skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You mention you don't want to work for the man, this sounds like you'd prefer to go freelance or start your own business. Given that and the fact, which I'll accept at face value, that you're a bad ass developer who knows big O notation and can code your own lists and trees and hashes, and you did fine in your math classes, and if you did go to college it would be to get a CS degree, then I would say no, don't go to college, it will be a waste of time compared to what you could have done by not going to college, in particular starting a business while traveling the world and not going into debt.

If you are not a trust fund child, the debt loan from college will definitely prevent you from starting your own business and ensure that you have to work for the man whether you want to or not.

If you decide to go to college later, that's fine too and maybe by then you'll have a hankering to study philosophy or russian literature or such and do so without going into debt because you are already running a multi billion dollar company that you founded yourself.

You sound a lot like me. I was designing embedded systems and writing operating systems in machine language by the time I was 16. I ran into problems dealing with concurrency, read a number of papers, had some solutions, but felt there had to be a better way, and so off to college I went, and I got into one of the best engineering schools there was (Stanford). After four years, I had not learned a single useful thing and discussions with top professors in the field taught me only that not only had almost no professors at top engineering schools have ever written and released to the public a program more than a couple thousand lines of code long, but also these jokers don't know anything about developing software. So it was a big waste of money.

If I had majored in art or history or something like that it might have been worth it because I wouldn't have been pulling all nighters to finish labs that were busy work, and probably gotten more sex with hot girls, and learned something interesting that I didn't already know.

If I skipped college, I would have gotten a 4 year head start on my career and I wouldn't have had to pay off $50,000 in loans right away, which required that I had to work corporate BS for several years to pay off before quitting and doing my own thing.

So, for your specific case, and speaking from my own personal experience, don't go.
Awesome work man! To make it fully Google Instant, you would want to run the query against the first result in suggest. For instance, if you type in "la" you would get "lady gaga" instead of "L.A". Keep up the great work. :)
Hm, think of:

... was never made before ...

... does always what it should ...

Something like that?
> I think someone said in another thread that some users are not really clear on whether Google is a website, a browser, an OS

It will soon be a reality with google.com, Google Chrome and Google Chrome OS.
Microsoft having a funeral for iPhone
Books That Make You Dumb
Hm. I am not sure if that's possible through Apple's API. I will take a look.
... Not if the microwaves are in your control. You can certainly police microwaves on your own campus. (Not that this is an intelligent idea.)
We're still talking about awfully low levels. Schizophrenia is a rare condition, and doubling your chances of getting a rare condition still leaves it as a rare condition. When a risk factor for a rare disease merely increases the risk by a factor of two it's usually not worth worrying too much about, and it'll probably remain too difficult to sort out the cause-and-effect.

And yet, I can guarantee that many people reading this article will immediately take it to heart that "not getting enough sun during pregnancy causes schizophrenia" and make it a part of their personal belief structure. Perhaps the worst effects will be on the mother of schizophrenics, who having just got over the Freudian hangover in which all mental illnesses are blamed on the failings of the parents, will now be able to blame themselves for wearing too much sunscreen during pregnancy.
Requiring whores to register and be checked for STD's is not the moral equivalent of quarantining people in their homes. It's more similar to product safety regulations or building codes.
You have to find the middle ground between only doing stuff you are absolutely sure you can deliver excellently because you've already done that kind of work before (which for all of us is always going to be small) vs taking stupid wild risks with technologies and areas you are not familiar with.

Also, there will always be risk that you will deliver a crappy product because your client did something that made it that way (eg "but we MUST have .Net ASP on the front end talking to a PHP back-end and ONLY using flatfiles") - that's a constant regardless of your degree of familiarity with a given technology or problem space (you can mitigate that in other ways but that's beyond scope here I think).

Take stock of what it is that you are comfortable working on:

* Technologies you have clearly demonstrable capabilities

* Problem spaces you have worked in before

* Areas you have researched

Now extrapolate by one degree - eg so if you are familiar working with Hadoop you probably could set up and use Cassandra if you needed to. But to say you have experience setting up a massively scaled and redundant data warehousing operation would be too far.

If you have built mainly consumer focused apps you might feel comfortable trying a social network app, but jumping into financial software might be too far.

etc.

Now with the above market clearly the technologies and spaces you have experience in and don't be afraid to take on jobs that exist in the "1 degree apart" space - but be cautious of anything that falls outside of that.

Sorry if this is a long windy reply - I've spent the last 5 years consulting and the above is my basic methodology for this.
Alcohol is strictly regulated by all levels of government.
This is only a copy of
http://scienceblogs.com/oscillator/2010/09/edible_symbiosis....

It is better to link to the original article. It has some photos and videos of the figs.
Though not specific to music (and would have mostly non-music suggestions), you could hit suggestqueries.google.com with a jsonp-formed request. (maybe throw "music" in front of the typed query or something to apply filtering).
Yeah, and girls who walk home alone at night had it coming if they're raped.

