skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is rare, but not unheard of; I can think of fiveish people off the top of my head that were admitted to MIT and Caltech without a high school diploma. All of the cases I know of are kids who just decided to leave high school without finishing their requirements, and went directly into one of the tech schools a year early.

The blog post mentions that there 'was no place nearby to go to high school.' That's really the issue in play. All of the 'MIT a year early' people I know about made a case to admissions that they had exhausted all of the resources at their schools and the time for MIT was now. The tech schools don't discriminate against lack of opportunity. If you're perceived as not taking all of the opportunities presented to you, though, you're finished. The post mentions that he took some community college classes. This shows a desire to learn and an ability to take advantage of the resources available to him. If he hadn't gotten a high school diploma because he was just too cool to be bothered, I imagine that he would have had more of an uphill battle.
Just switched to an Apple Magic Trackpad after years of wishing that someone would make a giant trackpad. It's everything that I had hoped for.
Is Astrology hate sugar-coated with pseudo-science?
yeah, use vimperator [http://vimperator.org/vimperator]
It requires cheap trackability to tax.

Of course, BitCoins are easily trackable, thus doomed. It was possible, though, to design them without this property, ensuring that costs of tracking offset the potential tax gains.

EDIT: It would be fun to consider the arbitrage opportunities rendered possible by such sales tax.
I'd like to hear more about this. I've been thinking of getting more into photography myself. It seems like wedding photography is a bad idea as it's way overdone. I was thinking architecture or portrait photography. What did you all end up doing?
The term is subjective, yes, but an app that promises a Gay Cure is by definition offensive, no matter what definition of "offensive" you choose -- it's also medically dangerous, since gayness is not really a disease.

So if Apple pretends that it's doing this approval for the betterment of the App Store, like a Shepard blocking out impure apps from its garden, then they'd better make sure Gay Cure apps are out, otherwise they are hypocrites.
Sprint Brings Glasses-Free HTC EVO 3D and New HTC EVO View 4G Android 2.4 Tablet
Dude, you started the metaphor with tour comment. Can't exactly blame someone for calling you out on it.
It's called TrackPoint. I got so used to it that now I buy a USB thinkpad keyboard for my desktops too.
How do you advertise? This sounds like a great idea but I'd be interested what your strategy is to get eyes on the books, since this can often be so much effort as to not be a passive income anymore.
The xcode 4 templates are in svn trunk: http://svn.macosforge.org/repository/ruby/MacRuby/trunk/misc...
Or distribute a file that wasn't Avatar.mp4, but looked like it to the Dropbox client?

Modern hashing algorithms make this practically impossible, sorry.

Just because you have a hash string that's not technically a copyrighted film, you could still be guilty of copyright infringement. cf. http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
I also like to use the UltraNuv buttons together with the trackpoint (nipple). Trackpoint + the middle button - nothing beats this for scrolling. Except maybe C-V and M-V :)
Yup. A call filtering application with the ability to filter off unimportant calls from family and friends and allow urgent calls from these people through.

Took about 2 weeks to get the first sale. Now it is selling at a rate of 1 copy a day
Well, the long school years is a way to structurally hide mass unemployment now that we don't have child labour. If youngsters could provide meaningful work and pick up their skills on the way, things would look radically different. Especially in the turtle-pace that tuition normally take. Sure, learning takes time to settle, but why not do something meaningful while the learning settles?
Why the Web is Like a Rain Forest
The math portion of the SAT doesn't even cover precalculus (stops at Algebra II). Would you really expect someone who scored below 700 to have otherwise impressive credentials?

I'll agree that the more stellar applicants do tend to have high SAT scores but that's also in part because they are a) stellar and b) the SAT is a trivial test. I still disagree that SAT is a cutoff or benchmark. I highly doubt the admissions committee sees a 600 and throws the student out before reading the rest of their application to look for things that stand out. That said, there are tons of students with 800s that don't stand out at all and get weeded out.

