skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"But, 35% or so of my social group that are pursuing degrees in Physics are headed to Finance instead of research. I'd much rather seem them expand human knowledge than profit and live an easy life."

Are there enough research positions to employ the majority of current physics and math students? I doubt it.

If you choose Finance as your desired profession, and Finance sees physics and math as a good source of new talent, then it's very rational to choose a physics or math major to get into Finance. As pointed out in a sibling comment, upside to physics and math departments is demand that wouldn't otherwise be there.
Tubebook.org - iTunes Library & Facebook feed Sharing via Youtube
Tubebook.org looks to socialize your iTunes Library & Facebook Feed by matching music and videos to pre-existing YouTube videos. Share the Library with friends.
Absolutely - if only to be able to read things like Tonika and Doozer.
In other news, HR still has no idea what it's doing, but is convinced that arbitrary heuristics which eliminate candidates implicitly lead to optimal hiring, business managers still don't understand tech work, and Wikipedia is widely believed to trend toward accuracy.

(in other words, hiring people is hard work, really hard work, but we pretend that employing arbitrary requirements [e.g. must be employed, must have exact experience in variant x of library y on platform z] equals the necessary hard work)
Sure, I don't see why not.

I slapped together a quick wiki... what do you think of hosting discussions there?

http://sicpgroup.pbworks.com
Now, who has the number for the Nobel Prize committee?

Easy: http://www.kva.se/en/contact/Committees/Nobel-Committee-for-.... :)
Ask HN: How can a side project hacker get code review?
I'm hacking on a few side projects. It would be nice if I could make money using them, but mostly I'm just using them to learn new tools. Frequently I have questions about the best way to design an application, or how to ensure that user data is secure, and I don't feel comfortable asking about it on StackOverflow or similar, either because it's too vague or could get traced back to a vulnerability in the projects I'm working on.

Is there a way I could get someone to "code review" the stuff I'm doing? Even if it's not looking at actual source, but just talking to someone about whether the way I'm laying out my code makes sense.

I could open source the app, but then I couldn't really make money off of it.
How many people download illegal music?
Awesome, count me in too. I started on it a while ago and I'm just towards the end of the 1st chapter. But I took a break and I seriously need to get back to it. I'm also putting up all my solutions to Github.

Would be great to work together, good way to stay focused and disciplined.
Why SQL Sucks for NoSQL Unstructured Databases
Solandra = Solr + Cassandra
Actually, Éire is the official name of the state in Irish, but you're right that the official name in English is simply Ireland, not the Republic of Ireland (which is an official "description").

When being a pedant, the key qualifying aspect is accuracy and correctness ;)
My schedule is pretty busy, but my goal is to put in 45 mins - 1 hr a day working through it.

I've put up a wiki to host discussions... any thoughts you have on how to structure it would be great!

http://sicpgroup.pbworks.com
Hey sayemm,

I'm the author of the article, so thanks a bunch for the praise! I have switched to being a professional Rails programmer four months ago and left the last 2.5 years of daily Python programming behind me. This post is more a by-product of a mail that I answered.

Maybe I'll sometimes get around and write a pendant for Ruby. To get you started - for my new job I had to read these seven books:

* Agile Web development by Sam Ruby

* CSS, the definitve guide

* Head first software development

* jQuery in Action

* pragmatic git

* The Rails Way by Obie Fernandez

* The Rspec Book

Granted, this is less Ruby then Rails specific.

Best to you on your path,

Alain
We do have serious issues. Anything that gets people to vote, and ideally to think about their vote, is a good thing.
It's a fun language with a lot of potential.

Even after playing with it and reading a lot about it, I still picked up a few additional things from this article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2631964

I'd say that's a good place to start if you're still not quite convinced it's worth it.
The Psychology of Time
I completely agree. In fact, as I read the title, my thought was "big list of features" and was glad to see that was, in fact, what the article was espousing.

