skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: Which IRC Channels Do You Frequent?
After discovering #startups on freenode for the first time today, I want to make sure I dont miss out on anything else.
The Lazear Jack Of All Trades paper cited is available at http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/lazear/Personal/PDFs/Balance... for those following up references
The actual intro CS course at WVU is "CS 110 - Intro. to Computer Science". According to the course catalog it covers:

"Programming and program design; simple data types, variables, and expressions; program modularization through procedures, functions, and classes; repetition and selection through control structures; structured data types including arrays and records; applications."

Here's the home page for the Fall 2010 CS 110: http://www.csee.wvu.edu/~adjeroh/classes/cs110/
The course is titled "Introduction to Computer Applications", so I'm not sure how it's "the worst course ever". Where I went to school, 101 classes were for non-majors who needed a credit from a particular college or department.

There are a lot of people who can't create calculations in a spreadsheet (as phirephly mentioned) or organize information into a simple database. Without having these basic skills, an individual is at a significant disadvantage when they enter the workforce.

As far as Office 2007 goes, sure Office 2010 has been out for a little while but universities teach using the versions of the software available in the computer labs... perhaps WVU hasn't upgraded yet.
All the snark in here is great, but it's really just a naming issue. This is not a recommended course for any of their actual Computer Science degree paths. Not newsworthy.
At least they would teach me something I don't know yet...
I'm looking for something that I, as a subscriber, can use to convert RSS to email.

I know that there's already tons of mass email tools for bloggers.
I didn't see the point of the talk (and was very annoyed by it) until minute 31. That's when the topic starts, in my opinion.
I think eventually most people will be entrepreneurs. More and more things will be automated, decreasing the need for labor and making it easier to build value by combining the results.

For example, once robotic transportation becomes a reality, virtual assembly lines will be possible, giving entrepreneurs new tools and lower costs. Something people previously moving things from point A to B could take advantage of to create products and services at suddenly lower costs.

In the same way the Internet made it possible to distribute digital products world wide, low cost robotic transportation will make it cheap to combine physical things in interesting new ways.

All of this will make being an employee less rewarding and entrepreneurship even more appealing.

Instead of being a cog, more people will be buying cogs and building machines that satisfy even more human needs.
It's called humility. You might look it up in the dictionary. While you're at it, check narcissism.
iPhone-controlled beer cannon
Hosting Images With Google Storage Manager
An equation for friendship
Because Apple almost completely controls the iOS platform, and they will not allow you to write a new codec for their browser.
Effective Editing in Emacs: Moving.
But you couldn't put those sayings on stock photos and have it work so well.

This blog works because the "fakeness" of the stock people nicely parallels the ridiculousness of the slogan to create a satirical meta-advertisement... about advertisers.

Unless you make satirical apps for app developers, or satirical science papers about scientists, you're not duplicating the irony of this blog.
IPad 2, iPhone 5, and why Apple is shifting its mobile line to Qualcomm chipsets
Really, the highest earning "occupations" (or most prestigious) change as time goes:
- in the 1800s many smart people became authors or poets.
- in the 1950 many became physicists
- around 2000, many became entrepreneurs (or even venture capitalists)

Purely macro-economic reasons can dictate, that sometimes it is best to be an entrepreneur (say, in times of "under-investment"), sometimes a consultant and yet again, sometimes an employee (in times of "over-investment" in a sector)
I recall the split between publisher or developer and Valve on steam is determined per game, but for many indie games it hovers around 40% to Valve. For larger publishers and franchise games, this starts to drop considerably.
New Solution To Fundamental Computer Network Problem
This title is misleading. From the site CS 101 is described as a "4-credit general education course". They steer students from all majors into this class to learn how to make flyers, use access, enter excel formulas, etc. I actually took it and found it to be pretty useful.
By the way it's not required for CS or CPE degrees. The intro for CS students is the java based CS 110. See http://www.lcsee.cemr.wvu.edu/ugrad/curriculum/curriculum-de.... For those interested in some more exciting stuff see http://ai-at-wvu.blogspot.com/. (Disclosure BS Comp Sci @ WVU)
I'm not actually so sure about that- being "good" with excel is partially about being able to break a big problem into a series of transformations of data. Excel is a kind of sneaky way to get business analysts to program.
There's no reason you can't use MailChimp, sending to a list of one subscriber. It's free, too.
The ICC color profile in the PNG has a copyright string of Apple 2011. If he took them mid-last year, this doesn't make a ton of sense.

