skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Free College Hack:

In high school, I had a rough time with family stuff and my grades started to slack. I knew that getting a scholarship would be crucial if I wanted to go to college in the future. However, my grades simply weren't going to cut it for the Florida Lottery Bright Futures scholarship. I needed a 3.5+ GPA, a 1250+ SAT score, and 60 hours of community service in order to get their best 100% scholarship.

At the rate I was going, my GPA wouldn't be near that.

So I did some research, and I found out that the Bright Futures Scholarship was also applicable to home schooled students. Intrigued, I researched a bit into what made up a home schooled student's GPA.

I found a legal loophole here. One of the ways that the State of Florida graded home schooled students was by letting them talk to a psychologist. The psychologist said you were performing at a grade level, and you graduated. Grades were simply "made up".

So I dropped out of high school end of sophomore year, and created my own home schooled program. Which basically consisted of building a boat, programming, and volunteering at ECHO (echonet.org)

In dropping out, I basically had two years to practice taking the SAT's in order to get above a 1270. I scored a 1280 and got a 100% free ride into any State school.

But by the time I'd spent 2 years out of the educational system, I'd decided a year of living in the rain forest would be better than partying at school. So I turned down the scholarship and moved to the Panamanian rain forest instead.
Well if that guy ever applies for YC he'll sure have a good answer to the "hacking a system" question.
Thanks Joseph! We haven't set up anything, since we're waiting for the equipment to arrive (and judging by ETA it will be another month or so, sigh).

I'm doing this as a favor to my friends, since I have experience with live TV (I direct live TV and high profile reality shows), so I'll set them up with nice lighting, camera angles, etc. I was looking either vidblaster or wirecast and outputing through flash encoder - SD video, I don't think equipment will be good enough for HD (especially cameras).

I'll give Justin.tv a go first then - basically I was in a dark, since there is a LOT of FUD out there (obviously, since you say otherwise) - about low quality (probably bitrate) of justin.tv streams.

Thanks again!
I don't think thats going to happen soon. Adopting open source is probably a matter of pride for MS, else they would have already included Python/Perl in Windows
During the summer after my first year of college (early 90s), I did temp work for a company finding comps for mortgage applications. Searching was slow, but printing was even slower. I installed a print spooler so I could get more done and not stress. The higher ups were impressed with my productivity and wanted me to quit school and go full-time, which I declined. Some full time peers were jealous, realized what I did and complained to the IT department. I was let go for installing unauthorized software when the real issue was setting a higher bar for performance.
Facebook sues sex site “Faceporn”
Is Java a good choice to develop new apps? Or is it a dead-walking language?
Geez, awesome story. How was the rain forest? Motivation for moving there? Do you regret turning down the scholarship?
Google Analytics is the Excel of metrics: it can be used to do all sorts of things. That doesn't mean it is always the best choice.
Actually there was one other outcome possible if the cars made contact at a wrong angle (which was not that probable since the pickup was against a barrier and the engineers car was driving straight in the lane): The pickup would have pushed against the barrier some more that it would have probably stopped the car or at least reduce the speed at which it was traveling, while at the same time pushing the car in front to the opposite side, maybe making spin in place. If things went wrong in this situation at worse he'd have a car in a worse state and the man in the pickup could have died if the barrier made him topple over. The probability of the pick-up going into traffic again (which would make the car in front collide with the barrier, which could be fatal) was really small... hell uuid duplicate probability small at that.
this is the best Social Engineering hack i have ever heard of.
??
Could you tell me how to do that sync stuff and get pro unlimited? I'm making a website with dropbox for downloads and already made a dropbox account. Could anyone please tell me how to do that sync unlimited stuff? TY.
There's a good amount of fear mongering going on here. I've been using App Engine+Python exclusively for side projects since its release and never run into these problems.
As someone who is reading (and practicing) about story structures and screenplays a lot for the last year or so, I can see where you are coming from with that.

Also, it's a really tough job you have. Props.
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If my math is right, the kinentic energy of 2 ton vehicle going 40 MPH is roughly equivalent to 70kg of TNT.

That's the kind of fire this guy was playing with, for his life, the life of his family, the life of the other driver and all the bystanders.

