skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When Soviet Russia imploded in the former USSR and in lots of satellite states huge amounts of state owned real estate and means of production changed hands for peanuts.

It was probably the largest theft in our lifetime and whether you call eventually turning that into assets in western countries laundering or not is arguing semantics.

Ill gotten gains get converted into more diversified and more respectable assets.

Basically these men (and their predecessors) stole a country, the fact that that gives them access to mechanisms that ordinary criminals can not afford does not place them morally above them at all in my opinion.

This period is sometimes referred to as the rape of Russia, but that makes it sound like it is over, which is far from the truth.
They didn't actually want to buy Motorola Mobility either. But they did.
Somewhat off topic, but I wonder what exactly led some of the commenters on this post to think that this is a good place to vent about Facebook server errors and such.
What did the comment you're replying to say?

He has deleted it. But I'm curious.
Is This the Future of Punctuation?
This is much better than my own comment - I never even knew about that syntax!

Is it efficient though?
Turn it on its side, and put two pieces of glass in front, and you have two times 1600 X 1280. It might be a bit heavy, though.
Listen very carefully to pg kids. And I think its easier to herd PhDs if you at least did some grad school. Look at Larry and Sergey, most respectable situation, they are on perpetual leave from their PhDs.

p.s. I did not open the link. The title indicated that the click-through would be a waste of time.
I think the interesting conundrum will occur when a higher form of animal (reptile or mammal) evolves to the point where it can only survive in a toxic waste dump. Then you will have to choose between cleaning up toxic waste and destroying the habitat of a new species, or preserving the species and dealing with the side effects of the toxic waste.

To date I believe there are only insect cases that have done this (less outrage when you kill off a new species of roach)

That being said, given the AIDS virus in apes, given that apes were being hunted, and given that there was lots of needle re-use going on, the rise of AIDs as a scourge was pretty much a 100% probable, regardless of 'who' was the alpha 0 patient.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/idiom

An idiom is rather a preferred practice.

If you take some time to read through some Python source, you'll notice that, although the code uses the exact same constructs that you are used to in Java, it does so in a manner you might find unfamiliar or unpredictable.

One example is the use of try/except instead of if/else (beg for forgiveness rather than ask permission). Another is Duck-typing rather than Interface (if it quacks like a duck...)

Coming from Java and looking at some Python code without forewarning or context, you might just be tempted to label the whole thing as really really bad practice, when in truth, it's just Idiomatic Python.
Though I wonder, what is the best way to spend those years? Would working at and/or creating a startup at 19 better prepare the 22 year old to start a successful startup than attending college?

Of course there is more to college than just making an individual ready for a career in the real world but I think that college should evolve and find better ways to teach students than the current model.
That's what I'm wondering. I don't really care about these small displays with huge resolutions because I don't find a huge benefit beyond a slightly better picture. I remember going from 320x240 to 800x600 on a 15" and my mind was blown. That's because my icons went from taking 1/4 of the screen to actually being an 'icon'.
Penny stocks canada
College isn't about learning. It's about forming social connections.
This is painfully simple.

You and your friends own 95% of the company, with what sounds like little or no outside investment.

Any advisor with 5% of the company who proceeded to displace a founder with a member of his own family should be immediately dismissed, with predjudice (eg. strip him of his shares and any board voice, if legally possible).

He is a hired hand, with minimal skin in the game. Unless the family member is supremely overqualified (eg. started a company of his own and had a successful exit), this is self dealing of the worst sort. The optics alone merit dismissal - speaking as someone who has consulted at the highest levels of major companies, a good advisor should avoid the mere appearance of self-dealing, let alone actively promote it's occurance.
Java is the "hammer" in the metaphorical IT toolbox. Sure, niche and very useful tools are in the toolbox too, and all have their place, but ... to stretch the metaphor a little further, no toolbox is complete without a hammer. <sidenote>to any real developer, popularity is an irrelevant metric</sidenote>
Actually [x for x in xrange(..)] will produce only one list. In Python 2.X, range() returns a list while xrange() an iterable.

If you just need an iterable, itertools.repeat(0, 100) will do the trick.
He may be implying it's a filter bubble effect:

http://www.thefilterbubble.com/
The exception that proves the rule. I think that nearly anyone who sets out to follow Steve Jobs's career path is likely to end up pretty disappointed in the results. Steve was one of a kind.
My guess is that it's optimized, but I don't know. Semantics-wise, it's consistent with list addition.

>>> [0] + [0] + [0]
[0, 0, 0]
>>> [0] * 3
[0, 0, 0]
How often do developers get to truly choose the language they use? Developers usually go where the jobs are. There are a lot of Java systems out there. Doesn't necessarily mean Java is or isn't a "popular" language. I'd be more interested if there is any data on how many newly started projects are using Java compared to other environments.
There's a misconception i've noticed to why many go to college, in this area at least. I see no problem with going or dropping out. Everyone is in a different situation and at different levels in their career. Many have already ran or are running companies. In fact most of my friends that are going to college (those want to run startups) are going because...

