skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Proprietary or not, it is an accessible language and IDE. The idea of learning an open language is a good one. But, I think at the high-school level, it would be more important to expose students to something with a low barrier of entry. I don't mean the language, but the entire package. With VB you install one application, and you get an environment where you basically type code and press a play button to get it to run.
I wish I could make it seem like I wasn't trying to make money but pull in ~$1.2-2B this year[0][1]

[0] http://www.allfacebook.com/facebooks-ad-revenue-to-surpass-1...

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/01/facebook-will-hit-2-billion...
Why are all the headings in flash? Why?!
Ask HN: How Did you hack your education?
This is a broad question but in general i wanted to look at ways of getting ahead in school etc.
So how did you hack your education?
How accessible is VB.NET for all those kids who own a Mac?
No matter how many different classes require a paper to be written, always write one paper and reuse it for all classes. US Profs love creativity and when you come to them and ask if you can write about the "History of Religion" for your history paper they will always say yes. Then go to your religion professor and pitch the same paper. Et viola. Two classes with one paper. And since you'll have a little more time to write the one paper it will usually be better.

Also, always do the readings _before_ the class, not after. By offsetting your reading one week sooner then everyone else you'll have an advantage.
SOCIAL SECURITY DISABILITY
The Harris Law Group was founded to protect the rights of injured people by offering outstanding legal services and personal attention to each client. We handle Workers Compensation, Social Security Disability, Personal Injury and Medical Malpractice.
Dup:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1883050

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1882541

Neither have comments.
A lot of what I did to hack my education was specific to my particular circumstances, but two pieces of general advice should apply to anyone:

1) Choose classes based on the professor, not the subject. Ask around to find out who the exceptional professors are-- you'll find out, quickly-- and take whatever they are offering. A good professor can make the dullest subject come to life; a bad professor can suck the life out of the most fascinating topic.

2) Treat studying as a job. Set aside a couple of hours a day, preferably at a fixed time, to do focused, head-down, no nonsense studying. I used a study carrel in the library, every day for two hours. Two hours a day was all it took, to stay ahead of the pack in all subjects, and still have endless time for a very active social/extra-curricular life.
That's better than I was expecting. I'm surprised more people don't take advantage of this (or maybe they do, I don't know). Use S3 for permanent storage, ephemeral disk and RAM for cache, and pay spot rates. Sounds pretty good if one's design allows for it.
then he went on and desi^h^h^h^h ... crea^h^h^h^h ... hacked Perl...
Most non-technical average users (read: the majority of their users ) just don't really understand / care about the privacy issues.

They just love the experience they can find at and pretty much only at the facebook site.

The tech press and media make an initial fuss about all of it but by the time they figure out a way to bring it down to a level the masses can understand facebook has put a notification on the top of the News Feed to explain.

I'm not agreeing with the practices merely attempting to explain why in the minds of the lion share of facebook users mind it just does not matter
No need to go that far. The easiest way to protest this is to DDoS the system - if a large enough proportion of the population consistent opts out of the backscatter, the system will collapse on itself.

There is no way TSA can clear a flight full of people using patdowns fast enough. All we need is enough people to refuse - no need to make special requests or other muck up the works.
Does the compensation reflect the working hours? That is, your roomate is working at least 50% more than normal [1], does he make 50% more than people who work normal hours doing similar work?

[1] I can't comment on the industry standard because Apple is kind of a hybrid between a software and hardware company.
It's not that I care so much - I don't really care about the karma - it's just that it's a source of information about the community and my actions within it. Karma is intended to reinforce "good behavior" and discourage "bad behavior" and so I pay attention to it.

Not least, as I'm running a closed community I'm paying very close attention to the effect, and to the discussions that occasionally pop up.

> I have the hacker friends extension ... set
> to highlight all of your comments and submissions.

