skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that it is an important insight.

intelligence is less confusing when regarded as an optimization process.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/tx/optimization/
According to the article itself, the new tech bubble has not arrived:

" But it does not mean that we are returning the big tech bubble that we had in the 1990s. LinkedIn is only one company, and one crazy IPO does not a bubble make."
I don't know if they are still doing it, but 12 years ago the University of Maryland had something like this. They had CMSC106 Introduction to C and CMSC107 Introduction to Unix classes that had no credit towards the major, but allowed those interested a gentler introduction to computer science.
this reminds me, although tangentially, that i saw a chapter of a book once that was basically dedicated to dissecting all the boilerplate in a standard C "hello world" program. It would go over details about argv and so forth and then introduce wrinkles into the program and see if you caught what they were.
I have pushed dokuwiki in my department and now it is being adopted by several others.
On a company level we have email and blogs (only by sen. mgmt)
What brought you to Guatemala?
I have been reluctant to use "the 'b' word", but I'm afraid this is overwhelming evidence. LinkedIn waited a long time (by late-1990s standards, anyway) before issuing this IPO. Their business is relatively mature; while I don't think they've captured the entire market, even in the US, I think it's fair to say that the size of their ultimate market can now be estimated, and it doesn't look to me like it's more than 10 or 20 times their current revenue. Does anyone have any reason to think it's bigger than that?

If that's right, then yes, they are crazily overvalued at this price. Maybe I will short them at some point.
I recommend starting with the math. You won't even know you could think in certain ways until you've been introduced to the mathematical concepts.

On a similar note: The linked post is on how many new students don't understand the fundamentals in only one semester of programming. A counteranecdote is how many hard-science majors pick up programming far more easily than beginning CS students. I suppose the thought patterns for the one help in understanding the other.
I am working on:

- Learning Russian with a friend

- Expanding my background in the core areas of Mathematics

- Reacquainting myself with graphics programming and implementing at least part of a game engine.

- Finding a Thesis topic...
But do we need one (I mean social graph)? I believe our code (ie. github) or advices (ie. SO) speaks more than social graph when it comes to programmers, doesn't it?
Short hair styles
Offers short hair style advice on how to manage and color short or medium-length hair. Includes hair fashion news, hair trends, pictures, style guide
Hacker Monthly's Startup Stories (free digital edition)
Quick note: would be nice to see a tag line that explicitly states what you're offering. It's about setting up tee times with friends, correct? That should be stated more clearly and simply.
No more Viacom content on Netflix. Please don't make us money....
I've read everything on the page and I'm not exactly sure what it does.

I'm guessing its for planning golfing "events". But I doubt my father or the casual user would understand that.
I'm too old for node.js
really ? Perhaps you are ignoring the fact that with PHP you can be as secure as you can care to be. It's all up to you. But let's not get started on this one. It's done to death already.
Ah, life in the US - really, the FBI could kick down my door and take all my computing equipment for any or no reason at any time. Grumbling about Twitter or Amazon is about as controversial as I get, though. Is it better to have your data stored in 'the cloud'? Not really. It's vital have encrypted backups here and there one way or the other.
SID 2011 news coverage
A Look at the Root Causes of the Arab Revolution [interview]
Not deprecated, but frowned upon. Youtube has more stable URIs than any link shortener, but by using an intermediary, there are now two opportunities for the link to die.

If YouTube changes the URI, the shortened link will no longer work, and if the shortener goes out of business, again the link will no longer work.

Moral of the story: just use the URI for the actual resource. Shortening amounts to obfuscation and brittle-ness, and most HNers are opposed to their use in the comments section.
Right, a student is thinking, "WTF is this quadratic formula for?" might not have gotten much from this. This shows the benefits of the end-game, not the middle point. Bridging that gap for students I think is the hard part.
I really liked this interview. I agree on most, especially: "Revolutions often end up as something different from what their supporters proclaim at the beginning. Democracies are fragile systems that require deep historic roots. It took almost a century from the time of the French Revolution in 1789 until the democratic form of government," and then later
" In fact, only Great Britain, France and the United States, in that historic order, constitute the core of the West. But not Germany."

What I find odd, is that he sees some factors like GDP per capita as secondary symtoms of rising female literacy but not the shrinking birth rates. I think, that shrinking birth rates are also just a symptom of rising female literacy!
It's like meeting Beethoven and finding out that really he hates listening to Mozart.

Apparently, Ludwig was rather taken with Wolfgang's music:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart_and_Beethoven
This is why I've left some sort of server-side encryption out of the storage product I'm designing. I mean, I'm just using webdav, so it should be easy enough for you to bring your own client with encryption support; something you already trust.

The main benefit of encryption in these situations is that you have to trust your provider a whole lot less... If I get compromised through a OS hole? if you are encrypted, you are covered. If I get compromised through a physical attack, governmental or otherwise? if you are encrypted, you are covered.

