skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your post is pretty long so I may have missed it, but can you afford college? Does paying for a degree and getting mediocre grades work for you / whoever is paying for it?

If so I would say go ahead and stay there, take classes, pass, but also start shipping your own products (if you're not already).

Like a lot of people I got a degree (not CS) at some bullshit private college because I felt I had to.

I'm now on my second career (CS) and my second successful business and I can tell you that my degree has meant almost nothing to me. It's probably true that my first career (in marketing) wouldn't have taken off if I had to tell people I was a college dropout, but programming is pretty unique in that regard and in my experience many/most people just want to know if you can ship a quality product or not.

Having said that, I've seen a lot of people who say they must to do their own thing really mean that they can't commit to whatever they're doing. I used to be like that. You say you're confident that you can build products that can make money. Have you done that? If not then get there first (while in college) and see how you feel.

If you're really a startup person, you can manage both college and a product to prove yourself. I don't know how your CS department works, but having a product on the market might also open that door. If not, screw them and go your own way.

Also, failure in business is not binary or permanent.
I love how all over the map the comments are.

There are so many vectors for comparison, it's ridiculous to try to generalize it. Seriously, different startups today cost several orders of magnitude different amounts today based on what they are doing.

To make any kind of reasonable comparison, you have to look at specific costs. Sure, processing, memory and bandwidth are way more than 10x cheaper, but applications might eat up a lot of that with additional complexity. Open source software, modern browsers, the rise of REST APIs, and the relatively saturated and savvy userbase mean that some apps today are infinitely better than they were 12 years ago (because they were previously impossible). On the other hand, people costs aren't any cheaper, the optimal size of a dev team hasn't changed, and you'll still need to expend the same amount of effort to compete regardless of how much better all technology products are overall.
I was one of the poor, unprofessional slobs who only made $100K or so in SF and NYC. I thought I was living a pretty good life, but maybe I should be ashamed that I'm not a millionaire CPA (huh?).

Here's a typical programmer bachelor situation.

I made about $6000K after tax and contributions to retirement account in SF and NYC.

car = $0

insurance = $0, paid for by employer

other debts = $0

iPhone = $80

rent = $1000 studio or share

utilities + wifi = $250

metro card/transit pass = $80

You can fudge those numbers a bit for a better apartment/room and maybe zip car or even your own beater car, and you're still usually under $2K. I didn't put food in there because that was highly variable, even for me. I saved $24,000 a year without thinking about it, and still experimented with motorcycles, snowboards, music gear, travel, etc.

You essentially have $4000 - $4500 a month to save or spend on food + whatever you want.
Hint: MD5 and Rainbow tables
Haven't heard a single critical analysis of Thunderbolt. So here I go..
I am not an expert by any means, but I do have something to say about this Thunderbolt thing.

First things first, Thunderbolt is just a technology, not a protocol, which is good, but it also has some implications. For instance, it cannot really replace any existing protocols. So questions about the fate of USB 3.0 in the wake of Thunderbolt sound misguided to me.

It seems to me that Apple's intention behind this technology is to have a single type of port to connect everything. That would make it seem like you can get rid of your USB, firewire etc. ports. But since your device expects to be plugged into a certain port, you ultimately have to provide that port. Which means that you do need to buy a new dongle, unlike what people are claiming. For instance, if you have a USB flash disk, one end of the Thunderbolt cable can be plugged into your MacBook, but the other end has to expose a USB port (assuming Thunderbolt will carry USB packets, which it does not today). So either the cable has to be Thunderbolt on one end and USB on the other, or the device needs to have a Thunderbolt port. This is good for Apple because eventually they can have only Thunderbolt ports on their Macs, which saves money and makes them cheaper, but pushes the cost out to consumers or device manufacturers.

