skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This weekend I began to take a computer science course at the local community college.

After the four hour class, in which the professor spent the first two hours talking about how accelerated the class was, and the 2nd two hours on how to install the JAVA SDK on Windows I immediately dropped the class.

My decision was based on my personal findings that MIT, Berkeley, and Stanford's online offerings are superior even though I won't be able to interact with a mentor.

While I'm happy that I'll be getting my $500 back (I think I'll put that money towards a cyclocross bike or Thule roof rack :cp), I'm appalled by the lack of accessibility to good mentorship at the community college level. Is my experience peculiar or is this pervasive?

As an aside, the prof. also called the Windows CMD, Unix... not even "like" Unix. He said, "This is Unix." My head almost exploded. This was after he spent a good deal of time telling people there were lots of jobs in the Unix and Line-UX field...
Watch mad men season 3 Trailer Review
You are right. All Daewoo models in Europe are now sold as Chevrolets.
Ok, but part of what makes Erlang so interesting for this kind of stuff is that you can do long running tasks in the event handlers without locking up the system. Erlang will take care of scheduling it, so that other requests can keep coming in and getting handled, and processing power is divided up between the different Erlang 'processes'. Writing simple select/poll/event/whatever servers in C is obviously going to kick ass in terms of speed, but things become more problematic when you need to start doing some real processing.
The Seesmic picture is just awful. Giant Loic LeMeur head surrounded by smiling, supine employees. It just screams "we just got fucked by the alpha male."
It's like getting a free trip to the Great Wall of China but only being allowed to explore it 2 feet away through a magnifying glass.
`my' is also an alternative, can make the code look less cluttered.
That's much easier to use than windowshop.com.

I wish I could see my Amazon wishlist with that interface, Amazon's UI for the wishlist is terrible.
Anyone else find it weird that a VC lacks basic Excel skills?
They have multiple methods for accessing the videos, one of which is Silverlight. Two of the other methods work on Windows and Mac and at least one of them works on Linux. I don't know what you're complaining about.

Believe it or not, there are some people out there actually using Silverlight. Even more people use other Microsoft products by choice. Microsoft couldn't have possibly "bought off" all of them so just chill out.

I'm not much of a Microsoft fan myself, but a little competition for Adobe in the online video/rich interface arena can only be a good thing.
This is a mildly interesting article, but inappropriate for HN.
The Fall of the House of Crunch
Seems like that assumes that the top one percent or so are some kind of trapped citizenry. Wouldn't they just move assets/gains/themselves offshore? Seems like if anybody had the ability to change their life parameters to avoid taxes, it would be the uber-wealthy.

By taxing capital gains, you hit the millionaire store-keeper who sold his shop and is now retired living on investments, the startup guys just cashing out, the day-trader who made a mint. In short, the transitional folks. You keep slightly-rich people from becoming super-rich. The really rich don't seem to be encumbered by any one nation's tax laws.

My opinion only. Sorry for butting in. I was hoping you guys would cover this point but I haven't seen it so far in your discussion.
Steve Jobs: We Still Haven't Figured Out The Living Room
Linux applications gain new developers on Windows and OS X
Well, yes, but memory footprint will be higher and speed will decrease slightly. You will also want to leave all the protocol handling (HTTP etc) in C to prevent further slowing down.
Even if Royalties for Web Radio Fall, Revenue Remains Elusive
Hey alecco, nice blog! I've been playing with a bit of libevent goodness myself, your code will be very helpful ;)
Better yet, learn several languages that are significantly different from each other. That way, your mind will be more flexible, and you'll be able to pick up whatever languages are currently popular for marketing reasons on fairly short notice.
Was happy to see that NewsCred is in the comfort quadrant!
This brings up something that's been bothering me for a while: how does MS's dividend make anybody want to buy their stock? IIRC, MS pays a $0.11 dividend per $22 share (price as of this morning). I'm not very familiar with things relating to stocks, but that looks like an interest rate of 0.5%. My checking account does better than that, so why would anybody care at all about a dividend that is so low?
Now if only it had bash-style auto-completion...
Web 2.0 has crept into the everyday work place, FaceTime reports
I think even in the case of rape, practical grounds matter.

