skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hate school. With a passion. I find I learn best sitting quietly alone, thinking, reading or experimenting. This applies not just to Computer Science, but most subjects.

Between the Internet, amazon and a good library, an above-average intelligence person can teach themselves many subjects, including CS. The point about not knowing the order in which to learn is invalid: Easily solved in <5 minutes by going to a few university websites and trying to establish a common denominator. For the really gifted ( and I should think enough most who are motivated to learn CS autodidactically are), they may probably discover new things by simply playing around, noticing interesting phenomena and use our famous OCD tendencies to add to the field. That's how most scientific discoveries are made. Ramanujan, the great Indian mathematician, was not formally trained, yet made important contributions.

I'm also reminded of the anecdote where a student who had not attended class got a copy of the homework from a colleague, not knowing that the professor had told the class the problems were unsolvable. OF course, he solved them; the other students had a mental block. But to be honest, if you learn things from books, they will consider certain problems 'unsolvable' as well.

Ultimately, it depends on your IQ, aim and financial situation. If you've made up your mind, like me to be an entrepreneur, you don't have to care about a degree. In fact, I would like to make a ton of money while young, so I can spend lots of time later delving deep into both the sciences and humanities (in many ways an artificial distinction; Google "Lockhart's Lament").

If you plan to work for others, its safe, but not absolutely necessary, like anything else, it depends. In this case, the employer in general and the specific interviewer. If s(he) has had many good experiences with non-degreed employees, your chances are better.

From a purely acquisition of knowledge standpoint, yes, you can teach yourself CS. If there's something you're not sure about, I'm absolutely sure that you can develop a good relationship with a good professor local to you or even online. My gut feeling is that good professors wouldn't mind, they love smart students.

Ahhh, my friends, the journey of self-discovery!
MacRumors Buyer's Guide: Know when to buy your Mac
Happiness is not selected for or against any more than satiety is. You're using first-order reasoning on a second-order trait.
There's got to be a greasemonkey script or a Firefox plugin that disables this behavior. Perhaps Awesome Highlighter should link to one of these solutions.
because most hackers here married their right-hands,unfortunately.
Getting the essential things right.
In Search of Perfect Harmony, Through Software
Why do we need a school? Nearly all information we learn in school is on wikipedia as well.
Look at the two pieces of poetry:

"Did you hear about the rose that grew

from a crack in the concrete?

Proving nature's law is wrong

it learned to walk with out having feet.

Funny it seems, but by keeping it's dreams,

it learned to breathe fresh air.

Long live the rose that grew from concrete

when no one else ever cared."

and

"I see no changes all I see is racist faces

misplaced hate makes disgrace to races

We under I wonder what it takes to make this

one better place, let's erase the wasted

Take the evil out the people they'll be acting right

'cause both black and white is smokin' crack tonight

and only time we chill is when we kill each other

it takes skill to be real, time to heal each other"

there both from Tupac Shakur, but the first one is from the poem " the rose that grew from concrete" and the second one is from the song "Changes" The difference is that in the first one its just words put together with a meaning, they say something. But the second one i like more, because of the rime and the rhythm. The first one is written on paper and published to be read, but the second one is from a song, it has to conform to the rhythm of the song, the words are structured to fit with the music and the flow, the second one has structure and architecture and it has to be simple enough to fit with the music and the beat. Making the second one is harder and its more beautiful. When i see good code, for me that means that it follows the flow of the readers mind, the code just fits and does its job, no fancy magic stuff, just simplicity and beauty. It has to be easy to understand too.
This will always be an issue unless you use a distributed/mirror/farm architecture with more than one data-centre.

Most decent data centres are highly resilient and reliable (i.e. cheap solutions are not always worth the headaches if you run important apps/services) but, regardless, if you put all your eggs in one basket there is not much you can do if the basket drops.
So, having done a degree to get a job in computing, only to find that it's not enough, I wonder why I wasted 3 years when all I came away with was good Scheme experience. Now a self-employed Lisp programmer.
The New Trophy Home, Small and Ecological
It would be great to have this kind of historic information on all consumer electronics.

It's nice to buy a fridge on the cheap because it's last year's model.
In India, Growth Outstrips Agriculture
How Steve Jobs used his Apple millions to turn Pixar into the most important movie studio
The only potential I see is in the tiny url service part of it. But I was only aware of this AFTER testing it out. It should be emphasised more:

Create a short url for a page - AND mark the parts you find interesting. Tiny url but with a marker.
SSL encryption coming to The Pirate Bay
Is Google a bottomless money pit? Or just a very deep money pit?
Not quite, but almost close enough. You'd have to create a plane which can take off and land vertically. This can probably be accomplished with a tilt-rotor design, where some performance tradeoffs will have to be made.

