skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My adviser: all students got academic jobs (some multiple offers) and finished in 5 years (5 years from B.S. to Ph.D. is normal for math). The most recent student, with whom I had overlap, said he rocked.

Okay, great! I feel confident in recommending your advice: If you want an academic job and can find an adviser like this, go to grad school. Otherwise, do not go.

Of course, if everyone followed this advice I think you might be able to fit all the world's grad students in a high school classroom, because your adviser was freakishly good.

How does the funding work in the math department? Lots of the theorists I knew seemed to be TAs almost until the day they graduated -- and in their field, unlike the experimental sciences, salary seemed to be a major fraction of the expense of keeping a grad student. In the experimental wing, where it can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to keep (e.g.) a genetics student stocked with reagents, the whole problem of adviser choice has an additional, frustrating degree of freedom: If your adviser doesn't have money to hire you, it doesn't matter that she's the greatest person in the world.

It might be possible to find someone who scores highly on the flush-with-cash axis, the graduates-students-on-time axis, the good-reputation-in-field axis, the track-record-of-successful-students axis and the provides-useful-research-advice axis... but such folks have their pick of grad student talent, and once they're done the other students have to pick among the remaining advisers, balancing the various factors and hoping to get lucky. Or, of course, they can quit, which is probably a better idea, though it is hard to make yourself do it once you've gone that far.

One overwhelmingly useful thing is to have independent funding. I had a fellowship and I cannot overstate how helpful it was -- I was able to shop for advisers in situations where my fellow students felt trapped by financial realities. If you find yourself headed for grad school, apply for every fellowship you can.
I have learned that it isn't success that really brings happiness - it is the process of getting to success. And that same process sometimes leads to "failure."
Follow his twitter feed to find your answer.
I'm completely underwhelmed by all the iPhone Loopt bashing. A slew of people have reported accidentally spamming their friends, but nobody has been able to describe what happened.

When I used the Loopt iPhone app, it was pretty obvious what was going on to me. You have to actually tap on the names of people whom you want to invite. Now, if there is some bug that's causing invites to be sent to more than the individuals you tap, that should be addressed, but its probably nothing more than a bug.

Merlin Mann hasn't even tried the Loopt app, but has no problem arguing about its supposed privacy violations. If anyone has more information, or can actually describe the problem people are supposedly having, I'd be interested to hear it.
I tend to agree, but the street hasn't gone into panic mode at this moment. Right now, most people are hoping for a turn around because if they were to sell, then they'd lock in their losses (after all, VMW was worth twice as much ONLY 6 months ago!).

The momentum is to the downside, and I say short if possible because of the fact that there are so many hopeful investors clinging to the idea that they can "make money" in this market (when in fact the best they can realistically hope for is that they break even).

The true long opportunity will be perhaps next September/October when the street is really regretting ever getting into the markets to begin with.
i'm not sure if i understand completely.

if the functionality is a simple toggle, like, click to zoom in, click again to zoom back out, then use a CSS sprite (or something similar) to toggle the icon between a zoom icon with a plus and zoom icon with a minus (so that the image will remain mostly the same and therefore not confusing).

if its something else, either do something more complex to toggle the icon between a variety of icons, all of which being similar. if you're looking for just a single icon, perhaps a simple magnifying glass without any other decoration.
Please, this is hacker news not reddit, take the anti-capitalism somewhere else...
Jerry Yang must go, so please help find a new Yahoo CEO
Looks very promising, and it's about what I do currently (using my own domain and a catch-all email address).
"Costly network operation"? I guess you don't live in the UK or similar. (Data is free here (EDGE or free wifi)).
Do you have to pay for incomming calls and SMS as well? If so that's just ridiculous.

