skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was actually discussing this with a fellow Yale student over dinner tonight. We both came to the same, largely negative, conclusion as the professors interviewed in the article: "it’s an unproductive use of Yalies’ time."

These students are given opportunities most people only dream of. We are exposed to leaders in our fields every day. We are blessed with a $20 billion endowment that enables nearly anything we can envision. Many of us receive tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars in financial aid. The fact that so many choose to go on to careers that do so little to give back is, in my opinion, shameful.
They've been taking donations http://www.digest.com/Donations.php

I would guess that nissan motors didnt actually want to shell out 1M to buy the name. They probably offered a paltry sum, which Uzi rejected, and then tried pulling a digital version of Eminent Domain. If everyone knew how long and how expensive the proposition would be, I'm sure Nissan Motors would have preferred to just have paid a million for the domain
Then the price tag for nissan.com should be around $10M.

Do you think Nissan Motors is not willing to pay that?

Nissan Motors has more customers than Nissan Computer has. That does not mean that Nissan Motors deserves nissan.com more, but that means that there is a price tag which is beneficial for both these companies.

Most likely both of them are too stubborn to benefit from that transaction.

Edit: why the downvoting?
For those post "Yes, it def is cancer" without spend several minutes doing a test themselves, yes, Node is a cancer... cause you cannot resist cancer.
I blame the Internet. No, seriously.

Sites like HN and Reddit tend to have a vocal crowd who decide that certain languages and tools are the domain of the elite. This groupthink is religiously defended through self-righteous blog posts ("I switched from Java to C and became a better person!!!") and comment threads. Inevitably, posters go looking for something that the True Language is known to do well, and then overgeneralize their experience. The result? Karma, and another voice to add to the constant din of Conventional Wisdom. Intellectual honesty takes a backseat to conformity...as usual.

Developers looking to improve their skills should pick up new languages, especially those of different paradigms and abstraction levels. But the hegemony of 'superior' languages will always weigh in to these decisions, and potentially block out the idea that the language is merely a tool used in implementing the final solution. It was never the end goal.

Nor is being right on the Internet. This phenomenon is one of humans, and their politicization of engineering. We must be wary of the ego, and harness it for it's good uses, rather than always looking to appear badass or hip through our technologies.
This is true. Both the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute and the Yale Entrepreneurial Society are doing great things. In fact, two businesses opened in downtown New Haven this fall that were the direct result of YEI's programs. The fact that the upcoming "HackYale" web entrepreneurship course attracted 600 interested students is also comforting.
I am not convinced we DO have a sufficiently educated society. I see serious candidates for public office who are rejecting science (http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/22/a-fundamental-r...). I think democracy itself requires an educated populace, and that an egalitarian society requires at least a basic level of equality of opportunity for all.
> He contests that because a shitty Fibonacci number generator performs poorly Node.js is worthless. I contend that shitty Fibonacci generators are shitty in whatever language or framework.

I don't think he contends that. He was just using Fibonacci as an example to show that IO is not the only way to block a process. Although he doesn't go into it, this issue is one thing that you have to weigh when you decide to use eventing instead of threads: can you break up any potentially long running computation to maintain availability?
I propose that we explicitly mention any exercises that we stumble over. Yeah it may make us look like idiots but we're destined to look like idiots anyway, and there's a major upside: we're going to stumble over different things, which means we can provide good explanations to one another, and learn better.

I have a few examples of this sitting at home but am hacking at the library at the moment. It is heavenly quiet here. I will post them later.
I like node.js, but this post completely misunderstands "Node.js is Cancer". The point of that post isn't that node.js is slow; its point is that node.js does concurrency, but not parallelism; i.e., if your code is CPU-bound, it can only serve one request at a time.
At this point:

there's enough vested interest in seeing Uzi Nissan win that he wouldn't step down (and yes I donated some of my AllAdvantage revenue to the cause)

And Nissan Motors can't be too happy that nissan.com criticizes the motor company.

