skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just finished putting this one together: http://taxes.kareemshaya.com
This is always a tough question to answer, as the answer is always "well, it depends"

That being said. Every single one of these people who thinks you can substitute a few books and going to a bullshit networking event for the experience of college is completely full of crap. College FORCES you to create bonds that many would honestly never have the opportunity to do so on their own. They also build social objects which become pivotal tools later in life, if you are smart enough to take advantage of them.

This is the same argument for the "Should I get an MBA?" crowd (of which I am one of those wondering that Q). You don't go to college to learn linear algebra or financial statistical modeling. You shouldn't be going to learn a trade. You should be going to learn. You should be going to engage. You should be going to experience new things. You are going to build your network.

You are much more likely to meet better partners/cofounders in college than in high school or at random networking events. At least the college has marginally vouched for them.

Should you drop out? Sure if you've tested your idea, and people other than your mom and nerdy neighbor think your idea is cool. If you can tell 5 or 10 people who you would consider "normal" about your idea and they get that it solves a problem, then drop out and run with it.
Try to get the highest rated photos of the last week/month/year, for example.

I don't really know anyone that uses flickr this way, or at least i should say that flickr is not explicitly about quantitatively accessing massive photosets.

Highest rated photos, though? I don't think taste is a numerical metric.

edit: superfluous asterisks
Telepresence Robot Makes Cameo Appearance on Big Bang Theory
The MySpace Background is a Promo For "The Social Network" Right Now
Actually the early Lisp had some bugs (or strange features). Like no static scoping. But they fixed it.
I am on the board of housing nonprofit. Despite being real nice, we still have to take people to court to get an eviction processed occasionally. $250 a pop. $250 to fill out a form and bring copies of the lease and late notice to the courthouse.

If I recall correctly we can only recover ~$60 of court/lawyer fees from the debtor so it is often cheaper for us to ignore a debt.

Part of the problem for us is that our general manager is a lawyer, so he puts a premium on "building a relationship with a legal professional". I suspect this is the case for the rest of the market where in house counsel is reviewing compensation for the firm they just left.
Scientists Catch First Glimpse of 'Pseudo' Hawking Radiation
In my experience, this is 100% spot on. Hell, while typing this comment the caret is catching up to my keystrokes. Why can't we get interfaces right? We have all this processing speed available and yet our computers are slow. I press the shortcut to open a new filemanager window and it takes a second, why can't it take a few ms? My window manager is already loaded, what takes so long!

Like it or not, this is the primary reason that the iPhone is so popular. It is the first fast smartphone. All the other phones I had tried before the iPhone came out were just frustratingly slow. Hopefully, with the competition, other phone manufacturers have started to fix this (I'll get my first Android phone soon, I hope it's a fast one).
+1, a lot of top tier graduates have been having trouble finding positions the last couple of years.
Bit late to reply, but we have had > 300 donors last I checked, with 21k or so users at that time. So, let's just say 1% - still good. Enough to give me ramen profitability for the last four months.
I usually choose other airlines, because often the Southwest flights to whe I want to go have too many stops. I like a few things about them though. First, they help keep the other airlines prices down. Second, when I do fly them and have a stop or a plane change, I'm back up in the air again in no time.
Ten years of deliberate practice. (http://www.norvig.com/21-days.html)

Actually, in his case, more like 35.
AOL Reports Q2 Earnings-50% Advertising, 40% Subscription
True, I suppose. I work with AJAX and the DOM quite a bit, so as soon as I started using Firebug to debug that stuff, it became pretty obvious that it's showing me the DOM as it is, not as it was.
That "convention" is one of the only standards-compliant ways to delimit URLs. Fix your copy-and-paste mechanism.
no politician -- on either side of the aisle -- is seriously proposing cuts to Social Security or Medicare.

