skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All except 2 of the classes listed are actual math classes offered by the math department. One of them in the list (the origami one) is offered as part of a high school summer program.

If you major in pure math, a lot of it does fit more in with liberal arts than it does with, say, electrical engineering. At least one great mathematician of the past boasted about how his work had no practical value. (G.H. Hardy)

At these smaller liberal arts schools, math majors are often preparing to be math teachers, so learning how mathematics ties in with history, theatre, art and literature can be very helpful as a teaching aide in the future.

The other thing is students at these institutions have to take a required number of "liberal arts" credits. The school will offer courses like this so that the math majors can pick up these credits from the math department, instead of the math majors having to take Theatre 101 or whatever.

All that said, I thought the course titles sounded quite interesting.
Netflix’s Transition to High-Availability Storage Systems
Just thought i'd let anyone else interested in this domain that i've found a possible partner & the domain is currently in use.

thanks HN
Say what you may about Jobs, but you have to admire how he plays the game.
Oldest trick in the book. It's good to see the tech industry catch up with what politicians discovered centuries ago.
Then, what is the common concept between all these implementations? What makes you decide that one piece of code is OO, while another is not? Is the line clear or fuzzy? Do most programmers more or less agree on this line? In other words, what do you mean when you say "OO"?

I've read the c2.com wiki page Terry linked to. From what I saw, some programmers would say that C++ is OO¹ and Erlang is not, while others would say the exact opposite! This strongly suggest that the term has become mostly meaningless. Yet you seem to think that it hasn't. Hence my questions.

[1] By "X is OO", I mean "X encourages OO programming"
probably majority of the 1200 applications submitted on the last 2 days.
^^^THIS!^^^

Seriously, if you haven't done it already, find or make yourself a module that lets the user customize the keyboard controls to his/her preference. Then you can just drop it into any game you write, and presto! You're good to go!

For even more gooey goodness, make up some one-click "profiles" for different keyboards that users can pick at a click. You don't need to make it top priority, and you may not even need to do all the work yourself. If you just ask for people's preferences in a forum, or a feedback form with the game itself, you can probably get a ton of helpful input.

Best of luck!
For me, the words "Inbox Zero" have come to mean "Learn to love Gmail's Archive button".
My generation has been described as entitled. Quite frankly, I do feel as if I am owed something, and that society at large has failed to keep its end of the bargain.

This quote also hits the nail on the head for many of the older generations posting here. The fact you feel entitled to anything is the source of much grief. I'm part of your generation, but through the professional experience I've gained in the past 8 years, and having been put in the position of hiring people from both Gen X and Y, I've realized that this entitlement hurts you much more than it helps.

Success is newly defined for each generation. Our job, in wake of this economic disaster, is to find out just how that definition has changed and move forward.
Is Dutch required for your job? To use that as an asset you may have to justify that need to the immigration folks.

Couple the need for Dutch with a job specification that requires experience but leaves out the degree requirement and that may improve your chances.

Having said all that, it is always better to talk to an immigration attorney. Talk to your company, write down the questions you have, and do a one hour consultation with an immigration attorney. It should cost the company less than $200, but a lot of things will become clearer.
The Case for Apple Buying Facebook
Why does Android have Steve Jobs rattled?
>Chrome's more minimalist approach

I find Opera to be far more minimalist than Chrome from a user interface perspective. Chrome doesn't even let you remove the tab bar.

[ Here is a screenshot of me switching "tabs" in Opera http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/9053/operal.jpg ]
Pretty sure the implied inertial frame is the one relative to the spaceship, and not any other encapsulating frames.

But I linked that mainly for the table just down the page a little comparing various efficiency measures of different propulsion systems. I'm pretty sure that chemical rockets are the least efficient we've ever implemented or imagined, barely sufficient for travel within the solar system, and certainly not efficient enough for any trips, round or one-way, beyond our solar system.
Another "great" example of this: the Corn Refiner's Association has applied to rebrand HFCS into "corn sugar."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100914/ap_on_bi_ge/us_corn_syru...
If I'm understanding this correctly the competition wouldn't be dev vs dev but store vs store. If that is the case then your app becomes a commodity and each store will try to compete on price, lowering the dev's profit margin in the process.
The "1000 ideas" syndrome
I have seen people become cynical in the face of consistent joblessness despite many applications. It worries me because it could cause permanent negative attitudinal shift with bright people -- the early parts of a career can be very formative, and it's not good if, instead of a good, supportive and developmental manager at a stable company, people feel stuck with bad bosses or cannot escape the tyranny of unemployment.