You should never focus on features (even in a big company focusing on enterprise sales). Focus on what customer pains you solve and how you solve them. Features are a tertiary concern after that (and that includes both presentations and product development/planning).
Launch Your Site Too Soon
Videogames Pwning Hollywood In Release Week Sales
I'd like to see someone make a knife without using any modern technology precursors whatsoever. That means starting from using ones hands and what is available from nature in its natural form.

I think it'd be quite an accomplishment.
Reading this new account's 15 tweets, it's clear that it is being run by someone who fancies themselves as a bit of a social media expert, but who is rather awful at it.

Ironicly, I can't see them ever getting nearly as many followers as the bot ever had.
One option that I noticed is missing-and because of which I considred cancelling my netflix account- is that streaming is not available on your account if you travel outside the country. Even though I know how to get around it, why do I need to feel like I'm doing something illegal to access something I paid for?
So you still think the Internet is free?
If it's really true that you screen out otherwise qualified developers because they don't use your favorite version control system, and don't give away free labor in your specific field, then I'm not surprised at all you can't find people.

As far as wanting to lure people away from good jobs just to take on a temporary contract position, that is amusing. Would love to hear about your fully paid relocation and signing bonuses to cover the cost of selling an underwater house in order to move to your city, also obviously those contract rates are actual going contract rates of $150/hr+ and not employment rates but we call it contracting for tax purposes rates of $75/hr, right? Probably not.
I don't know if it's been here in the past, but it was linked in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2644863 a couple days ago.
How long would it take to finish the book?
You're right and you belong to the group of devs that we absolutely wouldn't hire.
Bought his ore? Terry Pratchett dug his own ore from his estate when he smelted the iron for his sword, though he used a blacksmith after getting to the iron bar stage.

http://www.news.com.au/technology/terry-pratchett-creates-a-...

(Being a knight no longer conveys the right to carry a sword, it is a violation of the knife laws, so he keeps the sword hidden. Such days.)
Anecdotally I've heard 8-12 months to finish it AND do all the exercises.

I'm hoping it can be done faster, but I'm committed to the idea that it could take a while given my work schedule.
I get what you are saying, I really do. But having been on the other side of the table several dozen times, the correlation is really quite astonishing. I ask more for information than to make the ultimate decision and it has never been the deciding factor, but the correlation is undeniable.
I agree that The Goal isn't the greatest literary novel in history; but then it doesn't set out to be that.

For me, the genius of ToC is that it provides a focussed, step-by-step way to get to the big productivity improvements; whereas lean/kaizen, while also very effective, can take an age to get to the same place.
Ask HN: Please rate our startup - bandplanet.com
my promo code for HN: https://www.bandplanet.com/promo_code/PXAQDH

bandplanet is a platform where artists can sell their songs and get 100% of the profit. Fans can read about events, listen to songs and albums, create playlists and get in touch with their favorite bands.

Also, all music can be listend to for free. When bought, it can be downloaded.

All of it is written in two months using Rails/JS/jQuery. The music player is MVC itself and communicates solely via rest - therefore it can be embedded somewhere outside the scope of bandplanet.com. I could go on, but I'd rather you check it out yourself.

So, what do you think? Any bands/singers/drummers/etc on HN?^^
Smalltalk is written in Smalltalk.

It's unique in being far more than a language: once upon a time, it was an operating system (http://tekkie.wordpress.com/2007/07/19/squeak-is-like-an-ope...).
The map and filter functions were almost depreciated in Python 3.

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=98196
The thing that surprises me most, and something I'd find absolutely unacceptable to release, is that the stock GUI config tools are broken or do nothing. This is a QA issue. I personally don't care if it took them a decade to properly test and sort this out. You should never release, release level software with broken GUI components like that.

