skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think more importantly it ignores the networking effect that being in the general undergraduate program has. While I'm sure that people who attend the GS type programs at the various top universities are bright, you don't generally get to make the same connections as regular undergrads do (at Penn most GSE classes were later at night and I believe it was much harder for GSE students to take the regular undergrad classes).

I would say that while I loved everything I did while I was in school, it was the outside the classroom opportunities (student government/organizations) which were generally restricted to just undergrads that really taught me the most useful skills and connected me to a much broader network of people that I've found very helpful in my professional life. While I wouldn't say that it's a bad idea to "sneak in" I don't think it's the same experience/value as the regular undergrad program.
I agree that Last.fm is for statistics-gathering, and Grooveshark is for listening to what you want, but for radio, it's all about Pandora.

BTW, I really appreciate TinySong.
I still don't know where this objection comes from. I have been asked by non-techie friends many, many times for help with their computers. None of my friends, PC or Mac, have ever had to ask how to install an application.

I consider the process(es) to be extremely self-explanatory. Apparently there are others out there who don't feel this way, and have encountered evidence of people being confused by it. I accept this, I just don't get it.
awesome! thanks so much! :)
Mac App Store: boon or bust for developers?
Quite. In American football the basic play is to prevent the entire team from following the ball around.

In rugby the only time you have this pushing behavior is in a scrum (aka scrimmage), where most of the team members get into a group blocking position against the other team and the referee throws the ball into the middle between their legs. Then the teams try to push each other backwards so one of them can get over the ball and kick it out to the rear of their scrum, where another player can pick it up and start running. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/rugby_union/rules_and_equipm... has an explanation and a useful picture)

Even though this scrum is a test of brute strength, there's no impact involved because the scrum is carefully arranged and supervised by the referee before the ball is thrown in, not least to minimize the risk of injury. Pushing is one tactic, especially beloved of teams like the New Zealand All-Blacks who have a lot of big Polynesian players, but an equally valid approach is to rotate the scrum to one side or the other and use an opposing team's forward momentum against them. The main injury risk is a broken neck or torn ear, but these are mercifully rare. About 10% of rugby injuries involve concussions, but the overall rate of injury is much lower, and you could play many games without ever getting a bang on the head.

Strength is important, but no more so than speed or agility. I weigh only 140 pounds but I was a fairly good rugby player in school because I was nimble, and there are quite a few small professional players. If you are interested and have 4 minutes to spare, this video shows the highlights of a game with two excellent, versatile teams doing 'a bit of everything': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heoO_5MvZ0w&feature=relat...
Basically Linode competes on customer service and support!
I still maintain that Google can do more good with more efficiency than any government.

That's fine, but there are plenty of other people who disagree with the assertion. If the money is in the hands of the government, at least those other voices get a say in how it is spent.

The opportunity cost for anything you spend $3bn on is very high. A government could choose to spend it on cancer research or space ships. Google can really only spend it on a very narrow range of products -- and can't combine it with other serious numbers required to do the really heavy lifting, like that required to fix the disastrous public plumbing in the US.