People disagree with you instinctively. It seems that we have Deontological tendencies by nature. Mostly people do not find utilitarian arguments compelling. You have to weight the scales very far in favour of utility before people will violate a principle.

the dry communities

It's an extreme case. These are mostly very small very isolated (like 2 days drive to a store) communities. Generally self imposed by direct democracy or community elders/leaders. I don't know if it works. I don't know if it helps. But that is besides what I was saying. Assuming it's a net gain, I approve.

*It's interesting that we arrived here from the public health care questions. I'm actually surprised that someone open to a 100% practical outcome argument would be so against public healthcare. I expected more fundamental objections: despite the net loss..
The Brain Unveiled: New Imaging Method Offers Spectacular View of Neural Structures
one reason: "Error establishing a database connection"
What would Apple do with Yahoo? Yahoo now is where AOL was in the '90s, symbolic of everything that's cheesy and lame about the Internets. The last thing super-cool Air-toting Apple customers want is to be associated with it.

If Apple buys anyone it should be Sun (or what's left of SGI).
Fonts are embedded in most PDF files.
http://pmjdebruijn.blogspot.com/2006/06/extracting-fonts-fro...
Global stock markets fall again
It is surprisingly practical. It's fun to browse through. They propagate a lot of the most important Amazon information through, so that you can look at more than just the covers. And I'm sure it makes the designers of book covers, who work really hard at their art, very happy to see online stores like this.

Having said that, here are some reasons why I prefer Amazon's usual interface:

* Used book prices

* links to other editions (including Kindle, audio, etc.)

* "Customers who bought this item also bought" (with ratings) -- I use this to get a quick grasp of the popular titles in any given genre.

* The customer ratings, which are of course being gamed these days, but which continue to provide additional perspective in some cases.

And, of course, what this is really missing is the ability to open up the book and page easily through it. That's the real killer app for a physical bookstore, and zoomii seems to have less of it than Amazon.com, not more. Amazon offers "Look Inside" for many books, which I don't think is really a great substitute for looking inside a physical book, but it's better than nothing.

Is Amazon's interface cluttered? Yes. Is it so cluttered that I'm willing to give up these bits of it in exchange for less clutter? No.
Nice writeup, but I think he forgot the most important one...

"Delight your users."

In my experience, everything else on OP's list is a byproduct of this.

When you delight your users, everything will be easier and more fun, you'll get better feedback and support, and you'll be best positioned to steer your career.

I you're not delighting your users (for whatever reason), do everyone a favor and either figure out how to or move on.
We'll see... ;)
I'm not sure that it was a misunderstanding. I'm trying to get a better idea of what you were trying to represent. I think I have.

I meant, do you consider that there are things that are a public responsibility, things a society owes to its individual members, that are not The Governments place to provide?

I think you answered no. These things should be personal not public.
You can worry about it, but worrying's not likely to help...
Give me your email and I'll send you the answer.
Start-Up Empire = Start-Up School
This should_raise an exception (Ruby + Shoulda)
StartupEmpire – Canada's Conference for Startups
That's what I keep telling linux people. We need more distros, not less. More window managers, more gentoo only websites, more binary blobs & more incompatibilities. Besides, reverse-engineering proprietary platforms is lots of fun.
Google, buy Zemanta
Value of stock comes from a combination of dividend and expected raise in their price, analyzing just half of it will grossly underestimate its value.
Obviously, anything is possible with C. Erlang is written in C, after all. You can break up processing into small steps that don't bog things down, and even formalize how you do so. But the difference is that in Erlang, that's taken care of for you.

