skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think it's purely an issue of quality so much as exactly what you want (though quality also does vary). It seems that what you're asking for is actually slightly different than the linked blog post: that post is arguing for a stronger emphasis on software engineering, whereas you seem somewhat more interested in CS theory (they overlap, but different schools are stronger/weaker in different parts, partly because everything you really ought to know is >4 year curriculum, so schools have to pick a subset).

For example, Cal Poly is a very good school on the software-engineering side of the spectrum, with a heavy emphasis on C++ programming, OS/systems, software-engineering methods actually used in industry, etc. But it's not where you'd go if you were primarily interested in PLs theory, algorithms, etc.; the number of Haskell-expert or world-class computability-theory professors is much smaller than the number of world-class systems and software-eng professors.

For theory-heavy undergrad schools that are of high quality, one approximate metric is what proportion of graduates go on to get PhDs in CS, which indicates that the undergrad program successfully prepared people for that route. I believe Harvey Mudd is the highest on that metric, but Carnegie Mellon, Caltech, and probably a dozen other schools I'm blanking on also have well-regarded, theory-heavy undergrad programs.
Odd, I didn't think the post I referred to was that old.

I guess it also makes sense not to have submission downvotes, since the really bad posts will just get killed, and the iffy posts just won't get enough points to get very visible.

Thanks for the explanation.
For anyone who doesn't use Gmail, Google sent out/is sending this email to all Gmail users:

Google rarely contacts Gmail users via email, but we are making an exception to let you know that we've reached a settlement in a lawsuit regarding Google Buzz (http://buzz.google.com), a service we launched within Gmail in February of this year.

Shortly after its launch, we heard from a number of people who were concerned about privacy. In addition, we were sued by a group of Buzz users and recently reached a settlement in this case.

The settlement acknowledges that we quickly changed the service to address users' concerns. In addition, Google has committed $8.5 million to an independent fund, most of which will support organizations promoting privacy education and policy on the web. We will also do more to educate people about privacy controls specific to Buzz. The more people know about privacy online, the better their online experience will be.

Just to be clear, this is not a settlement in which people who use Gmail can file to receive compensation. Everyone in the U.S. who uses Gmail is included in the settlement, unless you personally decide to opt out before December 6, 2010. The Court will consider final approval of the agreement on January 31, 2011. This email is a summary of the settlement, and more detailed information and instructions approved by the court, including instructions about how to opt out, object, or comment, are available at http://www.BuzzClassAction.com.
Thanks. We fixed the display bug. And thanks for the suggestions. Keeping things simple is the lodestar and is quite difficult, but really worthwhile.
This is a neat hack, but the title is a little misleading - most of the real work is handled by inetd, not the shell script.
> you don't want the hassle of installing the full Apache package

sudo apt-get install apache2
sudo vim /usr/lib/cgi-bin/hello_world
sudo chmod a+x $_

Not that much of a hassle.
Absolutely. Superman didn't even grow up to be a total dick.

Wait.

Wasn't there...
Oh right, http://superdickery.com/

In other news, you'd be surprised what supermanisadick.com points to.
This is probably just a function of slot machines having been around for much longer.

Of course all these same requirements make perfect sense to implement for voting machines.
Heroku Users Group meetup, 11/3 @ 7pm
or grandma
How exactly do you think those paper ballots are being counted?
Join us at Heroku's offices[1] in San Francisco for the first-ever Heroku Users Group meetup - followed by a drink-up jointly hosted with Basho.

1: http://bit.ly/a1s88R
For real? That just seems strange to me: a well functioning service gets acquired by Facebook, only to shut it down. It's OK if FB uses the technology and user base, but I read that after dec. 15 all accounts are deleted. Strange...
Random e-mail account anyone. Its free and will always get through.....
Dear god,

If you could combine this with a Google-docs-like collaborative editing feature, I could once again enjoy a life free of word processors, where the true meaning of Meta-Shift-^ could become known to the masses.

That would rock. Just sayin'.
He means to include it in your HN profile, not as a reply to the topic. You should be able to do that here if you're logged in:

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Seantron
Rest in peace, Luke Bucklin. Minnesota will miss you.
I believe there would inevitably be some blowback stemming from that sort of behaviour...
It's rare I want to call someone with conservative technological estimates unrealistic. Usually I see the opposite. But I don't think Kasparov is on the mark here.

The cellphone was invented after that and has forever changed the way we reach people and fundamentally how they are reachable.

Do you remember life pre-cellphones? When you left your house you literally dropped off the map. There was no way of anyone knowing where you were or where you were going. Unless you let them know beforehand, there was no way for people to catch-up with you when you got there. All sorts of tiny events required massive planning.

Now when you leave the house, should you so please (and the vast majority do) you can be reached. Climbing a mountain? In another country? Nobody knows this? They can still contact you! You can be at a place you've never been before and your friend can contact you and meet you there!

