skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unless you're positive you want to go the academic route, I'd highly recommend working for a year or so first, and I don't mean as an intern. I remember folks from my M.S. who came straight from undergrad, and by and large they had trouble with the sort of things that you'd simply know if you'd worked on production code before. For example, in a database architecture class, one student actively argued with me on theoretical grounds (chiefly that it breaks the concept of defined primary keys) when I pointed out that it's common for commercial RDBMS's to be able to create autoincrementing identity columns for tables. Another student opened up separate copies of Eclipse for each file he wanted to edit, and then asked me why he was having performance issues on his machine.

I know that computer science != programming, but you can get a significant amount of knowledge from just a small investment in time in the "real world", and that knowledge may prove quite useful later in your studies.
Play’em, TV powered by your friends
Play’em is the name of my last week-end project. The aim of play’em is to play the videos that your friends shared on facebook, without having to browse, just like watching TV.

In order to give it a try, open play’em (http://playem.org/), connect to your facebook account, watch, and relax! If a video is boring, you can skip to the next one.

Technically speaking, play’em is a plain HTML page with some concise javascript logic. There is no server logic, so it’s very fast to use and simple to maintain!

It would be a pleasure to read your thoughts about this tiny project. I'm also interested in collaboration opportunities, e.g. with a designer :-)
This article sounds like a lesser version of a Linus rant I read once and even he used the strawman argument of "in C you can always see what's going on". Does nobody in C use function pointers?

I say horses for courses and if you use operator overloading and templates to make your C++ code overly cute then it's not the fault of the language.
Productivity tips for the easily distracted
SPILLO Cave Boutique Hotel Cappadocia Turkey - Boutique hotel Cappadocia
Wasn't this posted just a few days ago? I can't find it on google, but I'm convinced people were discussing it on #startups...
Sort a list on your own criteria with Python
This is exactly as one math professor mentioned in his lecture: "Everyone secretly write down a number on a piece of paper. I will give the prize of one million dollars to the person with the highest number, but the prize will be divided by the number written."

He wound up paying 1 cent. Which went on to prove that if people cooperate anonymously, everyone wins, yet some people will always chose to not cooperate and screws the whole pot. All the class had to do was collectively write 1 and split the 1 mil evenly between each other.
> who is going to see them as a worthy non-profit entity after this point?

Probably the same people who do today. Non-profit does not mean non-revenue.
Purpose of a 'mystery key' on IBM PC 3270 keyboard
No, you guys. You don't get it. Bitcoins are going to take over the world. We're ALL going to be part of an economy of Bitcoins, just like we all universally adopted Swatch Internet Time[1]!

[*1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
Don’t design like a programmer
link to play‘em: http://playem.org/
Going Independent Is The Best Move I Ever Made
This might be true for any other field than math, but the basic understanding of math you need today is no different from what Pythagoras and Euclid needed.
I had the pleasure of beta testing the app for a while before it was launched and thought the price cheap. It's really interesting to see how many people have come up with issues with either pricing or the features without trying the app first.

But even more interesting are the "reviews" that came out immediately after the app was launched. Reviews by people who obviously had not tested or even purchased the app. They judged it based on screen shots and their own assumptions. Gizmodo being the prime example here.

Given the pricing expectations of the Mac App Store, people's tendency to pay based on how easy they think it was to build the app (something this minimalistic practically codes itself) and the mentality that if I don't find something useful, nobody else must either, I really feel bad for people who are new to the app business.
awesome, especially since I am planning to move couple of projects to rails 3.1

most popular libraries easily got converted to coffee

but faced some problems with hand coded javascript files from a project. "Label not supported" error. going to test those with jslint
agreed. I miss the shocking 'oh, and one last thing…'. watching steve jobs present is highly entertaining sometimes.
It makes a lot of sense to improve the performance of email campaigns, but to link poor email reception to Google Search penalties is highly speculative and misguided.

