skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think if you "compare and contrast" how you learned $x (something you learned outside of school), and how subjects are taught in college, that might lead to some insight.
Can you link to the specific article? I couldn't find it on the BBC site. I found this however: http://www.vertical-leap.co.uk/news/facebook-uturns-on-data-...
I work in academia, and have also worked in private industry. One of the largest problems with academia is that there is no easily quantifiable metric of success. In the private world a good indicator that you're doing something right is that you're making money. In state schools this is complicated further because budgets are based on something entirely independent of performance. For example the state school I work at has the highest enrollment ever, and our 6 year graduation rate is up, but this is going to be the worst year yet for budgets in a while. There simply exists no reward/punishment system that encourages good behavior and discourages bad. Even tenure works the opposite of its intended effect: the value of life long job security is inversely proportional to how valuable you think your skills are to other people (if you're top in the world any org you work for should be begging to keep you, if you think you're the bottom of the barrel you'll fight tooth and nail to earn virtually permanent employment). The only exception to this is research, where grants can serve as a good reward system, unfortunately this only creates a further imbalance in that research is rewarded but teaching is not.

In short incentives in higher ed are random, if not flat out reversed. The only motivator for good educators is personal passion.
To add to the list: The HTC Touch Diamond2, which was released in Oct 2009, had a 480x800, 3.2" display. The HTC Touch Diamond, which was released in May 2008, had a 480x640, 2.8" screen. Both of those screens are around 300PPI.
> These people are idiots. 2300 college students interviewed... Think about that for 1 minute.

Common sense is no substitute for an intro stats class. 2300 is plenty.
...and the current 256 MB is laughable.

Except to the 15 million people who bought it last year.
Here's my concern: my iOS game runs the iPhone at a nice warm temperature.

At the retina resolution, either frame rate will drop or the iPad will get hot. It will need horsepower, but if doesn't get the horsepower, it might just run slower. It's hard to say.

256MB of RAM is fine for most types of games.
The Oldest Bench Ever
College rocked my world, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. You get out what you put in.
Getting some use out of C# dynamic
1. Luck
2. Intelligence
3. Persistence

Like they say in match point:

The man who said "I'd rather be lucky than good" saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It's scary to think so much is out of one's control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward, and you win. Or maybe it doesn't, and you lose.
passion, tenacity, and irreverence
Gruber, of course, has some interesting comments in that area:

>From an official PR perspective, Apple, famously, says nothing regarding what it will or will not be announcing before a major keynote. But they do, somehow, seem to occasionally manage expectations quietly behind the scenes.

-On the pre-MacBook Air hype

http://daringfireball.net/2008/01/macworld_expo_prelude
Rereading the article, I don't think the author is claiming that at all. The wording of the original yc comment framed the question in terms of whether wars are good or bad or what constituted a war, etc., and that's how we followed, but all the author claims is that wars=inflation and that good dow years follow inflationary spikes.

I would imagine that the only reason why someone would posit this correlation would be to say something on how to view our current situation, and I think he's saying that we've had a bad 10 years (logarithmicly speaking), but once we're out of this war (by him, inflationary) period, things will be great.

I'm not sure if I buy this argument or its implications, but the omission of korea, panama, gulf war 1 and somalia and the inclusion of the GWoT don't "ruin" it for me, at very least.
Good. Your comment is the most valuable answer in this thread and it was the last one to show on first page.
I almost missed this comment because it was just barely above the fold.
obviously, gpl advocates don't want other people to make money on the work from the sweat of their brows.
Why isn't it legal, out of curiosity? I get to see quite a few CVs that include the rank the applicant got in the IIT-JEE exam (for most purposes, I find that to be a rather useless metric.)
I'm so confused about Stuxnet--some people were saying it was among the most brilliant viruses ever, (from memory) using several 0-day exploits and doing things like recording normal activity to play back to machine operators while it did its damage. That alone sounds pretty impressive to me. Then on the other hand I've seen a few articles in the past few days calling it "nothing special after all." Which is it?
That kind of bloat should never be loaded by default.
2 Charged in iPad Security Breach
http://dynamicdrive.com/ perhaps?
Great article on things you would/should generally do as an entrepreneur, but Id have actually seen bit more of a break down (daily perhaps) on actually work done towards the particular app/product.
1: Use framework: jQuery (for animated effects/AJAX), CodeIgniter for backend. Or mootools/scriptaculous if you inclined so.

