skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The grades need to havebsome basic normalization because college admittance personell probably do not have the time to review several thousand projects during college application season to determine whether or not they actually demonstrate competence in the skills involved or if they were actually demonstrating the skills of the student and not the "projects that will get you into harvard" crib sheet the student was using. Grades and test scores have various drawbacks, but they are a relatively inexpensive normalization and filting mechanism compared to something like this; at the upper end of the spectrum you are doing projects in addition to grades/tests but the latter filters the project work that has to be considered to a manageable amount.
Knuth's fonts were meant to model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_metal_typesetting .
BS mythmaking mostly taken from a tabloid's sensationalist take on the book [1]. For one, the whole "Larry & Sergei asked Jobs to be CEO" story has been around for a long time and has been so blown out of proportion you'd think Steve had an office at Mountain View instead of the few meetings and offhand remarks that really occured. And the whole hiding the iPad from Schmidt seems deceptive in a few ways. For one, it was well known that Schmidt would often be asked to leave meetings if a conflict of interest was to be discussed. And for another, Google would have to be purposefully ignoring the outside world to be surprised that Apple was releasing a tablet.

1: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1375121/In-Th...
Yes! And believe it or not, Southwest is now the largest carrier in the US! What a success story.
Hotel Lima Peru | Hotel Plaza del Bosque ~ Hotel
And if you refactor without tests, “you’re not refactoring; you’re just changing shit”.

I'm reluctant to contradict this, because I am a fan of unit testing, but: it is entirely possible to safely refactor many programs that lacks unit tests by being disciplined about how you sequence the changes that you make. If you break down and organize your entire refactoring effort into a sequence of tranformations of your source code T1, T2,...Tn and you can prove to yourself that each step along the way that the behavior of your program did not change as a result of each step - and you can execute this sequence with fidelity, then you are refactoring, even in the absence of unit tests.

Although it is much better to have a regression suite.

Edit: on a more personal note, I remember when I first realized this. I was a young Java programmer, and I was given a class file and told to make it better. I had no idea what this code was supposed to do, and it was written by someone who was more of a project manager that wanted to try Java. It was enormous, and comprised of a mere handful of epic-ly long methods of deeply-nested if statements and loops. Everything was badly-named.

I was at a loss to make the code better without even understanding its function, but then my mathematical training kicked in: "...if I can make a sequence of small behavior-invariant transformations..." Aha!
And thus the meaning of "lunatic" came full circle.
Good God, my scrolling finger is cramping. It seems like a nice presentation, but maybe something more compact would be a more suitable online format?
If you want to get an idea about what kind of clusterfuck is ahead, just look at the on-going Arctic dispute: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Territorial_c....
`gosh` is security theater for piped shell scripts
Before I opened the 0MQ Pandora box I'd given up coding and was happily writing my autobiography. 0MQ seemed like a pleasant way to spend a weekend. But before I knew it, I'd lost control. Days, weeks, months have passed now, all I think about are more subtle and perfect messaging patterns. They flash before my eyes. Weird names and topologies. It doesn't get better, but worse. Soon I'll be coding all nighters, my wife will leave me, my kids will forget me, and all I'll be doing is programming, motherfucker.

Seriously, 0MQ has made network programming fun (again) in a bad, addictive, way. Any design I can think of turns into real working code in a few hours, sometimes days. And I'm using C, a language that isn't normally fun to work in.

Right now, it's multithreaded clients and servers for resilient shared distributed hash maps. Tomorrow, network-wide logging. After that, another message broker. And so on.

Yes, it's a negative experience. I'd like my old lazy life back.

For the love of god, don't try it.
I read a similar article which was written five days earlier: http://www.richardrodger.com/2011/04/05/the-javascript-disru...

The author points out that Douglas Crockford's writings have played a big part in the language's resurgence - his book "The Good Parts" was what turned me, and I suspect a lot of others, back on to Javascript.
I don't have a source for Google's original mission, but I think it is fair to say that their current mission is to collect as much information of all kinds as they can, make it findable by people, and make money by selling targeted advertising accordingly.

