes, and is one of the reasons I can drive around this city so effectively.

Technology is a tool. Use it how you will.
There are many ways to go bankrupt: a brand name change is a good one
quite off-topic for HackerNews I believe but an interesting read :-)
A college degree will give you a lot more choice of opportunities and it's hard for me to think of any it will eliminate. That said, flunking out because you are not motivated won't do you any good. So if you are really not motivated to do it, try something else first. Military service, a start up, a regular job... all will give you perspective.

Taking this path however, be sure that you are happy with what you are doing before you start putting down anchors like getting married, having kids, etc. as that will greatly limit your freedom to keep exploring.
The accounting software behind FaceCash (which I run) does this. http://www.facecash.com

If you have SSL issues with the site, it's because we just switched hostnames and the new EV certificate is pending.
Make a commitment to finishing something.
Genetic link to short-sightedness found
I am bloody sick of that troll Nicholas Carr.

Exactly the same things were said of printing - conservatives said that we would lose the ability to remember things when all knowledge could be looked up in a book.

Exactly the same things were said of slide rules and calculators - that we would lose the ability to reason as our ability to calculate atrophied.

The obvious debunking of Carr's argument is the incredible level of skill so many computer users exhibit. Obviously we HNers are all aware of how bloody difficult programming is, but we forget just how complex a lot of very ordinary software is. Watch a skilled Photoshop operator or a really good Starcraft player in action and you'll see Carr's hypothesis go down in flames. Something as mundane as Excel is easily more complex than any system in the world just a few decades ago.

Carr is at the bottom of a very long line of dreary, reactionary trolls, cursing that the young people today don't know how easy they've got it, that they're going soft with their newfangled tools.
this reminded me of highschool. we used to take sodium from the lab and put them on water and watch it explode, fun times :)
Done. :)

http://drunsen.com/flickr.html
To throw in my own experience: I have a BS in Physics, and I'm currently finishing an MS in Materials Science. I have friends who are working on startups while they do their CS PhDs. I hang out with electrical engineers, drink every Friday with a group of chemists and biologists, and play games with a selection of librarians, psychologists and English majors. And in a couple of months I'm starting an awesome HPC job which I found because of the people I met in school.

The advantage of a university is a high concentration of diverse, smart, and interesting people. You get to spend several years in an environment with a lot of people who know things you don't, a lot who don't know the things you do, and you are there specifically to talk to each other. Sometime's they're the same people, because humans don't overlap perfectly. Not everyone you'll encounter is worth it, but it's easy enough to find the ones who are. And you'll all have the time to hang out, which can be hard when you're dedicating yourself full-time to something else.

If you're really an excellent developer, and you're absolutely sure that this is the work you want to do for the foreseeable future? You can probably make it work without college. But that doesn't mean you should.
I'm in the same position right now. I am working on a startup with a developer buddy, but I decided to take a bit longer to launch to learn how to code what we are building.
Can anyone provide a graphical representation of the DOM please?
I am having a bit of difficulty visualizing the DOM in HTML that is used in Javascript and all the scripting languages to manipulate elements.

I am sure seeing something would make it all clear.

Anyone have a nice graphic that clearly illustrates all the HTML tags and the various DOM relationships between them?

If not, anyone care to make one? :)

Thanks.
We're already there. Man has always existed in that symbiosis since he's been man. Man is defined by his exceptional tool use, so I will claim man has never not existed in symbiosis with machine and been just "man".

A ship that can carry a settler across the ocean is a prosthetic foot that extends his powers of travel. Eye-glasses are prosthetic eyes that extend your power of vision.

With the internet we are basically building improved books with better lookup features, they both are still prosthetic memory storage communicating information visually.
Doesn't niacin reduce mortality?
I've never had anyone ask me to actually copy and paste a piece of code that I'm proud of. I have had people ask me to point them towards code samples on github that I'm proud of though.

If they're good employers, they're probably just looking for examples that you take pride in your work and that you can actually write code. Thus, my advice is to be honest. Even if the code isn't "sexy" or even that good. In fact, I've done well several times at this point of the application process simply by saying "This code sucks. But I'm proud of it anyway and here's why."
I think the point about entrepreneurial work being harder was mainly referring to the self discipline required to get a job done when it stops being fun, and the understanding that your livelihood depends on the success of your product rather than the number of hours you spend at a place. It's much higher risk, yes, and I imagine that risk is something most teenagers simply haven't had the experience to be able to understand properly.
Even the -illusion- that it's working quickly will help. Remember those checkerboards that would show up on the iPhone when the screen couldn't paint fast enough? People tolerated it because the -activity- on the screen matched what the user's finger was doing.

