skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quite right, stop whining. I don't know your location, but in most states, your local community college is cheap. At my alma mater, it's $1775/semester. At the CC my sister recently dropped out of (note: she takes full responsibility for her choice), it's $20/credit + ~$200/semester. When I was a poor grad student living just outside NYC (income < $20k/year), I blew $1775/semester on booze/pot/computer stuff I didn't need. Your state is probably cheaper than NY.

Do 2 years of college. Once you turn 24 (+/-, something in that neighborhood), you are independent, your father's income is irrelevant for financial aid. If you have 2 years worth of college done, you can graduate when you turn 26. You are "behind", but not by much. If you want to speed up the process, marry a chick who needs citizenship, marriage also makes you independent.
Unconvincing. The article doesn't really explain why people make bad decisions, it just describes the sort of decision which people might make and then asserts it's wrong.

Anyone who did decide to commute for an hour just so they could have a spare bedroom that their parents can stay in once a year, of course, is making a stupid decision, but living in a house instead of an apartment has plenty of other advantages.
Maybe more like a feature... I've noticed that realtor.com beta lets you search for houses within an X-mile radius of a given address (e.g. your work). Trulia.com, on the other hand, lets you see the housing trends for a given city/zipcode. If I could do a search on Trulia (and save it) within X miles of an address, and see housing trends and houses for sale for that circle (while I'm dreaming, let me have a custom RSS feed for a given search instead of an email), that would be ideal.
If you can somehow get the local co-op job listings @ your uni, you'll find a lot of entry level positions for intern type jobs. Try applying for places w/o transcript requirements, read a bit about algorithms, and you could find yourself with a $2500/month entry level programming job.
Download App Store apps not available in Canada, from Canada (see comments)
IPhone Touch Even Sexier Now
New worm transcodes MP3s to try to infect PCs
I'm sure I'm not the first/only one to have this idea, but to make the robot systems much cheaper, why not have an ecosystem of smart objects, and the robot itself much simpler? For example, for the food preparation industry, have all that food be in smart containers (self-weighing, able to dispence discrete amounts, chemical sensors to determine "freshness" of the food, if applicable). Is anyone aware of such systems, or perhaps working on them as part of a startup?
"people get pissed off"

most people don't know what cookies are.
Ask YC: Primer on DNS?
I'm looking to move a few projects from shared hosting to VPS...and I can't get a straight answer out of my host as to what to expect as far as downtime with setting up nameservers and pointing my domains to them.

As far as I can tell, I'm supposed to set up my new nameservers and aim the relevant domains to these new nameservers.

What I don't get is what happens next.

The name servers have to propigate? And this can take 6-24 hours? Then the domain redirection has to propigate and this too can take 6-24 hours?

Is there any way to know when this propigation has happened? It seems like I'll be flying blind and possible incurring up to 48 hours of downtime on these sites in order to get them working on the new nameservers. Is this normal? Seems awfully inefficient and mysterious. I don't like the idea of passively waiting around with all my sites down while some mysterious process happens "across the internet".

Can anyone clear this up? (I realize this is elementary stuff for this forum, but perhaps helpful for some?)
What We Can Learn From Successful Entrepreneurs
Same happened to me. Got the message but still got the receipt.
Its kinda ironic, Google had been seeing such high growth rates for a business of their age and size that it seemed as if they were defying gravity. Add that to the environment in the Googleplex, and you have a company that doesn't feel like a company.

This creates the potential that Google will overlook something, which will lead to some little guy taking their place as they took Microsoft's as the standard in software development
javascript programmers who thoroughly understand DOM scripting, making things work securely in IE 6-8, safari and firefox

Now we are getting somewhere.

Look deep into your soul and ask yourself: "Is there an actual reason why I haven't become a web programmer yet?"

I'm going to catch hell for saying this on news.yc... but stop learning Lisp for a while. Nobody knows about Lisp but grad students and MIT grads, and they're going to hire other grad students and MIT grads, because there's a long line of people with advanced degrees who would love to be paid to hack on Lisp but can't find that job.

Where there's muck, there's brass. Learn some HTML, CSS, Javascript and -- god help us -- PHP, in the form of a good and popular toolkit like Drupal. If you can't stomach the PHP (after learning Ruby or Lisp, PHP can feel like typing in boxing gloves) learn Django, Pylons or Ruby plus Rails -- but, if you want steady work, PHP may be better in the short term. There's an enormous and growing number of PHP-based sites in the world, and nobody can find the coders to keep them all up.

Above all, learn SQL. If you're going to pursue some paper qualification that isn't a college degree, make it database administration. SQL isn't going anywhere for the next decade, companies need those skills, and a surprising number of developers have only the faintest notion of how an RDBMS works.

