skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sounds very similar to my story, also left home and started work immediately, only doing my degree in late 20s.

Now 30, I've worked in 8 countries, developed on Linux, OS X, Windows & iPhone, for web, desktop and mobile.

First salary was $200/month (in South Africa) :) Happily, that has improved by a few orders of magnitude.

It really is a great experience to have had, though sometimes I wish I had gone down the academic route and aimed for some place like MIT/Stanford.

But fuck it, one life.
"Not to mention the main reasons Al Qaeda doesn't like us seems to be to our support of Israel and our lack of action on global warming. I'm sure they don't like the way we treat Muslims in the airport, but it doesn't seem to be a big source of terror attacks."

They don't like us because of our lack of action on global warming? HAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAH.

It sounds like they are catering to the lefties in the US. The group that they can win over and use as a tool to infiltrate the US (The left hates the US military and Christianity..).

It's not a source of terror attacks because it's damn near impossible to get anything into the airports.
You're being naive. The chemical energy of the gunpowder in a bullet is (3 kilojoules / gram) * 4 grams (M16 round) = 12 kilojoules.

A 17" MacBook Pro battery contains 95 watt hours = 342 kilojoules. Effectively using the battery as a weapon would require some creativity, but the battery contains almost 30 times as much energy as the bullet. And lithium ion batteries are known to explode in extreme circumstances.

But the point I would like to make is that it is inappropriate to make important decisions on vocabulary. Is an unused bullet any more of an "explosive" than a laptop battery? Is a long piece of broken glass a "blade over 3 inches"? These screening guidelines are simply guidelines, to be used in context. Should you allow someone to take live ammunition on a plan? Of course not. But when we expect customs officers to strongly interrogate someone who has already landed about a travel souvenir, the terrorists have already won.
They haven't, because putting a large amount of weight on assignments leads to endemic cheating. Exams are highly weighted because they take place in a controlled environment where students can't easily copy answers or crib off the Internet.

I suspect if they ran source-level comparisons on the programming projects at your university, they would find a huge amount of copying between students.
This probably doesn't effect big accounts like that. Based on their pricing table anything over 4000 TB is the same, already discounted, price.
> This despite what other evidence suggests is a considerable
> increase in the quantity and overall quality of said food

1. What will our food production look like in the future after we have damaged the quality of our soil in much of the current areas that we are farming? Our normal solution is to 'just add fertilizer' to it, but that comes with its own cost, and it also has to come from somewhere.

Currently -- iirc -- most fertilizers come from livestock feces. My personal views on whether or not we should be 'farming living beings' notwithstanding... You have to feed those livestock something in order for them to produce feces. The current practice is to grow food for them (or to feed them the ground out remains of other livestock animals). So you need to grow more food in order grow more food? That doesn't seem sustainable.

This is not even getting to the issues we have with fertilizers running off into waterways and creating 'dead zones.'

2. The growth of 'comfort' or 'junk' foods I see as more of a regression than anything else. Their existence would be fine, if it weren't that some people don't know the meaning of moderation...
Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful responses, good luck.
The article has pretty good advice, I got a core due pretty late in the cycle and they refreshed a month or who after I got it. I did not have a choice though as it was part of a package for doing some consulting work. If I would have been purchasing it. I would have waited for the refresh but given the circumstances I did not really have a choice in the matter.
This article needs a link to one of those "don't talk to the police" articles. Just let them arrest you. When the judge realizes what happens you will be back out in society, perhaps with an apology.

Also, you can't lose your citizenship by committing a crime. You certainly can't lose it without a trial.
Yes, that part is unfortunate.

WRT your username, I love mispronouncing carbocations as carbo-cashuns.
Ahh.. I think perhaps the fact that isn't immediately obvious was somewhat intentional on Apple's part.
Not related to the purpose of the article, but the subject:

Are there legal precedents regarding situations like this? If she developed into a body/mind of a child who understands how to buy something, could she buy alcohol/cigarettes? If someone had sex with her (again, not now, but say she developed to the equivilent of a 13-15 year old) then presumably it wouldn't count as sex with a minor? (If someone were to have sex with her right now then it might be proven to be non-consensual, but not legally paedophilia?)

Sorry, latter part of that is not exactly a nice subject, but pretty interesting from a legal point of view I think.
The article doesn't imply he's astonished at all. It more paints the picture of a world-weary traveler recounting an interesting, harrowing tale about the time he got through a foreseeable but nasty experience.
I know this is probably a bit early for it, but is there any chance of internship positions being open for this coming summer?
Agreed. Even if the syntax is wildly different, the structure is similar.

This is where XML gets annoying. Sure, it does make sense in certain situations, but it quickly gets hard to map all the attributes and child nodes into a nice object.