I find it a weak defense for Android by saying "well the newer phones don't have that problem". Most people can't afford to change their phones with every new hardware rev, so it does matter that the OS makes every attempt to make all user experience optimizations on any given piece of hardware. You can't rely on Moore's law to improve usability for existing customers.

With the exception of the 4.0 OS upgrade, I can't say that I've had major performance complaints on the iPhone 3G either. Myself, I'd like to use my current phone as long as possible before giving any phone manufacturer more of my money.
I think perhaps it depends on the school you choose. I went through 6 years of college without obtaining that piece of paper. I bounced from electrical engineering, to pure mathematics, to computer science, and eventually to network administration.

I've been doing freelance development for around 5 years now and have been a network admin for a small municipality for 7 years. All the while I've been involved in open source projects and a few tool building projects that I apply to all of my jobs.

The experience I had in college was bitter. The CS department wasn't teaching anything useful. The only two classes from the dept. that taught me anything were Data Structures and Algorithms. They were unfortunately taught in Java (the school moved from C courses to Java in my second year there). Everything else was knowledge that I had learned on my own prior to college.

I found the pure mathematics courses to be more interesting and useful. Discrete mathematics being the most useful for development. I think the course taught me better ways to approach problems, not just the mathematics itself.

People I've worked with who have degrees seem to have a very focused skillset. They know a lot of theory, but lack a lot of practical knowledge because (I assume) they don't care to educate themselves further. I'm not making a sweeping generalization here, just an observation. There are plenty of college graduates with a ton of practical knowledge.

As mentioned, I don't have a degree, but I think I'm doing OK career/job wise. I can provide for my family and enjoy what I do.

If you don't go to college, get as much experience as you can. Many employers will ask for a four year degree OR equivalent experience. If you want to be a developer, learn other disciplines that tie into development (such as system administration) while you're writing code. In doing so, you'll be less dependent on others to get your job done and you'll be better adjusted to most any position. Understand the foundations of your work. Additionally, learn to speak/write well.

Colleges seem to focus not on learning, but completing the tasks required to obtain a degree. It's mechanical in nature and you only get out of college what you put into it. If you go, be willing to go deeper than the coursework.
The "engineering" here is not what the guys in the video did, but what the guys back in WW2 did to design a vehicle that could be stripped and reassembled in the field.

By saying "that's what Jeeps are for" you are just taking it for granted... Vehicles don't grow on trees.
That'd be thrown out of courts as a violation of your 5th Amend. rights. At least here in the states, in the UK crypto keys can be requisitioned with the penalty of jail time if refused.
That may be true. But this is a good example of something that means one thing to programmers, and another to customers. We know version numbers are meaningless, but I'm guessing most people would put down software version 0.3, because it doesn't sound good. Come to think of it, I would also prefer a version 10 over a version 0.6, even if consciously it makes no sense.

Just another reason webapps are better. No version numbers to keep track of! :)
Try this link as well for my views on this topic:

http://danieltenner.com/posts/0004-college-vs-startup.html

And of course the attached discussion on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=500007
Smells like an urban legend. Either it didn't happen or the pictures weren't so "innocent".
Great concept. What about security? Will you have access to users' Google Docs files?
I bet Android has a lot of room to improve not just by improving garbage collection but by decreasing garbage creation. The compiler can do a lot of optimizations to reuse objects instead of allocating new ones. I don't know what the state of the Android JIT is, but Sun's JIT took many years to incorporate some basic-seeming optimizations.

One thing that could be done in the meantime is to rewrite performance-sensitive Android UI code in a way that eliminates object allocation. In Java this would result in horrifying code, but it might be worth it, and they wouldn't necessarily have to use Java.
I got my 3 year degree in 2 years and since we're in Italy it was really easy - I could have spent my time in better ways.

But the point is I probably would not have done that, college teaches you some basic things about IT (or business or what you want) that you wouldn't study on your own because they're basically too boring and you might be too busy doing other things (being it working for you, for someone else or even doing wonderful things)

Also college "woke me up", when I first started (actually I spent the first semester playing cards ALL DAY :) I didn't know what I was gonna do with my life - probably work for someone.
I'm not sure if this was gonna happen anyway or it was that for the first time I knew I could take save time in college rushing the coursers.