If I do the encryption for you, I give away a bunch of those benefits. If I'm completely compromised, you should assume that any keys I have access to are also compromised.

I think giving up "deduplication" is completely reasonable in this regard; the competitive landscape right now is that "cloud backup" costs about 10x what I think it ought to cost for backups (In part due to the fact that many 'cloud backup' services are built to be fast enough to serve webpages; If you let me have 'backup system' level performance, I can do it a whole lot cheaper, but also in part due to the fact that s3 sets the price here, and S3 is still charging "pretty good for 2007" prices.)
What LinkedIn means for Facebook IPO
- Learn (basic) German

- Brush up on statistics

- Write a cloudish music player
The politicians who are willing to accept and act on their greased palm offers are the real problem. In a normal, non-corrupt system, the RIAA would never come anywhere near receiving such powers, anymore than Jim McJones down the street.
Another key aspect is that even major software updates tend to work reasonably well on previous generations of their devices. For instance, an iPhone 3GS can run the latest version of iOS, and Apple's one-year OS development cycle isn't obstructed by a carrier's two-year contract cycle.
researchers believe it’s likely that companies unintentionally place gendered job advertisements.

“Many companies want to diversify,” Gaucher says. “Companies that use highly masculine wording may, in reality, be just as welcoming to their female employees as they are to their male employees.”

This isn't about protecting gender, it's about unintentionally stomping on it. If you're accidentally alienating half of the population, you're going to miss out on a lot of good attributes of that gender. Some examples from the article: "competitive" and "dominant" (male) versus "compassionate" and "nurturing" (female). And how likely would it be for a male-gendered person to make the videos in this article: http://arstechnica.com/ask-ars/2011/04/how-to-build-your-own...
I have a Thinkpad W520 and can confirm that Linux (Kubuntu 10.10) will run just fine with the different BIOS option. I can even run Company of Heroes under wine and it runs pretty decently. Not sure what the extra penalty to battery life is under this different BIOS option, but the lappy still runs at least 5 hours.

btw, I use the proprietary nvidia drivers (just run their install scripts and it should work fine).
Except for programming artifacts and tools, and my Latex setup for serious writing projects, I have done the same sort of thing: use Google docs, GMail, Amazon Music Cloud, and pictures on Picaso and Flickr.

I do back up my stuff that is 'on the cloud' but that is quick & easy and I only do it occasionally.
RailsConf 2011 Presentations, from Best to Worst
The Real Reason Al Qaeda Didn't Pull Off Another Major Attack
With 100 million users, that makes it $90 per user. That looks a big number, but consider the cost of recruitment of a single position and look at the value of a validated network of 100 million professionals. I am sure each position filled in by recruiters would be worth a lot more.

+ Ad revenue.
+ Their paid plans average $30 a month.

I would not short them yet.
There is currently a 1 billion Euro proposal for a grant on graphene research in the EU. [1] But the decision will not be made before the end of 2012.

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110308/full/news.2011.143.ht...

edit: Sorry, not to much new information here. They also mention it in the original submission.
During the run-up to this getting passed I encountered a number of articles that speculated having this kind of legal precedence might entice broadband providers to push similar legislation around the country. Of course IANAL, so I was hoping one (or several) might chime in on how likely that is.
Learning Django and Javascript and probably PostgreSQL.
I have thought about this tag line a lot but you're right, it could be more clear. I was trying to avoid using the phrase "make a tee time" as I didn't want to get lumped in to other tee time sites but I may want to rethink this. Thanks.
Reading this article brought to mind this scene in The Graduate:

Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.

Benjamin: Yes, sir.

Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?

Benjamin: Yes, I am.

Mr. McGuire: Plastics.

Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean?

So, I'm wondering how and where I should be investing to take advantage of this materials revolution. Seems like a pretty obvious bet to make, but it seems to be spread across many companies and with an indeterminate schedule (some say 5 years, some say 10, some say "we don't know"). And, more importantly, so many of the companies involved are too big for one product or even one line of products to make a huge dent in their bottom line. I've invested in IBM and Intel in the past based on research in the pipeline, and while the products did come to fruition and did prove to be good for the companies bottom line, the stock market didn't respond as much as one would hope (but probably about what I should have expected, had I really done the analysis of how it would effect their bottom line).

I'm not sure I follow you on the oil companies, though. Sure, they've been a major player in the plastics pipeline forever, but, if graphene isn't made from petroleum derivatives, I'm not sure it is a natural fit for oil companies. I would say the folks building LCD panels and other silicon-based products are the obvious candidates for some graphene products (and Samsung seems to be near the front of the pack in products based on graphene)...but maybe it'll be some other segment altogether (solar panel makers like Sharp and Kyocera, perhaps?).

