skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Should I drop my engineering degree?
I'm currently slated to finish my college education with a degree in Electrical Engineering (EE). I've been planning on being an engineer for many years now, but I recently took a very hard look at the engineering class schedule... it's terrible; nothing looks interesting.

With that in mind, I'm seriously considering switching to a dual major in math and psychology (weird, eh?).

The major advantage of engineering for me, at this point, is job security -- I will almost certainly get a reasonably interesting and decently-well-paying job (right?)

Does anyone have any experience with math or psych degrees and the related job markets? Does getting an engineering degree really help that much with getting a job? How many people with engineering degrees are actually engineers?
When I developed i.three.com.au for my former employer, I would have loved to have Zepto.js...

It's an iPhone and Android only website. Would have been perfect!

Zepto.js and jQueryMobile have different purposes, just deal with it.
Tons! Just emailed you. Would love to show a fellow HN'er some of the goods that this place has to offer. Just moved here a few months ago and loving every minute of it :)
They don't give it in Joules because I have no way of understanding how many Joules it takes to run my 17W bulb for two hours per day - but I do understand rather easily how many kWh/day that comes to. So while kWh/day may be confusing from the standpoint of relating it to the amount of coal burned, in point of fact it is the natural unit to use when discussing consumption.
I think this article applies to people who have dream jobs which are drastically different from their 9 to 5. I think most people here build technology products for a living and aspire to build even bigger, better, more fulfilling products as their dream job.

Overall, I feel my ventures in tech entrepreneurship grant me unique experiences that are infinitely more valuable to my career than sitting at my desk completing bug fixes and and ad hoc features.
Assuming the logo is one solid single color design (like the ones I included in my original post) - nothing. I just send it right to the cutter in eps format and it's done. I consider a solid design one that may have several separate shapes and text but they are all unified into one "shape area" ie - if I change the color of one piece of the design, the rest follows.

If the logo has overlapping shapes and things like that, I'd have to work some Illustrator magic (merge, add to shape area, remove from shape area, expand), but it's not really a problem. Hope that clarifies things!
Yeah, many of my friends liked union jack's a lot. I avoid strip clubs, so I can't personally recommend.
about 18hrs here ;)
Reddit Reached a half million dollars in donations for Donorschoose
The Portland Saturday Market has some nice arts and crafts, and it's a nice place to hang out by the waterfront. It has a nice food court as well, good food and variety.

http://www.portlandsaturdaymarket.com/

Most of the rest seems to have been covered, enjoy your trip!
Most every company will take the data they have on hand into account, but some companies are much, much better at funnelling quality information back to themselves than others.

A Compal laptop doesn't have the benefit of having a lot of data from previous models incorporated into its design, because sales, support, and repair takes place at 3 or 4 levels of indirection.
Technically, no, dynamic programming just means solving smaller problems as part of a larger problem.

eg. dykstras algorithm for a shortest path, or a merge sort.

I think you're thinking of dynamic typing, which .NET and F# have, kinda, (via dynamic method invocation). In F# to invoke a method dynamically use the ? operator.

x.Bar() # static call
x?Bar() # dynamic call

in C# to do a dynamic call cast the object to Dynamic.

((Dynamic)x).Bar(); // dynamic call
((IFoo)x).Bar(); // static call

Also, you can do multiple inheritance in a static language, C++ as an example.
Just because 75% of people below the poverty line were not employed for half the year...

Go read the first 3 sentences of the report. That includes clauses inside parenthesis.
Facebook Announces Friendship Pages That Show Friends’ Mutual Content
Whitepaper – How much should Android, BlackBerry, iPhone app development cost?
So you're saying that wild claims on the Internet in a given field mean that that entire field is purely scammerific? You must have a difficult life.
What is the benefit to a VC firm to be on Sand Hill Road?
Some stats from reddit comments thread:

- 500k reached in 46 days!
- Over 130k raised in the first 24 hours
- Over $200k raised in the first 48 hours
- Average donation size - $48.98
- Previous donation record from a group - $400,320
- An average of $10,420.87 raised per day.
I bought Land of Lisp as soon as I became aware of it. Every time I hear a truck out front I think, its here. Looking forward to total Common Lisp immersion. Thanks for all of your contributions past and present to the Lisp community and of course for the book.
Thank you for your answer, I've never heard of it. I'll order it tomorrow. It seems that this could be a good start!
Working in tech and retail showed me this. I decided to make it up to the world in general, in a small way.