edit: If it is sending out SMS it would make sense for it to ask you first definitely.
Syntactically Awesome StyleSheets: just for the name they deserve uptake
Other than the fact they are likely to invest in young/the startups, what (if any) are the criteria for inviting investors?
I didn't downmod you, but I believe your post is being downmodded because it has no content.
A closure is an implementation technique for representing procedures with free variables. -- SICP @ http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-15.html...
Connecting With the End User
How one IT company's employees all telecommute full-time
Everytime I hear "Googley" I cringe. It must be aweful working at google, and not wanting to be "Googley" and not being sorrounded by all that childish stuff. It's like join a cult, not a job. You either are "in" our spend the rest of the time being miserable.
awww... doesn't work anymore.
do you seriously think any of the public stats sites are able to understand traffic of small sites like ours? Not so much, as it happens. And this fact is pretty well documented (seomoz has some good posts documenting how comscore, alexa, and quantcast don't do so well with smaller sites/services). I'm in NYC on an iPhone- I'll find the posts next time I'm in front of a real screen.

The 7 percent number (we were up to 9 for a while) is user growth-- not traffic. Both are still growing nicely.
EULA violations = copyright infringement, even if the violation outside of a EULA isn't
spam in the ice machine?
What if in the past they hired based on preconceptions about college graduation?
That was actually understandable! I've run into this "problem" before when playing around with FP, and I never quite knew how to solve it without ugly hacks. Now I know - thanks!
5 things your prospective customer wants you to know
The example is awkward but could be simplified as "click on the walking man's left arm", and if there were five images 150x150 side by side and only one image had the walking figure the spambot would have to choose the correct image and the correct 15x15 pixel range in that image, so a 1/500 chance of being right.
Now all we need is a terminal application and it'll be all good.
What Is Preferred Stock?
Embarassingly Gushing Praise for TechCrunch And The New CrunchBase API
Horizontal and Vertical Security: Which do you need?
It had been four years
Creating an Intermediate Replication Layer
Yeah, I've wanted this service, but I want it for my own domain.

I want a Firefox widget that sits in my browser and communicates with something on my server.

When I show up to a site it offers me the option to log on or generate an address, preferably by category. The addresses feed into categorical email address. Say 139sdfjf.myshopping@rudyfink.com all goes to myshopping or preferably, I just designate the generated 139sdfjf@ address to end up in shopping so an internal structure wouldn't be exposed.

In a perfect world this aliasing system would be linked to my spam filters and be website aware so if anything came in on a particular email address it could automatically act to cancel that particular email and map a new one to the account. I'd of course be delighted if a standard protocol for handling these anonymous identity interactions with websites could be developed so the whole process would be transparent.

In an even more perfect world, this system would work transparently with many similar systems that get approved FOAF style.

Identity and informational spam management could become much nicer than it is today.
Hey, they forgot the sector that's doing really well these days:

Oil.
An Air Car You Could See in 2009: ZPM’s 106 MPG Compressed-Air Hybrid : Gas 2.0
Wrong.

A "good buy" is not one which "has fallen as low as it possibly might", but one which is under-valued. When considering long-term investments, what matter is not whether the stock will go lower in the months, or even years, that follow, but whether it is undervalued.

Chances are, most tech stocks are undervalued these days. If I had any money I'd buy Apple, which is no doubt dragged way below its intrinsic value because of the general downturn.

A good maxim for long-term investors is: if the stock you're holding (waiting for it to go up) goes down instead, re-examine the fundamentals. If the fundamentals haven't changed, buy some more. That should help explain why what you say doesn't make real sense (even though it appears superficially sensible).
IPhone Apps as a Startup Marketing Tool
I've been using it, and it was fairly obvious to me exactly what I was signing up for. I actually bothered to skim the "Privacy" section of the license and said, "Oh, that's how Loopt plans to make money, by sending me SMSs with advertisements. That's predictable.

I think what's happening is that people are conflating Loopt's "We will share your phone number and location with our advertisers if we so decide" with their invite system, and getting into an uproar as a result.
I completely agree that's a huge problem.