If Google make their products more social then their is a clear value-add for the consumer of the data, and also a value-add for advertisers. I don't think Page is making a mistake here at all.
Gmail and other services have run very poorly in the past - and when Google isn't recommending Opera users to use a supported or modern browser, they outright block the user string of the browser directly or indirectly[1]. I don't know if Opera's JS execution was just so abysmal that Google Reader and Gmail couldn't run at all in their first years, or what went on.

I had some more bookmarks on this, but I don't know where they are at the moment. Maybe I've misplaced them, or Opera sync botched something. I'll see if I can find some of them tomorrow.

[1]: http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2010/09/08/google-instant
Thanks for all the design feedback everyone! Fixed some of the site bugs you guys had mentioned. I'll probably post the blog entries about some of the design in a week or so. Follow me on twitter for those updates or if you have any other questions you want to ask me directly :) http://twitter.com/mactyler
Impressive, but might I suggest using a public domain ROM, instead of exposing yourself to a lawsuit:

http://www.zophar.net/pdroms/gameboy.html
Maybe I'm out of line but none of that looks too difficult. I studied a (spoken) language at school and was tested on that. Learning Latin isn't too different. The mathematical elements of the test looked straightforward.
- E-mailing de masse -

Tout comme vous je reçois chaque jour une bonne centaine d’E-mails publicitaires.
Cela ne me dérange pas trop outre mesure, et je ne fais pas partie de ceux qui hurlent immédiatement au spam loin de la.
Les éliminer me prend tout au plus une minute car sur G-mail il y a un petit " carré " qui marche très bien, mais parmi eux, il y en a certains qui m’intéressent quand même , car ils proposent des produits ou des trucs et des bidules et autres machins qui pourraient parfaitement figurer dans mon catalogue web ( c'est à dire ma corbeille ).....
http://webboutiquevelane19.blogspot.com/
The tail is wagging the dog here!

If you have to choose between a creative workforce that knows how to get things done and a standard workforce that fits inside of boxes and stereotypes, then damn the boxes and take the minds. Even if it costs some glorified HR person some trouble down the road.
I was expecting (or hoping) that the pictorial versions would somehow illuminate why these various identities hold. But they seem to be just an alternative set of symbols.

I wonder why numerals are used to represent 2 and 3 in some places, but stacked boxes are used in others?

The idea appears to be that artists find the use of colors easier to memorize / mentally manipulate compared to letters for variable identifiers. I'm not an artist, so I'm curious if others find this to be true.
1. If your t-shirt is going to shrink from a large to a small the first time you wash it - you've got a poor quality tee.

2. If you've got a poor quality tee that doesn't fit, why would I wear it?
Coda's talk was really, really good - especially the parts where he talks about taking measurements in a meaningful way.

I think that the talks are being recorded; it would be worth watching the video even if you've gone through the slides.
Disclaimer: Most of my knowledge of the Wild West comes from the movies.

In the WW they used to quite like public hangings, both legal and illegal. Why do you think they did this rather than just shoot people beside a grave and roll them in? As a deterrent to others is my guess.

I appreciate jedsmith and others views, and do somewhat support them, but lets say the OP had just issued a DMCA (and it was actioned). What has that achieved. The copier loses his site, so from the OP's perspective for this instance the problem is solved. Until next week the guy registers another domain, and another, and another. And his friends do it too.

I bet the guy doing the copying is going to think about it twice next time, and I bet one or two people will have read the blog post and rethought future plans.

Don't underestimate the amount of stress, time and legal costs that some people would spend trying to resolve a problem like this.

I know this Wild West killing is not the best approach but at this point in the history of the internet I am seeing few alternatives to prevent (ie not resolve post event) these things happening.
Or just have the user load a rom locally, like I do with my little NES ROM painter[0]. Nintendo strikes down hard on emulation like this. Although I see why he chose DKC, that is one beautiful GBC game.