Perhaps someone at ZDNet re-saved them. If that is the case, they should release the originals.
If You Are So Smart, Why Aren't You an Entrepreneur?
You don't actually need to use MIX; my course used TAOCP and skipped most of the assembly-level stuff, and everyone did fine just psuedo-coding things. I've never written a single line of MIX.

So, skip the whole half of Vol. 1.
Learn sed/awk/perl/ruby/python already and use it to your csvs. Nobody needs those programs, because the alternatives are free, easier and more comfortable.
I used to teach this stuff to high school freshmen as a course titled "Information Technology Literacy." If given the choice again, I'd rather be chasing the headlights of a bus.
No, I don't think a Bayesian evidence update implies confirmation bias; but your comment directly implied confirmation bias, i.e. explicitly looking for a specific piece of evidence on the basis of a different piece of evidence. That behaviour will tend to multiply the effect of any given piece of evidence, because while you're busy looking for that confirmation, you'll be less open to seeing the other side.

Ironically, the easiest way to end a sentence with a period and continue the next (after a single space) on an Android phone keyboard is to tap the space bar twice.
Yep, I think this is a fairly vacuous article. There's not much that really be drawn from the analysis - other than; there are a lot of colours available and they were used by businesses in various designs.
Inside of mine is $18.95. I feel old.
The end of privacy was a foregone conclusion: with such rapidly falling cost for video and audio hardware, the only way to keep privacy would be totalitarianism.
WTF? This was awesome!

LinkedIn, please allow Cubeduel to use your API. This is the most fun I've EVER had with my data (that you happen to keep safe for me).
How is this surprising? Lua is a small, clean language, and Obj-C is a hideous mess.
Oh, very nice - this is just the kind of thing I was looking for. Mathematica is more power than I need, and sometimes I just want to explore without pursuing a solution to any particular problem.
Whatever you do with it, you're going to have to grow it one town at a time. It'll start in your own, then the next town over, then the next town over, similar to how you described your goals. Unless the new people referred to the site see activity of other nearby people using the site, there's no social proof that it's worth their time to share anything, and there's no chance that something shared will pique their interest enough to give the site more than a passing look before leaving.
To "build" a repository is 3 mins job in git. I'd still put in your CV once you've built one though. I'm currently considering making switch from the SVN http://goo.gl/Ho66I
More anecdotal "evidence" that doesn't seem to add any weight to the rebuttal, except "well this way worked for me."
Presumably? If these photos were taken for proof/evidence they just don't cut it, especially coming from a security specialist/professional.

... Or, they could just be a photos of a shoddy light fixture installation.
Expect webOS Tablet Announcement at HP's Special Event
Heh, now that you say it, I actually looked at the topic counts on the device forums over at CyanogenMod recently to help me decide which phone to buy. Was considering the HTC Desire HD, but it seemed to have way too few threads, so I went with the Nexus S. Figured that's a safe bet :)
How about the obvious negative subdomains? ihate.example.com comes to mind.
Perhaps instead of this poll, pg could simply toss some page analytics onto hackernews? To be honest, I was surprised when I didn't see any trackers in the page source.
I think that's sort of madmaze's point - the presumption being that the photos do indeed come from Danchev and that he is not crazy.
Is that for real? Why havent they called the police?
Comfy Helvetica for Hacker News now final
Looks like this is a duplicate of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2105439
Yeah, it's real.
It seems great until you understand what economies of scale mean. A big group is likely to ultimately win over several groups collectively of same size.

