skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are plenty of opportunities in NYC - from startups, to big brands, to finance. All of them are competing for the same talent.

When you are ready to start looking, change your LinkedIn profile to say you're a <whatever> consultant located in NYC. You will start getting contacted by headhunters within a few days.
I think the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is grossly overblown, especially for getting stuff done. You might notice that all of the research (at least all of it I have seen reports of) uses very short term operations, things that can be done in minutes, or hours at the most, to show the contrast. I do not think intrinsic motivation can be maintained without something outside of itself to keep it focused. I don't think it an accident that nearly all advances in knowledge (explicit or process) comes from academia with its obsessive status games or from for-profit businesses with the need to make money.

I have mostly used work to help maintain my focus over the years. While most of my projects were not directly part of my job, I used the requirements of my jobs (and expected jobs) to guide my learning from project to project, for some continuity. Those that were not related to work were a lot more scattershot.

ADDED: Before someone brings up examples of people who weren't currently academics contributing to science, like Einstein writing papers while he was a patent clerk, there is no reason to go through the extra effort to write up results into publishable papers (which is a lot of work) if you are not aiming for something more than the sheer joy of discovery.
Interesting concept, but I doubt it will take off. The present version would be easily breakable by image-processing and some scripting. They could obfuscate the image, but then you're in the same war-of-attrition you see with text-based captchas today.

Text captchas suck, but they're the only thing that's ever been shown to be robust over the long term.
Your experience sounds great.

I agree that we don't need to abandon college. However, I do believe we must abandon the idea that a college degree is a mechanism by which we can accurately determine an potential employee's baseline education, intelligence, and ultimately, their value.

For all the value you've derived from school, there will be 100 more individuals in your graduating class that never achieve a 10th of what you have.

I really enjoyed the recent New Yorker article on "Why we have college," where two different theories for the purpose of college are presented. Personally, I'm a fan of the second theory:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110...
What I think is incredibly cool is not just the simulation of a single system, but of an entire network, the environment the networks ran on, and the historic "feel", with fake users, nodes, hacking tools, games, interpreters, random files spread all around.

It's one of the most incredible things I've ever seen.

I'm half wondering if it's possible to mirror this in some way so it can be preserved for posterity..."telehack in a box" or some such.
feature request: I would like to be able to use the software with a pointing device or with the two mouse button rather than with the A and L keys.
The crusade against college
There are areas of Brooklyn that rival Manhattan prices, but generally speaking the further away from Manhattan you go the cheaper the rent gets.
Diversification. It's usually imprudent to have 90%+ of your net worth invested in a single three-year-old company, if you have people willing to buy the shares from you.
It's a completely client-side solution. It will be easily broken.

Even it it weren't, and shapes were generated and verified on the server side, computers are extremely good at recognizing simple shapes.

EDIT:

Here, to break it on this page

http://www.josscrowcroft.com/demos/motioncaptcha

simply enter this into the URL box:

javascript:$('input').attr({'disabled':false});
As far as I can tell from the demo there is no server side validation on this captcha. Everything is handled on the client side. So really all your doing is making an annoyance for your honest target users. And allowing a spam bot to just totally ignore this 'captcha' to submit their POST regardless....

I've seen hundreds of these 'alternative' captchas. 'slide to unlock', 'sort images' ect. None yet have proven to be as effective at stopping a simple curl script.

Real captchas will store the value of the image or verification method on the first fetch in a session, and when the form is finally filled out the server will verify that the session value matches the submitted value. Without this component, the alternative captchas are pointless and just an annoyance to your real users.

Spam bots are not built on top of web browsers...
Wow, I did this, and went through the following stages:

1. What am I supposed to do?

2. Oh okay. Wow, this is really hard.

3. Focus focus focus tunnel vision mode

4. Now I am really good at this.

5. My brain is tired and I am no longer good at this at all.
It seems to me that you're problem isn't that you don't have motivation it's that you need rewards right ways. I used to be the same way. Learning a few tricks in each of those areas gives you a thrill, but once that thrill wears off you lose interest and go off to find your next thrill.

Grades are just a slightly longer term reward. You work hard for a few weeks or a month then you get rewarded with an A or a B.

Instead of beating yourself up over these things you need to find a way to "reward" learning something in more depth.

Discipline isn't forcing yourself to do something it's more like tricking yourself into doing it until it's second nature and that's what you naturally do. For example, surround yourself with Haskell materials and environments to the exclusion of all else AND have set up some kind of reward system for yourself. Or removing junkfood from your house in order to get hungry. If you're hungry and search the house for a snack and all you have are salads or pre-cooked chicken breasts then odds are you aren't going to go to the trouble to leave the house to find something else, you'll just eat what you have.

Basically you need to find a way to make delayed gratification more gratifying to you than instant or short term gratification.