Taking the car analogy further, suppose I tried to turn on my radio, only to find out the volume knob (which I can quite clearly see and manipulate) doesn't work, 2 or 3 days of Googling into it lets me know that there's a new knob, over on the other side of the steering wheel to control volume, that's undocumented, doesn't work properly, and dumps all the petrol from the gas tank if it goes above 7.

The actual way to resolve the volume knob operation is to swap out the radio the car came with with another one, except doing so will cause an engine conflict requiring a new transmission and a green left rear tire. Until of course the radio stops working, which requires you to rearrange the spark plugs in a random order. But hey, the new radio you put in has satellite radio that works so long as the windshield wipers aren't on intermittent wipe...so you can check that feature box I suppose.

Reading the manual for illumination it says: "to lengthen the distance of wave propagation attenuation from the magnetic speaker drivers, rotate the amplitude control clockwise (unless south of the equator where clocks work double negatively backwards <G>)"

Searching the Internet for help always ends up with conversations like

"you shouldn't have bought that radio, every body knows that"

"which one, the stock one, or the new one? I didn't have a choice with the stock one"

"RTFM"

"I did and it's entirely not helpful"

"did you try removing your shoes?"

"no"

"do that, it'll fix it. I have the same car you have, but from 1962, and that's how I solve my tire problem everytime"

"I don't have a tire problem, I have a radio problem"

"that's what you think...."

blah blah blah blah

and in the end we're talking about different cars anyways
That quote is taken from The Choice, and is Goldratt's attempt to summarize his philosophy: that his logical Thinking Tools can be used by anyone, and can provide win-win benefits for everyone in any situation. Worth a quick read, I'd say...
Should update the list from the vid.
Keep in mind none of the 'secure vault' type services of today existed in 1998, and PCIDSS didn't exist until 2004.
I had success with getting code review for my projects by attending developer meetups. Just find someone who's comfortable with the language you're using, and ask them nicely.
Nookniche.com - available, The idea was to help people look in the nooks

Flightr.com - I own this. Dont know if it matches what you are looking for

expecreo.com - available, latin mashup of creo = 'to make, to create' and expe - from experience....
Python 2.7.2 Unleashed
Cara Mengganti Status Via Dari Hp | Seribu Satu Cara
Apple Back To School 2011 Promotion rumored for Wednesday, June 15
Unfortunately, working for free isn't an option for me. On the other hand, I also don't need the $5500+/mn that tech giants like Google and Facebook pay.

I am between my Freshman and Sophomore year now, but I am looking forward to hopefully finding an internship for next summer. I like the idea of doing my own thing if that doesn't work out. I'd still have to work, but I'm sure I would have more than enough time for a side project.

I'm going to be working with one of the CS professors at my school for 2 months starting on Friday, hopefully that will give me a leg up on the competition when it comes time to find an internship. What do you think?
Just as an addition to this, a friend just pointed out this tweet

https://twitter.com/#!/brandcarrie/status/20333195936

About to set up a Tower Bridge Twitter with the IT boys... Any advice?
Did you try itertools.imap instead? Vanilla map gives us a list; imap gives us a generator. (Also, I'd try a generator expression as well to see how it compares to a list comprehension).

Also, note that the article is from January 2007; I'd wager that Python has evolved and had a wealth of optimisations since then, especially regarding "common idioms" such as vanilla string concatenation and list comprehensions.
Or, in general, selling to someone who won't personally be using your product or service, but will make someone else use it.
This is fairly ok. Except when the elites start ranting about the serfs not getting it :P
Go has zeroed values, and you are encouraged to make them valid-but-empty. That includes zeroed pointers.

Is there a material difference between that and null? I don't care what I'm "encouraged" to do -- does the language force you to opt in to null?
eBay: Perl

Amazon: Perl

Twitter: Ruby on Rails, Java

Optimizely: Python

LinkedIn: Java

Craigstlist: Perl

flickr: PHP, Perl, Java

Tumblr: PHP
Classic Books Reviewed in The Atlantic
Absolutely. The concept of coming up with something to sell (or resell), setting up a barebones store, doing some test advertising and seeing results in just a few days is timeless. It's even easier today than in the past since creating a good looking ecommerce site is easier than ever with all the store builders and payment services available.

