skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having done my undergrad at an Ivy League institution, I can say without a doubt that everything mentioned in the article is absolutely true. I would even go so far as to say that most of my peers were for the most part semi-competent (on good days), driven individuals with either the skill and nurturing to game the system. The result is a fairly disappointing group of people who care more about a Wall St./Big Consulting job, but honestly, admissions officials care little to change the system, so this is the result. That said, however, many of the undergrads I have TAed for at Berkeley have the same mindset, with the exception that the Wall St. job is now a job at Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, etc.

To a certain extent, we shouldn't care about Ivy League institutions, because in the end, they are just a name, right? What is sad, though, is that there are brilliant professors at these universities having to teach these pathetic students, and not those who actually care and have some skill in a particular subject. What is sad is that parents, employers and institutions themselves proclaim that these students are the best and the brightest and we believe them. What is sad is that the resources of the Ivy League institutions are widening compared to strong public/private universities, but the "elite" institutions are not giving these resources to those who can best take advantage of them (I think what should have been more carefully scrutinized was Harvard President Drew Faust's comments a few months ago that Ivy League institutions will have the best scientific research because they have the most money/best profs, and that other institutions with fewer resources should work on "smaller problems" - the most disgusting thing I have heard in a long time). In short, the whole system is powerful, yet completely broken.

If, by some luck of lottery (at least in my case), you are someone who really cares in this "elite" environment, once you get past the disappointment of not relating to your peers, you have a great opportunity to do research for professors who are not only brilliant, but also very helpful since you are one of very few who care. I just hope that the many others like me who did not win the lottery get the same chances I do. I know at Berkeley, the grad students are given tremendous opportunities with respect to research (with probably only slightly more money concerns than places like Stanford/MIT), but it's very tough for an undergrad to get the same opportunities. I know I wouldn't have survived as an ugrad here, but I'm not sure if other institutions have similar environments.
How many 1.5 million user email systems have you operated? You don't just "throw up a few servers and be done with it."
IE8 WebSlices
I graduated from Davis in 06 as a computer science and engineering student. I would rate the faculty very highly, they are the right combination of professor and teacher. I worked with them as a student and a researcher and enjoyed it.

I wouldn't rate my classmates so highly. My class was the last of the surge created by the first bubble.. and I felt everyone was in the major to please their parents and secure a boring but safe future in engineering. There were certainly some exceptions, but they were just that. I felt these people lowered the difficulty of the classes. I learned a lot more when I found the smart ones and worked on projects with them outside of the curriculum.

Anyway, the CS dept has had a big drop in enrollment now because it has still been 4-5 years since CS degrees were not highly in demand. I assume the classes are of a higher quality right now as the people in the classes have purer motivations. And I assume the quality of students will drop again as the second surge hits.

Feel free to email me if you want more details.
While thedailywtf.com is an excellent source of entertainment, I think it's more useful to study code that compiles, looks, and runs fine, but has some less-obvious deficiency like an XSS vulnerability, or poorly chosen algorithm (e.g. bubble sort). I like to skim through "best practices" books whenever I'm learning a new language or technology.
Beautiful Tag Clouds
So to see the article, I get to go through an interstitial, a pop-up asking me to take a survey and an article broken into 6 pages.

Sorry, I've stopped going to sites like this. The ad guys may be creaming their pants with all the crap they've sold companies, but I'm not giving them the satisfaction of my page views.

I stop visiting about.com about 2 years ago because of the same thing. Advertising is fine, but don't piss me off in the process.
To explain:

I browsed a few clicks in as 'Googlebot'. Rather than typical website links with many targets, and useful anchor-text, each page had only one substantive link, with minimal query-string-like anchor-text (like "section=features").

If a bot reached the URL "http://www.noloh.com/index.php?section=features", and then that URL appeared as a search result, and then users visited by that URL, they would then (upon navigation) find themselves at odd composite URLs like "http://www.noloh.com/index.php?section=features#/section=bet...".

Meanwhile, if crawlers discover inlinks from other sites that users have copied and pasted, like "http://www.noloh.com/#/section=whoweare", a crawler will only see this as a link to the root page.

Your pagerank is going to be diluted over these arbitrarily different URLs, and traffic analysis via toolbar reports is not going to boost key target pages as strongly as in an application with traditional stable URLs.
Great Pinoy!
Social Engineers Move Inner City Crime To Suburbs
Thanks for the input so far, guys. I do want to ad that if I were to try something like this I would probably not publish much tech content. Tech savvy readers already get the blogs they want.