Its easier to drill down to what you need without having to mess with arrays or attribute hashes or retrieving contents. (Retrieving contents is the worst part. Sure CDATA would theoretically help, but what do I do when the API I'm using ignores it? Parsing linebreaks, spaces, and empty tags becomes a hassle!)
Depends on what you mean by 'senior leadership.

Anyone listed on this page: http://www.google.com.au/intl/en_au/corporate/execs.html
Well, the ones inept enough to do that are only not a threat if we stop them when they do inept stuff like that.

Good thing this policy stopped the Unabomber and Timothy McVeigh.
Working on many fronts, but with fingers crossed about tomorrow, cause it sounds like fun. Good luck to everyone. No seriously.
I didn't make it so contact the author, just found it on reddit.com/r/books
Just won 10 games in a row 7 roach rushing. This is awesome :)
"It would be pretty easy to make an argument against many sects of Christianity on the same grounds (yes, really: http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/146438); literally thousands of people have been incited to violence by radical right-wing preachers over the decades. Does that mean that Christians are dangerous to the United States and should be stopped at the border?"

Are they acting on it?

Do you have suicide bombers killing people in other countries in the name of Christianity? You pointed to one, single, crazy group that may or may not even be affiliated with religion.

It's funny how all the intelligent people here seem to play dumb when it comes to understanding why US customs agents may want question someone that could be a potential threat to the US.

If it were middle-age white guys that were killing people, I would hope custom agents would profile them as well. It's the intelligent thing to do.

"Freedom of religion is at the heart of the founding principles of the United States of America "

I find it hilarious that the lefties in the US are so against religion..unless it's Islam. I think it's probably because they are both on the side against the Unites States.
I'm not going to argue for the sustainability of our current technological society. I'm just saying that real wealth has increased quite markedly.
Are we ready for spotcloud yet?
You got the point! Winter YC is not a fairy tale. It just (maybe?) makes things easier from the start.
E.g. I'm currently busy with other projects.
Ask HN: What Novel Are you Writing This Month?
It's the start of the National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write a 50,000 words novel in the span of one month.

What are you writing?

I am writing the "Courier War" which is about a tax-evading robotic courier network. My goal was to write 1666.67 words a day so that I will achieve the goal in 30 days.
Gift certificates? e.g. Indiaplaza
Pyjamas is great fun. I made this silly asteroids game with it a while back: http://rumsey.org/space/Space.html

The sound is the only thing that wasn't written completely in Python. It's flash, and it also seems to have broken in my browser since the last time I loaded it. The rest of it still works fine.
Google is going to have to offer incentives that rival the pre-IPO stocks that FB employees are getting. They know that being in on the pre-IPO = instant wealth. It is hard to pass up that opportunity. I am sure they are not leaving due to the fact that Facebook offer more exciting and challenging work but when faced with a few years of work, IPO and then do what you want to it is hard to stick around even at Google. The part that I look forward to is the start-up boom that is coming after FB IPO's. I expect to see these developers leave in droves to start their own ventures with their new found wealth from the IPO. That is when tech will get pretty interesting again. A lot of bright people with a pocket full of money, means a lot of interesting pursuits for sure.
Defense attorney Orlando
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Yes of course there are laws against rape of someone who is mentally incapacitated. Ususally something along the lines of: "[It's rape if] the actor knows or has reason to know that the victim is mentally incapable, mentally incapacitated, or physically helpless"
A "bullet" is the lead projectile that comes out the barrel of a gun. Bullets do not contain gunpowder.
A really ineresting way to look at aging is this: if longer life was evolutionarily advantageous, we would have evolved additional molecular mechanisms to support it. It's not that by dying earlier we keep the gene pool fitter, because that's not how evolution works. (We'd otherwise have a much more complicated algorithm on our hands.) Rather, we die simply because there is no advantage in having us persist--we only gained and conserved what was optimal for our species' lifecycle. Anything else requires extra energy and support machinery and is not likely to be amplified since occasional breakdowns are likely to be serious or fatal (and more common with the increased complexity!)

Compare gymnosperms (conifers) and certain angiosperms (flowering plants). The former persist for long periods under drought and stress conditions and only bear seeds after a two-year long development. Some desert angiosperms sprout, pollinate, spread seeds, then die in the span of a week. -- Different evolutionary strategies evolved under different environments and selection pressures.

(Concession: evolution isn't "optimal", but it has found good enough solutions that I often call it such.)
What's your favorite Django app?
My confused state of mind
Agreed- I had to read that sentence twice.

Tomorrow on cnn.com: "Scientists say women don't feel pain"
Very awesome.