By the way, while we're talking about fixing unemployment, I'm hiring a system administrator just south of Seattle, for my manufacturing company in the green space. Smart folks who enjoy a happy working environment and solving interesting customer-facing problems are welcome to get in touch with me.
I hate working on IE, everytime I have to work a lot on CSS for IE.
I wasted a lot of time on it.
Should be considered illegal.
There's been some recent progress with Protovis and SVGWeb (a JavaScript + Flash shim for SVG support in Internet Explorer):

http://groups.google.com/group/protovis/browse_thread/thread...
On the contrary, PG encourages open criticism. It's a good way for YC to improve.

We had a great experience with no regrets. Apply now if you're on the fence. Having said that, my criticism is that, like any startup, YC has some growing pains while it scales.

In particular, our experience (S2010, 36 companies) wasn't as intimate as I had hoped it would be. But they're working to address that, which was a learning experience in itself. You get to see how smart people try to scale an operation while preserving what makes it special.

Relatedly, I also didn't expect YC to feel internally competitive at times. Resources can become limited, from the basics like seating and food, to the important stuff like the time and attention of speakers, investors, and PG himself. With that many companies, there's also inevitably some overlap among product ideas.

However, overall it was much more cooperative than competitive, and I welcomed a little friendly competition. The resulting "coopetition" is a balance I think they'll need to watch as they scale.
Ugh. I can’t wrap my head around the concept of expecting some mechanical path to success and subsequently being flabbergasted at the realization that, even if it ever did exist at one point, it doesn’t anymore. Who cares if anyone told you things are that easy? Everyone telling you that was wrong—get over it. For your own good, get off your ass and do something worthwhile to distinguish yourself. Instead of doing the old spray-and-pray with your résumé, find a job you want and then do absolutely anything it takes to get that job.
In other words, don't be superfluous.
Except that to new grads, they weren't.

All the gold was going to your parents. :-)
Not to be a buzz kill, but I think that's the first thing that will be carrier disabled. The downside to Android's openness is that carriers are open to disable features that they don't like. And they certainly have been pushing against "dumb pipe" since there's still plenty of money in selling "minutes".
you hate to have to spend a lot of time dealing with the fact that it turns out that you have more versions of browsers out there than you thought

But there are effectively only 2 versions of firefox in play on this day today:

3.6.10 : The current release

4.0b : The current beta

And you can tell the people on 4.0b that it's their problem for using a beta.
Their previous argument—"yes, it's open, but it sucks"—was less effective than this. It also said pretty much the same thing.
Open and closed can mean so many things in this context. The whole debate really needs to be more semantically focused on what they mean to really make any sense.
The use of framing the debate like this in the tech industry is pretty old. One of the most notable examples that comes to mind is how the fledgling open-systems community (the loose collection of competing Unix vendors back in the 80s) kept pounding the pulpit of "standards", and Microsoft countered by propagating the phrase "de facto standard" in the trade rags.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Ah, no. I'm saying your generation is having a harder time because your expectations are so ridiculously high.
The new realities for startups
Agreed. Also, sentences like "I mastered the ability to combine several strategies, each with varying strengths and weaknesses, highlighting the strengths and nullifying the weaknesses" are no good. What strengths? What weaknesses? When I read something like that, it says to me (or perhaps screams?) that nothing substantial was actually accomplished. Definitely in need of rewording to make things far more concrete.
JetBrains WebStorm. While not really up to level of some of the better IDEs for other languages, it's probably the best JavaScript IDE currently available.
Jobs begs the question: Are the users actually the system integrators?

What does that even mean anyway?
Of course the company is the customer and you are the product. They pay; you don't. Follow the money.
Why would be it good to see an industry take cues from the least honest profession?
"I read somewhere that when Prop 13 passed, revenue from property taxes was $5 billion and now its over $40 billion"

So? Prop 13 passed in 1978. How much has the value of the property increased in that time? Have property tax revenues even kept up with inflation?
PlainText: Text Editor with DropBox Sync for Your iPhone or iPad
Startup's road map hiccup
Actual URL: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/10/sex-at-dawn-is-right.h...
Portable, solar-powered water desalination system
Debating 101: Frame the argument.

Both sides of any argument do this. Google by calling it "open" which means more than it really does. Apple doesn't debate it's not open, it just debates that the results aren't any good because of the confusion of choices. "Open" is supposed to be a good thing, Apple doesn't believe it is.

But the fact is that Apple is crying about it, they're explaining why they made the decisions they made. They need to justify this to their investors. Google needs PR to make Android look good.