If Google paying its taxes would mean that it couldn't do all the stuff it currently is, that's one thing. But they've got $33bn sitting in the bank. They can more than afford to pay their taxes and continue creating Wave and AdWords.
DroidDraw: Beta
63 percent of iPhones were sold outside the US in Q3
It looks like the 2 different terms are contradictory. We may have to wait and see if they clarify whether you just have to pay the extra fees or if you are completely switched to a paid account if you go over.
Bear in mind that Hayden is now 'currently a principal at the Chertoff Group' (http://chertoffgroup.com/cgroup/), a security consulting thing. As well as having headed the NSA during the initiation of the massive wiretapping program, he has a lot to gain financially from this "new form of terror".
I have an engine that I can directly fiddle with, using one hand to rev the engine whilst the other messes with the carbs. Most new cars (in developed Western economies) come with a big cover over the engine, forbidding the user to touch the internals. If you just want to drive within the lines, you get the latter. If you want to fiddle and play and experiment, you get the former. It's really not a problem for anyone.
Wow, the list of excuses to not attempt a startup is getting shorter and shorter.
Ideas? Check. (See HN the past few days)
Page design? Check. (Web page templates with free samples)
Hosting costs? Check. Now Free for a year with AWS without being tied to a specific language/framework.
Your point about Android development may be the reason this move occurred. The IOS vs Android war is at full steam right now and Apple is known to be the aggressor in it thus far.
Asteroid mining and electricity generation have the near-term potential to turn space into a lucrative economic endeavor, instead of an exotic money pit. They are the only two things I know of that could profoundly change the World's exploration of space.
It is a marketing campaign designed to generate reg. Marketing is about getting the right message to the right people in a way that they prefer to hear that message. In this case existing users are not the right people. People who have been thinking about trying AWS but don't want to shell out any cash are the right people.

It is not really alienation. They are investing money in converting people to their platform. Offering this to existing users makes no sense from that perspective. It is pretty standard across many industries to offer exclusive deals to new customers.
There are three reasons why that approach tends to work well in scientific computing circles.

First off individual computational errors are rarely important. EX: Simulating galactic evolution as long all the velocity's stay reasonable each individual calculation is fairly unimportant and bounds checking is fairly inexpensive.

Second, there is a minimal time constraint, losing 30 minutes of simulation time day is a reasonable sacrifice for gaining efficiency in other areas.

Third, computational resources tend to be expensive, local, and fixed. AKA, Cray Jaguar not all those spare CPU cycles running folding at home.

However, if you’re running VISA or World of Warcraft then you get a different set of optimizations.
Negotiation Skills for Entrepreneurs & Investors: Negotiating Skills
Apple wouldn't do it because making the user's have to click to load content without an intuitive explanation isn't "easy to use".

Adobe wouldn't do it, because a large majority of their customers build annoying flash ads.
Mars has a lot less sun and atmosphere then the Earth, so terraforming it would involve a large investment in greenhouses and nuclear energy.

But Venus has an excess of sun and heat, and parts of its super dense atmosphere could potentially host floating algae, which absorb CO2 and rain down to the surface when they die. (Where they could burn and release all the CO2 again, but maybe a tiny bit stays out of the atmosphere.)

I guess what I'm saying is, we might be able to "seed" Venus and then sit by and watch as a carbon sink is created. And with less CO2 the atmosphere would start to cool off.

Now my very amateur understanding of Venus is that because the greenhouse effect creates super hot temperatures the magma underneath the crust of Venus does not form hot and hold spots like it does on Earth, it does not flow or erupt. There are no volcanoes, the crust is too "baked", too hard and thick.

But over long periods of time the crust still tends to break up: At a massive scale, planet wide, the whole planet surface is then covered with lava, the lava eventually cools and the cycle starts again.

This is why the surface of Venus looks suspiciously smooth except for a very few, very recent craters.

Now imagine we are able to "infect" Venus with life and it does manage to suck CO2 of the atmosphere and cool down Venus to the point where the surface of Venus can support liquid water.

It seems that could either trigger another planet wide cracking of the crust or maybe just huge volcanic eruptions.
But I think once life is widely distributed even that could not expunge it. And with a much cooler atmosphere softer elements would not be baked out of the crust and the Venus crust would start to resemble Earth's crust, complete with softer and harder and lighter and heavier components and volcanoes.

And one day we could move in.
I would assume that they require that your Amazon account be associated with a credit card before signing you up for AWS. Regardless, I do think it's too bad that they just don't extend this to everyone (if you're already using AWS it's not like the Micro instance would be a huge jump in your bill) since it does give me a bit of a sour taste in my mouth (luckily for Amazon, AWS is just too awesome for me to really care that much). It would be nice to have a micro instance to play around with somethings. But taking the crack dealer analogy, now the first hit is free, but I'm already hooked.
Apple Guidelines for Mac App Store
To make scrolling slightly easier, I implemented a jQuery thing that provides a visual clue to delimit the new content from the old one.