Gosh. <blush> Thanks.
... and a kind of sailing boat, and a programming language for MS-DOS business applications which was actually quite popular back in the day. But generic terms like "android clipboard" are more important anyway.
yeah that is true. most of the time array would not have holes. when it does, using 'table.maxn(...)' works.
Your photos are easily accessible using the Graph API[1]. I wrote a python script which downloads all your photos and saves them to your computer[2]. However, I agree that Facebook doesn't make it easy for other web services to access stored data.

[1]: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/photo

[2]: https://github.com/derferman/scrapebook
You're arguing against a point I didn't make. I'm not arguing for the existence of pure altruism, or denying the importance of genes. I'm saying that selfishness doesn't explain human behavior very well. It's an argument against the common model of human beings as rational economic actors. For the most part our motivations lie elsewhere, and we don't behave as homo economicus unless we are in weird and artificial situations.

I'm also making a more subtle point about the difficulty of delineating where a person ends and society begins. This is a much fuzzier concept for me, but I have a hunch that it doesn't make sense to say that a human personality is entirely contained in the body that we normally associate it with, any more than crashing waves are contained within a rocky shore. The body gives rise to this funny thing called a mind, and yet minds don't seem to be stored just in one brain.

I did not understand your point about the sociopath; it seems to be making my argument for me, that the driving forces at one level of organization tell you little about the next level up.
You turn javascript off to get rid of lightboxes? I can kind of understand that, but you're also turning off lots of functionality in modern websites/apps. It's like blowing your leg off because your little toe annoys you.
Ask HN: Where to find non-geek jobs at startups
My fiancé is looking for a new job and would prefer to avoid the drudgery of working for yet another investment bank. I know all the usual places to look if I'm looking for a dev/tech job with an interesting company, but where would someone looking for an admin, PA, or similar role typically look?

Ideas?
An old but good discussion - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=290216
Hi from France. Apple has legal obligations as they are an editor. But in my point of view, it is not the role of a compagny to decide what is "legaly moral".
This is the first problem.
Second one is that (please consider i'm european) a compagny can't decide by itself who have the Right be a concurrent. In Europe, it took long years, but finally Microsoft has been condamned for obstruction to concurrence because of IE domination! Now, each new computer whith Windows must give the choice at the first boot between selected browsers.
I think this Will happen one day to Apple, because restrictions about Adobe flash are just illegals. Just like the impossibility to use the app installers of our choice.

@spike021:
The fight against piracy is not an argument. Look how it is easy today to find and install a cracked app, and how it is easy to crack and spread worldwide an official app.
This is the demonstration that Apple closed model is absolutly not the answer to piracy.
Ask HN: How do you track progress of reading technical books?
You have a (big) technical book that involves, for example, learning a new API/library/programming language/OS/etc.

How do you track the progress of reading the sections and chapters, the programming examples tried, the references and additional articles read related to something from the book?

Maybe I'm a bit anal about that but every time I started reading a technical book after the first 50 or so pages I'm starting to feel overwhelmed with the inability to have a clear log of what was read, when it was read, what examples have been tried out, what was left to be read, etc.
see also Scheme in a Grid
http://siag.nu/siag/
I'm pretty sure Facebook would then remove the href on the link & tell people to copy/paste it into their browser.
I did the minimum required to not fail out of high school. In the massive amounts of time that I freed up by not doing homework, I taught myself to program C and Java and Perl. I made sure I understood the material I was not doing the homework for, so I could ace all the standardized tests. I took (and aced) the AP tests even though my school didn't offer AP courses. I (barely) graduated high school, then worked for a year at a tech startup. Evidently some admissions officer found that impressive, so I got into a top college.

Then I did the minimum required to not fail out of college. (Actually, I cut it really close, flunking two courses in my major and at one point having it look like there was no conceivable way I could fulfill the graduation requirements.) In the massive amounts of time that I freed up by not doing homework, I redid the database system for a 100k-user website, wrote the school's course evaluation system, and taught myself Lisp and Haskell. I had no trouble finding jobs after college, despite my dubious graduation status.

