skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I understand your point completely, and I agree. I, too, am an exceedingly awesome world-renowned hacker who has been unfairly treated here. PG doesn't really care, or he likes it this way, or he's too busy doing other things. We need to build a TRUE hacker's community, and this website isn't it.

Remember: the internet routes around damage.
Founding a nonprofit.
I've never really enjoyed xkcd. The title says "This Is Funny Only if You Know Unix". I think that actually this is funny because you know Unix. Barrier to entry and understand the strips is low, yet gives an unique feeling of being special because you know others do not understand the joke.
also - wasn't one of the americans this guy:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/04/25/twitter.buck/index.html
I like that definition, and I also think that the above article satisfies it. The only problem is that not everyone may find the same things interesting...
Google Trends doesn't show data for Google, other properties
If they did that then the figures would change daily and be different for each market in which the car were sold.
Philip Wadler teaches at the University of Edinburgh:

http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/

I'd think it a good thing to get hooked up with him, depending on your interests.
Get Smarter
It can be confusing in the UK where economy is usually quoted in mpg whilst petrol is sold in litres.
Why is physics so big, do you think? We're not going to be using TeV physics for a long time yet. Is it just coasting on last century's reputation? That graph puts material engineering on a separate dot.
Being a musician?
Wait, so toga girl is running her fingers through your hair, eating your steak while hacking into your email? Dude, I think your computer has a virus.
Study proves bad guys really do get the most girls
working @ a startup, consulting, and lending a hand at establishing a better startup environment in Austin.
Interactive experiment to predict your choices based on artificial neural networks
I found on XKCD cartoon glorifying some event in 20th century history - but showing a lack of education in that it was basically wrong. As if reading books is a crime against being a geek, and cartoons are somehow okay to be illiterate.
IPython. You can leave off the parentheses on all function calls where ambiguity does not result.
Does Alexa really harvest passwords and spider password-protected areas of sites?
With ejabberd's (what they use for GTalk) cross-protocol modules (specifically, YIM), this should be relatively straightforward work on GOOG's part on the backend. I guess they must be really working hard to get the frontend interaction and design right.
I question that he wanted to be hired at all. He seemed to go to the interviews for self-affirmation. Although the detailed listing of MS interview questions he was asked was interesting.
I already posted this in the thread for the first article about this, but since it was already off the front page: none of the Linux distributions have released fixes for this yet, so I rolled my own for etch. http://dfranke.us/rubyfix.txt
I thought this was great.

I really think corporations should open up their media archives, such as photos, videos, press releases, and put them all online.
I've studied @ Oxford, have friends at Imperial and Cambridge. Not sure how to say where's "best".. however there's big differences in approach/material studied.

Oxford is small (~20 undergrads/year doing straight CS) and the courses are extremely academic/theoretical in nature - both could be a +/- depending on what you're looking for. The tutorial system at Oxbridge (where you get a few hours personal time with a professor each week) is definately the big bonus that defines what makes it a great education. It's definately not a way that works for everyone though.

For me, choosing where I wanted to study was less about the course and more about the experience I'd have while there - it's a personal thing but I find I learn best by teaching myself, so for me priorities were whether I liked the city, atmosphere, plus the overall perception/reputation of the university since it's obviously nice to come out with a certificate from a "brand name" that people will respect.

The best things about Oxford are the people you meet and wide range of other things to get involved in alongside your course - wherever your friend's looking, I'd definately suggest they use this as part of the comparision.

Let me know if you've got any more specific questions/want follow-ups.
Which one? I don't remember anything like that ...

And, I'll bet you dollars to dimes that most math/science geeks know more about the soft sciences (Economics, Psychology, History, Philosophy, Literature, etc.) than the other way around.

Most math/science people I know have read a fair amount of Dostovesky, Freud, Jung, Friedman, Wittgenstein, Derrida, and uncountably many other authors and social scientists.