The prediction API looks really cool, which could hopefully make its way into a mashup. The feed push API seems genuinely useful, although it'd be nice to see a demo of its power/flexibility.

I wonder how much Buzz data we can get our hands on, and how easily?
I think the "propaganda" was the Osama bin Laden snacks...
Why institutions matter
The one time I (30-ish unaccompanied male) bought a ticket at the airport on the day of flight and flew without checked bags, I actually did get some extra scrutiny.

So, the red flags are noticed at least sometimes.
Who's running Google Australia?
They're just going to refuse to let you get on the plane. There's no right to fly in the constitution.
But what about if she becomes mentally/physically ten, and consents?
An arithmetic test for divisibility by 7.
(x % 7) == 0
What about the visit logs ? Does HN stores the visit logs ?
P.S. http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/harlanyu/traceability-...
Anatomy of blekko's press launch
he's a big headhunter for finance.

Try to get banks to drop VB. good luck.
Hotmail now works with other e-mail accounts, even Gmail
How to Get Users to View Main Item Pages
I love JSON because I remember how painful it was to use XML for the things I now do with JSON. It's a breath of fresh air.
> You don't have to fly. In fact, you can drive between any two places in the US and never be searched or questioned or anything.

The interesting thing is that air travel is far more of a natural right than travel by road. At least the government built the roads you travel on.
I'm going to have to disagree with your disagreement.

If you want to get into startups with enterprise customers, then maybe palantir is the right choice, but otherwise you'd learn a lot more about customer acquisition at facebook since there are probably a few hundred startups that all use facebook for customer acquisition.

I also don't see how palantir makes the US government more efficient -- they're mostly a big data mining company. They make fancy predictions which help locate terrorists, allocate finances, and other cool things, but the only thing that will make politics efficient are effective politicians. Data mining won't mash out all the filibusters that happen at the house.

I would say if you want to learn about data mining and machine learning techniques, palantir is the right choice.

If you want to do a startup later, facebook is the right choice. Facebook tends to buy out many small startups, so there will be many at that company who have the same mindset as you do. This is important should you decide to look for cofounders who have the same startup passions. I can't really think of any startups acquired by palantir.

I'll also mention that it's easier to placate investors if you tell them your startup team consists of ex-facebook or ex-google employees. A startup with ex-palantir employees just doesn't have the same homerun ring to it, and when investors are making that gut judgement call after looking at 2 slides from your 5 minute pitch, they're going to go with the team with ex-facebook employees.
Automated book page dewarping by line detection (book scanning)
Start using the Google APIs console to manage your API usage
1) It's an argument against the article because the chart is presented with little consideration to the methods used to generate the chart, which are arbitrary and are homomorphic to a specific (yet unspecified) definition of harm.

2) It's easy to interpret the chart to mean that, in the driving metaphor, driving at 200 mph is safe so let's just eliminate speed limits. Again a deficiency in the definition of harm (total harm, harm per capita, economic harm, social harm, initial harm, expected lifetime harm, average harm, what does harm even mean) leading to conclusions not supported by evidence.

A more specific chart and methodology would help people to do informed reasoning. If your presentation of evidence isn't actually helping people to make more informed conclusions, what is it doing?
The Chrome Assault: IE’s Walls Are Crumbling
What are you talking about? Palantir isn't reinventing government or finance, they are making extremely niche data analysis tools for the intelligence services and trading tools for wall street. If those institutions crumble, Palantir has no customers.
I don't know, I use XP at work and linux for everything else.

My complaint is that there's the menu bar AND there's the dock the combination really takes up alot of screen real estate

I personally use awesome WM one status bar at the top, no window decorators, maximum screen real estate for apps ( I'm also using an 11.6'' laptop)
I always consider Pret to be a coffee shop, but even Wikipedia says they're a sandwich store.
The Chevy Volt: An Electric Car With Its Own IP Address
Make JavaScript tests part of your build: QUnit & Rhino
This is what I hate about HN. People who don't understand economics are inherently the people that are down-vote happy. Thats why I don't care one bit about karma.

You have chosen to compare what I was talking about, GDP (Nominal in this case) and a percentage of dollars (since you quote the USDA, I was talking about worldwide btw, just like the op) to food. It's an apples to oranges comparison, and for the most part, reinforces my comment above, that someone down-voted.

Yes, we spend less on food than we did in 1929. Do you have cows in your back yard btilly? Probably not. Why do I ask? Because comparing the farming industry in 1929 to the industry of 2010 is like comparing the age of slaughtering your own "home-raised" cow, to the age of mechanized cow raising, slaughtering, and delivery into the closest super market. Um, of course the price is lower. The real interesting part, though, is that the price could be even lower if the money supply wasn't artificially increased by trillions of dollars. Fun fact, if $1.00 would have purchased $1.00 worth of goods in 1929 (which it did), if you had instead, saved it until 2010, it would purchase ... wait for it ... $0.08 worth of goods. Does that not strike you as odd, that although productivity has boomed, e.g., we can make more things for less dollars, the value of the dollar has plummeted?