Not to understate his heroism, but had this gone horribly wrong he'd probably be a Darwin award candidate.
http://github.com/josegonzalez/git-php

Crappy re-implementation of git-web in php. Yes, I realize it looks like github. Yes, I realize the code is from various existing frameworks/blogs. But git internals are so cool!
good question.

a compact answer to that question could be either

"yeah, the market is limited to those who have already discovered the gains in productivity by using multiple screens and are addicted to screen space"

or

"Well there is research that supports that increased screen space increases productivity and reduces fatigue, now its a matter of people discovering it because of an affordable and light enough as a magazine solution"
But you can nest function definitions, so in practice the lack of a multi line lambda just means just prior to where you use it you'd just have a "def f ...".
They're not evil. Just the root of it.
I would say there's an enormous bias, (ycxxx) in the title gets a lot of early upvotes. Not to mention the obsession with PG - even his tweets get submitted, and fast.

But those stories aren't that frequent and once they get their friends' votes they're competing on a pretty level playing field ... if the submission's not genuinely interesting it won't last.
They may need it, but I think the world would be a better place if they never find it.
I just remember being struck by how fast Google was. I literally couldn't believe it was possible to search an index that size in less time than it took to load most static pages.
Are these all graduates of US colleges? I can't find confirmation either way, but it's worth keeping in mind that college degrees from many countries are not comparable to US.
Reminds me of one summer day when it was about 32°C outside, I came home in the afternoon and decided to kick back and placed my wallet, keys and phone on my desk. Though a while later I went to put something in the recycling bin just outside our backdoor and just before it slammed shut I realised it was locked though it was too late. I definitely didn't want to be stuck outside waiting for someone else to come home.

We had a new evaporative cooling system which means you have to have a few windows open, though they were all locked open a jar. It was certainly frustrating being able to feel the nice cool air flowing out of the window onto my face and it wasn't enough in the heat.

I tried reaching through the window with various instruments such as bamboo sticks, broom handles, etc. that we had lying around but nothing was long enough to reach my keys. I tried a piece of plank but not only was it too short but I wouldn't have been able to manoeuvre it anyway. At that point I was thinking I was doomed. Fortunately we had a new kitchen ceiling put in and it suddenly occurred to me that we had some 5m long pieces of ceiling pine timber on the front verandah.

I lugged one around to my bedroom window and the length of pine was not only long enough but thinner and far more flexible than the plank. I was able to drag the keys off my desk and across the floor near the window. Then used a bamboo stick to fish them out from there.

I was probably stuck outside for 30-40 minutes in the end, though it was a good several hours before anyone else came home.
We have one on campus with a couch.
Sysadmins: how to make the programmers love you
The problem with Red Hat is it's stuck on Python 2.4. Altho' the hassle of persuading the SAs to install ActiveState too was what led me to OCaml, so it's not all bad :-D
Pay no attention to the code behind the curtain: the tech behind tldr.it
Cap your download speed. BW per month you want / time online = new download speed. Just an idea.
We had a weekly biology quiz that was randomly generated from a set of questions, but would save your progress. However, it gave you the answers to the questions you got wrong in real time, but it would only send your answers at the end of the quiz.

So all you had to do was get the first question right (if you didn't save 1 answer, it would generate a new quiz for you), exit the quiz, then reopen it and collect all the answers to the quiz. Then before exiting the quiz, disconnect from the internet. When you opened it up again you'd fill in questions 2-10 with the correct answers.
I sometimes love humanity :)
Well done! This is the no-tech version of what the shoe computers were trying to do ... with a lot fewer shocks :-)
What the heck did we convict Aldrich Ames for?

I assume that you convicted him for breaking the law. Moral liability and legal liability are two orthogonal things.
These numbers look right. For low-end VPSs, I've seen a rule of thumb of 4-5 VMs per core. Amazon's Compute Units are probably close to (but not quite) 1 core/hour. Since they later launched micro instances, even one core must have been overkill for many customers.
I like the first half of your comment. The second half, though -

> On the other hand by hastening the end of the war and preventing future wars (by informing the public of the horrors), the upside is solid.

Letting Iraq break into regional sectarian rule would be a disaster. Foreign forces need to be there until locally trained police and military forces are able to keep rule of law in Iraq. Letting the place become a failed state would be very bad for all parties involved from almost all perspectives - it would probably cost more American money and lives in the long run [1], and certainly would result in oppression, violence, and misery for Iraqis.