So now, every christmas, I find some of the services I use (like my bank, full of VERY helpful, friendly people) who have call centres active on Christmas day, and I ring them and say thanks and Merry Christmas.

The only downside is occasionally someone will cry because a random stranger wished them a Merry Christmas because they're at work.
I signed up yesterday for a friend of mine and when I saw the cheapest plan at $49.95 I just grabbed the free one and upgraded to the $24 plan.

I thought it was a glitch in the pricing screen (and my friend still thinks I am seeing things).
Just figured that out, and added to the about field. Thanks :)
I think it's pretty well accepted that Math Major + Demonstrable Aptitude in Field > Major in Field

for pretty much all relevant fields. Psych degrees are worthless (except of course the raw value of the knowledge you gain from going through the process.)
I don't get the impression that the YCombinator app is one that needs coaching for. Questions are straightforward, answers should be too. This isn't a college app.
Ask HN: Rate my startup.  I need a name
http://searchstream.co/

this is a site that prompts people to complete a sentence. hopefully will generate memes.

don't let the name fool you, has nothing to do with search... i plan to change the name. any ideas?
"from the schools' point of view, individual gifts are literally worthless"

What the schools want is for alumni to always be giving. Not dissimilar from venture funding, they really care about the tiny fraction of alumni who hit it big, and give tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. It's easier to get the few rich alumni to give if everyone's in the habit of giving.
clickable http://searchstream.co
How to Interview a Designer
How To Pitch A VC: Don’t Forget The Warm & Fuzzy
I believe he was being sincere. Perhaps something a bit more analytical and introspective with regards to the company?
Ask HN: What to do in Poitiers, France?
I will be at the Make Art festival (makeart.goto10.org) in Poitiers, France next week. Any one around? Recommendations for food and things to do solicited.
No ploy. It's straightforward: We're testing the plan mix, the number of plans on the sign up page, and the design of the sign up chart. All the prices remain the same.
When tollbooths are feasible, roads are indeed a private good. You are indeed correct that many of the intermediate goods in providing a public good are private goods when they are sold.

I'm not sure what this has to do with anything, unless you are discussing something silly like the government buying tanks and giving them to private individuals. There are gray areas, but I think the biggies in the federal budget are pretty clear.
Free plan isn't displayed, but available at
https://signup.37signals.com/basecamp/Free/signup/new
> "people below the poverty line in the US consume extremely low quality food."

Is that because they can't afford medium-quality food, or because they're choosing to buy substandard food anyway?

I've gone shopping with people way below the poverty line; in every instance, they spent as much as I did for a similar time period, at the same quality of store, and yet came out with far crappier food. I don't know if my experience is typical, but I find it hard to believe, given the prices on various types of healthy and unhealthy foods, that "eating low quality food" is a result of lack of money.
LCD Soundsystem on failure and laziness
This is pretty interesting. Do they ever convert BitCoins back to fiat money or precious metals at some point? Well I guess I can research this myself, I did come across BitCoins before. Fancy idea of backing currency by CPU power rather than a tangible, durable, universally accepted store-of-value but it's a step forward from fiat currency that is backed by the decree of Heli Ben and the gunned power of a state to tax future production...

The notion of bitcoin being backed by CPU mining or even GPU mining is a fallacious notion. CPU and GPU are used to mine bitcoins and create bitcoin blocks, nothing more.

Every currency will probably have an exchange market. Bitcoin is no different. People have brought pecious metals with bitcoins, as well USD. However, USD are usually prefixed with a service such as Paypal USD and MtGox USD, and so on because of additional monetary property that the service provider imbues to it. Thus, Paypal accounts are considered risky because of chargeback.