[0]http://www.mattgreer.org/exercise/1nespaint
Better safe than sorry – take precautions with your phone
Listen to yourself. Where did you get the idea that I think we shouldn't pass laws or regulations at all? This is a message board political flame war rattling its cage trying to escape. Kill it.

I don't particularly support this regulation (I'm not totally against it, either). Many other things, I do think we should regulate.

What's wrong here is that I think it's too early in the connectivity industry to say that the incumbents we have now are so powerful that we should freeze them into place with regulations. And even if it isn't, it's not the place of an unelected and unaccountable FCC commissioner to pass a law that couldn't get passed through Congress, where the Constitution says new laws should come from.

Every time you say the FCC should be able to make up a new rule, you're in effect saying that the executive branch should be able to make rules there by fiat. I don't recall any us being so psyched about that prospect when Cheney was President.
If you're at least 25 and you weren't reading Yegge in 2006, it's time to seriously examine your priorities. ;)
I went to a cheap state school and mostly regret it, I wonder if there's any correlation?

> According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sarah Lawrence College has been the most expensive college in the country for the previous two academic years (2008–2009;2009–2010).

> The total cost of tuition, fees, room, and board for a student entering in the fall of 2009 was $55,788.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Lawrence_College#Tuition_...
Check for potential trademark issues.
Social is apparently so important that one of the founders of Google has concluded their lack of it is an existential threat. What should the punishment then be for execs of Google fucking up one of their best shots at social? Setting and/or changing the culture is one of an executive's jobs.
I know you're joking, but...

When I was in college, I was hanging out with some guys who worked for Greenpeace. I asked them, "how would you feel about mining the moon for raw materials?" The response I got back was basically, "NO!", "THAT'S HORRIBLE!", "O.M.G. YOU'RE EVIL!"

I tried to explain that the moon was a big, lifeless, ball of rock. But they were having none of it. They all thought we should leave the moon alone, pristine in its lifelessness. <shrug>
Has any group done a similar thing to promote Indian startups? Sounds like a more sustainable and helpful thing in the long run. Give a man a job in your company, and he'll work for you for the rest of a life. Teach a man to build his own company, and he'll work for himself.
This is why you should take part on StudentCompetitions.com to show-n-prove what you got instead of getting that grade everyone else got. Soon new platforms will be rolled out. Without getting into details; imagine GitHub but for everything - in competition-format. If it sounds like a bad idea I just wasn't detailed enough. ;)
Raw Tube
Haskell on iPhone
There's an art to knowing when to move on. Congrats to PJ and kudos to groklaw!
Cable franchises and rights of way are scarce goods that were quickly priced according to the markets. Regulations are, in part, an attempt to limit the value of those goods and reprice those goods. This doesn't sound like a good plan to me; the government is good at a good many things, but price discovery is not one of them.

The next wave of connectivity providers hopefully will not depend on rights of way. If you want to talk about things the government should do to balance out Internet access, let's reevaluate how we're handling the RF spectrum.
"I never drink beer" --FlorianMueller (http://lwn.net/Articles/402113/)

Really explains a lot in my humble opinion. (Not necessarily the not drinking of beer, but the rather unnecessary pointing out that he doesn't drink beer)
You think things were used more carefully during the Teapot Dome era? :)
I would like to go just a little OT here and say Steve Wozniak is truly a genius and it was not until reading Founders At Work that I completely understood how much so. His talents unquestionably span far beyond some mere mortals like myself.
It is the anti-pioneering spirit in me telling me that this is rubbish?
You mean “unlike so many of his tech peers with opinions on the education system”, right? Because otherwise that fact is as irrelevant as the fact that Woz has never been a policeman. Or is teaching especially related to tech in some way I’m not seeing?