I just don't think things were any better in the past in composition or comprehension.
I read as far as "International Journal of Socialist Renewal".
> Scholastically, life works out better for people who value books more than television. And better still for people who value knowledge more than almost everything else.

"Truly rich people talk about ideas, poor people talk about other people."
It's free to receive in the UK, but very pricey to send. If Loopt spammed my contact list here, it would probably cost me about £10 in the process.

I don't have an iPhone yet, so that can't happen. Lucky me! Oh wait..
Could be, and there are plenty of non-Marxist articles on this subject which we could be reading instead of this load of garbage.

Though personally I don't want to see economics articles unless they're narrowly focused on, say, startups or technology.
Documentation or death (or: the rise and slight drop of rails blogging)
"Almost all" might have been hyperbole, but "many" is certainly true.

On the other hand, HTTP is clearly far superior to FTP, especially if you include extensions like WebDAV and the power of custom headers.

I was just pointing out, insecure formats that don't define how to do listings or set mod times or deal with Unix permissions can be quite good. FTP sucks mostly because of the ports/multiple connection issue, as you pointed out.
The point of an essay (at least pg's style of essay) is to explore a subject and, to a lesser extent, to incite others to explore the subject and their own feelings about it as well.

Unfortunately, the writer here decides not to explore his own feelings fully and his points are made in a few sentences without details or evidence,

"The bits on London or Paris are terribly naïve and missing the point. Whoever is using the word hip for London or art for Paris can only have a vague understanding of what he is talking about"

This smells like an ad-hominem

"Looking into Paul’s ferocious defiance towards school and corporate culture, it is easy to imagine Paul being a rather shy person, who would rather jump in the ocean than being part of anything looking like a team."

Lack of substance really hurts this blog post.
Facebook, MySpace Ignore Location On iPhone At Their Peril
Congress goes after NebuAd and Embarq
Of course. Digg is mainstream.
Agreed. Very nice though.

I heard (read) there might be an app to SSH from the iPhone, but that's about it. And I don't think it would be free.
What the hell happened to Kleiner Perkins?
Scientific Commons: 2e7 publications, 8e6 authors
Can Interfaces be Evil?
In general, if there is some functionality other web sites don't have, there is no icon that will make this new functionality clear to a user.

If clicking a button will make it zoom in, use the standard magnifying-glass-with-a-plus. If clicking a button will make it zoom out, use the standard magnifying-glass-with-a-minus. If clicking a button will open some other weird zoom mode then it is guaranteed not to be clear. Might as well just use a magnifying glass with no text then to imply it's zoom-related.

I wouldn't be surprised if the best design is just to find space for an extra button somehow, and use the 2-button-zoom that is so standard.
Do you have to pay for incoming calls and SMS as well?

Yes.

If so that's just ridiculous.

Yes, it is. Welcome to American capitalism, where avarice is more important than long-term strategy or customer loyalty.
If you look at the history of philosophy or science you don't find a lot of women. But there could have been. It's a shame. The more scientists and philosophers (and many other things) the faster we make progress.
Here are prepared remarks from one senator who has some brass.

http://bunning.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=NewsCe...
Make Money by sharing free content | MAKE MONEY ONLINE WITH HARRY
Top Ten List of Coder Excuses for Bad UI Design:

1. I understand the UI perfectly. The users must be stupid.

2. It's all spelled out perfectly clearly on page three of the license agreement.

...

Let me add one:

3. You have no privacy anyway; get over it.

Anybody else want to add one? I'm still a bit short of ten, here.

I note, with approval, that the Loopt folks were smart enough not to make excuses but to fall immediately into the Apologizer role:

http://loopt.typepad.com/loopt/2008/07/iphone-invite-c.html

... which, if we carefully parse Loopt's own description of the problem, seems to be entirely warranted:

When you clicked the “Who’s on Loopt” button, all of your contacts that are current Loopt users were auto-selected to receive invites. A total count of people receiving invites appeared at the bottom of the screen. However, we have since disabled that functionality due to customer feedback and confusion. We are working on an improved invite flow that will include an invite confirmation screen that will be released very soon.

