skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll share something with you that I've only recently come to understand: Unless you're really interested in both subjects then double majors aren't worth the time and sweat you put into them. The fact is that the double major MIGHT give you a slight advantage when it comes to getting an interview, but after you have a year or two of experience under your belt your double major won't matter much at all. Software companies want people who can get things done, not people who can take more technical courses than any human should.

I was considering a double major in Applied Math and Computer Science but I've recently decided to go a similar, but different route. Instead of taking all of the Applied Math courses that I don't foresee myself using, like Partial Differential Equations and Numerical Methods for Differential Equations, I will be picking up a few math courses that I actually WANT to take, like Probability Theory and Stochastic Processes.

Take courses you want to take. Take courses that will help you in the long run. If you don't get a double major, then so what? Just go build something awesome and you'll get a job no problem.
LulzSec's Leader Sabu can be at DefCon Security conference
The US bailouts were approximately $16K per capita, so whatever the banks receiving that money do with it replaces the massive amount of interest needed for a bubble.
But there still are Appl et al. involved in the group. Additionally, I don't believe that such a deal would benefit MS. They are earning more from Android than Windows Mobile!
Help me kill IMAP and Exchange in a single blow
Well, if you could use the power of your mind to generate a field that repelled radioactive particles...
I wonder if this is another attack paid for by facebook (or Apple?)

http://www.cnbc.com/id/43017686/Facebook_Admits_Secret_PR_Mo...
This is a plausible alternative theory, but it seems this is a case where the media gives too much attention to non-mainstream views in Academia. Is there any claim that the consensus among historians has shifted?

Also, I find it hard to believe that there aren't some personal accounts or primary sources that could more or less decide the issue.
27" models at 2560x1440 are becoming more affordable. My brother pointed me at Hazro, which he's using in his iPhone dev shop. I've also seen a substantial fall in price for the Dell U2711.

I've been looking at this a lot recently as I consider moving away from the 2 screen setup I've had for years. My main motivation is that my laptop docking stations only have one digital output. VGA just doesn't cut it for a clear screen.

The drop in price on the 27" models has me hoping that the 30" 2560x1600 ones will also come down. I've wanted one of those for ages, though when I once used an Apple cinema screen at that size/resolution it felt kind of weird.
Two thoughts:

1) Why do we continue playing the blame game with something that happened 65 years ago? I for one, no matter how bad I feel about what happened then, am not going to apologize. Seeing as my parents had not yet been born, I don't think I'm especially responsible, and I think it's pretty much the same across the board.

2) What is with this postulating about how "maybe nuclear weapons are not as good of a deterrent as we thought"!? They were certainly a good deterrent for... I don't know... the entire Cold War!? It doesn't really matter if they deliver the destruction we fear. As a deterrent, the only thing that matters is how much we fear them, which we obviously do! (Just look at the folks wringing their hands over Fukushima)

P.S. As I understand it, modern nuclear warheads make Little Boy and Fat Man look like toys. The US had a bomb of 25 megatons in 1961. Little Boy was 15 kilotons. May be wise to consider this when claiming nuclear weapons are no more consequential than some firebombing- leaving aside the part where one can be delivered from a submarine hundreds of miles away, and the other requires an entire squadron of bombers to do a flyover.
Funfaree: How Enemies Can Become Best Friends
Is spam a big problem on Facebook?
Wikipedia Aims for more contributors
Earlier you mentioned:

> it gives the government an incentive to grant patents and to prevent them from expiring.

as a downside to IP tax, when said downside already exists with said system, and is not made worse by my proposal. Then you say:

> Existing maintenance and filing fees clearly have not been enough to prevent large numbers of frivolous patents.

But this does not support your earlier assertion - the existing fees actually _support_ a large number of frivolous patents, because the value of a patent is (potentially) infinite, whereas the cost is known, and not prohibitive. The existing fees were NOT designed to curb patents -- they were designed to make it profitable for the government.

