skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Define your goals and passion. What is it about "Software engineering" that you like the most? Not every kind of software engineering work necessitates all the things you are required to learn over the course of a CS degree. But of course, some do, and some jobs will require you to have a degree. Some won't.

I don't have a great answer for you other than, 1) focus on becoming more efficient at your studies and/or 2) realign/cut back on your course load so that you can actually learn and retain the information. Short of that and you'll just be wasting your time and money.

BTW I have posted a similar question here, coming from a slightly different perspective of one without a CS degree who has somehow wound up in programming. I create some excellent solutions that are valued by others, but wouldn't presume to call myself an "engineer," and I'm fine with that. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3063828
The creative class is a lie
http://entertainment.salon.com/2011/10/01/creative_class_is_a_lie/singleton/
Push Mac to side, grab rxvt on nearby Linux box, ssh back to Mac, write code. There's something funky about actually using the Mac terminal which doesn't work for me.

bash, nano, make, g++, git.
His point is precisely that the input is awful.
No, Twitter is Not censoring or blocking Trending Topics
Some jobs artificially demand a degree, as in, the HR department will file your application in the garbage if you don't have one. There may be other ways into those jobs, but to a first approximation, you "need" a degree.

And some jobs flat out don't care about degrees, just so long as you can do the work.

You might consider transferring to a different school. Cornell College, for instance, offers a one-class-at-a-time schedule, so you could do your proposed, "study calculus, then study physics" sequence. And Olin College is reputedly very good for teaching engineering-oriented subjects.
Are we in violent agreement? If even 10% of European population are fluent in two languages, and we restrict "super" to something meaningfully specific, say top 2% of population, then fluency in two languages is not sufficient for super status in Europe.
Raquel Welch: How Young Do You Want to Look?
That's a terrible comparison. People have to show a government ID to buy alcohol, stating your age on a website is much less of a verification. Plus, there are few kids out there who haven't had the idea to lie about being 21--it's just much more difficult than giving a different birth date to a website.
As far as I can tell from skimming it, pg is arguing against optimizing for economic equality in that article.
This is interesting.. what prompted such a project?
What is generally accepted as the most popular clojure web framework? I'm new to clojure, and functional languages in general, so I'm actually starting with working through SICP before I look into a framework, but I'm curious.

tl;dr
What is the equivalent of rails in the clojure community?
I am building from HEAD, so my results will likely differ than the average user's.
Interesting, I've had a similar idea, but different: you download a command line tool and publish your local .md (markdown) files with it under some name, like:

$ p register <username>
$ vim content.md
$ p publish <content>.md # gets published under <username>.domain.com/<content>

I didn't know if people would find this useful, but judging from reactions to this, it looks like there might be a market for it
if you tell people in Argentina, the U.S., Macau and Nigeria that they are European

What? Nobody was saying anything of the sort.

Brazil has a large population of ethnic Japanese. A number of them are able to speak Japanese. That doesn't make Japanese a Brazilian language. Nor does it make those born and raised in Brazil Japanese, aside from discussions of ethnicity.
The f_c_book brigade will be here soon to downvote you.

They really hate to be called out as creeps and liars.
Airbnb, Chamath Palihapitiya Settle Differences; Employees will Get Liquidity
The sugar thing certainly tallies with my experience. I've never done a glucose tolerance test, but something about sugar highs, followed by deep crashes, sounds very familiar.

I ended up largely eliminating refined sugar from my diet. I still eat some, very hard to avoid entirely, but I try to eat mainly scratch cooked food, wholewheat bread, lots of bulky starches and proteins.
New balance H710
Yes, the article says the input is awful, but this headline implies the code is awful.
handcent SMS - I like the popup feature, only non-stock SMS I've tried.
Touchdown - I like the customization, I only have to enter my pin when entering the application.

Google authenticator - if you're carrying an android and using gmail you should be using two factor.

Astro - solid file browser

Dolphin - only browser I've used outside of stock, very solid, tabs, sync.