If you've ever seen Tim Ferris's book "The Four-Hour Workweek", he suggests that exact system, except without accepting payment and without having the product available yet, so that if people do try to order from you, you've validated that there's a product-market fit before investing time and money into an elaborate website, stocking inventory, etc.
No, you misunderstand: I believe most of the operations you need to perform a context switch are safe in the kernel's context. Sure, you'll need a bit of assembly code to copy out and set registers and stuff, and you can't do that bit in C either. But other than that, safe pointers should work.
https://twitter.com/#!/BrandCarrie/status/71231424824483840

"follow our new Twitter account for Tower Bridge.... @TowerBridgeExh"

@TowerBridgeExh is invalid, so if this is the same one, then they didn't originally go with the stolen account. I also see several similar accounts (like @tower_bridge), so this might not be related.
Satphones draw attention in much of the world. It's hard to pretend to be an ordinary peasant when you're carrying a device that costs the equivalent of two year's wages. When the US and Afghan authorities are detaining people for possessing a digital watch[1], a satphone is a total liability.

WiFi-enabled smartphones are ubiquitous and dirt cheap - used shanzhai handsets cost just a few dollars. A smartphone's firmware is the ideal place to hide crypto.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_F91W
So much wrong with this (feel free to add more numbered points):

1. The account was already popular (i.e., it served a purpose): 4000+ followers.

2. The account was already active with plenty of tweets.

3. No warning. No notice.

4. No back-up of the tweets.

5. The new account is clearly some useless social media expert bullshit.

6. In their defence, the new user claims not to have been informed of how this was going to be handled.

I perfectly understand the general concept of fighting user name squatters, but this just makes no sense to me from any point of view.

Is there any nasty legislation that can penalize Twitter for having accounts misrepresenting the official namesake?
The Python analog would be something like this:

assert (object() < object()) == False

(try running this in the interpreter a few times)
That's definitely interesting.
In CPython, LCs are simpler in bytecode than map/filter, which makes them faster. That's all, really.
victim of a hacker attack, with user passwords
exploited, using a "brute force attack"

Is very different from

it’s possible that those passwords could be
obtained by a brute-force attack
http://twitter.com/#!/LulzSec/status/79321829042429952
Goldratt's books sets out to teach TOC and other theories in a fictional environment and it does a really good job of doing everything you are so skeptic about.
Book of Speed - website optimisation tips
> reversed(sorted(my_list))

I thought sorted(my_list, reverse=True) would be slightly faster, but it seems not (by a tiny amount). Weird.

> "while True" should be used in-place of "while 1". Reads better.

If you disassemble these statements, you'll see that "while 1" creates fewer instructions:

def foo():
while True:
pass

def bar():
while 1:
pass

import dis

dis.dis(foo)
# 0 SETUP_LOOP 10 (to 13)
# >> 3 LOAD_GLOBAL 0 (True)
# 6 POP_JUMP_IF_FALSE 12
#
# 9 JUMP_ABSOLUTE 3
# >> 12 POP_BLOCK
# >> 13 LOAD_CONST 0 (None)
# 16 RETURN_VALUE

dis.dis(bar)
# 0 SETUP_LOOP 3 (to 6)
#
# >> 3 JUMP_ABSOLUTE 3
# >> 6 LOAD_CONST 0 (None)
# 9 RETURN_VALUE

Edit: This is in Python 2.7.1. d0mine pointed out that the discrepancy is no longer the case in Python 3. Good to know. :)
Which me of another of my favourite books, Iain M. Banks' Excession [1], which is pertinent to your example. It's a great book but is probably best known for Outside Context Problem, which is the kind of problem which:

> ...most civilisations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.