Remember that no matter what you're "supposed" to be doing, you always have a choice in what you actually do. There're lots more paths to an impressive resume than doing well in school.
There was a screencast on "Why Lua" posted to HN not too long ago.
SSH: Use Password or Public-Private Keys?
I am sorry, but I don't get what's so amazing in this phone except the fact that Microsoft managed to persuade Dell to build it.

That was some serious play with Windows OEM licensing...

And, BTW, I could use the eternal life and US$ 5B bank account, but I already am stunningly attractive... ;-)
Top Twenty iPad Apps for Political Junkies
Actually, I like "anterior" and "dorsal" better than assembly instructions from the 1950s.
Where is their list of flags applied when building the test programs?
unless somebody steps up to my computer and tries to cut some text
Funnily enough I checked my photos on facebook the other day and half of them have disappeared. Been deleted.

Don't rely on facebook keeping your photos, let alone allowing you to export them.
Entrepreneurs: The Real "Peace Prize" Winners - Chris Brown - Mises Daily
It's easier for the computer too. Parsing and outputting json involves much less overheard than doing the same in XML.
You can "choose" insofar as you can email support and they can manually change what data-center your next VM and all subsequent ones will be built in. It really should be exposed through the API, but the people who write the customer-facing API haven't done it.
genuine question (this sounds a little smarmy but I know nothing about Graph API or web dev at all really): How is it not easy for other web services to access this stored data when a random guy can easily throw a script on GitHub to do it?
You do know the referer header is optional don't you, I mean, you'd look pretty dumb relying on it for any web service because, you know, some crazy people turn them off altogether, perhaps with the Firefox add-on RefControl.
I suppose CL/Scheme programmers just learn by heart what those combinations do (ie. what kind of structure they work with), because to me both cadadr and the (first (rest ...)) sequence are equally meaningless at first glance. It's not easy to see what the data structure looks like.

In Clojure it's usually more idiomatic to use destructuring, which I think is much more understandable since the form follows the structure that is being accessed.

Or you can use get-in, which takes a sequence of keys to dig into a deep associative data structure. It doesn't work with sequences, but building highly nested seqs is rather uncommon in Clojure.
Where? I have 9.0.570.1 on Windows 7 (32-bit) and I don't see such an option in the about:flags.

The only flag relating to tabs I can see is the first one to put the tabs down the side.
Good article, it is good to show that there are lots of indie devs that earn money with Android.

We started last year with Android, and we are making around $2000/month (1M downloads in total) with really simple applications. The majority of the revenue comes from ads, but more and more paid apps revenue is higher!
That's poetic justice for having code files in excess of 50k lines.
I wrote one using a LISP dialect a few years back. I still like the idea. :)
Wouldn't the safest path be contacting the company to see if they are ok with it? They probably are, since it's a common word and they didn't go after the owner of TUVW.com. In the worst case scenario you will have to choose another name. Better now than later.
There were other accounts too that are still active but that he may be locked out of. That particular account got silently hellbanned for sarcasm: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=551664

Some historical threads: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196390 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1015591
I got 30 right, but with the exact opposite experience. The 6 I got wrong were the ones I did immediately, and the 30 I got right were the ones I thought about.
VB isn't easy like basic was easy. It's not hard mind you, it's just not VB. VB.net is trying to be a basicish language that's good enough for enterprise development.