(BTW, not that any of this takes away from your nice article - I voted it up because it's the kind of thing I'd like to see more of!)
I like browsegoods.com better. gives a feel of being in a store.
Also http://see.stanford.edu which is open to everyone, if you're looking for actual class lectures.
Social Tools - Shareaholic
Career Advice For Young Developers: Start a startup while you're still young.

Before you turn 21. Then you're old!
Hitler a hot political topic these elections, says Twitter
Scaling and performance
Bret on Social Games: A Case for Cloning Games
The J-Curve: The Evolving Value Of A VC Portfolio
New UK-focused technology venture capital fund
Those of us with computers, or access to TV, or even radios and newspapers already knew about this. I don't think daily stock market movements are particularly germane, either.
But I'm 23 and still in school! /me cries...
You want your authentication hash to be slow. Password tests are never in your 80/20 performance hot spot. The faster a single password test is, the faster it is to run an entire dictionary through that test function looking for a matching hash.

SHA256 is slower than SHA1, which is slower than MD5. But in the grand scheme of things, SHA256 is fast. It's designed to be fast --- fast enough to run on a per-packet basis in secure network protocols.

Bcrypt is designed to be slow. So is "stretched" SHA256, which is simply SHA256 iterated thousands of times. Both these schemes are much harder to crack than simply hashing a password with SHA256.

The trouble I have here is that authentication is one part of your application you don't want to mess around with, but already someone here said "I'm going to try this just because the name is awesome". Forget the cosmetics. There's only one right answer to this problem.
ok, lets settle for learning languages from the two companies with the top cash on hand: M$ and Apple. That should mean F# and Objective-C. And then learn a new language each year just to keep the juices flowing.
It's clear what people want: Any movie or TV show ever made, at the press of a button, in high quality.

Now realistically forget the 'ever made' part, and focus on classics + all recent content, there's no reason why cable companies shouldn't be able to deliver this soon. Merge the on demand libraries with streaming video sites like Hulu, and we're almost there already.
Exactly. Also, if you want good games, I used to be a games developer so I could post cool & fun games, but that's not the point of hacker news.
Computing is about to face a trade-off between sovereignty and efficiency
Yes. The average liberal arts major makes almost $9,000/year off their writings. You can make twice that much by rehearsing the phrase "Would you like fries with that, sir?".

The sad thing is, that blurb should be read in the beginning of every English class. Writing, like music, is a "night gig" for 99% of the people passionate about it. You still need a day job to cover your rent and lifestyle.
It's sad that even recent history gets badly mangled.

This is all what PR and marketing is about: not to speak of companies supposedly involved (vs. hidden in plain sight).
It is interesting how this reads like a "how to recognize a person who is bad at marketing" list.

Really, I think as a customer, you get a much better deal if you place more value on logic and honesty than on rhetoric, confidence, and the tall guy in the nice suit.
Is the global economy melt-down the USA's fault?
I've been reading about all the world-wide markets taking a nose-dive and I'm wondering:

Is this all fall-out from our (USA's) sub-prime/credit collapse, or were these other countries also making the same mistakes?

Did we tank not only our economy but the whole world's? Or did everyone shoot themselves in the foot at the same time?
I dont know.

I'm 21 and am just kicking off my first major startup. I dont really think I am ready for it. I think a couple more years in-work experience (only een employed for 6 months out of university) would do me good... :)
the thing is, if joe average thought less of people for being intellectually dishonest, joe average would be in a much better place. Instead of just appealing to his emotions, politicians (and salespeople) would need to appeal to his interests.
Search for articles about the collapse of Iceland's financial markets for a partial answer to your question.
Anyone know if this includes the flight sim easter egg?
Give me an AppleTV that will output 1080p HDMI, do high quality upscaling, and will play not only my iTMS content, but also stream a wide range of other codecs and containers (divx, mkv, etc..) from any source on my LAN, and has a DVD drive built in, and I'll put one in every room! Double points if it hooks into the NetFlix streaming option and/or Amazon Unbox.

