skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The total number of friends does not matter. It comes down to the fact that there is simply information you want to share with only your close friends.

You're not going to tell everyone that the VC you just met with is a tool - but I bet you anything there are a handful of people you do want to tell and discuss it with.

This issue needs to be solved from both angles. An experience that encourages the sharing of content with dynamic lists of connections + an interface that organizes content based on conversations and not strictly a news feed of interactions taking place within your personal network.
Friedman is a cheesy, uninsightful, mostly bogus commentator.

I could not have put it better myself.
Remind HN: November is Launch an App Month
As discussed previously on HN(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1773398) a bunch of us are going to commit to actually launching an MVP by the end of November.

We're gathering in the Facebook group here:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_141079939271952

What are you going to be launching in November?
"A CompSci grad is supposed to be able to do difficult things that arts grads simply can’t understand."

/rant/

The majority of CS education that I've had so far has been theoretical. There has been a lot of math and pseudo code, and logic. Programming rarely comes into it, and when it does, it is (generally) trivial (and it is OK if you get it partially wrong).

Compare this to my undergraduate in philosophy, where I was generally writing at minimum 30 pages per class per semester in term papers, regular writing assignments, and thousands of pages of reading.

There is no question to me that the undergraduate philosophy degree was more challenging.
(this is solely based on my experience, I do not mean to indicate it reflects all experiences with all MS CS/ BA PHIL experiences.)

In the philosophy degree, I learned theory and wrote (and I wrote a lot).
And sometimes my papers came back with lots of red ink.
I took my lumps and rewrote them.

In the CS degree I regurgitate facts, and write the occasional Java program. (Normally from a 'starter' program).

There is no question to me that an ideal CS degree would be as programming intensive as an arts degree is writing intensive. Programming assignments for each class, and producing a substantial piece of work by the end of the class. You know, demonstrating knowledge.
Thanks! I'm reading it now, actually....
All the hate on artsies ruined the article for me.

If you haven’t trashed your computer while doing something
questionable, then you’re not a computer scientist – you’re just
an arts grad who didn’t get laid

A CompSci grad is supposed to be able to do difficult things that arts grads simply can’t understand.

This is exactly the type of biased, negative, and unproductive criticism that the HN community works hard to prevent and has been recently vocal in admonishing.

I may be a little sensitive - I have both a double major BA and a Bachelors in Computer Science and my CS friends look insanely ignorant when they presume they know anything about the benefits/lacks of an Arts degree. Arts "teaches you to think" in ways that CS/Engineering students are never even exposed to (except for by some token arts requirements) - it teaches you have to think about people and the human condition. I would much rather have a CS grad help me start a company, but equally rather have an Arts grad run it (See Warren Bennis' On becoming a leader for a much better investigation into why Arts students make the best leaders [of human beings]).

I'm not saying that Arts is better in any way - I'm just asking for mutual respect. No poli sci student is going around saying they can prove the amortized runtime of a skip list - if you're in CS please don't pretend you've had their education either. Your education also isn't any "harder" in any objective way - ODEs or building an OS in C is not any more difficult than wrapping your head around Aristotle or existentialist phenomenology, it really isn't. It's actually much easier to get an A in CS than Arts, but that's a bit of an aside.

I realize that this was an article not a comment, and I don't intend to start a debate. I just think we need some mutual respect between the disciplines and there seems to be a latent "bash artsies" in some tech writing that really needs to be squashed - it's not helping anyone.

[more to the point of the article: My subjective anecdotal evidence is that arts grads have a MUCH harder time getting hired post-grad (which makes sense considering they chose to learn fundamentals not practical skills) so they go either a) travelling b) to grad school c) to law school. This is a major skew, none of these people should be consider employed, but they don't contribute to the arts grads unemployment rate either]
Clickable Facebook group:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_141079939271952
OpenBSD 4.8 Released
I think that depends on where you do most of your work.