The site in question was most likely affected by the Panda update which was released (in several iterations) around the same time and looking at the articles on the site I can see why this could've happened.
Chernobyl had no core containment

Can we agree that any given reactor will likely have no core containment either, after a passenger jet crashed into it?

it was a big explosion

Likewise can we agree that there will be a big explosion when a plane crashes into a reactor?

the director was incompetent

And that is unheard of in other reactors?

on a European scale, it's not much

So, which of these areas would you like to evacuate permanently?

http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/power-reactors-map-sm....

No. It may happen.

I wonder where you're taking your optimism from. Yes, terrorism may disappear. But it doesn't seem too likely, does it?
This seems to be a sensible idea. The long break in between shows causes me to turn the channel when one ends.
Anyone else bored of the "i" prefix?
What are online compilers and IDE's?
"these people are getting a significant proportion of value for simply being early adopters"

I'm not one of them but have no gripes with that. What you describe is also commonly known as the entrepreneurial taking-unknown-risks for an unknown-future-reward.

It's the same with government currencies -- the government/banking complex gets newly created money first, and gets to spend it when the new money supply still has the purchasing power of the old money supply, ie. before inflation. This is their bonus for successfully defending their monopoly on money creation. Not that I'm in favour of such a privilegue. Which is the appeal to a growing number of users: yes, early adopters may be rewarded in proportion to how early they adopted, BUT no-one can unilaterally create new Bitcoins at the push of a button or by signing some law and even the early adopters could not initially create more bitcoins or faster than prescribed by the open source peer to peer protocol.
> If you’re launching a high-end smartphone, you’re going to get a rush of power users flocking to it right away — and if the browser freezes every few minutes or the battery is inexplicably charging at a glacial pace, that’s a problem. Those power users are going to talk to each other, and they’re going to talk to their less technically-inclined friends.

I disagree a little bit about point 2 in regards to it being Apple-like. The first version of the iPhone (3G) is very slow and clunky. I was just on my sister's last weekend (and I own a iP4) and couldn't believe how long it took some screens to change (in seconds, not milliseconds). How about the issues with the antenna on the 4? or how bad the service was (has been?) in NYC/SF? This is actually what I find remarkable about Apple's iPhone success. How did they get people (including myself) to deal with all of this?
I stopped reading after "I’ve been unable to find a proper replacement for a phone that launched nearly half a year ago".

Dude, if you've been through 5 phones in less than half a year, you have problems not the phone. Chill out. You like this phone? Keep it.
MIT computational puzzle still unsolved after more than a decade
I recently looked into generating bitcoins, and that's not really true. Very little power goes into generating a successful bitcoin, true... But a LOT of power is wasted by failing to generate them. That's why it takes days, weeks or months (depending on processing power) to generate a successul bitcoin, on average.
I can't listen to jazz while coding. Jazz is foreground music. It's communicative: it grabs your attention and forces you to listen. It would be like trying to read a book and watch a movie at the same time.

For me it's ambient and/or electronic (particularly Brian Eno) or occasionally a bit of folk or indie.
Infected Mushroom - Classical Mushroom is my go-to "gotta get stuff done" coding album. I highly recommend it.
My solution is to expire the BTC to force circulation.
I find lyrics in music very distracting when trying to concentrate, so my go-to focus music when I need to Get Things Done is jazz. John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Miles Davis.

That said, the first album in my "Concentration" playlist is actually "Music for Airports" by Brian Eno [1]. It's ambient music from the late 70s that was actually intended to be played in an airport. It's light, airy, and awesome. It's a four track album where each track is long: 17 minutes for the first track.

If you've never heard it, give it a listen.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_1:_Music_for_Airports
Yes, this appeared three days ago on the front page.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2591367
This worked surprisingly well. Nice work!
Why Java folks should look forward to Scala
Really?

What's next? The Five Best Coding Drinks? Air Fresheners? Light Bulbs?