Also, currently supported protocols are PCI Express and Displayport. PCI-E is interesting because it makes it sound like you can in theory connect just about anything. But there are a couple of problems with this. If I want to make my USB device play nice with Thunderbolt today, I have to have something that understands the PCI protocol. That means, my USB device needs to carry an embedded USB controller. Similarly, if I have a SATA disk, it needs to carry a SATA controller. As one can imagine, this is expensive, not scalable, and just a waste of money. The other problem is that Operating Systems and BIOS's don't expect their PCI devices to get hot-plugged, which in theory they should, and Apple can certainly ensure that for the MACs. But most PCI devices themselves do not expect to be hot-plugged. Given these two problems, I don't see how an ecosystem can develop around Thunderbolt. But its Apple, so they might have a brilliant plan that I cannot imagine myself.

I do see this technology as ideal for docking solutions. Imagine your iPad or iPhone with a single Thunderbolt connector that can be docked onto something which can then connect to a mouse, keyboard, display and what not. Beyond that, I am running out of ideas.
question: Why does google show your site existed 10 years ago?
We are just getting into cloud computing in a big way but the main problem has been spooling new machines up in a clean and repeatable way. Our current thought is to boot up a "raw" AMI and use Puppet to provision it.

CloudFormation might be a better way. Instead of having Puppet maintain the system, why not just update the CF template and spool up a new instance to replace the old, outdated one? I guess it just depends on how much you can stick in a template. If you can specify specific versions of packages (Ruby 1.9.2) it might just work.
Arabic in general is hard to transliterate properly, especially vowels, f.ex. I noticed 3 versions of Muscat used interchangely - Moscat, Muscat, Masqat and while travelling around Oman often cities who had an A on our maps were spelled with O or U on road signs.
But the Network tab only shows you files if you had it opened from the start, which is of coures correct behavior. You don't want Chrome tracking network latencies on all sites you load. The network tab is for tracking more than looking at resources.
From the available info there were indeed simple passwords and password reuse between systems of different security levels.

openssl speed md5
The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed.
type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes
md5 23895.04k 85345.30k 231322.03k 412608.40k 546306.56k

If you look at the openssl numbers from my workstation, you'll find I can generate hashes for 1.5 million 16 byte passwords per second. The nice part about rainbow tables is that they are easy to compute in a distributed nature. Take a couple hundred EC2 boxes and you can generate HUGE tables, if you're smart with how you use S3 you can write the tables directly to S3. Cracking unsalted passwords is a very simple time/memory trade off. Given the issues with MD5 with a good math background you might even be able to reverse the password. (eg. create a known password that computes to the same hash)

If you got creative with some FPGAs or GPUs you could do far better.
Honest question - what is the HTML5 part in here (as opposed to I rewrote it in HTML+CSS+JS)?
I think they future cased it for HTML storage requirements and for people who are doing more advanced stuff rather than just basic work. Might be useful if you're using those features.
So it was good that I didn't spend time learning chef/puppet or going with RightScale till now?
eHow still shows as number one for me in Google. It's nowhere to be found in duckduckgo.

That eHow article actually seems quite helpful and straightforward. Is there a problem with it? Hopefully Google can rank the results on a case-by-case basis instead of condemning an entire site that actually has some useful material.
what do you do, out of curiosity? I often forget that not everyone lives in my little corner of the development universe.
I know this is not a popular opinion here, but I'm not sure if I like Google reacting to what tech bloggers echo chamber talks about. Are we sure that this what is good for regular users and for the creation of quality content on the Internet? This group is not representative at all.

There seems to be enough "normal" spam in the search results that Google should be focusing on first. Just yesterday I searched for "viking dishwasher clog" and the #6 result is a .info page that is nothing but obvious spam.

I previously mentioned the issue of Wikipedia poorly regurgitating content from original creators (sometimes with attributing, sometimes without) and outranking that original page, even if it contained approachable, illustrated and in-depth article, and Wikipedia's content was much weaker. This is not something that tech bloggers will notice - they are much more likely to read Wikipedia's programming, science, math, or tech articles, which are of much higher quality than those on other topics, so you won't hear them complaining when they see Wikipedia as #1 everywhere.