They want to bide their time, as PG mentioned people should take their time. They want to have gone to Stanford, etc for the badge it holds, although this is becoming more debatable as the more people have degrees the lower value it holds and seems to be just for vanity. The most important reason is social pressure and trying to conform with their peers and for contacts they could make.

Next year i'm not planning to go to college at all, my current startup which launched about 2.5 months ago is about to pass 30,000 users a lot of which are buying products so we're nicely profitable.

I don't feel I need connections as I've been able to meet lots of great people on Twitter, at conferences like disrupt and contacting some before I visited SF. I've got about 5 months left and now i'm visiting SF, spending time meeting people and such. I'm decided.

I'm very happy to take the risk of moving to SF from London, this will be next spring and may be working on something new. I would say it's totally a case by case basis, it's fine if people want to go to college but I don't like that many have told me to go as it's what they had to go through. Which makes little sense.
Can states in your system overlap physically, or would they have borders at all? In either case, how would jurisdiction be decided?
I also find that jobs for Java are generally about maintaining or expanding old systems.

The majority of jobs with newer companies or even newer projects at larger companies tend to involve C#, at least in my city.
He said that the CIA does not allow its employees to have Facebook accounts and the reason cited was similar to the title of this article. They were also advised that their families should not have Facebook accounts. Even low level employees were advised to do this.

Finally, he made a point of saying he was using a throwaway account.
Heard of it months and months ago, but otherwise your opinions are common to pretty much everyone I know.
FaceCash Files Formal Complaints Against Stanford, USC, Pomona, and AAU
As someone who just switched majors to cs after not being exposed to it in high school, the learning part of college is pretty important to me.
The guy worked for the world bank. He owns a gigantic home and probably has been vetted by the feds given their recent investment activity.

I think pg must be literally rofl with some of the stuff being posted re Yuri in recent times. Do think that HN also doubles up as some kind of comedy central carefully curated by wily partners. Information asymmetry ensures that some jokes are only understood by the chosen few.

Look at this " official " account http://twitter.com/#!/yurimilner for further insights

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgcxGFmYyPs reflects yC quite well.

PG is Colonel Hogan of course.
The problem with statistics in discussions like this is that they don't really mean anything. Sure, the statistic you mentioned shows that 64% of business owners have a Bachelor's degree, but it doesn't show that having a Bachelor's degree is useful in starting and running a successful business. This is a common flaw with statistics.

Example - Most successful tech entrepreneurs are male (let's say 9/10). That doesn't mean that women are only 1/10 as likely to succeed in that space if they tried, it just means that most successful tech entrepreneurs are male.

People with Bachelor's degrees are likely higher than averagely smart and ambigious people with successful and supporting parents. Who knows what would have happened if they skipped over the degree they felt they needed and instead jumped right into starting a business. Sure, it would be very tough in the beginning, but I'd bet that they would reach their goals faster than delaying the start 3+ years. Ambition is correlated with success, a degree is just correlated with ambition.

Dropping out of college is, quite obviously, not positively correlated to success. Most people who drop out do it either because it is too hard/too much work or too expensive. However, I think that people who drop out (or not start at all) not mainly because of those factors, but because of a strong drive to reach their goals faster are just as likely to succeed (if not more so).
Depends on the startup. Starting a startup will teach you more about startups, certainly. But you could end up on a local maximum. For example (this is just a conjecture of course) the Google founders might not have known enough to build Google at 19, and if they hadn't stayed in school, they might never have learned enough to.

In any case, as you say, the goal of college is not to make one a better startup founder.
Everyone who isn't on facebook is a CIA employee
I suppose I didn't say it correctly, you're still maintaining two objects though (xrange the iterable, and the new list being built by the comprehension). The "optimization" I suppose is a moot point because Python's handling of lists is pretty solid and this isn't the 90's anymore, but at least with the while loop you've only got one list object and an integer (which is faster, I would think, to increment than it is to produce the next sequence in the iterable object?).

Anywho, splitting hairs. Goladus had the most helpful comment (I even learned something).
The either/or nature of your statement makes it inaccurate, as far as I'm concerned.

If you pursue an engineering degree, you are learning things that you can put to practical use, and if you don't learn some of those things in college, you will need to learn them elsewhere. Want to start a company to do machine learning? Natural language processing? Highly scalable parallel data processing? Networking can help you make that business successful, but it won't help you write that code.

Both skill sets are important.
You jumped a step. They would have never figured out he even had a new disease, they would have just treated him symptomatically and assumed he had some sort of immune issue. Detecting a virus without knowing what you are looking for is really hard.