That's why people are "Pro Life" not anti-abortion. Do these guys read the news, maybe they just started?
He says in his pros/cons list at the end that he'll wear trousers to the interview.

I don't think he 'expects to walk in to a job' because of this, heck from the sounds of it his attempts to get a job have been largely fruitless.

This is just his way of standing out from the crowd and getting himself noticed enough for an employer to ask him in for an interview.
do a 100 to 1 reverse stock split in exchange for modest additional funding, reducing the entire equity holdings of the founders to less than 1% of the company in one fell swoop.

Isn't that how facebook re-jiggered things to make up for early equity granting "mistakes?"
The only difference between HFCS 55 and 'sugar' (meaning cane sugar refined to purely fructose/glucose) is the glycosidic bond between the fructose and glucose. In your gut sucrase will snap this bond and sugar becomes identical to HFCS 55 in your gut.

In this sense HFCS has gotten an unfairly bad rap because HFCS 55 is equally as unhealthy as sugar. If anyone thinks sugar is more healthy than HFCS 55 they are sorrily mistaken. If you're eating HFCS 90 then perhaps it is more toxic, but for the most part they are on equal footing.
"They feel like they've done everything that was expected of them. They went to university and graduated with a good degree."

This is the problem. Just showing up isn't enough. This fill-in-the-blanks approach to careers is why the university degree doesn't mean anything anymore. It's never about being the norm, it's about exceeding the norm. Yes, that means more than 50%, by definition, won't cut it.

What did they do while they got their "good degrees from good universities"? If the answer is "the bare minimum to pass", as it seems most of my former classmates did, then it's no wonder they can't find work.
Brainstorm a few logical reasons this could happen and I'm sure the answer will come to you
See
http://www.deutsche-startups.de/startups-jobs/stellenangebot...
and
http://soundcloud.com/jobs
Is a metaphor not a type of abstraction? At any rate, you're correct, I'm probably not giving people enough credit. I'd say that if you can avoid "X of Y"-isms, you're better off doing so.
That's a firefox bug.
Please write better mails, especially professionally.

There is a mail disease that is common in the tech workplace, everyone merely adds their own 2 cents onto a large (and important) email thread, forwarding it around and giving every recipient the same problem: reproduce the relevant context by reading the entire thread again (including every single false path) and hope you come up with the same context as everyone else.

Corporate tech email would be a million times better if people spent a lot more time summing up the current state of affairs succinctly and laying out assumptions explicitly.
Do you mean didn't exist at all, or just hadn't been made by Apple?

edit: Not sure why I'm being downvoted. The answer affects the whole tone and meaning of the article.
2. Snooze emails - http://www.followup.cc/ [ed] not a bad idea, but not in love with forwarding my personal/work emails to a 3rd party

My first thought reading this is that it Gmail should have a similar feature that says "Remind me at X time unless this thread becomes active again".

Fairly often, I send an email expecting a reply and don't want to forget about it if I don't get one. But I also don't want to either a) keep the thread in my inbox or b) make a task/calendar event to track it.
If you're making the decision to unsupported IE completely (or just IE6, etc), it's wise to offer the Chrome Frame plugin to any IE users that come along:
http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/chrome-frame-gett...

Within the last two weeks code was checked in to allow non-admin level installs, so when that debuts everyone that gets prompted can actually install it.
What's also interesting about that chart is that software makes up such a small part of revenue. A bad CEO would see that and devote a similarly tiny amount of resources to software development because, you know, it doesn't make the company much money.

Not to say that Apple software is all awesome, but at least they don't treat it as a cost center that has to be trimmed.
Framing is powerful and fascinating game every spokesperson worth its money plays.

Steve Jobs talked a lot about fragmentation and brushed openness aside. Why then did Andy Rubin not talk about fragmentation but emphasize openness? Because he is not stupid, that’s why.

That’s what makes many of those public fights very frustrating to watch. In a perfect world humans wouldn’t get distracted by frames. They would be able to recognize that there is nearly always more than one aspect to a story.

It absolutely drives me crazy when, for example, so many advocates of nuclear power can only ever talk about CO2 and so many adversaries of nuclear power can only ever talk about safety and waste.
> * The film admits only 20% of charter schools gets "amazing results". In reality, the huge study that stat comes from says only 17% of charters beat public schools, 46% generate comparable results, and 37% are worse.

One difference - you can close the failing charters. Failing public schools are virtually immortal.

Another difference - choice is also valuable.

> * Finland, the movie's model school system, is entirely unionized, has much lower poverty, and has a stronger social safety net than the US.