So if you already got "the balls" and think you are mature enough to build something awesome, then do it and skip college.
But please don't skip college to be depressed after 6 months and work for a big corp, since you seem to hate it.
14 Helpful jQuery Tricks, Notes, and Best Practices
The threat is not against the Plans to the Empire but the password for the encryption system. That, as the video shows, can be done and without any particular haste. As the article suggests, freezing the RAM lengthens the decay process. The method is likely to have been known by three-letter agencies for some time now. The good guys are seldom, if ever, ahead of the bad guys, so it seems likely that the latter know it, too.

But, for the sake of argument, let's say that they don't crack it on the first go. So what? The password has to be in RAM every time the machine starts. AFAIK (and I would be pleased to be wrong about this), nobody shreds data on the hard drive because the user gets their password wrong. So, said bad guys can try to their heart's content.

As far as I'm concerned, it is a major hole in any argument for full-disk encryption.
Heat. Heat the sucker up, and it comes out easy.
Any name that is not completely bland will alienate someone. I will refuse to even consider any app with "Twit" or "Tweet" in the name. But I'm not their customer anyway. A name that is appealing to your target customer is probably better than a generic one.
Yup. I think I learnt a lot in these four years, sometimes I look back and wish I had focused on startups earlier but I realize I still had a long ways to go back then.

I finally quit this past May and joined a former co-worker on his new startup, so it all worked out in the end.
Great post!

I think this supports two of the most important qualities of a entrepreneur..resilience and persistence.

You gotta get back up when you get knocked down and you gotta keep going after you get up.
I think someone may have written a google docs FUSE fs. I do know that the FTP app Cyberduck recently added docs support.
Have a look at the source code. He just uses Google search.
Besides the GDocs integration, the big differences are our business edition that integrates tightly with Google Apps and shared folder recipients are not counted against their storage quota.

And a bunch of little things.
usually work fine for me. whats your ping to their data center?
Python's C code is pretty well written. Plus it can be useful to know about if you actually write Python.
I am bloody sick of that troll Nicholas Carr.

Couldn't have put it better myself. He really thinks he's good at being reductive.

cursing that the young people today don't know how easy they've got it

Every generation is sure that these young kids today, with their hair and their clothes, just don't appreciate how hard things used to be. Every generation is wrong about that, of course.
Myths about prostitution
I built a fault-tolerant system for binding lots of disparate and network-unaware services via a monitored event-driven communication protocol to a network-fronted cloud architecture. It's called Katamari, and it's the version of Fuzed (this same concept just for Rails instances) that I modified to run as the majordomo of Powerset's realtime query analysis layer. It let us take un-threaded and network-unaware software that talks over local file descriptors and turn them into a cloud service.

Katamari also has some fairly good fault tolerance characteristics. It aggressively tries to maintain a cloud and it has no real single points of failure. It recognizes hung or crashed instances of individual workers and restarts them. It also supports arbitrary versioned resources existing in parallel, which is great when you want to do A/B testing.

It was also designed so that it was usable in both a development and production environment. While currently little slow for most production uses (~2ms overhead for most queries, with a special case of ~12ms), it's plenty fast and runs in less than 10mb of memory on most linux systems, and can transparently go from a 1-box to a N-box solution.

Microsoft open-sourced it for me (after 2 years of bureaucratic nonsense), so I am just pulling out the useless and crufty parts before I put it up on GitHub. I've given 2 talks about the technology, one for Fuzed at Railsconf and one on Katamari at the last Erlang Factory. I hope to have a modernized version maintained this year, and start moving the tech forward.

Katamari is about 10k lines of code; with about 2/3 of that being Erlang and the remaining 1/3 being Ruby code for the glue (Ruby was Powerset's primary glue and binding language, so it is the only supported binding). Katamari aggressively leverages the characteristics of Erlang to accomplish this feature set; its safe to say all the fault tolerance wouldn't have been doable without Erlang's implementation providing the basics for it.
In an interview some years ago, director John Hughes (and I wish I could find a citation) commented that the (made-up) slang he incorporated into his dialog was expressly invented to keep the movies fresh (longer); that (real) slang tended to quickly become stale.
Started etap: http://github.com/ngerakines/etap which ngerakines took over.

Iterate: http://github.com/zaphar/iterate an agile user story tracking app. Which is mostly useable but still in development. Used nitrogen which I found to be a really good web framework for dynamic applications.
Thanks Andrew! The Google Docs access is approved via OAuth when you sign up.
He can't possibly type very fast on a regular keyboard...