I'm thinking more along the lines of businesspeople - "Blogs for the rest of us" you could say. Is there a potential demand for blogs off of the internet?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=225962

Example of the political incorrectness within:

"We are undergoing the Paris-ification of America. The snobbish French always thought Americans were nuts to let Washington, the capital of the country, and New York, the capital of the world, turn into hellholes. Why build public housing projects in the middle of your great cities for riff-raff? The French elite, no fools, kept beautiful Paris for themselves. They warehoused their African immigrants out in the bleak suburbs, where every night is Car-B-Que night."
Who is making money in the gold rush of internet? Not the diggers.
Parascale & Cloud Computing News
Nanosolar builds 1Gwatt/annum solar cell production tool
Posted by Martin Roscheisen, CEO (on their blog)

As we are busy ramping our operation, we almost forgot to recognize achieving a major milestone in solar technology: The solar industry’s first 1GW production tool. Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClLKVs9oSxE

Most production tools in the solar industry tend to have 10-30MW in annual production capacity. How is it possible to have a single tool with Gigawatt throughput?

This feat is fundamentally enabled through the proprietary nanoparticle ink we have invested so many years developing. It allows us to deliver efficient solar cells (presently up to more than 14%) that are simply printed.

Printing is a simple, fast, and robust coating process that in particular eliminates the need for expensive high-vacuum chambers and the kinds of high-vacuum based deposition techniques from industries where there’s a lot more $/sqm available for competitive manufacturing cost.

Our 1GW CIGS coater cost $1.65 million. At the 100 feet-per-minute speed shown in the video, that’s an astonishing two orders of magnitude more capital efficient than a high-vacuum process: a twenty times slower high-vacuum tool would have cost about ten times as much per tool.

Plus if we cared to run it even faster, we could. (The same coating technique works in principle for speeds up to 2000 feet-per-minute too. In fact, it turns out the faster we run, the better the coating!)
Parascale Raises $11.37 Million For Cloud Storage
Good Internet Revolution vs Bad Internet Revolution
Ew, JavaScript. I prefer seeing sites coded to be used without it.

Besides, you get a wider market when you consider the smaller percentage of people that have Noscript or whatever.
Well, both my start-ups certainly had viable business models. If you're looking to make money, that usually helps. Even VCs will be happier to fund a startup that has a viable business model.

I think the whole "make something people want" motto can be profitably expanded to "make something people want enough to pay for it".

I strongly suggest you watch DHH's talk at startup school.
http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hans...
1. Build the idea and take it as far as you can without any outside investors.

2. Once you're out of money and your business is more mature, you will have a better idea how much your company is worth.

3. You can now negotiate with investors.

Advice: Don't worry too much about the finances. Focus on building a great product first. =)
Social Cause India
Daring to show the truth to the society expecting a social reform towards the greater good.
Premature Ejaculation Treatments
Premature ejaculation is the no.1 sexual dysfunction suffered by men. There are many reasons behind premature ejaculation, from stress to low levels of serotonin. More and more treatments are becoming available for premature ejaculation and it is important that you understand and have knowledge of what treatments work best. At PrematureEjaculationTreatments.com we understand this need and provide up to date information on each treatment.
i like how, if you block the cookie, the whole site just fails to load.
Why is anyone surprised that a more recent product is faster and cheaper than an older one?
The probability of you finding a point to that post is at least equal to the probability of everyone else here combined.
> apparently their financial aid isn't too good

nonsense. Harvard, MIT, and Princeton have the best financial aid in the country (besides of course Olin, Cooper Union, and the military academies...)
Actually, despite its, uh, antiquity, I like this idea. Let me explain.

1) Why does everyone think that they'll have trouble from blogs for republishing? It's huge extra exposure - I feel that you'll get tons of people interested.

2) Go away from publishing blog posts to stories about the bloggers (egos), about how they started their idea, features on getting started, new stories by bloggers, etc. The TOPIC is blogging, not the posts that they've written. Remember that and you have your focus.

3) It's simply not a topic covered by any major magazine

The bad -

1) Magazines are indeed dying. Ad revenues are down and continue to drop.

2) It's ironic to cover such a new media with such an old one and the irony will hit people as they read it.

3) You're going to need a good deal of money to start this up and do circulation.
If P is a built-in function taking a single argument, or one that's already been defined, no. That's often not the case, though, and using a simple lambda is annoying and usually less efficient the rest of the time.

For example,

filter(isfile, os.listdir(some_dir))

is cleaner than:

(f for f in os.listdir(some_dir) if isfile(f))

But

filter(lambda f: f.endswith('.py'), os.listdir(some_dir))

is worse than:

(f for f in os.listdir(some_dir) if f.endswith('.py'))

Ruby's blocks are something to be jealous of, in this case. List comprehensions and generator expressions have other merits, though.
Ask HN: Practical Advice on Data Analysis
Building a unique startup, how would you go about adding "data analysis" capabilities to your app so you can better judge your startup's value, success rate for campaigns etc?
Very good points. Yes it does seem to be pretty expensive to print up the physical magazines.