Evernote - unified note taking across my 3 devices (phone, laptop, laptop)

LTE on/off - turning off 4g in spotty areas or when I'm low on battery

Meebo - I use it for a xmpp client

Pandora

Swype

Webex - I do a lot of these, and this app is great
Speaking of Libertarianism, I'm curious what the HN Libertarians think of Murray Rothbard. Based on what Wikipedia says, and what I've seen from occasionally reading of /r/libertarian on Reddit, he seems to be a major Libertarian theoretician with a significant number of followers.

In his book "The Ethics of Liberty" he says some things that I find hard to believe that, frankly, anyone who is not mentally ill could consider acceptable for a government and legal system in a civilized society, so I'm looking to get some other opinions. Is Rothbard really a respected Libertarian thinker, or are his followers just a small subset of Libertarians who happen to be quite vocal (kind of like the Tea Party for Republicans)?

In particular, see chapter 14, "Children and Rights", available online here: http://mises.org/resources.aspx?Id=e407b9ac-8791-4e1e-b23f-6...

He applies the basic libertarian principles of self-ownership and non-interference in property rights to determine what is proper law in regard to children. He reaches the interesting conclusion that the law shouldn't distinguish between children who are not born and children who are born, concluding that the extreme pro-choice conclusion he reaches on abortion (that it should be allowed at any time) must also apply AFTER birth, with the only change occurring at birth being that the parents can no longer actively kill the child. They can let the kid starve if they wish, or decline to provide clothing and shelter. (He does say that morally this isn't good, but it wouldn't happen often because under Libertarianism there would be a free market in children and so the parents would sell the kid rather than let it starve).

Note that the child has the right to leave, so if parents say to their 10 year old, "We aren't going to provide for you any more", the parents cannot stop the child from leaving. You might wonder how a 10 year old who leaves is going to earn a living, but under Rothbard's system there would be no child labor laws. On those, he criticizes them because they have "systematically forcibly prevented children from entering the labor force, thereby privileging their adult competitors" (yup...child labor laws oppress children). (And of course prostitution would always be an option...Libertarianism, at least as envision by Rothbard, it seems to me would be a paradise for those who like their sex partners young, plentiful, and inexpensive).
SACSIS.org.za » News » The World » Why Iceland Should Be in the News, But Is Not
But the "hosting" party must click Accept to begin recording, thus they'd know they themselves were being recorded. In addition, at this point, the onus is on the recorder (as they were likely instructed in the Terms of Service they accepted), not the app, to ensure that the folks they're recording agree to be on camera/recorded.
But this whole "liberty" concept confuses me. Can't we just say it's a bad example because we'd be violating her right to life? Because when we bring liberty into the picture, we are in fact saying that her liberty is more important than the persecutor's liberty. So it's not really liberty that has the final say, but life. And then, even if we say that, its not always the case that violating the right to life is ALWAYS bad (think trolley example). So I think "consequentialism" suffices.
Debian, debian, debian: http://debian.org
Do it -- you won't regret it :)

Ubuntu is turning into such a mess.
You can find a blog to support any cockamamie idea you like.

"Homeopathy doesn't work? Tell that to this guy!"

"Astrology is bunk? Tell that to this guy!"

"Having sex with a virgin doesn't cure AIDS? Tell that to this guy!"

That guy doesn't appear to have done a lot of legitimate scientific research, so I'm not sure why anybody would listen to him over all the people who have. And all his videos of his kid eating unhealthy stuff as though it has any significance at all make my quackdar start blaring. Like, when the kid learns to walk, is he going to post videos of her running across tracks in front of an oncoming train to prove that's just fine as well?
A corollary question is: how does one become a non-crappy boss, particularly of programmers? In my 20+ years of programming for a living, I can count the number of really good managers on, well, on my thumbs. And they couldn't be more different -- one was a University bureaucrat with a history as a radio operator in the Army; and the other was a peer engineer who was promoted over me at a big company.