Another bias I starting seeing lately is the high ranking of new Q&A sites (another focus of tech bloggers), when excellent topical forums with very good content, often exactly with the answers I needed, are ranking poorly. I’m speculating here, but I think Google’s focus on links might hurt its ability to bring up deeply hidden content from forums. These forums won’t get many links from tech bloggers and others looking for the next big thing, but they have very valuable content for many long-tail searches.
Jeff Barr's post: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/02/cloudformation-create-you...
Awww man, I thought I reported it first :( (My report is the duplicate listed in the ticket)
Instead of:

window.setInterval(frame, 1000);

Do:

window.setTimeout('window.setInterval(frame, 1000)', 999-(new Date()).getMilliseconds());

That way the seconds will be properly synchronized.
mahalo is No.3 when you search for it.
http://www.google.com/search?q=mahalo

many outdated sites are on 1st page for other terms
No, I am suggesting that switching tasks (not applications) will make me less productive.
Even though the implementation above doesn't use any HTML5-specific features, the term is becoming a synonym for Dynamic HTML.
ID Security a Roma
Ieri si è tenuta la 1a Mostra Convegno specializzata sulla sicurezza della Identità Digitale a Roma, organizzata dalla Edisef, con diversi patrocini tra cui quelli di Aipsi, Anorc, GC-SEC e ISACA.

L'evento era molto particolare perché consentiva agli avvocati di ottenere dei crediti formativi necessari per l'iscrizione all'albo, insomma una sorta di CPE per il mantenimento delle certificazioni. Gli interventi erano quindi suddivisi tra tecnologi e giuristi con un mix abbastanza unico...
Wonder what this means for companies like http://jumpbox.com/
We used Jumpbox in the in the past to setup some quick examples for testing.
This is big. Makes AWS a wholesome offering. Kudos to Amazon!
A shame that the fastest-moving value is placed in the portion of the spectrum where we have the least colour sensitivity. I'd have put hours in blue, myself. If I'd thought of it.
I appreciate the pointlessness of being yet-another recreator, but hey, why not: http://davidlynch.org/toys/colorclock/ :D

My quirk is that you can stick a fragment on the end to change the mapping of time to hex. e.g. http://davidlynch.org/toys/colorclock/#smh is seconds=red, minutes=green, hours=blue.
This shouldn't be a problem as long as you're willing to:

- not sign, in the first place, any NDA or confidentiality agreement that would extend the employer's right to anything that 1) you work on your own time and 2) isn't directly related to the current field of work you're doing for the employer

- in general, steer away from employers that spend time worrying about their employees leaking out their precious knowhow

- to enforce the above choices should you find yourself in such a situation; in other words, walk away real soon now
Has anybody read anything explaining how giving external devices DMA access is or isn't a problem? It seems one could make a Thunderbolt device that silently injects itself into the running system, writes itself to the hard drive, etc. without even touching the CPU.
Here's a version that cycles through the colors continuously (without jumps). Now the numbers do not directly corespond to the color code anymore (they alternate going up-down). Also you can multiply by 256, as the maximum is not reached for any of the values.

I uploaded it here: http://lkozma.net/colorclock/

d = t.getTime()/(1000 * 60 * 60 * 24),

...

body.animate({"background-color":
"rgb(" +
(((d%2)==1) ? parseInt((h / 24) * 256) : (255-parseInt((h / 24) * 256))) + "," +
(((h%2)==1) ? parseInt((m / 60) * 256) : (255-parseInt((m / 60) * 256))) + "," +
(((m%2)==1) ? parseInt((s / 60) * 256) : (255-parseInt((s / 60) * 256))) + ")"});
};
Small bug: Single digit hex codes are showing without the leading zero - it's probably affecting the colors as well.
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It's corporate IT's death struggles you're observing. Unfortunately they don't tend to die quickly.