I actually think this disrupts my zen a little bit; I'd rather not be reachable at all times. I rarely pick up my phone - maybe for my father, my brother, or my girlfriend. Everyone else can leave a message.
That's a pessimistic worst-case scenario way to look at it. The same could be said of almost anything else. Why make friends? Why post on Hacker News? Why read books, or watch TV, or leave your house? It's never enough to say "Bad things can happen" and leave it at that. You need to make the case that the costs outweigh the benefits.
I got a very nice rejection email last year. Here it is:

We're sorry to say we couldn't accept your proposal for funding.Please don't take it personally. The quality of the applications continues to increase with each cycle, and since there's a limit on the number of interviews we can do, we had to turn away a lot of genuinely promising groups.

Another reason you shouldn't take this personally is that we know we make lots of mistakes. It's alarming how often the last group to make it over the threshold for interviews ends up being one that we fund. That means there are surely other good groups that fall just below the threshold and that we miss even interviewing.

We're trying to get better at this, but it's practically certain that groups we rejected will go on to create successful startups.If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email telling us about it; we want to learn from our mistakes.

Y Combinator Staff
Also on a motorola droid here. I experienced the same problem, but if i tapped on the flash side first before giving keyboard input, the browser would stop intercepting my keyboard stokes, and I could control the javascript side.

I also noticed the flash side was smoother, while the javascript side was very jerky.
It's the "extreme egotism" that involves not being interested in giving your team points just because you keep barking at me that I'm "obligated" to do so.
What I've learned from Sci-Fi movies
exactly, it's MITM attack people have been able to do for at least a decade
This seems like a good way to spread some viruses around via usb autoplay.

Seriously, I can't see this becoming a huge hit, if you need to walk to a physical location to get a file (what if someone has already deleted it, or there's a queue?), to say nothing of the difficulty of holding a laptop steady at chest level while connected to a usb drive embedded in a wall.

Is there more to this than a half baked idea at taking a virtual process (file sharing) and taking it into the real world? Is it more convenient? What value does having an anonymous drop spot have that bittorrent, or megaupload does not?
Dear Soupy,

You've certainly got quite a quandary on your hands. Having an offer from either place is a great opportunity, but I'd be happy to highlight some of the more unique aspects of a Palantir internship:

We do most of our product management as a distributed task across all of engineering. Rather than the traditional "product management tells engineering to implement this specification", we hand out problems to our engineers to solve. This means designing solutions to real world problems, writing specifications, and then implementing those solutions while giving guidance to QA on testing and to docs on training & documentation. This experience is what you will learn on your internship at Palantir - our interns sit on the engineering team as full engineers for the summer, working on the same pool of problems as the full-time engineers.

At the end of the summer, you will have learned to invent new technology, manage the product cycle, and translate requirements between cooperating teams - all useful experience for someone who wants to run their own company some day.

Some interns, however, have a very unique experience. Consider Michael Kross - he came to Palantir as a front-end engineering intern in the summer of '09. During the summer, he worked (alone, but with the original prototyper as a mentor) on building a fully-functional flows visualization to be used inside the Palantir Government platform. His work shipped as part of a regular release soon after he left for the summer.

But in June of '10, six months in to his tenure as a full-time dev and about a year to the day after his internship had originally started (he was a December grad), he had an interesting surprise: work that we had pioneered (including the flows tool) for recovery.gov in fighting fraud in the stimulus money was being applied to Medicare fraud. Vice-President Biden held a press conference where the flows tool was being used as the backdrop where it was announced that Palantir would be used to help reduce a $65 billion / year problem - not bad for a summer internship!

Finally, to address your thoughts on networking: you will have a great deal of visibility at Palantir, both in meeting people on other teams, working closely with the people on your team, and in being noticed. You'll have full access to the team of people that built the Palantir teams and products up from an idea to a shipping product and to the people that built the infrastructure to grow the company from idea to institution.

At the end of the day - you can’t go wrong quite honestly. We think Facebook has a great product, a great engineering team and respect their work tremendously. The key decider for me personally would be the type of problem you want to work on, how you perceive the impact of the work you’d be doing at each company and the size of the company you’d be joining and hopefully becoming a part of after you graduate. You’ll have a great time, learn a lot and be challenged in either environment.

Best of luck with your quandary,

Ari Gesher
Senior Software Engineer - Palantir Government
Important Information about Google Buzz Class Action Settlement
Google rarely contacts Gmail users via email, but we are making an exception to let you know that we've reached a settlement in a lawsuit regarding Google Buzz (http://buzz.google.com), a service we launched within Gmail in February of this year.

Shortly after its launch, we heard from a number of people who were concerned about privacy. In addition, we were sued by a group of Buzz users and recently reached a settlement in this case.