Is it even possible to manage programmers in a way that doesn't cause one party to develop bleeding ulcers?
The Facebook blocker isn't to blame here. It's sloppy JavaScript programmers who assume that the FB global variable will always be initialised and available to their other scripts. If they bulletproof their access to FB, the rest of their site wouldn't break for paranoid visitors.
IIRC Hypercritical, Build & Analyze and Back to Work. 5by5 is packed with Mac nerds!

I stopped subscribing to The Talk Show during its original run because John's manner was so lethargic. I like his site but not his podcast.
My thoughts after plowing through this, were that it's a shame the conclusion was at the end of such a hard-to-read article.

If ever there was an article that could benefit from a solid abstract, this is it.
Does Vision Security Scam People? 30,000 People Can't Be Wrong
I don't think there's an equivalent framework (fortunately), but there is Compojure (https://github.com/weavejester/compojure) which is similar to Sinatra.
Thanks, missed that. Will put it in a post-commit hook.
Isn't CentOS more designed for servers? I'm not sure. I've considered Debian Squeeze, but it's one of those things I've never got round to looking at in enough depth.

Our older users are in their 60s and 70s. We're a non profit radio station and several of our volunteers have never used a computer before, or have had only a passing involvement with them.
Follow up: http://allthingsd.com/20111002/airbnb-investor-chamath-palih...
I'm suggesting the Python code is not bad at all, so this headline is just confusing. Personally I'd just use regex replace to convert the data rows to CSV directly, not as thorough as the Python code.
Windows Phone is an infant platform as compared to Apple and Android. But yet look at how fast they learnt after the NoDo delays. Have you gotten the Mango update yet? It rolled out to exsting phones already. And that is not just in US but worldwide. How many updates has Android pushed so soon to its existing phones and that too so widely?
or a free EC2 instance.
Thanks for all the work! I'm using Noir right now for a few things, and I love it.
According to Wikipedia (for what that's worth), Fitts' law has been established to apply just fine to touch interfaces (third paragraph under http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law#Success_and_impli... ).
Hello $money.
What you're hearing is almost certainly the Proximity Effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity_effect_(audio)

I used to record music for a living. I was really big on using natural sounds in unexpected ways. There are a lot of things you can do with creative use of microphones.
Projects from HackNY's fall 2011 hackathon
still, an example or demo page would be a good addition.
Yup, worked on this very data problem (bad data sources, especially gov) for a long time, but gave up as I didn't see it as the road to riches. At the end I hit upon an AI solution I'm sure will work, but I never finished it, still on the shelf, though.
This article is the motherlode:

http://brehaut.net/blog/2011/ring_introduction
I laughed ;)
I'm biased, so take everything I say with a grain of salt :)

I'm not sure there is a rails really and I think that's somewhat by design. Compojure is probably the most famous Clojure web lib, but it's not a framework per se. It's at a level below web-frameworks as most people think of them and Noir is actually built on top of it.

If you're just wondering in terms of having an active community, I believe Noir is currently the most trafficked complete package, but Compojure itself draws a lot of discussion :)
If there is one application that really makes me appreciate having an Android phone, it is Tasker. Tasker allows you to defined custom rules to automate your phone. An example of how Tasker improves my life would be that I have defined rules that will mute my phone's notifications automatically at 12:00am and reset the volume to normal levels 8:00am. This helps me sleep. Tasker's UI is clearly the product of a programmer, but the functionality it offers is hard to beat. I am pretty sure that Apple would never allow such an application that has the level of control over the phone as Tasker does.

Are there any other automation application recommendations?
>> Better access to data is generally a good thing.

Yeah, like the IBM computers in Nazi Germany.
They should save their investors money and pivot out of existence.
The font you've chosen is missing some characters. http://j.hackerhub.org/unicode
> What is generally accepted as the most popular clojure web framework

Citation needed.
Agreed, ad. replacement may be derivative-work liability for Amazon; I don't think the case-law is clear.