I haven't seen anything like that before, yet it feels like obvious to me.

You see the effect here: http://virteal.com/ScrollCue
"Lots of it" seems like a bit of an exaggeration. This particular site, a large crater close to the South Pole which manages to avoid direct sunlight, has 5.6% water by mass, but what does that come down to in Earth terms? A small lake? I suppose it depends how deep the water goes.
You also run the risk of becoming very good at something you might not like very much. That's just wasted time.
Yeah I noticed that. Does that mean that Sun can start creating the runtime again? Does that also mean I can skip the hassle of going to Apple Dev center when I want to download the JRE?
At least now it's been diagnosed. As I was reading this article, I couldn't resist the urge to wikipedia Quaking Aspen, General Sherman, and (from the comments) the antimalarial effects of quinine.
I agree to a point - but not when the first brand gets to a certain popularity mass. Look, for example, at the "tube" segment. They all make me think back to Youtube as a brand. The four letters won't matter if they don't come after a brand that's massive like Mashable, in this case, it does though.

But it seems you will be OK for the reasons you say - much of your audience might not even know what Mashable is - or care enough to make the same association I did.
Think what you will, but I think that many tech visitors will make the same mistake - I almost didn't bother reading the link because of it.

The site is a bit of a font party, so I'd love to see how it would look with more Georgia and a bigger base font.

I love the concept of a pink colour scheme, but the colour of pink to the right seems to burn my eyes a little.

I'd also get rounded corners on all your pink boxes.

I think the site design would also benefit greatly from having only a single sidebar. Multiple sidebars is a trend I hate, because few, if anyone, are able to pull it off. Speaking of sidebar, it doesn't look as good with boxes with different widths compared to having a sidebar with similarly sized boxes.

Is the blog an Awl-Jezebel-esque concept, or what is the overall idea? It looks interesting.
And it's a suggestion to people who rely on Java being there that they should keep a copy of the installer package handy, because it might not be included later.
It is conceivable that the operating system used to capture the screen shot included the monitor's color profile in the image, and that profile then somehow incorrectly applied by whatever viewing software was used to display the images.
So I lost 80% of it pre-whine...any other hairs you'd like to look at cutting?
"Smart people can sometimes make stupid choices. Don’t let stupid choices be the foundation for your department, your company, your work environment, or your life."

Words every founder should carry in their wallet.
The Extreme Brain
So where's the code? I don't see it on GitHub?
Close Pixelate: beautiful implementation of pixelation with canvas
Quoting from a friend who went to a similar school:

Wow, that is total misinformation. Yes, all the Ivy League schools have General Studies programs but they are looked at as an adult/evening education program. For example, Penn's General Studies program doesn't even require standardized test scores:

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/lps/undergraduate/ba/

I'm sure a person can put on their resume that they have a Bachelor's from Columbia or something but then if someone who went to Columbia (or any Ivy League school) asks them about their experience, it will inevitably come out that they were in the General Studies program and then the person is in a really awkward position because they know that the other person knows that it was General Studies and it seemed like they were trying to pass as a regular graduate, which then starts to feel like resume fraud.
very cool - I wonder if a more generalized smart cap for prescription drugs could track usage in the same manner.
Irish banks didn't "invest" in property as such, they just lent spectacular amounts of money to both mortgage applicants and property developers. The result was a huge property bubble. Anglo Irish Bank is the most notorious of all the banks, because it financed property developers particularly and got itself into a huge mess and has to be bailed out by the government, or the country's economy will collapse (according to the government.)