I challenge you to find more than a handful of English or History majors who are familiar with the works of Turing, Galois, Knuth, or Euler.

It isn't polite to say, but not all academic disciplines are created equal. Some fields are just harder than others and tend to attract smarter people than others. Math, physics, and other hard sciences are simply more difficult than literature or history.

I would feel comfortable saying that anyone who understands Einstein's field equations is capable of understanding deconstructionism with relative ease. I don't think anyone would seriously make the opposite claim.
[Video] Advice for 15 year old startup entrepreneur
Parallel Python or Ruby?
If you were to add some parallel language constructs to Python or Ruby or <insert your favourite language>, what would you add?
Lets assume you are only allowed to add 1 or 2 constructs so you dont go changing the whole language upside-down. Also assume that you are not allowed to take something out of the language only add to it.
Please describe in detail with actual examples if possible. Dont just say "I will add actors" at a very high level.
Presidents and the Mythology of Munich
Whoa... 15-year old kid starting a start-up? Good luck! I'm 15 too, but even though I've done some some programming in the past three years (compilers/interpreters, PHP, some Java GUI, reverse engineered a file format) I don't think I would try to start a company, school taking up 8 hours a day and all that. Yet.
As opposed the parking fees in NYC that people pay? The traffic they endure? Which has a higher fatality rate flying or driving? Have you driven through a snowstorm? If you drive into a tree you die too.

The safest thing you could do is sit home on your computer all day, it would also be extremely boring. Life is not made up of driving to and from a cubicle and typing on a computer. I would much rather take the 0.0001% chance of dieing while doing something fun than the 100% chance of living an entire life that is devoid of any meaningful experiences.
Ack - a faster, more featureful, grep
Keep in mind that Python 2.6 already has the new multiprocessing package, which presents a simple interface for multiprocess computation.

I'd like to poke around with Python's compiler module and look at the AST--you could enforce that a certain class of functions have no side effects, and then spawn multiple processes to execute them semi magically.

Futures like the ones in IO (http://www.iolanguage.com/scm/git/checkout/Io/docs/IoGuide.h...) always struck me as a pretty cool way to abstract away synchronization problems. Using the multiprocess stuff as a background would be fun.
One change to ruby that would be useful, would be to make Enumerable.collect run in parallel.

There's probably a whole bunch of other Enumerable methods that could be made to run in parallel as well.
Would also be interesting to see how many people are working in tech vs. other fields. I definitely get the feeling that I'm one of the few people here in a non-computer-related area.
Haven't you heard about the egregious buffer overflow vulnerabilities found recently in Ruby? Not a good idea to use it for anything serious in light of those, IMO.
Another choice is to use their phone number. They sign up on the web, type in their phone number. Then they are shown a PIN, you have an automated phone system that dials the phone number and prompts them to enter the PIN that is displayed. RapidSSL.com uses this method to quickly confirm a user for their SSL certificate, so I assume it is good enough for your use.
The author is correct about how disorganized Google's interviews are, as well as how little respect there is for seniority. Whether this is an advantage or a disadvantage is, I think, an open question.

It's tempting to think that because Google is currently very successful, whatever Google does must be correct. But it's the other way around. Google is so successful that it's hard for them to figure out exactly where they're fucking up.

As for the "I'm famous in Bulgaria" bit, that complaint sounds funny to American ears, but it is a real issue. There are people at top Valley firms who grant just about anybody from MIT or Stanford an automatic interview, and leave candidates from Waterloo or ETH on the resume pile. Do you know what the best school in Bulgaria is? Who the top hackers are? I don't.
Maybe he's talking about

>>> funcs = []
>>> for x in xrange(3):
>>> funcs.append(lambda: x)
>>> sum(f() for f in funcs)
6

Were you expecting 3? Lambdas (besides having such an awfully long and difficult to type name :P) capture only the "name" of x, so when the for loop changes x later, the lambda sees the new value--so the sum is (2 + 2 + 2) instead of (1 + 2 + 3).