However, people with knowledge that computers can't yet automate; will be pretty valuable (Try online self-diagnosis..).
There is a huge political scandal going on right now in Bulgaria. http://bit.ly/e0wZtj This guy may have been used to obtain the recordings of the PM ...
Feedback on my music start up :)
Better url to start with: http://songfountain.com/site_feed
Three statisticians played a game of darts. The first statistician shot, but missed, by a meter to the left. The second statistician shot, but also missed, by a meter to the right. The third statistician yelled "bullseye!"

- relevant statistician joke
It was a Dupe -- Somehow someone used a different URL so it didn't just upvote it. When I submitted it I didn't catch it on there yet. In this case, having it twice I guess doesn't hurt so we can get some awareness.
He doesn't need a js tracker if he just looks at logs. While analytics adds a lot of cool features, it is often to the users detriment.
The title of the article is "Why American Mothers are Superior" but the body of the article primarily talks about the writer's own parenting, and from her description we can clearly tell that she is far from representative of the typical American mother. I am definitely not going to endorse the Chinese model, I think it has huge problems, but I think there are many 28-year-old unemployed History majors out there right now wishing that the status quo on American parenting had been a little bit different when it could have helped them. There are a lot of fat kids in theatre school, a lot of mediocre musicians, a lot of aspiring fashion designers who would maybe benefit from a little less love and a little more splash of reality.
Critical thinking?

Can you build me the next facebook? I can't say what it is unless you sign this heavily-one-sided NDA.
Actually, I like the idea for "Things Real People Don't Say About Your App":

"Clearly this app is unusable because it doesn't follow HIG"

"This minimum viable product just isn't minimal enough"

"This site works with just me on it, but I don't think it will scale to millions of users"
Sadly, money motivates, and I can understand that. I still think that way about people who go to work on guided missiles and so forth. Perhaps it's a stretched simile, but I think it's like selling crack to kids to feed your family.

I don't think it's that civil to omit the company's name, it's more like letting them win. I find it interesting and useful to learn which companies are behind shady activities, as done in the article:

> The equipment, produced by Alcatel, Siemens, Cisco and others is then sold to Iran, Myanmar, Belarus and other repressive regimes, as part of normal network operator procurements.
The article makes it sound to me like the original letter/photos were actual printer/paper, not digital.
مسلسل العشق الممنوع الحلقة 150
Chrome dropping h.264, from Adobe's perspective
Both of the photos are confusing, but the photo depicting the wires more so.

If you count the wires it seems right until you notice that the hacked up blue and white wires are not going to the lighting device at all. Or where the power (phase/neutral) are coming from. They go out of the frame to the left, instead.

I'm not sure what I'm looking at, but it looks like something is in the wall that requires power.

A couple of things come to mind:

- The man might be paranoid and mistook sloppy electrical work for evidence of ... something funny? A threat? I tend to think this is unlikely, as he's a security researcher and probably pretty well versed in these things. If he found a bug, taking a picture of it wouldn't mean anything.

- He's being extremely careful and photographed something that would only mean something to someone specific.

- The two wires that are kludged together seem to go into the wall. The white side is taped to what looks like standard romex, which seems to be where the phase/neutral for the lighting fixture comes from, but those wires travel outside of the frame to who knows where.

- The blue wire that's exposed doesn't look like CAT-5, but the color of the shielding is the same color as some bulk CAT-5 used in construction, though joining the wires under that blue tape seems like a really bad way to connect two exposed ends. I'm leaning towards it not being data cable, but being simple copper wire. Which, yes, could carry data.

- It's unlikely that the images contain information that would be easily deciphered. It's an in-case-of-emergency-break-glass message and it's not explicit as to what these images mean. It's probably intentional.

