skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice model, unfortunately it doesn't work because of a couple of factors:

If you run CPC ads Facebook will show your ads more often to users who are "click happy" (they've said so publicly), there's also an impression among a lot of advertisers that Facebook charge a premium for CPC (which they haven't been willing to confirm or deny)

Also if you're buying CPM Facebook give you a "quality" discount, so if you have a good CTR you actually end up paying a much lower price than the initial suggested bid.
I'm surprised that most people seem to have ignored this line:

> it’s about doing, as opposed to knowing or learning

After graduating, I had to teach myself everything in that list before I could actually do anything that I found interesting. Now, this obviously doesn't apply if you're, as you say, writing a compiler, but for the average CS student, this is a great list to complete.
Mea Hercule! Hodie facere cupivi, sed hunc ludam.

Seriously, though, this is incredible. I'll probably play with this all weekend.
I disagree: the author is to blame. Every message has an audience and the author must know that when they write. At Hacker News we are, well, hackers in the broadest sense. While some of us might appreciate typography for what it is, I believe most want to know how it might improve their products and services. Allegoric prose does not help, in this case.

(Edit: to clarify what it is I disagree.)
The netherlands' chamber of commerce API shuts down at night too, which is why a free alternative had to be created (openkvk.nl) to proof there shouldnt be a need for the shutdown.
Isn't there a way to get information from HDD's about how long they have operated from when they were manufactured using SMART? Not that anyone keeps those records on hand once the HDD is no longer in their possession, but if you are paranoid, you could start offloading those records every minute to a different server. That way if yours is seized, you could at least know if someone had turned on your HDD's and for how long.

It'd be cool if HDD's/SSD's started compiling rough stats about numbers of reads and writes for this purpose.
Actually that's not a bad comment about how an actual College CS program may not have anything to do with the real world. I run my own servers, I code my sites from scratch in HTML, JavaScript, PHP, SQL etc.. build all my computers.. made several open source contribution coding in C.. I can do everything in that list and much more..

Yet when I applied to a local University in a CS program a couple years ago I was denied. Why? High School Math grades not quite high enough.
I see, i read your question too fast. Using scratch/alice/nxt/what-have-you as a tool to show what compsci is and how it can be exciting is fantastic, i just wouldn't use it as a method for teaching programming. My bad.

Another thing to look at is the Lego NXT robot, which uses very Scratch-like software (drag and drop action and control flow elements) to control a real robot that they can put together with Lego pieces.

I wouldn't downplay the importance of having a python prompt or a c compiler available, though. It may not seem as exciting as drag and drop programs, but to some kids it is more exciting (it was to me when i started programming, certainly).
Users have already been taught to choose among different desktop apps. How? By clicking on installed shortcut links on their desktop. The same can be done with internal web apps.

Treat these legacy web apps just like desktop apps in that launching them requires clicking an icon specifically for that web app somewhere on their machine that opens the web app in the appropriate browser. Those browsers (like IE6) could be locked down to only work for certain URLs. For everything else, the user would then just need to use a more modern web browser such as Firefox 5.0.

An ambitious startup could find many other (and probably better) ways to solve this problem. The issue with legacy web apps that run only on IE6 always struck me as a potential business opportunity for any startup interested in targeting the enterprise space. With Firefox's recent shift to an accelerated release cycle, it has made this problem even more pronounce.
FTA: "It's actually a hybrid that is largely built on Harmattan, the legacy Maemo 6 code base that Nokia shuttered when it committed to MeeGo. It seems sort of dubious on the surface to call the software MeeGo when it's really still Maemo, but the hybrid is apparently designed in such a way that it has full API compatibility with MeeGo 1.2."
What if I have a photo copy or picture of a card?
How does Re-Work compare to Getting Real?
The Jerrycan: Astonishingly Beautiful Industrial Design From The 1930s
How would you represent individual character kerning? Demonstrate hinting, anti-aliasing, Clear Type, points, fonts that don't exist on all systems, etc.

Plus, every browser is going to render things differently (and individual settings in browsers will cause inconsistencies between different installs of the same browser). A picture is simpler, and gives a consistent experience across all mediums.
Sharp-Eyed Viewers Catch Fox's 'MasterChef' Faking a Huge Crowd
Klout Founder: Vegas Hotels now checking Klout score for upgrades
I would like to learn French and Chinese. Being Vietnamese and trying to understand more about Vietnam's history, I know that there are a lot of ancient tomes written in French and Chinese (Vietnam had 1000+ years of Chinese occupation and about 200 years of French). My hope is to some day read those original tomes in their full context and meaning rather than translated ones.
lulzier hunter - by bottle_of_rum

So, who's bottle_of_rum, then?
A lot of those internal apps hang by a thread with regard to cross-compatibility. Many large companies still live in IE6 land where change occurs on a geologic scale, and what's more that's sort of the way they want it.

