skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What are some tips for getting into top Computer Science colleges?
I am currently working on getting into a top school (Columbia University) to get a degree in Computer Science. I am an entrepreneur and web developer with a startup I am about to launch. I also have created a website to help students memorize. Any tips on how to make myself look more wanted to the college?
Your comment was looking a little grey under the collar when I read it, which I think raises the irony to which you allude to another level.
Sorry, maybe you haven't spotted it, I am using Barclays Wealth, that is, the small part of Barclays where you have a relationship manager you can talk on the phone (mobile) at nearly any time and meet in person when you need. This is not the "general" Barclays.

When you hit the insurance stuff like Barclays Aviva or the payment processing, it really depends, sometimes you are out for an Indian ride, sometimes not, most of the time it seems like it depends of the complexity of the issue.
It's rather strange to see a QWERTY layout when using dvorak. That said, if you showed a dvorak layout to a QWERTY user, you'd have a powerful demonstration of how much less finger travel there is and it convince them to switch.
I do agree, the debate has not been settled at all.

There continues to be vigorous and divisive debate over the conclusions and we obviously do not have (1) sufficient data to draw meaningful conclusions and (2) do not know enough about the actual physical mechanisms of the planet's climate to make meaningful projections.

I firmly believe we should all be responsible citizens of this planet; being mindful of the environment is the right thing to do. However, the debate over climate change - and the policymaking as a result - are obviously quite politicized.

The current movements for and against climate change are more about protecting fiefdoms, building empires, exploiting subsidies and crushing opponents than it is about being a mindful steward of the planet.
Grappling, and strategy of chess, yes. But you forgot the other third of the appeal to the American mind, the litigiousness allowed by the instant replay review and numerous rules with slightly different penalties. Each play is a sequence of strategy, chaos, lawsuit.
Masters this year from USC, undergrad at Hervey Mudd.
related courses with online materials: http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-courses-on-large-scale-le...
LaTeX3 Roadmap
I told my daughter to bring her umbrella to school today because the weather report called for rain. But it didn't rain. I am, by definition, stupid because I caused a loss for another person and derived no gain.

So it seems odd to have an outcome-based definition of stupidity and not a decision-based definition. Stupidity can't be attributed to a person if it is defined by the random forces existing outside of them.

I, for one, believe stupidity has degrees of intensity and is context-sensitive. I find it shallow when people are labeled as stupid simply because they failed to make an optimal decision in one of thousands of decisions they make everyday, possibly in an area for which they have no concern or for which the cost of finding the optimal decision far outweighed even difference in benefits between the worst and best outcome.
Well one click jailbreak is proof of concept. It could do something worse. It is hard to know if your iOS device has been rooted...
It's just the not-logged-in view.

The alternative would be a security hole in Google.
You don't get automatic permanent residence in the US just for marrying a US citizen either. There is several years and several thousand dollars of paperwork and process to go through, even when you're coming from someplace like Canada.
Yeah, it's an idea. That's how they work.
Since it is developed by Mozilla - the creator of Firefox, will this game engine be cross browser compatible?
Thanks for pointing that out. I completely missed that wonderful thread.

EDIT: I agree with amirhhz. Nirvana, if you have a blog or newsletter, please let me know. The only info I found from HN & googling you is twitter @NirvanaCore, which I am looking forward it, but I don't want to just know about NirvanaCore from you. I want to read and know about you and your thoughts.
Remind me of an old friend from the village I used to spend my childhood holidays. His family used to consider members from some other family as "foreigners". Actually, the "foreigners" lived in the village for slightly less than 150 years :) By contrast, my friend's family (and most other local families) were living in the area for at least 400 years, often up to 800 years for some (when documents exist).
I thought the music had a slight hardcore punk sensibility that made me smile. Had it not been for the length and the chorus it could have been a song by The Minutemen or a contemporary. Great musical comedy on the piano solo.
مسلسل بائعة الورد الحلقة 4
"labeled as stupid"

I strongly dislike the idea of labelling people as stupid, or for that matter smart, as it then implies that everything they do is then destined to be "stupid" or "smart". I am, more than happy to label individual decisions as stupid or smart.
I use both Javascript/JQuery and GWT, depending on the task. I'd use GWT when I want more predictability - when an app is complex enough that I'd like to be able to move bugs to compile time instead of run time (unit test or otherwise). With GWT you don't look for a bug in Chrome's Javascript console, say. A new browser comes out with weird specifics? Great. Switch on the flag for that browser and recompile, and that browser gets a unique snowflake version that works perfectly. Over time, GWT will improve the JS it compiles to, even given the same source code. It gets faster independent of the browser improvements.
Really? What about

function Y(f) {
var g = f(function(arg) {
return g(arg);
});
return g;
}

The inner() function from Mozilla's implementation is actually unnecessary in languages that support lexical closures.
Ask HN: Got a Kindle. What now? What books should I read?
Kinda silly question, but honestly i've got no idea where and i should start searching. I can find the best ruby gem for a given problem, but i never learnt how to find a (non-technical) book. I typically enjoy non-fiction investigative stories on economical,business technical "revolutions", e.g. Deluxxe, Kingpin, The big short, etc.
Or fictional stories on non-fictional issues like the movie/book(?) "up in the air".
Technical book recommendations are of course also appreciated as long as their readable on a beach or in an airplane.
The proper way to avoid the return _results is just put a blank return statement in the last line of the function.