The FU price point now is probably much higher than 10M. But another interesting thing happened: auto companies started adding <usa> to the domains. For example, bmw uses bmwusa.com and mercedes benz uses mbusa.com, so a lot of people expect the nissan motors website is nissanusa.com
Do you have any recommendations for accessible R tutorials? I would love to get into this a little bit more. R seems quite effective for these kinds of things.
Is there a reason that these examples are using some sort of deeply nested call stack? Is it just to enforce 'slowness' in the function calls?

def fibonacci(n):
a,b = 0,1
for i in range(0,n):
a,b, = b,a+b
return b

(cadged from zacharyfox.com) performs far, far better than the nested function calls. I imagine it would in javascript as well. In python at least, all that function calling infrastructure is relatively expensive.
Green river Killer steal a lamborghini
Some of the really compact formulae are trial-and-error stuff, but it doesn't have to be. You can make an arbitrarily complicated software synthesizer with this thing, and if you just want to compose algorithmic music in a "constructivist" way, you can do something like this:

SS=function(s,o,r,p){var c=s.charCodeAt((t>>r)%p);return c==32?0:31&t*
Math.pow(2,c/12-o)},SS("0 0 7 7 037:<<",6,10,32) + (t&4096?SS(
"037",4,8,3)*(4096-(t&4095))>>12 : 0)

So I've defined a function "SS" which stands for sawtooth wave applied to sequencer -- where a sequencer takes an ASCII representation of notes and a speed and a base octave, and converts them into relative note frequencies, and then the sawtooth wave synth is done by 31&t*<multiplier> -- which is a number that cycles between 0 and 31 at a frequency determined by the multiplier. Just typing "31&t" into the code will give you a sawtooth wave at 8000/32 = 250Hz which is either a flat middle C or a sharp B below that. 8000 being the sample rate, 32 being the number of steps in the wave generated by "t&31".

So one of those is synthesizing a bassline and the other one is an arpeggio that starts and stops when t&4096 is true, which means it's "off" for about half a second and "on" for about half a second (8000/4096 to be precise). Add the bassline to the arpeggio and you get both voices at once.

My version has a textarea just so I could put things like that together. The OP, however, is less interested in the constructivist approach and more in the trial-and-error approach where you find something that can be implemented in 10 bytes of assembler and it magically produces a symphony.
I mean, if you had the opportunity to earn six figures at graduation, wouldn't you go into these fields too?

75% of Yalies are normal people (the other 25% come from money). They're the children of working professionals, federal government employees, etc. They have had comfortable upbringings, but their families don't have "fuck you" money.

They've been pushed and prodded all their life by parents who, like everyone else without "fuck you" money, are desperately afraid of falling out of the middle class. Most of the kids don't know it yet, and maybe the parents don't consciously acknowledge it, but it's a major force underlying the thinking of every parent who sends his kid to an SAT prep class so he can get a high score and go to Yale.

At the same time, regular jobs suck. Thanks to the consultants, they're overly structured, have shitty benefits, and workers are managed by PHB's who don't know jack-shit about the jobs that the workers do. Upward mobility is curtailed, because many F500's prefer to hire managers from the ranks of consultants, instead of promoting people from within. The risk in potentially more interesting jobs is high: fail to make it big, and you could be stuck in a job where you get yelled at for punching in a couple of minutes late and to the extent that you're lucky enough to get health insurance, it'll be on a shitty plan. Thankfully science/tech is mercifully insulated from this phenomenon (so far), but many students don't have the particular aptitude or desire for those fields.
there is a good post about this on stack overflow... that parallelism in nodejs is more of a hack.. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4631774/coordinating-para...
This is great. Can't wait till I get some free time to hack on.
And when there is a place to park your bike, it looks like this: http://tinyurl.com/6eteaux . (From my last trip to Kyoto. :)
"Letter of intent" is a very weak validation.

Either you can get an actual contractual commitment with a check or you still have not closed the deal...