Whatever happens, I want in, at least as an investor. So, I guess next time I review my portfolio (which currently contains GOOG and nothing else) I'm gonna do some more research on graphene. It's probably not a big rush to find the right companies...since it'll be a very long bet, anyway.
Myself, I moved all my vital email, coding, and
business administration from a desktop box with
Linux to an Android phone and an MBP on the last
trip I took.

Do you also code on the phone somehow or just on the MBP?
What HTC Incredible S
One thing to consider when drawing comparisons between music performance (not theory) and programming is the market for fresh graduates.

Julliard can afford to be as competitive as it is because the input-output function is a strong bottleneck: You don't need many graduates (for every open violin position in European orchestras, there are roughly 800 graduates), there are plenty of kids who've been playing since the age of 6, so entry is competitive and standards are very high.

Programming? Very different situation. The market demands large numbers of CS grads, and (what the author so condescendingly calls) "natural programmers" are fairly rare. So standards suffer.
Cheap spanish classes (cheap everything, really) and nice weather. The internet could be a little faster, but I guess you can't have it all.
greplin should be able to do this
And completely unusable for the average consumer (needing them to keep track of their key, and somehow secure their key, and somehow pass their key to every browser they use.)
The descriptive text is in large part there only to satisfy the requirement of 'enablement', meaning, if you patent an idea, you have to disclose enough information so that someone reasonably skilled in the art could duplicate your invention. Trying to parse the descriptive text of a patent isn't particularly useful.

Thanks for clarifying there.

Wow- so using any handheld device with a keypad that interacts with a server in such a way that allow a sale is patented.

I've been struggling to wrap my head around this issue, so I tried to recall if we've ever been in this situation before where it suddenly became possible for the "ordinary" person to make cool new technology applications. It occurred to me that perhaps there was. Several decades ago consumer electronic components became quite cheap and powerful (I could buy integrated circuits as a kid and build stuff, for example).

So, I wondered, are circuits patentable? Maybe that would be analogous to what's going on today. Turns out, they are patentable.

So it seems that changing the law here would require singling out the software industry as being particularly "special" in some respects, and maybe in a way that it really isn't. This thought pulls back my knee-jerk "ban the software patents" reaction quite a bit.

However, the industry itself recognizes that software is somehow special. For the first time to my knowledge builders of stuff that isn't toxic or somehow else dangerous can declare it illegal for you to take it apart and see how it works. So maybe software is somehow special and a special case can be made concerning software patents-- like having them expire sooner. (I have a knee-jerk reaction against the "no hacking" terms, also.)

Here's an article by Pamela Jones on reverse engineering software if anybody's interested: http://lwn.net/Articles/134642/
The middle-men (investment bankers, in this case) didn't make the $300 million profit - they sold it to people who manage money, that made the profit.

Typically, the biggest blocks of money for IPO investing will be institutional investors : meaning that the actual beneficiaries will be the pension funds, and investment funds of regular people.

The sources of profit to 'Wall Street' are the 7% underwriting fee (which is an enduring travesty, IMO) and performance fees on the managed money (which get a boost because the underlying fund appreciated step-wise).

Regular performance fees are mostly related just to the size of the fund (approximately 1%) - so the effect of the IPO jump on an overall fund will be negligible. However, individual managers potentially benefit indirectly because their performance relative to their peers would improve, and they may be able to get bigger portfolios to manage (which is the big win for an institutional money manager).

If the IPO buyers were hedge-funds, then they would benefit from a 20% performance kicker (which is why people at hedgefunds can be very handsomely rewarded). OTOH, the hedgefund investors would likely just be 'flipping' the shares within a couple of days - so they're less attractive/stable initial holders than the investment banks would ideally like for a 'solid' IPO.
Thanks for the tip Ben, regarding questions for the HN community; it's been noted.

I'm interested in learning more about this "directory of startup tools" you mentioned. Will it be a self-compiled directory, or something more collaborative in nature?
I don't think that's how it works. I think what the speaker meant is that the accounting data is forwarded from the local access point to the billing system at the end of the day.
You canuse, at least for older versions, catdoc.
New mobile app aims to combat corruption
A simple writing exercise has been shown to close various stereotypical "gaps", including gender and race: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/11/2... Maybe it would be effective here too? "Perhaps you care about creativity, family relationships, your career, or having a sense of humour. Pick two or three of these values and write a few sentences about why they are important to you. You have fifteen minutes." Then read the job ads.
I was assuming dropbox would do reference counting so they could delete data that nobody is using, and account tracking so they can put storage limits on your account and charge you for using more space.

But they could make a system which didn't do those things and then they would be able to do as you discuss.

Now the limit to what they could do for the RIAA is identify if they have a file stored and delete it or block it from being stored, but only with an example whole file - not by filename or hash.

So the solution is ugly, and reasonable, but has some weaknesses. Yet, it is better than nothing.