Not true. Paul Ryan did, and even got into a fairly public fight with Paul Krugman about it [1].

http://www.roadmap.republicans.budget.house.gov/

[1] The fight was mostly over matters of little substance - Krugman told a few lies about Ryan which blogger Megan McCardle repeatedly debunked. The substance of the proposal was not discussed. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/08/krugman-... http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/08/paul-kru...
Have you tried different cpu governors?
And they are also planning to sell AIG and GM shares most probably with decent profit.
And still, TARP will likely to be one of the main reasons for downfall of Democrats.
So this is like Digg ?
Ask HN: How do I inform an organisation of a security issue on their website?
So the other day I came across a website that doesn't use any kind of security on their online form in which people are entering financial information along with their own personal information.

I've tried to email this organisation and even call them to inform them of the error but have come up against a brick wall in both cases.

The thing is, this organisation has inherent trust from the community and people will enter this information freely because of this trust. Even their privacy policy on their site states that they will secure the information but they obviously aren't.

Any ideas on what I could do? I'd rather not just leave it alone.
Suggestions:

1) The icon needs some work. Not sure what you're trying to represent.

2) When you click enable/disable in the popup menu, the menu should automatically disappear. You shouldn't have to click again to dismiss it.

3) If while you have the extension disabled you load a page in your blocked list, then enable the extension, then refresh the page, the page doesn't get blocked.
Base62.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1119722/base-62-conversio...

A case-insensitive variant is Base36:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_36

I remember you being a Lisp programmer; it's built into CL's Format function:

(format t "~36r" 9999) ==> 7PR
Mixpanel: Scaling to the Internet - Writing C extensions for Python
I'm not sure how race got involved.

Ignore that. I was reading a parent's post and reply to the wrong parent comment.

Many people agree with you that people should take care of themselves, and that Social Security and Medicare should be, at most, a safety net for people who would otherwise be old folks on the streets without healthcare. Such a policy is usually referred to as "means testing" retirement benefits.

No, this is not what I advocated. I advocated that the family should resume the role of caretakers(or what been eroded by government) instead of leaving old folks alone in old people homes. Old people can then serve as babysitters, teachers, etc, to grandchildren. That is assuming, that they do have them.

Eliminating government retirement benefits altogether will never happen because no one likes seeing 70 year-olds suffering in poverty, but they don't dislike it enough to ameliorate the problem directly via charity. Humans are weird like that.

Maybe some. But this is ignoring the option of creating mutual aid societies. Fraternities organizations used to exists in large number and large number of Americans join them, regardless of their race and class. They provide orphanage, hospitals, and even home for elderly. Now the welfare state serve some of these functions, some said, poorly.
In a really roundabout way, the Fed is manipulating securities in much the same way Wall St did during the financial crisis. Only an entity with that much buying power could make such a vast investment with such incredible terms. It seems like they said, "we're gonna loan you a bunch of money and then you're going to owe us that much and then some back, and to protect our investment, we will make a guarantee to your solvency so our floor is profit."
Programming language trade-offs
Love this blog!

If only there was more constructive criticism of the broken mess that is desktop OSs...
I left a six figure job voluntarily to do my own thing. Before I left, I was working late nights, sometimes until 2 or 3am. I liked the job, but was unfulfilled. Fast forward three years, and I am now on my own in a successful startup that I own. I'm making about the same amount in income. And I sometimes stay up just as late at night working. So why leave, you ask? Freedom. I make my own hours. I work for myself. When I win, I win for ME. When I lose a deal, I lose for ME. My passion has increased one hundred fold, and I sleep soundly at night knowing that I am in control of my own destiny.
> Study something you will really enjoy

It's kind of a paradox though, it's hard to have real passionate interests when you've never been out of school, traveled, lived.
I don't think that anybody can reliably match all 31 of those colors, particularly when the context changes from similar shades to white. Especially for the big slices, the name needs to be in the slice, not at the side of the chart. The smaller slices can have the names printed in the callout labels along with the percentages.
Having difficulty deciding if that page is a joke from AOL.