Anyway, fascinating story and I really hope this guy stays safe. Espionage and cyber crime are huge industries full of all sorts of bad actors.
You might want to look that statistic up before you try and correct someone again.
Perhaps you missed the "Analytics by Mixpanel" logo at the bottom of the page? :)

(Yes I realize it's not actually being used)
I've told other wannabe entrepreneurs that there's an awful lot of confirmation bias even in entrepreneur networks. I point out "Facebook makes billions of dollars! You could do it too"- articles but show "Small businesses are very likely to fail" for an counter example.

One should do critical thinking and always get relevant feedback because hey, what you're doing is for others. Not for yourself.
Show HN: ASCII art Kinect hacks
Thanks for the comment. Figuring out a way to build the site's traffic is interesting. To be honest, I've done nothing to acquire traffic other than a blog post (on my own blog) and submitting it here on HN...so very very few people are even aware of its existence. Still, the site averages roughly a 100 views a day from cities around the world. Getting people to POST something so far has been challenging.
Having taught people both systems, I will assert, based on my personal experience, that while some developers can certainly pick up Git relatively painlessly, picking up Mercurial objectively requires less time, and leaves users less likely to get into a state that they are unsure how to exit. This is purely based on my own personal experience, and I have not scientifically codified the learning time in double-blind testing or whatnot, but it's a data point based on more than just my own personal meandering attempt to learn the two tools.

EDIT: I am not making a value judgment here. It's harder to learn to fly a plane than drive a car, but that hardly makes the car better than the plane or vice-versa. It's just a recognition that their learning curves aren't identical.
They ARE photos of a shoddy light fixture installation... that is, unless government spying devices are dimmable!

The full text of the image once rotated reads:

ELECTRONIC TRANSFORMER
MODEL: TE-60

(20-60W)
PRI: 220-240V, 50Hz, CosΦ=0,99
SEC: 11,6V, max. 4.9A
Ta: max. 50°C, Tc: max. 85°C

GTV (R)

Dimmable
EMC Approved
Surge Protection
Overload Protection
Short Circuit Protection

Symbols: CE, double insulated, don't throw away, and some I don't know.

I can't find it on Google, though.
If you want to jump straight to the source:

https://github.com/nitrogenlogic/kinstats

https://github.com/nitrogenlogic/kingrid

https://github.com/nitrogenlogic/kinradar
Spy devices are small, right? That's kind of the point. He said that someone might have hidden something small nearby, but if the real thing is small and hidden... why draw attention to it in the first place with a transformer? It doesn't make sense that "it was supposed to be found", as it alerts him to the fact that something's going on.

He would be far from the first geek to be overly paranoid.
Jeez, why didn't I think of that?

http://www.mailchimp.com/kb/article/what-is-an-rss-to-email-...
Heh. That reminds me of the scene from Pride and Prejudice where they discuss how "accomplished" is applied too liberally to young ladies.
AT-TEs are the 6-legged ones.
I'm no spy, but that doesn't look anything like a bugging device. It looks like a large transformer (what kind of bug needs a 20-60W transformer??) and a crappy wiring job. It looks like maybe wiring for lights for a vanity mirror in the bathroom. I think the bottom of the image is a mirror reflecting a roll of toilet paper.
In the real world, people hate advertising.

This is why as an app developer I am deeply sceptical about Google's model. Okay, so the consumer saves a buck, but then you chip away at their goodwill every time you show an ad. And note, when you're showing an ad, to make it effective you have to make it intrusive, you either have to lock them out of the free functionality for a while or you need to make it eye-catching.

I don't know anyone that said "I'm so glad Google bought Youtube and plastered ads all over the videos".

People hate advertising so much they will go out of their way to avoid it.

