skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Although he has an odd way of expressing his opinion (and mostly appears mistaken ) I think his teaching would be very interesting and I would definitely listen to it if I had a chance.

I wonder how much of this is headline grabbing (which is fair enough, it will help enrollments perhaps of the smarter students I think).
I hate How-tos like this that resort to fink or Macports.
It’s about time Comcast | TechJaws
I used to work with Chemical engineers (I was an elec eng) - they had a saying: "one point is a line, two points is a trend" when trying to analyse production data (always only half joking).
5% Layoffs Rumored At Myspace
Norton Internet Security 2009 Beta on Steroids | TechJaws
[Quotable] NetNewsWire, JotSpot, Git, Google, old Texas sayings, etc.
If you want to work a guaranteed maximum of eight hours a day, then America has just the thing for you... I hope you like cubicles.
Didn't yamada cover this ground about a year ago?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=51989
There are a lot of freelancers/one man shows who contribute to open source, so in that case, their time is a bit more liquid and the 5K would be put to good use.
Universities should not be vocational and neither should high schools, IMO, but for some reason in the US the idea of purely vocational education is taboo. So the two get mashed together and you get this tension between the lofty notions of a liberal education and the need to make a living.

Separating people who want to build car engines from people who want a liberal education at the secondary level is seen as a sort of elitism.
How come this dupe is not being picked up?
Yes, exactly my thought. In tech industry, I'd say the problem you are aiming at is solved reasonably well already - Techmeme, HN, Friendfeed, or even slashdot...I just skimm what is new and that is it.

But I don't want to discourage you - it could work, if you will find your own angle, have good editing skills and willing to do it regularly.
Which im network are you using? I worked on SEC crawler in PubSub during 2004 to 2006. I remember SEC has SGML version of all filings. So in this case, it may be better to use SGML parsers to process the document due to its structure.

Let me know because I think any project that will utilize data SEC will be interesting.
Because people can learn from the experience?
Hmmm, very nice idea, I'll definitely have to get that implemented. Thanks Matt!
airplanes are so unreliable that people are using them less and less

Really? I think that airline travel was actually at an all-time high in the USA in 2007:

http://www.bts.gov/programs/airline_information/air_carrier_...
Using the splits that Yahoo has had and its current stock price 1,574,364 shares is worth $31 723 434.6
I dunno, you deal with the risk of standing on thin air no matter what you use, unless you've designed your device from the silicon up.

There's not a strong argument to be made for using Java in an industrial setting, but I'm not clear that a finite-state machine that compiled down to JVM bytecodes would be inherently less safe than anything else.

Ada doesn't guarantee the correctness of your program, and C certainly doesn't. This interview reads more like an inarticulate complaint about how things keep changing than a real argument against trends in education.
Are there details any place about how you went about implementing this? For example did you use any open source software for the face detection (OpenCV?) and are there any libraries that are particularly good for this kind of thing?
Techmeme,etc. all sum up what you should be reading, not what it is. Techmeme/HN tells you where to find the news easily, not what the news is easily.
At least you are honest about your beliefs.

Most people get highly offended if you suggest that their political stances are nothing more than a series of gut reactions.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43074
New Alzheimer's drug shows early promise
Pickens rips Yahoo management, says he dumped shares at a loss
>Frankly, I'm pretty sure that my barbaric, 7th-century European ancestors would have tested very poorly on any IQ test.

I'm not saying Europeans are or were inherently more intelligent or superior. I don't know about 7 AD, but definitely back in 7 BC my ancestors surely had as low an IQ as any group afflicted by this problem today, if not lower.
Mobile web standards announced today
Peer Producing A Web 2.0 Keynote
This is even more true for non-webapps; one of the worst assumptions you can make in a performance-critical app is that your libraries are already fast.