Exceptional candidates will be exceptional regardless of their standardized testing scores.

Edit: Not trying to say that they admit all the exceptional people either. I'm absolutely positive plenty of people get screwed by the limited number of slots despite being more than qualified.
Or conkeror, if you prefer Emacs bindings.
You could ask the same of Google and Chrome.

An excellent treatise on the topic is discussed in Breaking Windows: How Bill Gates Fumbled the Future of Microsoft, by David Bank. It describes a lot of the tensions that existed inside Microsoft as they tried to figure out how to continue selling Windows as a platform, while still seeing the threat of the web as a platform on the horizon. IE was part of that threat response to stay in the game, ahead of the game, and in control of the game.
My most recent venture started out as a side project and is now becoming my main focus. It is a simple Twitter App which makes it easy to share more on Twitter whilst annoying your followers less (by helping you to avoid tweeting 5 links in a row within minutes).

It took 7 weeks for me to take it from idea to launching the MVP (during most of the build period I had people using the service).

I had my first paying customer 4 days after launch. It has now been running for just under 4 months and I am making $315/mo, though that number is rising almost every day (it is a freemium service with a free plan and paid plans priced $5/mo and $30/mo).

I am likely to reach ramen profitability within a few months and will focus fully on it.

I blogged about how I took it from idea to first paying customer, which may be of interest - http://blog.bufferapp.com/post/3328167762/idea-to-paying-cus...
I agree, it's wonderful! Totally worth the price... I've had mine for several years now, and I've had to get a replacement because the first one died. It was in warranty, and it was replaced by support with no hassle at all. No cross-ship, no return shipment at all, just 'peel off the serial code, then trash it'.
yeah I think those courses do still exist, mine was a straight-up MSc though.
As long as you can have significant number of users on your software, you can direct (or misdirect) the direction of that technology.

Nobody knows how bigger the web browser is going to be, MS sure doesn't want to lose the power in influencing and ensuring that their other product stay relevant.
I think the ability to automatically update people's browsers is an extremely valuable weapon of Google's. Compared to the slow, manual releases of FF and IE, Google surely has the advantage that new features will be seen by the public earlier on Chrome than elsewhere.

Does anyone know of Mozilla or Microsoft having any intention of switching to a more continuous release cycle?

(I believe Google uses http://code.google.com/p/omaha/ to push their updates out - quite a fascinating piece of software.)
I tried to get some free coins through the bitcoin faucet to a newly generated address (18YTP3wEbaiNX2QaQ4k1Gi89JgXntxAiff), but so far haven't received anything. Might be a problem on my end, or the transactions might just be slow, or they didn't send anything to me at all, but so far bitcoin transactions don't give the same instant gratification paypal or credit card payments give me, where you press the 'buy' button and get access to a service immediately. Perhaps this will get faster when the network becomes bigger, or if I use one of those digital wallet sites instead of running the client myself?
A bit weird, but a RollerMouse Pro (http://www.rollermousepro.com/).

I got it once while fighting a bout of RSI and it's a bit weird but I really like it.
I had a mouse next to it for quite a while but after not touching it for a year I'm now all in.
EReader tops Tcl's Google summer/code ideas list
I didn't say anything about trust.

It was merely a suggestion to look at Iron or talk to the developers as they promote their product as an alternative to Chrome along the lines of privacy. You'd think they'd be in a good position to point out the differences.
I have an old project (http://sudokugarden.de/) where I built a website about Sudoku back at University when I was bored. I consider it feature complete, and have stopped to actively promote or develop it for two or three years now. I still make 1.5k to 2k per year in advertising (mostly CEO text links - adsense prices in that segement are too low to be profitable, and I don't want to bother the visitors too much. People who sign in for free don't see any adds). I made my first dollars a few month after the launch, when my adsense account finally reached the threshold for the first payment.

I'm now working on a project where I want to collect semantic relations between books (sequels, prequels, translations into other languages etc.). It's not launched yet, so no income so far. It will have affiliate links to book stores. See https://github.com/moritz/quelology if you are interested in details.
> The implication of the app in question is that if you are gay you are some kind of diseased freak that can be "cured".

