skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Boston is a wonderful town. You can bond with all the former New Yorkers -- just talk about how annoying it is that the trains stop running at 1am and the conversation will be off and running. Don't bring up the Yankees. ;)

I know that isn't a useful suggestion, but I don't know much about NYC.

You know about the upcoming Fog Creek Open House? That might be a great networking tool, one way or another: Either you will get along with the Fog Creek folks, or you can chat with all the people who secretly despise them but have turned up for the free food and the gossip value.

Anyway, I wish you good luck!
The backstory on Senate's Google-Yahoo hearing
SandstoneDb, Simple ActiveRecord Style Persistence in Squeak
Drink Coffee? (or tea?)
This is a strawman argument. Your tax dollars are paying for the military anyway. The article claims they can build 20 schools for the cost of one cruise missile.

In the long-run, we can't win the GWOT through military force alone. Even relatively hawkish people like Richard Clarke recognize this.
"Three Cups of Tea" is a terrific book. I highly recommend it.
I'd argue that the subjectiveness of a paper isn't as totally devoid of a good method. If you, once you were out of the woods from writing you paper, read it you could probably tell the teacher what grade it should receive. If you couldn't, if she gave you a great paper, (say an A paper) and you could easily compare the relative merits of each paper. You'd know immediately if your paper was worthy of an A or not.

Its probably all the more difficult for the teacher to grade the lower end of the scale. Giving a B grade is probably pretty easy. The paper was pretty good, but not an A. From there on down it gets difficult to wade through the errors and bad constructions to figure out if perhaps the ideas were of B quality but everything else was a C or D. I'll bet that the lower end of the scale is the most difficult and gives the most grief.

Its like judging climbing routes. They have this whole rating system (5.8, 5.9, 5.10a, 5.10b, 5.10c, 5.10d...) that is wholly subjective, much like an english paper. However, if you were told that something was a 5.10a, and you could climb it, you could surely judge climbs around it. "oh, well that climb was pretty hard, I just barely made it after several tries at the crux (the hardest move). It must be a 5.10b or c."

On a side note, grading "quantitative" tests isn't easy or grief free either. Math tests with lots of mistakes are frustrating. You want to give as much credit as possible for correctness, but for a multi-step problem, how does one assign points for correct ideas but incorrect implementation. What if they screw up the first step, that didn't allow them to do any of the other steps, but they had the right idea for those? Its quite challenging.
Can you do independent study to finish high school? Don't drop out and don't do GED. Either will put you in such a low educational caste it may be hard to break out of later in life. Finish, get a real diploma for the reasons everyone has already stated. Think of yourself as a guerrilla warrior and right now you're biding your time and building strength.

It sounds like you aim to be the CEO type. If that's the case, you've got to train yourself to be a CEO. No one is going to do it for you, at least not if you're an entrepreneur. A CEO wears a lot of hats, but mostly a CEO is a salesman, especially in a startup. So learn about that and get good at it, even if it means you take a job selling someone else's crap for a few months just to know what that's like.

Yes, you definitely should learn to program to the point where you can build real things. It's not hard. If it seems hard try a new language or technology, or find a mentor. A CEO needs a pretty good bullshit detector, so having some tech knowledge is critical if you're doing a tech startup.

One final thing: People often emphasize that failure is ok and that is how you learn and find your weaknesses and build strength. All of which is true. But you get to choose your failures, probably more so than your successes. Make sure the projects you pick will teach you valuable things and let you make a lot of contacts. You'd be amazed how many happy coincidences happen when you just happen to have learned some unique thing or you just happen to know so-and-so from the last project you worked on.
Because you're in the developing world, and you're desperate to become an engineer / civil servant / whatever, so your kids don't have to drive taxis?

I'm all for studying what you're interested in, and in general, I don't do things that I'm not at least marginally interested in, but let's not kid ourselves. This is a luxury that many don't have.
>> Richard Branson didn't finish high school.

Neither did the guy who served me fries this afternoon.
Seriously, who didn't see this coming?