The settlement acknowledges that we quickly changed the service to address users' concerns. In addition, Google has committed $8.5 million to an independent fund, most of which will support organizations promoting privacy education and policy on the web. We will also do more to educate people about privacy controls specific to Buzz. The more people know about privacy online, the better their online experience will be.

Just to be clear, this is not a settlement in which people who use Gmail can file to receive compensation. Everyone in the U.S. who uses Gmail is included in the settlement, unless you personally decide to opt out before December 6, 2010. The Court will consider final approval of the agreement on January 31, 2011. This email is a summary of the settlement, and more detailed information and instructions approved by the court, including instructions about how to opt out, object, or comment, are available at http://www.BuzzClassAction.com.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
This mandatory announcement was sent to all Gmail users in the United States as part of a legal settlement and was authorized by the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.

Google Inc. | 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway | Mountain View, CA 94043
This is a symptom of the fact that an "app" is a leaky abstraction. It is nice to think about a webapp as being a collection of apps that have well-defined narrow functionality, but it is just not the case. As soon as you start writing code you realize that the apps need to be coupled or you have to jump through major hoops to decouple them properly. Once they are fully decoupled, they look more like plugins than apps.
Efficiency is an odd word choice, but I do agree with your usability criticisms.

What I love about Notifo is that it exposes a web service that lets me push arbitrary messages to my iPhone (e.g., I have an autorun batch file that lets me know when my son is on his computer, just to make sure he isn't getting up at 6AM just to play games). Getting that working wasn't difficult, but definitely non-trivial. Stepping back a bit, looking at notifo.com and the different services that work with it (pushly, HN, etc.), getting all the pieces to talk to each other is definitely a bit head-scratchy if you're non-technical.

I think this is a place where large companies have the benefit of scale such that a small service like Notifo can become a part of a broader online portfolio like Windows Live or Google. Otherwise, the mental burden in installing Notifo, registering a Notifo username, and figuring out where to enter that in on another service seems too high for casual users.

I suppose that Notifo's long term plan is to be acquired, but the downside is that I doubt agreements like what they have with Wufoo and HN would survive the transition.
Apparently. Perhaps they are working on their own service from scratch?

What moved me to post this: the other day folks here were discussing what hinders cloud service adoption. IMO, stuff like this does the most damage.
onTransact makes me die a little bit on the inside. Must... refactor....
"Sticky" threads are typically seen in forums where the threads are ordered by time of most recent comment. They make more sense in that context.
Review my startup: PadLister - Apartment Listings with Online Applications
Agreed. Technology is an end. The means to success in the field (and almost any field) are focus, creativity, determination and optimism. Chances are your affinity for tech will rub off, and it's not exactly an uncommon hobby these days.

Good luck, it's always great to see somebody considering child education.
10 pm is a fake notification time.
As should SO.
I know, I was just joking...
Totally agreed. This would be great for Apex or any other place where you want a web based portal to your cloud based code.

Very cool!
Make sure you offer an incentive for those who fill in the survey. Don't make the survey too long, but put a lot of thought into the questions and execution (sending it somewhere in the next few days to your entire user base might not be the best idea). Ask yourself questions first: what is is exactly you want to know, and to what extent are you willing to take action on the outcome.
Nothing about this is intended to be the least bit secure. It's a fun hack, nothing more.
Also, you can't diff or merge them.
Having karma as the measure of legit accounts will force spammers to make more submissions, most likely in automated mode.
It happens in Denmark quite a lot, but I usually just give them a real zip code I don't live in.
This should be implemented as a bookmarklet, or more preferably a userscript.
In which case, just put them all on the mortgage (if you have equity). Usually the best interest rate.
Control+z will enter Vimperator pass-through mode and the site will work. Just hit escape to exit pass-through.
Yes. Look up a reference to "no one wants to read your shit" in the google. And it is so true, no one reads your website (or mine either). You are fooling yourself if you think otherwise (at least for getting that initial conversion).
Agreed. Obviously OP loves his kid, he's not asking: "How do I make my child a cyborg?"

Unconditional love is hardly a guideline anyways. Kids need rules, instruction, challenge, inspiration and just generally good examples to follow. That's the tough part. Loving your own child is an achievement akin to dressing yourself.
saw the site ... like the idea but could not find how to edit the page and add my link even after i signed up
20 Recommended Quora Threads for Startups
Haven't read his calculus book, but Strang's linear algebra book is the best math book I've ever read. It's actually readable! Certain chapters are available on line. Based on it I would definitely try his Calculus book if I needed one.
You're confusing apps that you never have to write again with awesome apps that really define and make Django better as a whole. Nearly every common use case you can think of exists already has a Django app. Most of them are trivial, but it's nice to not have to write it again. Why would I pick commenting as my favorite app?