Anyway, music is such a subjective choice.

Plus, listening to music (or anything really) while performing any kind of cognitive task has generally been shown to be a distraction [1] [2] [3] (and others).

[2] has an interesting quote:

> IT105 students did not perform as well with music on the graded labs 2 out of 3 times while
IT155 students performed better while listening to music. The inverted-U hypothesis also known
as the Yerkes-Dodson law [10] can be applied to the results. The inverted-U hypothesis predicts
performance improves on a task with increased emotional arousal up to a point after which
performance on the task deteriorates. The optimal level of arousal for a task depends on the
complexity of the task. When the task is complex a low level of arousal is optimal. When the
task is simple a higher level of arousal will lead to peak performance.

[1]: http://iris.lib.neu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&...

[2]: http://www.asee.org/documents/sections/middle-atlantic/sprin...

[3]: http://www.quora.com/Does-listening-to-music-while-programmi...
Yup. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2591367
+1 for "Something Else", great album

As for me, I can't get any work done without this:
http://soundcloud.com/birdfeeder/jurassic-park-theme-1000-sl...
Packages and package state....
Maybe windows can have good looking icons now
"Conrad Wolfram says the part of math we teach -- calculation by hand -- isn't just tedious, it's mostly irrelevant to real mathematics and the real world. He presents his radical idea: teaching kids math through computer programming."

http://www.ted.com/talks/conrad_wolfram_teaching_kids_real_m...
It's interesting that each of those practice scenarios he recommends are fairly dangerous from the point of view of the ego. I would be very apprehensive about learning the multiplication tables in a public fashion.
Reverse-engineering the infant mind
I built a hack during the hackathon at Disrupt and was shocked to see that even though we were in New York, there were very similar traffic numbers from California (Disrupt was using an ISP in New Jersey so I am summing NY and NJ).
someone call m. night shyamalan!
The distraction bit is generally subjective, as well. Without music, I'm distracted by other things that actually pull me away from the computer. With music, I'm glued.

I found the list to be helpful, actually.
Test Your Leadership Skills; Build Better Indo Romanian Business Ties
I don't mind it when paired with a unique product name but do find it boring when paired with an every day word, iPhoto, iBook, iPad, iCloud. What's worse is that this one uses the 'i' and 'Cloud' together... my Apple fanatic marketer is going to have a heart attack!
funny, 3 of the 5 mentioned albums belong to my favorites :)
Not quite hacking, and not quite fiction, but I think Microserfs as well as others by the same author are representational of the more above-ground hacking that goes on quite a bit.
I love it. Dead simple & entertaining app
Why not just mandate cable providers pick up a small portion of the tab instead of going through the Federal government? FCC could make this happen over-night, in relative terms.
for me anything non-repetitive, non-lyrical and not incredibly overrated like Ghosts I-IV works for coding music
How Much Does a Web Site Cost? Tech
Really nice...

I found it interesting that you are with Mozilla considering the guy behind the llvm-to-javascript compiler works there too...

https://github.com/kripken/emscripten
European Court Partially Backs Kremlin in Khodorkovsky’s Prosecution
This is a very fair point, I think in some cases people are primarily interested in functionality as opposed to design.
Bosnian prank at Microsoft
7 ways to exploit psychology to sell security
this is what makes me visit HN every day. This will give me inspiration for the entire week. Hell of a resume loren, wish I had creativity like you and knew css better :)

How long did it take you to put this effort together and did you send your "formal" resume to airbnb before coming up with this idea?
Building real time communications applications with Python, Django, and Tropo
I don't think it's going to be a cloud hosting service. More probably a cloud music and storage service.
Just taking a wild guess that PG is Paul Graham, so any negative comments to the post are irrelevant at this point.
Thanks Gilles, I'm glad that you enjoy Play'em! :-D
The situation is not much better with inflating fiat currencies. Those who are closer to the money spigot have an advantage over those who are further way.
Long hair styles
Not only does long hair allow you to generate great looks such as half up half down hairstyles and elegant updos, it's also the just right way to glass case luscious waves and cascading curls! You can also style your tresses in a braided updo.
Cud-chewing is the etymology of the psych term, actually. Regurgitating the same thing over and over...

