skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find it particularly amusing that two of the most vocal advocates of dropping out of college are Peter Thiel and Mike Arrington—both of whom completed Stanford Law degrees. College dropouts Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are strong proponents of finishing your degrees. Even Steve Jobs talks about the importance of liberal arts education.

The funny part is, I would be more apt to take the advice of those that did finish. They attained a degree and experienced first hand the lack of advantage. By completing their degree they are the only ones in the position to fully evaluate whether it was worth it or not.

As someone who left school and then went back later in life because I fell prey to the "I need a degree mentality", I can certainly say that only after I finished school, that I am in a position to evaluate fully whether it was worth it or not. Only after I finished my degree, was I able to state unequivocally, that attaining the degree did nothing to further my career.

I achieved the status of CTO 3 times before ever completing it. After that, I became my own worst enemy and started to convince myself that I needed to return and seek the completion of a degree. So at the point before the degree, I most certainly would have been in the you need to finish camp. Only after completing and the removal of that insecurity, was I able to see that it had no effect and offered no advantage to where I was before.

Now I am not saying that individuals like Bill Gates are insecure about their lack of degree. but I do question whether they can truly make an evaluation the pro's and con's given that they have not completed the experience required to make a full evaluation.
The Lesson of Dropbox: Usage = Value
> Please don't fall into the trap of believing that your daily work and working for the greater good are mutually exclusive.

a great talk about it

TEDxWarwick - Noam Kostucki - Making Money From Doing Good

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gRaHyHJjrg
Created 117 days ago!

o_o
The misunderstanding of economics contributes to poverty. The Austrian economists tend to write about this. For example, the minimum wage essentially makes it illegal for very unskilled workers to work. This was dramatically illustrated when the US government imposed a higher-than-market minimum-wage on the island of American Samoa and decimated the economy.[1]

An economically-naive do-gooder, considering that a minimum wage helps poor people, might work hard for its passage, not understanding that the minimum wage actually hurts poor people.

[1] Peter Schiff gives an excellent explanation of the result of the minimum-wage on American Samoa: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X25U_7mx9jU
They were antagonistic, insincere, subtly hypocritical, and appeared simply brainwashed.

That's true for a lot of people. Most people don't want to think for themselves, they want to fight for an idea that makes sense for them, and they lack the mental tools to actually think or challenge the idea.
Yep, here was the previous article.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2847675
Can confirm of similarly good service in Vienna, Austria;

Thorough investigation, dusted for prints, and even took sample of nondescript, possibly bodily fluid (turned out to be non-organic).

Very professional; Though wouldn't get burglarised again.
So: radical ideas are uncomfortable.

And this is why I'm writing a programming language that isn't turing complete.
I guess this is going to be the next race for browser compatibility. So far I've tried Firefox, Safari and Chrome all on OS X Lion, I'm hoping a newer version of Chrome will work, if not I guess this is all still mostly academics.
Adobe Releases Media Player 1.0, Launches Adobe TV
Let's say that between thinking this up, questioning the utility of it, asking HN, and actually implementing it takes only one hour.

You know what you could do in an hour, trivially? Find the person who can say "Hire Taylorlb" and invite them to lunch or coffee. Alternatively, find someone who they trust and get a warm intro like "Still looking for a $FOO? You should talk to Taylorlb."

You can try more exotic ways to break into $TARGET but walking through the open front door is a good place to start. Bonus points: many people competing with you are pathologically unable to find the front door because they think it is cheating.
Oh, the joys of running a task that is suitable for a GPU ... on a GPU!
Perhaps we don't need to consolidate information into ideas (theories), as much because the information is available directly (via internet). We don't need to find the underlying pattern anymore.