I generally love Apple stuff, however I'm already using my Xbox 360 to stream DLed video content from my desktop, so it's hard to justify getting another device that just does that. If I could replace my DVD player or another device, that'd be something to consider.
Grantham:  S&P 500 bottom between 600-800 in the next two years? (see last page)
How could he have neglected to mention Test?!

Test everything. Test it early. Test it extensively.

If testing 'isn't needed' and is a 'waste of time' for the simple thing you're doing, it'll only take a few moments away from your busy day. If it was needed, you'll be glad you caught the error when you did.

If in doubt, ask any veteran developer about the horror stories they ran into in production due to a minor bug that could have been caught at the point of development with a simple 'complete waste of time' test.

Edit: I cannot understand why this is being down-modded to negative territory. This is classic 'advice to a young engineer'! Your development career is headed to a dead end if you cannot create reliable software.
Nonsense. Unions have been targeted ever since the civil rights movement; the labor movement gave rise to organized communities of (African-American) workers eager to get rights outside of the shop floor.

Its one of the very reasons the labor movement in this country stays dead. People in power aren't interested in upheaval.
It's sort-of silly to compare a publication like the old Infoworld (which had a large staff and was a weekly print publication that hadn't mastered the digital realm) to a small team, blog-based publication like the Crunches. They're two different beasts.
I'm 28, and while I have a number of failed startup companies/ideas in my past, my current one is a success (although it may not meet the criteria of a startup here, it's a small LLC that I've "started up"). The reason it's a success is that I have 10 years of experience working with hundreds of companies (lots of contracting, etc...), so I KNOW how big companies work, I KNOW what they need, and I KNOW how many large players in a particular niche are failing to provide good services/products. Which made it easy to for me to create a better offering, that was price competitive, and met the needs of a niche of large customers.

So while I'm old, and while I definitely think you should start a startup when you're young, being old has it's advantages too:)
How can scammers obtain your passwords?
Of course they cut deals with educational and government institutions. It's just good business to do so. Expose the students to your products and there's a good chance they will buy them later because they already know them. Besides, they can write these deals off as donations and benefit from the good PR. Numerous companies operate like this. Schools, especially, have traditionally been Apple's territory. Do you really think cash-strapped schools are paying retail for those Macs? Microsoft is not alone here and despite the fact that we can cite cases of corruption the practice itself is not necessarily corrupt. It is merely a marketing tactic of early exposure and high profile usage. The result is genuine interest among paying customers.

The type of work that I do exposes me to many types of web technologies at many different organizations. This is purely anecdotal, but there is real interest in Silverlight among heavy users of Microsoft technologies. Adoption is very low right now, but there are quite a few shops testing the waters. And why not? If you don't care about multi-platform interoperability it's actually pretty nice. If I had to guess I'd say there are more shops like that out there than ones who develop platform-independent applications. I think this is a very bad idea, but these organizations are making a conscious decision to operate like this. They could just as easily choose to use platform-independent and open source tools, but they're not doing it. Microsoft isn't paying them all.
Holiday Lighting without the Hassle | ServiceLive Blog
How to deploy a Physical Honeypot
Equal Chances for Equal Talent
Awesome, I loved how multiple different types of movement evolved in the water creatures -- propellers, snake-like swimming, arm strokes, etc.

I think it would be great if someone used a modern video game engine to do similar experiments on current hardware.
no, it has nothing to do with being a 'nice guy' - it is about being direct and honest. I know several brilliant people who are completely confident even in areas where they know nothing. The problem with this is that for me to use that brilliant but intellectually dishonest guy, I need to have a good idea of what he knows and what he doesn't. This one guy I know is a brilliant computer scientist, or at least, he's much better than I am. He's not going to deliberately mislead me, but once he gets an idea in his head, to him, that idea is truth - this is fine when you ask him stuff he knows. You get the right answers, and aggressive rhetoric to back it up. He's a great counterweight to salesguys, 'cause he can talk the boss into doing the right thing. However, if you ask him about something he knows nothing about, he will back up his uninformed opinions and half-baked theories with rhetoric that is just as strong.