I'm liking the idea of getting it in an area where the readers may not have access to the internet (specifically plane rides). If I know I'm going to be on the plane for 4 hours and I can't use my laptop for the internet, what better way to calm the panic than by having a magazine full of 10-15 or so blogs that I can read?
Anton, a Special-Purpose Machine for Molecular Dynamics Simulation
Publishing the magazine of blogs online defeats the purpose somewhat. :)
UNIX being a corporate project with billions of dollars of capital seems to be a slight mischaracterization (at least according to what wikipedia currently says, "some financial support from Bell", on the UNIX topic). Eventually it received more support, but it didn't start out like that.
>And the inflation thing should not be a big deal.

I know it's not a big deal, it's just in an early paragraph and a glaring example of hindsight. If you'll recall, in the late 19th century farmers in the United States wanted to legalize silver as currency because deflation was making it hard for them to pay back their mortgages.
Honestly, I'd just say "get past started" for now... But yes, implementing prolog would be great... Check out the Reasoned Schemer... but only after Little and Seasoned.
I agree with most of his criticisms, but disagree strongly with his conclusion. My main beef with the Ivy League is that it neither trains people to be productive nor broadens minds. I don't really don't think it's possible for a government funded institution to broaden minds ( and yes, even the Ivy's have massive amounts of government subsidies). The professors in the humanities and social sciences act much more like an insular priesthood than purveyors of free thought ( which is not surprising considering the origins of the university and the selection process of professors). Comments on news.yc show far more free thought than I found in sections at Yale. I also do not think Joe carpenters' tax dollars should be subsidizing Yalie English literature majors. It's amazing how professors advocate that the government should do more to tax the rich and give to the poor, while never realizing that state funding for higher education is among the most regressive government spending that exists.

The university functions essentially as a gatekeeper to various credentialized professions ( scientist, professor, doctor, lawyer, civil service). As gatekeeper, it really does not need to educate you. Students have been selected for high enough IQ that they will learn what they need in grad school or on the job. The school's main job is to teach you to love the school, that the school is responsible for everything good in your life, and that the school makes you special. That way, when you end up making money, you will be sure to send money back to the school that was responsible for such happy times.
Audience Development
And I expect that many students will find Gmail more convenient. The simplicity of the interface, the fast loading time, and the ability to search your inbox instantly for attachments or contacts are all winners for Gmail.
In the latest Webkit with the squirrelfish javascript engine it runs very smoothly. Really nice program.
The 'Art' of Being Donald Knuth
I'm using Ubuntu 8.01 and have the same problem as the grandparent.
You're quoting Larry "I've done more than anyone to fuck up programming languages" Wall as an authority on programer clarity?!? Um... no?

here are some examples from real python (twisted)... let's see how much clearer they are than anything else:

''.join([''.join(['\x1b[' + str(n) + ch for n in ('', 2, 20, 200)]) for ch in 'BACD'])
''.join([''.join(['\x1b' + g + n for n in 'AB012']) for g in '()'])
msgs = [os.path.join(b, mail.maildir._generateMaildirName()) for b in ('cur', 'new') for x in range(5)]

It is code like this that makes me run for the hills... Even ignoring the list comprehensions, I use join as an example of how python gets everything backwards...

ary.join(', ') # ruby - oop: tell the array to join its elements with a str
join(', ', ary) # perl - fun: join ary with a str
', '.join(ary) # python - wtf: tell the str to join the elements of some other ary?!?
thanks, I had some free spaces left when I was pursuing my comp sci degree and took one composition/design class. It helped me to look at other things besides just code. I did wish I took some more because it was interesting and somewhat applicable.
Intel won't touch Vista
>Recently it seems like almost every post has a comment thread about how the post isn't hacker news...

Most of the ones I've noticed are on stories such as "entertainment celebrity x dies", "politician y does z unrelated to tech", or "OMG we're all going to die as soon as the economy collapses and we devolve into cannibalism and the last survivor is driven insane from Global Warming and kills himself".

I don't read every comment thread, but it's mostly those stories that I see "not Hacker News" on.
Google group on discussing efficent algorithms
Much of the real business news (such as the nitty-gritty of the Bear Stearns buy-out) is leaked by insiders, so no access to executives is necessary. The Wall Street Journal regularly brutalizes major corporations on the front page, I don't think they follow the theory of the grandparent comment.
"They asked various political leaders and generals to evaluate the probability that the USA would withdraw its ambassador from the Soviet Union. They then asked the same people to evaluate the probability that both (a) The USSR would invade Poland AND (b) as a consequence, the USA would withdraw its ambassador from the USSR."