Take memcpy, for example; a while back I noticed that the win32 memcpy was atrociously slow for small blocks, significantly increasing runtime (since our program, x264, did loads of small memcpys). So I wrote my own; it was almost 10 times faster. And that isn't bragging--the function itself was utterly trivial--it just goes to show that system libraries are not always well-optimized.
"the idea of quizzing candidates on whether they can diagnose and track down compiler or processor bugs is similarly useless"

Maybe Ada compilers have lots of bugs. :-)
IBM’s “Pensieve” Project to Digitize Business Cards
I don't think he is active teaching now. He holds emeritus now so he has no duty to teach unless he wants. He probably spends most his time working on AdaCore and its spinoff. I suspect his attitudes is due to his father's influence, who was a very famous organic chemistry researcher Michael J. S. Dewar.

In fact you can learn the similar experience just by doing a project yourself. I learned most stuffs in my life from projects. A course just gives a pressure to finish something before deadline. PG and YC are using the demo day to push applicants to finish something and with a potential payoff for finishing it. (Why? because of human nature tends to procrastinate!)

So maybe you just pick a non-trivial but not too difficult problem (Unless you aim for Turing Award and wants to be the first one to prove/disprove P = NP), find some friends/comrades who wants a challenge. Set up a deadline and payoff and go for it. You learn by doing it and the more you do it, the easier it will be.
There's a few nuclear power plant on Long Island that never got started due to Three Mile Island :\. Also, Brookhaven has a few nuclear reactors for research purposes that are still used as well. In the late 60's or early 70's, they (the power company, now known as LIPA, but this was before NY State took over) started to constructed a commercial nuclear power plant.

It was originally supposed to output ~550 Megawatts of power and cost ~75 million to make. Then it got delayed. They went back to planning stages and increased the output to over 800 Megawatts as well as designing plans for another two reactors. However, one reactor was close to Manhattan. That one never got past planning stages due to protests. The other one never got built either. I'm not sure why.

Anyway, by the end of the 70's, the cost of the original plant had skyrocketed to over $2 billion. And it wasn't even finished yet. Then there were protests due to Three Mile Island. By the mid 80's, the plant was complete. However, politics deemed that it would never be opened. So they spent another $250 million to decommission the plant. It cost around 6 billion in total.

And a few years back, anyone remember the big blackout that happened? Power grid got overloaded. There's a cable that runs under the LI Sound now that draws power from Connecticut's nuclear power plant. Around 330 Megawatts of power. By comparison, the unused nuclear power plant on Long Island - that's still connected to the power grid - is supposed to be able to produce around 400 Megawatts of power.

Oh, and we (the taxpayers) are still paying the bill for that unused power plant. And will be for the next 15 years.

Wiki has a good writeup on this, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoreham_Nuclear_Power_Plant
I believe Octopart is turning a profit.
How does "low-level" imply difficulty? Why are low-level programming tasks considered harder than tasks higher on the abstraction ladder? I don't think the difficulty of your job has anything to do with with the level of abstraction you're working at. If you hold job difficulty constant and vary the level of abstraction you'd probably see different salaries based on the supply and demand for programmers working at that level.

Low-level is not superior to high-level. They each have their own different challenges. I don't think it is a bad thing to focus on high-level for your career. That does not mean spitting out half-baked PHP web pages. Of course it's helpful to have been exposed to low-level concepts at some point.

This is the same tired old argument about how real engineers program in binary and you ignorant handicapped kiddies can only program in C. The only thing that changes is the level of abstraction at which the 'real engineers' work, and that just keeps going up.

Somewhat related: http://www.yosefk.com/blog/low-level-is-easy.html
That's what happens when your company stagnates while competitors move ahead:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=myspace%2C+facebook

Facebook has been all over the news, and everyone's talking about it--yet I haven't even heard someone mention Myspace for months. Either they're not doing anything to get attention--or nobody is listening.
You might have adult ADD. The solution would be a good diagnosis, and ritalin or some variant (concerta, strattera). Allow 6-8 months to find the right drug.

It's life-changing.
It's also true that the failure of Java is that it cannot express a mis-initialized pointer.

