skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Colleges are only partially there for academics. All in all they exist to prepare you for "the real world" and to be a productive part of society. Certainly you can go to college and not socialize and not watch/play any sports and focus only on preparing for your career in academia. That's a choice. However, most people gain a lot more out of their college experience outside of the classroom. I was a student-athlete in the ACC and I certainly gained a lot more preparation for life after school from my experience as an athlete than as a student. To say sports aren't important in college is simply naive. As a matter of fact, to the poster that said "that doesn't mean kegs are good for education" I'll play devil's advocate and say that there is a ton of education that comes out of socializing and partying. It helps you become a lot more comfortable in social settings. In turn this helps you in other facets of your future career.

tldr; IMO, out-of-class activities during college are just as important if not more important than the in class education.
I've been looking around for (post-grad) internships for the last few weeks. The most successful tactic so far has been to just email and ask directly. Make sure to link to some existing projects that you can show off so they know you won't just be dead weight. Show that you have actually researched the company and are interested in what they do. I've had a few interviews already with this sort of thing:

> Person X, I saw your job posting on HN and wonder if you also accept interns?
>
> I have professional experience with python, erlang and ocaml and have
> previously worked in a startup environment. I have
> little practical experience in machine learning or data mining but I
> do have some classroom learning as well as a solid background in math.
>
> I have a resume and portfolio online (
> http://scattered-thoughts.net/all?jid=2&tag=about ). A few of the
> smaller projects in there are vaguely relevant to Company X - a personal
> job hunting agent (
> http://scattered-thoughts.net/one/1274/311469/330868 ) and an email
> chat bot for 419 baiting (
> http://scattered-thoughts.net/one/1274/311469/329424 ).
>
> I am hoping to start a phd in September so I cannot accept permanent
> positions at the moment. I am not a US citizen but I am eligible for a
> J1 visa and able to move to SF without financial assistance.
>
> Thanks
>
> Jamie

Edit: Fixed the formatting
And if you're running Linux, which window manager are you running?
Donated. My way of voting against DMCA in general and SCEA in particular. The disenfranchised can only vote with their dollars, and if they can, they should.
Startup Quote: Sam Altman, co-founder, Loopt
Anyone tried Google's Android app maker?

http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/
It's true that obesity is a growing problem, and it is likely also true that nearly all cases of type II diabetes can be prevented with dietary changes. But, the article repeats the 'reduce saturated fat' meme, which lately has been called into question.

Gary Taubes
http://higher-thought.net/complete-notes-to-good-calories-ba...

Robert Lustig
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

Cynthia Kenyon
http://donmatesz.blogspot.com/2009/12/how-insulin-controls-a...

Nutrition and Vision Research at Tufts (Allen Taylor)
http://hnrc.tufts.edu/1192109687036/HNRCA-Page-hnrca2ws_1192...

Kurt Harris
http://www.paleonu.com/get-started

Mike Eades
http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/

Uffe Ravnskov, "fat and cholesterol are good for you"
http://www.ravnskov.nu/cholesterol.htm

LivinLaVidaLowCarb
http://www.thelivinlowcarbshow.com/shownotes/

Weston A Price
http://www.westonaprice.org/dentistry/289-invisible-toothbru...

William Davis
http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/

etc.
Yes, and I take that to mean anything that's non-trivial or experimental. I've heard him speak on the idea of experimentation before, and that's what led me to the methodology I use today.
Every company has a rocky beginning.

- Sam Altman (@sama)

http://startupquote.com/post/3404098510
This article has a bad smell. One commenter said it best -- the author is confusing 'risk factor' with 'cause'.
So is this a statement or an argument? I would agree it sucks, but what would the cost of pg's time be to create, test, and implement this?

Other than your emotional state, I don't see a huge win here.
I know why politicians do that, but why do people do it here on ycombinator?
I am running Linux (ubuntu 10.10) and I am using the Gnome terminal.
Of course I could switch to something else if this could make things easier.
Does hash tables stores only values or they can store other data structures? What happen when they store references to other data structures?