As much as businesses like to bitch about IT costs the fact is that, for what they pay, most of them get a quite a lot of utility out of their poorly-budgeted and mismanaged IT departments. Even their talented developers are so overworked and underpaid and mismanaged that they churn out mostly garbage, but it's usually garbage that gets the job done right then. Anything more than that is always viewed as a luxury anyway, until you can't upgrade anymore because 10% of the internal apps misperform running under a newer JS implementation. Nevertheless, the business sees something better and thinks they might need it but they first have to wake up to the fact that OSS != free shit, and they don't like that at all. "What happens if they EOL FF5?" Well, you have the source, fix the problem yourself, that's how it works. You're a big organization, you got this amazing tool for absolutely nothing, give something back. If you can't accept those terms, fuck off back to IE land.

So Dotzler is absolutely right. There is no way his organization can please enterprise as they have impossible demands, so fuck them.
How to be a great PM - Product Management in 5 (not so simple) Steps
> It's true. If we applied the same rules to countries that we do to the mafia, you'd be a criminal conspirator in an agency that has routinely used murder for control and profit.

And your hero Che Guevara?
I think that Jarin just needed a few more items to put in his portfolio for his internship interview at Fox News.
Perhaps this is somewhat heretical to typography-knowledgeable people (I honestly don't know), but I've always preferred quotes to be straight up and down, as in this preview box: "

It just looks cleaner to me. Curved quotes look good in large size print, but I'm really not a fan in smaller font sizes. Do you have any examples of good quotes in small font sizes?
Is there another PHP framework you would recommend? I'm about to start looking at Symfony as a replacement for our aging, home-grown PHP framework. I'm partial to Django, but since PHP is a requirement I could use thoughts on PHP alternatives.
Object oriented vs. functional programming
Www.ambien-side-effects.com site details - Technorati
It's great to see such a positive retrospective. Keep your head up and thanks for sharing!
Funny coincidence. I've just started reading "Daemon", the technotriller by Daniel Suarez.

Great book so far (currently around page 130). I usually only read while commuting (2 hours / day), but this book is so exciting, I found myself reading it at home too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_%28technothriller_series...
Selective Permissions For Android

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2684449

also

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=moxie
From the way you describe it, it sounds like a "barley wine"[1] (actually a type of very strong beer, despite the name).

[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Barley_wine
Where is Rails Headed?
If it will fail if Nokia wants it to fail. If they try to support and promote the N9 and Meego as well as they can, I think it will gain traction fast.
Without getting into deep political theory here, you realize that the US system at least has built in mechanisms which allow it to be completely replaced right?

I understand how some people are frustrated by what seems like an unchangeable system (not saying that you are, just an example) when in fact it is quite changeable. If you have the time and energy to learn how to 'politic' changing the system becomes a question of scale much like if you understand how compilers are built changing GCC becomes a question of scale. New system call interface for an embedded architecture? Pretty straight forward. Changing operator precedence and making integers 37 bits long? A harder thing (still doable, its just code, but the scale is larger because you touch more of the code in the compiler).

So to put your comment in 'tech' terms and continuing my gcc analogy, you posit that the goal isn't to change the compiler since that is too hard, rather delete every copy of the source code everywhere and every executable so that folks will have write a new gcc/binutils from scratch. That way the new compiler and binutils will be better than what we have today.
Agreed. The alarmist title that the OP chose completely misses the point.
Yeah in my experience (both personal and from interviewing people), you end up getting a poor introduction to both (at least at the undergraduate level) since in many universities the major can't decide which it wants to be. You have cases where people know of NP (but have never done a reduction), and simultaneously know of version control (but have never actually used svn or git). This is really unfortunate because I feel similar majors (like math and EE) probably prepare you better for these fields (math perhaps being a better precursor to real CS and EE giving you great fundamentals for programming/comp engineering). It seems more and more like there needs to be a clearer separation, something like how econ or finance is separate from math, where math majors don't really have to learn excel or financial formulas, and econ/finance majors don't have to learn linear algebra, and both can go pretty deeply into the things they actually care about.