But they don't have to directly replace ads. in order to monetize ads well. Because they have all of a user's browsing history with Silk, they can target ads. as well, or possibly better than, Google. Perhaps they show ads. at the bottom of the screen, or in the screen saver, or while web-pages are loading, or with location-based pop ups for coupons for a store just down the street, whatever.

In this respect the Fire is a direct attack on Google, and Amazon probably has to take this step in order to be able to subsidize this tablet as much as Google will be able subsidize their tablets. For this reason I wouldn't be surprised if Google soon cuts Amazon off from Android by making more of the OS closed source, and breaking app. compatiblity. If this occurs, expect Amazon to make a bid for Palm.
Customize the WebKit Inspector (Chrome Dev Tools)
I think he meant it as a question, not a statement.
Well, you could keep the USB stick and give the lawyer the decryption key.
If you implemented that completely, I think you'd see a pretty massive correction and living in the suburbs would become much more expensive. State and even federal taxes fundamentally redistribute wealth out of cities and into sparsely populated regions--correcting for that alone is probably more than the realistic urbanist can ever hope for.
There is no one framework (in fact, most of clj's web ecosystem is not frameworks) that is far and away more popular than the others.

At the heart of everything is Ring[1]. Ring is roughly equivalent to WSGI or Rack. However, if you use Django in python you basicly dont ever have to know about WSGI. In Clojure you do want to know about Ring. Thankfully Ring is very simple; its a spec describing request maps and response maps. In addition provides common adapters for various JVM web servers (In the general ring ecosystem there is support for Jetty, Netty (via Aleph/Lamina), Google App Engine (via appengine magic), Servlets, Mongrel2) and middlewares.

There are three sets of libraries on top of ring that are commonly used to build sites:

## Moustache

Probably the closest to raw ring of the three, moustache provides a sophisticated url routing API. Of the three I'm mentioning here it is probably the least suitable for clojure beginners, however it is my personal favorite.

## Compojure

This was the most popular [noir is apparently on par] and oldest (it predates ring but was rewritten ontop of it in the 0.4.0 release). The best analogy here is apparently sinatra for ruby.

## Noir

Noir is the most recent addition and is higher level than Moustache or Compojure. In fact, Noir is built on Compojure. I havent had any real experience with Noir myself but it is probably the easiest entry point into web programming in clj.

Compojure and Noir both use Hiccup for HTML generation, and Moustache uses Enlive. Enlive is extremely powerful; even if you choose hiccup I would encourage you to take a good look at enlive anyway, the two solutions dont need to be mutually exclusive.

[1] Ring: http://github.com/mmcgrana/ring/
Cross-posting from my Quora answer:

http://www.quora.com/Airbnb/Why-are-Airbnbs-founders-excludi...

I have no knowledge of specifics outside of the ATD article mentioned, but my read says that the dividend will go to all common shareholders. So employees who have both vested and exercised shares will receive their pro-rated portion of the proceeds as well. It just seems that the founders must hold 93% of the vested shares (21/22.5), which is reasonable given that they started vesting years ago, when they were still in their cereal-selling phase.

Addressing the founders' decision to dividend-to-common instead of secondary selling some of their common shares:

In a typical venture financing, only preferred shares are sold, and there is a price per share that is set by the round's valuation. After closing, the price per share of the common shares/options is determined by external auditors in what is called a 409A valuation process. This process is a little bit of a game, whereby the company tries to come up with reasons (financial models, market comps, etc.) to depress the price of the common shares relative to preferred. This has the benefit of giving subsequent hires a lower exercise price on their options (and eventual higher profit upon exit.)

The price delta between the classes can be as high as 10:1, though it's usually closer to 3:1 and narrows as a company approaches IPO. However, were anyone (founders or employees) to sell common stock in the round, the common price per share would jump to exactly this new clearing price. Since Airbnb is a hot company, it's reasonable to think that buyers would be willing to pay a market price for common that's not far below preferred. And that would mean less upside for all future employees. A dividend-to-common avoids this.