What you can do, instead (and I do it often enough that I wish lambdas created their own lexical closure....)

>>> funcs = []
>>> for x in xrange(3):
>>> funcs.append(lambda x=x: x)
>>> sum(f() for f in funcs)
3

By using x as a default argument, you force the x inside the lambda to be the value it was when the lambda was created. It kinda sucks, and always felt to me like a deficiency of the implementation leaking up into the language :[
Any tips on becoming a bad guy? :)
Rob Cross has a nice book on Social Network Analysis.

Google Social Network Analysis to get a quick over view of the field and the relevant open questions.
Some German universities have Max Planck or Fraunhofer Institutes attached to them. They do interesting and cutting-edge work, and take local students for assistant work, etc., which is great to do something "real" during your studies.

Denmark (Aarhus and Copenhagen) seem to have pretty good CS programs as well.

I don't know though how feasible these programs are if you only speak English. Some degree programs are being offered in English these days, so it may be worth an inquiry.
From the article:
"It may be true, as the saying goes, that leaders who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. But it's also true that leaders who carelessly or heedlessly use historical analogies, who twist or hype the lessons of the past, may be destined to make even bigger mistakes than their predecessors."

Interesting to see how important historical cliches are, being a source of influence for post-war politicians, and so present in today's political discourse.
> Truly a hacker in every sense of the word.

Except the ones that involve computers.
MPAA Says No Proof Needed in P2P Copyright Infringement Lawsuits
Better to start now then when you're trying to jugle a startup and a demanding full time job. I work around 9-10 hours a day and still have plenty of time to work on my business. So there's no reason you can't give it a shot! Some great companies have been started in people's spare time. You never know what might happen, even if you start with something small.

In hindsight I wish I had tried to start up a business when I was at school. Even if they had been failures, I'd have a pretty good understanding of certain business aspects that most young people would have yet to have learnt.

The best time is now. Tomorrow is too late.
I'm not a Ruby fan, but wouldn't finding those buffer overflows make it more secure? Now that they've been found, they're fixed. (Sure, it could be indicative of overall careless design, but I don't think that's the case here. A few silly mistakes, now no longer a problem.)

Finally, Ruby has more than one implementation. Finding a hole in one implementation says nothing about the language overall.
If you use Coro with Perl, you can say something like:

async {
do_something;
cede;
do_something;
}

do_something_else;
cede;

See http://search.cpan.org/dist/Coro/Coro.pm for more information.

[Edit: If you want to see a continuation-based web framework built with Coro, look at Continuity: http://search.cpan.org/~awwaiid/Continuity-0.994/lib/Continu...

It's very cool.]
So you're saying that he should just aim for the "lowest common denominator" instead? That market is already saturated. (Ever watch TV?)
You just need to get rejected a bunch of times because you're a nice guy, resulting in plummeting self-esteem, which naturally leads to multiple substance abuse problems and a penchant for bar fights. Then you'll have to resort to petty crime to support your habits, which leads to you getting caught, eventually enough times to go to prison - and, bingo, when you get out you can get the women who rejected you before :-)
> I challenge you to find more than a handful of English or History majors who are familiar with the works of Turing, Galois, Knuth, or Euler.

The thing is, advanced works of mathematics and computer science are almost completely irrelevant for people not working in these disciplines, whereas the humanities and social science arguably have applicability for anyone who considers him or herself a citizen. And in fact, these "English or History majors" are very likely to be versed in, not the works, but the insights of many mathematicians whose contributions are taught in high school and college mathematics courses, albeit without attribution.

Some people wind up majoring in the humanities and social sciences because they can't cut it in highly mathematical disciplines, sure. But it's also true that many of the mathematically adept are also weak in the humanities and social sciences.