In Tcl, list and dict always are values so their string representation is already a serialization.
Duplicate: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1901152

Lots of comments.
Show HN: A Browse-able RESTish API
You can use my http://ihackernews.com which works great for mobile devices.
Is this the start of the second dotcom bubble?
Windows Server and Linux kind of "grew up" together in that Linux didn't really steal away a dominant Windows market with servers, but they both established their market shares in this space over the same time frame.

Microsoft has tried to underhandedly support efforts to kill Linux (like buying tons of crap from SCO after its suit was filed), but they haven't gone "all out" yet. I don't think that means that they won't ever do that. Again, the deal with Novell is posturing; by offering customers the guarantee that they won't get sued for using Linux by MS, they are essentially saying they may sue non-customers as they feel appropriate.

Microsoft's cash cow has always been in the desktop -- desktop OS and office productivity suites. This is the market they'll fight to the death to protect. Bringing legal action against Linux now would only serve as a distraction and a big PR help to things like Ubuntu, exactly what MS doesn't want. They seem to understand the Streisand Effect. There's no point attacking an enemy that is struggling for traction.
As zrgui said (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2242098) that these sites add " low-quality content apps " into the market but something simple like this does serve its purpose, in my opinion, for the younger, growing up, geek generation. Looking back at how I got interested in programming, something like this probably would have sparked my interest in mobile development by jump starting my baby steps in creating "my own app", ragardless of how simple the app might be.
Wow, someone downvoted that. Could you elaborate on why you think reducing social cost is a valid argument for promoting suicide? Note that I'm not saying there aren't valid arguments supporting the St Paul's approach, I'm only suggesting that "because it's cheaper" is an incredibly callous and cynical one.
How many page impressions add up to the equivalent of an hour of EC2 time? How does that compare to ads?
The only time I've seen communities maintain or increase their quality over time has been when they were private, invitation-only affairs overseen by a respected and benevolent dictator.

I've also had some thoughts with regards to an idea like this. I wonder if the dynamics of private forums moderated by respected and benevolent dictators can be captured in entirely emergent form?

qqygh is kind of like a de-facto moderator of reddit.com. The power he wields as a submitter is entirely emergent. There are also other redditors who start their own moderated subreddits. I wonder if moderated subreddits could emerge out of some kind of karma system? Twitter is somewhat like this as well, but it only includes the "submission" part without direct moderation. (Does that take the form of un-following?)

What Jacques proposes basically has the same filtering dynamics as networks of personal connections in real life or on sites like Facebook, but without so much of the isolation and insularity these networks produce. I posit what he's proposing would end up being much like a "fuzzy" version of the friend graph.
This was written in May 2007. C# 3.0 was released in August. We are talking about c# 2.0 here. No Lambda syntax, no Linq, no Type Inference, no nothing. Anonymous methods were clearly intended to handle events, and even that was discouraged in favor of On_SomethingHappend(...) methods in the MSDN docs.

His code must have looked like this:

public delegate TResult Func<T,TResult>(T input);
public delegate TResult Func<T,U,TResult>(T inputA, U inputB);

public static TResult Fold<TAcc,T>(IEnumerable<T> collection, TAcc state, Func<TAcc,T,TAcc> f)
{
TAcc acc = state;
foreach(T item in collection)
{
acc = f(acc,item);
}
return acc;
}
//[...]
public int FunctionalMasturbation()
{
int totalWithdrawed = Fold<int,int>(0,_withdrawals,
delegate(int acc, int value)
{
return value+acc;
}
);
//...
}