Don't waste time crafting LOI language and focus on the actual sales process of getting the customer to commit to buying your solution.

Nobody is going to be impressed by LOI that does not bind customer to anything. Don't break out a champagne unless they actually put skin in the game.
made a 2-line remix of miiro's 1-line symphony [1]:

Side A: http://tinyurl.com/3uejhum

Side B: http://tinyurl.com/3mfaogd

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlrs2Vorw2Y&feature=playe...
Kodak fell victim to disruptive technology
On the converse of this, someone has been cybersquatting my last name for about 10 years. Any advice on how to get it?

Details: I own the .co.uk version, but not the .com. My dad has had a company registered (not in the US) with the name in it. The cybersquatter seems to have squatted a bunch of dutch last names and isn't associated with the name at all.
Tips to Get Cheap Plane Tickets to Europe
It's just a canonical form; it's far easier (IMHO) for a beginner to understand a recursively written Fibonacci number computer than your function.
I strongly disagree with what Ted wrote, but I really wish he would come out and enter a dialog with the community. There's a thread on the mailing list, twitter, and blog responses floating around now, but no substantial effort by Ted to respond to or even acknowledge the replies he's received.
It should be noted that the Python code example runs in 4.038s on PyPy.

Standard Python: 1:07.31 :)
Ask HN: What HTML5 features have you found most useful?
I've been taking a look at HTML5 today and I want to know what features people are using to make building webapps easier. So, what features are you using and why does that feature make your life easier?
I'm on the same boat. In my case, I even attempted to contact using the "make an offer" form and never received a reply. Strange way to do business.
Someone over on reddit.com/r/coding put together a version that graphs the output:

http://langtons.atspace.com/audio/waveform.html

Enter something like t^(t%127) and the similarities are even more striking. :)
"... I would venture to say most of what is said about meeting people is either bad, or easily interpreted in a way that will not be helpful. ..."

No mention of body language? "Body Language Basics", Navarro, Joe. ~ http://www.psychologytoday.com/print/72334
It should be noted that, with PyPy, the Python example executes in 3.924s.
JavaScript on the JVM: Dyn.js, Rhino, and Oracle Nashorn
I once interviewed at a small startup for a software engineering contract, and when time came for salary negotiations, the CEO said "so you're looking for $15 an hour for data entry?" I explained that I was not at all interested in that, and wondered why they wanted someone who knew Grails, Javascript, etc. for data entry. The CEO apologized, and said that they posted the same job description under different titles and salary ranges, just to see if someone would slip up. Needless to say, I passed.
Well, if you are a small startup (>20 people) I would say that recruiting is probably a job you should take over yourself, much less want to know.

You need to know that type of thing. As a startup, word of mouth is a huge factor in your success. If you have disgruntled people who were mistreated, you're going to be in trouble.

I make sure I answer every email (we're ultra small at 2 people). For partner companies I even brainstorm some ideas to help them/make their life easier. It at least shows I care about them. You have to be really involved so...yeah, you should want to know!
He totally misunderstands node's reason for existence, and also why it can be awesome.

His preferred infrastructure (once I cut through the swagger) is:

Highly-tuned request dispatch --> multiple processing threads (or processes) --> back out to requesting client

For certain workloads, e.g. long-polling, pubsub or high-number-of-client workloads, unix dispatch overhead is actually very significant. One cannot instantiate 500 python threads on most unix boxen without severe doom.

For these workloads, essentially ones where you need to push text around with a minimum amount of stream processing on top of it, node is totally, totally brilliant. It is crazy fast. Magically so, even.

If you think of node as a lightweight turing-complete dispatch engine, you will be happy. If, on the other hand, you believe that fairies and pixie dust mean you can write blocking, bloated javascript code and that node will solve your worries, then you'll be disabused of that dream quickly.