What I've seen again and again is people just routing around them. And around any other corp strategies that stop them from getting their jobs done.
On the first photo, was that "Defeating malware" or "Delivering malware"?
I think it's a high density thing. Same lessons in Western Europe.
All types of Control, Isolation, Ultra Isolation Transformers Manufacturers 
Indian Manufacturer of Transformers and Stabilizers
I'm quite sure there are much more mappings from hh:mm:ss -> rgb which would be even more interesting or even practical.
For sure the internet will iterate on this idea in just a few seconds :)
In addition, the transliteration also depends on the target language. E.g., in English Qaddafi seems to be the more common form, while in German almost always Gaddafi ist used:

866,000 Google hits for: '"gaddafi" site:de'

9,090 Google hits for: '"qaddafi" site:de' (and nearly all of them are English articles)
Security is not goal in itself, although many IT types seem to think it is. As you note in your second paragraph, it's a sliding scale, to be weighted against productivity etc.
I have somewhat mixed feelings about it, but I think I like it how, with modern technology, civilian semi-organized groups can challenge and shame such shady and clearly power obsessed companies. It feels like a kind of balancing force against the most dystopian possible future.
A different approach is to just get consumer acceptance and get into the enterprise via the backdoor. That's what Dropbox (and 37sigs etc) are doing.
News results look much improved. Yellowpages.com and variants (yp.com) continue to clutter up local search results.
I'm sure the service will grow with more features. One thing is for sure, Rightscale can be a bit costly. I welcome anything in the AWS management space that saves money.
The Unofficial Guide to Migrating Off of Google App Engine
Really, your best bet is to route around them. I may be a techie but I have little respect for corporate IT, sorry. Instead of focusing on increasing productivity, they always seem to focus on increasing their control (in order to not loose their jobs), and to increase "security". They don't remind me of hackers, they remind me of airport scanners and laywers.
Agreed. However, if Hummingbird is capturing the data anyway it should be possible to build an interface to allow me to troll through it. I just didn't know if this was built-in to HB or if would be something that I would have to build.
> But most PCI devices themselves do not expect to be hot-plugged

Is that actually true? It's been some time since I went through the protocol, but PCIe does have native support for hot-plug. Certainly during the enumeration, I don't see why a card (distinct from the host) would care in the least whether the rest of the system was booted or not.

Don't forget that ExpressCards are effectively PCIe, and they have no problems with being inserted or removed whilst a system is turned on.
What do you mean by '16 byte passwords'? 16 bytes is only 1 or two character under most encoding schemes ...
#FFFFFF to #000000 would be white to black.
Ask HN: What do you do and how much do you make annually?
1. What do you do?

2. how much do you make annually?

3. What was your first job?

4. For how many years have you been working?

5. What kind of skills are most important in your job?
Re #2: higher performance external video cards (think 3D accelerator dongles for laptops), cluster interconnects, RAID arrays of SSDs, RAM-based "disks" for use as another layer of cache, lower-latency ultra-high-channel-count external sound cards, etc.
Intel: new 'Thunderbolt' data-transfer system is blazingly fast
It's geeky but true: An Intel technology called "Thunderbolt" is creating quite a storm in the computer and gadget worlds this week.Here's why this may matter to you: Thunderbolt will allow you to transfer photos, videos and files from other devices to a computer faster than ever before.
Is there any reason to change the algorithm, initially, only in the US?
Anyone know what's up with the speed issues? I've been trying to book a room for SXSW for days now & at least from here (CH) the site is unusably slow. Weird since my last experience booking a place in Vienna 5 months ago was great.
BLasmO - First Time Here - Hmmmmm.....
Xkcd - Nanobots (Why should we move to IPv6)
Ditto. To me, it looks like hipster.
Enigma genius Alan Turing papers saved for the nation
It is true that in theory, they should be hot-pluggable. But try plugging out a hard-drive while your system is running, bad things happen. USB devices, on the other hand, expect to be hot-plugged, and take appropriate measures for that. For example, removable media flash drives don't do as much caching in volatile memory as internal SATA hard drives. Another example would be a graphics card, which, if you plugin while the system is running, won't get recognized. But if you want to use Thunderbolt to power external displays that carry their own graphics cards, the underlying assumption being that the card already knows how to talk PCI, then you can see that there will be a problem.
http://davidlynch.org/toys/colorclock/#hms
http://davidlynch.org/toys/colorclock/#smh
http://davidlynch.org/toys/colorclock/#mhs