The only reason AIDS was even detected was because of a pattern with many people who were in similar groups got infected. The similar groups part is critical - that's what tells people it's infectious.

A disease that hardly infects anyone is unlikely to even be detected.

And even if we assume your scenario of detection, your second scenario would not play out. With billions of dollar of prevention we can't stop it - you really think millions would do it? All it takes is a little sex tourism - which despite the risks and the knowledge still happens today.

And finally, none of that would erase the stigma because the reality is that AIDS is mainly transmitted by low status individuals, and changing the origin would do little to change that.
Right, exactly. But there's many ways to form social connections. You can meet influential people in this ecosystem fairly easily. With a mix of friends of friends and just interacting on twitter or maybe hacker news and building these relationships.

At least it's worked for me. Been in SF for the last few days to have some meetings and coffees as It's hard to connect properly from London and it's been fairly good as i've spoken to lots of people in advance. People are willing to help with advice or connections, especially when you're early in your career.
> Sounds like you shouldn't be using Rails if this is your philosophy.

> You'd be better off just using Sinatra and including
> ActiveRecord, and whatever other Rails libraries you want
> to use.

What seriously? Something doesn't fit inside Rails' neat cutouts so obviously the solution is to get rid of Rails? This smacks of "if you don't like Rails, go somewhere else." Just because you're using a framework doesn't mean you can't do anything outside of it, ever!

I mean, take Rails. It gives you a LOT of convenient stuff that you wouldn't want to throw away wholesale, but if you have a Customer model and a Card model, where do you put the checkout code? It could go in either place.

A great solution is to put it into lib/checkout.rb and write a custom Checkout class that manages how Customers and Carts interact. Not only does this make it super-easy to test outside of ActiveRecord, but it consolidates the code in one common place, and you haven't tossed out Rails for no reason.
It seems to me like he's just trying to sound deep, as opposed to be deep ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/k8/how_to_seem_and_be_deep/ ).
If you move to a new apartment, on the third floor, it's "more efficient" to carry all your stuff up on one trip. But there's a limit to how much you can bring up on that one trip.

If you make a lot of smaller trips, there's almost no limit on what you can have once you take the "final" trip up.

Also, if you drop something on one of those trips up, you don't lose all your stuff (and you) at once.
Is this a joke? It must be a joke... right?
To be fair, though, some of the things on that list really do seem more like best practices, like advice not to use:

from module import *
I just read, that syntax is sugar for the list.extend() method so it's still making copies of the list - I wouldn't use it for a list containing complex objects; but that is very idiomatic for simple use cases (like this one?).
Woz's passion for electronics started waaaaay before college. More like at age 11. (I'm reading iWoz right now, it's great)
IBM made the T220/T221 (22.1in, 3840×2400) from 2001-2005. It's definitely possible.
Yeah, I wonder who this dmr guy was, anyway. He sure seemed to know a lot about C.

It sounds like he worked at Bell Labs - maybe he knew the guys who wrote the language!
I wonder if school sucks at teaching so much that we failed to retain most knowledge we learn in schools and thus that why even people with a high school degrees are not worth much.
I don't think nervousness about a particular implementation approach is a reason not to implement WebGL, just a reason not to do it in what I gather is Chrome's way.

On the other hand, Chrome's strategy might just be getting explained poorly. My nervousness comes partly because the way it's described sounds like a filtering strategy. If it's more like a whitelisting strategy, it could be considerably less scary, and more in line with what I was kind of expecting from browser vendors.
I am running Ubuntu 11.10, and it seems that manual pages for "hier" are not updated.

man hier
Not exactly. "Simulated Instrument Flight Conditions" usually means that your instructor has you put on a view limiting device [1] so that you can only see your instruments and not outside the aircraft.

One of the reasons it's done this way is to teach you to ignore inter ear cues and trust your instruments. Your inter ear senses acceleration, not absolute motion. Couple that with the centrifugal force during a turn changing your perception of which way "down" is, and your body responses become one of the main reasons you get into trouble.

It's similar to banked turns on car racetracks. When you're in a banked turn, "Down" for you is no longer towards the center of the earth, it's at an angle, perpendicular to the speedway. You also loose the sensation of turning once you're in that banked turn long enough (specifically once the fluid in your ear settles down and stops moving). If you were driving with a blindfold, you wouldn't be able to feel how steep your turn was.

[1]: http://sportys.com/pilotshop/category/864 "View Limiting Devices"
But all that really tells is that there may be some correlation to the attributes of a person which allows them to make their way through increasingly challenging levels of education (smarts, drive, luck, etc.), also allows them success in business. It is more than likely those attributes were present before entering college. Perhaps even as far back as birth.
It's a very complex situation. First a huge percentage of American's start college. So the odds of a successful founder having at least started college are going to be very high.