This is an abomination. Right, for developers with a background in FP, than it's pretty clear what's going on, even if it looks like puke. But in 2007 you could hold a conference for all .net devs with knowledge of Functional Concepts in a telephone booth.
In Tcl lists and dicts always store values.
My friend & mentor keeps telling me to quit being a wussy and that I'm about as skilled as he was when he was a fresh graduate. I need to put on my big boy shorts and just apply. I am an enthusiastic autodidact so no problem there.
JSONloops, open-source real-time multiuser audio sequencer
That's his point, setting a cookie on the root "domain.com" will mean it's sent to "www.domain.com" or "blog.domain.com" as well. You mostly do not want this.
I have had two interns in the past. Both of the positions came about because the person approached me and told me what they wanted to do. I didn't have to think too much about their proposal - they had it figured out for me. So I said yes.
That sounds great, looking at my own questions I'm probably overcomplicating things and wouldn't know it well what works until I tried for real. Or maybe it is all part of the StartupBus idea - work with the given constraints. :)

I wonder how much of the requirements are specific to this situation, or one could put together a mobile-productivity-bundle: some hardware + software to deploy similar environment anywhere on a short notice. :)

Loved the idea of auto-geotagged blog posts that was mentioned on the site, I think. Any chance of sharing it? :)
PS3 hacker Geohot asks for support
My college roommate used to buy them in bulk and keep them warm under his bed and then drink them even in the room. I get being on the road forgetting to bring water and getting a bottle for that, but you can prepare and bring a reusable bottle of your own on the bus, to your meeting, walking on the street, etc.
If I offered you free cyanide but I told you it's candy, it's that a win too?
Here is the actual study (3 links deep): http://www.unitedhealthgroup.com/hrm/UNH_WorkingPaper5.pdf . Take a look at page 8, the one that contains this prediction. It was made by taking the rates of diabetes and pre-diabetes in 2007 and in 2010 (37.0% and 39.9% respectively), and drawing a line through them to get 51.9. That includes a 26.3% (2007) and 28.4% (2010) rate of "pre-diabetes", which really just means a HbA1c test that was higher than average.

But between 2007 and 2010, the diagnostic test for pre-diabetes, the HbA1c, got much cheaper and became part of routine screenings where it wasn't before, so the slight uptick observed may actually be an artifact of increased testing, and it is definitely not part of a trend that can be linearly extrapolated ten years out.
I don't want to sound rude, but I think that you are just pushing exercise for some day in the future that may never arrive.

I don't bike to school either, I use public transportation, however I regularly exercise. Believe me, there is time. It takes only 20 minutes every two days to stay fit and healthy. I am sure you can find the time to do it. Just reduce the amount of time you read HN or Reddit or sth.

If you need motivation to start, you can begin by following a program like http://www.100pushups.info/ to get started. Break free of being lazy.
I'm not sure this constitutes any problem other than a lack of understanding of the python runtime. What the author describes as:

"the mutable default parameter quirk is an ugly corner worth avoiding"

could also be described as:

"a natural outcropping of python's late binding, "names are references" variable model, and closure mechanisms, which provide a consistency to the language that is often crufted up in others"

I do somewhat agree with the author that this particular functionality should be a "use only when needed" feature. I don't think it should be avoided at all costs tho, because there are times where the mutable default allows for a lot of saved code. In fact in a few cases the code to work around using mutable defaults can get into some serious voodoo because frequently the writer is actually trying to work around the bigger mutable/immutable objects and names are references "issues" in python.

This also reminds me of something I was reading on the front page today about the old 'use the whole language' vs 'simplicity is king' holy war.
Well, it pretty much depends on what system you are using. On linux for example you could use frame buffers (on windows or osx i have no idea). But i think you should check out some kind of library like SDL, which is easy to use and has bindings for common lisp and python (it's written in C).

EDIT: take a look to http://code.google.com/p/lispbuilder/wiki/LispbuilderSDL
There's nothing wrong with regular city tap water.

Many folks are hyper-sensitized to the taste of a very small amount of mineral content that some water may or may not have. Bottled water manufacturers have latched onto these childish preferences and cultivate them in order to (very successfully) con people into paying for nothing and waste enormous energy and resources in the process.