Because Airbnb is so young and fast growing, they still need the allure of the upside of stock options to recruit and retain talent. Any sophisticated investor should understand this dynamic. And yet this dividend annoys them because it means there's a wealth transfer occurring that doesn't increase their ownership.

Let's assume for a second that I'm right and that all vested/exercised common shareholders will see some of the dividend. As food for thought, what if Airbnb had instead said they were going to spend $21M of their newly raised capital for cash bonuses for anyone who had worked for them more than a year -- distributed per employee via this equation: total hours worked * total value created... would the Valley's response have been less uproarious?
I own a type 2, and it is so tempting to want to open it up and see how it works. I collect antique tech as well, and I agree with your sentiments of craft and engineering there are truly some amazing machines out there.
They forgot to mention that they really appreciate that taxes are always discussed in terms of "income".

The truly rich have no pesky income - that's for the servants. They just have property and expenses, which their accountants, lawyers and politicians keep safe.

Hints: tax-free foundations are great, intellectual property is tax-free.

(There's a reason putative class-betrayer Gore Vidal spoke of "our owners", referring to the U.S. aristocracy.)
Just try telling a Mexican they speak Mexican.

They know they speak español, not mexicano, they know it came from Spain, and even a Mexican will brand you as a fool if you try to tell them otherwise.

Classification of language has nothing to do with ethnicity, background, where you were born or where it is being spoken.
Tevatron shuts down
Cache - http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
I think I might want to do a grad degree at some point, but I think that is mostly coming from the part of me that wants to impress everybody else.
Dresses for juniors of all types and sizes
Investors Spooked by China
Clojure doesn't quite have "the equivalent of Rails" yet. Ring is basically equivalent to Rack, Compojure is a lot like Sinatra, and Noir is sort of like Merb, except it's built on top of Compojure.
I appreciate the detailed reply.

I am talking about the dynamic load. A moving train generates a standing wave that is a function of the train's weight and its speed. I don't see how adding a spring changes that. This standing wave bends the track and the bed, resulting in fatigue damage.

I know about the standing wave because in the early days of trains, there were problems because the standing wave propagated at speeds the locomotives were able to reach, and this resulted in mysterious destruction of the tracks and a derailment. (The solution was to stiffen the tracks so the wave propagated faster than the locomotive.)

Feeling the ground move down as the wheel trucks pass is dynamic, yes, but it is not vibration, as its "frequency" would be the rate at which the wheels passed by, and its amplitude would be proportional to the static weight.

Furthermore, there will be more localized bending as the wheels and track must deform so the contact area is enlarged to support the entire weight. (Assuming the same elasticity of the track steel.) This local deformation is going to produce cracking and wear of the surface of the rails.
For the sake of accuracy, here's what I should have included:

https://github.com/xdissent/ievms/blob/master/ievms.sh

Easy way to set up a Microsoft (IE7/8/9) browser for testing in VirtualBox, if you are running on Mac OS X. Beware though, these are quite large images.
Ok, looks like xiph.org was just having a hiccup. You can do it real time with sox.

First, Get sox. I prefer homebrew for Unix type stuff (http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/), but it's likely MacPorts, Fink, and other sources have sox available too. If using Homebrew, just:

$ brew install sox

Compile your program. Run it like this:

$ ./soundprog | sox -r 8000 -t u8 - -d

Voila, just like having a sound device. You can play with the 8000 to make it faster or slower (modifying the pitch as well).
An accidental survey of the Hacker News ecosystem
Rapists are, by definition, not normal. The untrained layman might not be able to pick them out, just like sociopaths often manage to slip under the radar in day to day affairs, but they are fundamentally a different sort of animal.
Actually, there's a lot of smart money in Color.
More specifically this is an API to FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data).

Many (most?) of the graphs you seen on econ blogs/columns/news articles, even popular ones, are generated using FRED.
http://entertainment.salon.com/2011/10/01/creative_class_is_...
Entrepreneurship and Political Activism in Egypt with Shervin Pishevar