Well, the organisation that created this app explicitly believes that. There's nothing implicit about it.

But it's not like they're forcing this app on people. I'm assuming it's being willingly used by people who believe homosexuality is wrong and think they can stop their own homosexual urges.

If that's what they believe, let them go for it, I reckon. I don't have a right to tell them that they should be having relations that they clearly believe are wrong or immoral.
For what it’s worth I spend ages restricting my laptop purchases to Thinkpads and Latitudes for the nipple; ended up resigning myself to Macbook due to OS X and found that I was far more productive on the big trackpad and gestures than I’d ever been with the nipple.
you could do better. i have an identical business with exactly 23 sites that averages about $900/mo and rising.
It's a shameless plug for my own project idea, see http://wiki.tcl.tk/28062

Last year I devised an open source alternative to Adobe AIR (http://code.google.com/p/deskml/) and intend to use that as the platform. I've already got some code written for the ereader, that mounts and unzips an epub using Tcl's virtual file system capabilities, and changes the embedded web server's document root to a file indicated inside the epub by the epub meta data. Etcetera.

Come join the project, if you're a student you can get paid by Google, and after the summer we should have a nice startup bootstrapped.
Not if the cake hasLayout.
Depends on application really. I love the big apple trackpads for general browsing, coding etc. A mouse is much better for precise Photoshop work or gaming. Mind you, I tend to use a gamepad for gaming these days. Guess I’ll put a mouse as that’s what I use day to day the most.
Bikereisen mountainbikereisen bikeferien
I think the following sums it up quite nicely:

"Of course you need good scores and good grades to get into MIT. But most people who apply to MIT have good grades and scores. Having bad grades or scores will certainly hurt you, but I'm sorry to say that having great grades and scores doesn't really help you - it just means that you're competitive with most of the rest of our applicants. MIT is very self-selecting in that regard."

From: http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/apply/the_selection_proc...
Due Diligence for a startup - what's involved?
Hi HN! We've received an offer to buy us out :)

Just wanted to know what's usually involved in due diligence for a 1 year old web start up. How do we prepare for it etc.

Cheers
I also like Track-Point on my ThinkPad. Probably the benefit is that I can use it without removing any of my hands from the keyboard.
I've been looking for a good mouse alternative. I really wanted to like the apple magic trackpad but found it too imprecise for anything but casual surfing/consuming.

I also tried a Wacom Bamboo but wasn't precise enough either and I didn't feel like spending more on a better tablet. The other issue with a tablet is you then have this pen in your hand which you have to either hold while typing or put down/pick up each time you need to use it.

I may give a kensington trackball a try. I've had friends who swear by them.
Laser Space Telescope Could Test for Vanishing Dimensions
why not get out of the judgment business, it's a loser.

just let (a significant number of) users report "potentially offensive apps" and make a category out of it. if the ratio is overwhelming then (users) ban the app.
I am working on web projects and I can confirm the costs scale. It gets even worse if you are doing e-commerce, then you lose real $$$ as well.

You may think with all the fancy tools and smart frameworks you should be safe. But refactoring becomes more and more difficult as you incur debt and your tools and frameworks give up on you at one point.
OK, a couple of things.

Firstly, the world is full of things that seem obvious, but subsequently turn out to be false. Correlation does not imply causality, and studies to check apparent connections and that then find that they're real, should still be published. Ridiculing them is what has led to a state where negative results don't get published, and hence the same work is endlessly repeated.

Secondly, if you really, really know you chemistry, or you talk to some really advanced chemists, you'll find that they don't really understand why water is wet. That understand the concept of "wetting," but that's not the same thing. Millions of dollars are spent by various industries every year investigating the phenomenon of "wetting." So that's not obvious.
A potential security hole in the "obvious" answer to a standard question
How to recognize Fake and Genuine for iPad 1 & iPad 2  - منتديات قروب الساهر
I mostly agree, however I think it is important to highlight that these considerations have a real-world impact.