Also, The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?' the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we have lunch?'
Not many people get rid of their car entirely when they start riding a bike.
how big is the Israeli market overall? About the size of what US state - maybe Pennsylvania?
MSnRS/1HH: How to make a Twitter Bot in less than 1h
One of the more 'out-there' theories is that new viruses are constantly falling to the earth's surface... from outer space:

http://www.panspermia.org/panfluenza.htm
I’m on Lion and vanilla Chrome works for me. Safari also works if I turn on the Develop menu (in the Advanced tab of the preferences) and use it to turn on WebGL.
It's ridiculous to measure the popularity of any non-Facebook service by number of Facebook fans. The percentage of users who fan a page of Facebook can vary vastly between competing companies.
Yep, newest version of chrome does work. Which is also the only browser that does. It uses about 40% of a i5 dual core cpu in the Macbook Pro 15" mid 2010.
One of the great joys of using the FireFox Nightly, is that stuff like this usually works. Unless you need total extension compatibility, these have seemed rock-stable over the last month or so.

http://nightly.mozilla.org/ <--- try one of these

Taking one notch of one of my 4 cpus, since it's obviously running mainly on my Radeon 5570 graphics card/
Got the latest stable for ubuntu 32 bit and it doesn't work.
It is certainly no accident that the post-idea world has sprung up alongside the social networking world.

.
.
.

Entrepreneurs have plenty of ideas, and some, like Steven P. Jobs of Apple, have come up with some brilliant ideas in the “inventional” sense of the word. Still, while these ideas may change the way we live, they rarely transform the way we think
I exactly understand your point. It is for that reason that I mention that I graduated from college. I have a degree but it did not take me to where I wanted to be. I remain a critic of the education system and I see that UnCollege addresses some valid issues about traditional colleges.
That is why I said "eventually" ... it will be more than one cent and it will happen slowly. As price keeps cropping up some people will choose to use other services.
You don't find that conclusion informative and interesting? I did, much like I find Godel's incompleteness theorems or the Halting theorem very informative and interesting.
Easy solution: buy a used bike. :-)

Incidentally, as I get older and travel more, I find myself increasingly interested in the classic, low-slung, steel commuter bike. The sort you see Japanese cops, businessmen, and moms riding. Dirt simple, standardized, and indefinite in lifespan.
Motion Induced Blindness
From a Hackathon in Silicon Valley to the Conflict Mines of Congo
This is a great tool. Seems to be a much easier/faster version of Tim Brown's Web Font Specimen (http://webfontspecimen.com/).
I wouldnt say totally preposterous to compare. After all these companies rely heavily on Facebook for their marketing, of course their email list is probably their key marketing tool, but that info isn't available. Then again, I did also write the article so I am a little biased, thanks for the feedback.
It provides a public good and is part of our national infrastructure. Maybe you don't see the point of it but it keeps a lot of our economy and communications lines going.
"USPS has a government granted and enforced monopoly on mail."

What? Does Fedex and UPS know?
Bethesda Forums Hacked Yet Again
From the book How to Negotiate Like a Child [1]:

once someone has offered something extra, it's hard to take that back.

Further:

often when confronted by silence, the blabber will say something that
she didn't plan on saying.

And further:

if you observe children, as I did while researching this book, you'll
notice that kids are content to sit with their friends and not say
anything at all for periods of time that would drive an adult to
reveal all manner of personal information.

[1] isbn:081447294X
"Papers, please."

"I'm sorry, you haven't been granted permission to be in this neighborhood. Come with me."

I really don't understand how police officers can be comfortable with these actions. Unfortunately, I've talked with enough "normal" people who think the police are justified in this that I believe it is going to get far worse before it gets better.
"Actually the DS has a touch screen which allows it to almost replicate the dual-analog sticks. So there are FPS games for the DS that use this."

With that I guess we're just going to have to agree to disagree. IMO just because you can slap a couple of "virtual joysticks" on the screen and pull input data from them does not mean you have a system that replicates dual-analog sticks, and I say that as both a programmer and a gamer.