Finland is less populous than LA, almost all interactions involve relatives and long-term acquaintances, and it's all proto-Scandanavians.

The last point is important - anything works if you just have to deal with Scandanavians (or Mormons).

> * While the movie points out that only 0.04% of teachers ever lose their certificate, it omits the fact that 50% of new teachers leave the profession within 5 years, mostly because of working conditions.

Apples and Oranges. Bad working conditions drive out both good and bad teachers. (Conditions might be more of a issue for folks who have other options, which might be disproportionatly the good teachers.) Certificate revocation is likely to be dominated by bad teachers.
A Deepness in the Sky, which is loosely related to A Fire Upon the Deep, is also great and also won a Hugo award.
Its a great idea. It might even boost the already good cooperation that I think exists amoung the start ups.

Somehow, the idea that having this cross equity holding is going to be damper on one's motivation to build their own start-ups seems moot. Who wouldn't want to make more money if their idea seems good enough?
Kawa in Languages shootout (vs Java, Scala, Clojure, JRuby)
According to Doug Bowman’s reply to me, integrated URL shortening is (of course) a known pain point that they hope to resolve after taking care of bugs and nailing the implementation.

http://twitter.com/#!/stop/status/27695305433
>> For example, Java, can you tell me the difference between volatile and synchronized as it regards the memory model without looking it up? What's a happens-before relationship and how is it relevant to those keywords? What's the transient modifier do?

>I didn't claim to be a Java guru. Very few Java programmers actually need to know the answers to those questions in day-to-day programming; I could probably (if asked to, which I'm not, thankfully) write thousands or tens of thousands of lines of Java without ever needing to know the answer to those.

You're wrong, and this proves the point. This isn't 'guru' level, the workings of volatile and synchronized is even on the basic SCJP test. This may not come up in your domain, but if the project deals with threading, an experienced dev will be more productive than you right off the bat, after two weeks, and probably after a year.

In fact, threading is pretty tricky, so it's likely you will be counter-productive to the team until you've made all the Java threading mistakes you need to make in order to understand why your code is bad. And, you might never know your code is bad unless a domain experienced Java dev explains it to you.

Domain experience matters.
Standing on the side of the road next to a pulled-over car is a known way to get yourself hit by another car.
> Programming languages can't all be picked up that quickly, since semantics may differ a lot. You can't say "Give me any programming task and I'll pick it up".

Speak for yourself. I learned AutoLisp with one bit of sample code someone left behind and a bit of Googling in about a week, starting from zero. Nobody else where I worked knows it at all. But from that, I coded a full set of functions that did everything we need.

I reverse-engineered the semantics of some crazy internal scripting language to some of our industrial machines. Nobody bothered to document that thing at all and it was custom to my employer.

I learned to use a different testing tool from nothing more than a bit of sample code and being told that it was based on VBS. I then improved the code I was given.

Some of us really can figure out the semantics of something just from reading a few examples. This also works with foreign languages. Particularly if I can get parallel translations (e.g. subtitles), I can start working backwards to extract meaning and solve for unknown words.

In short, you'd be surprised about how quickly we can figure out things, especially if we've seen something like it before. Sure, there are pitfalls, but anywhere where you have nice syntax aware IDEs and whatnot, it's not nearly as much of a barrier as you seem to think.

The more languages you've used, the easier it all is. This goes for both human and computer languages.
Steve Jobs: Apple will use $51B for big moves, not 'stupid' ones
This is a recent policy change for banks. Banks hate chargebacks. Taking credit card info to be charged after a trial period is up, is a reliable recipe for an increased amount of chargebacks. It is unfortunate and there's been talk of this policy being altered or at least loosened, but who knows?
I will readily acknowledge that investors can exercise their legal rights as they deem appropriate, There are times, though, when it makes you want to hold your nose as you experience it, and the 100:1 reverse split was clearly one of them (over the years, I have seen many, many down rounds and I would not make that statement about the overwhelming majority of them - so I understand and don't disagree with the general point you are making).

The second situation was not only ugly but blatantly illegal and led to a major lawsuit with some pretty serious repercussions for the wrongdoing "partner" (settlement by having to pay a 7-figure sum to the founder plus later getting sued by the acquiring company for various wrongs, including the one described here).
Buddify
Not so much an 'IQ cap' but they don't want to hire people who will leave soon for better jobs.
I suspect that you're right. It's one of the reasons I was enthusiastic to buy the Nexus One directly from Google, and was disappointed to see the idea fizzle.

I really think it'd be for the betterment of all of us if wireless phone companies became commodity wireless internet providers. Sigh...