Let me know what the outcome of this trial is.
It would be sweet if he showed his BML format to compare and contrast in regards to his list of grievances.
Not entirely related, but I really like using 3rd party DNS services. (I use DNSMadeEasy.) They offer reliability, because they disperse their DNS machines geographically.

If you keep your TTL low enough and your host has a massive outage, you can reroute traffic to hosting environments. (If for no other reason to say, "Uh. Our host just got nuked. Give us a few hours to get everything installed on our new host.")
But what if that premise isn't true? What if some people just suck at everything?

I can't see any reason why everybody must be good at something. There's nothing about genetics which says that random genes will combine in such a way as to give them at least one useful skill.

How would we go about testing your hypothesis?
VCs usually list job openings at their portfolio companies, so for NYC, check out the Union Square Ventures jobs page (http://www.unionsquareventures.com/jobboard.html).

Silicon Alley Insider also has a jobs page with some startups listed (http://jobs.alleyinsider.com/).

And you can use "Reg D" to find out about startups which have just gotten funding that may not be listed anywhere else (http://redeye.firstround.com/2008/06/the-death-of-st.html).

The nextNY (http://groups.google.com/group/nextNYdigital) and NYC Tech Boosters (http://groups.google.com/group/nyc-tech-boosters) boards also list jobs from time to time.

Also, even though it's not a jobs board, you should subscribe to Jay Sulzberger's mailing list (http://lxny.org/correspondence.html) to find out about tech events in NY.
No, we need to win the war against violent, Islamic extremism, and violent religious fundamentalism, in general.

In that regard, schools and education are just another weapon in a combined military / social arsenal. As it turns out, the schools are cheaper than the missiles.

The point is, if we don't do this, we will lose.
Oh, man, schools and cruise missiles aren't fungible. Heck, no government program has ever replaced any other government program. We'll see those cruise missiles targeting the schools before that happens.
Can someone decode what the hell this article is about? A paint server is a.... ?
I am also looking for this type of events, so any help would be great!
And, oh by the way, if we don’t see these sorts of prices, someone, somewhere is manipulating the system rather insidiously.

Or one of the assumptions here is wrong.

The big missing factor I see is the amount, and selling price, of other products that come out of that barrel of oil. You buy the barrel, refine out the gasoline and sell that... but the leftovers aren't worthless.

From http://www.quoteoil.com/oil-barrel.html :

The largest share of the 42 gallons of crude oil contained in a standard barrel ends up as finished motor gasoline. Motor gasoline accounts for 19.65 gallons of the finished product. Next in line is distillate fuel oil at 10.03 gallons.

Jet fuel comes in a rather distant third place in the refinement process. Of the original 42 gallons of crude oil in a barrel, that portion which will end up as jet fuel is 4.07 gallons. Residual fuel oil accounts for 1.72 gallons of the overall refined product.

Then there's a list of another thirty things that you get from the remaining leftovers.

Rough rule of thumb: add up the number of gallons of non-gasoline products in the paragraphs above and you get about 16 gallons. That's nearly equal to the amount of gas you get from the barrel. Assume the value per gallon is about the same for every product and you get gas selling for about half of $8.59, or $4.30 per gallon, which looks suspiciously like what we are paying right now. Puzzle solved.
Indexing your heavily used queries and page/view caching are also good alternatives to denormalization.
Cacheline splits, aka Intel Hell
Only in the US, as far as I know. I was actually shocked when I came here at the extent to which borrowing money to pay for a car is seen as normal. Personally I still tend to think that real estate is the only thing worth borrowing money to buy, and that if you can't afford a $20,000 new car you should buy a $3000 used car.

As a side effect, I see a lot more new cars on the road here than in Australia. Also, used cars depreciate a lot faster.
I think it was more to do with hiring the talent from Summize as well. From the TC article: "Twitter has also hired 5 of the 6 Summize employees."
XML is character based

No, XML is binary. The <?xml at the beginning of the file is the "magic number" that lets the XML parser guess enough of the encoding to read the "encoding='whatever'" part, and then the rest of the file. Everything is binary though, never treat it as text!