"There are tons of iOS games that utilize the iphones touchscreen perfectly for good controls, so it's absolutely possible to design good controls into games."

Like I said, for some games, yes, you can have good touchscreen controls. But by limiting the system to only touchscreen controls you're cutting out a giant amount of games that could otherwise run fine on the hardware but whose controls do not naturally map to touchscreen.

Yes, you could produce a version of New Super Mario Bros that used a virtual touchscreen joystick, but it wouldn't be the same game, at all, because the physical nature of the controller has a huge impact on overall gameplay. Nintendo above all other companies recognizes this (thankfully), which is why they have continued to find success even after down periods in their hardware cycles. If they gave all that up and just focused on the iOS market, that would be the worst thing to happen to gaming since Looking Glass went under.

"It's just like when the DS came out and they started designing games to take advantage of dual screens, touch screens, microphones, and cameras."

When the DS first came out, games went crazy trying to support the touchscreen because of the novelty, yes, but well within a year of the system's launch they started to pull back on that and produce games with largely classical controls that only used the accessories for little flourishes and not for main gameplay. Why? Because there are a LOT of games that require physical switch controllers to play correctly. (The same applies to the Wii where they went nuts with motion control and eventually started using that primarily as a flourish for most games, because not all games are a natural fit for motion control).
Ah brings back the days! Once upon a time I did most of my programming in a Forth like language we called "Fifth".

Eclipse today is almost bringing Java development to the point that it is sort of as productive as the Environment we built for Forth that ran on 20 Mhz PCs with 16 Megs of memory.

Almost.

What did we have?

Lazy compilation (functions compiled as needed rather than making us wait for a full compile) which doesn't exist today for Java, unless you count JIT (which honestly is a different concept).

Hot code replacement (that worked every time rather than the "sometimes works" with Eclipse).

Immediate functions for implementing all sorts of functionality algorithmically at compile time instead of writing code generators and initialization functions.

Instant initialization (a side effect of Immediate functions). Our Postscript Interpreter booted in milliseconds on a 16 Mhz 68000 as compared to the 1 or 2 minutes for the Apple Lazerwriter.

Hot key navigation -- Eclipse is about on par.

Online help -- Eclipse has a bit nicer interface, but ours was pretty near "Wiki Easy" to develop and extend and available on a key stroke.

Graphical interfaces and windows, Syntax completion, Syntax highlighting... All ideas that came later. All we had was character graphics, but we did great stuff with that.

Anyway, Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I miss programming right against the metal, but I also don't miss it too!
I noticed this too. The example would make more sense if the rules were changed so that the pot is multiplied, say by 2. Then the optimal case is both put in $5 and end up with $10.
Good to know. I have paid off my bikes carbon debt then, about 4 times.

I was biking a lot in general - then was biking to work each day and put 12 miles per day on it.

Now though, I work from home, so I have not been using the bike at all :(
Honestly, his comment changed my mind. I hadn't read that "timeline" pdf before. So to me, his comment was very interesting.
GDP of israel is just over that of Louisiana.
I feel like this is a checklist that makes you feel like you're accomplishing something (checking off items on the list) while never actually launching your website.

In a way, it gives you a bunch of excuses to put off your public launch - "I just need to fix some CSS bugs in Firefox 2" or "I just need to test the backup restore process one more time to make sure it works". Most of us aren't building bank software here, and if you're building anything consumer based (think Facebook), the advantage of having a site up and getting feedback on it over having all these things checked off is astronomical.
I was a bit surprised to see no meniton of security. Any website checklist that includes backups because "your website data is too precious" should have a security assessment on that checklist.
The Path
Ask HN: What language do you think has the best FFI?
Just kind of curious about what people think about different FFI implementations.
Well, I think the ideal role of government would be to facilitate the sort of meta-cooperation necessary to solve the problem. The current planning/funding role clearly doesn't work.
Gödel theorem / Halting problem: "We are sure that something is impossible." -> Interesting

Virus Origin: "We still don't know. We will keep researching." -> Not very interesting
I'll definitely check out the video, but I'm not yet persuaded. I think nationalism is dressed-up tribalism. Further, propaganda, especially of the Goebbels sort, is directly opposed to the pursuit of widespread thinking and big ideas that this article is promoting.

