skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Speaking as someone who applied for MIT a few years ago, something like this is no longer possible and the "rat race" description used for comparision is now in fact valid for MIT as well.

Nowhere in the recrutation process you have much possiblity to show your "software code" - everything is very formalized and you have to submit your grades, essays on specified topics, pass the SATs and go through a interview (but the interviewer doesn't have to know anything about the discipline you want to study). Yes, you can describe your most interesting projects as part of your application, but if you read the admission blogs and other MIT materials, it is quite clearly implied that unless you have near-perfect grades and/or near-perfect SAT scores, they won't even look at the project descriptions, essays etc. Also there is no way of knowing why you were accepted or rejected, because the whole proccess is 100% opaque to the outside world.

I still think the MIT is awesome and the admission process probably has to look more or less like it looks like because of the volume of applications they have to go through. But the post and some of the comments seem to leave the impression that the MIT addmission comitee will look at every person as a "unique snowflake" to find the really outstanding candidates. In reality, the admission process has to be quite mechanical so that they can at all manage it and only after the initial 90% of the applications gets rejected, they can be scrutinize the remaining 10% in more detail. So, if you want to get-in, you have to "optimize grades and SAT" and "speaking French and Chinese, playing piano and painting abstract art" won't hurt either.
Isn't the lack of adequate judgement (moral or other) the definition of being a kid?
A greater need for parallelism doesn't mean we have to throw out OOP. It means we have to throw out needless mutation. Immutable objects (e.g. java.lang.String) are fine.

OOP along the lines of Erlang processes is also fine.
This has been tried by many people. You better have something useful or you will get a lot of flak.

See http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-startup-ideas-that-persis...

Also check out HN user akkartik's http://readwarp.com.
I've tried to have that debate between my two opinions so many times, but haven't managed to find a way to be OK with people who are racist or homophobic.

I'd still defend the right to call me stupid, to call all British people stupid (my country), and many other things. But some hatred goes too far over the line for me to not want to try and prevent.

I'm not particularly up on legal systems, but I believe that in both the US and the UK the law is with me, to an extent at least - while freedom of speech is promised, there are also laws against types of "hate speech"?

Plus, freedom of speech says that they should be able to have that opinion and to say that opinion, not that they have the right to have third parties promote that opinion. Extending that is why I had the right to complain to Apple, and, while their removing the app isn't exactly a case of "free speech", it is a case of them being able to chose what their company sells based on moral choices.
This is a really nice gesture from Microsoft. A humble example for everyone to learn from.
I honestly believe our education systems(those that I know about) most of the time end up keeping some of the best people behind.

The idea of degrees and diplomas where everything is depends on scores achieved in a set of examination is utterly counter productive in my opinion.

I hate it when I see people worrying about grades without understanding what those grades actually mean.
Here's a mirror, just in case there are others for whom the main download site is estimating nine hrs to go. (Mac OS X version)

http://www.macupdate.com/download/10700/Firefox%204.0.dmg
A clever MSFT plan. It motivates the Firefox team to increase the number of releases, so they eventually stop the actual development and realize that the infinite supply of free cakes is easily convertable to cash.
I also did a stint in SecondLife, trying to build web-enabled in-world products and/or build web services that would take Linden dollars for payment. Probably made $600 in revenue.

It was my Artix Phase.
In other news, one data point is enough.
That makes no sense, "offensive" is an arbitrary standard anyway. By definition you're being selective about it.

I guess in this case Apple's standard is that they remove apps that are offensive to their shareholders and customers.
One in thousands. Like I said: people make mistakes. It doesn't bother me that we're dealing with human beings who aren't perfect; better this than the big brother corporation with an agenda.
After that story, there's no source code? It would be interesting to see, at the very least.
Oh, seriously, don't waste your time with this. Androcles is a known math/internet troll/crank, and threads like this are an infinite sink of time.

It's not worth your attention - flag it and go build something useful.
Mobl - A new open source language for mobile devices
Idiot[+] on internet doesn't understand reference frames, difference between force and velocity, etc. Film at eleven.

[+]: "Idiot" may actually be a troll.
This.

I, too, got into college without graduating high school, based on some software I wrote on an Apple II. It wasn't MIT, but that's kind of the point-- many schools are open to non-traditional students who impress them in some way. And back in those days, I imagine the bar was a lot lower in terms of what kind of code it took to impress (due to Moore's Law, as much as anything else...)
Huh, I hadn't realized Netscape was that big way back in 1996! From that point of reference, Chrome's 26.2 megs doesn't actually seem huge. If we take 384 kbps DSL to be today's equivalent to a 14.4 kbps modem (low end of the "normal" internet connection), it's a 3x quicker download as well.
It's rare, but not unheard of even outside of CS.

