skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The previous poster made a claim about poor students in high-quality schools. I thought it was an interesting claim given that there have been experiments to that effect. Someone who says "If X, I bet Y!" should be happy to hear that "Someone tried X -- do you know if they got Y?"

You are “giving up” at the point when you “give up” on doing better than a minimum wage job with no high school degree.

You're not "giving up" on the workforce when you stay in school? Also, are you "giving up" on school if you don't pursue a BA? An MA? A JD? A PhD? A postdoctoral position? A professorship? Tenure? A Nobel? Fields Medal? When you say that they "give up" you imply that they don't do something because it's too hard -- I'd rather say that they do the right thing, which happens to be the easy thing. I've "given up" on being a novelist, or an athlete, or a mathematician, or a drug lord, because I don't have the skills for that job.

I like how well your link controls for the possibility that smart people pursue higher education. I eagerly await the Center for Public Education's (they're neutral, too!) report on how height income, because most people under five feet tall don't even bother to join the labor force.

I believe that a high school education is valuable in itself, beyond financials.

Okay. There are lots of things that I think are valuable, but that I don't insist you pay for. If you're spending huge amounts of other people's money, you probably owe them some assurance that it's not just because it sure would be nice to have what you're buying (regardless of cost?) but that they will get their money's worth.

If we’re going to have a democracy, it would be nice to have voters have some idea of what’s what.

And they're learn this from government schools? How many teachers will tell kids that their government is horribly inefficient, or that their country has veered far from the values that its founders fought and killed for? Your argument might be persuasive in general, but I'm opposed to democracy so it doesn't sway me in particular.
* Bring a bike and a snowboard!

* Go to Tahoe/Reno.

* Do a West coast run up to Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, Whistler. Ski in BC!

* I'd highly recommend spending lots of time in Portland/Vancouver. Both cities have a lively startup scene and the social scene is more friendly than Silicon Valley IMHO.
TechCrunch Elevator Pitches - One startup. 60 seconds.
I'm the Ops Co-founder. True C like languages are faster, but we don't need quite that much speed. nothing Scientific, or really mission critical. I mostly want the code to run faster vs ease of coding. So if the app was going to take longer running in php than python, but faster to code, I would still want python.
This may be something you have considered, but you might want to consider an automated online back-up service rather than an external hard-drive. Less stuff to carry around and much more insurance.

Hope you have a great trip... Good luck. I live in Columbus, OH so if you are ever around, drop me a line (email is in profile)
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if there is some correlation between reality television and cancer. After all, significant television consumption is correlated with obesity, and obesity is correlated with several forms of cancer -- never mind other risk factors like vitamin D deficiency. For all we know, reality television could be more correlated with cancer than cellphone use.
Twitter headquarters.
"I've been working on the RAILROAD!" (Chorus x10)
Im a huge soccer fan. Your site needs to work on the public facing pages. It is not clear what or how to do anything on the site.
Ask YC: PHP stock charts
I am building a site that will display stock charts that I would like to create with our own data. I've looked at some charting options like Google Charts and Flash Open Chart, but they are not ideal. Google Charts doesn't have a candlestick chart and Flash Open Chart is flash, which I'd rather not use.
I'd prefer something simple like this:
http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/charts/big.chart?symb=goog
But it needs to be fast. Any advice?
Thanks.
Looks very interesting. Ordered it right away.
This is a no-brainer. Without an extremely compelling reason to move, there's no point, especially when the place you're already at is decent. If you lived in South Dakota, okay, that would be another matter...

Have you ever visited SV? It's a big suburb.
Malcolm Gladwell on Hiring: the Mismatch Problem
I don't think this is a bubble at all. It seemed ridiculous to me that 30-40 year oil futures were valued at 50$ a barrel when most scientific theories of oil production dictate a dramatic decline in worldwide production during the next few years. In fact, I played with the idea of speculating on the 10-year price of oil a few years ago, but my understanding of markets at the time was not good enough to realize that there was actually a thriving futures market. Gasoline can't be stored for more than a few months, and getting hold of and selling physical crude oil is probably more hassle than it's worth.