Also, nationalism isn't a big idea in the same sense that communism or western democracy are. Communists and democrats of many nations work in common cause for their ideals, but nationalists of many nations are by definition opposed. What they share isn't so much an idea as a set of behaviors and a style of thinking. In Gabler's framework, nationalism is more an observation than it is a big idea.
Only because of modern farming processes.
I'm on a relatively ancient non-unibody MBP with a Penryn Core 2 Duo, 512 MB GeForce 8600M GT and Snow Leopard and it works on vanilla Chrome for me as well. And it uses 30%–40% here too — interesting since the i5 benches a lot better.
As a straight translation of percentages, sure. But who cares that 1.3% of the population Likes something except in the context of total population? "1 out of 77 kids has an awful haircut, an equivalent to over 5,000,000 awful haircuts in America."

Better to keep the scales the same: US state with closest pop to Israel is Virginia, total market available to Groupon in Israel is arguably about equivalent to that.
Doesn't seem to work here however on the Dev branch (15.0.849.0). Not that that's surprising: random stuff breaks regularly, and there's no way to go back...
"I don't know how gridlock on the highway system causes unemployment," rather:)
Worlds Best Holiday Destinations in December, Asia, Europe
I think that assumes that you bought a bike instead of a car. In my case, that's true, but I'm sure in many cases that's not true.
Biking to work is so much more than saving a bit of carbon emissions. It provides physical exertion (which is usually lacking in our society) at a minimal time commitment.
I am sure this is hard to quantify in carbon emissions but since a ton of carbon is quite cheap on the exchange and the medical systems quite expensive I guess it is a net win.
PlantLab Revolutionizes Farming: No Sunlight or Windows, Less Water, Better Food
Ideas such as the death of God or the end of history, ideas that can't be nailed down, much less verified, serve as food for enlightening discussion. And we're tired of discussion. We can't take any more. We want ideas that can be settled in labs or supercolliders or computer simulations. Why don't we want to talk about ideas any more? Actually, it was a single idea killed our appetite for discussion and hence our appetite for big, open-ended ideas. That idea is that everything has political implications and because of our concern for the well-being of others we are morally obligated to prioritize politics above all else.

Because of that belief, we cannot indulge in honesty, good faith, or curiosity in any intellectual discussion, lest the enemy steal a march on us. Lest a child starve, a woman be raped, a citizen be robbed of the fruit of his labor, or a nation decay, we must treat every discussion as a political battlefield. Talking with someone you disagree with on their own terms isn't stimulating or educational; it's legitimizing a harmful ideology. Conceding a point isn't part of a healthy interchange of ideas; it's emboldening a dangerous mentality. Even the goal of changing your conversation partner's mind is self-indulgent, since what's important is not changing the mind of the person you're talking with but convincing the spectators that you're winning. It doesn't even matter whether your partner thinks you are sincere. Since the spectators are the point, he is obligated to argue with you no matter how uncivil or insincere you are. It would be immoral of him to concede the field to you, because of the damage you could do with it.

This view of conversation as political struggle, which ruthlessly extends into every sphere of life through the habits we cultivate in public, has banished good faith and curiosity from intellectual discussion and turned it into an onerous moral obligation. Ideas that stimulate conversation are an unwelcome call to arms for bored and weary warriors. Good riddance to them!
One guy who (apparently) successfully does it is Joseph Turian [1]. He is on HN [2] and quora.