Of course, we know it's a bad idea to mix work-devices and private devices, and we probably also have little trouble procuring a work-smartphone if we need that. But for a non-IT person with his new iPhone, exited that pointing the Exchange app to mail.work.com just works, it's unacceptable.
The project itself is still undecided. All I know is that there's an opportunity for me to do my final project in Osaka coming april, so I applied.
PoE on Arduino would indeed be fantastic. Hopefully it'll be in the same price range. It would make for lots of interesting industrial apps.
I also forgot to mention, another great way to gain confidence in new areas is to experiment and R&D in your own time.

Pick projects that will leave you with a clearly demonstrable experience of a marketable technology (eg Node.JS is cool but difficult to find wide market interest at this time).

But only do this if you have time between gigs - always take a gig over a project because you will always gain some kind of experience from any gig, in addition to getting paid.
I'd probably also send them a bill for the cost to me, in time and effort, or restoring all my data.
I turned it off. Maybe I'm a luddite but nothing that Google does of late is very interesting.
Is the "remote wipe" command really supposed to delete all the data on the device? It sounds to me like it's meant to erase just the data associated with the Exchange account, but that the implementors misinterpreted it to mean "erase the whole volume".
Webmachine, ErlyDTL and Riak – Part 2
Ask HN:Can I force a fortune 500 company to do business with me if I own stock?
It has always puzzled me to know if I own stock of a big company and myself own a business, can I use that to make the Big company do business with my not so big business?Would I need to buy more shares? How much is enough?
$.post("/itunes/ajax", {'q': q, 'hell_yeah': 52012} <-- Hell yeah? :P
That's a good find. Though I don't know if Google's suggestions will fit into Apple iTunes search.
I agree. There will be plenty of victim-blaming going on here if people read too much into the epidemiology.

Thinking about the implications of your comment for my suggestion of a clinical trial, I realized the following: powering a clinical trial to detect any change in the incidence of such a rare disorder is going to require tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of participants. This sounds absurd but may actually be possible, given how much interest there is in vitamin D lately (faddist, IMHO, but whatever). Possible because (1) social interest; (2) vitamin D is cheap; (3) vitamin D is likely relatively safe at typical doses.
He's blames the remote wipes on the local IT guys. Calls them sadists. But I bet they are just doing what their corporate policies require them to do. The policies are written by the suits in management, not the local IT guys. If you want to bitch, bitch at them.
Do you own a controlling stake?
Er, the whole point of the article is that the health benefits might not be caused by alcohol consumption, but rather by higher degrees of socialization that happen to be correlated with alcohol consumption.
True, but its not that simple. Don't forget about knock-offs. It may be hard to fake an iPhone, but its not too hard to fake clothing, and I can't imagine it will be too hard for a prostitute to fake a "clean" badge to increase her hourly rate, if its worth her while.
They typed "AGREE" to the policy on day one when they were hired. IT is 2000 miles away. No one from IT is going to visit their office. They are going to wipe the device per corporate policy.
Would it be possible for you to add support for App Store searches in addition to music, or do Apple's APIs not support that? If you had that, your search would easily replace iTunes's for me.

Nicely done!

EDIT: Oh, you have movie and TV show searches. Out of curiosity, what country are you in? Some results that come up for me aren't available in the US iTunes Store.
Raffles Hotel of modern Singapore
Again, the OP is not talking about reasonable questions. Whether one is traveling for business or pleasure is not a reasonable thing for a customs cop to inquire a citizen upon entry into its own country. It is indeed none of their business.

I guess they only want to intimidate you and get you talking for a quick psychological profiling. And the OP responds like I wish everyone with nothing to hide did.

And that doesn't mean entrance lines would take forever. Police adapt their routines to the available time and resources.
Wow that is sad. How would you describe these women?
Microsoft is also quite welcome to use webkit. In fact most everyone would be much happier if they did.
Android's Dalvik VM has only had a JIT for 4 months (shipped in 2.2)

Hilariously enough, they started using V8 in 2.0 a year ago — so in 2.0 and 2.1, Javascript is JIT-ed but Java isn't!
Text Processing API / Service
Hi,
I am looking for a Service / API that can process text and give me important keywords from it.

I have looked at Alchemy and Yahoo's API.

Are there any such other APIs / Services.

Thanks :)
It's like the normal version, except very fast!

In the case of Google Instant, results start to show up as soon as you start typing. So if you wanted to find a page about "Vermont," you would see:

v...
[results about "v for vendetta," let's say]

ver...
[veryfine juice beverages]

vermo...
[vermontster ice cream]

vermont...
[normal vermont ads].