I don't really understand the focus argument--seems more like a lack of self-discipline than an iPad "feature".
I'm in a similar bucket to the OP here. In my experience, everyone who went to college encourages me to go to college. However, everyone who didn't also encourages me to go to college: people who took an extra 4 or 10 years to finish their degrees encourage me to go to college; very successful college dropouts encourage their mentees to go to college.

I think what it boils down to is that college is a universally accepted "good idea", and if you are deciding not to go that route, it's something that you have to tackle on an individual level.
I highly recommend reading this free report (123-page PDF) from Igor International (naming and branding agency):

http://www.igorinternational.com/process/igor-naming-guide.p...
I don't know if you plan to actually market yourselves as a "better Dropbox". But if you do, you should make the differences (and similarities) much clearer. As someone who understands what Dropbox is, the sentence you wrote above is excellent: I know exactly what you are (like Dropbox), but also where you're better.
Never even went that far.

I don't see why I have to do that.

It should work like YouTube or Vimeo. I shouldn't have to be doing tracert or pinging the server the video is being served from.

This is a solved problem that they shouldn't really be spending resources on - quite frankly.
Whether it has already happened does not change whether it could happen. You only need to encounter one asshole like the one here: http://boingboing.net/2007/04/24/canadian-professor-d.html and you're screwed.
I don't know how the scene in Jacksonville is, but I would strongly recommend, if you skip college, to go to a strong technical hub (Silicon Valley, New York, etc). You will have fantastic networking opportunities that you won't have elsewhere, which goes inline with what tptacek's point (d).

FWIW, I am leaving college to take a full-time job at a company in the valley. I was (am) a junior in CS.
Thanks! Hope you give it a shot.
i agree, it is hard for some people to not take it personally... i have struggled with this. my approach has been to focus on things i can control... and you can't control if people reject you.
I agree. Probably 50% or so of the time I'm looking for something I've looked at before... either in my history or my "archive" that is spread across multiple sites.
I've never had a problem.

Also if you look at the source of the Techcrunch.TV page all the video links seem to point to Ooyala so I don't think they're self hosting.

(It could be something on the page itself that causes you trouble. Try this: http://vodpod.com/watch/4419021-ask-a-vc-fred-wilson-gives-b...)
It is slow sometimes, but their query logs would be useful for query suggestions. Query suggestions should be based on what searches are popular. Not sure if you want to go through the effort of making suggestions yourself though.
True, but I think we're crossing one of those historical barriers where a quantitative difference becomes so large that it becomes a qualitative difference. The kind of symbiosis you achieve with devices that connect you instantly to every other person on the planet and to which you can offload all kinds of calculation and information gathering is truly new.

I'm not a triumphalist about it either. Technology gives but also takes.
As another example, Minecraft (recently mentioned on HN) is currently on version 1.1.0 despite still being in its Alpha.
Key quote: "The advantage of a university is a high concentration of diverse, smart, and interesting people."
Been using it on both my office & personal account. Incredible! Considering that I spend most of time in inboxes, it has already saved myriad hours of mine on searches.

It also intrigues me that these guys launched it even before Google Instant. It rocks!
some would say the lack of video quality is enough not to watch
Doesn't work in 7.0.522.0 (59180) Ubuntu 10.04
Nope, you can only make sure they do not get new data.

From https://www.dropbox.com/account#manage (pressing "unlink"): "[The unlinked] computer will no longer stay in sync, but it will keep a copy of any file it currently has."
Even if your focus is health, why does it always have to be at home, alone?
Fair enough! He really is a remarkable guy.
I was in my high school health class. The principal informed all the teachers over the intercom to turn off all radios and televisions.

Our teacher told us that today was going to be an important day to remember and that he wasn't going to be the one to shield us from it. He rolled in a television and we watched the news until the period ended.
I guess dropbox works for most people because it's so easy to use and just fixes their specific problems (of keeping files in sync, quickly sharing them via url, etc).

Me, personally, I use Google Apps for emails and documents and so, naturally, I try to do as much as I can with it. Today i collaboratively worked on wireframes through it even though mockflow or mockingbird are much better at that. But they cost a bit more than I can affort right now. Also, it's nice to have everything in one place.
You know, I have a friend who went to law school to become a lawyer. After he got out, he realized that all the people who told him he should go to law school weren't lawyers.

To me it sounds like you might be misunderstanding CS and might want to re-evaluate if you really want to do it. However, because people tell you that you "need" a degree is a terrible reason to stay in school.
Yes, but it is not a pure HDL modifier: it also reduces LDL-C, so it is not clear which effect leads to niacin's benefits (both could, to be fair).
How do i go back to regular Google?
I've found Vimeo's service is terrible for Europe.