"...will include an invite confirmation screen". Uh, yep, that could be the problem!

It would be nice to provide more detailed bug reports, but it seems that we can't because Loopt treated this as an emergency and updated the app right away. Which was also very smart.
A quick note on website heatmaps
Google Finance Stock Screener
According to my friend with a 3G iPhone, he got (or will get) an app that allows him to run SSH through his browser, or somesuch like that, so that the app won't terminate when switching around, or whatever. I don't know because I have an Openmoko, which comes out of the box with a terminal. :P
To be precise: mhb on ajbatac on hacker webzine on Schneier on Chinese Hackers.
Merlin Mann said it better than any of us could ever hope to:

"SMSs cost money. Like real money. Not popped collar polo shirt money."

(Of course, he was referring to being the recipient of SMSs, not the sender. (Which also costs money.))
Sexy Forms in Rails
Yeah, the rest were dogs. There's probably about a difference of six pixels or something.
http://search.oreilly.com/?q=mind+hacks&submit.x=0&s...

i remember these 2 mind hacks from Oreilly being good, but i htink mine got borrowed forever.
The Reg once posted an article titled "PC Sales Down" while in the first or second paragraph they had the statement, "PC Sales are up 13%" (or something like that, the number's probably a bit off).

I suppose that shows where their priorities lie -- sensationalism.
White Paper on 'Cloud Architectures' and Best Practices of Amazon S3, EC2, SimpleDB, SQS
I believe the messages sent were from Loopt's shortcode so it wouldn't technically cost you money, but it would cost whoever received the message. But in general you shouldn't send a message to everyone in the phonebook by default. Especially without a confirmation page. You potentially just shared your location with bunches of people you don't want to know your location (exes, bosses, clients, etc).

This is the kind of thing that could easily get their shortcode revoked which is why they reacted so swiftly.
'It wasn’t a money thing for the bands, but a consciousness thing. As long as people were focused on “documenting” the experience, they couldn’t be fully “in” the experience.'

I've noticed this about vacations. On one trip I found myself way too preoccupied with recording images for some possible future perusal, while missing the immediate visceral experience. And it struck me as crazy.

I do think a lot of what gets lumped into "social media" is a cult of distraction. It seems just a wee bit self-absorbed, too, and quite unsocial.
If only there were some way to implement a captcha that could only be solved automatically by doing useful work--say, a few steps in a protein folding sequence, in a way that's easy to visualize.

"Imagine a beowulf cluster of spammers"
> I'd expect even a car mechanic to have enough brains

How many things in your life can you fix by yourself? The typical car mechanic is far less dependent on others to keep things running.

> Isn't academic aptitude strongly correlated with ability to succeed in the world at large

No.

In fact, even in the areas where you'd expect academia to be most relevant, half of the genius' are academic failures. (The academics do dominate the middle, but that's probably because academia is used as a filter and that keeps out all but the best of the academic failures.)

> the educational system is a massive failure

Not massive, but anything else that "succeeded" as well would be considered a failure. However, the bigger failure may be outside the educational system, expecting things from it that it can't deliver.

Then again, that may be academia's fault. Who else would think that the ability to comment intelligently on the wizard of oz has broad predictive power.

FWIW, the guy who wrote Babylon 5, which is full of literary representation and symbolism, ie abstraction, says that he can't handle "let X = 5".
It's not a book, but understanding the methodology behind supermemo is a good place to start.
I can tell you that until there are zero reports of these sorts of problems, there is absolutely no way I can even try this application out. I'm glad that people are piling on about it, because I have a big fat phone book full of people that I only call after I can prepare for 30 minutes before hand, and the thought of even accidentally sending them a text like this gives me the chills.

Like, if I'm plumbing my contact list to try to get a one in a million favor type of contacts. It would be disastrous to spam these contacts with my phone number and an invitation to something stupid like Loopt. What a great way for me to tell these guys "hey, look at me! I'm some douche with an iPhone, here to spam you! Please, never let me call in a favor again!"