Sounds like there is a market in there for mutually-trusted middlemen acting as, well, "trustees" or escrow services? Or is that built into BitCoin already. Of course if the scam only materializes after the transaction was already completed to mutual consent, that's a different matter. But what kinds of fraud are happening there?

The trust network is mostly around the bitcoin forum. There has been talk of creating reputation systems of some kind but nothing of substance come out yet. Most frauds are usually the drive-by scams type of frauds. However, the other concerns is when escrow failed to do their job or simply disappear. There may be no intent of fraud involved, but people lose their money all the same.
Thirding http://calagator.org/ Specifically, PDX Hackathon is a pretty good time and happens every Thursday night at the Luckly Lab on SE Hawthorne. Show up, hack on a project, talk with other hackers about whatever.
To add, none of the prices have changed. The make up of the plans, and the prices of the plans, are the same as they were before the experiment.

The experiment is in design, layout, suggestion, and reducing the number of plans shown at sign up to reduce confusion.
I was a math major for a while in school but moved over to economics (still math intensive, lot more job security). An EE major is really impressive, so if you can stick it out, I might just do it. It makes you very versatile and a very desirable candidate.

Also, if you are looking to connect with employers and are still a college student, check out my startup: CollegeJobConnect.
Nuevo fallo de 0-day en Flash Player
It's not about perfection, it's about finding someone who's right for you.
I was expecting an article about how people who ask instead of just taking end up "small"
my father was one of those guys for this area, and he didn't work for dell
How easy it is to keep in touch with non-parent friends depends largely on their tolerance for sleep-deprived conversations about poo :-).
It doesn't sound deliberate, but many pricing discrimination schemes work exactly like this: For someone who can afford it and is in a hurry, they pay $x. For people who are unwilling to 'flop' their chequebook, you give them the free option and offer an upgrade that is $(x/2).

Neatly captures the surplus while hiding the $(x/2) price from people willing to pay $x when they sign up.
> I want discussion, reason, and persuasion to be used to
> solve society's ills; you want the gun.

What do you do with criminals in your utopia? Discuss their crimes with them and persuade them to pay restitution?
& NewLISP !
I guess one question is whether the bulk of the illegal immigrants in Arizona at any one time are using it as a residence or just passing through. This would definitely make it less attractive as a residence, but its advantages for transit are considerable.

The prison business has had some curious effects elsewhere a judge went to jail up around Scranton for abusing his power to send kids to jail for offenses that ordinarily might've rated probation before judgment; he was compensated by the company that ran juvenile prisons up there.
OH MY GOD! :D thank you so much :)!

I mean that.

I've been working all day and have just uploaded a whack of improvements

- categories now implemented
- adsense moved around (hopefully) optimized a bit for clickyness

I've actually taken some ads off the page - but I'm really interested in finding more content. At the moment, I've just been using http://addictinggames.com (bless him, plug plug)

But more sites and content will make my place much better. I'm especially in love with embeddable!

I've been going at it solid since my OP without a break - so I've got to step away for a little - but I'll definitely take advantage of this :)
So. Torn.

Lisp is awesome, kudos for realizing this and falling in love with it.

A bit weird to write a story about the awesome new language you learned, and focus on how hard you can slam the doors on ever learning again.
Limits make everything more fun!

I have this thing I call the Nintendo Theory(tm). Nintendo was great at producing games that were simple, responsive, and had endearing characters. Companies like Microsoft and Sony pursue complex graphics and complex controls and they make amazing feats of technical engineering but if you ask people what games they absolutely love, a lot of them will say they love the old Nintendo stuff.

I try to apply Nintendo's approach when I'm thinking about and designing the user interface for my app.

I suck at Mario, by the way, but I love it.
Oops, I almost forgot. I'd like to mention "Japan Night" on Mon, Nov 8 at Portland State University's Smith ballroom. It's a big annual event put on by the Japanese Student Society. I think tickets are $10 for non-students. Support the local university students! (Disclosure: I am tangentially involved in the event, so I feel the need to advertise it.)
I didn't notice the [deleted] and it made sense to me :-) Obviously, I haven't got any wiser.