The emphasis with the red squares is a little much (see this one: http://help.aol.com/Platform/Publishing/images/insert_cd_cd_...)
Or even sooner, so they don't drag down the averages.
This is one of my pet peeves so I need to elaborate a bit.

In our jurisdiction, renters have some decent protections which make it a pain in the ass to evict them (as it should be). Unfortunately, because of the ridiculous lawyer fees everybody but the lawyers lose. By the time a renter reaches eviction they have racked up so many lawyer fees that even if they can now pay rent they won't be out of the hole. Their credit is going to be ruined anyway so they skip out and don't bother paying what they owe to the landlord. So now the renter has screwed up credit and loses their home, and the landlord has an empty apt, loses out on rent and lawyer fees while the renter could have paid off the debt!

In other words, the lawyers charge so much they make the law irrelevant. No one wants to get them involved at all. There are many people in my life I love who happen to be lawyers, but there are lawyer jokes for a reason.
This story just got picked up by Daring Fireball and ZDNet.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/09/30/blackberry-playb...

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/blackberry-playbook-ill-believ...
This came up a couple days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1736166
Nice effort! Though, it seems like this extension's functionality greatly overlaps that of StayFocusd's (1). Is there any "killer" feature to get me (and other StayFocusd users) to switch over?

(1) https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/laankejkbhbdhmip...
كشف الاختراق والتلغيم بإحتراف وتدمير ألمخترق
كشف الاختراق والتلغيم بإحتراف وتدمير ألمخترق
الحماية من الاختراق و كشف الدمج والتلغيم
I've seen that picture before, and it's pretty indicative of its lower settings, yes. And I agree - the sharper & more accurate edges of 2000 make the less detailed / smoother textured interiors look disproportionately worse.
I write a lot more and I read about more diverse subjects.
Probably because of the analytics -- if you create a short URL and post it somewhere, you want to know how many people (etc.) clicked your link, not how many people clicked any link that goes to the same place through the shortener.
Ask HN: Size of a program as a measure of simplicity?
In this article http://plus.maths.org/issue37/features/omega/index.html Gregory Chaitin says that "... simplicity — or lack of it — [of scientific law] is reflected in the length of the program."

Since "the size of a computer program is the number of "bits" it contains"; Chaitin measures simplicity with the number of bits in a program.

This doesn't sound right to me. All "hello world" programs achieve the same result; but all "hello world" programs do not have the same number of bits; as far as I know.

Anyone care to comment?
"It's not about the degree: it's about what you can get out of the university while disguised as a student."

Could you elaborate?
Thanks! That answers the question about the startups, but what about your view on the subject? Do you think it's generally better for startups to raise if they can get good terms?
Ask HN: Did Data Marketplace flop?
First off, I apologize if this is an inappropriate post and will gladly remove it if I'm breaking the guidelines. Long time lurker, I've been a little post-shy. Data Marketplace was YC funded, so I thought I'd ask here.

I was pretty excited about Data Marketplace when I first heard about it on HN. I posted a couple of datasets and check it weekly to see if there's any interesting requests. Over the last couple of weeks, I've been unable to reply to requests due to Internal Server Errors and as of this posting, I can't get to the site at all. Additionally, their Twitter account hasn't been updated since April 5th.

I think they have a good product set up and was hoping they'd succeed. Are they just slowing down or have they thrown in the towel?
http://plus.maths.org/issue37/features/omega/index.html
"They" as in Scheme.
Regardless of whether they're correct about it lowering traffic or not, I strongly dislike the use of the word "steal" here. To me that signifies a strange sense of entitlement; the search results are not "yours" and you don't have a God-given right to them, so Google cannot steal them from you. You might as well claim that "I'm Feeling Lucky" steals your search results because users never see any mention of your site if you're in second place, or that showing 10 results per page is unfair to those in 11th place.