Perhaps the current development is a bit of an overcompensation..but not much of an overcompensation. The current price of oil is probably higher than is dictated by supply and demand, but when it comes to futures, a correction up has been in the coming for a long time. Unless all speculators are certain that we will have a dramatic increase in fuel-efficiency (on the order of 50% over the next ten years) across all markets that buy fuel, there is no hope that there will be an abundancy of oil in the future. Add this to the fact that China and India are expected to consume more oil in the future, and things look very different. I think what has happened is that speculators have finally realized this, and that the current price spike is caused by "speculators" correcting the price up to a realistic level. This is how markets are supposed to work, and no new laws or political hand-wringing will be able to do anything about it.

Saying that this is a bubble seems like wishful thinking. When politicians start investigations to check out whether this is the case, there should be reason to worry. Actual bubbles are rarely identified with this great unity. If they are so certain, why don't the ambitious politicians of the US short crude oil futures for a few billion dollars? I think that would be quite an interesting spetacle.
If you are putting in the money, put it into the company as a loan. I'm sure this isn't the only capital this company will need so it makes it silly to split equity based on short term thinking.

I think also everyone will have to think as this is their idea too. If you had the initial idea, the inital idea will change.

Don't get trapped by short term thinking. Split the company three ways, get vesting and a 1-year cliff and then get on with it. Only then will your equity actually be worth something worth worrying about.

Good luck.
An Informal Proposal for CSS Class Selector Inheritance
This sort of stuff would be far more useful on freebase, so that an API would be publicly avail for devs.
Joost Architecture
(Co-founder) well we are/aren't trying to prematurely optimize. It's more like 4 great languages to choose (depending on option) and we don't really know enough to pick and learn one. So we're polling to find out if there is really something that we should with a few requirements. Like we care more about how fast the code runs than the speed of coding.But generally not to the excess of writing in C (etc).
Dialup isn't 56KB? Ah, my lying network monitor.
pardon my ignorance - but how can i setup versions with my SVN repo and my local checkout? I was able to give it the login to my svn repo and that worked fine, but no clue how to get it to recognize my local svn checkout
im watching the videos from/about sicp now:

http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-le...

amazing stuff, recommend everyone to watch.
Is there a place to grab a binary for this?
Without knowing anything about Versions, why not just `svn ci` whatever you have modified locally, then re-checkout the repo again using the client? Totally understood if it's a big download, just throwing it out there as an option.
I live near Sacramento, and I'd agree it's not really worth going out of your way to visit. It's not a bad or unpleasant place, and parts of midtown are quite nice, but there's not much point in being here if you could be somewhere else.

If you're heading inland from SF you should (as someone else said) visit Lake Tahoe instead.

I don't agree with what other people are saying about trading in your car on something more economical. You're doing maybe three thousand miles, but it's spread over a six month period, making your total gas costs for the actual road-trip only a hundred odd bucks a month. If the F-150 is reliable and holds all the stuff you want to take, then take it.
Now if only we could completely turn heat into light. Wouldn't that make for a interesting heatsink on a computer?

I forsee: Oh man, my computer is too bright
Oil Prices: The costliest & cheapest nations
Git's great for the Linux kernel. SVN is the versioning system of choice for alot of OSS projects.

Hey, I'm just glad to get passed CVS and it's poopy recursive directory support.
Scribd Announces iPaper@Scribd - Convert Email Attachments to iPaper
How Yahoo schemed well in advance to keep MS away.
Great Advice from Evan Williams, founder of Blogger and Twitter
Jane McGonigle: Saving the World, Reality Hacking thru MMORPG
Sounds like a lot of fun, Sam. Good for you.