One of the biggest fallacies out there is that good software engineering is about aesthetics and somehow detached from the resultant product, e.g. 'the user doesn't care about how it's implemented' etc. - this is patently false, as code quality dictates robustness, maintainability and ability to make changes to the code base, both during development and after shipping the thing.
Am I the only one who becomes functionally useless after the first 24 hours? I'm nearly 30 now, but the maximum I'd have done 10 years ago was 36 hours.
Quick tip - the vimperator team had an internal disagreement and both of the lead devs split. The fork, pentadactyl, looks like it's under much more substantive development. http://dactyl.sourceforge.net/pentadactyl/
I am acutely aware of how well some people can do but I just didn't have the time to do more back linking / articles, so for me I was more than happy with the return.
I completely agree. For years now I've been working on using the mouse less and less and the keyboard more and more up to the point now that I hardly ever use the mouse (a couple of months ago I sat down and used a public terminal for 25 minutes before I discovered that somebody had stolen the mouse).

Up to now I've been using conkeror for my browsing need (and w3 in the terminal when following links in email from wanderlust in emacs) since emacs is my OS of choice. However I'm now in the process of converting to chrome. I found out that with the help of some extensions and a little bit of scripting I will be able to have a chrome almost as keyboard driven as conkeror and finally be able to use some extensions I have sorely missed in conkeror (biowalled2browser, readability, etc) and that most google products work fine without having to write modes for them (nice since many of googles products are rather keyboard driven by nature)

Why do I do this? For one I hate wasting time, and I hate wasting screen real estate. My computer should be a tool that helps me get tings done as fast as possible, not something beautiful to look at. The more use of GUI and/or mouse the slower one works. If you can to everything from the keyboard, and _know how_ to do it from the keyboard, you can work much faster than when jumping back and forth between the keyboard and mouse or other pointing device.

But I take it one step further. Being all about efficiency I don't want to have to move my hands much either. I therefor strive for using and/or creating setups where ones hands never have to leave the asdf-jkl; position of the keyboard. Thus I don't use enter (C-m or C-j), I don't use arrow keys, and avoid at all cost using any keys that are not reachable without moving my hands from the home location on the keyboard.

To sum up: Basically I'm a keyboard and efficiency geek ;)
I can agree with that (and with you for the most part). I just maintain that "near perfect" isn't part of the equation.

Edit: I never was really arguing against this (just that near perfect notion). There's a big difference between near-perfect and bad.
Sorry, I'm not hip enough so you just downvote me?
AFAIK in both the US and UK you can still say whatever you want quite freely. Where the issue comes up is when people try to incite hatred, because all our laws fall under everyone else's rights being above our own.
so basically, you're a pimp
Smoking is medically dangerous.

Should Apple ban iSmokeit and other apps that facilitate smoking?
Trackpoint, jacked up to max speed and acceleration, with 3 mouse buttons under my thumbs. Like a CLI, it takes a while to train yourself to fire the mouse pointer to any spot on the screen with just a twitch, but once you do, you never want to take your hands off the keyboard to scratch like a cat in a litterbox again.

Unfortunately, only IBM (Lenovo) makes a good one, and few people train themselves to use it, so it's likely to disappear. People try it for a minute or two and decide that it's terrible. I wonder how they did their first minute on a bicycle....
Classifying blatant racism under free speech can have actual consequences too. Consider the genocide in Rwanda in which racist radio programmes encouraged massive killings. You could say that everyone's responsible for their own actions, nobody forced anyone to grab machettes and kill their neighbours, but somehow that argument falls apart when you're dealing with mass hysteria.
Glaring typos in the third paragraph, with repeated phrases and bold text. Good story, though. Upvoted.
I built (literally) a couple of these a few years ago while learning about SEO and never did anything else with them. At their best, they were making something like $300 per month (combined). With the last Google algo update the rankings are pretty much screwed and these sites now make something like $20/mo.