A good programmer has to know both high-level and low-level stuff. And also has to be able to understand or, at least, to make a decent hypothesis on why GCC core-dumped.
http://askaninja.com/node/1175

If you weren't a hacker in the last decade, you're now a hacker in this one!
I know. The intention was to up-vote the link. The links are identical.
If you end up going with raw text, but semi-organized, you might look into something like ELIE. I've never, ever used it, but stumbled upon it today in a different context:
http://www.aidanf.net/software/elie-an-adaptive-information-...
Ask YC: What's the best solution for geotargetting by IP?
My startup is interested in building a simple ad targeted ad solution for our site. What's the best geotargeting DB / server solution?
Poor Reception? "Go To The Hilltop" Sprint Tells Customer
I don't think those were his main arguments. His strongest argument is much more about out sourcing and that students need to be able to do the hard jobs. We should also remember that the prof. didn't write the article himself so this is some journalist paraphrasing his words.

I think the bottom line is that Students who's university career consists of only programming in Java miss out on a lot of the low level technical details about how a computer works. A good CS program will teach concepts instead of tools and languages. That would be called a "technology" degree. There is a place for Java but to teach it exclusively at the expense of C, C++, Assembly, etc... is foolish and leads to exactly what this article says it does people who don't really know what they are doing and are easily replaceable by cheap overseas labor.
This will fuck startups up pretty hard. It's the exact opposite of what Mark Cuban proposed for small businesses. I'm not saying his approach is right, but this looks pretty bad.
Can you give some example, then?
I dispise these shortterm-investors. Dudes people have other more meaningful goals than to make you rich.
One way to make this more successful is to make sure high school students are forced to read the blogs you're covering, which is why Cliffs Notes and SparkNotes are successful.
Was that some random product from some 3rd party outfit, or a flagship CPU from a major manufacturer that's installed on tens of millions of computers?
My two cents: http://twitter.com/tipjoy/statuses/871812474
So why do we need these new databases then? In America you are presumed innocent, this new data regime assumes guilt and is open to abuse. Its a slippery slope towards greater supervision and control of ecommerce, with major new costs for businesses-- which have to maintain these data pools. Tracking gross revenue will actually lead to more audits of innocent businesses. Check out this testimony:

http://www.cdt.org/testimony/20080612sohn.pdf
You visit the site, there are two updates per day posted. Each update has the most important headlines of the past 12 hours. Example summary or story:

Scrabulous Gets Shut Down on Facebook

-North America ONLY , not international
-Decision made by Scrabulous devs, NOT FACEBOOK
-Culmination of Hasbro suit filed last week on DMCA grounds
-EA has US rights + real networks with international rights
hey, that's a very very good point worth mentioning.
Sharding with Max Ross (mp3)
Housing Bill includes sweeping data reporting provision
What about usability-wise? Much nicer to use than either Opera or Safari.
>You can't end a debate on rail travel by saying it's not profitable without subsidies. Roads would not happen without massive government subsidies either.

The marginal road might not be profitable, but some roads would be built without subsidies. The earliest highways in America were funded by private businessmen who thought it would be profitable to connect the towns that they lived in. Private roads have a long and successful history, even if in modern times they have been crowded out of the market by trillions of dollars of federal and state projects.

One of the four great intercontinental railroads was built entirely without government grants or subsidies. If I recall correctly, it also lasted the longest.

When I criticize the government or question the need for its existence, people often respond with "Oh yeah, how would you get around without roads? The government provides all our transportation. That's useful.". However, the argument is a straw man, historically ignorant, and blinded by the status quo. Too often people are so constrained by how things are that they can not think about how they were different in the past or how they could be in the future.
Oscon in 37 Minutes
HTTParty (Rails HTTP lib)
Why doesn't Google just release a Twitter clone and be done with it?
why all the other colors? seems they're letting their customers have long-term dissatisfaction as a choice.
Transportation is a good with a large demand. I am certain that, absent the government, quite a bit of transportation would be demanded and provided in the free market. The quantity of roads or rail produced might be less without all the subsidies, but I'm not sure this would be a bad thing. It would certainly be easier on the environment, since transportation tends to be resource-intensive.