Whoever is capable of creating a cheap general-aviation VTOL aircraft will be rich. Technology development in aviation moves at a glacial pace, but only because everyone is afraid to be sued or crash. The "crash" risk can largely be mitigated with emergency parachutes, whereas the "sue" risk is a question of politics. Not technology.

One final note - the MPG rating for aircraft only accounts for about half the running cost of operating an airplane. Engine maintenance is horrendously expensive, and all too necessary given that small planes only have one of them.
Snow Leopard screenshots emerge, reveal Web App functionality
Real World Haskell: Ten new draft chapters
I recommend finding a mentor. Someone who writes code that you respect (be it for quality, clarity or efficiency). Start reading their code and asking questions.

The open source community is a good place to start looking if you don't have someone you respect in your own community.
Gotta think Apple's relationship with Intel will change some of these release cycles. Great resource though.
How does this differ significantly from Third Voice? http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2001/04/42803
Man gets Windows Vista to work with printer
User annotations help make the user feel they are part of the community/creative process. Walled gardens like NYTimes might be scared (remember ThirdVoice) to let the public annotate their content - highlighting is a trojan horse to overlaying user annotations and co-opting their precious content. If I were the NYTimes, I'd be scared to sign any revenue-sharing contract unless it specifically prohibited later, more sophisticated annotations.

One of the most-popular sites in Japan is a clever site that lets anyone comment directly on a video, literally.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nico_Nico_Douga
More evidence that Perl is languishing: Mr. JAPH himself is hacking Seaside.
Sun Microsystems in Bollywood
Sun Microsystems is into bollywood. It is the technical partner for the upcoming movie "love story - 2050".
Check this link
http://longlivethepc.com/abacus/?p=10
What are your views about this?
In that particular case, ack's performance advantage seems to arise mostly because of a bug that causes GNU grep to be terribly slow in multibyte locales:

http://blog.i-no.de/archives/2008/05/07/index.html
http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?14472
That's very cool -- I've often considered doing that (moving to a cheap Asian country). I'd be curious if you have any more advice about it -- which countries were good, what sort of places to stay in, etc.
Putting Prices Into Focus - Why We Have No Clue How Much Stuff Should Cost
Yeah, that's a tough decision.

Keep in mind that very few people make it through a PhD program with a good enough outcome to become a professor, and it usually has less to do with intelligence, than with luck, social skills, and the ability to "play the game". And if you do manage to get a faculty position (somewhere...), you've got another six years of hard work ahead of you before you've got any true claim on autonomy. Then you get paid dirt for the rest of your life.

You can always go to grad school later, but you've only got so many years of youthful enthusiasm and the ability to live cheaply. And once you have a wife and kid(s), it gets a lot harder to start a company. My advice is to take the massive-upside risks when you're young, and leave the low-upside risks for later.
Good luck with that. I daydream of a similar path (though Spain/Portugal rather than France).
This kept me on Firefox as well until I discovered SafariStand, which includes this feature.

http://hetima.com/safari/stand-e.html
Brilliant guide, thanks. I need an MP3 player right now, so this is real helpful.

(OT: Anyone know the closest thing to an iPod with WMA support?)
If you have an online business with a subscription based revenue model, would it help sales if you set an artificially high price point for one level (high, medium, low, free)?

Anyone have experience charging just one level to multiples?
encryption please :)

EDIT
Thanks for changing it :)
"When Marcellus withdrew them [his ships] a bow-shot, the old man [Archimedes] constructed a kind of hexagonal mirror, and at an interval proportionate to the size of the mirror he set similar small mirrors with four edges, moved by links and by a form of hinge, and made it the center of the sun's beams – its noon-tide beam, whether in summer or in mid-winter. Afterwards, when the beams were reflected in the mirror, a fearful kindling of fire was raised in the ships, and at the distance of a bow-shot he turned them into ashes. in this way did the old man prevail over Marcellus with his weapons."

"Archimedes and his Burning Mirrors, Reality or Fantasy?"
http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Mirrors.htm
Perhaps computer science is the glue rather than the cutting edge?
A lot of research is not even realistically possible without computers.
Parallellisation is important for bioinformatics and so on.

But the really cool stuff that computers could potentially solve is incredibly hard, like machine translation and computer vision.

