skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree about the shortest path stuff being purely novelty stuff-- but I must admit it was the first thing that came to my mind when I tried to connect Wikipedia with graph theory.

Personally, I like playing around with graph theory, but I have yet to come up with a compelling business case-- I wish you luck, and hope you find something cool (and lucrative.) I'd probably be a customer of a fast graph database, but I doubt there are a lot of other graph theory hobbyists out there.
I found this post interesting, given that I heard a similar rant in the speaker lounge at a conference a while back—a designer was complaining loudly about people who asked her what tools she used to produce her oft-admired products (obviously, I'm anonymizing here). "MY BRAIN," she said snarkily.

My reaction (which I suppressed at the the time, since I was rehearsing my talk yet again) was that not everyone is out to get you when they ask about this. Not everyone expects to be able to do what you do just by picking up the same tools. Many people may just be asking out of interest, looking for alternatives to the applications they currently use, trying to improve processes.

Personally, I'm happy to evangelize the tools I use. I think they improve my productivity, and in general the more people using something, the better the community around and support for it.
We need to stop fooling ourselves and just flat-out have masters and apprenticeship. When the system in schools and in companies works, it boils down to this anyhow. (I'm not including prodigies that you couldn't keep from learning no matter what you did. I'm talking about those talents that wouldn't flower if they didn't fall into the right circumstance to reach their full potential.)
Hooray! Broad generalizations!
College is a place where you learn to learn, or should be...
I thought grails used groovy, a jvm language (but not java)...
Most people don't have a reasonable alternative at the time.
Cineplex big screens available to Xbox gamers
I personally think college-education is over rated as of today. The only reason education worked as a good model was because there was scarcity of Information and this information could be obtained only if you paid tons of money and joined college.

Today times have changed drastically, a guy sitting in remote part of Africa(with a basic internet connection) can obtain the same information which the guy in Stanford or MIT is trying to obtain.

Colleges surely had advantages a decade back like Mentors, Teachers, Abundant Information, Labs, Job Guarantee. But today Internet is replacing all these one by one and colleges today can't guarantee jobs. Unless colleges start offering something really substantial else they will have a tough time competing with internet educated population which is growing day by day.
Thanks PG and YC!
For whatever reason, Singaporeans seem quite willing to discuss how strict their laws are, but Americans and Brits are not such big fans of wondering how Singapore can live with its absurdly low crime rate.

https://www.osac.gov/Reports/report.cfm?contentID=82856

This is incredible stuff: "Murder cases reported for the first half of the year declined to six in this city-state of 4.5 million people, compared to twelve cases reported for the same period in 2006. The Regional Security Officer (RSO) estimates the current number of murders at the end of 2007 to be approximately eight. All murder cases for the period have been solved. Reported incidents of rape increased for this period to 70 cases, compared to 53 cases during the same period in 2006. Motor vehicle theft and snatch theft incidents increased 25 percent during the first half of 2007. Housebreaking incidents for the first half of 2007 declined ten percent. The “outraging of Modesty,” a Singaporean crime pertaining to unwanted sexual touching, is reported to have increased a negligible amount."

Twelve murders per year, in a city of 4.5 million people! New York City, a little over twice as big, is bragging that their murder rate is under 500 for the first time in decades. They are bragging that you are only 2000% more likely to get stabbed, strangled, shot or beaten to death in NYC than in Singapore.

The fairest analogy is that Singapore is run the way a private business would run a nation-state. Private property maximizes the rent they can collect from their residents, but political freedom is pretty worthless. Google doesn't let users determine their search algorithm, and won't even bow down when they accidentally link to something reprehensible (Google "Jew", for example). If someone wants to switch, they can switch to Yahoo!

It's instructive that it is so much cheaper to leave Singapore than to leave the US -- Singapore is a pretty small city, and there are plenty of other small, English-speaker-friendly places in the area. If the cost of switching governments got as low as the cost of switching search engines, you'd expect the quality of government to approach that of online search -- Singapore is a great example of what you get when you move along that continuum.
Series AA Equity Financing Documents
His post is bullshit, opensource software sucks for this reason ... its built by a bunch of hackers that don't know anything about interaction design or what customers want and need, don't know much about much of anything other than the technical.

Its great when the users are all techies ... but in my opinion most of the desktop apps suck ... openoffice is a piece of shit.

I totally agree with edw519 ... this guy just doesn't know what a product developer does or how to do it. Contrary to the elitist hacker opinion that these people don't know what they are doing ... effective, methodological product developer actually do contribute significantly to finding out what people want. A lot of programmers need to let go of their egos and realize that they are not know-it-alls.
game. changing.
College is an aspect of upper- and upper-middle-class life (formerly) that has replicated on account of the status and advantage once conferred by the college degree. Now it's a requirement for a large set of jobs, most of which wouldn't even be considered desirable.