Here's my thoughts:

Keep the truck, but get a Truck Camper: http://www.truckcampermagazine.com/ Hell, if you can afford it, get a miniRV. It know it's kind of old school. But there's a lot of people on the West Coast that have them. And the RV parks should be fairly good pickings after the summer's over. They aren't really sexy, but you should be able to stay in very nice RV parks that have wifi, hookups, pools, grills, etc... for about 800-900 a month. And, you don't have to worry about finding a month to month lease. There are even a couple of RV parks outside of LA, but there's a 8-9 month waiting list to get in. If you go this route, you'll have to have another form of transportation for runs to the grocery store, etc... for that, get a vespa or a bike.

As for supplies: Skip the desktop and 2 LCD's. If you need the extra screen real estate, use your laptop and plug in an extra LCD monitor, keyboard and mouse. After 3 months, hauling a big case around gets really old.

++ for Utah's/Arizona's national parks like Grand Canyon, Bryce, Zion, Arches, Monument Valley.

Skip Tahoe. Do stop by Shasta and spend some time along the coast in Northern Cal. If you do the Eastern slope of the Sierra's at all, stop by the Bodie ghost town. It's awesome: http://www.bodie.com/ Spend some time in Big Sur.

My favorite part of California is the Central Coast between Big Sur and Santa Barbara. There's a small college town called San Luis Obispo that has a good engineering school (i.e. nerds) and a string of quiet little beach towns all around. My wife and I try to get down there every 3-4 months to unwind. It's lovely. Not exactly a big party zone, but nice if you like the beach and peace and quiet.

Buy a wet suit and a surf board and learn how to surf. You can park your camper RV along highway 1 and surf at any number of beaches along the coast.

I really didn't like LA much at all. Lived there for 2 years. Meh. YMMV.
Sounds like you've gotten some good advice so far. Here's what I'd add:

Camping in the lake Tahoe area is great, particularly one campground on "Emerald Bay". If you're there in winter, do try snowboarding/skiing.

In the SF area I recommend checking out Pacifica and Santa Cruz, and making a quick stop through Carmel. Each is a different flavor of northern CA beach town.

Also, north of SF Mendocino is awesome and the surrounding area is quite unfettered compared with a lot of areas that attract tourists.

In SF, you can find a monthly room in someone's apartment/house for $400 to $600 on Craigslist.

Also, check out the wine country (tourist attraction but there are some nice restaurants, and everything is posh and manicured, yet not in a stodgy way), and definitely check out the redwoods (Muir woods is easy to get to but there are others) for some hiking. You don't see trees like that every day. The smell of the redwoods and the eucalyptus will be memorable for a long time... it's wonderful.

In SF proper, check out the mission district, and yes, Yelp is a great resource. Also, there are a bunch of cool technology oriented meetups in the bay area, so spend at least a few days (at the beginning of a month) around here so that you can check some of them out (js, mysql, ruby, startups, etc.).

You can't miss L.A. either. I highly recommend going to this place called Skybar which is in the Mondrian hotel. Book an (expensive) room for one night at the hotel (preferably Thurs, Fri, or Sat) and go to Skybar that night and mingle with the local L.A. scenesters. I have done this a few times and it's quite an experience. Also, the Mondrian looks out over the bluffs and you have a great view of the HOLLYWOOD sign. Hey, you're visiting the west coast so just bite the bullet and be a cultural anthropologist for a night... :)

If you go south of L.A., check out the fish taco scene. The NY Times ran an article last year about a west coast taco "exploration" that a writer wrote up on a similar trip.

For the driving, I recommend that you stay on the 1 when possible, as the view of the ocean is worth quite a bit. The 5 is full of trucks and it's very hot and unpleasant.

In general, I recommend trying to conserve money by doing things like camping, couch crashing at people's houses, etc., and then splurging a bit on some good food now and then.

Restaurants I recommend: Cafe Gratitude (creative vegan fare that will knock your socks off, particularly the coconut pie), Pane e Vino (in SF, try the pizza with arugula), Mustard's (in Yountville, decent prices and a sample of the great food of the wine country).