As for Einstein's field equations and deconstruction, I can't claim to have studied the former (nor am I aware of why I should have), but I suspect you're overlooking the extent to which understanding them requires a considerable background of non-intuitive knowledge and an understanding of symbolic conventions in a way that understanding deconstruction doesn't. So pointing out that the set of folks who understand deconstruction that could understand Einstein's field equations with relative ease is likely to be much smaller, at least in proportion, than the other way around, doesn't imply much about how smart the two sets are on average.

Incidentally, the number of sci/math types who cling to the Sokal Affair as an excuse for believing much of contemporary humanities theory is gibberish suggests that an understanding of things like deconstruction probably don't come as easily to them as you might think.

At the end of the day, I really don't understand what disciplinary elitism gets you, other than an inflated sense of self-importance. What matters isn't what one is capable of understanding (except to college admissions staff), but rather what one does.
The mistakes are so amateurish that it should raise questions about the rest of the codebase (i.e. the defects which are yet to be found)...
This article brings up an idea I had for a while: make a map of the sciences (and eventually of all academic disciplines) with meaningful x and y axes. My suggestion is practical vs. theoretical for one dimension, and hard vs. soft for the other. Has this been done before?
I agree with you.

I think the cartoon said something about the history of the Nazi's, which I'd read about, and it was wrong or wide of the mark.

I'm a computer scientist with a humanities diploma (media studies) and I recently started reading more history books.
How is this "hacker" news?
This is completely relevant to hacker interests.
Surviving the Net
It's not, really, but there's presumably a number of "good guy" geeks here who have difficulty interacting with the opposite sex. Unfortunately the hacker-entrepreneur community is also implicitly a community of guys with various inadequacy issues, so stories like this (I remember one purporting to explain why beautiful women marry less attractive men making it the front page) and, say, stories about getting bullied get voted up.
lol. Taking your joke literally, I think one would simply fuck his life up in the process, without the upside of getting women at the end.

From what I've seen, guys with high time preference (short-term oriented) win out at the beginning, and guys with low time preference (long-term oriented) win out in the end. Pretty tautological stuff. Guys who spend high school working out, worrying about clothes and social standing, and prioritizing their sex lives get sex early on. But then you have Wall Street bankers from elite colleges, and they get a lot of women too. They were often nerds in high school.

Now, you could argue bankers are "bad" in the moral sense, but like the quasi-criminal guys at clubs, they have status and (in many cases) the attending arrogance. I think the "bad" question is more of a question of status than morality, but the two get mixed up because people with status aren't always super nice.

But I'm just basing it on baboon studies like this one: http://hanson.gmu.edu/showcare.pdf
Hmm is poking around the AST necessary? What about looking at the bytecode instead?
You're right. The only people this kind of article would speak out to are nice, lonely guys who are online on a Saturday night.
Even Reddit tolerates dupes, for the most part, when separated by some time.

If it's old to you, don't vote it up. If it's new to you, great.
http://mattmaroon.com/?p=329
I agree with the note that MS developers are 'more' organized or professional. Need not mean they are better - I think both Google and MS have extremely talented developers (I work at MS)...just that MS being an older company has matured in the development process. Google will soon be there.
I think you mean "2 + 2 + 2 instead of 0 + 1 + 2"
</sarcasm>

I'm gay.
I am not sure about Bulgaria, but Russians seems to be winning most of the ACM programming contests. (I am not russian, btw)
So, there is some real talent over there.

Comming from an ex-comunist country, I can tell you that the schools teach a huge amount of math, physics, and other sciences.

When I came to the US, I thought high-school was embarrasingly easy. I also cruised my freshman year in college, and I started to get really challenged by school only by the second semester of my sophomore year in college.

The other caveat is, that all the good people have left my country, and are working abroad, making pretty good salaries. So, whats left is not necessary the top of the heap.

I am not sure about the situation in Bulgaria, but I bet it is similiar. Saying that you are the "top" engineers of the country, when you know most of the good ones have already left, is not saying much, unless he backs the claims up with real products and feats he has done.
Your example of Einstein's field equations is a terrible one; I've got a Ph.D. in math phys and I don't understand them very well. How about just the laws of thermodynamics, basic probability, statistics and logic, and perhaps the basics of how computers work? Basic economics would be gravy.