Is college a massive waste of time and money for a lot of people? Probably. I think it's useless and unfair to put a person through college and then have him end up in a job that does not involve the level of autonomy and intellectual challenge that college led him to expect. Since society has not evolved to the point where good jobs are abundant, it's hard to see any good reason for more than 5-10% of people to have college educations.

One has to examine the motivations behind the proliferation of higher education. The far left supports widespread college education under the belief that if lower- and middle-class people have the benefit of a liberal education, they'll demand good jobs and become "Angry Young (Wo/)Men" if they don't get them and, therefore, evolve into revolutionaries who will overthrow the status quo. The corporate right likes it because the colleges provide companies with a sorting mechanism, the costs of which are paid by the people being sorted rather than the corporate "users". The center supports widespread college education under the guise of increasing social equality. It's obvious that an idea with such support from both the wings and the center will be implemented.

Also, there are the goals of the academics. In the 1950s, professors widely believed that a merger between the academy and the larger capitalistic society would improve their social position. As they saw it, rule of society by educational institutions seemed to be the next logical step after rule by the church until the Enlightenment, by governments up to World War I, and finally by business corporations in the XX-c. They got their desired "merger" but Mammon, being larger and meaner, won and turned the academy to its needs, rather than vice versa.
The problem with social skills, is that they're learned in a cultural/social context. For many, the desired quality and kind of context is only available in small doses (with a particular group) whose effect is diluted by the larger context which can only be corrected by moving somewhere else.
PG has "made noises" about this for a while here. I'm glad to see this, as it's really not rocket science, and as Matt says, "a great starting point". Thanks also to the lawyer folks involved for getting it. This sort of thing won't mean less work for good lawyers, it will mean more work doing real stuff, and less twiddling around with boilerplate.
Not to be pedantic or anything :) but there's a typo on seriesaa.html page: "...many situations with without too many modifications." 'with' is extraneous.
Why?

You should be sure that "rewriting from scratch" is going to give your users some concrete benefit that will make them like your site even more, and you should be sure that "rewriting from scratch" is the easiest way to give your users those benefits.
You could create certification tests for those as well - general knowledge test, creativity test, writing test, personality test
Bravo. Smart people will be smart, no matter what. Smart people with time and energy will educate themselves. Smart people with money (or the willingness to accept debt) will buy a decent education.
On a lot of sites, especially those with a set navigation layout (where a new link/button is more obvious) and regular user-base, users will often click on a new link/button just to see what it is and not always because they want it.

I cannot help but think this is only useful on (high-volume) sites where individual users are of low value i.e. do not pay to use service or contribute much, and for anything more sophisticated or with savvy users it would be deterimental (imagine seeing this on the stock-market web-app you pay $$$ for).

It all depends on how often you use this trick really.
The mathematical approach to music has one endgame, and it isn't pretty.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LACCAF04wSs
I'm torn between two somewhat incompatible visions:

1. College should train you for some sort of career and should do so in the most rigorously objective way possible. In this view, certifications provide the gold standard of objectivity.

2. College should help you become well rounded, responsible adults. By which I mean, able to reason about complex issues, having some background in history, science, philosophy, literature, the arts, a basic understanding of subjects that affect our lives, such as economics, etc... In other words, the sort of people who desire to remain informed about political events, who could weigh several candidates for office and be able to apply some sort of selection criteria beyond a mere gut instinct. In other words, the sort of people that keep democracy on track.
I am very skeptical about these interviews.

All I am ever interested in is a code sample. That will answer all coding questions. It can not even be compared to forcing a nervous candidate to code by writing on a white board. It also can not be compared to a quiz on topics in programming. Get a code sample, read it, ask a few questions about it, that is all.

As to if a person would "fit' on a team, it takes roughly 3 seconds to figure that out. So have each team member meet with the candidate for 1 minute, that's plenty of time.

Then do a background check, call references and that's all there is to.

Everything else is just smoke and mirrors BS. It selects for people good at interviewing, not good hackers.

And lastly you can always fire people, if they lied about their code sample or whatever. So lets stop acting as if hiring someone is irreversible. In America at least, firing people is still easy.

There's one thing to note about large companies. Large companies can't trust one good developer to evaluate a code sample. So that's bad, and they then fall back on a day long dog and pony show. And then they usually have huge, ugly, crufty code bases, that means that they can't even tell if someone is good or bad until AFTER they grok the code base. And groking the code base often takes a LONG time. So to pay someone for months only to then fire them and start again is expensive.