I wonder a little if this reflects a general debasement of the word "steal". Some years ago it clearly referred to taking physical property, but maybe the smear campaigns from the music / movie industry have successfully extended the scope of the word to include things like this.
I think that's a natural course of action for people comfortable with formal semantics of languages: "implement it, or implement something in it" is an excellent way to learn.

OTOH, one gets a lopsided view of the language. I have been learning Java for the last 1.5 months, most of it hacking on ABCL. I have got a good understanding of the runtime system, reflection, class-loading, security and the type-system. But I still look up primitive stuff like string manipulation and file I/O operations.

I miss Lisp a lot, but Java makes up in platform what it lacks as a language. You can use class instrumentation libraries to generate and manipulate code at run time. It's well worth tolerating, at least until I know enough of it to wrap the libraries I need to use from ABCL.

Eclipse is nice once you ditch the mouse and install the Emacs bindings plugin.
As I posted in his comments section:

<em>And could exist again.</em>

I hope it does.

Still, this reminds me of Joel Spolsky's <a href="http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html>Bl... and the 80/20 myth</a>. The reason this computer doesn't exist is because people don't want it—or, to be more precise, they don't want to make the trade-offs it implies in sufficient numbers for there to be a market for such a computer.

Nothing is stopping someone from making a stripped-down version of, say, Linux that will boot "into a graphical everything-visible-and-modifiable programming environment, the most expressive ever created faster than the latter boots into its syrupy imponade hell." But most people evidently prefer the features that modern OSes and programs offer. Or, rather, they prefer that modern OSes support THEIR pet feature and make everything as easy to accomplish as possible at the expense of some speed.
Must Have Apps for My Droid X
Seriously, no URL shorteners on HN -- even Google's.
What you say doesn't prove that is horrible as a photo site. Yes, you're right, exploring through 'ratings' often leads to garbage if one has some better taste in photography, as in most of photo rankings and contests on the web. That doesn't mean that it doesn't meet it's purpose as a photo sharing website. Also, besides it's native explore/search functions there are tools around flickr where you can explore photos through different parameters, try f.ex. using my buddy's tool http://fffflckr.com/ it grabs 'favorites of your favorites', it's quite handy and it's easier to find sth you probably will like.

I've used their API many times for some experiments, and if you feel you got a way to find great content, it'll be probably very easy to build a tool for that. That's also a great advantage of flickr.
It turns out you can give a fairly precise answer to that question: http://paulgraham.com/equity.html
In addition, Android Market users from 32 countries will be able to buy apps, with the addition of Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Israel, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Sweden, and Taiwan

So that means developers from these countries still cannot sell paid apps? Can anyone throw some light on this.
Compared to the size of the government, or even just the deficit, it's comparatively minor. By your numbers.
To be honest I wasn't aware that this existed. It seems that a lot of the stuff they are down is all the stuff I had planned so its going to be back to the drawing board to come up with ideas that will make this plugin a contender to this one. Currently DistractionBlocker is very much a work in progress and hopefully it will continue to grow with feedback from the people that use it.
But the US government may still be guaranteeing a lot of their assets, in particular troubled mortgages and other toxic assets that might not be gone from their books.

In 2008, this guarantee was for $306 billion.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a...
Not testing, rolling it out as a keyboard navigation feature indicator, enabled by default since couple days ago:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/fly-through-your-inst...
Awesome feedback. I know the over all design (including the icon) needs a lot of work, and an upcoming update should include that. In this update I will work on the automatic disappear.

The refresh thing has to do with the way chrome handles this event. I'm working on a work around for it right now.
By the time the government exits all the ownership stakes acquired by the bailouts -- banking industry, auto industry etc. -- there could be 100 billion plus in profits. That should go directly and immediately to more economic stimulus, to further counteract the economic damage caused in the first place.
And then he walked it back - the way I saw that conversation was Ryan walking his statements back and Krugman trying to pin him to them, or, if you'd prefer, exaggerating them -- that's just more support for "noone will touch SS".