The amount of transportation produced in the free market would be equal to the amount that people were willing to pay for, and that seems fair to me. Producing roads that people aren't willing to voluntarily pay for is a social loss. The people paying for the roads would rather use their money for other things. We are taking their consumption away from more highly valued goods and putting it towards lesser valued goods.
Future of Internet Search: Mobile version
My understanding of the post is:

The title is misleading.

If many people doesn't use your code then it is a waste of time to write it.

No minute lost comes ever back again

Take heed and see ye nothing do in vain </quote>

If you're designing a product, but don't understand how the system of networked humans will work around it, you really can't understand how your product will work either. </quote>

In order to ship code you should know how to influence people.
Paul Graham - Cuil
I'd rather see LOLCATs.

I haven't quite figured out how to articulate what's wrong with this kind of thing, but it's somewhat similar to Fox news -- they're not simply useless, they're corrosive.

I'm still trying to think of a better explanation. Disagreement is fine and good, but this kind of thing is something else. The 37signals posts do a good job of presenting an alternate perspective, but in a way that is generally positive and helpful.
Some relief for worrywarts
Actually UML is the only programming language allowed, so he had to code it all up in the proprietary CASE tool first and then generate the Java from that.
Why Cuil Sucks - It can't even find itself
Attacking the word "hacker" will definitely get response from the YC community. I think the YC community at large is in love with calling themselves "hackers".
How does that work out on a per-passenger-mile basis?
I subscribe to a magazine called The Week that operates on this premise. It's a weekly that summarizes top stories (general news, editorials, columns, business, tech, reviews of art, music, books, films, theater, etc.) by drawing a few key sentences and quotes from multiple mainstream sources.

They have a daily online version here: http://www.theweekdaily.com/

None of the stories are generally more than 4 paragraphs or about 12-15 sentences and usually draw on 3-4 sources with varying takes on an issue.
You certainly have more faith in the effectiveness of social engineering than I do.
Reminds me of Brijit, which provided 100-word summaries of articles in major newspapers and magazines. Unfortunately, it ran out of money, because its business model involved paying people to write the summaries.
Not even close. The Dell has lots of venting, beveling, and recessing that Apple's products don't. Also the way the pieces of plastic come together isn't too neat. Also, the typography isn't good. Etc.

Here's a detailed pic: http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/corporate/imagebank/des...
what drove you to subscribe? simplicitiy i assume?

do you think something less than 4 paragraphs, more like 4-5 sentences would work?
ive eventually thought about opening it to user submissions. The incentive is a link back to their site + name credit.
During your startup lifestyle, how many hours of productive work do you get accomplished per day?
That's just argumentum ad antiquitatem.
Can you not do it with Google Docs? You can share a document with the employee and use a different font for your comments.
I totally agree that they shouldn't be vocational, I was just pointing out that the guy's arguments about what was useful for the job market were totally specious. I personally think schools should teach Computer Science instead of just Programming (or, if they want to be vocational and give people certificates in Java Programming go for it, just don't call it a BSCS) and that they should expose you to a large variety of languages, techniques, and ways of thinking. There are plenty of things to complain about with CS coursework at various places, but saying Java is useless in the real world or that debugging compiler or processor issues is a critical skill for every engineer is ludicrous.
Only southwest hedges their fuel prices, apparently the other airlines don't have the money to do it. They complain that it's "not fair".
(string=
"http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/entdev/article.php/3761921/The+Anti-Java+Professor+and+the+Jobless+Programmers.htm"
"http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/entdev/print.php/3761921")
=> nil

I'm really thinking "community-based" dupe detection would be beneficial. If someone matches dupes together and 20 people agree it's probably safe to give preference to one or merge them automatically.

edit: Oops, this was meant to be a reply to michaelneale.
In the world of Twitter ... even 4-5 characters could work. ;)

I actually subscribed because I had expiring airline miles that I had to use up on something and it was one of the options. That said, I'm planning to renew. I've found that I am so overloaded with information on a daily basis that the shorter summaries are a lot easier to keep up with -- and because the summaries quote their sources anything that I want to delve into deeper I already have a short list of good articles to check out.