And the moral of the story is: Stay away from big companies.
Requiring everyone to learn some nonpractical things is a waste of societal resources. If some people want to learn something just for the sake of it, they could join reading groups/attend lectures on their own time.
it does, but you can interweave java with groovy, as well as include/use classes/libraries/etc.

edit: also, of course, i meant "not quite as productive as rails" in that OP.
OOOOOOOOOOO YESSSSSSSSS
I met an Irish engineer. He said that all of his classes in college had to do with engineering. If he wanted to study the Classics, the attitude was that he could just go and do that in his own time.

Personally, I think this is better. If you try to legislate breadth in your students, then you end up just making a mockery of what you're trying to teach. You end up accomplishing the opposite of what you were trying to do.

I spent a few years teaching Computer Science 101/102 as a TA. A whole lot of my students were in Journalism, Communications, or Criminology or some area like that and just trying to get their math requirement out of the way. My conclusion in retrospect: to most of my students, this was largely just a bureaucratic exercise.

If you want true students, you need to find the students that have the interest and desire.
Writing your own allocator is a great exercise; I've recommend it as a means to learn systems programming in C. But if implementing your own is often not worth the effort in a real application. If memory allocation is an issue in your application, there's probably an existing allocator that solves the problem better than you can.

Thank you!
Like it or not, college is about more than job training. For a lot of people the social life is a big part of it, the first part of life away from parents, but still with some security, and about intellectual exploration

It's funny, but I got a whole lot more of that stuff after dropping out. Am I really going to learn more from a place where I don't pay the rent, buy stuff with a meal card, work fifteen hours per week but don't necessarily have to show up, and am surrounded by proto-alcoholics? If you can deduce the modern college experience from any sane set of first principles, I'd like to hear about it -- but it seems to me that Murray is right. If we didn't have college, and you tried to invent it, you'd be rightly denounced as a loon.

And he puts too much faith in certification tests as "classless", in my opinion. I used to do test prep, and like most things, the people who have the money and the time to train for the certifications have an advantage.

Murray has crunched the numbers rather than counting the anecdotes; studying for the SAT can raise scores a lot at first, but if you studied two hours per day for 150 days, your expected score increase would be seventy points. Murray cites this (http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetai...), which I haven't read. It would be a good plan to introduce your convictions to some data, so you can back up your assertion with something besides "I used to do test prep, and envy rich people too much to wonder what I can learn from them."

Perhaps none of that is worth the lost time, but when I see it in the WSJ, my initial reaction is that it's another right wing wacko who sees college as just too many liberals with too much influence.

You also might be happier if 1) you didn't assume that the newspaper that recently published a Barbara Ehrenreich piece (http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB121380066376984...) was irredeemably right-wing, and 2) if you considered the possibility that since college professors are overwhelmingly liberal (http://cellasreview.blogspot.com/2002_08_25_cellasreview_arc...) and nearly impossible to fire, they would consist of a greater than average number of liberals who do, indeed, have too much influence.
In the UK, the higher education system is as you desribed in point 1, you get a degree in exactly your subject. yet they have no shortage of people who can debate on the issues you mention in point 2.
"turned the academy to its needs" -- nay, it practically started out that way!
I think it's almost always a bad idea to create a subconscious association between your brand and something that doesn't work properly.

Yeah, maybe the rational user will conclude that the 404 was somehow their ISP's fault (although I, for my part, tend to regard 404s as a sign that either the link or the site has aged out of existence). But convincing the user's conscious mind is only part of the battle. At the subconscious level, you've just lost: The user now associates your site with brittleness and broken promises.

I think it's probably better to test with a "beta" page, or a "coming soon!" mailing list, or something other than a metaphorical brick wall.
The benefit of liberal democracy is that it prevents the corrupt and powerful few from acquiring the leverage to do great damage, allowing for technological and civil progress over the long haul.