In economic terms, as an app developer the way I see it is that free+ads is really just burning up my user's good will to enrich Google. The more I annoy my customers like this, the less likely they are to recommend my app. To the extent that it is less than a zero-sum game... it's not just an even 50:50 trade-off between for pay and ad-supported.
I'm writing this from Hong Kong, where I run a scholarship for young entrepreneurs in mainland China. A few thoughts:

-To understand the mentality of a Chinese parent, you need to know a few things. First, the obvious one child policy, and the expectation that this one child will support their children but also their parents and grandparents (no social security, minuscule pensions and a non-existent safety net). This puts an enormous pressure on the individual to have a stable and high wage job. Lots of people on these boards are in startups (or would like to be), but few Chinese nationals are willing to take that route due to the immense risks involved. They're gambling not only their personal wealth but also the survival of their family.

-School is brutal, particularly college admissions. Each student at the end of high school takes something called the gaokao. Imagine the SAT on steroids (2 days long) that you only take one and almost wholly determines what "tier" of college you get admitted into. You can take it once a year, and if you fail, you have a second chance one year later (the intervening year is usually spent studying 14+ hrs a day). You pour a gazillion college-bound kids into this crucible of death, with only a scant few slots at the other end. Even for the student goes abroad to study, they've been indoctrinated with the cutthroat and "success at all costs" mentality necessary to get ahead in China. It's a numbers game, and the numbers are stacked to make your life hell.

What does this have to do with obsessive parents? Take these last two facts and mix in some historical perspective. Many of these parents either lived through or are sufficiently proximate to the turmoil of the 1960's and 1970's to know how brutal life can be for those that do not get ahead. It's not the American poverty of temp labor and living in a trailer park; it's the poverty of starving to death. It's the poverty of not having shelter from the cold, of having zero access to medical care. While this is less true of today's China, the fear of this poverty survives, even for those in relative affluence (think of your grandparents that lived through the depression and still are obsessively thrifty).

I can understand why these parents are monomaniacal in ensuring (or trying to ensure) a better life for their kids. With grueling competition, a one-child policy, scant social safety nets and a vivid memory of how brutal China can be, it makes sense.
While there are a lot of lists that proclaim what's better about git -- at some level you're right: you can do the same things in subversion than you can do in git. (Even though svnmerge doesn't really do nearly the same things as git merge.)

That being said, I've witnessed the main gains of git after using it for a while. It is no longer a chore to branch and merge, it's instantaneous. It takes no time to commit. There is no penalty to committing -- my commits don't make it to everyone else until I'm ready to send my commits. This means that in a git environment I find myself committing, branching and merging more often.

Over time, you find that the increased number of commits and branches helps you to collaborate with others in ways that you just weren't used to thinking about in subversion.

If you are always working on things very linearly and are never context switching (and your peers aren't context switching), then you will notice no change with git. However, I have never worked at a place where this is the case.
Could it have been a formerly-proper light fixture installation that had a power wire borrowed to power a recording device?

If I was going to bug someone for a long time, I would not run new wires. I would piggyback off of some other low power device.

He could have gone searching after they removed everything, and looked for something that was spliced.

On the other hand, I would not bug a bathroom. That seems like the worst place to bug.
Try the article and comments here: http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=2062855
List of digital forensics tools
This would make it much more complicated, but did your algorithm take into account the difficulty of hitting each scoring area too? That would be pretty interesting to have as an iPhone app or something.
I think I have been putting this off far too long but... do you guys think one could study TAOCP alone, without studying at MIT or Berkeley? I have been working with computers since more than 18 years as a programmer and sys architect but my studies never included those awesome books like TAOCP.

I am not very fluent in maths, so now I am worried if it is at all understandable to study it on my own? Maybe I am completely off in my assumptions here.. I would appreciate some feedback!

Oh and, any other equally fundamental IT/computers/programming MUST_READS you can recommend?
Ancient tech from the '80s explained by iPod-era children
Firefox for browsing (because the awesomebar is still way better at finding things in my history/bookmarks than Chrome for me, and because of bookmark tags). Chrome for development.