A friend of mine is finishing up his degree at Brown University having never graduated from high school. Instead he joined up and did three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan as a pararescueman. The university has a program in place for students who experience an interruption (family, work, service, etc.) in their education.

http://www.brown.edu/Administration/Dean_of_the_College/advi...
I was talking specifically about trusting Google's motivations, not the concept of security itself. You're twisting the issue; of course it's possible that Google's security will be broken somehow. But that's the case with anything, anywhere, anytime. So there's not much point (IMO) in basing decisions around that possibility.
How long the application is supposed to live, should be relevant here. Some stuff can be a piece of crap, even if it goes against some sensibility of a developer, if it isn't suppose to live long and can give you something back. Some times it should be up to the people that know how long it'll live. It's first when you make the money to pay for the refactoring, you should do it.

But hey, make it perfect from the get go ;)

I know, temporary stuff has a tendency to become permanent. But if you see this trend, then you and your manager should be grown-up enough to have the discussion of rewriting it for something more longterm. (It all depends on what sort of project it is).

Long term projects should never voluntarily allow technical debt. It's just bad for business.
It's a long-standing tradition between Mozilla and Microsoft I believe.
Google Tradutor
You can't print/generate money indefinitely

Why not? Our current currencies (which are a lot more useful than BTC) are not backed by any finite commondity like gold.
Also FYI, Aza left the Mozilla project to start up something called "Massive Health", here's his blog post about the new business: http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/leaving-mozilla/.
Yes, but it's very very hard to do it now. Also it's limited and the more you print the less you will be able to print.
About a year ago I built a number of micro niche sites aimed specifically at generating adwords income for high ppc terms. They weren't especially pretty but they were a good exercise and more than paid for themselves.

At the point I sold them (22 sites) they were generating about $190 a month in adsense revenue, all this from me buying 'keyword in domain' urls, having a relatively good eye for writing seo copy and building some inbound links.

I sold the lot on flippa for just over $1k, so I suppose it made me about ~$300/mo for a year. I know of some individuals who have over 1,000 domains running (across some of the most random niches you would just laugh at!) so I think it's a pretty decent passive business for them.
In a similar study, water is wet
Not entirely sure this fits the bill, but I've leased out one of my former lead developer to a client, when our consulting business got rammed. He's is offshore, and the client is in Europe. Right now I do individual consultancy, and then get a form of passive income from leasing the developer out. I make around 700 USD a month, with effort limited to sending out the invoice.
Wow. Is it me, or do those 'monster characters' on the landing page so really, really amateurish?
isso é merda
The South African-designed Pebble Bed Modular Reactor[1] was supposed to be designed to be meltdown-proof through the use of passive cooling.

Rather than using rods for fuel and water as the coolant, the PBMR design used graphite and TRICO-coated LEU pebbles as fuel and Helium as the coolant.

In the event of a total loss of control, the large surface area of the pebble bed would theoretically dissipate the heat at enough of a rate that the highest possible temperature the core could reach would be around 1600˚ celsius, too low to cause the fuel to melt.

So even in a worst-case scenario the reactor core temperature would just rise to a safe 'idle' temperature and sit there indefinitely, allowing more than enough time for the pebbles to be safely removed from the core.

At least, that's the theory as I understand it. But the PBMR project was cancelled as part of the South African government's cost-cutting measures, the project's rising cost and a belief that the commercial future of the project was bleak. There were also concerns from some quarters about the resistance of the graphite coatings on the spheres to fire. The intended pilot plant was not built.

However, I understand that there are other high-temperature reactors like the PBMR in development around the world, so the technology is still being pursued. It's an interesting approach to the problem of trying to get the benefits of nuclear power while minimising the downsides.

[1] http://www.pbmr.com/
The mathematics of being nice
Ask HN: Who executed an idea you had years ago?
Who has an old notebook filled with detailed scribblings about a "short-message sharing service", or a "location-based check-in site" that you sketched out then left to gather dust? Was your idea better in any way?
So the economy could become dependent on everyone keeping their software up to date..... As a web developer this scares me.
Are those running on your name or do you guys created a company?
I guess it keeps the IE developers in a job. IE was neglected before FF started taking market share away. Probably not many (or the right people) working on it before that.
Is the currency backed by CPU cycles?
Essentially yes.

If so, what are the CPU cycles being used for?
Essentially nothing. Just doing time consuimg calculations. Makes it hard to fake.
This is the problem that I had when I was applying to colleges: I used to ignore classes that bored me but were required and instead spent time that should have been spent on homework, etc. doing programming side projects and learning CS concepts.