Follow the example of Khan Academy. They use game mechanics to keep people coming back. Do the same for things you want to study.

The other thing to realize is that at some point you need to commit to a path and ignore everything that's not applicable to that path. You can't be know everything. If you want to be a PHP developer don't go off and read a book about embedded C programming. It's outside of your area.
Especially if you know something they don't.
Florida Homeowner Forecloses on Bank of America Branch [video]
As long as the work is a result of taxpayer's money, they SHOULD make it free for the public's access.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet is culture. I have hired people on elance and sometimes the simplest things trip you up because of cultural differences. There are even significant cultural difference between California and Louisiana, let alone between the US and a another country overseas.
To be specific, it is a meme now that Sony has bad security. Because of this, hackers are more willing to attempt hacks against Sony, because A. they feel greater confidence in their chances at success, and B. people spread stories that confirm preconceptions, so succeeding in a way that confirms the "Sony has bad security" preconception will increase their reach, and therefore their feeling of reward.

Take, in juxtaposition, OSX's security. It is a meme that OSX is more secure than Windows—even though the opposite is true, as each Defcon competition proves. However, because of the prevalence of the meme, few amateurs are willing to attempt to hack OSX; most virus, worm and exploit writers instead tend to get their start hacking Windows. Then, because people tend to fall into patterns of doing what has brought them success in the past, when these people become security professionals (whether white-hat or black-hat) they specialize themselves to the Windows malware/exploit ecosystem—and the meme perpetuates itself.
I feel for you. I am Italian and my wife is Thai. Just to change planes in London on the way to Mexico, she should have applied for a Visa or... "go and hope the immigration officer in London let her trough". This is actually stated, with other words, in the law.
Same for the US. We could not buy a KLM ticket to Mexico from Italy because the stopover was in Los Angeles.
I still wonder why they made this rule... probably terrorism. Anyway, closed countries inevitably collapse, remember the Soviet Union?
Alternative medicine: Think yourself better
I don't know about this Ponzi scheme label, but I'm pretty damn sure Google was buying a brand that was well known in that market space. This would have reduced the competition for market entry. Groupon's site is not difficult to make at all. It's nothing complex. So Google's $6 billion offer I think was purely on the business side and nothing technical.
In the paper didthe difficulty increase automatically? How did that work?
Can anyone reccomend a good iPhone or android version?
Agreed. Personally it seems they made purly emotional decision to hate a trend and found "logical reasons" to support their whimsical supposition.
I think most offensive is the implication that it is our duty to devastate our lands with pesticide and the chemical waste that go with it. This has to be one of the most contra logical articles I have seen in some time. I am for careful genetic engineering but so far it seems to bu used for noting more than a form of hydraulic despotism.
I would use Ocaml before Haskell as a production language, actually. It's hard to reason about space performance in a lazy language, as I'm sure you can imagine.

Ocaml is an elegant, simple language that is in many ways like a "functional C". You can also write very fast, robust code in it. Haskell is where the next generation of cool language concepts is coming from (like Lisp in the 1960s-80s) but I'd prefer Ocaml for production use.

That said, you'd need to put some resources into rewriting the runtime to make use of multicore. Ocaml is blazingly fast but right now the implementation is single-core only.
An Industrial-Strength Audio Search Algorithm (Shazam)
Surely this matters very little if you only have one CSS file and JS file. Which if you use sprockets and precompile assets will be the case. It definitely was so in the past that if you didnt serve your assets in one file you had to use a horrible subdomain asset hack for parallel downloads, but Rails 3.1 even solves this (so long as you have node.js or therubyracer installed)
As a fan of David Münnich's notpr0n, I must say that the pythonchallenge website looks like a really cool spinoff and seems more approachable than Project Euler.

Edit: Not to mention you're not restricted to using Python, just like Project Euler. What's not to like?
I traveled for years doing business everywhere in the world and I always did it on a tourist visa: US, Australia, Europe, China, Turkey, South America even Russia (notoriously bureaucratic for these things)... anywhere.
And all the people I met did the same.
Business travel wouldn't probably even be possible.
You've got to catch a plane and go, fast.
If we start treating business people like immigrants on a boat we are doomed.
"he has already cashed out more than $300 million of Groupon stock as the company sold shares to outside investors"

This money should have been spent on funding Groupon, hiring people, improving their tech, infrastructure, etc. Have there been other companies in the past where someone cashed out $300 million and is then using an IPO with the guise of raising money for the company?
If you want the ultimate in NYC luxury, find an apartment within walking distance of your job ... you can pretend that the $100 / month you save on a Metrocard makes up for the rent increase. A 5-10 minute walk-to-work commute is probably the single greatest quality of life improvement money can buy.
First thought: Seriously, you guys couldn't just make SQL or something lucene-based work for this (like elasticsearch) ?