Edit: why the downvotes? I seriously don’t understand why the parent comment is mentioning that apparently irrelevant fact; I’m not just being nitpicky.
That sounds like my dream hacker college. As a drop-out myself, I am thinking of going back to school sometime in the future, and wondering if SLC might be right place for me.

If you don't mind me asking, why did you drop out? Were there anything wrong with the school/system that made you move to SF without finishing your degree, or was it only for personal reasons?

Would really appreciate if you could share your overall experience at SLC.
Do you have the internet? How would you like it if the FCC required you to pay an extra $20 a month to get movie downloads, whether you want them not, or to allow your kids to access violent video games or adult content, whether you want them to or not, just so everyone would get what the government considers to be “the full Internet experience?” What if you’re low income, and you’d rather spend that $20 on books? Or warm clothes? Or food?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like advocates of net neutrality want low income people to have that choice.

(note words above are not mine)
No? Not really? Pretty sure AT&T and Comcast spend way way more of their own money forklifting in CRS1's and terminating circuits? From where do you get the idea that the major carriers are heavily subsidized? I'm sure they get breaks, but no, I don't think your taxes fund AT&T, Comcast, L3, &c.
There is no company I have to deal with on a regular basis that is worse than the electrical company.

This Internet stuff is not really a voting issue for me (health care and education are the big things that make me a Dem and not a Lib), but the candidate that tells me he wants to turn AT&T into Commonwealth Edison has secured a donation from me to his opponent.

Be careful what you wish for.
Makes sense. Good career move. Cement your position even if the cement sinks the ship.

She's married now anyway, we'll see how deep the bond goes.

Google Ventures should do micro-seeding. Google should also remunerate against project traction and returns, and maybe disconnect pay from position.
Fast search for Python docs
I'm using bcrypt cause Coda told me so.
The page seems to have been removed from nyu.edu. Strange.
Question: for the random number generator, instead of changing the internal prime numbers, can't you use a seeded generator (e.g.: mersenne twister), using the "i" value (the function number) as a seed?
PJ is very knowledgeable and well respected. She also ran groklaw on a voluntary basis at a great cost in terms of time and energy. In some sense, she will probably feel that she's getting her life back.
It's nothing personal, he's just doing his job: http://lwn.net/Articles/434587/
I don't know anything about the education system in USA but looking at the numbers the university I am currently attending has to deal with every year and the amount you have to deal with when hiring I can bet the difference in size is quite big.

If we look at the university I attend, it currently has above 16000 students, with I would assume an average time as student of 3 years. The program I attend had more than 3000 applicants out of which 200 were selected. Not all programs have that ratio but I would not find it strange if the average was a ratio of 10:1.
Using these numbers we thus have (16000/3)*10=~53000 students applying each year. (I did a quick search and my numbers are surprisingly correct.) The university has 3 weeks to make its selections.

Please tell me how to do that with your system.
All this is reasonable. Having said that, on an issue where reasonable people can so clearly have reasonable disagreements, and where so much is at stake, it is simply not unreasonable for Congress to demand that rulemaking occur the legislative process.

The EFF is right about this. Whether you like net neutrality or not, you should hope the GOP wins this one. I don't want to imagine what stupid shit President Romney could come up with for the FCC to do to the Internet.
Startup swag: effective marketing or waste of pens?
Socket AM3 to work with AM3+ CPUs? Sort of...
crappiest looking billion $ project Ive seen
...interesting though
On one hand, he says he hates the phrase, but it doesn't look like he hates what it means - or maybe he doesn't understand what it means - I'm a little confused by the take-away from the article.

That being said...

Re-inventing the wheel should mean throwing away everything we know about the wheel and inventing something that solves the same problem - only better.
I'm kind of in the same boat. I'm evaluating it right now to see if it'd be suitable for iOS<-->server comms, but it seems more like something you'd use behind the server gateway.