But to the main point, it shows by your argument that you failed to grasp the full extent of what I was saying. Money is just paper. How do I know that? When a country can lend itself (by selling its paper for another countries paper, in the case of the US, China purchases the vast majority of US treasuries, though, no one even knows if China is printing money, or being disciplined with their monetary policy) trillions of dollars and put that into circulation, of course the GDP will rise, but has progress been made? NO. GDP is nominal, not absolute, and it does not reflect productivity, or even actual PHYSICAL output! It reflects prices.

In a small country of 10 people, if all of those people have $1, and a barrel of oil is $1, the GDP is $10 or 10 barrels of oil. If the government prints up $10 more dollars and hands it out to those 10 people, now everyone has $20, but oil prices increase to $20 since MV = PQ. Ah, now the GDP is $20, but we can still only buy 10 barrels of oil. Now that is Your kind of progress.

My point, to wrap it up, was that things like global literacy and hunger are things we have been improving. Improving global GDP has no measurable impact by just inflating the number. The number is just a number unless it is put in real terms, which is not how the original post read when it listed "improving global GDP" as some kind of accomplishment.
We got rid of our one and two cent coins in Australia in 1992. Likewise, you're correct about New Zealand not having 1, 2 or 5 cent coins.
>> Your whole business model is based around publishing content on the web you didn't create

You mean like Twitter? Facebook? Youtube?
Turning the tables on a ZeuS botnet
UGG Sundance II Black Womens Boots
I think those who don't make it should use it as motivation to take that extra step, be it from YC next time, or bootstrapped/ the many other funding roots. I guess you can look at it as a come back even stronger next time, prove them wrong type way.

Even the act of filling out the application is beneficial, makes you focus and evaluate where your business is currently and the road ahead.
IE9 Outperforms Other Browsers for HTML5 Compliance
Why you should love IKEA
Hmmmmmm . . . Losing 35% of your labor force (by commits) is nontrivial, and probably enough that the disenfranchised could mount a considerable counter-presence. However, if I was Larry Ellison, I would think that if another 35% percent of the productive commits are still at Oracle (probably more), I was could backfill the loss with some idle talent, scrub the shops for some folks who have been chaffing under their current management, for example. I'd be betting that product is still quite viable, and for damn sure I wouldn't be giving those renegade sons of bitches the trademark they obviously covet.

The view from the vantage of Meeks et al must be quite a bit more complex, and it must seem colder and less safe. Gotta find job. What's the unemployment rate here in California these days? Best of luck to the Document Foundation.
Eclipse Makes Available New Release of Eclipse Virgo
Do you think white Christians who have visited Idaho should be confronted verbally at length by policemen whenever attempting to rent trucks? Especially if they're carrying a Bible? Should the rental truck police demand to know whether they accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, implying that if they do, they should definitely not be allowed to enter Oklahoma?

Should the mothers of white Christians renting trucks have their phones tapped by the FBI?

You could already have constructed this analogy. Instead you choose to be disingenuous about it. Don't you think America should be capable of doing better than this?
"Thanksgiving. Remember junior high school, high school, elementary school, everybody bringing in cans for the hungry people? Remember that? Just imagine, if somebody, when you were in fifth, sixth grade, if the Principle had the gonads to say on Monday: 'Children, it was the most single, wonderful outpouring of generosity that this school has ever seen. More cans of food feeding a hundred and ninety-three families came to this school than ever before. We only have one problem and we’re gonna' deal with it this coming week. We’re gonna' cancel our regular classes and what we’re gonna' talk about is: what are those people gonna' eat next week?’" ~ Harry Chapin

I ask for one day as a tenacious first step. That one day is when I can take the first step, too. I feel it hypocritical to ask others to do something that I, myself, could not take part. One day acts as a point in time where people can stride together, in unison, to carry a much stronger message than a random smattering of people throughout the months to come.

An act of unity with a definite place (airports) and a definite time (November 15th, 2010) and a definite call-to-action (opt out), I believe is easier to accomplish and coordinate than a call-to-action where nobody is sure of when or where to start, or whether they will be singled out.

It is about saying no... together.

It is about showing people that we can open doors together and, once the door has been opened, walking through it.
Not quite what I'm looking for.
The fact that the Cheezburger Network code and development environment is as inviting and straightforward to new developers is not an accident. Without constant care and refactoring, even the most mundane-seeming software systems can develop into unmaintainable cruftballs.