> Any IP tax would have to be quite a bit larger than fees existing now to be effective."

My proposal addresses this perfectly. It puts the "cost of carry" of a patent in direct proportion to its value. It is not a "sin tax", it is a "use tax" - if you use the legal system (courts, customs) to protect your profits, you pay according to these profits.

The end result is likely to be much fewer well written patents which are non-trivial and (relatively) easy to defend in court, which will be strategically selected by the grantees. Furthermore, it puts older and newer patents on equal grounds, unlike other suggestions of "from now on ..."

It is probably possible to balance the filing fees (because of fewer patents) and the IP tax so that it doesn't reduce the government intake; This might not actually be at 1%/year, but rather at 2%/year or 0.5%/year (or some other number), so the liquor thing might not be relevant -- although I agree, in general, that the government is itself a "fee / tax" junkee and therefore cannot be trusted to do the right thing.
The Groupon model IMHO is not sustainable unless they can generate repeat business. It's great a system for securing guaranteed customer numbers. But with such a huge discount to attract them, and with 50% of that going to Groupon coffers, I don't see the benefit to small-medium businesses. Larger businesses could write-off the deal and attempt to either increase brand awareness or upsell instore. But even then, they're risking enforcing a consumer mentality of only buying at the discounted rate.
I don't think you can ever have too much screen space. Your workflow adjusts to make use of it.

I've currently got a 27" iMac with two 20" Dell monitors turned portrait either side. I keep things like IM, Twitter, Email etc in the two portrait screens and keep what I'm working on in the middle.
A few ways Groupon is helping local businesses:

1. Groupon is bringing offline local businesses online. The same way Google brought small advertisers/small businesses online.

2. Groupon could be a useful way for business to get some cash up front for future customers. That cash may help small businesses expand, instead of taking loans to expand.

3. Groupon cost of small businesses could be useful marketing cost since Groupon deal reaches out to many local customers.

Slightly old but interesting read on this: http://www.evanmiller.org/is-groupon-the-next-google.html

Further, this article itself mentions "Note massive competitors like Google, Facebook, Walmart, Opentable, etc. already doing their own versions of daily half-off deals". As people have said "imitation is the best form of flattery". So many Groupon clones show that there is a demand for such a service from both small businesses and consumer sides.

However, some of the accounting practices of Groupon and the way Groupon used recent investment money seems unusual and have raised a lot of eye-brows.
Internet filteration system of the day
That story sounds fake. Do you have a citation?

Those Japanese extreme nationalists might be crazy, but I'd be surprised if they were to blame Russia for Hiroshima. Their main peeve against Russia is due to USSR's annexation of a few Japanese islands at the end of World War II.
I think I might do a year of study abroad and I am thinking that Singapore is my first choice. I don't necessarily want to do my entire education internationally but would definitely consider doing a year or a semester.
The only thing that might change the morality of the bombing is if Truman's objective was actually to intimidate the Soviets (as was suggested but never convincingly argued in the article) rather than end the war (as is commonly assumed). Simply changing the reason why Japan surrendered shouldn't much change the morality of Truman's decision, since you're holding fixed what Truman believed.

Analogously, most people think it's moral for a SWAT team to shoot and kill a hostage taker. The fact that the hostage taker was actually going to release the hostage anyway (unbeknownst to the SWAT team) if he wasn't shot doesn't really change the morality of the shooting.

But really, 99% of the morality is decided by whether you think strategic bombing can ever be acceptable (either because you are a pure consequentialist, or because you subscribe to the Doctrine of Double Effect and accept that the bomb's actual target was the industrial base of the Japanese cities rather than their citizens).

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-effect/
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From Wikipedia:

"The term patent usually refers to an exclusive right granted to anyone who invents any new, useful, and non-obvious process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, and claims that right in a formal patent application. "

In my opinion, the key part is the non-obvious part of "new, useful, and non-obvious"; the invention of a new medicine is usually non-obvious, but the invention of Amazon 1-click shopping is obvious (in hindsight).