[1] If a country gets a reputation for withdrawing under pressure if wars aren't won fast, that encourages enemies during a conflict to fight a slow war of attrition, which is the bloodiest, nastiest, most expensive kind of war. Now, the response to this might be "well, America shouldn't fight wars any more then!" - but, realistically looking at America's history and demographics, I would bet on continuing to have an armed conflict every 10-20 years or so. Those will become nastier and more drawn out if the United States gets a reputation for withdrawing if an insurgency causes problems long enough.
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Bizzybe - http://bizzybe.com/

This is my first project using Web.py. I wanted to get a feel for the framework and see how difficult it would be to build a minimalist twitter-like site. Not sure if I'm going to give it any more time.
VS is (and has been since I know it) a great technical achievement. It more or less takes the pain out of Windows development. However, it's very Windows-centric (hardly unexpected) and Windows is really not relevant in my current work - mostly Python/Django on Linux on a mostly PHP/Java shop. I don't do C# nor deploy against .NET and it would take a lot of convincing before being allowed to deploy a Windows server in our farm. Even a deployment on Mono would have to be justified, since there isn't much difference, application-wise, between a Mono stack and a Java one.
Rethinking the established elevator controls
I'm a touch-typist. (I studied piano in my youth for 12 years, and now on the computer keyboard I can switch back & forth between qwerty and dvorak without much trouble, although I prefer the latter.) I thought that I would hate the Apple keyboards, and for exactly the reasons you mentioned (lack of contour, not sufficiently actuated, too large...) but it didn't turn out that way. My touch-typing wasn't terribly dependent on any of those properties.
It's me also. Honestly, I thought it was some terribly advertisement playing in the background. I missed the first half of your video because I was searching for the source of this over-dramatic music. IMO, the music gives the listener a feeling of urgency and dramatic tension that is 180 degrees from the feeling I want when I'm looking at elegant, minimalist software like PadPressed.

I think your software is incredible, and kudos to you for developing it without even having the iPad hardware in hand, but I closed the web page as soon as I discovered where the music was coming from. It was too much of a disconnect for me.
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I regard NetBeans as a very capable IDE. Consider that VS has, probably, lots of hand-tuned x86 assembly in its guts while NetBeans is nice and portable Java. You could probably run it on an Azul box.

I know. It's an excuse for a perceived lower performance, but it's better to progress slowly in the right direction than to rush at warp speed into the vendor lock-in you seem to have escaped ;-)
Ask HN: Does anyone have experience with Mechanical Turk for business?
I am thinking about using it, or a service like it where I can hire simple manpower very cheaply, for various SEO needs (like submission to directories). Has anyone here ever used it for business before? What were your experiences?
Ask HN: Director of Technology or Principle Software Engineer?
So here is the deal. Yesterday one of the partners who owns the startup I work at had a quick conversation about my future with the company. I was the initial developer hire with the startup (we more than doubled in size the last three years) and I built out a team of developers and other tech people to keep things moving. Now they have an opportunity to bring in a "ringer" (someone who has managed tech teams at this stage of business) but they also want to keep me happy.

My impression is that I could push either way. I could work to continue managing the company's technology and team or, as an alternative, I could become something like a principle software engineer and take on the task of figuring out where our platform is going while giving up day to day work on protecting the company's existing $20 million cash flow and managing the team.

There are pros and cons to both but I was curious what other folks thought. I'm still one of the better developers on the team and I know the most about our platform. In theory I could add more value to the company by leveraging my knowledge to help bring together a new data warehouse, a cloud platform, a facebook app, a mobile app, etc.

On the other hand I like managing folks, everyone was hired to work with me, I feel challenge learning about running the business, and, while I don't get to code as much this way, I still bring a lot of value on that end. I'm also worried that I'm giving up something for my future career if my title changes at this stage in the game.

So my general questions:
- Are my fears founded?
- How would I carve out the role in such a way that I'm not just a member of the dev team working under a new manager?
- Do other firms have roles like this? How effective are they (for the person and the company)?
Red Hat are deploying Python 3 right now ...

... which is another saga. Python 3 is "close" but incompatible with Python 2.x, and the way around this is to have two installed copies of everything. Sheesh, brilliant plan.

(In case it's not obvious, I really dislike Python).
90WPM is the speed of speech. Any faster is for contests.

Speech speeds for speeches and books on tape, where the listener can't interrupt and ask you to repeat, are typically around 150WPM http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/aug00.asp but normal conversation is up around 170-280WPM http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003423.h... and court reporters need to be able to transcribe speech at over 180wpm and typically 200wpm http://www.thehighschoolgraduate.com/editorial/DF/courtrepor... .