Turn on the spigot, drink up, and don't fuss about it so much.
The point he is making is that stackoverflow is important because

1. It is useful at work

2. It is useful for getting work

He dimisses the possibility that people asking questions about photography might not be photographers doing it for a living ( and a hodgepodge of sites focused on photography, mathematics, Apple, video games, board games, role-playing games, and science fiction. Interesting? Sure. Important? Hell, no. )

Besides who can be more obsesses about scores than gamers?
Also available on Github: https://github.com/Marak/JSONloops

JSONLoops is a multi-user audio sequencer reminiscent of Fruityloops. Audio playback is handled by node.js servers, while multiple browsers act as control devices. Songs are stored in the JSONloop format, which are simply nested JSON arrays.

Usage:

git clone https://github.com/marak/jsonloops
cd jsonloops
node server.js

The audio sequencer will now start playing on your local machine, you'll hear sounds. To access a control interface for your JSONloops server, visit http://localhost:8080/
I've also used fugue before:

https://github.com/pgte/fugue

It launches a master process which forks and manages child worker processes and talks to them over a socket.
Thank you, though I actually took my arse to Vacaville, which is about ten miles up the road. I bought them this domain name: http://www.opportunityhouse.us/ Their website has come a long way in the time since then. They developed a lot in the time I volunteered there and the director did indicate that it helped enormously that I helped them streamline their paperwork and cut many man-hours from the process of keeping it up to date each month.

Good luck with your search for an internship.
Your poll may be skewed by those who don't have downvote power voting "No".
What I don't get is why mcdonalds, with all their clout, doesn't make value meals that are good for your health at the same time. People are lazy, so if you allow them to be lazy and eat healthy food at the same time, there must be a goldmine of potential revenue there. McDonalds could create a market for healthy fast food and dominate it for decades to come, but they just sit there like couch potatoes.

Typical innovator's dilemma I suppose.
He's got some good points.

The first startup I worked for had really ugly code... That worked. And for the first couple years, I wrote slightly nicer code that also worked. Eventually, the product matured enough, and had enough customers, that it was time to get serious about clean code. I started adding unit tests and cleaning things up. It was almost impossible to get everyone else on board because they were used to doing things the 'quick' way for so long.

But eventually it became unbearable to continue as we had. The whole company got on board with unit tests, then scrum, and eventually ordered a complete rewrite of the system with clean, maintainable code.

I didn't actually agree with the last bit. I thought incremental changes were best for most of it, and a complete rewrite for other pieces would be the best.

The point is, they started out quick and dirty, launched, made some money, and then started cleaning up. It enabled them to seize the market and hold onto it, despite competitors that came along and threw millions of dollars into developing a competing product.

One size does not fit all.
Cases like this don't come down to a simple interpretation of an existing law, often focusing more on the intent than the wording. Sony actually defended a similar case, Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.,.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Univer....

Edit: HN sees to dislike periods at the end of URL's: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Univer...
You've piqued my curiosity. Why would a developer ever need to do anything (that affected his code) from the command line?
The majority of for profit blogs aren't great reading because they are constantly trying to put something new out even if they don't have anything interesting to say. I though the Coding Horror blog improved a fair bit when Jeff no longer had to rely on it for a living and just made the occasional post.

I like the idea of using a blog to build up a following which you then sell some more organised a long form content to in book/ebook form, similar to 37 signals although best results would be to not just recycle the blog content.
I'm in a similar vessel over here in Scotland/UK 30yr old, CS undergrad, wife/daughter etc. I've no experience other than the 1.5yrs coding from University and mostly in Java & php. Around 3 weeks ago I used linkedin to target companies in and around Edinburgh that I thought I could work in, loosely based on product/location but not tech stack. I also used google finance and used different phrases to find larger companies. I contacted managers and HR staff via unsolicited email with my CV and academic transcript.