Add to the that, founders are more likely to come from a middle or upper class background. The percent of that demographic that attends college is even higher.

Then factor that successful founders are almost universally ambitious, and most ambitious people start college.

Given those numbers I'd wager that upwards of 90% of people who become successful founders have at least started college.

If their company succeeds while they are in college and they quit to focus on it, or if they drop out before starting the company--instant college dropout success story.
It's going to be a mess with imports for those who need to use both com.google.common.base.Objects and java.util.Objects...
> if you don't like Rails, go somewhere else

Exactly. Makes perfect sense to me. If you're not going to lean on the framework, why even use the entire stack? You can pick and choose the parts of it you like, and want to use under the context of something like Sinatra which is meant for that sort of thing.

> but if you have a Customer model and a Card model, where do you put the checkout code? It could go in either place.

You can put it in either place. I'm not sure I understand why just because there's some flexibility on where you can put method X you should just work completely outside of the framework.

Edit: But this is a different point than the original debate though. I think the blog author goes way too far in avoiding using the framework.
Working against Rails, or any framework, is definitely going to cause pain. On the other hand, Rails is not perfect and I, like the OP, have been noticing a number of voices lately worrying about building large Rails apps. Which is awesome, because either Rails will adapt or something new will come along to fill the need.

Sinatra + cherry picking rails lib might work great if you've built a few apps like that, but it would nice to package this approach in a framework which guides people down this road.

Personally, I feel that Rails could evolve to the point where the approved path involves using some adapter (like a service layer) to talk to ActiveRecord. I've written about how Java accomplishes this in comparison to ActiveRecord: http://casestatement.tumblr.com/post/11514731433/javas-jpa-f...
It seems unlikely that as a medical "curiosity" anyone would have made much progress.
Take it from someone who knows: how good you are at your job matters very, very little in comparison with how much people like you as a person.

It's about mindset. Make sure that your expectations are aligned with your long-term goals. If you spend 100% of your time on training yourself in cs, then expect to be very shocked by the social dynamics of your first job. Conversely, if you spend 60% of your time focusing on becoming more social, then expect to have more friends, connections, and to connect with an overall larger number of interesting people during your lifetime.

So make sure you think about the answer to "What are my long-term goals?" and allocate your time proportionally. I didn't. I'd trade you my 10 years of advanced C++/graphics knowledge/gamedev industry experience for the college opportunity you have right now. And I wouldn't spend it by burying myself in studies.
Yeah, Mark controls 3/5 board seats for life. Investors are essentially just along for the ride.
One of the biggest benefits I've experienced while attending university is that I'm forced to learn concepts I might not otherwise expose myself to. Over my last semester I had an assembly language course which exposed me to many unique problems I wouldn't have otherwise encountered.

If I'd been learning on my own, I doubt I would have seen the value in investing a hundred hours in a language I wouldn't ever use in industry. Same goes for a number of other courses, all with varying degrees of relevance.
Get your degree in May with the CS minor. You already have the job offer for what you want to be doing — take it, and get out there and start working. You'll learn more in a year on the job than you will in the classroom.
"this system" wasn't put in place by Obama.
You are right there, but I am sure he learned a lot of useful stuff in college. I studied a lot of hardware and electronics myself and those fields include a lot of theory and high order math that one usually cannot learn in high school.
Front Page???
Good point. Thanks for calling me out on that.
Just a note: the optparse module is deprecated, in python 2.7+ argparse is preferred.
Can anyone suggest any other materials or resources in the same vein as this?
It's one thing pull elements into libraries it another thing to put the whole model layer into the lib directory,
Can't things change quite a bit between these years? When your in school, you're broke. Its not weird to eat ramen and work all the time.

But by the time your 22, maybe you got an internship at a cool company, and they're offering you 80k a year. Your getting used to a decent standard of living. Maybe you get recruited by Wall Street and the dangle 140k under your nose. You take the job, and get locked in with the "golden handcuffs". Now your comfortable, and you meet a cute girl, who wants a guy with a steady job, so you never start the company.

Maybe this guy was never really meant to be an entrepreneur; maybe he wanted that comfortable life all along. But when he was 19 he was ready to go.

> There's no rush. Someone who can start a successful startup at 19 can do it as well or better at 22.

I think there is a better chance that he won't start the startup at 22, cause he got a high paying job, and doesn't want to downgrade from his standard of living.
You do understand that when the author says "your app" what is meant is "the domain or business logic that drives decisions."

Seriously, what's with the attitude? There's more than one way to architect software and Rails doesn't cover every single base. Pulling business logic out of your ActiveRecord models and into separate classes makes it easier to test and easier to manage code that interacts with more than one model.

Lighten up.