The author claims that most editors use latin-1 character encodings; I don't think this is correct. Everything uses UTF-8 these days, and if your UTF-16-encoded XML has a BOM at the beginning, it will use UTF-16 instead. So basically, this is not really a problem. You can use your text editor to edit XML.

In the end, it sounds like the author doesn't like file formats that take more than the minimum possible way to store the data. XML is pretty verbose, but since disk space is cheap and libraries do all of the generation/reading, I don't really care. XML is far from the solution to every problem, but it is much quicker than rolling my own format which nothing else understands. (BTW, did the author ever try gzipping the XML? That should make it much smaller. libxml2 can even operate directly on gzipped XML files.)
Very insightful interview, Paul Graham has really thought out what went wrong during the last bubble and has drawn some good lessons from that period. I agree 100% with the "web 3.0" part, classifying the movement of the web as a version number is really playing down the advancements of the current web environment. Then again, as the web matures people get excited about the new offerings and subsequently buzzwords follow. Its good to see people that see past the hype and are making viable things that people actually want.
The mess they are in now isn't because of Ivyleague type dudes with good grades who are actually dumb. Its just ridiculous decisions all along the way. Who came up with the ridiculous idea that Fannie-Mae could buy its own securities? That still amazes me.
Top 25 job resources for tech/biomedical fields
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That's what these colleges should be doing, if they're taking student's money.

Oh, and also... if you're going to be claiming to be an English lecturer and complaining about illiteracy, you should probably master the rules of apostrophe placement first.
"Startup founders hacking their own bodies?"

Heh, interesting way to put it - kudos.

So with that in mind - I will buy a beer for the first person who successfully manages to integrate their bodily functions with Twitter :)

If you fart (for example, disgusting thought, but just putting the idea out there for kicks) how intriguing would it be for hundreds or thousands of people around the world to know about it instantly?

You could be in an office in New York, let one rip and people in Madrid, Melbourne, Mumbai (or some other city starting with M) would know about it.
Why no ads? How would you keep them off?
I'll let you know when I start-up :)
My Mom always wants the screen to "return to the way it was".

Me: You mean the desktop?

Mom: I don't know. The way it was.

Me: Is it this? (shows her the desktop)

Mom: No. It was all black.

Me: You mean off? (shuts computer down)

Mom: Yes. Thank you.

My Mom's a preschool teacher, and I will rely heavily on her wisdom when I have kids, seeing as I don't know jack about 3 year olds.

Me in 7 years: Mom, my kid won't eat his dinner. I think I got a broken one.

We all have our own useful areas of knowledge.
I meant simple in the sense that it would be a pretty straightforward way for me to help people like Ms. L. I doubt it would be in any way easy.

And I taught my mother from basic computer illiteracy into practically a power user (well, a relative power user: email and surfing and transferring images from her digital camera. she's the envy of all her friends, at least...).

The biggest hurdle was getting her to believe me that no matter what she did, she couldn't possibly harm the computer beyond my ability to repair it. I think a lot of people unfamiliar with computers think that it is very easy to irreparably damage them. It kind of discourages taking risks and trying to solve problems on your own. Once I made it clear that she could (and should) do whatever she wanted without fear, she picked it up extremely rapidly.
Minda ICT: Video Debat Minyak Anwar dan Shabery
This is a despicable thing to do, but let's not swing towards a reddit-style diet of stories which perpetually feed our sense of outrage.
Perspicacious and lyrical. Nicely done.

Having said that, I found the author a bit whiny.

I can almost hear his supervisor at his "night job"

"Old Professor X seems like a nice enough sort," they'd say, whispering among themselves, "but he'll never be ready for a job a at a major university. Sure -- he might get published in some rag like The Atlantic, but serious work? Not likely. He's just not cut out for it."