I already catch enough hell for using an iPhone instead of a Blackberry like most of corporate america and the military sector.
Germany, and also J2ME has been around for a while. In the beginnings, sending SMS as well as network connections were very costly for most people in Germany.

I guess even if it were free it would make sense to ask people before the phone is allowed to connect somewhere else.

Some mobile phone vendors provided an "always allow" option in the settings, though.
Is this a joke?

Its called a "disposable email address" and they have been around since sneakemail.com, which started in 2000, then spamgourmet.com and then a hundred other copycats. So basically they add OpenID to an old idea and you call it an amazing web2.0 innovation?
Where do you start it?
"Chances are, most tech stocks are undervalued these days. If I had any money I'd buy Apple, which is no doubt dragged way below its intrinsic value because of the general downturn."

What makes you think so, and why would you be the only one thinking that way. How do you know that Apple wasn't extremely overpriced before and is now seeing the long overdue correction?
I like the End of first para! its a killer for me and my friends!
Moving $1oo million to iPhone apps in addition to other mobile tech investments (which the article doesn't mention) is an internet play.
Sunil Mittal on Entrepreneurship
There's probably considerable overlap with books on creativity and making your thinking more flexible. Roger von Oech's _A Whack on the Side of the Head_ and _ Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!_ may be helpful.

Also, look at some of the books about home schooling, targeted to both parents and the teenagers themselves. I remember Grace Lewellyn's _ The Teenage Liberation Handbook_ having sections along the line of, "How do I go about really learning history/math/foreign languages/etc."

Many things with meta-learning advice will have it as a secondary topic, albeit an important one. Try your public library -- this is an excellent question for a librarian.
People here might like to know that the Roomba is successful as a consumer product because the parts are so cheap. They are so cheap because they can fit a great deal of intelligence in a tiny kernel. They do this with a toy version of Lisp. By toy, I literally mean designed for toys. "My real baby".

It's actually a software problem -- and the numerous clones failed to figure that out.
Argh, sorry.. first submission ever. I goofed up and didn't permalink: http://modicus.blogspot.com/2008/07/why-hacking-exists.html
Do you/somebody-else know the process by which somebody from outside the US can continue to work in the US?? Is there a specific Visa we would need to apply for.

I always thought it was easy for founders to continue working in the US - it was only hard for people coming to work for existing companies...
The author of this piece is going to feel pretty stupid when congress passes a cap-and-trade bill next year and KP rakes in a few billion overnight.
Related, see "How to Solve it": http://www.math.utah.edu/~pa/math/polya.html
Loopt update
IIRC, you worked at iRobot before starting TipJoy. Would you mind to share your opinion how you see the future of the company (medium to long term)?
Ah. So it would have actually been sent from Loopt and not from you. Now I understand.
I think Apple's been chronically underpriced because financial analysts and the like seem to lack the foresight, over and over again, to realise that when Apple launches a new product, it's pretty much guaranteed to be a hit. Basically, I believe that Apple's products are more awesome than the market thinks, because the market is non-technical on average and so doesn't fully comprehend just how cool Apple's products are, and treats it more like just any other technology company.

I'm not a financial analyst, though, so this is not backed by any data, if that's what you're asking :-)
Makes sense to me. Internet companies are getting by on ever-decreasing amounts of funding, while huge firms like KP have an ever-increasing amount of money they need to invest. Internet companies and KP aren't interested in talking about the same sorts of money any more. It makes sense that their attention should be shifted to big expensive projects like biotech and fuel cells. Whether that will pay off for them remains to be seen, but from a technology point of view I hope that it will.
That could be a good deal for a spamming business. I think that certain spammers currently invest significantly more than 1/100th of a penny per solved CAPTCHA.
Hah. You must not have been that good - the ones I never turned in didn't really hurt me either.