2: Learn to use CSS selectors effectively. It changed my world in a day literally. Easy to digest source: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/html-css-techniques/the-30...

3: Only use fancy fonts for headings, never body copy.

4: If stuck on design, browse famous Web Design Gallery or CSS gallery for blog and current trend design. For corporate or more convensional, i like to pick inpirations from templatemonster.com

5: For backend, best to learn from basic. Type the tutorial codes one by one and understand how it works. If short on time, just focus on CRUD operation. When got more time, learn how to optimize it for speed and maintainability. After that, pick any frameworks that is popular and promising. It will help shortern your development time tremendously. :)
First-Class APIs
>Parker wrote a tool that analyzed similarities between the Stuxnet code and the code of some other well-known worms and applications and found that the code was fairly low quality.

well isn't that hand-wavy.

>For example, the command-and-control mechanism is poorly done and sends its traffic in the clear and the worm ended up propagating on the Internet, which was likely not the intent.

this is part speculative and part, in my subjective mind, stupid. propagating on the Internet seems a highly reasonable method to me. what do you expect it to use, facebook? maybe the constraint is that it has to express itself on the internet and therefore 'in the clear?'

>"This was probably not a western state. There were too many mistakes made. There's a lot that went wrong,"

Is that really so western-centric? this guy is seriously just reaching for criticism in order to grab headlines.

>Lawson concludes that whoever wrote Stuxnet likely was constrained by time and didn't think there was enough of a return to justify the investment of more time in advanced cloaking techniques.

That's at least reasonable, because in all honesty maybe there wasn't enough of a return. Lawson seems a better analyst than this Parker fellow.
Good come back! Nothing in the history of mankind has ever been chosen by the masses because its good qualities turn out to outweigh its bad qualities and aesthetic ugliness.

hahahaha! You sure did make that guy eat his hat.
Yeah it's pretty loaded, hopefully there is something in there for everyone : )
No, just picked it because its probably the most recognizable state school I could think of. Never even been to Ohio, but if so I gotta go to a football or basketball game.
I see nothing wrong with that statement, it certainly wouldn’t confuse me or seem strange to me. I would take it to mean that there are slightly more woman in north america than man. The context (i.e. the ratio of men and women is usually very close to 50:50) would tell me that there are likely not many more women in north america than men.
Well, actually, the idea behind doing science, like the studies cited in the article, is to find actual evidence for things rather than just guessing what the answer is.
The circulation of current generation after two or three years, who is more into facebook right now, will come to know it is sucking them, there is nothing which adds something into them apart from being cluttered forcefully in so called 'social' stuffs.
Thanks! Let me know if you have any questions/comments. More documentation is here
http://bwhite.github.com/hadoopy/
I think you have to pick the tools that will allow you to get things done as fast as possible. Get you to something thats releasable (MVP) and allows you to test your assumptions. If you read a lot of the articles on HN you will see a lot are about how fast and cheap can you run experiments on your assumptions and execution. I think you are thinking in the opposite of what you need to be in saying, "I want to do it right, not necessarily quickly". So yeah my advice is .. if you know Java do Java, if you can pick up PHP fast, do it. Whatever makes sense and can get you a working prototype that clearly shows your vision.
Papercrop: Make reading journal articles bearable on ebook readers
It was used in conjunction with exact numbers in this case, that’s just not a casual context.
Harvard University Financial Report FY2010 [pdf]
This was asked on Quora yesterday: http://www.quora.com/JavaScript/How-do-Angular-js-and-Backbo...
I created this, and it might be a good time to mention that I'm always looking for new opportunities. I'm a well-rounded front-end developer with a sense of humor. ;)
Things-babies-born-in-2011-will-never-know
Doh! :)

Nice article!
Could you clarify this?