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

Anglo had an arrogant and corrupt board also, which didn't help. (Incidentally, their former CEO, David Drumm, is hiding out in Massachusetts, and has filed for bankruptcy there, due to the far harsher bankruptcy laws in Ireland compared to Massachusetts.)

Irish banks could raise money in Europe (German money for example) and lend it at a higher rate here in Ireland. Because Ireland has such a tiny economy relative to mainland Europe, they could raise, and lend on huge amounts of money relative to the size of the Irish economy. At the peak of the bubble, something like one-in-seven people were employed by the construction industry, either directly or indirectly, which gives you an idea of how important it was to the economy. Now the government is talking nonsense about building a 'knowledge economy' - which makes me shudder as they will try to turn former bricklayers into C++ programmers or something equally daft. The property bubble was Ireland's first taste of real wealth in our recent history and we pretty much blew it on big houses and Range Rovers, like a newly-minted lottery millionaire.
How is that any different than Python, Ruby, Perl, etc...?
There is no performance difference for Core2Duo generation CPUs with identical clock speeds and cache size but different TDP ratings. The LV/ULV ones are the same chips as "regular" mobile (or even desktop) dice but hand-picked for their low consumption. It gets murkier with the Core iX generation due to the automatic overclocking mechanism.
Your enthusiasm for gmail has blinded you to the reality. Sure it might be the best thing to you since sliced bread, but in every market estimate, gmail still trails behind hotmail and yahoo mail which means that for most people, gmail is not a radical improvement.

http://www.quantcast.com/profile/trafficGraph?wunit=wd%3Acom...

http://tctechcrunch.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/gmailvs-hotm...

Of course, since you are only a college freshman, I don't blame you for not knowing that there were dozens of serviceable webmail clients long before the existence of gmail.
>> I always wonder if I'm ever using the right parts just because there's so much there.

Good point, but I'd say that (1) any well-documented API call should discuss its alternatives, and (2) any well-designed API in general should try to minimize unnecessary overlap between functions.
All of this raises the obvious question: what thing of lasting value did you gain from doing this?
If you want to wait long enough for Venus to start having plate tectonics, you're going to be waiting a long time.

By this point it's probably easier to tow Mars to a better orbit. Or just blow Venus up and make a (partial) Dyson sphere.
I schedule deployments during off hours.

The key is to wake up at either 4 pm or 3 am.
Who said this thoughtful quote?
I seem to recall a winner of the Twilio contest that developed a similar app for reporting symptoms. Couldn't this easily be extended to just about any condition?
But the US can actually reduce the gap by cutting down on wasteful spending (see Iraq and Afghanistan adventures). This should be a priority but alas our politicians love to spend and that applies to both sides.
It all sort of reminds me of Amusing Ourselves to Death where we keep giving up freedom for the sake of entertainment. Where is Neil Postman when you need him?
Of course, one of those accounts would be used to host an app to manage the other 299...
Mozy releases C++ library for high-perf async, event I/O in a sync model.
Mozy releases Mordor, a C++ library for high-performance async, event-driven I/O in a synchronous programming model using cross-platform fibers and stack swapping.
I would guess if one prokaryote engulfs another, it's highly unlikely that both of them are going to survive the experience, much less that both will thrive and evolve a symbiotic relationship, much less that this relationship will persist through cell divisions into subsequent generations. Both organisms would have to be uniquely suited to the relationship in the first place.
This is simply the best time in history to be starting a new business...

... except in the future, when it will be even easier :~)
you know, something like yahoo mail...
At a minimum it would take practical fusion power. To terraform mars you would need to add a lot of air and water, which would have to come from somewhere.

It would take immense amount of energy to move the water from other bodies.

This is a probably a 22nd century possibility, not a 21st.
I found the memo from 2003: http://web.archive.org/web/20030210024427/http://www.interna... -- this blog thread discussing it is enlightening: http://www.advogato.org/article/624.html
Somehow they should work it out so that a credit card is not required. Google keeps spam under control by verifying real people through SMS.
What does this mean Google?? (Image)
"Here's what I view to be the optimal path: Go to a cheap (but flagship) state school (e.g., Penn State), enroll in the Honors program (due to great high school grades), pay virtually nothing, and then (marginally) get into an incredible Master's program at a school like Princeton; "

What? Penn State for non-residents is $35-40k.