Also, sprint EVDO doesn't always have a cap. Mine was a bit more expensive and has unlimited bandwidth.
Ask YC: What's the most intrusive ad you've seen?
Ads are getting more intrusive over time, especially on TV. The current trend is to show ads that take over the bottom 1/4th of your screen, but I saw a new low. While watching Family Guy on TBS, an ad for a new sitcom appeared in the bottom left of the screen. The "star" walks on to the screen, picks up a remote control and "pauses" Family Guy to advertise the new show. When his advertising pitch was over, he "un-paused" Family Guy and the current programming resumed.

While we've been tolerating the generation of TV pop-up ads, 5 seconds ads to catch the "Tivo rewind", and longer commercials, this seemed like a new low to me.

So my question is: What's the most intrusive ad you've seen? Was it TV, Internet, at the movie theater?
10 Big Businesses That Have Moved Their Headquarters Abroad to Pay Less U.S. Taxes
While we had a lab full of computers in high school comp sci, we did all our main work on paper and on the chalk board, and all tests were on paper too. We had to learn to think things through in our heads. At the end of each year was a 3-month development window where we had to write a complete app (game, whatever) start to finish, so we did do some serious code for our age (this was 8-9 years ago now).

To this day, I bring a notebook everywhere and jot in pseudocode on the bus, in meetings, anywhere I can. I'm certainly able to think through problems better because of that. Programming is a written language, you don't need a computer to speak it, just to interpret it. And pseudocode is a great art to get good at. Highly recommended if you're looking to pick up a new language, just learn to program on paper and in your head instead.

So what they're likely looking at with the paper and pencil test is simply to see whether you can actually think in general, and not just debug your way through an assigned task.
I don't know if anyone else read the article who still actively "has" to develop in php.. but the problem he is asking them to solve with pencil+paper should be totally doable in a few minutes; even for someone fresh to the language as other than maybe the strcmp function you would need no real "library" knowledge.

I think it's clear that there are two kinds of "solid" php developers. The ones that have moved on to other languages/paradigms and love it (thus answering "where have they gone") and those who have moved on but still make their bread and butter in php but apply those new paradigms best as they can (cake php, fluent expressions, correct use of OO etc.). The problem with hiring the latter is they are most likely gainfully employed or more interested in doing their own thing.

Maybe you should try hiring people with aptitude and providing crash course training as well as further education incentives.
I assume most everyone would quit if someone got fired/reprimanded for talking about weed. It's real life, not high school.
In the bay area: hit Lake Tahoe, Napa, Yosemite. I'd be happy to meet up when you're in town (check my profile for contact info).
a better analogy would be:
your car may be locked but other people have keys that unlocks your car.then someone proves it by unlocking the car with his key
That's the main reason, my friends, that successful mobile startup is a huge oxymoron right now.

I work for one of the biggest mobile app vendors, and to get to that stage, you have to be in bed with the carriers, yet if you made too much money, they probably will aim squarly at you, and do in house (or with third parties) what you used to do.

They can just look out whatever they don't like. Even if they tell the user they are paying for "data service", they still let in only non-free apps where they get half the cut so the consumer is being charged twice for that data access.
They can ban apps outright, or just make it in a way that everytime the app request something on the network, and anoying popup comes to tell the user if they want to give this app permission to access the network.
Here is the dirty trick: They put up this poup for every HTTP request, which means any network aware application becomes useless! It used to be that many phones that the option to let the user say "Yes", once, and never be bothered anymore, but carriers just requested phone manufactors to remove this, and annoy the users everytime, unless the app is "blessed" (i.e. signed) by the carrier themselves.

Of course they are doing this to "protect the user", and their "network", which is total b.s.

Unfortunately, the FCC does nothing about this, and that's why Google's move to force open apps standard with all the spectrum auctioning that happened a couple of months ago, was a great step.

The scary part is that this is yet another look, on how the internet could become if ISPs or broandband providers are let to tamper with whatever they want and all the traffic that passes thru them. That's why I think net neutrality is a very important issue, and it should be extended to wireless providers also.
My pitch is for a website that lets you upload videos talking about your startup and then others can rate it. I want to call it something snappy. Like elevator.tv or eleva.tv or maybe vator.tv.
Weed? No biggie.