Glad you enjoyed the read. It's something I deal with personally as well.
I'm hanging out for an Apple TV app store. It'll be absolutely huge when it happens.

Glad to hear Steve will be presenting. It would have been kinda fun if they set the expectation that he wouldn't be there and made us sit through an hour of Phil Schiller, just for Steve to run out on the end to have a one more thing moment.

(Ticker tape and lasers are optional.)
Do you mean http://pgxn.org/about/ or something else?
Wait for when they really get desperate and you see Swamp Dog, Bounty Logger.
> you singled out one sentence in the article as being untrue, which would suggest you consider the rest of the article to be true.

This is not even remotely valid reasoning.

He weighed in on one part of your article because he's in a special position to know whether or not it's true. Choosing not to weigh in on the rest of the article says nothing about his opinion of the rest of it.
Have you read "Emergency" by Neil Strauss? It's kind of all about hacking real life. Great read, IMO.
ZOOM and ENHANCE!

... If this really works as well as it seems, it's going to ruin some of our best pop-culture-technology jokes.
I'm impressed. Definitely an upvote.
MAME?
Yeah, Azakai's brilliant. The paper he published was useful when figuring out how to translate goto statements to JS (C# supports them, though thankfully, they aren't used much.)
Unless you live in Ted Kennedy's or Trent Lott's district, where the cotton farms and paper mills are.

For decades these senators continuously sabotaged measures to eliminate the paper Dollar and get the US entirely on dollar coins. The US is probably the last major economy to still be using paper for such small denominations.
The points brought up here, especially by Thoma but less so by the quoted passage by Woolley, are very valid in my experience. Often times the shortest way surpass a difficult abstract challenge is to find a practical instance of it and then slough through the mechanics. You abuse the natural pattern searching of the human brain very productively that way.

Simultaneously, these arguments tend to be reactionary and ignore the benefits of calculators. A calculator, use effectively, allows for a far larger number of examples to be considered together than the brain is often able to achieve. This is was most apparent for me in pre-calculus classes where students should be gaining abstract intuition about the behaviors of functions. Here, graphing large numbers of functions varying their parameters allows one to quickly get a sense of a parametric family.

There's an implicit statement here that the "gap" is one such that the lower generation is worse off than their elders --- which is a pretty common human narrative, really. I think instead that this difference is less well-ordered than assumed. Technology is definitely capable of improving human cognition and learning by providing new capacity, and curricula need to explicitly study and take advantage of these capacities.
Rube Goldberg machine shatters Guinness world record, destroys planet
This is still strange for Apple. Speculation and then 'failing' to meet speculation always happened around Apple events, but still Apple didn't care.

Wether they do it to set expectations or not, this is the first time they give a list of what they will announce.

EDIT: spelling.
HTML5 for Mobile
Suggestion: disclose the budget during the programming breaks. Show how much PBS has, how much does it cost and how much they have to get from advertising in order to make ends meet. That way, donors can make informed decisions knowing that when the needle is back in the green the commercials will go away.
Steve Jobs will introduce iCloud at WWDC Keynote June 6
All education works best when customized for the learner. In your case (and mine!) you prefer to learn without the possibility that someone will ridicule you for making a mistake. Many people actually learn faster/better when the threat of ridicule is on the table, though.