Thing is 0MQ gives you transparent auto-reconnection--but I want to indicate with a spinner when that's happening--and it makes request-reply synchronous--but I already do everything asynchronously in the client anyway. Hmm.
congrats :)
Standardization per se is not the problem. Standardization creates a base pool of knowledge and skills which are necessary to formulate, innovate, collaborate, and build projects.

Instead, standardization should be limited to a well defined subset of academics and education.
Do people actually run bash scripts from the internet without reviewing them first?
Totally disagree. I don't think I've ever heard this phrase used when someone's primary intention is to make a better wheel. If you're building cars, do not try to reinvent the wheel. Leave it to someone who is all about wheels.

Which is my main beef with this article: when it comes to developers, you absolutely can reinvent a piece of technology, but if it's not the focus of your business, you need to be prepared to make it your focus if it's really that important or that big an opportunity. There are a ton of great examples of technology being reinvented or improved (see HipHop from FB and FlockDB from Twitter), but they tend to represent a marginal plus to the business and are still not their core focus. I hate it when developers want to create their own database for their app, their own game engine for their game, etc. Wheels, game engines, and most software is a full time business, not an adjunct. Just use what's available to you until you absolutely need to do it over or do it yourself.
Agreed. I had to Google it, and I don't really know what word he meant either now.
Wish they found some way for users to use opera.com instead.
Gerard K. O'Neill is smiling up in heaven at this — if you don't know him read his bio: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._ONeill
The internet gets boring (relative) and you're almost guaranteed no distractions. The other time I've found for myself is on public transit (busses/trains) where I have imperfect internet (tethered 3/4G) which is enough for hitting third party APIs and some quick documentation/SO/github lookups but not much else.
Ignored, completely.
>> Once a private enterprise can go mine asteroids they're going to have far more capital (i.e. money) than any nation on Earth.

Private enterprises like the Rothschilds and Rockefellers have had more money than any nation on Earth for more than a century.
Exactly my point. People don't realize the flaws in the blog software they use until they encounter a bunch of traffic.
They didn't push it to everyone yet, I don't have it...
Just for the record there was a movement in '79 against the US signing the treaty: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L5_Society#Moon_Treaty.2C_decli...
Hackers missions
You can use the left and right arrow keys to jump to the previous or next slide. It’s much easier than scrolling, and when successive slides are similar, it is easier to spot what changed.
I have to admit I need a tldr here
ML-like constructs in C++
+1. I learn the most from reinventing wheels. And I reinvent them on purpose.
a 'project-centric' education might be great for hackers (i.e., everyone who reads this website), but remember that not everybody wants to build stuff for a living, and even for people who do want to 'build stuff', the kinds of things they might want to build likely aren't as easy to get started with as software.

what kinds of projects would you propose for kids who want to be lawyers? doctors? hairstylists? law enforcement? military? basically anything except for engineering?
Virtual Cinematography - Image-based rendering and some ancient history
Having read a bunch of stories and comments on HN about education, I suddenly have an urge to send my future kids to Montessori or Waldorf schools.
I'm not convinced that you're correct, but let's assume so anyway. The point I am making is that technological superiority buys you far more than mere cash. This is why I referred to "capital" and parenthesised "money". Apologies if this wasn't clear enough.
I have fantasized about doing this for 15 years, and after reading this, I think I have finally got the motivation to do it.
GOD YES

I totally want something like this in education. I have a learning disability. I can't remember stuff so easily but I do love making things and that is how I learn best.

College, as much as I loved it, was always this sisyphean treadmill of quizzes, homeworks, and exams -- almost always covered in red. The cycle was, do homeworks, think I did it right, get back bad marks. Re-do homework, hoping I did it right. Take exams, fail exams because I couldn't tell if I did them right with HWs. It's like Waterfall and Education put together.

One class I took, Systems Programming, was the most helpful because there were no real tests or homeworks -- it was projects. It got my only A in college from this course, mostly because of the MUD I wrote for the final project. Other classes where this worked was English Lit, science labs but not the accompanying courses (sort of), others I can't remember.