It's all in your perspective. You could take a guy with the same students and the same success ratio and he could write a story about how rewarding it was to help people at night school!

I think that's why I liked it so much: it was so artfully done that I couldn't help but think that the same experiences could be written to drive home a completely opposite conclusion.
I just believe in equilibrium. Obviously, we don't naturally go extended periods without sleep over and over again. Forcing the body to do so through the use of drugs just seems like a bad, bad idea. This isn't a caffeine perk we're talking about here, its a little more serious than that. If other people want to do it, fine, but I'll stick to believing there is no gain without consequence when it comes to the human body. Where the drugs give you gains in one place, things will break in another.
Is the Fog Creek Open House open-invite, or do I have to register or be invited? That sounds like a great idea.
I use their product and haven't visited the site in months. I just look at the weekly summaries to get a decent picture of how productive my week was (hours in work opposed to waste of time).

Traffic to their site is not nearly as useful as their signups growth is for statistics.
So I tried gzipped XML versus just dumping out 4 bytes longs; here's a script that makes an XML file with 1000000 integers, and puts the same data in a binary file next to it:

http://scsys.co.uk:8001/16872

The gzipped XML uses about 5.5M, the binary file uses around 4M. So yes, XML uses more space, but you have to ask if 1.5M for 1000000 records is worth inventing your own format that nobody else understands. Sometimes it might be, other times dealing with XML's trade-offs might be a better use of your time.
I think the main reason for this is people stopped buying SUVs and Trucks. And those used to make up a very large proportion of car sales.

And the reason for that is simple really. Price of gas makes SUVs drop like a rock in value, and make used cars a lot more affordable. Why would I spend 40K for a new SUV, if I can get a 2 year old model for 20K
New Social Graph Engine
If you are a fan of games, I heartily encourage you to give Go a good chance. It is both beautiful and profound, yet of broad practical benefit. Poker, though very different, is the only other game I know which is comparably elegant, applicable and revelatory.
Agreed, you are missing an important element. There has to be an overriding reason why I should point my browser to your page or grab an RSS feed (assuming you have one). Can I win $100 a day by visiting your page, etc.? Find a hook.
Clearly there is a spectrum, I'm not missing your point. In this spectrum though, chess/go/sport are at one end and gambling is at the other. Poker is in the middle.
Yeah, this is called a materialized view.
Thank you; email sent.
I am Hyper Connected
An interesting adjunct to this is whether the criminals actually did -believe- a three year old would have a cell phone and be festooned with a headset.

Especially in LA, that might not completely crazy assumption.
I wholeheartedly disagree.

I know literary criticism is about as popular as Windows ME here, but reading good examples of it can be as enjoyable as the text itself(1). Of course there's always the question of how much authority the critic has -- but it's kind of like having someone with a lot of expertise explain the Linux kernal to you, even if it's not Linus.

To your last point -- I feel bad for you if those are the kind of books you had to read in high school. What were they?

(1) If you want to know what I'm talking about, try the Viking Critical Edition of Don Delillo's 'White Noise'. It has examples of criticism both of the kind I'm talking about and the kind that pg and others rightly mock.
I could never figure out why people were visiting the million dollar home page either.
Emacs' "old" regexp syntax
I've been using emacs recently, and I had a bunch of code editing I needed done. Figured I'd use emacs for the regex heavy lifting.

I failed miserably. My capturing groups didn't work. Then my digit character classes didn't work either. I was stunned.. what was I doing wrong?

Then I stumbled on Steve Yegge's emacs reg-exp post, where explains all of those limitations:

* You have to escape the (, ), {, }, and | metacharacters. That is, they're not metacharacters by default — without the backslash, they match themselves.

* There's no '\d' shortcut for the [0-9] character class.

* There are no lookahead or lookbehind assertions.

* There are no direct equivalents for Perl's {n}?, {n,}?, {n,m}?, /i, /m, /s, /x, \G, or (?# ...) constructs.