Do you actually know that Gnome is actively "code around" some alleged patent violation?

Programming around any imaginable patent violation actually seems really bad, especially given that software patents aren't looking as strong as they once were. I vaguely Linus or someone saying it's better not to research existing patents, it limits your liability. But just on the principle of letting corporations covertly bully you, it seems bad. It seems much better to force the companies sue you and see what happens.

My googling shows Apple has a patent on the App-bar but there are plenty of App-bars out-there. Red-hat apparently was worried to remove a dock but the screen shots we see here clearly show something like a dock. But even thread discussing that situation sounded murky. Docky still seems to be distributed for example.

Apple has patent on "Open Type" but that also is used heavily in Linux.
U.S. officials privately say WikiLeaks damage limited
Like everything else, just because a horse is a horse, doesn't make it a racehorse. For every scientist produced, there will be good and there will be bad. The more we have, the better the chance for good ones to float to the surface.
Was this the comment?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2095406
What's remarkable is that Apple is able to use perfectly normal engineering advances to generate the sort of awe of the company's abilities that then causes people to imagine that very large leaps in technology should be routine and expected from them. I'd imagine that this could pose a problem but in practice it hasn't before.
Well he was apparently doing that in 1993... What did you build on the web in 1993? NCSA Mosaic had literally just come out.
This. And the fact that lots of people go to college who aren't mature enough to know that. Or they go because their parents make them and so they party and dick around. The reality is that many kids who go to college --- shouldn't.
I'd guess slacking is mainly a culture thing. If your friends accept that it's okay, then you'll accept it's okay too.
Lost in all of this are the dedicated engineers who have put blood, sweat and tears into an organization, only to be left behind when technology changes. But is it their own fault? The company’s fault? Or just a natural cycle?

Let's say you join a company as, I dunno, a Unix sysadmin. When you go in, it's because they hired you for your Unix skills. But after 5 years, your value to the company isn't just those skills anymore, it's that you know the company's systems, its business, the particular way "we do things here", you have a network of people within the organization and can "get stuff done" and so on. And probably, by now, your Unix skills are falling a bit behind, because the company is not about the bleeding edge, they say if it ain't broke don't fix it (many large organizations only upgrade when the vendor desupports something) and besides, your time is spent in meetings now.

So people can fall into a trap - they're doing very well in the company - and don't even notice they're falling behind until it's too late...
ICQ vulnerable to bad updates, claims researcher
Tim Caswell on Node.js [podcast]
Installing MyDNS-NG & MyDNSConfig On Debian Squeeze
Colleges help you get out of them what you put into them.

Harvard has more smart students and professors, so you can get more out of them. But any college will provide a sufficient environment for you to learn, study and think critically, if you so choose.

But they won't make you do these things. You are an adult, after all.
It's legal.
Yes, that line came off as egotistical posturing. We got it.

But I don't like that your snarky quip--which distorts the fact that the author continues to use facebook out of a sense of social obligation, and which I don't think adds much to the discussion--is the most upvoted comment here.

Sure, you can be cynical and mock the guy, but I'd rather see you address his arguments. I'm not so much annoyed that you took the obvious potshot, just disappointed that the rest of HN is currently voting this the most important takeaway from the essay.
In the last year or two I remember reading about a UK company who sucessfully argued for either a right to privacy or a right not to have specific information published. This information was about some horrendous pollution that the company was responsible for in Africa, and iirc only came to light because it was picked up by a member of parliament and read into Hansard where it was subsequently picked up by social media.