I also know some people with hundreds or thousands of these kind of sites and I can assure you they're not happy.

Building a business that depends on Google's algo to be profitable doesn't make any sense to me.

EDIT: When I say it doesn't make sense to me I'm talking about side-projects where the goal is passive income. If you're going at it full-swing and plan on pivoting as required then it can absolutely be a genuine business model.
We call it cl...r (other part of body).
I still find iOS app updates on the device a bit hit and miss.
Google Flips Switch on Real Time Analytics
a few years ago (well, the weekend after my second son was born and i thought: hey, i need more money) i created http://www.facesaerch.com/, basically an alternative interface to googles image search with face filter turned on. the initial version took me 2 days (my son slept the most of the time anyways).

i did some basic SEO stuff (i.e. alt tags for images, a sitemap XML, an auto expanding index) and got some coverage for it on various sites (lifehacker, ...) which was quite easy because everybody loves searching for themselves.

the site is still hosted on a 1 EUR webspace / month and during its best time it had about 54.000 visits a day.

as for the business case: on a site with only images, people click on (google) ads. don't know why, they just do it. so the money was good.

google was ok for it for quite some time (hey, they even covered it on a google code showcase blog) but well i kept pushing the boundaries so i got a penalty (again and again).

now i got about 5000 visits a day from baidu and bing, but it's hard to grow these traffic sources (well that's true for bing, for baidu its mostly the language barrier). it was fun while it lasted, now i just don't care anymore. i keep it around (even though some people would like to buy it) as i might transform it into a real product sometime.

so what the bottom line: building a (SEO) sideproject for passive income is possible, but don't bet on it that it will last forever. oh yeah, maybe also: images + ads = awesome conversion
> the infinite supply of free cakes is easily convertable to cash.

Do you think there's a big market for second hand IE branded cakes? ;-)
Advertising as a revenue stream
"Something Ventured" in 1950, which we know as Venture Capital 
Epic movie about the Venture captial, all the actor are Original Venture capital.
In California, you can take the CHSPE

http://chspe.net/

to enroll in community college as young as 16. California has made it really easy to transfer from community colleges to UC schools. Transferring in to UC Berkeley's computer science program is very doable, especially if you apply through its College of Letters and Science (which you want to do anyway, since they are a lot more lenient than the College of Engineering in terms of letting you take time off and choosing the classes that interest you).

Advantages of this route:

* You can skip 2 years of high school and graduate with a BA while your high school friends are finishing their second years of college.

* You save money living with your parents and going to community college for the first 2 years.

* Your chances of getting in to a prestigious UC actually increase quite substantially.

This is roughly what I did and I've been extremely happy about it. Feel free to contact me for details/individual advice: [my username] at gmail dot com
surely the answer to that is that I shouldn't accept someone's bitcoins without being connected to the network to be able to check if they were already spent. this kind of "offline" transaction isn't allowed with regards to a credit card, why would it be allowed in our system?
Another language to learn? What is the problem in using Phonegap to accomplish the same?
How to Help Japan’s Earthquake Survivors by giving to Japanese Organizations
> The term is subjective, yes, but an app that promises a Gay Cure is by definition offensive

By your definition - it had thousands of downloads and the organisation that produced it has thousands of members who clearly do not find it offensive and that likely extends to tens or hundreds of thousands of evangelicals (if not millions).

That's how subjective works.
How to import AVI to iMovie with AVI to iMovie Converter Mac?
There was a thread (AMA) with Firefox guys on reddit last week, and continuous/fast release cycle is one of things that they want to focus on now. They want to start using it this year.
Damn. I had no idea that being run out of SA with your tail between your legs back in the day was such a predictor of success. Who'd have thought it?
Can you link to the context of that statement?

I think maybe he was trying to say something else, but said it in a misleading/funny way?
I don't have public a site up for the project. But we could get in touch through mail, my mail is miathan.6<at>gmail.com .