What is "non-obvious" ? If a single individual can come up with a similar solution (without access to the underlying research/data involved in the patent) in a short amount of time (a week, or at least in a DAY in the 1-click example) it does not represent a significant investment.

There should also be a requirement that the idea is implemented to be able to sue others. You may stop others' implementation if you have a patent, but you should not be able to charge them for anything until you have implemented a working solution yourself (to avoid patent trolls).

Or simply use the KISS principle and remove all software patents once and for all !
Was it somehow "not so vile" before?
I'd suggest 2x24", which you can do for ~$180/each straight off of Newegg or ~$140-150 if you wait for a sale.

I recently had pretty much the same debate about upgrading my pair of 24" monitors, and wound up moving to 4x24" side-by-side in portrait mode. The extra real estate is totally worth it, but you get the added advantage of having that real estate divided up into screens, where you can maximize/tile windows more easily than on one huge display.

The cost is nice, too; the 4x24" monitors were only ~$700, so even with the extra $120 or so for a pair of decent stands off of Amazon, the damage isn't too bad.

(Just realized you're talking about an extra for a laptop, which makes the situation a bit different. Leaving this up anyhow in the hopes of provoking discussion---I'm curious what people do for multi-monitor setups.)
> There's no reason to think that Windows 8 won't match it.

Actually, there is reason to think Win8 adoption will be slower - many people were still on XP (a 10 year old OS!) and holding out on upgrading to Vista because it was so bad (perception wise; no comment on any objective measure of quality). So when Win7 came out and was not bad (perception wise), all those who held out were happy to update. It's possible the Win8 updates won't be as popular because Win7 (like XP before it) is good enough that there is no compelling reason to upgrade.

But even assuming it does do 300 million in 2 years - poll your favorite developers; what is the time frame since win7 was out that they are willing to do a "win 7 only" release? (no vista support, no xp support)? My bet would be that maybe some would NOW, but no one would have a year ago.

.NET has been generally available for 10 years now, .NET a part of XP/Vista/Win7 for over 5 - and the vast majority of generally available desktop software is STILL not using it. Why would you believe a new Win8 runtime would be different?
I imagine it is a hell of a lot more dangerous now, and the guy willing to spend millions on stolen artwork is likely the guy who could have you killed without thinking about it ;-)
Entrepreneurs: Why You should Procrastinate Once in a While
Dickens wrote every word of his own stuff. And walked something like 20 miles a day, too -- often all the way out of London and all the way back. There was no "fiction factory" about him, just prodigious genius, and a whole lot of the best English ever written.

Adams is talking about stuff like this (chosen at random): http://www.amazon.com/Against-All-Enemies-Tom-Clancy/dp/0399.... Note the critical little "with" on the cover.

Dickens' success as a bestseller proves Adams' point, not yours. If you want an example of yours, pick Stratemeyer.
Different approach to form protection
I think ultimately what might happen here is that the government will regulate VC to make it difficult or illegal for fundraising rounds to be used primarily to pay off earlier investors. Saying it out loud like that made me realize how close to a ponzi scheme such a thing could easily become.
Not having a math degree will impact you later if you want to get into grad school in math/financial math. If you are pretty sure you are going into software, ditch the math degree.
It wouldn't be surprising if these reviews were fully paid. The developers get most of those payments back, so the expense of buying your own app a couple hundred times is insignificant in comparison with the income generated by being highly rated.
> if i put a computer on the defcon wifi, it'll probably be say, modern linux (ubuntu, debian, or redhat) running either a minimal subset of services (ssh) or perhaps nothing, with firewall policy applied, or a modern windows (windows7) with the firewall on. i'll be using a modern, fully patched web browser, also perhaps with some additional mitigation technology (thought nothing out of the ordinary) think perhaps noscript and EMET.