Assigning homework actually has the same effect as the in-class quiz, since it forces each student to reach in the same way and would be another example.
Personal Favorite: "Black Sands", by Bonobo
Physical Recursion: Only $700
I'm still using my original Palm Pre because I find the other mobile OSes lacking. Sadly, I'll probably make the move to Android soon since the Palm hardware is falling apart.
Tangentially, up until grade 6 or 7 (in the late 80's), my math books also included BASIC code related to the concepts --- usually at the end of the chapter. It's how I became curious about programming and more so about math (though in my case none of the teachers ever did anything with the material, I either just typed the code into my family's TI-99A or tried to mentally work out what the program was doing).
Hopefully they will release an iPod Nano that has tactile controls (again!) at the same time. That is my main hope!
Heroku Announces Major New Version, Full Node.js Support
I don't see an Apple TV store happening soon. They don't want apps that compete with iTunes. Probably they would welcome games, but Amazon VOD? Never. Netflix is the one exception because it's too big to ignore.
Steve Jobs to announce iCloud at WWDC
Deliver faster, don’t do it all yourself
For OO you have to have state. Objects should have identities which distinguish them. That means that two objects are distinct even if all their properties are equal.

This break referential transparency. Two runs of "new Integer(2);" will be different.

So you cannot have proper functional language with OO. Even if all your objects are immutable.
Even after the mining phase ends, the hash chain continues to be extended, requiring the same computational resources.
Apple Announces WWDC 2011 Keynote
Startup Genome - Berkley and Standford Profs Try to Crack Innovation Code
Ever listen to Bonobo? It's jazzy ambient/electronic stuff. Check out the album 'Black Sands', especially the song 'Kong'
From the original article 'Students today might be taught by a teacher who is himself unable to work out 37+16 without help' I take it that this is extreme exaggeration to make the point. Such a person would clearly not be fit to teach any subject let alone one requiring numeracy skills at its core.
How preschoolers beat business graduates [video]
Very, very cool. Interested to see how System.Threading is implemented/converted.
I recently got an item from themeforest (just a launching page). Even though it looks rather fancy, modern, etc.. (and I could never have made anything that nice looking by myself), I've found that integrating it into my project and tweaking it to be just right has taken far more time than developing something decent from scratch.
I wonder if the early announcement is to put pressure on the record companies to finish the negotiations. They now have a hard deadline to get the deals signed.
I actually disagree with the 'play perfectly' example. It emphasizes the beginning of the practice and de-emphasizes the end. If playing the whole thing 20 times is boring, imagine how boring it is to play the beginning over and over until you get the whole thing perfect 5 times?

Guitar hero has a mode that lets you practice pieces of a song. You can practice each segment to perfection, then play the whole song. This targeted practice should be a lot more effective and still obey the idea of what he's saying.

I once had a teacher that took offense at the statement "Practice makes perfect." They always changed it to be "Perfect practice makes perfect." I think it's more in line with the article's meaning, too.

As another anecdote, I've been studying Japanese lately. Never before have I been so acutely aware that the only way to improve a skill is to use it. Reading English for me is -very- easy and enjoyable. Japanese started out extremely difficult, time-consuming and painful. A few years later, and I'm much better at it... But my listening skill (for Japanese) has hardly changed at all. Why? Because I almost never use it.
Great guide, even if one completely ignores the RoR part.
Why not just mandate citizens donate a small portion of their income to charity instead of getting federal funding? The IRS could make this happen over-night, in relative terms.
I had the same gut reaction when I saw the headline, but concur -- the article makes it clear that this is a move to adjust when the same material is presented, not the introduction of new advertisements in the program.

As a consumer of such things I certainly like the uninterrupted viewing, but I'll be the first to admit that I'm not likely to sit around for the content at the end.
iOS 5 is definitely going to be a major part of the keynote. The question is what iOS 5 will actually entail.

I'm confident that notifications are going to be a part of it, but when they plan on dedicating the whole keynote to software releases, one wonders how they can sell it.

iCloud, iOS 5 - maybe some great stuff for developers such as Apple-hosted databases. Personally, I am crossing my fingers for an iBooks overhaul, but that's probably too optimistic.
I have used the soundtrack from Half-Life 2, and it kinda worked...