If Ryan came out swinging and saying "YEAH i want to dismantle SS", that'd be different.
I agree, I would never forget a book after only a month. I know that I have an above-average memory but can't imagine that most people would forget them in such a short time.

If people did, the literature section of the average pub quiz would be a heck of a lot harder than they are now :)
Awesome set of pictures. I can live with the squares of WebP better than the hugely-visible gradients of JPEG, methinks. Subjectively, I'd say those images show it to be definitely superior, by a pretty large margin.

Very impressive. I can easily live with the 2x decode / 8x encode with those results.

edit: though, if there's no alpha capabilities, count me out. Yes, that's my deciding factor.
Steam adds in-game micropayments with Steam Wallet
"These sorts of numerical tricks would never be tolerated if a private firm was perpetrating them."

You wrote that with a straight face?
Here's a link to the full text of the bill:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=s111-3804

I'm surprised this submission doesn't have more upvotes. It seems like I constantly see Net Neutrality being debated all over the tech community but this bill seems much more insidious than any of the possible evils that Net Neutrality supporters suggest.

From my understanding, a simple decision by a judge can knock an entire website offline. The criteria to be blocked is that the sole purpose of the website is to infringe on copyright. If the domain is registered in the US, then the domain registrar is required to remove access to the domain. If the domain is registered outside of the US, then ISPs and other businesses, including financial services and ad services are required to block/prevent the website from operating (I'm thinking this will greatly affect PayPal and Google Adsense).

In my opinion, this bill would set a dangerous precedent for the US government to be able to block any website. I could see cases where large entertainment companies would bring lawsuits against small web startups in places where the courts would favorably lean in their direction (think patent cases in East Texas).

This hits personally because I run a website that helps independent artists sell their music online. I can't really see any possibility of us being dragged into court on copyright infringement claims, but I do know we have to deal with scammers on the site frequently. It's disturbing that if this bill is passed a dispute over copyright infringement has the possibility of shutting down the entire site (which would have the ironic side effect of harming a lot of independent artists who then would have no way of contacting us online to figure out how to get paid).
Speaking of which, I was sad to notice that www.divvyshot.com just forwards to FB.
I was skimming through Peter Cochrane's 108 Tips for Time Travellers, a book from 1997/1998 this week. In it, he complains that his computing power has gone from 4Mhz to 40Mhz and word processors have slowed even then, and in future we'll need supercomputers to write letters.
What year is this guy living in?

I can't remember the last time I noticed my UI hanging. Maybe once or twice when I had a macbook, but certainly not in the past year.
My apologies. I wasn't aware that this was frowned upon. I will keep it in mind for the future.
Gah! No alpha? Count me out. The web NEEDS alpha channels. I can't count the number of hacks I've seen to get around the lack of an alpha channel in preferred-format-X.
Nopes - even though the company I left (Netflix) is rocking now :)
The problem with bloatware is not how much HDD it costs, but how much it slows things down. Let's say MS sold a copy of windows that wasted 60 fewer seconds of each day. For the average developer that adds up to far more than the cost of windows over the lifetime of the computer.

PS: Using a SSD on a high end machine with plenty of RAM simulates what a low bloat system could provide. It might cost more, but it really does pay for it's self fairly quickly.
How “Rejection Therapy – The Game” is Like Spetznaz Training
If you take jpegs from old cameras and recompress them into jpeg, you can get a remarkable reduction in storage. ... But I can't tell whether they even used such a "recompression to jpeg" control case in coming up with the 39% figure.
Missing option: Exercise.

I bought a recumbent stationary bike at a yard sale for about $70. It's quiet enough to not annoy other TV watchers, relatively comfortable, and it's low to the ground so you don't have to adjust the height of the TV.
A Huge Mistake Startups Make - we are the x of/for the y