With someone who is intellectually honest, I can ask advice on a wide variety of subjects, and even if I know nothing of the subject in question, I can figure out how much my intellectually honest adviser knows about the subject in question, as well as what he thinks I should do.

I also know people who are assholes who are also intellectually honest. Really, any kind of honesty requires being at least a little bit of an asshole.
Obama asks U.S. voters to "turn the page"
Fanboy Driven Development with Arc
From Stone to Silicon: A Brief Survey of Innovation
Colonia Dignidad: The Curious History of a German Cult in Chile
Inspiron Mini 12: Dell’s Answer to the Air
I'm a bit of a lurker on HN, but had to add a comment here. The Stanford online offerings are fantastic. I'm taking Stephen Boyd's "Introduction to Linear Dynamic Systems", and it is simply superb. The course is given at a rate of two lectures per week, but I've found that it fits into the rest of my life more conveniently to watch and absorb one lecture per week. Monday evenings are now my official "learn some new and important stuff" nights.

"Linear dynamic systems" is the essential intellectual foundation of a scary number of different areas: control systems, modern financial modeling, statistical modeling and analysis, search, etc. The material is a bit difficult, but it's one of those areas that are widely applicable.

I firmly believe that this whole area should be part of the core curriculum of any computer science program. It is right where more and more of the discipline is heading.

I've wanted to learn this stuff for a while, and have banged my head against a few books in the area, tried to take a UCLA extension course, etc. But never have I encountered more clear, intuitive, and lucid explanations of this material than in Prof. Boyd's online lectures.

This is one of those resources that make you wonder, "Why would an organization like Stanford but this on the web and give it away for free??" But if they are going to do it, then smart people sure as hell should take advantage of it.
Boston startup's 'portable eye' translates cellphone pics of text into speech
Australian government considers blocking porn and gambling sites
How This Bear Market Compares - Interactive Graphic
TFA: "Every day, millions of people receive dozens of unsolicited commercial emails, known popularly as 'spam.'"

This on a site called "All Spammed Up"? Something feels wrong.
Pixlr - the online image editor
Community colleges were designed to quickly train people for the post-war (WWII) economy. And since bureaucrats run them, you learn the industry demands...from yesterday.

The students and teachers are there for "a better job"; No enthusiasm. And like any situation where people do things they don't want to, it sucks.

And I think that is the real value of top universities, Y Combinator, or any great place. You get to do cool work with people who care about the same things you do. Find a way to emulate that.

And I'm not trying to be negative about community college, or college in general. But if you do choose to go back; Use college, don't let it use you. And that's true for life in general as well.

But ambitious people find a way; I'm self-taught. And while that would be scary to many people. Doing anything new is. And I feel alive.
The only way I can imagine getting an Apple TV (or similar device) is if it replaces my current cable subscription. I can't justify canceling cable until they offer live-tv for things like the news, and sports.

I'm ok with paying for TV shows ala-cart with no monthly subscription. With how little I watch it would probably be cheaper anyway. The only reason we have cable is for football and a handful tv series.
Media's Presidential Bias and Decline - Slanted Election Coverage and the Reasons Why
Since we are both obviously just talking about our own experiences, I can state quite definitely that knowing my team was gets 25% of the REVENUE from each of our projects is a great motivator. Not to work insane hours, but to do our best, knowing that we were being treated very fairly for our efforts.

If the success of the company is not influenced at all by your efforts, then that must be pretty depressing. Maybe a good sign that you would be happier somewhere else...
They should have used 'dominion' instead of 'empire', to riff off the better name canada used to have
http://www.filibustercartoons.com/dominion.htm
MySpace Gives Up On The Netherlands
Kevin Rose: Start Up During A Recession