Python is used at many top colleges as the into course (Georgia Tech and MIT are ones I know off the top of my head) and additionally, Zed Shaw has written an excellent first text on the language downloadable for free (http://learnpythonthehardway.org/index)

Additionally: Nothing is stopping you from ALSO learning python at the same time.
Or just put the link on a HTTPS page as referrer information isn't sent from those.
The ball's in your court google
Did you mean: define: pharaonic

No definitions were found for enphaoronate.
One thing that bothers me about Python's whitespace, is that it is not possible automatically indent Python code that has lost its indentation for some reason or another. You have to go back and read the original source to restore the meaning of the program even though you already have all the visible tokens it contains.
The flag is "Confirm to Quite". It might be Mac (v 9.0.572.1) only right now as I don't see it in Linux (v 9.0.570.1).
Fron what I read the Mono compiler for VB.Net is reasonably complete so to answer your question, it's there but more difficult than it should be.
This one: http://kylecordes.com/2010/lua-strange-loop
1. Python is Free (Free as in Freedom vs. free as in beer debate)
2. Python teaches you the importance of whitespace
3. Python forces clarity in your coding
4. Python is blackboard-compatible, it's a great pseudo-language.
5. Python has a great REPL
6. Python is great for both scripting and OOP
7. Real Hackers use it ;-)

Good luck! Just curious: do you guys have whiteboards or blackboards in class these days? Somehow teaching programming on a blackboard seems more appropriate & terminal-like to me.
Marvell quad-core ARM at targets x86 servers
I do agree.
Some people have referrer turned off, but afaik, they are the minority and this should do the trick. Google surely though about it.

This also works the other way. If you rely on FB assets (images, ...), they can shut your access down immediately the very same way. Can't say I like it.
I can't release the full results of the ones I've run, and they didn't cover Micro instances (this was about a week before they came out).

I can say that when executing kcbench (set to do 4 kernel compiles, same configuration on all machines, using a '-j' equal to the number of CPUs in /proc/cpuinfo) I got the following times:

EC2 Small Node: ~849 seconds
Rackspace 1GB Node: ~81 seconds

From what I've seen, a micro instance can supposedly (that is according to Amazon get more "burst" cycles than a small instance, but in the long term will be significantly slower. A sibling to this comment refers to some work that compared small nodes to micro nodes, and found the small node to be over 2 times faster than the micro node for large processing jobs.

Based on that, for CPU heavy jobs I would put a 1GB Rackspace node at something like 25x faster than the EC2 micro node.

I found that for the most part, in order to compete with Rackspace on CPU you needed to go with at least an Extra Large (which was about on par with Rackspace) or a High-CPU Extra Large (which managed kcbench in ~44 seconds).
Not sure if this is the right answer, but a guess: it's easy for other web services to access this stored data if the user provides them with their Facebook login and password, which no self-respecting service would ever ask for. Even if Google did at one point get users to give up their facebook credentials, the API's they access will probably block IP's that try to access multiple users' data in a short amount of time.

The best solution, IMO, is to use the browser as a platform: a Chrome extension can allow users to seamlessly sync data between services, because Chrome already has access both to your Facebook account and your Picasa account.
Considering that three of the four major mobile platforms are based on Java, and most enterprise web stuff is also based on Java, I would venture as far as saying this is completely wrong.
Well, she's closer to the camera than the TV is. Depending on the camera setup (distance and focal length) that can make a huge difference.
I would never give my gmail password to any third party proxy. So this is how I imported my gmail email addresses to facebook a few years ago in the first place. I took the export from Gmail in CSV format, cleaned out anything but email addresses, and fed them in Facebook.
I've always found this quote (apparently originally from 1975) somewhat strange, having grown up in 1980s, when BASIC was pretty close to the only game in town for a decade for home users. I still ended up seeing a lot more skilled programmers get started by early tinkering rather than through dutifully attending a college course in the formal derivation and verification of software constructs after having carefully kept themselves unsullied of writing programs without being absolutely sure what they are doing.

There may be a point in the underlying sentiment, but the thing as a whole just rings false in the post-microcomputer age. The big difference might be that the people Dijkstra was thinking of probably had had BASIC taught to them as university students, instead of tinkering with the BASIC repl of the 8-bit microcomputer they got their hands on as 9-year olds.
Personally, I think the very best use case for "cloud" is backup servers. Think of it, run a 'small' instance to slave your database and other stuff to EBS storage, and once a month practice bringing up production on "the cloud" - cheapest and most complete backup system I can think of.
Although a mass resistance would work, it's unlikely to happen, since it requires a large change in attitude and behaviour of a large percentage of the population.
>It relies primarily on unverified employer-provided data.