Web development jobs can be acquired one short-term gig at a time -- it's fairly low-risk for prospective clients to try you out, and the fact that you'll obviously leave for college in a year or two won't bother most of them. These jobs can be done from several time zones away. They can be done for clients that you've never even seen. If you choose your gigs carefully, each one results in a piece of publicly-visible software that can be linked in your portfolio and shown to future clients. Once your portfolio and reputation exist, nobody will care about what degrees you have or don't have.

I'm guessing that most systems programming jobs, and a majority of the Microsoft-stack C#/.NET jobs, involve physically sitting in actual cubicles in offices full of college grads. If you are intent on pursuing such a job, Columbus is probably the wrong place -- it has a relatively low number of jobs in your field and a relatively enormous number of college grads.
blueroof.com has a widget that links MLS data to local listings in Salt Lake.

Methinks there is potential for a web startup to sell such widgets...
I wonder if there is a conference on procrastination? ;-)
Thoughts on the monkeypatching debate: it's a matter of culture
Fighting For Its Life, Yahoo Uses Its Homepage To Battle Carl Icahn
I looked at the first solution and my reaction is something along the lines of "what????".

Why not just something simple like..
(defun foo(thing)
(list (nth (1- (length thing)) thing))

Same applies for problem 2.
when you say "game design" in your profile;
and " http://3boobs.de/ "

... your've gotta be kidding right?..right?
I wonder about biotech: is the costlyness inherent in biotech, or has it been brought about by legislation? No doubt some biotech projects are complicated and take a lot of time, but perhaps not all of them? (There are also costly IT projects).

I think there have often been opportunities to start small, that is why the garage is so famous as a starting point. The garage founders where not software developers, I suppose.
I've thought about such systems when hunting for startup ideas, but the snag that I kept coming across was: how do you convince people that they need all of these other 'smart objects' in addition to the people need to mesh the variety of smart objects.

On the other hand, most large manufacturers use robotic systems in the actual production of goods.
The Icahn Slate Is Not the Right Answer for Yahoo
I switched to no-tech aquascape instead
no more watering :D (maybe once a week water change)
and only about once in three months for 'mowing' along with cleaning up

fertilizing is also easy, fish and turtle excesses: just feed my turtles (separate aquarium) with excess floating leaves ... and get the fert the next day (the same spirit with those who use rabbit for fert)

Alongside, i romantized with chemistry lab 101 ... after reading forums on ferts (google PMDD and Estimative Index)

Made my own fert, mixing KNO3, KH2PO4 (NPK part), Mg,Zn,Fe and minor traces

Chemistry is another side of life that u can get a lot with little effort ... so is aquascape (compared to gardening)

These stuffs are almost like hacking/programming (tho not as scalable) so naturally i'm interested ;)
I'm an experienced internet user, and I occasionally click on an ad (maybe 4 times a year ;-)) just because I'm in buying mode anyway. For what that's worth - not much.
I think this really is a good understanding of the monkey patching debate. Jeff Atwood and Reginald Braithwaite are living in two very different worlds, with their respective legitimate perspective on what's good and bad, with their own references/assumptions.

As it is often the case, there is no debate if you're clearly living in one of those 2 worlds. The fun starts when you happen to be in the gray zone (e.g. with a mid-size company), and you need to make trade-offs between the 2 perspectives.
We couldn't even convert to the Metric system in America, I'm not saying its impossible but if you can't point to a clear benefit from it, why incur the cost?

I also think that right now the cost of robotics comes from the complexity of the software more so than the hardware. We have plenty of commodity hardware, and the actual robotics chassis/effector/sensor stuff is not all that expensive in perspective, but the software is a giant tangled mess of projects that do the same thing in different ways. (At least on the open source side). There have been moves lately to fix that, like the Gearbox project, but overall it is still a lot of people spending a lot of time reinventing the wheel.
Yeah, DNS is a bitch.

Best approach would be to host your DNS completely outside of your hosting company. This provides a certain level of resiliency.

Changing just about anything with DNS can take 6-24+ hours to be fully reflected on the Intartubes.

Just in summary, the DNS flow looks something like this:

Client asks DNS server what IP is www.foo.com
DNS Server has no idea (it could be in cache, but this is worst-case).
DNS Server looks up the root name server for foo.com and sees that NS1.BAR.COM is the nameserver for foo.com.
DNS server finds glue record for NS1.BAR.COM and finds that it has IP address 1.2.3.4
DNS asks 1.2.3.4 what IP is www.foo.com
DNS Caches answer based on TTL in response AND/OR sometimes its own settings to override too-low default TTLs
DNS Server tells Client PC www.foo.com == 1.2.3.4

Moving your domain from being handled by NS1.BAR.COM to NS1.BAZ.COM can take 6-12 hours to take effect, and then another 6-24 hours for most other servers to expire their caches.