When application season rolled around, I had to compete with candidates who had a much shallow understanding of their area of study, but had a much stronger overall GPA, loads of random APs, etc. While I did mention my side projects and depth in my area of interest, I didn't think to submit code or the actual projects; I usually just mentioned it in the questions or essays (which I'm not certain anyone even reads). This lead to quite a few rejections.

I'm at Georgia Tech now and doing well, because all my classes, more or less, are related to what I'm interested in. While I'm very happy here, I'm curious if I would be as happy if I wasn't accepted to Tech, and were instead studying in a place without such abundance of opportunity. I'm sure there are others in similar situations.
As much as I'd like it to be true, Firefox hasn't yet beaten IE in global market share. They are number one now in Europe (by some stats) and hold pole position in a bunch of countries but IE will need another 6-18 months to lose their #1 position at current rates.
That's not entirely correct. You don't need near perfect SATs/grades, especially at a place like MIT. I know plenty of people (myself included) who do not fit that bill. And there is plenty of opportunity to discuss your projects. I mailed MIT a packet of all the interesting work I thought I had done and they even have an optional essay where you can talk about "something you built" in their application. I think they really care about those pet projects and they are the best differentiator they have.
Funny how I tried to download iOS 4.3 from iTunes for my new iPhone 4 yesterday and the computer went to sleep while downloading it, which is around 700Mb. When I noticed I woke it up and clicked on resume, bang, went from 400Mb to "zero Kb" right away.

And, uh, it happened twice... Finally, at my third attempt I was able to download the whole thing after deactivating automatically sleep mode. As soon as it finished, an error was shown and so the file was lost again.
This is a bit of a naiive question, But what is the business rational behind Microsoft putting so much time and effort into IE? Where is the payback? Is it just so more people have Bing as their default search? Is it just so that Windows ships with a working modern browser as the user expects?

If anyone could clear it up for me,
Much appreciated

=)
The CA in question would likely prefer not to have their name all over this fiasco. Which is why the browsers blacklist something as opaque as serial numbers...
US judge writes unhappy ending for Google's online library plans
Wunderlist has a similar design to Things as has Flow. WunderList does crossplatform too using Titanium.
Listen to Old People
Touchscreen anyone? And i dont just mean iPads, i mean touchscreen monitors etc.
Lady Gaga interviewed by Google
This probably explains Mozilla's target of reaching Firefox 7 by end of 2011. They just really like cake.
Your analogy is slightly off. A wave is an act of nature: this is more along the lines of a jealous kid who knocks down someone else's sandcastle because he can't build his own.

In terms of moral culpability, sure. But when I put systems on the internet, I basically treat "intrusion attempts" as in practice part of the environment, like "mosquito bites" are in Texas. Perhaps they're best thought of as kids knocking down sandcastles rather than ocean waves, but their ubiquity makes them feel more like ocean waves, because you can basically assume that there are tons of those kids, and they're going to kick at your sandcastle every day.

The fact that there's a whole ecosystem of bots running automated intrusion attempts makes them feel a little bit force-of-nature-ish as well. If you lived in some neighborhood where thousands of roving robots were constantly checking doors to see if they could find an unlocked one, you'd have to treat "roving robots" as a quasi force of nature. Well, either that, or come up with a policing method that finds the controller of the robots and shuts them down, but I have relatively low hopes for how much of a dent "cybercrime" policing will make in the overall online-intrusion ecosystem.
You mean the pinned tab concept? I have no idea who started it but I used to have an extension on Firefox for that even before Chrome existed. Big Chrome fan here though.
Push Framework - Besides revolutions and couscous, Tunisians can also do this
Dude, I know natural language can be ambiguous, but I left no room for ambiguity.

So to summarize -- (1) misread what I said, (2) assumed I'm an idiot who can't find Chrome's History panel and (3) replied with "works on my machine" just to prove me wrong.

If you like Chrome, great, personally I love both browsers; but the issue here is that you should stay as far away as possible from real customers.
I invented Algebra when I was in elementary school. I had lots of slow loops trying to find values, then I realize I could "solve them".

I thought of Groupon.com, ether.com, and some of other stuff. Some of the ideas are fairly common, and the key is finding the right attack vector. Once you get integrated with a community or a business, you just see problems pop up. Once you have a problem, then you have an idea on how to solve it. The question is whether you can build it, ship it, market it, sell it.
VM Form Validator - JavaScript Form Validation Script Based on MooTools
PHPFog fucked up security, that's a given. And they should be thinking carefully on the lessons learned from that.

But your post seems to imply that the kids who did this have no responsibility for their actions; "it was just waiting to happen". This I strongly disagree with (not least because I work with 16 year old kids and they are completely able to take some level of responsibility for their actions).