The counter argument to this is that we often see computer engineers that lack a basic grasp of the importance of algorithmic complexity and theoretical folks who write terrible code. You have only to read some discussions on "JS performance" to see the ridiculous attention paid to making sure variables are local, when in almost all cases user programs are actually being slowed down by O(n^2) algorithms being used. Similarly, a lot of theoretical work takes a long time to make it into the "real world" because they are inaccessible to engineers (being written completely "in math"), and often when they do provide actual sample code for their work its written in a very sloppy way (from a "code organization" standpoint). It really would be ideal if you could have a major that covered both of these really well (and I'm sure there exist some that do, I obviously have not gone through every CS/CECS/EECS major in every university).
Believe it or not, I was in your shoes about a few weeks ago. I decided against the online/web services because I felt it was a bit limiting and I rather have my stuff on my own computer. Here's something I found that fit all my needs and yours: http://pencil.evolus.vn/en-US/Home.aspx

You can generate stuff into other formats AND html with jquery tab. Some pretty nice options. And everything is free and open source.
Free HTML / CSS for type & palette proposals
I'd be interested to hear from software developers what can actually be done at a web app level. Can we eventually have a fully functional Photoshop webapp?

Take a look at a company called Kaviza (recently bought by Citrix). They have been doing some good work in terms of deploying VMs onto thin clients.

Lets be honest though. Google Docs sucks compared to the Office suite. I've tried to use Google Docs for serious work, but a lot of functionality is still missing. Even if the world moves to web apps, I don't think Microsoft is doomed. An OS still has to run on the thin client, and Microsoft can develop web apps. I'd be very interested to try out Office 365 when it goes live.

Cloud based apps don't have to be web apps. Just ask Apple.
While I'm surprised someone got through four years of CS without learning to use mv, if you are looking for 'developers' then you should look for software engineering majors, and if you are looking for sysadmins then you should look at people with two year associates degrees in information systems or something. CS is a branch of mathematics; expecting fresh CS grads to make good sysadmins is like expecting comparative literature majors to win spelling bees. They might do better than average but it's not really what they're educated in.
I saw this on Kickstarter the other day. Looks great, I hope something comes from it. They raised the first level of $25K, but need $500K to do all the research. It would be great if something like this was inexpensive enough for cities to buy to pull into rivers/lakes near poorer neighborhoods where people don't have as many opportunities to swim in hot months. Could be a great community building tool as a side effect.
Has Apple had any failed products in the last 10 years?
i prefer CodeIgniter, myself, when doing PHP development. i like it because it doesn't force you into anything, but if you want to use its helpful features, you can.
Ok, so the law makes cookies illegal. What about browser fingerprinting? Does the law say anything about that? (I did a quick Google search and was unable to find the text of the law)

If browser fingerprinting or other covert tracking devices aren't spelled out in the law, this isn't going to mean squat. If you're not familiar with this technology, go to http://panopticlick.eff.org/ and see just how unique you look. You'll be surprised.
At University of Waterloo we make that distinction by having a Software Engineering program that's part of both the Math department (the department CS belongs to) and the Engineering department.

We also have Computer Engineering, which is a middle ground between Electrical Engineering and SoftEng. :)
One thing is for sure, don't use the same password for all your important sites. To make them easier to understand, have a system of differentiating from 1 site to another. As always, I try to: 1) numbers and letters 2) not a real dictionary word 3) Mix of lower and uppercase

My real paranoia is still: "what if this/that website doesn't encrypt or hash my password?"
Does Nokia even have a say in it any more?
My point is that "just doing your job" does not absolve you of social responsibility/repercussions. If a law were passed creating federal gangs that went around "borrowing" teenage girls from their families, you can bet fathers would kill to keep their daughters safe.

Just because something is legal does not make it ethical.
Ooh, now I'm jealous. I'm on 12 for Mac. Boo!
News flash: Security breaches happen because almost everyone in the industry sucks at this stuff, including (most importantly) those who SHOULD KNOW BETTER, yourself and Mr. Arment included.
Lean Writing
Ask HN: Need pair for job search in DC
I'm currently living in Washington, DC, and looking for work as a developer. I'm finding it hard to get motivated to do the drudge work involved, so I'm looking for someone to pair with (think pair programming, without the programming).

Basically, I need someone (probably in a similar situation) who I can sit across from in a coffee shop who could give a thumbs up or encouragement or a quick review of a cover letter, while I do the same for them.

Anybody interested?
It's just interesting, that's all. For me personally, seeing people killed on the battlefield isn't a good feeling, but it's not strange either. It's not outside the sphere of my experience. I know that people get killed in war and sometimes it's tragic but it's still interesting to watch firefights and gunships engaging targets.
What's so bad about the PHP ORMs? I am curious. I know Propel has improved significantly, and Doctrine 2 as well. Do you have any specific complaints?
Its often called a 'public service' killing.
Advanced Android note taking app with Freebase (semantic web) integration
Posted this in another thread, but -

WP currently requires all third-party apps in the marketplace to be entirely .NET/CLR-based. There are a lot of hints that this will eventually change, possibly at the same time they port to a Windows NT kernel, also hinted to be in the works. This might explain the confusion over Qt, if they plan to eventually port it but can't say so without revealing Microsoft's roadmap.
PhD Comics Movie Trailer
This issue is directly relevant to something I'm working on, so I went to visit the ICO page when the rules changed a few days ago. I actually laughed out loud. The sort of totally-overdone-in-your-face-don't-ignore-me-I'm-important presentation they have chosen is completely unnecessary under the new rules, and just makes them look like fools (which is a shame, because most of the time the ICO are reasonably clued up and some of the good guys).