On the other hand, if you started down the road with node, and realized at some point that you needed to refactor some of your slow code, you could do so easily. Doing the reverse (scaling an alternate scripting architecture) is not always so trivial.
It's a bit extreme to conclude that since Node's built-in HTTP server works this way, that it's "cancer." People still use it because it suits their purposes; there's nothing wrong with that.

AFAIK, nothing's stopping anyone from writing a CGI module for Node. It took years for Python to come up with WSGI and Ruby to come up with Rack. People are fed up with CGI and I don't blame Node's developers for excluding it.
https://github.com/rongarret/microWiki

uses showdown as the front-end of a wiki
One major difference - ZeroMQ and Erlang.
I hear that. In this case, though the entire blog article was complaints about slowness, or blocking behavior as seen through slowness.
> Is it just to enforce 'slowness' in the function calls?

Yes. He was just illustrating a point about blocking on the CPU.
Volatile is useful in implementing things like lock-free queues, at least on X86. For some real-time applications you can't afford to take a kernel lock or spin on a spinlock.
That is shocking.
I am amazed that Yale places so poorly.
I know that Harvard, Princeton and Oxford place much better, around the 40% mark.
Parallel Programming with PVM
yes, mostly sleep disorder, the intense crash and burn of coffee compared to a more mellow effect of for example green tea, and the tummy problems.

especially the crash/burn + sleep problems though, which lead to anxiety, which leads to either depression, or in my case a kind of jittery angst-fueled hyperactivity.
Objective C is certainly a cleaner object layer over C, but I still find myself writing core data structures and algorithms in C++ on iOS a lot of the time. The Obj-C data structures are so awkward to use and the lack of operating overloading results in a lot of really verbose code for things like intensive string manipulation and matrix math.
I think a better response to Ted's argument would have been to rewrite the fibonnaci number generator as a forked-off process with a callback that updates the requesting page on completion.

The thrust of Ted's argument (as I saw it, and completely agree with) is that telling people "inexperienced programmers can create high performance systems" is misleading or dangerous without pointing out that you can easily shoot yourself in the foot of you don't understand what is (and isn't) handled "magically" for you.

Using an algorithm that performs poorly in php or python isn't (necessarily) going to magically perform well in node.js's non blocking execution strategy. Abstracting away blocking network or io calls isn't going to help if you don't know (and notice) that your problem is the O(2^n) algorithm you're using.
My mind is blown! I have a zillion more questions -- if it's fun for you to talk about this please email me (address in my profile). Either way, thanks -- this is absolutely fascinating.
While node is doing the calculation, it won't be doing anything else (like serving the next request). If a more traditional server is doing the calculation, it will spin up another process to handle the next request.

If all you do is calculating Fibonacci, you can get ~(amount of CPUs) times the performance. You could use multinode for the same effect, but this is additional work.

In the end, it's a matter of the type of service you are doing. If it's a Fibonacci generator, you'd use something that's better suited than either node/JS or any other scripting language.

If you are doing something that's I/O heavy (which is probably the majority of today's web applications), node or other scripting languages might be better suited because they are easier to work with for most of us.

It's just tools. Not religion. I wouldn't use a hammer to remove a screw. And I definitely wouldn't write hateful articles (I'm referring to the original one) because somebody was using a screwdriver instead of a hammer to remove the screw.
If you don't want to be profiled you should consider pooling money and creating your own email service with like-minded people, use diaspora/anonymous boards for networking etc. Avoiding google is do-able. It just requires more resources.

Absolutely. I may go back to running my own mail server, or keep sing Google for apps while dropping YouTube in favor of Vimeo, and moving to Diaspora and skipping g+.

I find that most people who are complaining are neither willing to give up a bit of privacy nor are they willing to pay more or work harder to protect their privacy. You can't eat your cake and have it too!

Yes; for example I noticed that some Occupy<CityOrPlace> groups are on the one the hand complaining about companies violating privacy and using personal data for economic fodder while at the same time happily using Facebook to as their "homepage".