I tried searching but couldn't come up with anything as I don't remember the name of the company or who was involved.

If my memory serves me correctly, this was an example of exactly why corporations shouldn't be granted the same rights as actual humans.
Netflix Is Abandoning DVDs, Customers Who Prefer DVDs
I think the title is a little misleading ... but I understand that "Should Younger Developers with a hot and in demand skillset be paid more" is too long and not as interesting.

That being said, I don't really understand what the dev was upset about ...
Its just good ol' supply and demand.

Being skilled at new hot technology is always a good thing.
In my short time as a dev, I've seen the crazy salaries for WPF (.NET), Rails, facebook (if that counts) and now iphone/android developers and I'm sure this won't be the last time either.

Want to make $200k+? Pick up the skills that are attracting that kind of coin. Simple.
For some people, college is truly a joke of an academic experience.

I worked a couple of on-campus jobs at the school I attended. One of those jobs was in the department of Recreation Administration. I couldn't believe it was a major that people paid money to go to school and study. I couldn't believe the tests I photocopied were real - I could easily pass them, and what I didn't know was obviously information easily obtained from a minimal amount of reading of the textbooks.

It was comical, really, although the parents paying the same tuition for that that my parents paid for my CompSci education shouldn't find it funny. It seems to me like there are an increasing number of "paths of low resistance" through college.
For a second, I thought this was an Onion article about a spicy TMZ story or something...

A publicly traded company could have a "right to privacy"? What a country.
That's the priveledge that Chrome extensions require in order to inspect URLs as you load them, so they can conditionally apply themselves to the appropriate site(s). As far as I know, there isn't a more granular priveledge to allow access only to URLs as they're loaded (which an extension could still use to track your browsing habits by storing them in its localStorage).
Moore's law and iPad-sized "retina displays"
> And nearly twice their per-unit Mac sales for the quarter.

However, Mac sales are also up and the record number of Mac were sold this quarter.
any bump is temporary.

I've been on the top of a sub reddit (music). Got 7k unique for the day. 500 uniques the following day.

Within 3 days, traffic was back to where it was. I've read this is typical behaviour for getting reddit, digged, HN, TechCrunched, Mashabled.

This concerns me because with the advent of social networsk, we're teaching the next generation to wait for content to be pushed to them. So it's unlikely they'll go/explore the main web site. The maxim seems to be:

If my social network isn't sharing it, it must not be good. So I'll wait for it to come to me. Why leave the walled garden.

And if they do leave the walled garden, and follow the link, it's only temporary. Users will simply go back back to their learned response of waiting in the wall garden for content.

This empowers social networks, since they get to serve advertising off your content, but it kills off the main revenue model (ads) for the rest of the web.
Endowment Market Values of US and Canadian Universities FY2009
Ask HN: Rate my value proposition
Looking for feedback on the following:

UserMetrix helps companies build software that pleases more users, with less development effort; this is achieved by combining application analytics, with classical error logging and novel usability logging.

Would love to hear your thoughts on if you think this would be useful and feedback on the general concept.
If you're talking about starting the AES-CTR counter at 2^64-x, that's a buggy AES-CTR implementation: AES-CTR counters always start at zero.
Kay's definition of innovation is contrary to that of Peter Drucker. For him an succesful innovation has to accepted by the people.
Mobile is no longer a gold rush where you can get money for putting out any random crap, but, there is still plenty of money to be made.
How about displaying the comments "shallower": if some discussion ("a branch in the comments") goes too deep, maybe that's what doesn't have to be on the same page, as it's obviously something where a lot of arguments and counterarguments occur, and not something where the biggest insight is to be expected.

Such comment handling would however certainly motivate people to "post without the parent."
The author thinks that it was just "PR and faffery", while discounting the actual value of PR and faffery. Never discount these things. MySpace was practically built on it.
Agreed. One of the things I've had increasingly reinforced as I've gotten older and experience life more is that, "Not all new things are good, and not all good things are new."