(I do think I try harder not to be unwise, though ...)
Why not just write it in C#.
My team is working on this product:http://crm.dynamics.com/online/

We're massively ramping up as we get closer to our 2011 Q1 RTW ship dates, and the product is way more polished and functionally relevant than our competitors. Heck, I even think our marketing team has bought some massive advertising on money.cnn.com

We're very excited.
yikes! thanks for this comment.

I'd actually just announced the earnings (as I wanted to share) - but my ignorance of their policy in this respect has given way to caution.

I've deleted the post where I say the exact $ value of the earnings and instead will just say that it's managed to buy a pizza dinner.
I'm not that thrilled with yet more specific syntax for one feature. F#'s approach of having a simple core that can be extended in-language (versus only via the compiler with new syntax) seems like a much more elegant approach.

But it's nice that async code in C# won't be as painful as it is today.
Good points. A question is how long Windows and Office will remain cash cows for Microsoft?

1. One future state is that most people transition from desktop computers to smartphones, tablets, etc. We then dock these devices for doing intensive work.

2. Another possibility is that we have smartphones and tablets, but transition from desktops and laptops to thinner laptops (e.g., netbooks, new Macbook Air, etc).

The issue for Microsoft and others is then - what operating system and office software becomes the standard in this future computing environment: Windows and Office, Android/Chrome and Google Docs, Apple's iOS and iWork, or some other solution (e.g., OpenOffice)?
Tongue in cheek:

The strip joints there have quite a reputation.
I was being serious... sorry, I suppose I should have used searchyc.
I visited earlier this year and here were my highlights (YMMV):

- Fuller's Diner
- Powell's Books and Technical books -- a few blocks from each other IIRC
- Pearl district in general
- Tender Loving Empire (I went to the SW 10th St one)
- Sweet Masterpiece (awesome chocolate + wine/coffee pairings!)
- Saturday (weekend) market
- OMSI (first time in a planetarium since the mid-90s)
- Portland Aeriel Tram
- Portland Art Museum
- Japanese and Rose Gardens, Oregon Zoo
How can someone get to this if they don't know the URL?
Benjamin Sergeant liked this. (sorry :]
i have been loving lcd soundsystem lately.

inspirational to hear how poorly he feels he did during his early adult life. i've been doing music for years too, luckily for me not my main focus.

nicely put contrasting lazy vs. scared.

side note, i love that he turned down a job to write for seinfeld.
Voodoo donut!
Thanks. In terms of everything else, I admit it's poor. I cranked it out quickly in fireworks and agree.

I like the colors - but the bevel is low quality. I'll have to make an effort on the logo in round 2. :)
What's your favorite app of all time?
Forgive me HN vets, but haven't seen this topic lately. I was wondering what apps people loved to use the most, thought it would be a fun discussion.

iTunes blew my mind. I spent 3 days in college getting all my bootlegged mp3s set up. iTunes was so powerful and intuitive compared to everything else I was aware of at the time. It got me thinking about why some things are great while other things suck.
Nice! I have a bit of a Japan connection myself. If you're up for a beer afterwards, I'm buying.
Or as Heinlein puts it:

Happiness lies in being privileged to work hard for long hours in doing whatever you think is worth doing. One man may find happiness in supporting a wife and children. And another may find it in robbing banks. Still another may labor mightily for years in pursuing pure research with no discernible results.

Note the individual and subjective nature of each case. No two are alike and there is no reason to expect them to be. Each man or woman must find for himself or herself that occupation in which hard work and long hours make him or her happy. Contrariwise, if you are looking for shorter hours and longer vacations and early retirement, you are in the wrong job. Perhaps you need to take up bank robbing. Or geeking in a sideshow. Or even politics.