So, one of his examples matches: \(public Relative \)\(\w\)\(\w+\)

while usually you'd match: (public Relative)(\w)(\w+)

I really must say that I was surprised that, being such a killer editor, we as a community never got round to implementing a modern regexp syntax for emacs.

Is it that hard? Do many people miss this? ..or you eventually get used to the old syntax and skipping everything?

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/06/shiny-and-new-emacs-22.html
Summize was getting a dedicated XMPP feed of the data prior to the acquisition.

Search is it's own animal and whether it's "native" or not, it's more important that it works.
mechanical_fish, that is one awesome advice! thanks!
Google brings speech-to-text to political videos — what’s next?
It's all fun and games until your first psychotic episode.
Congratulations to Summize - a DC/Virginia based team that built the first robust, fast twitter search engine

> Summize revealed the true power of Twitter and its thriving community. Right from our home page you can “see” what people are talking about at this moment via our trending topics. We tamed the Twitter public timeline by bringing some order to the chaos.

http://blog.summize.com/2008/07/twitter-buys-su.html

Great developer/startup blog
Also, used cars depreciate a lot faster. I'm guessing you mean compared to used cars in the US, because generally I hear that new cars depreciate the most in the first two years.
Should the Empire strike back?
Ah cool info. I'm wondering whether the actual costs of ownership were higher or lower now or then though?

I imagine now with the price of gas and insurance the costs may come close.

In addition, let's not forget the fact that now families tend to have more than 1 car whereas before they used to have one.
Because it was a new and interesting idea with lots of chutzpah.

Million dollar homepage is the kind of idea that can only work once. Its draw was that it was novel - anyone who tries to copy it is no longer new, and so people don't care. Same goes for Leah Culver's etched laptop: she got sponsors because she got publicity, and she got publicity because what she was doing was new and interesting.
If you happen to have a tablet PC and a copy of Windows, you can use Microsoft's free "My Font Tool" to create a font of your handwriting. Sure, it requires some hardware, but it's easy and the results are great.
Unadulterated? Have you never heard of BPA?
New library to help building spam filters in haskell (parallel DNSRBL lookup)
Its my first haskell module, so any comments on how to improve it would be greatly appreciated :)
Why would I want to see this site? There is absolutely no point to viewing it, and therefore why would I pay to put something on it?

Also, how could this possibly take more than 3 hours to make?
What, eight cores isn't enough?

They're really pulling out the stops on POWER. It's going to be interesting to see how well Itanium stacks up (if at all).
This is a broad statement.

Being categorically against performance enhancing drugs is unwise because it would slow the development of new drugs that can improve people's lives. Also, it would deny helpful drugs to those individuals who wouldn't experience negative side effects(since everyone reacts differently to the same drugs).

I am against using performance enhancing drugs under-the-table, in an uncontrolled manner, because not only is that risky, but it doesn't contribute at all to our understanding of the pros and cons of a drug. But if you are up for experimenting and record your results, I think people should be able to try nearly anything they want to.
Go Games, Go Information and Go Study Tools
I'm in the same boat so if you want to talk, you can email me at dangoldin at gmail
This is a very interesting story. What I'm left with is the question of 'who are these people, really'? Is there really a considerable portion of American (or we could say Western) society that is practically illiterate? This seems counter-intuitive to me, I thought it was hardly possible to function at all without a basic understanding of the written word. If these people are out there, I have certainly never had any deep face-to-face conversation with them.

Or put in other words; I didn't think there were enough jobs available that didn't require a minimum of college-level skills. A checkout clerk could obviously make do, but I'd expect even a car mechanic to have enough brains to grasp some abstract literary concepts.

And other questions arise: Isn't academic aptitude strongly correlated with ability to succeed in the world at large after all? You'd have a hard time convincing me that most people who can't comment intelligently on 'The Wizard of Oz' are fit do be much more than corporate monkeys. At one level or the other, there is a major problem here - either the educational system is a massive failure, or the rest of us are stupid to assume that everybody has to be particularly intelligent.
Perhaps it also affects your behavior in strange ways.