Changing www.foo.com to move from 10.10.10.10 to 10.12.13.14 takes effect immediately on the nameserver (NS1...), but various other servers along the way (often including the client PC) will have cached the old information, and may not go out to see if the IP has changed for some period of time.

All in all, a "seemless" DNS move takes about 1 week end to end and goes through a few iterations in the middle.

I personally would probably setup a new server somewhere with HAProxy setup to shoot connections back to my "old" server. Then make nameserver changes to move DNS someplace better (this step might be able to be eliminated). Stage site on new server. Change DNS to send traffic to haproxy IP. Set haproxy to push traffic to new site. If things work as expected, set DNS to reflect IP of new server, and watch haproxy logs to see when traffic stops coming in (3-5 days typically).

The reason for the haproxy bit is that you can "steer" the traffic at will and immediately, no propagation changes. Many people have gotten burned on a new site/server where something doesn't work and DNS changes aren't immediate, so you're stuck with all these hits that can't be fulfilled.

Sorry if my answer is non-readable... I'm writing this while on a conference call :)

I can help you more if you want, email in my profile...
Geek & Gamer T-shirts Collection
Biofuels aren't a disaster in general. It's only corn-based ethanol that's a disaster. Ethanol from sugarcane is significantly less of a disaster, though unfortunately not much sugarcane is grown in the US. Ethanol from switchgrass or other random biomass is an even better idea, if we can get it working.
Come to university in Finland / Sweden.
Tuition is free in both countries. Housing costs, but it does so everywhere.

http://www.studyinfinland.fi/
http://www.studyinsweden.se/
I assume you're using your shared host's DNS servers and that a move to a VPS also requires a DNS move. If it's possible to keep the same nameservers it's just a matter of changing the record and everything will work right away.

Switching nameservers is what takes a long time.

It can take 24 hours, but it's usually much faster. There have been times that I've seen the change take place in just a few minutes, but that only means that the nameservers I'm using have picked up the change. Other nameservers may take longer. The result is that you're not dealing with a total outtage. Some users will get pointed to the new location while others will get pointed to the old one.

You obviously want to do this when you expect usage to be at it's lowest and it wouldn't be a bad idea to have a message on the old site letting users know what's going on.

Also, as long as you're moving it's probably worth looking into a more permanent DNS solution so that you don't need to switch nameservers again next time you switch hosts.
I like both my macbook pro and thinkpad keyboards, but the thinkpad keyboard feels nicer to me. The keys seem to have a bit more travel and is just feels good.

Both are solid though and I don't mind the mbp one. I just prefer the thinkpad one.
I think the author of this article doesn't realize how the decision making process happens.

Husband: I'd like to be close to work, perhaps 30 minutes away.

Stay at home Wife: I want a big house so I can play Martha Stewart and show off to my female friends. If I don't get what I want, it's a sign you don't love me.

Incidentally, some long commutes aren't bad. If your commute has exercise, sun, a river view and lots of beautiful women, you don't mind an extra 20-30 minutes:

http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/vt_riverside_park/v...
World's Fastest electric car by Shelby Supercars (acceleration can probably liquify you)
If you want to get more hands-on familiar with these, I used to be an administrator at hackthissite.org. It's a site that has hacking "missions" which let you try to get in the shoes of the cracker. It was very helpful for me in learning about things like SQL injections and XSS.

http://hackthissite.org
...which is a really cool language, and has a much more conceptually elegant implementation of OO than the C++/Java-style, I think.
If you know you need to make to your network, you can set TTLs to be lower, several days in advance. Problem solved.

(It's true that some crappy DNS resolvers don't honor TTLs, so you'll need to retain control of old servers for at least several days afterwards, to set up some automagic forwarding, receive mail from senders who haven't caught up with new MX records, etc. But none of this should be too difficult.)
If you're in Columbus, in state tuition at Ohio state is less than $9000 a year, so it is hard to imagine being unable to find money for school. You can make that kind of money working part time at a bar.
Linus Torvalds, Geek of the Week (interview)
2 other things: put a blog out there. write a few good posts that arent' obviously derivative of somebody else's.

put some apps out there. They can be facebooks apps that target your geographic area, or greasemonkies that do whatever. These are like selling rolexes on the street. OR: take all the posts tagged "C#" on delicious and technorati, figure out which are the best x thousand, use those to produce better .nET documentation. This would be like selling heroin to junkies.
That was just a fun side project. I used to want to become a game developer. I worked for a mobile games company for a while, and developed some mobile games and applications of my own. Except for the moon calendar, none got published, though. And they had the scope aspect I mentioned, meaning, they were still not really the kind of games I ultimately had wanted to create. Still, I should give those unpublished games their finishing touches and publish them myself - or maybe not, since the J2ME industry sucks...