It's when horse or crack are the main topics you may have to worry.
he's probably not paying enough.
Actually you can use the <?= syntax to make it even more concise:

function o($name) { return(htmlspecialchars($name));}

<?=o($name)?>

which lo, and behold, looks a lot like the rails candidate below.
Using Amazon S3 as CDN, Part 2 - Cacheability
Well, that's true, but it's not what people are generally referring to when they say "sugar". But technically I suppose that's correct.

I'm assuming red wine's residual sugar is in the form glucose, but could be wrong.
Also Yosemite in California -- it's just unbelievable. I was there last weekend and I was just amazed.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryangwu82/sets/7215760536136072...
This is beauty of the 9 to 5:

* 7am: Wake up, read HN, eat/get dressed/etc
* 8:20am: get on bicycle, bike to work (30min exercise)
* 8:50am: get clean
* 9am: work (code for 90% of the time)
* 4:50pm: stop work
* 5:00pm: bicycle back home (30min exercise)
* 5:30pm: clean up
* 6pm: eat

And after dinner I have free time, I could easily add 2 or 3 more hours of working if I wanted to here.
And I'm socially synchronized with the rest of the world!
This really doesn't matter to someone who has a recent machine - my crappy Dell laptop has 2 GB of RAM and Firefox feels very snappy. Casual users with older machines with less RAM probably won't use Firefox long enough for it to start using up lots of RAM.

It's not really that big of a problem.

For most computer users, spyware is a much bigger concern from the perspective of performance.
look at craigslist if you need something in greater LA. or westsiderentals.com
Gladwell is wrong about being able to fix the black-white performance gap in three years using better teachers. Not only does his argument go completely against all the prevailing research, but it doesn't even make sense because every white student would have to be assigned a bad teacher for the numbers to add up. (C.f. Equality & Achievement, Hart & Risley, etc.)
In-person sales pitches are still the worst. Street vendors selling T-shirts, panhandlers foisting guilt and selling guilt-assuagement, scalpers selling tickets -- they're all worse than non-human ads, because they're more adaptable and can try to manipulate you when you ignore them.
SQL Injecting PhpMyAdmin
I've been keeping my eye on this product for awhile, I'm actually concerned to use it given how long it's taken to come to market.

I'll give it a try this evening.
Think of what you want YOUR future to look like. Then fixate on it and pursue until it is a real thing. Of course it is a moving target but learning to handle that on the fly is a lot of the game.

Don't let society guide your path and definitely don't let your preconceptions do it for you. We are all loaded up with crappy information. It is easy to believe that there is a pre canned path such as University or a job. You will find only a barren wasteland there if you don't understand the reasons behind taking those pathways.

For example I was quite naive when I was 18 about what university was going to be. I expected it to be a "fire hose of information" full of new and unimaginably exciting things. Turned out that it was information that exists in nearly any bookstore, doled out at an excruciatingly slow pace. I ended up hating class, tolerating it enough to pass with decent grades, and spending all my free time hacking... just like I did before I went to university.

University serves its purpose for more "social" things. It will not make a great hacker legendary. Only hacking makes a great hacker better. You sound pretty capable which means you will not find as much "out there" as you hope. You would be much better served to focus more on teaching yourself and making your own way. It will be hard because your life might end up seeming worse than everyone else around you. But that is only because it is the beginning of a very very long race. You must understand that you are preparing and growing still. Those around you leading the "good life" reach the end of it when they turn 23. They took a shortcut to what they thought was happiness, income, wives, kids, friends... most of them don't even consciously know that they aren't happy and won't know it until it is way too late.

So I say the best thing to do for an ambitious person like yourself is don't take the safe path. Go full throttle, face first into your mistakes. Pick yourself up and repeat. Get out there and meet people on the street. Read the best books that have been written over human history. And remember to take your time. Do it right the first time as well as can be done but no better. And remember if your not pissing someone off, you aren't getting anything done!

Finally be sure to consider all advice including this advice in a critical manner.
It's always snowing on Wall Street.