But if the singularists are right computer science will solve the problem that solves all other problems :)
Or destroys us :(
I think that for those using PowerBooks, the ideal time to upgrade to a MacBook or MPB will be after the next refresh. The current MBP processor uses 34W, and the new Montevina refresh will use about 29W. The next refresh after that is going to be Nehalem in Q2 2009, which is going to be use between 35-45W, probably at least 40 for the version that will go into the MPB. So the new Montevina chips seem to be striking the best balance between speed and battery life. The 22nm Sandy Bridge refresh will fix the power consumption problems, but that doesn't come out until 2011. Since realistically no one still using a PowerBook will wait until 2011 to buy a new one, it seems like the optimal time to upgrade is going to be in late August or whenever the new ones come out.
Ask HN: I want to add SMS to my service, tips/help/advice?
Lets say you start a GPS/SMS-service so you receive an SMS, do some stuff with the data and sends back what they ask for.

So you have a transaction and thus a way to make money.
How can you charge money for this?
Can you contact a telecompany and somehow split the profits?
Like, you put a prize of 40c for an SMS then you split it 30c/10c telecompany/me.

Any tips on how to go about this? This must be possible right?
How can I estimate monthly server costs for N customers?*
I am trying to put together a feasibility study for a python/django powered webapp I am developing. How can I provide an estimate of my monthly hardware/bandwidth server costs in the feasibility study?
I assume it would have the form:
*M->thousand
1) 0-2M users: $200/month
2) 2M-5M users: $500/month
3) 5M-10M users: $X/Month
4) 10M+ users: $Y/Month with cost of $Z per thousand users.

These are just random guesses at numbers and ranges. What are some practical numbers to use for back of the envelope calculations? It doesn't matter to me what technology would be used for each, just what some practical dollar costs would be in those ranges.
I thought this was relatively well known. But it definitely would be nice to have this for other product lines. Apple is especially problematic though... Even knowing the release cycle, you often don't know whether a new rev will be a mere upgrade or a big leap.
Ask HN:  How would you implement a small-scale EBay?
What would be your framework and approach?
Everyone who wants an H-1B visa or an employment based Green Card.
I thought all the belly-aching about Vista was just people hating changes. Until I actually had to deal with a Vista PC. When my girlfriend bought a new HDTV, I built an HTPC to go with it, running Vista. Every driver just stops working (in interesting and confusing ways) every now and then, and has to be reinstalled. Yesterday I spent an hour poking at the network driver because it wouldn't connect and I couldn't watch the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica (and not being able to watch Battlestar Galactica makes me angry). Every once in a while the HDMI audio driver just stops working and has to be reinstalled. When switching between inputs on the TV, sometimes the video signal goes black, and the machine has to be hard rebooted. I'm sure these are all the fault of the hardware people writing crappy drivers, but it sure is a pain in the ass.

Amazon's Unbox software does something even worse on Vista. For some reason I can't figure out, it will only run once--on the next boot, it fails to start. That would be fine, except it tries to start again, and Vista pops up one of its "application has encountered an error and will be closed" or whatever...and Unbox tries to start again. Infinite loop. Since the Vista popup steals focus and cannot be ignored, the system has to be rebooted, and the app has to be uninstalled before the infinite loop kicks in.

I'd been led to believe that constant rebooting was a thing of the past in Vista...I think I reboot this box more than the XP install on my gaming system.

Vista is the worst computing experience I believe I've ever had. (And I've been using Linux as my primary OS since 96, when there were like five well-supported pieces of hardware, and I've also used every Windows since 95 in my life as an IT support contractor. I think many would say that Windows ME was the worst, but now I'd have to disagree. At least all of the drivers from 95/98 worked on ME.)
Flying is a real PITA. To just take off with a GA plane, you have to do 20-30 minutes of setup pre and after takeoff. You have to register a flight plan with whatever country nav system your with. Your also usually restricted to semi-rural GA airports, so if want to get to one place from another, there's usually a 1 to 2 hour car trip added to get where ever you wanted to in the first place. Air gas is also really expensive, at least +$.40/L because of it's high octane. It's not uncommon to burn through $200 of gas if you were flying all day (8hrs). Because it's aviation, the regulatory burden is extremely heavy, airplane parts are way more expensive than they should be, and you can often run into mandatory $5000 repair bills because system x has to be in tip top shape, and it wears down, easily. Learning to fly is usually a $10'000 minimum & a lot of time, and that's usually without instrument flying, which is necessary in cloudy or night time weather.
Flying is also extremely weather dependent, if you feel like flying to somewhere one day, you can't plan it because the weather might cancel your plans, frequently. Also you usually can't bring a lot of cargo or passengers w/ you either. You only really get the benefits of general aviation when your going long distances.