The first time I went to DEFCON, I got to hear Roger Dingledine complain about how Ubuntu had been shipping a version of Tor with a known remote root vulnerability for months. Modern Linux distribution != magical instant application of all patches.
On the other hand, he was measuring the radiation levels of his environment every day and probably never received any significant radiation dose. He was stubborn, sure, but not stupid.

Very nice pictures.
1. This is good, as long as these local business are being educated on the benefits/risks vs just being told it's good overall.

2. Groupon deals are used as a marketing tool to (hopefully) attract long-term customers/develop buzz. Merchants lose on every deal so I don't know what you mean by "cash up front".

3. Look at #2

Imitation may be the best form of flattery, but it may also just indicate that everyone is jumping into a hyped up market. Look at the aftermath of all the social networks. Except that Groupon doesn't benefit from user loyalty effects.

IMO, it's unsustainable growth in it's current form. I think they can develop a profitable business (as they did before), but sustaining that hyper growth curve....not so sure.

I don't understand what Groupon hoped to gain with it's "first-mover" advantage. Everyone I know (including me) who buys groupons does it just because they give the best deal for a specific business, not because I'm somehow loyal to Groupon. I will just as readily use Living Social or Buywithme or whatever other coupon site is out there. Until they fix this, the market will just be saturated with more and more players. Race to the bottom.
Fair enough. But without a good comparison against random picks from the same pool it's impossible to judge the quality of these picks. Given that there were a few gimmes in the list (slashdot and vonage for example), and given the notable absence of plenty of high profile CEOs in 2006 who foundered shortly after I'm not at all impressed with this list.
You reap what you sow.
Elite Team &gt; Company
We are in the time where building a company is no longer considered as an impossible thing to do for a person. But is a company really a thing that you want to build?
Same here. At times, it gets so bad that I have to hit Ctrl+C and then it dumps out a nice big trace before giving me my shell prompt.
My phone runs Symbian.

When iPhone 5 comes out, I will probably buy a by-then-cheaper iPhone 4. If I don't it will probably be because of the keyboard (I text much more than I phone).

I'm avoiding Android because I don't want even more of my life going through Google (same reason I haven't tried out Google+).

Windows Phone isn't on my radar. I was holding out for Maemo, but it's not living up to its potential, even before Nokia decided to switch to Windows instead.
I believe that I will have a strong enough background in math just with the CS curriculum that my school offers and the double major was really just to set me apart and in part because I enjoy math.

Do you think that your economics minor has benefited you? Are you in the software industry?
It is a charade, and you are right about Nagasaki/Hiroshima mixup on my part. The bottle throwing I witnessed myself though it was in mid-80s, and it was a part of the same charade. Police let that happen, but things generally remained under control. People who worked in the embassy not long ago said the same show was still being put on, but finer details I don't know.

The Soviet Union inaction with the bombings angle -- this also comes from the embassy people and I have no reason not to believe them. Not that it means it was/is a central part of these protests.
When a deal appears for a business on Groupon, people buy those deals that day and visit that business later on. That's what I meant by "cash up front".

Yes, I agree with you that barrier to entry is very low. However, Groupon has so many businesses lined up (since they have maximum reach) that Groupon can choose the best deal to offer to customers. That's the advantage Groupon has compared to others.
Groupon can work excellently for small businesses. They just have to know what they're doing.

A friend runs a coasteering/outdoor activity business that has used them multiple times. As they have under utilized capacity , the marginal cost of extra customers is near zero (imagine they can take up to 12 people on an activity, but only have 3 booked in).

It doesn't matter if Groupon is taking 50% of this, they still see an increased profit.

The danger is, of course, cannibalizing their existing customer base, but, as a reasonably new company, its much more important to get money, and customers, coming through the door.
Bury your room key...-why LV hotels dont use RFID for room keys.
Scan your credit card remotely - not if they are mag stripe.