The reason I think you may have a hard time finding work is that, in my experience, and I believe this to be a widely help opinion, you get far more out of careful feature selection, cleaning, and filtering; and careful hand tooling of algorithms to your domain than out of your raw ML tech. This has been my experience at two companies (no names since there are tools on HN who like to make posts out to be representative of the company, but if you want I'm happy to discuss over email.) The problem then, for you, is that this augurs poorly for hiring external consultants because the hard part is domain specific knowledge and you don't want that to walk out the door. To the extent that people want help setting up common toolkits like R, lucene, elastic search, weka, mahout, vowpal rabbit, etc, there could be lucrative work.

I'm actually pretty curious about this myself. In fact, if you want to discuss offline, drop me an email.

Good luck.

[1] http://metaoptimize.com/blog/

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bravura
When you visit search.yahoo.com, some lazy-loaded JavaScript resources are served from a Node.js server.

That server uses YUI server-side to calculate JS module dependencies for that page's autocomplete feature. Since the response is very cacheable, and resolving dependencies doesn't happen on the client anymore, this technique improves loading time for that feature by 40%.

It also delivers less code for modern browsers. Feature tests from the browser are sent in the request, which server-side YUI considers for eliminating code only needed by older browsers.
I think the article was assuming you're already someone who owns a car and will continue to own that car, not that you own neither and are buying one or the other.
Thank You Mr.Death
Reading the Eiffel entry, it mentions Design By Contract. This is interesting stuff and I should mention that .NET 4.0 includes Design by Contract in the framework itself.
Hybrid Delivery: Corporate Applications and the Cloud
Most of these companies have already demonstrated a willingness to sell you down the river if the government so much as looks that direction, so there's not really much of an effective difference.
Tohoku Tsunami Creates Antarctic Icebergs
The trick would be to use those few years to eradicate the worst diseases, or at least fight it back enough that it can then slowly be eliminated through quarantine etc.

The common cold is still around, but notice that smallpox is essentially extinct, and influenza is way less common than it used to be. Bubonic plague- also mostly gone.
I enjoyed the article and generally agree with the argument. However I wonder if we are over romanticizing the past?

How much of an effect did Rawls and Nozick have on the practical political debates of their time?
Does Cinemax’s iPad app violate Apple’s no-porn policy?
I did this too, as well as a couple of extra precautions, and I did not notice any decline in the junk mail at all.
Cached (other cache is down too): http://web.archive.org/web/20080905140834/http://stampsjoann...
So the bit that gets left out to the very end is that he wasn't physically detained.

The photographer is shooting at a refinery. A cop shows up and asks what the guy is doing. Guy says he's an artist. By the guys own admission, the cop was perfectly friendly and polite. Cop asks to see his id, and gives some spiel about how Homeland Security lets them require you to show your ID. Cop runs his license and hands it back and says he can keep on shooting. Cop leaves.

There are two things going on here. First, nationally in some areas there's this push by law enforcement against being photographed, and they try to extend that to public places too. That's very bad and needs to be combatted.

The second thing is the flavor of this article is trying to portray this event in the light of the first situation, and it just plain isn't. If anyone is taking pictures of a major installation and it's not something that normally happens, it's prudent to just nicely ask what the person is doing and move on, which is what happened here.

The photographer wasn't physically detained or arrested. The cop didn't want to look at the photos or try to make him delete them. Just because you feel like you are being detained doesn't mean you are.

I am a photographer too. I got all bristly when I first started reading this, only to reach the end and see that nothing happened. I've gotten face to face with people who think they can can control what people take pictures of.

This, however, is not one of those situations.
The batman equation
"Among the non-criminal behaviors "which shall be reported on a SAR" are ... asking about an establishment's hours of operation ... and taking notes."

So if I see an interesting business which is closed, ask someone if they know when it's open, and note that down so that I can return to it when it is, I would be reported as a suspicious person.
Errr... what's the word for printing the top of the stack? Or some way of getting a result back out?
If you don't want the world to see your files, actually stop them from being accessed instead of politely asking robots to not index them.