Kind of like that!
I went back to see it, and indeed it's there at around 0:32. It's right behind the grille, so it's probably a radiator or at least a fan.
Etsy Instant Search
Why are you tied to Java? Is there something about Smalltalk that makes you not want to learn it or are there other constraints?
In which way doing business with you will help them?
I saw a company recently announce they would not be supporting IE6 any longer.

The questions in their forums ranged from confused to bizarre. My favorite was "will I have to back up all of my [member data on their site] or will it still be here?"

People truly do not understand what is going on here - they have no idea what is stored/processed a remote server, what is happening locally, what a browser or another desktop program is, etc. I thought computer illiteracy would become less of a problem as more people used computers every day, but unfortunately, it's worked differently than expected. The average level of confusion has stayed the same and the ranks of the confused have grown.
It would be interesting to see such list for the app descriptions (may be gauged by sales, not by the app score). It might be that some harmless-looking words trigger positive or negative reaction.
Freaconomics has interesting chapter on words used in house advertisement - some word like "wonderful" send negative message.
Then you will be like 80% of the people delivering products out there, that doesn't make it good or acceptable, but knowing this should help take some of the pressure off of you.

The key with consulting is to always communicate with your client, let them know where you are and how much more work you think you have. Be honest about how you feel about the quality of it as well, a good client with work with you and help you deliver a great product.
Think about how this would scale... Anybody could setup some lame business, buy a few shares of stock in a handful or large organizations and 'force' those companies to do business with them?

Sorry, but if you think this through, it's not even remotely logical.
Same username? That's assuming it's still available. If it isn't ? Then you have to remember a one-off username. Also, I do not use the same password for all web sites. That's the most basic security FAIL. If someone figures out your password, then all your accounts are compromised. This is the worst security advice ever. I'm sorry - but you know this is true.

Yes - I also do the dummy email forward. I agree about not giving random sites your google account. So create a dummy google account.
Apps don't get killed for requesting memory. They get killed when they're running in the background and other apps request memory.

Can't malloc return NULL and the app act accordingly ("your picture is too big, so i am not going to edit it").

Thats exactly what happens. You're free to run:

void *foo = malloc(INT_MAX);

foo will be NULL. The rest of the app will continue to run without any problems.

// edit: Here's what happens when you do run that (the last line is a NSLog() to show the address of foo):

Malloc(4972,0x3e088868) malloc: *** mmap(size=2147483648) failed (error code=12)
*** error: can't allocate region
*** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug
2010-09-12 19:44:59.154 Malloc[4972:307] malloc: 0x0

// edit 2: Here's the code: http://thisismyinter.net/misc/hn/Malloc.zip
"If Ruby has the weight of a giant behind it, hopefully it will experience a similar wave."

I take it you didn't consider Sun a giant?
Well it is the main language that I have worked in for many years now. I did some Perl early on and have done small one off projects in Python and Ruby. I really like how rock solid the jvm is and then there is always Scala and Groovy (mostly Groovy).

Another thing is that in my personal programming the server side isn't really where I hurt the most. Currently I'm more interested in client side stuff. I am learning Flex and ActionScript at the moment in order to convert some code I did in javascript/ajax to Flex.
Fundamentally, PHP has an entirely separate address space for each web request... This is a much more "robust" (reliable as opposed to "featureful") approach to web development because there are no data structures in RAM that are shared concurrently between requests.

For example, in ASP.NET, I've had a whole team of developers swear up and down that there are no static variables in a particular segment of code that could be the subject of a race condition. Sure enough, I go in there and find one that's hidden away in a very obscure location.

Java has the same problem, as does any environment that exposes threads to the language. Sure, in theory you could do some very nice things by sharing data structures between requests, but practically the whole programming style of PHP encourages people to avoid horrible horrible problems with concurrency, and there are no language features, even in the laboratory that practically make those problems go away.

To take another example, the urldecode function in CPAN has been wrong for 15 years. If you want to write a urldecode that works right, you've got to write your own (possibly using the built-in for a base). Similarly, the URI object in .NET sometimes does incorrect transformations on URIs, and you need to use string URIs if you want to make interoperable semweb systems... PHP has the lowest fraction of 'things that say they work but really don't work' of any web programming languages, and that's the reason why it is so successful. Other languages are "blub" because they don't recognize that it's even possible for things to be this easy.
The Wilberforce Award - $1M for an alternative to consumption-fueled economy
Remember, it's perfectly legal to be arrested in the country whose laws you've broken. In fact, it's also legal for a third-party country to arrest you, as in the case of Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Pinochet%27s_arrest_and...

The US was nothing to do with this affair. The crimes were committed in Chile, the judge who indicted him was Spanish, and Pinochet was arrested in London. (He was eventually released to Chile, but the reason was declining health, not lack of jurisdiction.)