I agree with his sentiment but Penn State is not a cheap school unless you live in PA, it is another example of a marquee program that is almost as expensive than a private school. (Actually it is more expensive than some very good private schools).

Better advice is to go to the best state school in your own state, then go to the graduate program that is excellent in your field (which may or may not be Ivy).
Netflix streaming is down
Perhaps the parent is in the same position I, and I'm sure lots of others, am in. We signed up for AWS already to check it out, but haven't used it. We are essentially the same as a new user because we currently don't subscribe to any of the paid services, but we registered too early to take advantage of this offer.
Thanks for putting this as its own domain, folks. I wanted to go to it after Aria's EMNLP talk but couldn't remember the URL, it went by too fast.
Am I the only one who believes that taxes are evil? I can't wait until I can afford lawyers to help me get out of paying taxes. If if I break even I'd rather see my money going to a professional than a government,.
Wikipedia to the rescue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon#Cuts_of_bacon

Unfortunately I have to confess that that was indeed streaky bacon (which would be better served crispy), not back bacon (which would not). But then again, this is just my opinion...

Anyway, I think we can all agree than bacon is delicious?
I'd rather say that the lesson is that getting in comes down to people, not rules. A bureaucracy requires bureaucrats.

There are many people who'll stand in your way of getting into a university moreso than arbitrary rules. I don't know if you have a good term for people who occupy their administrative desks like thrones (here, we call them "desk popes" translated directly.)

I recall applying to a highly-esteemed British university once, and I was aghast at what a sordid mess it was to apply as an international student (no info wheresoever, and Open Days was announced mere weeks beforehand), not to mention the admission gatekeepers themselves.

It's worth noticing how she got in:

>I spoke to a counselor at General Studies, who was similarly encouraging. I showed him my transcripts and the As I’d gotten at Columbia so far. He said: “Great! Yeah, you’d be a terrific candidate for GS!” He encouraged me to keep taking classes at Columbia and apply to GS for the following semester. I told him I didn’t want to keep spending money at Columbia if I wasn’t eventually going to get a degree. He told me I wouldn’t have any trouble getting in. And the credits would go towards my degree.

>

>Except it didn’t work out that way. Three months later, I applied to matriculate at Columbia through the General Studies program. My application was rejected. Let’s just say I was a little pissed. I could have applied somewhere else. Or returned to SUNY Geneseo. But taking two semesters of classes at Columbia is EXPENSIVE.

Did she get in, because the rules allowed it, or because a guy there screwed up, and she called him on it? She got in because and in spite of him.
The trouble with that is the deployment is expected to be simple and under your control.

The real fun bit comes when users get at it. By doing the deployment at night you find out if it worked at 9:00am the next morning when 1000s of employees connect try and do some work. If there are any issues you are then in deep xxxx

By doing deployment in the afternoon, people are offline for the hour or so it takes to deploy but then you have all night to fix any issues.
Not many companies have a customer-base that is spread evenly through the world. Not having a "perfect time" doesn't mean there isn't a "better time" than 9 AM EST.
What are off-hours? This is the Internet.

We used to have off-peak times, but even those days are mostly gone now.

Anyways, I agree with the spirit of this article. Best to do pushes when everyone is around or paying attention and you are refreshed, in case you just unleashed a disaster. :-)
OP here. I probably shouldn't have made my argument sound quite so mathematically rigorous. :)

You're right that a well-designed UI can decrease the complexity of additional features. That said, I think it's usually true that additional features have a larger impact on the complexity of a UI than the complexity of an API. Not as a universal rule, but as a general guideline.