These are all very relevant to the world we live in today.

By the way, the whole Sokal affair is forgotten in the sciences. I first learned about it when a random passerby (an english prof) made an unkind comment about Sokal when he saw the name on a (physics) paper I was reading. Admittedly, this was at NYU (the epicenter). But this was also 11 years after the prank.

Also, engineers can pick up deconstructionism relatively quickly:

http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html
It was contracted to Owen Byrne, an news.yc'er

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ojbyrne
sys.stderr.write("fatal error\n")
one issue I have is the mouse-for-aim requirement. If I could hold control to turn, then release to move, that would be much better. I have trouble with using the mouse for action...
A VC: Checking Out Google Trends For Websites
Which _is_ the newest form of hacker.
Predicting Where You’ll Go and What You’ll Like
public transportation is awesome. Especially in NYC.
It seems like it is only faster because it applies a bunch of heuristics to avoid searching certain files and directories altogether. I use "ack" myself and it's quite nice, but the heuristics aren't perfect: ack won't search for strings inside yacc grammars (".y" files) by default, for example.
FULL TIME = 70% School + 30% Startup
What projects have you done?
I imagine some of the posters have attempted similar jokes, or are even the authors...
Didn't work too well. Also the last 5 or so pictures didn't show up.
GMT 3:48

Even if every person voted 6 times, it's still an average of 4:1 people who voted in the poll to those who upmodded the post.
If you want to be an entrepreneur, and you don't need a PhD to do it (e.g. you aren't starting a biotech company), then for the love of all that is holy, don't start a PhD program. Quitting is like gnawing off your own leg.

The PhD program will be there later. Trust me.
gem install facets
require "rubygems"
require "facets/thread"
%w[a b c].threaded_map{|str| puts str }

It's multicore if you're using jruby.
"It'd be particularly interested if there are any such start-ups which actually outsourced their development to a low-cost location like China or India, and still succeeded."

Stata Labs' s(http://www.statalabs.com/) product Bloomba (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomba) was developed in India. (I was part of the team for a short period). Stata Labs was acquired by Yahoo. Traces of Bloomba can be seen in Yahoo Mail v 2.0.
I'm doing lighting design for a band. We're leaving for Europe in a couple days. I'm also trying to develop the next generation of stage lighting controllers.
So what? That's part of what humor is. All jokes hinge on the idea that at least one person doesn't get it, even if it's a character in the joke itself.
I thought security by obscurity was wrong in all cases :(
What I found interesting is that he turned down the offer and the reason he did so.

Bulgaria is technically either the poorest or one of the poorest countries in the EU (GDP per capita is listed at $12,252 in Wikipedia), so anyone from there should be thrilled to take up a well-paid senior position out West working for well-known company such as Microsoft, right? Wrong, apparently.

I think posts like this go to show that the flow of technically skilled people going from the Eastern European countries out West (or even to North America) may be slowing down if not coming to an end altogether just because the salary differential is no longer compelling enough for them to want to move.
People upvote if they liked the story, and they vote just to share.
Why do all these regex utilities sound like onomatopoeias for really obscene things?
I'm only saying this because no-one else will, but how many of us thought "cute chick flying a plane!" then read "barely 11 years old" and almost died of shame? Anyway, still a great project :) I couldn't even have imagined flying a plane now, let alone at 11.
Check out safariadblock (safariadblock.sourceforge.net) for an adblocker that is basically a port of adblockplus.
Zoho development is not outsourced, rather thier entire development team is in India's zoho office. Thier biz dev is in US. Thier hiring is very different and interesting. they hire many kids out of high school. In india, normally ppl who drop out of high school almost always do so,bcos they cant afford college education. Very rarely do ppl drop out t pursue thier passion due to society pressure of importance of education.