If you're a front-end developer then jQuery. If you're a mobile guy, then objective-C. If you're a backend developer, then erlang.
The shape of your problem
Canonical is always hiring for various positions, most of the engineering focused ones are remote:

http://webapps.ubuntu.com/employment/
Taking Sides: How groups are using the Internet to distort everything
Yes, I find this annoying as well.
Bosses Overestimate Their Managing Skills
The Startup Diet
I'm a second year CS student and probably not a typical example, but I've found University education fairly comprehensive and useful. I have been programming and fooling around with robotics and such through high school, so I guess I knew a lot more stuff than most of my classmates. This is probably reflected by the 20%-30% or so (my approximation) drop rate after first year.

Anyway, in my first year we've studied different layers of a computing system:

* Computer Engineering - and implemented [MU0](http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~pjj/cs1001/arch/node1.html) on an FPGA

* Architecture - general principles and ARM ASM

* OO programming - theory and a lot of Java

* Computation - finite state automata, regexp, a bit about complexity

* Math

Plus some more specialized course units:

* AI

* Distributed Systems

* Team project - which was mostly about team work, but some web apps stuff too

In the second year there are a lot more specialized units:

* Algorithms (implemented in C)

* Operating systems (just pen and paper for the first 2 labs, boring for now)

* Databases (SQL)

* Machine learning (labs with Matlab)

* Networks (Wireshark FTW)

* Microcontrollers (with real dev boards - ARM + FPGA)

* Architecture (again)

* CGI

* Distributed systems (again)

* Mobile systems (seems to be mostly about radio comm and codecs)

I mean, really, you have to be an idiot to blag your way through all of these and not learn anything useful for potential employers. It is true that it probably helps a lot if you have some previous knowledge and/or do independent work as the learning curve is steep. But if you can't do it, maybe you should be studying something else.

The geek culture is visible both among students and staff, but to be honest it's clearly a minority.

BTW, this is CS @ Manchester Uni.

And a WTF moment, because not everything's this good: We've had a "careers workshop" and then we had to submit a CV and cover letter to get marked on and receive feedback. I've submitted the ones that landed me an internship this summer and I've been failed (this probably means I need to resubmit a corporate-looking one).
The real source of IE5 traffic to minecraftwiki
> I can't quite understand if you're saying GA's are neural networks, or just that both of them are overused.

I was saying that both are overused.

> one of the big problems is that the heuristics for a heuristic algorithm must be designed by with human insights

By "heuristics" I don't strictly mean "rule-based", but you can do a good job in reducing the search space by a large amount if you program in some common sense that will discard obviously bad moves.

It would be surprising if the devs did understand all the interactions, as it would mean that the search space is trivial. SC2 is not that much different from chess, and, to my knowledge, the best chess-playing AIs don't use genetics. They get much further with trees and precalculated start- and endgame moves.
The OS itself may, but apps don't always. The 2:30-localtime problem has been an awkward one for cron in the past.
This is a great deal! I'm buying this for the included WooThemes wordpress themes. I've used them before, their themes are well coded and are constantly being updated.
A CompSci degree is not the only thing you need for career in I.T. It's not a vocational degree like medicine is.
Review my startup - Adventure Cow
I've witnessed that a number of times -- at one company I worked with, we had a team of 30 people disabled even though all of the unit tests worked fine. Someone had inserted something into some shared code (that with even marginally competent engineering would not have shared) that rendered the entire application stack inoperable. I think it was a monkeypatch (Ruby on Rails), so it was VERY hard to detect.
"A student in a C++ class at least has a chance at being exposed to something lower level."

True, but the risk of using C++ in other CS classes is that they'll spend most of their time fighting C++, and not focus on whatever the class is supposed to be teaching. And the instructor/professor may be wasting a lot of time doing C++ tech support, rather than teaching compiler concepts, or whatever.
Elasticity is NOT Cloud Computing... just ask Google
Supreme Court to hear arguments on whether violent games should be regulated
Well, I really don't think there's much to do here.