At some point principles have to trump convenience.
I almost went the consulting route. It seemed so appealing. Good pay, lots of variety in projects. In the end I didn't. As a result, I've gotten real experience working at real jobs. I didn't consult on how to improve sales. I sold stuff. And now, I don't consult on how to implement sharepoint at megacorp. I make software.

The salaries are still higher in banking and consulting. But they aren't high enough to compensate for the utter lack of value I'd be providing to society.
My point was not that this was absolutely hard, but rather that's way too hard for the totally mundane thing I was trying to accomplish---namely getting public data from a US-funded statistical agency into a form suitable for further statistical analysis (which is the whole reason they make this data public).

Also, I don't see how it's ironic that I used Python---it seems irrelevant. Whitespace in Python has a well-defined, commonly understood purpose; using tabs or spaces to indicate hierarchal data relationships is not at all standard, presumably because it creates messy dependencies across rows of data.
So, this may be a silly question, but what exactly are you doing that's going to use so much freakin' CPU?

Situations where blocking is going to be an issue:

1. You have roughly equivalent CPU usage per request, which means that you just have too many requests. Threaded or evented will both get bogged down here.

2. Most requests use a small amount of CPU, but every once in a while a request will require an ENORMOUS amounts of CPU. You want the one person with the crazy demand to feel slow, but everyone else to be unaffected. How often does this happen, exactly?

Most modern web apps spend the majority of their time talking to databases, which in NodeJS is a nonblocking operation. If you need to steamroll your CPU frequently, then perhaps NodeJS is not for you, but I don't think that's a common use case.
Science-fiction is optimized for interesting story-telling, not for predicting the future.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/k9/the_logical_fallacy_of_generaliza...
From what I am understanding from the post is that you are actually sharding other tables like photos, likes, comments but not the main users table, right?

So, if one day you want to shard the users table, it will render all current sharding useless, right?
Ugh, it hurts to read this kind of advice. Sue! Punitive damages! You can get costs! (btw, you probably can't get punitive damages, at least from the little info you've provided, and costs =/= attorney fees)

The best advice in that thread was to seek out on-campus legal aid. At the law school I went to, there were clinics that dealt specifically with entrepreneurship and IP. Look around, I'm sure other schools run similar clinics. You generally don't even need to attend these schools to utilize their services.

At the very least, if you can't find something like that, or the deal you're working on is a little above their pay grade, some professor on campus can point you to somebody that does good pro bono work or is willing to work on contingency.

If it just turns into a negotiation, you could do this yourself, but, honestly, you're probably going to get taken to the cleaners, both financially and emotionally, if you end up negotiating against professionals. Get a lawyer. There's no shame in it. http://www.ajkesslerblog.com/hired-guns/
Originality really isn't the right word. I've been original my whole life -- almost everyone has by definition. I can do a lot of original dumb stuff. I think what you want is closer to ingenuity. And this is why mastery is important. And its also why mastery of certain things is important. I was one of the most original (and skilled) Gorf players of my day -- no one really cares. Had I been equally skilled at chess I probably could have gotten into Harvard on that alone. Both relatively equally non-transferrable skills.
I agree he's pretty much a self-healing new-age self-promotion marketeer. the books he suggests are just populistic ramblings. also, reading up about psychological disorders on the internet is even worse than reading up on "normal" diseases. just don't do it, either you will persuaded that you have a disorder while you don't, or be supported in whatever delusion you can come up with, as there probably is a whole community built around it. HN is no exception in this regard, as a lot of the "self-help" articles on here are just a ripe breeding ground for mania :)
Nice! Thanks for the quick fix.
There is no "make an offer" in my case. It just redirects to an electric bike website.
So falsehood is okay when midwives save infants' lives, but not when teachers educate them?
That's why Japan has the "do tell, and we won't ask" policy. If you admit to giving someone a bribe, you don't get in trouble. If it's found out that you have a bribe later, then you do. So going to the cops is really your only way out.
How would he know that an IP lawyer would be eager to take the case? Is that supposed to be common sense or something?