Well-run dictatorships can be prosperous in the short run, but the inexorable decay into rule by a corrupt elite will bankrupt a society. Once a madman or idiot gets into power, decades or centuries of progress will be erased. One benefit of liberal democracy is that it's much more robust, relying on laws and traditions rather than the people running it. Look at how much damage the Bush Administration has done to the US. Were it not for our liberal, democratic political traditions, they'd have caused 100 times more ruin by this point, and we wouldn't have a very good chance of being rid of them in Jan. 2009.
And all else being equal, wouldn't the test help you? If you can, it's probably best to hire based on things like passion and creativity. But if your main python developer quits two weeks from your launch date, it might be more convenient to hire someone who already knows the language, and can prove it.
We did as well and they saved us a fair bit of cash - not to mention the hassle of figuring out what vanilla terms should look like.
I would understand if this was something big and untested. But IMHO, when a project is as simple as yours is, there is no reason to do it right (not perfect) form the start. There are things you will regret if you start to gain traction.
Thanks for the link and those stats are indeed incredible. It's worth pointing out, however, that low crime-rates and economic prosperity are not at all uncommon in dictatorships. Examples I'm familiar with include Porfirio Diaz in Mexico or more recently Pinochet in Chile. In those cases, though, there where no "free-market" forces at play as people could not easily move to other countries.
Well its probably true, look at most liberal arts majors, they spend 4 years learning and then go back to the same job at GAP because they can't find any job in their field.

It seems like going to college is a requirement now, where people go there because its expected of them. They don't go to learn, they go there to put in the time(like in highschool)
BushyMark: Some of the best developers I know started late. DHH didn't start programming until he was in his 20s.

If you're willing to learn and can get things done, my company has 1-2 junior Rails development openings. Why don't you send me a resume at siqi@seriousbusiness.com?
The problem with this plan is that it will just make every college vocational.

The problem with this view is that some people just want the vocational part, and bundling it with something they don't want, but for which they will be charged, just makes them worse off. Being able to buy A or B is better than only being able to buy A and B.

It would be pretty annoying if some forward-thinking politician realized that a keyboard is worthless without a computer, and unilaterally banned the sale of keyboards that didn't come with a computer. But that would be a terrible plan.
Could you add scribd to it, so people can read them w/o downloading?
It seems like laymen refer to any superlinear growth as "exponential". Newbs.
I agree, I will be adding a box on the homepage that gives new users an idea of what the site is all about and displays the bookmarklet. Thanks for the feedback!
Sounds like we need to end the tenure system and get the academic "pigs" off their high horses!
Wow, pure awesome! This makes life so much easier for grass root startups and young entrepreneurs.

Much <3
In her case, it was an adeptness at gaming the corporate management system. After she wrote that code, she managed to put herself in a nebulous position between two groups where she was thought to be invaluable, yet all she did was to tell other people when they were doing something wrong, but never actually had to fix anything. You could often see her at the coffee shop reading a novel in the middle of the day.
Usually when I see a 503, I think, "Great. The site is f-ing broken/overloaded/down" again.

A 404.. I find, not so much.
I actually remember reading about research to make a male contraceptive. If I remember correctly it's harder because there are way more sperm than ova.
"Fool me once Shame on you. Fool me twice Shame on me." --Chinese Proverb.
We have those in some industries: It's how you get to be a plumber for instance.
I wrote it in Python, actually. And it has some very obvious bugs. Here's the revised code:

cuilBuzz = {
'1': 'All the rage!',
'2': 'Worst product e-v-e-r',
'3': None
}

day = '3'
print cuilBuzz[day]
# Although the print isn't necessary...

Now what would be interesting would be an accurate version using the datetime module...
We really need that in Programming!
Thanks for that.

Your comment prompted me to find this international list of non- and low-chlorine pools: http://piscinasana.blogspot.com/ .
.doc?
I would go further to say that the current system is disadvantaging rich countries immensely. I typical person without a college degree is likely to think he shouldn't even attempt to seek work such as IT (it's for those college educated types), and instead heads into the local service economy (further depressing wages there), instead of earning money for the country in globally based economy.
"A passing [CPA exam] score indicates authentic competence"

This is misleading, because the word authentic has a specific meaning in psychometrics. It means that the evaluation of competence is based off of things like observations, student journals, portfolios, inquiry projects, exhibits, hands-on activities, essays, performances, etc. A standardized test score is not considered to be an authentic measure of competence.
This is great! I can't say how positive a step this is.

It's really common for things like NDAs, etc to be provided by independent organisations free of charge (e.g. the UK patent office provide one) but moving this into other documents is a must.

I'd like to see a plain English description of each clause, possibly with extra optional clauses, creative commons style.

I love the idea of pick'n'mix legal documents. As long as they are drawn up by good lawyers it would make the law a much more accessible thing to regular people/companies.
Tunnels to Egypt Keep Hamas in Business
Good point. Twitter as a whole may be a good place to data mine current events.
I read about a similar idea ( in 4hww maybe? )

Basically take out adwords ads for products you havent developed yet, see which ones get clicked, develop those products.
Steve Jobs is really pulling out the stops to keep new products under wraps. He cleared the research lab out before setting the fire, about 10 new products to come out at the next Apple convention.