Compare this to a car:
1. Setup time: 10 seconds, turn ignition and go.
2. Weather: Who gives a fuck about weather, you can drive in snowstorms, rain, shine and it will do it. Maybe in the rare, rare major snowstorm, you have to do 20 minutes of setup before hand.
3. Cargo: You don't have to think about it
4. Passengers: You don't have to think about it
5. NYC Parking fees: You have to pay hangar fees anyway, and the world is not NYC.
6. Maintenance: You can bloody let your oil leak for a while, and it isn't $5000 to repair it!
7. Training: Usually free, or $1000 and you can become competent in months!!
8. Driving plans: You don't have to register a single car drive to anywhere!
9. Traffic stress: Traffic stress and the 7 things you have to juggle with flying is about the same! (Unless you have nice, expensive systems that do a lot of it for you).
10. Price: ALOT CHEAPER!

People fly GA for the pleasure of flying, not because it's necessarily better than a car, or commercial flights. It is the last bastion of the very well off. You'll still get harassed by customs & co. with a GA plane as you would with a normal flight.
University versus self-taught
If you can profile your application do so, data trumps estimates every time.

For a web based app your scarce resources are memory, bandwidth and database connections, disk space isn't usually an issue at first.

One factor to keep in mind is that as you add features to your app, your usage profile will change, mostly by growing heavier.
I walked past this the other day when they were building it out in front of MIT. What was amazing to me was not that it can melt steel, but that the mirrors they used were built to such perfect concavity with insanely smooth surfaces. The article suggests a possible application of the technology is bringing heat and solar electricity to poorer countries, but I have a hard time believing those perfect mirrors are really that inexpensive.

To compare this thing to anything Archimedes could have made is laughable.
Erlang at Work - Erlang Gateway Scalability
I love the name. It's simple, memorable, and instantly identifies what the site does. A very refreshing change from the plague of generic Web 2.0-ish non-word names.
A similar site is mactactic.com
Nothing but a sensationalist article based on bad science. If I may paraphrase the findings in simple terms: out of a narrow sample of 200 college-aged males, some guys were rated as slightly more obnoxious than average... those same guys said that they would like to have more hookups... and finally those same guys said that they do in fact have hookups.

Could it simply be that obnoxious guys like to brag about their supposed sexual conquests?
Can you just convert from wma to mp3, and then place on ipod?
I like the first one a lot better.

You may have unintentionally supported the null hypothesis, that there's just no accounting for taste.
Mechanics inspired by video games like halo? Maybe..
Some of the essays in Beautiful Code argue more or less what you said here, or at least they do to me. What do you think they got wrong?
Implement some sort of secured cryptographic identity for members that is tied to a phone number and a personal presence at a given place and time (stop by any $foo to use our automated signup kiosk and receive your free picture ID membership card) this would vastly reduce opportunities for fraud.
Google Datastore and breaking RDBMS habits
Daydreaming about it won't get you there! I have never traveled before doing this trip but have wanted to for years - I kept on putting off because it wasn't the "right time" etc.

A few months ago after deciding to leave my present job, I finally made up my mind to go for it before having to find a new way of making money.

Having made the decision everything has just fallen into place since. I have discovered that making the decision in the first place was the hardest part and I think this probably holds true in many aspects of life.

Another thing you will find when you decide to do something like this is how much your peers support you. Apart from a few negative types everyone I know has been really encouraging and offered to help me where I needed it.

I wish you well with your plans, but start doing it instead of dreaming it! :)
And so the question comes full circle: did you have any particular open source projects in mind? It's a big community.
For a start I would actually try and do something different from eBay initially just to offer USP/differentiation.

However, assuming you want to create an eBay for use in your own site/society/community and competing with eBay is a non-issue, I would do it in the tools that allow building as easily and quickly as possible.

I would use python/django because of simplicity in code style and they are good opensource frameworks for building web apps that incorporate many good paradigms. Others may prefer what is in thier skillset e.g. RoR/.NET/PHP, but that is preference... the auctomatic guys started building in common lisp.

My approach would be KISS, working on the core essence i.e. an auctioning engine, and building iteratively there upon. I would also initially start by looking at what is broken in eBay and what people generally complain about and try to incorporate the learning into my roadmap but still focusing on the core competencies first.
Not really - Apple's hardware market is driven by marketing principles not hardware costs or availability.
The first one is good of course, but the idea is that i liked the structure and rhythm of the second one. If i was looking for poetic expressiveness i might rethink my choice. The idea of taste is that you look for something, and if you find it in an object, you like that object. If you are looking for strange symbolist metaphors in poetry, you don't look at realism poetry, you look at symbolism. And in PG's essay about taste he said that people just have a lot in common, so they are generally looking for the same stuff.
Wonder what its efficiency is compared to a Fresnel lens:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGtA8E5iw3k

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.terrypeppe...