Try reading aloud something you're typing as you're typing it. You'll find that 90wpm is very slow speech. The only reason speeds like 50wpm and 90wpm can feel comfortable is that the actual process of typing is distracting enough that we don't have time to get bored.q
Pictourist could be quite fun for seeing how others live. Imagine following a person in a foreign country around their guided tour...assuming it's different enough from your own!
It's not a real "startup" type of project, but these are some of my half-finished projects that I'd like to bring to a stable and releasable point some time:

-----------------

At http://blog.marc-seeger.de/ , I'm trying to get a blog based on serious (http://github.com/colszowka/serious) (ruby, sinatra + flat files) up and running.
I don't seem to find the time (or muse) to keep doing some improvements such as:

- start adding more CSS and beef up the HTML semantically

- publish some new papers (e.g. my M.Sc. thesis)

- Introduce tags

- Create a cellphone-friendly version by just using CSS3
media queries

------------------

http://fitness.marc-seeger.de/category/joggen (aka: http://github.com/rb2k/run-a-log ) is another side project that works, but could need some polish.

I scratched my own itch after I couldn't find a simple way to visualize gpx files recorded with my cellphone (simple = just upload via scp)

------------------

http://github.com/rb2k/viddl-rb

A plugin-extendable commandline downloader for video sites. Currently does Youtube, Vimeo and Megavideo.
I basically hacked it together and never got arround to properly document or package it... :(
Can we please keep the April Fools Day jokes to one day per year?
I remember reading about this in iWoz and thinking "WTF! This is serioualy cool".
I was in Morocco recently with no computers at all in the hotel, let alone wifi. It felt weird in the 21st century looking into their office, only to see a desk with some kind of paper filing system. Not to mention they have to handle all their bookings on paper.

So I went to a net café to do some essential stuff. The computers there were painfully slow, as was their internet connection shared between a number of computers. Pulled my laptop out and turns out there was an open wifi network with a much faster connection. I ended up doing everything on the laptop, but paid the net café anyway on that occasion because there was no where I could use the laptop inconspicuously.

In the end it seemed there were quite a few open wifi networks around in Morocco. I guess they're counting on not many people having laptops.
There was a lot of exploitation of Club Live. Some of it had been factored in as a cost of doing business but it wouldn't surprise me if they underestimated it.

Overall, Club Live was a brilliant strategy. Despite horrible execution it still succeeded in ratcheting up the pressure on Yahoo by demonstrating that MS was willing to buy market share. With minimal cash reserves and no product of its own to put through the channel there was no way for Yahoo to compete. There sure were a lot of things they could have done better though.
Popular CRM systems for SMBs.What's your favorite?
hrmmm...

In college I worked in housekeeping. Every summer we would refinish the floors of various sections of the campus. Invariably someone would get past the signs and barriers and walk on the freshly waxed floors. So one summer I'd had enough and decided to do something about it. We set all the barriers up as usual with one small change. We posted an additional sign up somewhere where they could only see it if they were already standing on the waxed floor. The sign read "Congratulations. You have just cost the school 300 dollars" I had calculated the cost of footprints in the floor based off of man hours and materials. The next day I was called into Comptrollers office. He was holding the sign and having trouble being serious while scolding me. Apparently the dean of the college had brought it into him.

---------

Also in college I hacked into the school network (microsoft network so it wasn't hard). I didn't actually do anything that would get me in trouble like change grades or move money around. (yes I had full access to the financial records) I just got the utility they used to bypass the school web proxy. I left a message for the IT department so they could close the holes but they never did.

-----

I also learned to pick locks in college. Most of the professors had personal locks on their doors and kept whatever hours they pleased. They still wanted their office vacuumed and trash emptied though. My solution was to pick the locks to their office. They never found out but there wasn't a room in that college I couldn't get into. Only one lock gave me trouble but I just went over the ceiling for that one. :-)
> As far as I am concerned it would be the Office suite.

I would create Google Documents with forms and workflow automation. I'd pay less attention to formatting and emphasize semantics as the exchange of documents would be purely electronic and they would never hit paper. I would also emphasize collaboration and virtual meeting rooms with shared white boards, possibly with added voice chat and, bandwidth allowing, video.
One of my first mentors had that on his desk.
Journalism Hack:

During J-School I found a letter to the editor in a neighborhood paper from someone complaining about the busted up sidewalks. I decided to do a story about it and needed to interview the original letter writer. Unfortunately the paper only published her first name, "Judy" and no contact info.

I found the piece of sidewalk in question. Stopped, turned, and looked around at the 4 high-rise appt. buildings across the street. I pulled out my notebook, wrote "Please let Judy know a reporter is here to talk about the sidewalks with her," on it, walked into the fanciest, snootiest building, gave it to the doorman, and 15 minutes later, the writer of the letter to the editor "Judy" came down and did the interview. I got my source.

I was pretty sure the writer of such a letter would have to be well-off and cantankerous enough to be top-of-mind with her doorman.
Yes, all programming languages have limits. Next question.
The Death of Geek