FUD articles like this is why people dont know to use VPN or HTTPS, what a waste of CNN's money sending him there for this - sorry but it has to be said could have been a much better more accurate article covering actual security issues.
I did not know you could put conditions in inputrc. Useful.
It has FExpressions, the earliest form of macros. The arguments of an FEXPR is evaluated on demand. (http://nostoc.stanford.edu/jeff/llisp/19.html)
So Google wanted to buy them for $6B because... why?

Just to jump into the action late and lose money?
It's not a factual blame issue. Are then only those that dropped the bomb responsible? It's a mentality problem, people feel guilty because they don't think anything changed in their society and feel powerless and afraid that something like that could happen again, which is also why they keep writing about it, to keep awareness high and try to change society.

And with this I'm not saying that you should feel responsible instead. I'm simply saying that dismissing this by saying "My parents weren't around 60 years ago" without including an analysis of the context and environment is a pretty weak argument. For example, would you have made the same decision in the same circumstance in 1945?
Smart Media
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Bill Gates and Warren Buffet on Taxing Rich People
What good has google really done?
You still can. I've had friends review my apps even though I gave them all promo codes. And for the record, I don't think it's unethical to ask a few friends for a favor.

It'd actually recommend as a marketing strategy to hand out as many promo codes as possible. To bloggers, friends, anybody who asks or complains about your app on twitter. The goodwill you gain is worth far more than the potential lost sales. Even at $20, I think giving out promo codes has made me much more in good business than the thousand bucks in "lost sales."
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Mitch (Ryan Reynolds) and Dave (Jason Bateman), who has been estranged, they now lead a different life, Dave is a lawyer too much work
Mitch (Ryan Reynolds) and Dave (Jason Bateman), who has been estranged, they now lead a different life, Dave is a lawyer too much work
Mitch (Ryan Reynolds) and Dave (Jason Bateman), who has been estranged, they now lead a different life, Dave is a lawyer too much work
Mitch (Ryan Reynolds) and Dave (Jason Bateman), who has been estranged, they now lead a different life, Dave is a lawyer too much work
Mitch (Ryan Reynolds) and Dave (Jason Bateman) who has been estranged they now lead a different life Dave is a lawyer too much work,
It has more to do with the atmosphere than ad targeting. Pseudo names, screen names, random characters that can't always be pronounced scare away people who don't spend much time online. In most social settings, it's common for people to share names, for it to be pronounceable, and for it to be familiar. Like the "Trash" icon being where you dump your unwanted files, or the "Magnifying Glass" being where you search, you want users to feel familiar with your product. Google+ is pruning away a bit of the geek subculture so it doesn't become a huge majority and scare away a much larger crowd.

If Google+ ever becomes a household name, there'll be much less emphasis on real names. The risk of a super majority on Google+ by a minority in the real world will be gone.
At some point a balance has to be struck. If you spend all your time trying out new technologies, you never really get to know any of them very well, and your productivity is constantly hampered as you relearn the ropes on every project. I am all for learning new things, but I think there are definitely cases where it's reasonable to pass on rewriting everything just because someone thinks that "smart people use language Y, not X", and "X developers are too dumb to use Y".
Hm, it's not really an Apples-to-Apples comparison, b/c all the 27" 2560px displays I can think of are IPS, while 1080p's in the sub-$300 range are TN's. You'd be paying for the added display quality on top of the bigger screen + resolution.

For dev work, I'd say the nicest thing about the 27"s is the ability to put two full pages side-by-side, either a browser window + IDE, or vert. split IDE code panes. 1920px isn't quite there for two panes of code.

And personally, I've had 2+ 24"s, and I've actually found it too cumbersome: having emails/IM's on a second window actually becomes distracting, and moving your mouse cursor across so many pixels was less precise than either alt-tabbing to the right program or switching spaces/virtual desktops w/ a keyboard shortcut. For me anyway, 27" is the sweet spot.
I am happy I didn't even agree to the T&C of the facebook app forced by my phone manufacturer.