I don't necessarily need to go find "new" music in a world where Floyd's albums still exist. I don't necessarily need to go see some new movie that opens this weekend, if I'm in a world where I can just spin up Casablanca, or The Wizard of Oz, or the original Star Wars, etc. Much of the traditional big corporate publishing industries (movies, music, books, mainly) are all about churning out, promoting and profiting from new stuff. But people don't necessarily want new stuff. They want good stuff. And good old stuff (increasingly) lasts forever, and (increasingly) is increasing in total amount of back catalog to draw from. There's always more good old stuff than good new stuff, and the balance shifts increasingly to the old stuff each year. Companies like NetFlix and Apple and Amazon that make it easy to find and buy all that good old stuff, are going to having steadier profit streams, and arguably higher profit margins, than companies that try to do the big shovel-shit-but-promote-like-hell dance, because the latter business model is taking more risks and has higher operating/marginal costs.
Then the gpl is a bad choice for them as a license?
The obvious thing would be to rotate things sideways and display full iPad 1 resolution apps on screen with maybe 33% screen real estate left over for a menu of some type, or a second type of app, or tabs, or just blank space, and then to allow developers to make new iPad 2 apps if they really want.

1362 x 1024 would be feasible with current CPU tech, battery, and 512MB RAM, and would be a nice bump. Since the iPad works well in either orientation, I don't think this would be a big hit at all. They could also go for another non-standard resolution with a border around another dimension if 1362x1024 were not desirable. But, 1024x768 with 1024x594 left over for something novel seems like it wouldn't be the end of the world for ipad 1 apps, and then an easy way to expand to full screen for safari, mail, and any recoded apps.
I think you'd be better off distrusting those accused of abuse by their children, than distrusting medical professionals. It's hard to imagine the doctor meant you any ill will.
With all these privileges corporations are seeking and getting, I want to know when CEOs and other decision makers will also get the responsibilities of society enforced on them?

ie. going to prison for things like killing a bunch of people on the BP platform and tons and tons of wildlife. I mean even for a few months? Why are they sleeping comfortable in their beds every night plotting their next dollar?

BP, Worldtrans, Haliburton, not a single person has served a single day.

But try pouring a quart of oil off your curb while the neighbors watch and see how many months you serve in prison.

Blackwater, DynCorp, CACI and Titan Corp, not a single day in prison.
A mail system that doesn’t have a Bcc function doesn’t belong in the 21st Century.

This reminds me of a comment that we almost always get on HN when Facebook comes up, and its almost always right: it's not for you. If you want Bcc, it's not for you. The millions of people who are younger than you don't think to CC, let alone BCC. They want to communicate, and they want to do it now, and email is just that formal thing Dad uses. That's their terms, and Facebook gives it to them.

The author also discounts Facebook as being some sort of Neo-AOL. It is that, but where AOL faltered was being a completely walled garden. Facebook as a development platform, and, perhaps more importantly, an online identity to all sorts of other sites, makes Facebook use even more in-grained. I would love to see some stats from sites that allow Facebook Connect on how much their user registration went up. Facebook offers a portal, but also a wider identity, and they do it well.

If Facebook isn't for you, then that's that. But it doesn't mean what they're doing is wrong.
Yes! Well found :-)
Is there some way the HN community could help with the load, or some pathological behavior that a lot of us are doing that could be replaced by behavior that's easier on the server(s)?
Dunno about everyone else's math, but going from 1024 x 768 to 2048 x 1536 is FOUR times larger, not double.

Given that 'mistake', 1024 x 1536 seems more 'doable'.
So Gruber is well aware that he is a tool.
>Colleges help you get out of them what you put into them.

This is the most important point in this entire discussion. I had a pages long post about the wonderful years I spent at Cal, and the not so wonderful ones. But I think in the end, this comment sums it up much better.