Maybe. It depends what you are guarding against. If you fundamentally do not trust dropbox, then it is no better than nothing. If you do want to keep copied music files then it is pretty much no better than nothing. If you want convenience and features it is worse than nothing. If you want a basic security that stops dropbox easily trawling your most personal files, it is better than nothing.
This revolution needs new revolutionaries
Wow. The article is significant because it identifies and proposes a solution to a fundamental problem everyone has (even if they don't recognize it yet). Craig Newmark concurs with the poster per a gigaom interview. "Newmark called some form of distributed trust system “the killingest of killer apps” for the web over the next decade" (http://gigaom.com/2010/03/18/craig-newmark-on-the-webs-next-...).

A giant multidimensional karma score, a peer-based FICO score for reputation, a PKI-like vouch system, an Advogato-like acceptance scheme to cover all internet activity solves so many things.

- Know who to trust on craigslist, airbnb, etc.
- Astroturfing/trolling disappears on your favorite political forum.
- Gamed ratings disappear from your favorite music discovery site.
- Online referendums, with the assurance of only one account per unique person, are possible.
- Promotional online giveaways with a one per person limit become easy.
- Gone are account verification hoops like sms codes to a required cel phone.
- The usefulness of consumer complaint boards is restored.
- Trolls may finally become a relics of some ancient internet past.
- Amazon-turk inflated rankings no longer can mislead ebay buyers.

Bitcoin solving it's own local problem may very well fix everything else on the intarwebs.

I would expand on the posters call for "decentralized peripherals: a decentralized exchange, a decentralized DNS, Namecoin, and also a decentralized web of trust." Open source R&D, with decentralized governance and distributed funding by the crowd, is what should be powering all this.

Hackers should crowd-fund a collectively beholden R&D outfit that churns out solutions for fundamental things like reputation and decentralized peripherals. Right now such a role is played out haphazardly?, incidentally by matured startups that donate or "give back" according to their narrow focus some other narrowly focused institution. A wider more comprehensive, more coherent approach is achieved when hackers cut out the middle steps and self-organize to solve the fundamental problems they face everyday. Open source R&D... what should we call it?
The writer of this blog post and some of the comments here seem to be conflating two terms: "Computer Science" and "Programming".

I'd like to suggest that maybe we should consider two completely different things. Just as there is a huge different between someone who can play a musical instrument, and someone who is well versed in musical theory, there is also a huge difference between a _programmer_ and a _computer_ _scientist_.

You can learn how paging in a virtual memory system works, and how a garbage collector works, without necessarily being able to code up a program that plays "twenty questions". And similarly, someone be able to code up all sorts of interesting programs, without necessarily understanding "big O" notation. Their programs might not be the most efficient in the world, but it's certainly possible to do all sort of programming without being exposed to the formalism that comes from taking CS classes --- that's what most high school students who taught themselves how to write Basic, or Pascal or C programs generally have done.

If you decouple the two, then you could imagine having a series of classes which are "programming labs", for which you could test out of the first 1 or 2, and which would be mostly about the skill of programming, and different series of classes that are about _computer_ _science_, and which don't necessarily require that much programming expertise.
A real-time fantasy sports website using Rails, jQuery, and Faye -- all new technologies for me ;-)

http://www.fantasy5live.com
I've been working on an idea for a data-driven, rule-based web templating engine semi-inspired by CSS and XSLT. Been doing lots of research and working on a spec. Maybe by end of summer I'll have found some collaborators.

Aside from that, trying to learn Python.
I remember asking this very same question to my Math teacher when I was 12, during middle school.

She paused 5 seconds and then replied: "It's exercise for your brain, it makes it more elastic!".

Eventually, I became an engineer (and learned the hard way why math matters), but I really hope she dosen't teach anymore.
Show HN: Simple web service to retrieve Open Graph metadata
Scrambl sends out invites for golf and lets the group vote on the course and date.

How does that sound?
Will someone please buy hn.com and point it here?
hackernews.com would be comparably appropriate
You're probably just having some fun with semantics, but I'm sure helipad meant to say, "how many companies with essentially one product make billions?"
If you get a free weekend, and have an extra $75 or so, you should spend a couple of nights at Casa del Mundo on Lake Atitlán. Amazing.
I like the idea of the site, very interesting.

As a suggestion, how about a haskell.micro-optimization.com, rb.micro-optimization.com, or py.micro-optimization.com? I feel like this could be a nice resource if it included more languages.
kiba, if by "spammy" you mean continuing to call for focus of the hack-space's collective intelligence on one of its most fundamental problems... then spam on brother... spam on.
This feels like a treasure trove. Actually works out as a decent format for a book, I think. I saved the page as a webarchive to dropbox and opened it on the iPad with GoodReader. Good reading on the train. Cheers edw519.