Second thought: Hmm, ooh well, I just use google with site: news.ycombinator.com

EDIT: It annoys me when people hate on SQL and act like it's OMGSOSLOW. I would agree that fulltext search BY ITSELF isn't amazing, but you can use something like Sphinx to wrap it and support awesome things like Soundex / Metaphone fuzzy matching. It's also stupid easy to set up. The NoSQL movement is, IMO, largely misguided. If you need to shard data and scale ridiculously, something like Lucene can probably do it. If you need bigger than that, use memcached /redis and shard and map/reduce queries....that makes sense, but NoSQL doesn't seem like a great idea for PRIMARY data storage. It seems like you better have amazing backups :)
% of game pirates >> % of hellbanned users
Just for curiosity's sake, how is this dataset populated? Is ThriftDB just scraping HN? Is there some kind of back-end DB feed?
Some countries still think they are the centre of the world and that people would do anything to get there (like applying for a bloody business visa for a conference).
It's not like that anymore, wake up.
The world is full of opportunities in more open countries and business people are like web users: id the usability is low, they simply go elsewhere.
Google pits C++ against Java, Scala, and Go
Karim?
He could get a visitor visa, which can be used for tourism and business. Even if you're from a Third World country, it's not that hard to get it.

Then the US entity would pay his company in Netherlands, and he would get paid in Netherlands from the Dutch company.

The situation is the same as if you're a manager from a foreign company having a business meeting in US.
A report, based on interviews, from Human Rights Watch:
http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2011/06/01/we-ve-never-seen-su...
I realize that this is an important decision, and as such, am not going to make any irreversible choices until a month before school starts again in the fall.

I'm currently studying Computer Science. I'm pretty sure that this is the right field for me, because the few moments of true motivation tend to come at the initial phases of personal projects, such as a GolfScript interpreter I'm working on (https://bitbucket.org/bluejeansummer/golfscript). Most everything else (including my CS classes) feels like jumping through hoops, chasing after a degree that I don't think will be worth much when accompanied by bad grades.

A change is certainly in order, and I hope to find something that works over the summer. If I do get a job, I may return to school when I have a reason other than "It's what you do after high school". Otherwise, I hope to have found something that gives me the motivation to get through school.

Thanks for your advice.
Can someone older or wiser than me discuss what the idea is behind "only one return per method" in imperative code? I agree completely that it makes many methods much more difficult to read, and I've never understood why it was taught as a guideline in the past (and why some people still seem to subscribe to it today.)

EDIT: It makes a lot more sense to me now that I think about it in the context of a language like C, with no garbage collection and no exceptions. Thanks!
"Because of his existing wealth, he said, the Groupon IPO windfall won't bring big changes to his life."

If he's already wealthy - why would he care about diversification?
The Story Behind Ruby 1.9.3 Getting 36% Faster Loading Times
The Importance of Startups in Job Creation and Job Destruction
they'll never trust Sony with personal information ever again

Fair enough, but Sony isn't in the "personal information" business. They can always create some new company to handle the PSN billing, which is the only personal information that matters to their bottom line.
"You cannot overlook the fact that they’re also making hundreds of millions of dollars each quarter now"

I don't understand this "oh but they're making $4 billion so they must be a great company!" argument. If my business plan is to pay people $2 and have them give me $1 back, I could also make $4 billion (and I'd be loosing $4 billion in the process, but that's just "marketing expenses"…).
For the F# developer, WebSharper ( http://websharper.com/ ) seems to offer a great implementation based on the Formlets abstraction.
For some theoretical background, have a look at http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/links/formlets/ which has some articles describing the Form abstraction by Philip Wadler, et al.
Very similar to how the guest login works with chromebooks.
At risk of coming out of HN retirement, a friend forwarded this topic to me. I wrote an extensive commentary before signing-off:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2059012

(now back to peaceful slumber)
Well, that was worthless.

So it's an opinion piece, that kids have a "bullshit detector" of some kind. Fine, have that opinion. But look at the counter-arguments: Santa Claus. Easter Bunny. Generally-unquestioning adherence to parents' religion. Etc.

Sure, once they start thinking for themselves more, they start to find inconsistencies. Adults, of course, do nothing of the sort. They're not the cynical, doubting types, no siree.

So, cherry pick a couple high-profile success stories and project to the population as a whole. This is high quality content, apparently, as it has over 200 votes. Maybe people are just voting on the concept, as everybody has encountered someone getting upset over being told the truth?
pretty lame...
Andrew Mason’s "I'm not answering that" technique
You would be very surprised at the number of people in management positions at any size company that think this is OK.