Source: Jubal Harshaw in To Sail Beyond the Sunset
Law grads with time on their hands: a guide to suing Santa Claus
Before my long-winded reply: I am in North Portland and haven't had a decent technical conversation for a while, so hit me up if you want to grab a beer and nerd out, or possible go climbing weather permitted. cullen@ridewithgps.com

A huge part of Portland is the beer, and there are a few different styles of brewpubs. The first I'll address is the style I like the least, which are the annexes of larger distributors. These include Rogue, Widmer, Bridgeport etc. They don't have any charm to them, they are just restaurants attached to a beer label, and there is better beer to be had. Also, McMenamins has cool locations but their beer sucks and so does their food, prices and service. If you like drinking in cool buildings (old church, old elementary school with lots of bars inside) then check them out, otherwise don't bother. If you are going to go to a McMenamins, make sure it's the Kennedy School, since that one offers the most redemption. As far as the good places to go: Hopworks makes damn good pizza and damn good beer. Their red and their IPA are both fantastic, and the bar is really freaking cool. Lucky Lab is another place with good beer, but their vibe is completely different - if you don't like dogs and a big open cafeteria style game room, then don't bother. Right now my favourite place to grab a beer is the Fifth Quadrant (a Lompoc brewery location) - they have the best burger I have yet had in Portland, and Tuesdays they offer $2.50 pints. Their c-note IPA is great! Haven't had a bad server yet, which is saying something.

Unless you want a seedy experience, avoid the strip clubs. I am not a fan but have been to a couple over the years. I think it takes a certain person, and I can say it's easy to ignore someone when they say "but this one is really good!" - there's nothing special about portland strip clubs except the sheer number of them, so unless it's your thing don't bother.

Some of the best things about portland have nothing to do with portland itself, but rather the proximity of cool shit nearby. The gorge is gorgeous (haha), lots of cool stuff around mount hood as well. The coast is something else - if you haven't been to a northwest coast, it's a must. Don't expect nice weather and fun, but rather intense scenery, weather and wind. Head straight to either Astoria (see the Goonies house), or Manzanita for a cool small beach town feel.

If you are a rock climber, there are cool things to climb within a reasonable distance. I am happy to get some climbing in if you have some experience and want to tie into a rope, though I can't promise nice weather or warm hands.

Something that could be fun for around portland is one of the many pedicab routes offered. You can get a basic tour, or they have specialty tours going on for things like whiskey tasting among others. http://pdxpedicab.com/ and look for their pub tour and distillery tour.
Just emailed back - looking forward to meeting you!
"Trial and error. Give him or her a UI component to redesign, or present a problem you’ve been facing and ask for some ideas on how to solve it."

Asking for ideas is cool. But I don't personally agree with having to re-design something on the fly for them. If I don't come up with the ideal solution in a short time, I don't think it should make-or-break the job. Design needs time, just as much as any other craft.

Actually, I remember one company offered to interview me after viewing my portfolio. They asked me to re-design a news website as a test. Since they are a really big firm and well-known agency, I did it. After seeing two iterations, they rejected me.

I eventually got a job at another well known agency (without having to do any tests). Funnily enough, the news agency whose website I had re-designed in that previous interview test signed up with the agency I was currently working with. Thus, in the end, I ended up actually doing the real work.
>Everything is free downtown in the fareless square.

Sadly, not anymore. "Free Rail Zone" is the Newspeak for Fareless Square. Buses now cost you.
I agree with you that this can be a great channel for local businesses who want to sell online.

However, I see a couple of potential issues with this approach.

1) Merchants can offer probably a 5 - 10 % discount (acquisition costs shifted to discounts), but beyond that I doubt if can be sustained. Margins in most local businesses are not that big. So, it'd be hard for a restaurant to do a 50% discounted deal for like a month or so.

2) Another potential problem of this approach - how many users will check each individual merchants store ? People flock to Groupon because there's a new deal every day. Or in other words, the novelty factor keeps things fresh and keeps people coming back. If a merchant is offering the same deal for 6 months via the store, it might not be a big draw for users. This will be completely contrary to the notion of scarcity and novelty that make groupon's a deal a day model so successful.
I hope the convergence goes into the right direction, then.
Sweet! Just emailed you.