(x, y) ->
for game_piece in @game_pieces
if game_piece.is_at x, y
@held_item = game_piece
@held_item.start_dragging x, y
break
return
Watch Argentina vs Nigeria live streaming online Free 6 September 2011
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Well... things are little more complicated here in Europe after World War 2, especially here in Central Europe. Borders changed. A lot. People were moved out of their countries. It's hard to call people "immigrants" in those cases.
I love your work on this - a good heatmap library is super helpful, and this is a very clever way to demonstrate it. And that QR code demo you posted earlier is pretty sweet, too...good weekend, huh?
Some resources are virtual, so yes it is a vm.

Processes are one level, then there are bsd jails, linux containers, lots of vm types. All have different security issues, once processes seemed enough isolation.

In the end the bugs matter most, and vm isolation has bugs too, they have just been harder to find and exploit.

Security is not absolute, just a matter of degrees.
My TEDX Talk: on Grandparents, Nutella and Startups
That's very interesting. In Venezuela there is a controlled currency market meaning that is illegal to trade in foreign currency without the approval of the local government.

Right now Venezuelan have the following impositions:

You get a maximum of 5000 dollars a year for travel. Is not 5K for every travel you make, is 5K for all the trips you might take on a given year.

Not only that you don't get them all at once: you must report were you are going to and they have a table of predefined amounts for each destination. For example:

If you go to the USA, you get something like 50 dollars a day. This mean that if you go 30 days, they (the government) will approve you 1500$.

These 1500$ of course comes with some restrictions: you can only use them in the country you said you were going to. This means that if I happen to take a small trip to Toronto, I can't spend any of that money. If I do there are serious consequences (penalties)

On the Internet side of things, you get 400$ a year for Internet purchases.

When I say get, I mean you are allowed to buy that amount of dollars at the set market price of 4.3 Bolivares per dollar. This price is set by the government.

At this point it should be pretty obvious to anyone reading this that all these impositions have create a secondary market (which by law, as a Venezuelan, I can't talk about it) But let's say the price of the dollar is quite high.

How is any of this related to Netflix?

Netflix is going to charge in Bolivares. Then they will need to go to the government to ask permission to change those Bolivares at the current set market rate. The main issue here is that most likely the government won't be giving them the needed currency (not necessarily because they don't want to, but because they don't have enough cash to do it).

What happens then: Netflix will be full of Bolivares, that are subject to a 30% inflation a year. So they would inevitably need to go to the secondary market to change those Bolivares to Dollars.

This has its consequences: they would get about half of what they would if the government granted them the requested currency and second, trading in the secondary market is highly illegal these days with some serious jail time.

So, Netflix in Venezuela, to me seems like an strategic move to cover the region, but business wise I don't see it lasting long if the current limitations stay.

Other than that, I think is great they are investing in Venezuela :)
10 Reasons Amazon's Bezos is World's Reigning Tech Freak Geek Leader
I can think of a few reasons to build elsewhere like it being easier to do as a non-root user, and so you don't fill a system drive with experimentation, but I'm not quite sure I know specifically why you're saying so.

As for descriptive names, I agree.
> Living vicariously is the essence of being human.

I think this is the exact point the author is trying to disprove. The articles isn't saying that all viewing activities are bad, in fact he point out the "high-horse-ness" of people who say they are. Instead he is saying that the essence of being human is in being in the area, not passively viewing it.

While there is much to learn from watching, reading, ect, real life takes place when you are the doer, not the viewer. Teddy Roosevelt's very famous "It's not the critic that counts" speech (Full Version: http://www.leadershipnow.com/tr-citizenship.html ) comes to mind instantly.

While History is the study of things that you will never be able to do, it is immensely valuable, if that knowledge can be translated into ideas about what we should do. Winston Churchill was a student of history, and his life was meaningful because he acted on this knowledge to stop the German advance and save the free world.

You are right about the fisherman-soldier analogy. But I think the article's main point is that creators (read doers) are of much more value to society then consumers (read viewers).