In this case, Google wasn't responsible for Wave's failure to gain traction. Not to mention, Google keeps their employees quite happy AFAIK. I'm sure Wave's death played a key role in the switch, but honestly, that's of no fault to Google.

Imo, it's bad PR for Lars, not Google. It shows he follows the money, or at the very least, allowed his ego to define him.
Colourlovers (YC W10) Coloring Book: Jonny's Startup Adventure
Las Vegas Slots vs. Voting Machines
Maybe QtWebKit?

http://doc.trolltech.com/4.7/qtwebkit.html

It's still C++, but a lot more pleasant to deal with than Gecko, at least...
Ask PG:  How do you reply to questions so quickly on HN?
Do you have an alert that goes off on your phone whenever there's any question directed to you on HN?
One Dunkin’ Donuts store is taking a stand against the penny
Starring will not work. In a week you are going to be asking for a gold star as well so you can differentiate between your close friends and your really close friends. This will continue and quickly become unmanageable.

I don't think groups is the solution either. It is a solution but most likely not the best due to the fact that there are a million combinations of groups I can put together using my friends. Ideally these groups would not be long lasting and I could create them on the fly.
It certainly is a game of compound interest! On top of that the system has three features that interact to give it its depth:

1) There are several opportunities in each game to sacrifice your rate of growth to obtain a temporary advantage in present value (ie. cutting workers to rush).

2) Because present value is multidimensional (you can't measure the value of a Zergling directly against that a Mutalisk), you can sacrifice your rate of growth or your present value in order to obtain a temporary advantage in what kind of value you have (ie. cutting units or workers to tech).

3) Information asymmetry. While trying to gain these mathematical advantages, one has to act on information that is increasingly out of date. One can not usually predict the opponent's exact present value and rate of change, but can only estimate ever-widening bounds on their values.
"But I don't see any technology solution on the horizon that easily and naturally facilitates this."

Email
Why fb dude? I wanna keep fb private. Twitter list? Google Group? Something else?
That may be true, but he is already a professor so I assume that he has already covered his tenure.

And given his achievements, and speed at which he has achieved them, he is one of those people who probably won't have trouble getting tenure, no matter how much of a dick he is being.
Yep. I'm not an expert in the field, but I'd say it's a pretty good book. You'll want to track down more serious publications if you want to go deep, but the nltk book should give you a good idea of the basic terminology.

Also, if you just want to extract something, have a look at Latent Semantic Analysis - http://www.puffinwarellc.com/index.php/news-and-articles/art...
This article is complete BS. Why do people post crap like this. The vast majority of people who do open source work, do it as related to work, which is not their primary work.
Regenerative Breakthrough in Subway Cars Could Boost Battery Industry
Interactive Alphabet named Best iPad Kids app of the year by iLounge
Ask HN: How to avoid being a digital pack rat?
I am finally admitting to myself that I am a digital hoarder. I just upgraded my laptop and realized how much stuff I drag along each time I upgrade. I have VMs from the last three laptops and two workstations that I keep lugging around. At this rate my next laptop will have to have a 1tb drive just for the old VMs. I tell myself that I will cleanup later but I am at a point where it will take a significant effort to consolidate and minimize.

How can I avoid this in the future? How do you streamline your file storage and application management?
Very ranty article, but has a point.

I taught in a Computer Science department for 4 years whilst studying for a PhD. I can honestly say that each year, the quality of the students coming in reduced (lower qualifications, less students with any Maths background for example) and in order to maintain pass rates, the university responded by taking hard subjects out of the syllabus.

The UK higher education system is a mess. Its designed to only work financially with a ridiculous amount of students flowing through it. You can't maintain that volume and also maintain the quality out the other end.

My PhD was the same. I honestly believe that the minimum quality of what I had to produce what much lower than it would have been a decade ago. PhDs are the new masters and masters are the new degrees.