Yea, I mean Walmart scored high on that bogus list once. It's hard to imagine a worse place to work than Walmart (Offices I mean, the stores are probably as crappy as any big box retailer).
Kinda off topic but does anybody know the status of ''Google Me''?
http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-49/srfi-49.html

I think it's a terrible idea, but there you go.
Those who keep going on and on about parentheses in Lisp should try Haskell, which is basically* Lisp, except everything has one argument and is left associative. This simple rule removes a TON of parens. Add in the $, . operators and a bunch of other potential parentheses are eliminated.

*Except also that Haskell is typed and does not include code quoting/eval. But that's what Template Haskell is for :)
Tell HN: Fiddler complains about Hacker News
Minor issue but I was debugging something else with Fiddler and it kept telling me this about responses from HN:

Fiddler has detected a protocol violation in session #122.

The Server did not return properly formatted HTTP Headers. HTTP headers
should be terminated with CRLFCRLF. These were terminated with LFLF.

Presumably this is an issue in the Arc code outputting the headers. Also, is this where I should report this or is there a support email or something I can address?
When linking pictures, Phil Plait always adds a line that basically means "Click to enlarge". He started using the Simpsons phrase embiggen at some point, and a while after that he started making up words vaguely related to the context.

Pharaos are big in a metaphorical sense. Enpharaoronate means embiggen.
well, ruby and python, in your original post you've said c# is no better than java or perl, that makes "a bit" of a difference...
I would be making the same fuss in your position, however your teacher might not feel confident teaching a language he doesn't know, despite all the good talking points raised here. If he sticks with VB, I would ask him to spend some time later in the course making students aware that there are other languages, styles and platforms. Offer to help - write him a couple of pages on it, or pick a simple program from his course and translate it into Python/Ruby/C/Scheme/etc for him. Good luck.

Edit: To the person who disagrees with my advice, could you please let me know which part and why.
In Perl $#foo returns the index of the last element. To get the length you use @foo in scalar context. For eg:

my @bag_of_stuff = qw(do re me fa so la si);

say $#bag_of_stuff; # => 6

say scalar @bag_of_stuff; # => 7

NB. Lua arrays start at 1. Perl & most other languages start with 0 (zero) index
Causes of Acne and Symptoms of Acne
As for onsite hands, 95% of what you would go to the co-lo for can be done from your comfy chair if you have a good serial console/rebooter setup. Also, the he.net price includes "remote hands" service. Note, don't expect more than "remote hands" and make sure you clearly label everything... but you can usually avoid leaving the office.
Science says otherwise: http://archives.igda.org/articles/erobinson_crunch.php
Why Hulu Is the OPEC of Online Video
I'd say there's likely more VB jobs around. Secondly, learning a crap language first is often a really good idea. It shows you what not to do. It's like having a failed startup and then having a success - you learn from that failure.

And thirdly, it just doesn't matter that much. You should be learning programming. Not <specific language> programming.
How do you keep both sides in sync? Special comments in the source that get printed as left-hand pages and suppressed from the right-hand ones?
How about some good old promotion? Contact bloggers and try to get some PR. Here's a few good articles that have been mentioned in HN:

http://blogs.balsamiq.com/product//2008/08/05/startup-market...
http://blog.zferral.com/post/972974853/startup-marketing-get...
http://jasonlbaptiste.com/featured-articles/how-i-pitched-te...
http://blog.traindom.com/places-where-to-submit-your-startup...
It would be good if they can go into the demo and then sign up afterwards and keep the site they created in the demo.

Also, it would be great to see a list of add-ons