This is why we should have "One thing in which [we are] a doer, and not just a viewer."
What patents have in common with viruses
Maybe it's just you cherrypicking examples. Just as you think we are discourage tinkering, I can point to the DIY and Maker movement, the proliberation of Hackerspaces, and so much more.

In any case, humans do not build a civilization by having really smart men who know everything, but having specialists in all area of life.

The scientists would do well not to express their disgust and disdain for the lowly plumbers or the trashmen,

Yes, we are stupid, but so are you. Just pick an area that you know nothing about.
Does it work only in Chrome, or something? Noting happens for me in Firefox.

Edit: got blocked by AdBlock+.

Remark: it ignores characters/keys that aren't present on US keyboards. No é è à ñ ö π ς φ ... would it be possible to catch Alt/Shift keys, for instance?
it looks like all the magic happens with the U combinator, where "recursion" is avoided by finding F = f(f), and passing f as a parameter such that F can be reconstructed.

which still smells like recursion, a type of recursion where the recursive element keeps getting punted around as a parameter like an epileptic cannibalistic stem-cell with no name.
> Which keyword is useful? Var?

Yes.

> CS will put it back at compile time, don't worry.

May I ask why you're assuming I'm a moron, exactly?

> And it will do it in more consistent manner than many coders will manually.

I don't know who your coders are, but you should fire them.

> CS will save your ass from being bitten by IE because of stray comma.

Yep, confirmed, and you should probably fire yourself as well.
I didn't submit any bugs, but I certainly enjoyed reading the code. I learned a lot from it. Tarsnap has some of the simplest, understandable C code I've ever read. If I ever need, secure remote backup, I'd use this software and recommend it to others.
vnoremap <leader>p "_dP

"_ is the blackhole register, with this the replaced text disappears and you can continue "putting" the new text at will.
No I won't. It won't let me edit it. My foolishness can live on for posterity.
While I can't answer #1, I can give a reason for #2. When you're teaching people Ruby on Rails you would/should be teaching them what exists in the framework by default. The default templating language for views happens to be ERB-powered HTML, and so that should be taught.

Teaching haml and Rails at the same time would only confuse people as they will need to learn Rails AND haml at the same time. If anything, it would be better to introduce this as a "bonus chapter" or an appendix and let people choose for themselves rather than forcing them to learn something excessive.

Now, you may think that I would argue the same point for SCSS too. But now that SCSS is the default within Rails 3.1, it is "right" to teach it at the same time as Rails. The "leap" from CSS to SCSS is not as large as the one from HTML to haml, either.
Someone in the office or wherever will switch people slowly. People do rely on the office geek to tell them whats best as they dont know, and that person probably does the preinstall or technical induction for new users...
You're in good company. Mikhail Botvinnik, many times world chess champion, was known to watch tv programmes about chess. The theory being that you can never reinforce the fundamentals enough. I concur, in any field of study.
any demos up, or is it still too early?
Works for me in Firefox (Firefox 5.0, Ubuntu).
look at the reference class of all days that you make such a suggestion. compare the negative utility of "bringing umbrella; no rain" and "didn't bring umbrella; rain".
A solution to the MBA/Entrepreneurship paradox
Most Profitable US Software Companies
What I don't get is why their Chef server has to be publicly reachable at all.

Shouldn't it be available only through their internal, private network?

I might be missing something here.
Money doesn't tend to motivate me in bug hunting, but the laptop I am writing this on, and my next holiday came from a bounty I received from Mozilla a couple of weeks ago. I would have have found and disclosed the bug responsibly, regardless of the bounty program. But it sure as hell feels nice to be rewarded some times. I was also awarded a gift by LastPass earlier this year for reporting a security problem and letting them fix it before blogging it up. The vast majority of bug reports go unrewarded though. I don't mind, when the software is open source, or isn't backed by a wealthy company/individual.
Groupon for College Education
I thought you wanted them to say bad guy or gal.
Beanstalkers is awesome. Cool idea.
I maintain a book list that I developed for my personal use but you could just as easily use goodreads.com or Amazon's wish list. Everytime I see or hear a book recommendation I add it to the list. My list now has over 1200 books that I'd like to read so I have no problem finding a book.

You could also find the books on Amazon you like and then check out the recommendations. That should lead you to others.

To suit your interest in business I would recommend:
- Barbarians at the Gate: The Rise and Fall of RJR Nabisco (I'll never look at public companies the same after reading this book)
- Founders at Work
From the Technical FAQ:

How do I write to a file in COMOS
You can't, yet.