Knowing people that teach in the most prestigious universities in the UK, I also know that this issue affects all universities in the UK.
From COLOURlovers (YC/W10), we bring you the ultimate coloring book for Hackers everywhere...

"Through 14 pages of coloring you'll help him name his idea and color in the world he hopes to take over as he meets such characters as: Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Dave McClure, Chris Sacca, Mark Zuckerberg + Sean Fanning & the Missing Dinner Guest, The Last Super Angels Supper, Steve Jobs, Paul Graham & The Ultimate Sign of Success... A Custom Zonda!"

You'll even get to color in your very own YC Dinner!
http://jonnysstartupadventure.s3.amazonaws.com/PGYC.jpg
Boston, MA, USA. Remote is possible, but I prefer local.

Web Engineer for Practically Green. RoR on Nginx, mobile applications and some big data stuff. Ideally, you're a green geek as well...

I'm jason at practicallygreen.
The one in Froyo works just fine to play most flash videos and games.
A pain I know all too well...

http://assets.storenvy.com/product_photos/131899/6-McClure_o...
How to design a great about page.
I saw this on Inc while viewing another article.
Thought you guys might find this interesting.
I just thought you might want to know that web applications hosted on GAE are not accessible to Iranians, and presumably to people of other countries in OFAC sanction list.

Google responds with a "403 Forbidden".
Study: Alcohol More Deadly Than Heroin
So if you are reading this and wondering "Then where can I get a decent style guide?" perhaps try this one instead: http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/javascript...
The adoption of capitalism and participation in international institutions doesn't imply that China has westernized. By 'westernize', most people mean that they expect China to adopt democratic, individualistic consumer culture and a political system similar to Continental or Anglo-Saxon democracies. I believe this is extremely unlikely. Radically 'unwestern' states have always coexisted with industrialized capitalism: Tsarist Russia, 2nd Reich and Nazi Germany, etc. Not to mention that most Asian democracies like Japan would hardly be recogzable to a Briton or American. The best-case scenario for an emergent China is probably a state that looks a lot like Singapore, Taiwan, or Japan. IMO, China fifty years from now will probably fall far more toward the authoritarian end of the spectrum.
I don't think University works as a blanket indicator, but it definitely can help. At least at Bristol (my alma mater), the students are highly exposed to low level technical detail, with assignments including processor design, building an assembler, and in the final year, writing a kernel for a multi-processing OS (the hardest thing I've ever tried). They have courses on algorithms, computational complexity and a good mathematics unit too. Plus they teach C, Haskell and Java in the first year to give a good spread of different paradigms, and then expect students to go out and learn any other languages as appropriate for whatever they're working on at the time.

I have my own issues with my time there, but for giving a good, detailed, low-level understanding of computing, I can't fault them.
As storage grows, won't your old stash become very easy to store?
You know, I can't really speak to that. I know it's not a good place to try and make a good living as there just aren't many opportunities out here to make >45k a year.. most everything is entry level, retail, or hospitality around here. So I guess I was surprised when we are offering a very good job for the area that we got so little interest, but it makes sense in that most qualified people are just leaving before they become qualified.

I imagine dealer.com is nabbing good local hackers faster than we can find them
Point 2:
Apple has a great deal of influence to kill a great deal. Recently they depreciated Java on the Mac.

How many $30 desktop apps will you sell if users also have to download a 200MB Java runtime?

Don't fool yourself, Apple has to power to drive adoption (USB) or kill it (Flash, Jave, et al).
This is super valuable advice. One of the biggest issues I've seen in the technology world is forgetting that we are (often) not the target customer or the largest moneymakers.

There's a kind of minimum barrier of entry to interact on the places we like to hang out (knowledge, interests, etc), so a lot of people tend to get used to everyone being at that level of intelligence/tech savvyness. Then you launch a product that any "tech" person would easily be able to navigate and use, but someone who still mixes up which one is the mouse sometimes might still have some problems with it.
Brad Feld: Focus on entrepreneurs not investors
Great Ask HN idea ... I'll definitely be keeping my eyes on this section. Anyone for a tech writer experienced at writing detailed how-to articles and general blog posts?
I am a diamond level terran on ladder and have faced this rush build order before. To be honest it is a very strong build but most players will scout this very early.