At the jobs (consulting and otherwise) I've held in the last few years 75% of the companies stored passwords in plaintext. I'm not justifying it in any way shape or form, but Sony shouldn't be singled out. Until there is an immediate and clear financial incentive to use proper security companies are going to continue to ignore it.
I read that to imply it was after he sold the $300M, not before - the article claims he already cashed that $300M out. Thus, the extra net worth he would have gotten beyond the $4B would have been meaningless, whereas the $300M got him to the point where the IPO is meaningless. Based upon this, cashing out $300M would be extremely logical. But maybe my reading is incorrect.
This may not apply to this market, but I think it's still insightful:

"Here's a model that we've had trouble with. Maybe you'll be able to figure it out better. Many markets get down to two or three big competitors—or five or six. And in some of those markets, nobody makes any money to speak of. But in others, everybody does very well.

Over the years, we've tried to figure out why the competition in some markets gets sort of rational from the investor's point of view so that the shareholders do well, and in other markets, there's destructive competition that destroys shareholder wealth.

If it's a pure commodity like airline seats, you can understand why no one makes any money. As we sit here, just think of what airlines have given to the world—safe travel, greater experience, time with your loved ones, you name it. Yet, the net amount of money that's been made by the shareholders of airlines since Kitty Hawk, is now a negative figure—a substantial negative figure. Competition was so intense that, once it was unleashed by deregulation, it ravaged shareholder wealth in the airline business.

Yet, in other fields—like cereals, for example—almost all the big boys make out. If you're some kind of a medium grade cereal maker, you might make 15% on your capital. And if you're really good, you might make 40%. But why are cereals so profitable—despite the fact that it looks to me like they're competing like crazy with promotions, coupons and everything else? I don't fully understand it.

Obviously, there's a brand identity factor in cereals that doesn't exist in airlines. That must be the main factor that accounts for it.

And maybe the cereal makers by and large have learned to be less crazy about fighting for market share—because if you get even one person who's hell-bent on gaining market share.... For example, if I were Kellogg and I decided that I had to have 60% of the market, I think I could take most of the profit out of cereals. I'd ruin Kellogg in the process. But I think I could do it.

In some businesses, the participants behave like a demented Kellogg. In other businesses, they don't. Unfortunately, I do not have a perfect model for predicting how that's going to happen.

For example, if you look around at bottler markets, you'll find many markets where bottlers of Pepsi and Coke both make a lot of money and many others where they destroy most of the profitability of the two franchises. That must get down to the peculiarities of individual adjustment to market capitalism. I think you'd have to know the people involved to fully understand what was happening."

-Charlie Munger

http://ycombinator.com/munger.html
I doubt anyone would think of PSN as giving their information to anyone other than Sony, regardless of the legal status of it. If this new 'meme' is putting people off Sony, they presumably wouldn't buy a PS4 in the first place, regardless of who handles the billing.
I wonder if African doctors are taught "When you hear hoofbeats, think of zebras, not horses"?

That might sound like a flippant comment, but I found it interesting that such a subjective example is used to demonstrate what should be an objective axiom.
Such divisions rarely will actually occur to someone considering whether to use a Sony product. More generally though, I question that most people are going to think about this too much before buying - they'll think more about the downtime.
One, very simple, example:

int some_function( some_variable ) {

if (some_variable) {
b = 1;
} else {
b = 2;
}

log("Its important I log that I'm returning %d\n", b);

return b;

}

If its not obvious why this is superior...
I'd never even heard of this practice, hellbanning, slowbanning. I gotta say, and this may not be popular sentiment, that I view using such tactics as dishonest. You got a problem with someone, deal with it head-on. Don't resort to passive-aggressiveness, and don't yield to the oh-so-human desire for revenge the delicious poison of helping someone get what you feel they have coming to them.

Deal with problem users directly and honestly. Warn them, temp-ban them if it doesn't work, permaban them if they force you to, but not without telling them why.

I'm not speaking without experience. I've been the moderator of political threads in the off-topic section of a college football board for about six years. We've had to deal with some crazies.
Could someone explain to me why someone who stands to turn $1,000,000 into $4,000,000,000 would ever find it wise to cash out a measly $300,000,000 out?

Perhaps someone remembers how many paper millionaires got their houses repo'd the last time the market got very exuberant in Silicon Valley.

I get a sense that people want Groupon to lose, largely for the reasons that crabs like to pull down any crab attempting to leave the bucket. Groupon was the hottest game in town, based not on whimsy but on demonstrable revenue growth to hundreds of millions of dollars (!) in a brief period of time.

Everybody wanted in on that deal. If a condition of that was that founders/employees/etc walked away rich regardless of what happened to the company, oh well, capitalism happens to investors, too. "You make us all rich then you get rich, or you end up in the poor house" is not a law of nature or moral arrangement we should aspire to, it is a market condition caused in one time and place by the market favoring people with lots of money instead of with growing companies. With regards to Groupon, the market swung in the other direction.

Everyone knows that if a VC invests several hundred million into a company and that company blows up, the VC still walks away rich, right?