South on the other hand, is a major improvement that I can't see myself not having on a daily basis, and it's not a trivial use case that I could knock out in an afternoon. It's well-written, brings a lot to the framework, and solves a problem that most people can't handle themselves. THAT'S a piece of code deserving to be my favorite app.

I suggest you look at http://djangopackages.com/ if you still (incorrectly) believe that Django apps as a whole haven't exceeded every expectation of what sets Django apart from every other mainstream framework out right now. Reusable apps that take the mundane out of web development have been a huge success, even more so with the upcoming class-based views in 1.3.
And the lottery. We misestimate probabilities, particularly when they are extreme (near-certainty and near-impossibility). That gap between how likely an event 'seems' and its real probability explains the lottery, not wearing seatbelts, smoking, witchcraft, the monty hall problem...
MEG WHITMAN: STINGIEST BILLIONAIRE IN AMERICA? (OR: TOP 8 REASONS WHY BORAT
Hmm... we have a somewhat zealous firewall tool on our servers, but I modified it.

Try again and let me know. Thanks!
I just launched online applications with automatic credit checks, so I thought I'd share the site and try to get some feedback. This is a companion site to PadMapper (http://www.padmapper.com), which helps renters find apartments.

An example of a listing page on the site:
http://www.padlister.com/listings/6966.2-bedroom-2-bathroom-...

And an example of an online application form:
https://www.padlister.com/rent_applications/new/6966
Well said! I agree with all of it. I'd only add that the U.S. isn't the only country that can innovate, and that innovation needs purpose beyond energy production. I feel that purpose should be:

- Colonizing space.

- Making better use of our land for sustainable agriculture to feed the hungry and the children of our future.
Ask HN: Does anyone know what this kind of tiled web background this is?
I've been noticing more and more sites using a tiled, granular background as seen here http://www.colorzilla.com/firefox/

Does anyone know what these are called? I'm looking for a tutorial to make them (or if it exists, a website that generates them)
>"What moved me to post this: the other day folks here were discussing what hinders cloud service adoption. IMO, stuff like this does the most damage."

I completely agree. Speaking for myself, stories like this cause me to pause even more before joining, relying on, trusting, and eventually paying for any web based service.
Douglas Adams' Nested Preferences Weirdness
Or they might integrate it with Facebook and want to not have to worry about merging users between the two services.
Thanks jrockway. Updated :)
Test Your Website Before You Build It
Why would their agreements with current web apps not survive the transition?
FWIW, Newspapers such as "The sun" I'd expect to have a far younger readership than "The Times".

eg Tabloids are read by the young, grown up broadsheets by the old.
Good luck pitching Mike Arrington :)
You sir, win this thread.
You would be amazed how many people apply for programming jobs who seem to have no ability whatsoever to write software.
I wonder if they're doing browser history sniffing? If I were an evil-finance-company-web-developer, I'd certainly consider attempting to find out which of my competitors websites you've visited recently. Or whether you'd visited any of their (or my) adwords landing pages. Or (with a fair bit more work) whether you'd done any of a selection of specific google searches.

I've been playing with it a bit lately, it works pretty reliably in most of the Firefox 3.6.* browsers, as well as iPhones running 3.1.3 and 4.1, and IE 7 and 8... (Chrome, Safari, and iPads are immune to both the css and javascript sniffing techniques I've tried, but that's not to say there aren't other tricks that work for them...)

http://bigiain.com/csshistorysniffing.html

(apologies in advance if my cheapo hosting and naive and unoptimised perl/cgi proof of concept doesn't stand up to hackernews traffic volumes...)
You have a point, although I feel you talk more about social disruption rather than technological. Switched communication and voice transmission over electromagnetic signal were genuine technology breakthroughs, and both are over a century old now. Cellphone is a combination of both, and while it was out of technical reach in 1900s, the concept still would've not sounded alien to the engineers of the time.
Strang's Calculus book is fantastic. I bought it long ago merely to have it (having already learned Calculus).
What's the plan for monetizing the site? I've been under the impression that Craigslist will serve C&Ds if you crawl the site for profit.
lack of ownership. No one owns the data, no one can claim responsibility, and the only people that can effectively remove the vandalism is the property owner, and that's only if they know it exists. How often do you scrub your property for hidden drop points?
> "Don't you find lego is very kit-based (you buy a box and get to build a specific "thing")"

People always say this about Lego recently. They still have a ton of generic building block kits which are great.

My kids love doing both though. They love having the kits, building them, and keeping them 'for display'. But we have boxes and boxes of general lego bits, of which they're always using to build hogwarts castle, a school, or some contraption.

I think Meccano takes more patience. But good when they're older.

K'Nex is ok, but not as flexible in terms of what you can build with it than Lego IMHO.
I hate the beatles.