So it would seem in this case that Spanish law was trying to govern the whole of Europe?
48 hour hackathon @UPenn next weekend. Area students - come hack with us
Did anyone else notice how early on in the bug Google's Romain Guy pointed out that The "choppiness" and "lagginess" you are mentioning are more often related to heavy garbage collection than drawing performance as well as saying that newer devices might allow them to use the GPU as well.

Did anyone pay any attention to that, and ask sensible questions about tuning that? Of course not...

On the Galaxy S (under Android 2.1) for example, the lagging seems to be caused by keeping temporary data on the slow, internal SD memory. That can be fixed by moving it to external memory, and there is a one-click fix for it in the Market. That fix triples the phones performance in some benchmarks, and has completely solves any lagging issues for me.

It's possible the HTC phones suffer from a similar problem, but here everyone assumes it's the GPU so you'd never know.

Never performance tune without benchmarking first. You'll fix the wrong thing
No, but what if I did? Would that be different?
Every generation is wrong about that, of course.

Since you've proved it with your powers of induction. Not saying that you are wrong about the next generation, but you might be.
Probably along the lines of "...as soon as I open the app it crashes..."

Most likely due to the memory manager issues mentioned above. I've seen some quality apps get massive numbers of one star reviews for this type of problem.

The star rating system really irks me for this reason. Something that could be fixed to perfect condition in less than 24hours permanently carries the baggage beyond its relevance.
If that were possible, commerce would run with the efficiency of a nepotistic fiefdom.

Even if you held a controlling stake, the other shareholders might accuse you of having a conflict of interest, and funneling funds to your private coffers.

Forcing is usually a bad idea in relationships; private and professional.
Simple stuff, but:

- An IRC bot -- great fit for the language

- A URL shortener service (three times) -- first on Yaws, then on Nitrogen, then on ChicagoBoss (Hi EvanMiller!)

Erlang is the most fun I've ever had writing code. While a lot of that is the functional language aspect, I find it an extremely intuitive language at least at a low level (once you get past the 'there are 4 ways to end a line?!?!' stage). I'm still getting used to thinking through bigger problems in an Erlang way, but thats more a function of my brain than the language.

I think Erlang gets a lot of unfair knocks given it's pigeonholed reputation for 'concurrency and fault tolerance'. Certainly it has it's limitations (libraries), but generally, I think its a pretty well-rounded general purpose language.
Do folks here not work in a regulated industry? We went through a yearly course on How To Not End Up On Front Page of The Paper For Leaking Customer Information. One core part of that is putting up with a little hassle with regards to managing one's cell phone, such as a) not using it for work if at all possible and b) very carefully regulating what got saved on it if it was used for work.

(Nobody at my office should have more than "P. McKenzie" and my phone number saved on their phone. Including full name, email address, a photo, my address, and the like would give me a cause of action against the company if the phone was ever lost or if that information were misused.)

A smart device capable of downloading an email attachment could cause a multi-million dollar incident if it was lost. All it would take is a bug tracking system report with an attached file showing e.g. the wrong number of lines printed per page of radioactively sensitive customer data.
Charlie Brooker - Google Instant is trying to kill me
Bing is making them nervous. Instant has gotten them a lot of attention and Bing doesn't have the infrastructure to imitate it.
http://bit.ly/ddUj1E <-- if anyone finds analytics interesting, HN moved WAY more traffic than TC. A good section of the directs are HN too.
Ask HN: Analytics Programs
I'm launching a new website, and I'd like to do some detailed analytics on the usage on the page (i.e., more than just Google Analytics). I love what KISS Metrics offers, but this is a bootstrapped startup, and I'd prefer not to pay the fees for KISS.

What other analytics programs are you guys using to do detailed split testing?

I need to know where users are looking, where they're clicking, how long they're staying on each page, etc (i.e., would be ideal to track usage from landing to exit).

Thanks for your help.
Hi Lee,

Thanks for your comments. I agree with you... Ideas are cheap, but the pitch disclosing the idea is a little more formal than over an open forum of capable builders, wouldn't you agree? The purpose of my post was to develop some kind of a dialogue with a developer.. someone interested in getting into the music space. If someone said, 'hey man.. I'm interested in taking risks and hearing more, then we go further with the discussion.'

In reference to making you feel like I would ask a technical person to 'do all the work and then tell tehm what to do?' Ummm... What about sales & marketing and all the other roles that go with a CEO responsibilities in a startup? I'm not expecting anything different than a well defined CEO/CTO relationship. The idea is to have a partnership, not a dictatorship.

As far what I bring to the table - I'm a social maven who has access to many music folks who would use the product, business connections, & tons of passion. I don't have funding however. That's what Y Combinator is for... and the idea is to build a framework, get something going, and then pitch to them, Tech Stars, or other incubator programs in hopes of securing series A funding.

Thanks for the feedback though. Ultimately, I'm just trying to put myself out there and make something happen man. I will think of your feedback for future posts.

Take care,
Vincent