Or any other order, really.
Everything is for sale for the right price. Make them an actual offer. If they still say no, your offer wasn't high enough.
Might I ask why very few people last that long? Is there too much work and not enough free time, or is it that work itself is harder than elsewhere? Or is it something else entirely?
Better to be reviled than ignored
According to WSJ, the average developer in the bay area makes $99k:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870343950457611...

So if you're making $100k, you're just making what everyone else is making :-)
Drupal.org down, moving from CVS to Git.
Personally I have two (unrelated to each other) friends who've been living without really working for the past twenty years. They're really happy, and live on 500 euros per month each. YMMV.
Here's what I do, especially for web apps: choose a great name, then get the myGREATNAME.com or getGREATNAME.com

It worked for dropbox, Mint and 37 sigs.
Well, yeah, but you can't have a handy button for it on the page.
I'm not sure X-Factor has figured out Facebook entirely. Although what has been announced might work for the US market, in the UK all votes have been charged for using premium rate SMS, phone lines, or interactive TV, and form a massive revenue stream. I don't see any microcharging mechanism in place here, and am pretty sure ITV isn't about to surrender significant value in the franchise for no real gain.
Instead of the above trade off, I think I'd buy two machines if needed.

I see the MBP as a laptop to use plugged in a socket and with a lan cable at home, work, a client's place or a library, and only need decent portability and battery life. For all other uses I'd prefer the ipad or the Air(wish I get the $$ for it).
LOVE corporate IT. They should sell t-shirts that say that. And wear them ironically.
Also, an obituary to Drupal CVS by Larry "Crell" Garfield: http://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/cvs-obituary
Actually, I disagree. What I describe is more like RAM buffered IO, where the space can be reclaimed at no cost, rather than swap, where the data must be saved for coherency.

It's entirely viable for a filesystem to archive all of the data you've ever created. Treat the archived files as an LRU cache and, when new data needs to be saved, just write over the least recently used data. Instead of a volume bitmap of used blocks, you have a tree that can be traversed to get the blocks that can be overwritten. This is not data that must be saved, like the swap; it's data that should be saved until something else needs it, at which point it's overwritten, like most OS's RAM IO buffers.
Self-Doubting Monkeys Know What They Don’t Know
Do not forget Ninety-ninety rule:

"The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time."

I'm a huge believer of this one, I tend to be a little bit (please read: TOO MUCH) optimistic when evaluating the remaining work/time/etc.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-ninety_rule
Ask HN: corporate IT stories & startup ideas?
From recent HN threads: "our corporate IT department blocks most foreign domains, such as .ly, .io, .tv, and .ng." and "What should I do, corporate IT has blocked Dropbox?"

Maybe we should share corporate IT war stories, and connect them with ideas for startups?
A country shouldn't be run as a startup. Most startups fail.
Nice job, but why screensaver only for MacOS?
Bytes are 8 bits - UTF-8 gets most of ASCII in 1 byte (8 bits) and many (most?) other language glyphs can be encoded in 2 bytes or so (16 bits).

A 16 byte field can hold up to 16 ASCII characters, or perhaps 8 CJK glyphs that might encode a short kanji or hanzi password.
I didn't think of that aspect.
You've heard of the PHP SAPI, right?