What doesn't work
Interfaces (In the programing sense, not the graphical sense)
Foreach - Requires interfaces, so use for instead for now

On a brighter note -- from FAQ:

What is the Project Vision?
We would like to design Cosmos as:
(...)
*The LINUX of tomorrow.
Fun1club: Yeh Dooriyan (2011)
USS John C.Stennis, Carrier in Transformers Docks At Port Klang
Hackme: Deconstructing an ELF File
Please take this most racist survey ever
Are these types of surveys even legal?
Luakit - webkit and lua based browser framework with vim style navigation
lol "Those were the days"
DigiNotar Certificate Authority breach "Operation Black Tulip"
Or Rugby - which would seem closer to American Football but without the fancy outfits and all the standing about. ;-)
Thanks for the feedback; I've just made the improvements. The gg G mixup was a nasty little typo.
I've been using Backbone at Earbits (YC w11) [1] since February and have been very happy with it. We're running a pretty complex AJAX app that streams music along with providing a large set of functionality around the music itself (artist info, local concert alerts, track history, deep facebook integration, bookmarking favorites, event logging, running contests and promotions and so on).

For an idea of scale, we have:
~60 backbone views,
~120 javascript templates (underscore jst),
~30 backbone models + collections,
1 controller (the router)

And we have a fairly complex system of white-labeling that allows us to swap out javascript templates and augment view functionality for partner sites [2] and local sites [3] without adding a lot of overhead.

The combination of Backbone + Underscore + Jammit with Rails/Rack on the backend is working great. Even developers who are not familiar at all with Backbone and the ajax app, can dive in and understand everything pretty quickly.

Can't possibly recommend it highly enough, if you
1) are comfortable with Javascript, and
2) prefer to roll most of your own code so that you're not beholden to bulky rigid frameworks.

There are some quirks that annoy me, but overall I can't complain. One of these days when I have some more free time, I'll try and write a series of posts explaining how we're using it and our key learnings.

[1] http://earbits.com
[2] http://sfgate.earbits.com
[3] http://la.earbits.com
Saying "there are lots of VMs with security problems, therefore VMs cannot be secure" is faulty logic.

Most (perhaps all) existing VMs are quite complicated and are not designed specifically to be secure, but that does not have to be the case.

I bet I could write a secure VM in C that interprets some simple toy "virtual machine code" with around, say, 2^5 instructions. What I have in mind here is something like TinyVM [1].

[1] https://github.com/GenTiradentes/tinyvm
And should have used correct grammar.
You don't need to have POPCNT to implement much faster bit counting:

http://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html#CountBit...
Where would we all be today if we never improved on the first wheel?
Being a movie superhero I'd jump in the car and race down there, leaping into the fray and killing all the terrorists, including the midget pretending to be the cute little girl. Then I'd get a medal, and a pony.

You though, lacking superpowers, couldn't help if you were there. So I dunno, maybe you should frantically search until you get positive evidence, and an idea of what you could do to help, before you decide what to do.

There are laws to deal with the guy if these was a scheme to profit. If he was deluded there's no reason to take actions, he's no worse than the idiots who ran around because of his rumors. In fact his action was better. By forwarding his news he's inviting conversation and investigation, by running off to the school the terrified parents are actually potentially causing a problem.
The tablet form factor is not "winning" The iPad is winning. While the form factor and natural interface is a large part of this, it is not the only reason. The closed ecosystem of iOS is big part of the success too. iPads are computers for 'everyone else' and by that I mean that you don't have to worry about malware, viruses etc: Your grandparents and my grandparents can make almost full use of these devices without constantly needing help from the likes of us.

It has nothing to do with iPads being trendy. Real people see them and immediately understand them. They try them and they want one too - here is the perfect device for sitting on a sofa and browsing Facebook while watching TV. They are also perfect for keeping young children occupied in a safe environment for 20 mins while you sort out your chores. This is not the case with an internet connected PC (or Mac for that matter).

iPads are not going away. They are not a 'trend' (by which I mean they are not a blip on a graph). Expect them to grow exponentially and for very household to get at least one.

Eventually, some other company will work out that it isn't just the form and the touch interface. The accessibility to a wide demographic, the safe sandbox, the vetted apps, the music+video+app+book store are all vital.

Whether it is Google, Amazon or Microsoft (or another) that finally crack this remains to be seen.
Amazon offers glimpse of tablet-friendly web redesign
I think it's a great idea - there's a lot of crap to sort through. I checked out your site, I think it would be easier if you made separate lists for netflix and zip.ca
I bought the Sparkfun starter kit a few weeks ago.

http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10173
No demos? Isn't it a bit too early to advertise a game engine when all there is to show is a github repo?

Edit: Thanks for the link to rescuefox.
True, edited to reflect my bias. Again, different form factor, different uses.
Number 5 is so true. I've seen it first hand many times. If the password on your TrueCrypt volume is "password" (or something similarly trivial) then you've just given away everything. And you need to understand this.

Strong encryption with a weak password means nothing. You've undone all the power of AES encryption when you select a weak password. So please use strong passwords and understand why they are important.