These days, I am still interested in games, but it is not a priority anymore. My main interest was always AI, and I thought games would be a nice area for experimenting with AI. On the other hand, sometimes I still think that maybe I should just create a really nice browser game, never mind that there are already zillions of them around. I enjoyed programming games, so writing a browser game would most certainly be enjoyable.

I wouldn't call something like 3boobs game design, because it is mostly an existing game concept, not much to design. Programming a chess client (which I also did) is also not game design.
What does the word "Quality" mean?
Easily grab inbound search terms in Rails using search_sniffer
DNS and BIND, Third Edition
By Paul Albitz, Cricket Liu
Third Edition
Pages: 499
ISBN 10: 1-56592-512-2 | ISBN 13: 9781565925120
I find that if you can't keep focussed, that's because you are merely excited but not passionate about your work. When the excitement wears off, you crash.

Why do you want to do a startup? What would you do if you didn't need any more money?
Ok. So I'm not crazy. It's incredibly helpful to know that 2 days of downtime doesn't mean my host is a lemon per se and that I should reconcile myself to some serious downtime over the weekend (which is the best time to be down for me).
What Google Can Learn From The iPhone Apps Launch: More Games For Android
Worrying is fine. It's how you find problems. If you worry to the point of not acting, you won't last very long. The process of finding and solving problems doesn't have much room for delay in the context of entrepreneurship.
Well, there is legislation in terms of drug discovery: you can't just give people any old crap you concoct in a laboratory. But beyond that, even if you're not working on medical projects, lab equipment is expensive stuff.
Simplicity is easy to build.

Simplicity without drawbacks is hard to build (to verify only in the long term).

There has been found a term for that phenomenon: its spelling seems to be: wisdom.

(They even wrote a book about it, the most printed -- yet less read book ever: yes, exactly that one).
My Quest (poetically FindingDulcinea)
Ask HN: how do i move 5 GB of photos?
my friends all have digital SLRs and when we get together for a holiday each of us can rack up 5 GB of photos then head back to our respective countries. any ideas on how a bunch of non-IT people can easily send/download 5 GB from each other? flickr etc won't work since each photo is 3-5 MB and 5 GB is a fair chunk o' space. this seems like a page 1, paragraph 1 use of the net yet i can't seem to find a simple solution on-line - any advice?
A friend of a friend forwarded this to me, and I thought it was worth sharing.
'If women were more willing to reveal their salaries to one another, they would make strides in eliminating the gender gap in wages.'

I thought the 'gender gap in wages' was NOT caused by women being paid less than men for doing the same job, but various other factors - women going into less well-paid sectors, not asking for more pay, leaving employment to bring up children, etc.
And for number #5 you don't even need to write a function. Why not just use reverse? And notice his indentation and closing of parens is all wrong (i.e. not Lisp style). He's writing Lisp code thinking in a another language[1].

It's still a good exercise to go through them all as a Lisp newb like myself when I'm bored or need a break.

[1] Programming language, not Portuguese. :)
Preferred Stock: Liquidity Preference
Or even
(defun last(thing)
(car (reverse thing)))
I thought Boston was already a tech shop..?
I've often wondered why it is that colleges have gotten away with raising tuition 7% to 10% per year for decades on end.

This post is, indeed, very honest about the reason: Your college degree is a badge of social class that every other college grad will look for. If you don't have one, many college grads will assume that you are shiftless and lazy and whining and self-pitying and that you potentially have a series of pregnant girlfriends.

Colleges are charging you -- are striving to put you deeply into debt for a decade or more -- for admission to a club. And, make no mistake, I do generally recommend that you join that club -- the advice here is correct; you should fight to get a degree from one school or another, because the perks are real. But let's not lose sight of the reason why college grads get ahead and folks like the inventive and hardworking techs in my old fab, or my military-veteran uncles with their high school educations, get sneered at. The reason is prejudice.

Incidentally, I for one am willing to take the OP at his (her?) word when he says he's having trouble getting an affordable loan, particularly given the recent turmoil in the credit markets:

http://www.thinkfinancial.com/blog/index.php/student-loans/s...
Thanks for this link! I added it to the article!
A good point. I easily get excited about new ideas and then I start to compromise in the decision to work on the idea that interests me most, or the one that seems the most promising in terms of money making.

I used to want to do research, but these days if I wouldn't need the money, I would probably still do research in terms of doing a startup. I would like to see something useful come off the things I research. I need to do a startup because it is the only way I can see to be able to work on my own ideas and make them real. Not needing money would probably just mean riskier startups.

In theory I could imagine that would be possible within a corporation, too, but I don't see the path for me to get into such a position in a corporation. So the only option I see is to startup.
DNS for Rocket Scientists
its kinda like the "take the job making less money but closer to home to save money" but from a different angle