Also:

> The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.

The entry also notes the similarity to black swan theory [2].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory
No need to assume that! Some people like key lime, some people like pecan -- just like some people like their steel galvanized, and some people like their chrome-nickel-steel.
Consulting. In the short term, it blows the doors off of any entrepreneurial thing you could do.

The only problem with consulting, though, is that you need to keep doing it to keep getting paid. As such, the key seems to be to consult in short bursts and use the runway to bootstrap product stuff.

Seems to be working thus far.
Twitter moved off to Java last I heard if I read this correctly. Not sure if they still use any rails.

Source 1: http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/06/new-twitter-search/

Source 2: http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/01/new-twitter-search-relevant...
I disagree. This type of slide can be useful for explaining where the startup fits.
‘I’ve Got Nothing to Hide’ - Misunderstandings of Privacy [PDF 2008]
Edward Tufte: Data Analysis for Politics and Policy (pdfs)
"Users do not care about features."

This is as bad as the "ideas are worthless" meme, which is taken too literally by some. Sure, there are some products where you should push the benefits, but that doesn't mean that you should ignore the features. The more knowledgeable a market is, the more they want to know about features.
Kadane: Principles of Uncertainty (book)
In the Foreigner universe it is my understanding that the technology was not 19th century. It reached 19th century after centuries of careful technology transfer. (And then things accelerated.)
For anyone who's not aware, the full text is also available online here: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/
There was a monetary expansion during the tulip bubble (basically New World's gold + laws that made convenient routing that gold to the Netherlands).
[a separate response, since my other reply is absurdly long, and deals with only one issue ... ]

> There's your mistake. You think that bad outcome implies bad intentions. It doesn't.

I don't for a moment think bad outcomes imply bad intentions. But I do think bad (e.g. exploitatively avaricious) intentions are more likely to lead to bad outcomes than good intentions are. What I meant was that I was inferring not-good intentions from all the raping, killing, and violent suppression of dissent.

> How do you know that they didn't honestly think that killing a lot of people would result in good?

I am taking it as necessarily true that it is not-good to kill people who are not an imminent personal existential threat. Thus most atrocities are not genuine instances of "doing good".

> You seem hung up on Stalinism. While it does have the record in shear numbers, it isn't the winner in percentages.

Evidence?

> And, there are plenty of other folks who will go the same route. For example, it's not hard to find environmentalists who are hoping for a population crash. Do you really believe that none of them would push things in that direction?

Depending on what you mean by "crash", it's not hard at all to find such people -- I'm personally hoping that the world's population ethically decreases to more sustainable levels. But I'm not hoping that anyone dies prematurely. I'd just rather that people chose to have fewer kids. This doesn't even entail that I "know better" -- when people are richer and have easy access to birth control they use it and birth rates go down.

As for "pushing in that direction": you actually think environmentalists who have an actual influence on policy would work to bring about a population crash, by e.g., encourage starvation in Africa or an increase the spread of AIDS?
Google Docs preview - http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdl.dropbox.co...
I've been looking for a decent personal project for Go for a while now. It looks like a nice fusion of ideas.
Fair enough. I was only 11 in 1998 so I don't have any idea what the fraud/security situation was like (and should have thought about that before posting criticism). I'm sure CD Baby made the transition to more secure methods as soon as it was more apparent that sending CC information via email was a bad idea.

I was just surprised to see that, since it's such a well known Bad Thing now.
Nook Touch Rooting: Brief Update
Ask HN: Do you censor your children's internet?
If yes, what age and what technical approach.

If no, what's your alternate approach if any?
Edit: Also limes for sailors.

Actually that's a terrible idea. You want lemons, not limes. Really.

See http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm for a discussion of where the myth to the contrary came from, and for the complex history of how the proper prevention of scurvy was discovered, forgotten, proved false, and only later rediscovered again. It also discusses why you really don't want to use limes.