I would be more interested in searching the space for hard counters to build orders with certain match ups. Certainly it gets way more complex (and starcraft is).
Why Open Source Yields a More Secure Product
Hasn't Appleseed been open source for years? I don't understand what "going public" means or why "invites" are needed.
zferral is looking for talented & passionate team members.

Front & Back End (PHP)

Email me - let's chat!
What are you looking to do? It seems like there are enough of these "base" projects to work off of.
I agree with you in principle. That would have been a better outcome. But as they say, hindsight is always 20:20. When you're in the thick of things, the last thing you want to do is quit. Sometimes you only want to quit when you have to, so that at the end of the day, you know you gave it your all.
Indeed. Though the crucial difference is, that chess is a game of complete information, while StarCraft hides your enemy. It's much harder to do tree search without complete information.

As a comparison, look at the recent progress made in computer Go that employs Monte Carlo simulations. (And Genetic Algorithms are closer to Monte Carlo than to tree searches.)
Chess has a much smaller board, turn-based play, and no unit unit production or races, so it's a bad comparison.
Report from the BBC, and much dicussion here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1855713

If you prefer an American report on this British report, there's also the CNN version here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1856456
We appear to use at least some of the same subsets since we're both here. Just last week there were two videos on the front page the one time I looked that wouldn't play. This happens in my Google Reader on a daily basis as well.

As a Facebook Game developer I probably see more Flash than normal people, though the number of people who play Flash games on Facebook alone numbers in the hundreds of millions.
Heh, I was googling a Node.js problem a few days ago and came across the Meebo secret jobs page. Excellent way to reach out to developers! :)
There are a few web shops around Burlington.. I know Tag New Media is doing really hot and probably looking for good help.

Dealer.com is huge and growing. Other than that, it's really just programmer/sysadmin/tech-everything positions for smaller, non-tech businesses.. which aren't exactly 'good CS jobs'.

There are usually 1-3 jobs in the Seven Days for developers, most in the 45-60k area with a few I would guess in the 60-85k range.
Yellowknife, NT, Canada. No remote.

SSi Micro is hiring great hackers. Are you smart, motivated, and interested in working on awesome software optimized for our world-class, unique, and super-cool satellite network? Then come and be a propellerhead at our awesome, small company. We work with the coolest stuff (right now, we're building a web provisioning/portal interface to our new video conferencing offering in Node.js--and it's awesome).

www.ssimicro.com/jobs

We're a little company based in Yellowknife, the capital city of the Northwest Territories. We deliver broadband satellite internet to 61 of the most remote communities on earth, and now that our network's up and running (although we're investing heavily in upgrading it), we're busy building great software for our customers, optimized specifically for our unique network.

Recently, we built a file sharing webapp called Qfile. (Check it out: http://qfile.ca -- Free 60 day trial!). Why not just use dropbox, you ask? Well, our network is pretty unique: all our traffic is bounced off a satellite, and round-trip latency of ~600ms (which is because of the horrible limitation of the speed of light, which we are constantly working to exceed) means that we have to do things a little differently.

Yellowknife's not as cold as you think, and the 24-hours-of-daylight summers are not to be missed.

If you're interested and game, we'll make an offer really easy to accept: We'll get and pay for your apartment, a car if you need it, and pay you atop that. We'll do all that for up to three months while you evaluate us and the north, so that it's risk- and hassle-free for you to come to a really great, unique company in an awesome little city.

Email: stephenw@ssimicro.com
Austin, TX (the best city in the world) no remote

Camm Security Inc. http://cam.ly

Cam.ly is hiring. We're looking for IP camera firmware engineers and mobile engineers (Android). Email us at jobs@cam.ly or for more info go to http://cam.ly/jobs