This seems to be worded funny, such that it is easy to misconstrue that as the conditional "If the USSR invades Poland, THEN the USA would withdraw its ambassador". That is, the consequence is not viewed as separate from the condition if the subject considers the consequence as the only possibility of the condition, then the condition portion occurring alone and the condition and the consequence occurring have exactly the same likelyhood in people's minds. After all, the consequence has no reason to occur if the condition isn't met. The USSR invades Poland and it snows in Florida are two events that, if taken together, have a smaller chance of being true than either of them occurring independently.
Nokia buys Symbian, turns software over to Symbian Foundation
Why should the school system be in the business of running their own email servers? They don't generate their own power or purify their own water. The NSW Department of Education is probably not particularly skilled at running large IT infrastructure projects in-house -- nor should they be.
lol.. dude you really hate yourself.
As a CS northeastern Alum (who didn't do co-op), I can say that the students there have a chance to taste the "real world" - and the alternation between co-op and school keeps knowledge of the applied and theoretical fresh.
I did not nessicarily mean to claim any of the posted wisdom was my own, although some of it was atleast 'compiled' by me.

The grandparent has dismissed what I said as 'crap' created by my 'unjustified feeling of the profundity[sic]'. Interestingly, since these words stemed from eastern religion, from philosophy and even from common sense and reasoning (as well as my own personal experiences, and the words and works of psychedelic researchers) all these things too must be 'crap' that could only make sense after the 'delusions of drug use', after all:

"Biggest argument against taking drugs: they'll make you think that crap like that is "wisdom"."

PS: The path of blind rejectionism may be comfortable, it may be culturally encoraged, but as history has shown, it is inevitably a dead-end route.
send me an email please, your ideas intrigue me

this site has a feature where your email address is only viewable to admins
Flash 10 has udp support, kinda handy for game connections.
Ruby and Shoes and the First Ruby Virus
Obama, McCain Debate Via Twitter
Sent as requested.
Have you done market research? The most important question will be: "How much individual blogger (in average) would pay for the premium product"

If you want to learn from other peoples experience and mistakes (which is always a good idea) good questions are "Who are my core competitors and what is their business model", "Who have done something similar in other sectors (by other sector I mean for example news reporting in other media) and what was their business model and profit margin (and why you are different or similar)" and "Who have tried the same thing and failed and why they failed"?

That's just some food for thought :-D
>In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.”

Where would you go to get a legally admissible version of that information?

http://www.google.com/trends?q=orgy&ctab=0&geo=US... doesn't seem to do it.
Al-Qaeda's Growing Online Offensive
Does anyone else feel like the author hasn't really grasped the problem that the delays have revealed?

That problem is that the delays are being caused by customisations being done for different clients. And if you are doing customisations for different clients, you no longer have a uniform platform, leading to a fracturing of the market for developers. Basically, Android is being delayed to reduce it's usefulness to developers and to end-users. Google should have stuck to their guns, at least for the first release.

That said, I don't think Googles intention with Android was to create their own platform. I think the strategy was basically to make it easier for operators/manufacturers to create a smartphone that didn't suck, which would in turn make Google's core products more easily accessible from mobile platforms. I guess we will have to wait and see if this strategy is successful or not.
Maybe they have some privacy concerns..
Evernote Opens to All: Fantastic Promise, Disappointing Execution
I think this is the case that the choice of the syntax (and a bit of semantics) did affect the choice of API. I'm not a Python programmer, but I can see in your second example that they would prefer comprehensions to filter.

If there were curring or some convenient partial application syntax in the language, using 'filter' can be more natural choice. In Gauche Scheme, pa$ is a built-in partial applicaiton and I'd write:

(filter (pa$ string-suffix? ".py") (sys-readdir some-dir))

Or in Haskell:

getDirectoryContents somedir >>= return . filter (isSuffixOf ".py")

In general I'd rather write this in Gauche, for a regexp object is applicable:

(filter #/\.py$/ (sys-readdir some-dir))

So, if you have more variations than the bare lambda to create a higher order function (either in currying, partial application, or promoting objects to applicable something, etc), the more the functions such as filter, fold etc become useful. If you need to fall back to lambda for most of times, it would be natural that using those fns becomes annoying.
:) That's really funny.
HTML 5 will support some kind of raw-ish TCP connection (accessible from JavaScript). I think most games able to run performantly in the browser will be just fine without UDP.
I would like to see more collaboration betwen Intel and Apple. Thier recent joint offers have been far more usable than the Wintel products I have used lately.
“They are prototypical Russians. They combine a rather grandiose vision of themselves with an ability to live on scraps rather than compromise their principles. These are people the world is not able to cope with, and they are not making it any easier for the world."

Love this. I'm sure if we could be more like them, the world would be a better place.
Agreed. In fact, most PHP applications are full of nasties. Imho, that's because PHP is a language that makes it easy to write bad code. There is, of course, good PHP code too, but the majority is really quite bad - even when you look at leading projects like Wordpress.

I switched my blog over to typo because I just couldn't stand working with the writhing mass of spaghetti that is Wordpress (once you get under the hood, anyway).