I also had cause to visit a handful of other government web sites that day. Every single one of them was blatantly illegal under the new laws.
Yes, you definitely need to create a login/signup links. Just ask yourself this question: "what do I gain and loose by not having a login link?" Not all people read and not all people look at icons, so you usually have to have both icon and text to get all your users to take actions. If you make it less of a guess work for your users, they will appreciate you for it.
Very much so... I struggled with this last year, trying to make text reliably reach near the end of a two line space without it going to a third line and this ending without an ellipsis... without using JavaScript. CSS really does not have good text handling.
ReadSpeaker  O'Reilly - Highlight Text & Click Speaker Icon to Listen
It's possible they have a contractual obligation to Intel to release a Meego phone this year. Who knows. But clearly upper management is lukewarm on it.
Someone correct me if I'm entirely wrong, but I thought the point of the law was to stop third-party cookies being used to track users.

That is, if you want to track your users - that's fine, use as many cookies as you like and don't ask anyone's permission. But it's your job to do the tracking, you can't outsource it to Google.
5 Best Books on Improving Self-Confidence
Midas Touch didn't taste like the only barley wine I remember trying (Flying Dog's Horn Dog), but IANA beer sommelier, maybe you're right. :-)
I share your opinion of Midas Touch. The DFH ancient brew reconstruction I prefer is Jaihu, based on residue on 9,000 year old Chinese pottery shards. Tastier, and with more primeval appeal.
powered by http://www.readspeaker.com/

this or other tech could make web accessibility really happen - also makes web surfing much easier esp. on long pages.
6. Pick a better brand name. Sorry but GRINN.IT is a VERY bad name. Why? Because you have to spell it out for them every time. Just like pownce.

Hey, what's your new site?

grin it, check it out.

Grabs smartphone, types in grinit.com, nope nothing, grin.it, nope nothing. done.

Keep and understand the distinction between a bad PRODUCT and piss poor marketing.
Polygot projects - choosing the right language for the task
More details emerge on iPhone lite
Conan pokes fun at Apple's Final Cut Pro X
I think most (PHP) web startups tend to use frameworks (CakePHP, Codeigniter, Zend etc.) rather than CMS. Believe me, the trouble of hacking up a CMS to do what you want is more than just build stuff from scratch with a framework.
> If you're in someone's store you should assume that they have video of you there. Why should that be any different on the internet? If you visit my "store" I should be free to record that.

The ethics of that position break down if you're offering an essential service and everyone takes the same view: now people have no choice but to be recorded, even though on privacy grounds that isn't necessarily a good thing.

The solution to that problem is to legislate that people's personal privacy outweighs a business's desire to track them, and while the specific rules we're talking about here are perhaps not ideal, I think going in that direction is going to become more and more important in the next few years as automated data mining technology can be used to profile ever more details about ever more people.
can someone explain this line from the article: "the company's decision to repurchase would also cause a tax hit to him"?
I did my Masters in machine learning and I'm honestly not really sure how technically feasible human-level driving is. Particularly things like intersections where traffic lights get obscured by a tree or the power outages, or things where people arrive at intersections at the same time and there is subtle communication between the drivers for who is allowing who to go first.
Interview with Lulzsec's Topiary
I eat a burrito - that doesn't make me Mexican :)
So, how do you feel about LulzSec's recent op against Arizona?
Yeah, especially after I saw he'd increased from 1010 to 10000 items. That's a difference of 10101... right? I should've paid more attention to the binary subtraction section in class.
Thanks Jack. Happy to share something that can ring true for a large number of startuppers.
In my opinion TF2 has been ruined for a long time. Once they started with the class altering updates the quality of the game declined.

Don't get me wrong, I love that Valve are so involved with their games after launch and the free updates are admirable, but I loved vanilla TF2 and unfortunately that game no longer exists. Rather frustrating that the game I bought and loved has changed into something almost unrecognisable with no going back!
Google expects its software engineers to do all that and more with a computer science degree. So what if it's not taught in the major? You're smart -- figure it out.
Thanks! Not to be cliche, but it would been easier to keep going - but nobody wants to be a zombie. Lots of hard choices.
Go talk to someone at the uni who who cares about enthusiasm. Simply filling out a boilerplate form deliver great results unless you are boilerplate too. Engage some social hacking.
Learn Emacs: Use Smex for M-x Autocompletion
Jon S. von Tetzchner is leaving Opera Software