(Side note: I'm a tech blogger, so I spend my week immersed in tech news and The Week magazine allows me to catch up on all the other news I may have missed, which is nice.)
That, and you'll have to pay off China.
You're doing it wrong if you don't build your own framework at some point.

Blindly using rails or even merb or any other framework will only get you so far. To truly transcend, you must build your own or heavily alter an existing framework.

This is hacker news right? Go out and build your own framework already dammit!
This is what a website's Privacy Policy should look like
If people are looking for a simple way to convert audio and video on Mac OS X, I suggest looking into AudialHub and VisualHub by Techspansion (http://www.techspansion.com/)

Though it's not free, I've been very impressed with the quality of the video conversions I've done and the simplicity of the user interface.

(note: this is not my software, I'm just a fan)
He didn't. He wrote RoR precisely because there was nothing to do what he wanted for Basecamp.
IIRC, VisualHub uses ffmpeg for a number of video formats when converting.
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=bill+gates see 2nd column
haha, please don't encourage a twitter competitor with a 4-5 character limit. :-o

Yup, the goal is to make the consumption of tech news simpler. Definite links back to other valuable sources + analysis for those who want to dig in deeper. Not sure if you saw it earlier in the thread, but this site Brijit is similar to TheWeek. Sadly, they just closed shop.

Wait... you mean there's "other news" out there besides tech?
I don't understand object-relational mapping. At all.

If your data is not organized relationally, why are you using a relational database?
While switching operating systems or avoiding email/IM in the modern workplace is more than a little unrealistic, the core message is good.

Distraction undermines productivity.
How To Lose Your Cuil 20 Seconds After Launch
better yet, do it via trackback or whatever variant is hip those days
You're right, that's one of the reasons why I posted. If you're looking for the power and quality of ffmpeg but are intimidated by the interface (let's face it, you are on a Mac for a reason ;) ) chances are you'll like VisualHub. One added bonus I'm enjoying is the ability to distribute the processing via XGrid.
You ask about how many open source projects I manage. None. I am a completely private sector guy.

I've done a lot with $5K; employing that focus I talked about.

I was not taking a shot at anyone, nor at open source. Just at resources vs resource administration. I do not know which project this was (I know the guy mentioned it on his post), nor do I particularly care. A resource is a resource and a manager is a manager. A project that is in development must move forward, open source or not.

Case in point: We are using a certain OSS project in house. We ran into a bug, it's a well-known bug, been there for a long time. We fixed it because we had a time motive, resources, and focus. Right there: done. No hesitating, we needed to move onto something else. That kind of focus would certainly help OSS. $5K or not in our pocket, it was fixed.

Anyway... That may very well explain why private projects move faster than open source ones, the private ones have a profit motive, failure means financial failure. No matter how altruistic you are, if you fail financially, you don't eat.
Starting the campaign for The London TechHub
Oh you'd be surprised what you get abroad for $5k... US-based developers with mediocre skills: Be afraid, be very afraid.
i think what i find most appalling is how the electronic arts/hasbro scrabble app croaked this morning, presumably due to the incoming flood of scrabulous refugees.
OpenCL suggests that Apple would prefer to perform video encode/decode, physics, etc. on the GPU. It's logical, since the GPU is already paid for.
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Not sure if it's stagnation or saturation.
I find it interesting that the driver had been stopped by "10 people" concerned about the privacy of Google Street View in the same country that has thousands of CCTV cameras lining the streets.
trackback to submit?
That's certainly why I up voted.