I've had 3 interviews so far and a further 1 next week with. I've had 1 offer of p/t during term and f/t in the summer.

All 3 companies don't let interns loose on their codebase, understandable tbh. They look at setting a side project, within their 'product roadmap', to develop a proof of concept. Sometimes this ends up not being useful, but the company can keep their current dev team on more pressing issues while undertaking 'research'. Might be worth approaching with this tangent?

I'm assuming that an internship is the same over here as in your locale; a summer job? If python is your chosen path great but don't let it stand in the way of applying to different companies. All 3 of the companies I've interviewed with use .Net and MSoft stacks, of which I have no experience. I found most of the interviewers had been focused on assessing my communication skills instead of technical prowess. Learning another language can't be a bad thing?

Good Luck!
In the US it isn't illegal for companies to give information to a hiring company, they don't give out information because of the risk of being sued by the applicant if they give out information that may cost the applicant the new job.
Wow, a handy ASCII chart that disproves the entire concept of investment. Congrats!
Also, Marion Nestle: http://www.foodpolitics.com/
> Why are UC-Berkeley and UCLA head coaches earning more than 8 times as much as Christos Papadimitriou?

Because there are donors willing to pay the salaries of those coaches and there aren't donors willing to pay Papadimitriou more money. And, you can actually take money from big-money athletics and pay for acadmics.

You can argue that this shouldn't be all you like, but it is. The money that goes to those coaches can't be spent on CS. If anything, it actually provides more money for CS.

I've listened to John Hennessey, Stanford's president, walk through all this. He thinks that Stanford's athletic program makes money for its academic program.

If you think that he's wrong, please provide details so I can ask him. (And it better be something that isn't currently in this thread, as he went through the equivalent and more.)
The fact that some are managing to make a put-their-kids-through-college living doesn't undermine his point in the least. The fact of the matter is that the number of content creators who can meet that threshold continues to plummet at an alarming rate. Those who speak so glowingly of the promise of "the new models" are almost inevitably either succeeding with one already (at least temporarily) or not at all personally dependent on doing so. Not only are new models needed, but they need to scale or the number of content creators sending their kids to college will continue to dwindle.
I suggest that sometimes what appears to be "clever" for a given audience is in actuality the local optimum. Attempting to optimize it for readability without further study will worsen the code in some way, such as conflating concerns that have been carefully separated or introducing dependencies.

If "clever" is often necessary to avoid things like conflating concerns or introducing dependencies, I think this points us in the direction we need to take in improving programming languages. (Off the top of my head, this applies to both Ruby and Smalltalk.) Though, I've also observed that bolt-ons to programming languages to address these issues are often a bit too "clever" themselves. (Example: The original implementation of Objects in Perl.)
Read the manual page about "vga_drawpixel" function. I'm not sure you can use this if you run under X. Here is a useful link:

http://linux.die.net/man/3/vga_drawpixel

You should probably use a more advanced graphics library like the one provided by Gnome, but if you want to learn how to do it from scratch I suppose you need to start from a text mode Linux installation.
The Next Mass Consumer Social Wave: Political Expression
1. Write something they'll love. Something using their API or something. Something simple is ok, but something that shows that you'll provide value.

2. Then apply for an unadvertised junior Python job, not an internship and show them what you wrote.
Installation is a little cryptic right now since this was built for Music Hack Day. If you just try to clone and start the server up, you will likely be missing the node-irrKlang library.

See https://github.com/marak/JSONloops/issues#issue/4 for more information on this. We'll have an easy install option ready very shortly with node-sfml bindings.
Also, coffee and tea are drinks that people will accept even if they aren't exactly a person's preferred style/flavor.

People will order and drink coffee at any restaurant when the choice is generic coffee vs. decaf. Brand certainly helps but many people, even picky, will drink a brown liquid called coffee anywhere, if the primary objective is conversation, reading, etc.