Sure, at 16 your world view is incomplete and you can make rash decisions ("for the lulz") that backfire bigger and faster than you imagine. On the other hand there is no doubt they knew the illegality and the ethical issues with undertaking this - even if only vaguely.

And if they do not completely understand those issues, do you not think they should be taught them? As responsible adults we should be getting across to them in a sensible fashion that this was not a nice thing to do, and that the impact could have been a lot wider than it was.

Because if we don't and next time they do some real damage, well, that was an opportunity lost.

FWIW I think he crossed the line by causing damage. If I caught a kid breaking into my house I would probably drag him home to face his parents. But if he started smashing plates I'd be a little more pissed, that is a wanton act and probably needs a more severe punishment.

Sure, criminal charges are a silly approach in this case (no need to ruin his life for one silly mistake). Call his parents, explain what has happened and then get him to do some sort of "community service". That's an important lesson in consequence.

In this modern world 16 year olds are not nicking alcohol from the corner shop any more; they are breaking into websites. And that has potential for much more dramatic and widespread impact. We need to stop saying "oh, they're only kids". Instead we should recognise that 16 year old "hackers" exist on the internet and think of ways to communicate with them (ideally in a way that gives them an avenue for their curiosity without risking too much damage :)).

Bottom line; a 16 year old kid is a far cry from your dog when it comes to the ability to "understand" what you have done.

Just my 2p :)
What To Expect In Firefox 5 & Firefox 6: Features, UI & Performance Improvements
If it's not news, why are you linking to it?
Seems rather random to me. Amusingly, when I said "Munich" it understood "New York" - so perhaps somehow it already realized it is a city :-)

I have had a Nexus One for over a year now, and all the speech recognition does is annoy me if I accidentally hit the microphone icon and have to cancel it.

To be fair, I am not a native speaker of English, maybe it works better for native speakers.
Are your customers spammers? I'm having some trouble thinking of a legitimate use for this service...
Mind control - haven't tried it, but it could become huge...
Browsing included?
Cursing at Work: ways to avoid the sack
I had experience with multiple such examples. At the same time I was developing new functionality, my boss was also tweaking the libraries. So our tester kept telling me my code was broken. Then I'd look into it and find that the Strategy object used to calculate quantities in the whole app was broken. Again
I downvoted because the statement "It wasn't hurting anyone by being there" is wrong. Organizations and programs that advocate the ability to cure homosexuality are responsible for a lot of harm to individuals who are either forced into their programs or go to them willingly because they think something is wrong with them. These programs have caused or contributed to suicides among the LGBT community, so to say they aren't hurting anyone is just wrong.

this article mentions this: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/12/nyregion/12group.html?_r=3...
OOP will die right after structured programming. i.e. never.

I think over-engineered OOP will probably die out thou since as FP techniques become more common place, we will see more examples of good OOP with good FP rather than "everything as an object" mentality.
I don't know if this applies to the course you did but there used to be a lot of "conversion course" MSc courses in CS related areas in the UK.

These were very much targeted at people who did not have a background in CS.
Data Center Feng Shui: Reliability is not the Absence of Failure
What fraction of your customers are anything other than spammers?
> Maybe some of the ugliness of the old code has to do with handling bugs and corner cases that the programmer has forgotten about.

That's why I add comments to counter-intuitive pieces of code, often with a ticket number or a short explanation what goes wrong otherwise.
I think its fine if apps making fraudulent claims are removed.
Sure. But the government can still insist that all transactions paid in BitCoin are subject to a sales tax, which is payable only in legal tender (not BitCoin).

Money is whatever the market participants agree on, and laws are whatever the government agrees on.
Arguably, this is just that new domains appear or grow from what used to be niche areas into big ones. The old problem domains requiring ACID transactions still remain.
They have stats publicly available, so everyone can judge it themselves:

http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/apply/admissions_statist...

If you look at percentage rates, the self-selection of the candidates might make it look like it is not so rigoristic. But take a look at the absolute numbers, for example for the "SAT Reasoning Test Scores (Math)":

1172 / (1172 + 269 + 108 + 2) =~ 0.76

So 76% of the students enrolled have scores in the best 750-800 range.
Oh, like I said, in the current state of things I can't think of anything instructor-less I'd refer to as "a course". My point is that I believe that to be the state now, not an inherent, always-will-be state as your post seems to imply.
JavaScript tests & Compatibility tables
How to solve a song with math, Seattle Ignite
except that this is a privately owned app store. I defend Apple's right to exercise its property rights.

But not to the death. I'm busy that week.
probably just because I thought of a funny title.

good point.
Regarding the trackball: I use a "Kensington Expert Mouse" highly recommended!