skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The photos in this article do the best job I've seen; they show close-up images of text at various DPIs, demonstrating the visibility of the pixels at lower DPIs. (It would have helped to have an image of the same text to view directly at normal size rather than zoomed in.)
Steve Jobs Told Obama, 'You're Headed For A One-Term Presidency'
Am I the only one who's never heard of Klout until now? To me, they've failed at their own service.

So for an individual, Klout just reaffirms one's ego and then rewards with special opportunities for consumerism?
I'm not typically a Ruby/Rails programmer, but this seems to me like a different take on good advice I was given a while back: "Whenever possible, build libraries, not apps."

If my code does anything at all which might be decoupled from this particular program or webapp, I try to break it out into a library, which I then call from the app I'm working on. This sometimes results in some extra work when working on that project, but it's saved me plenty of times in the long run.

edit: typo
I sometimes worry that some consider dropping out of college a cause of success rather than a symptom of success.

Many of the individuals mentioned in this article started companies while enrolled in college. It was only after they realized the true potential of these companies that they decided to fully invest themselves in their projects. You cannot simply drop out of university without some sort of plan and expect success to find you.
A lot of this is great, but it's clear that the author has not actually followed the process of launching AWS. Bezos did not wake up one day and decide to start selling his datacenter space. AWS was developed, clearly after this person left Amazon, for Amazon developers. The engineer (CTO?) responsible for this woke up one day and realized, well, fuck, we could sell this. Pairing some of the stories here with that basic knowledge actually explains a lot of the SOA startups popping up in EC2. Companies are beginning to form in the shape of departments at Amazon, which is interesting, I'm not sure it's awesome.

That said, let's not fool ourselves. There is nothing more wrong with The Internet right now than EC2. It is poorly executed and Amazon's position as a market leader has made them incredibly lazy about improving it or contributing to the core technologies (Xen!) which are responsible for the most complex bits of it.
What I think is the greatest potential here is that this is essentially paving the way for the government to begin selling this fuel to companies that can't afford to put their own fuel depot into space.

Why is this good? Because once Congress sees the potential to make profit from NASA, then we'll see hundreds of billions dropped into it.

I believe the next step to this would be to set up a depot in orbit around Mars to reduce the weight necessary for a mission to Mars.
I don't get the message.
Article exhibits the common fallacy that because some college dropouts are wildly successful, dropping out of college is correlated with success.

64% of US business owners have at least a Bachelor's degree (source: http://www.census.gov/econ/sbo/02/cbosof.html).

Unless you have a great and proven business idea that's already taking off, staying in school and getting a degree seems to have a closer correlation to success than dropping out.
"I’d put my money on the kids who are dropping out of college to start new businesses."

Even though this might sound to some like a description of what YC does, in fact we're reluctant to fund people who are still in school. There's no rush. Someone who can start a successful startup at 19 can do it as well or better at 22.
I don't agree with that cliche. It's over applied.

Search is a product, too. It's just not a direct source of revenue on it's own.
That's because their apps are written in Java and they need people to maintain them. Java isn't going anywhere for a while.
In case there are Pythonistas here who will indulge a question: one thing I've never figured out how to do elegantly ("idiomatically", I suppose) is create a list of predetermined size initialized with a constant(usually zeros). I always end up with something kludgey like:

x = [0 for i in xrange(0..100)]

which seems so roundabout it can't possibly be the right solution.
Honestly, no matter how much homework, lectures, and tests you give student; it can't replace a drive to learn. A lot of students only bother trying to learn something that can make them money.
How do you handle dependencies? One of the slickest things about debian boot/init is resolvconf populating dnscache's list of dns servers with the dhcp reply. I love that. I'd wait a minute extra just for that.
This is where I was coming from. If you're willing to threaten's someone's life why do you need shares?
I started off sick at my stomach at the same thing you were complaining about -- the sad story of this unfortunate woman losing her 90,000 square foot house. But it became pretty clear that while they weren't mocking her to her face (which would be mean no matter who she was), they definitely weren't expecting everyone to sympathize with the plight of the extremely wealthy.

They make this point most clearly here:

> Of course, the trauma of giving up a Gulfstream or a yacht can't compare with the millions of Americans who have lost their only job or home. The Siegels will make do in their current 26,000-square-foot mansion.
"Never let your employer give you a pager, unless you're an ops guy."

Fuck You
Instapaper: send compilation to Kindle now
How to disinfect (not just "clean") a touchscreen
Interesting. Another thing I noticed is that code runs faster if floating point and integer arithmetic instructions are interleaved rather than "blocked" together.
After Sean Parker tweeted about this op-ed piece, there was conversation on Twitter about it by Sean, Chris Sacca, Gary Vaynerchuk, Anil Dash, and many others.

I'm sure there are many I'm missing that represent good ideas, but here are at least the tweets about the piece from the people listed above: http://storify.com/michaelschade/will-dropouts-save-america
we do a lot of demos, but why demoscene?
That isn't something new. Punctuation had always been ignored, + operator or not. (With some few exceptions like C++.)
> Money laundering = disguising the path money takes.

indeed.

> These transactions are extremely traceable.

Sure they are.

But the source of the original fortune behind all this is pretty murky and money laundering does not stop at the first stage.

Think of it as onion routing, going further and further into the legitimate world until those that handle the money have no way of proving or even knowing that the original source wasn't legit. It's all about provenance.

> It is equally ridiculous to propose the goal is to get money out of Russia.

Are you familiar with the name Berezovsky?

( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Berezovsky_%28businessman... )

You can go down as fast as up in Russia, and it doesn't take all that much to cause a fall from grace.

Spreading your assets in multiple countries seems like a good idea in an environment that volatile.

> How does investing in startups make that any easier?

It's a great way to ensure yourself future income and influence, surely one or more of them will pay back big time.

> If the money can get to a startup in the US, ipso facto it can get out of Russia, to any other investment.

Sure, but that won't get you in on the ground floor of a bunch of companies that will likely be very important in the near future. The return on investment in terms of influence could be enormous, it's a risk worth taking.

Better than buying standard oil or microsoft for an equivalent amount of money.

And if it is monopoly money to them anyway, why not buy that nearly free lottery ticket?
That was very good. I couldn't deduce what was going on until the last moment, which is (I assume) exactly the experience of pilots in this situation.
Why aren't there any higher-resolution desktop displays? If they can make a 6.1" panel like this, why can't they make a 24" 4K panel?
This is an important point that I don't think many people understand. Gates and Zuckerberg didn't drop out to start companies: they started companies in college, whose success drew them out.
I heard that too. Sounds like he had a bit of an ego, pissed off potential investors, and now Sean Fanning's Airtime is on the way to becoming Chatroulette done right (your FB friends instead of random pervs), and Andrey will have to return home empty handed when his Visa expires...
I remember being "Top Graded" as an "A Player" when I was at Rackspace. In addition to everyone quickly beginning to hate me, I caught an article on Top Grading in the next few days which said that A players have an average tenure of 3 months, mostly due to the fact that we shake things up and are unafraid to challenge anyone, which eventually gets tiring. B players are loyal and anyone who has actually read on how all this is supposed to work realizes that C players are just in the wrong job, possibly even at the right company. They're unhappy and they stop trying, unless you can redeploy them.
It's transparently obvious from looking at data that getting a college degree is correlated with success, assuming success means having more income. The gulf is significant and growing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...
This looks like a row of a DFT, but using the history variables and the single cosine to avoid computing the coefficients from scratch.
x = [0] * 100
Right, but that just means that you're only able to disprove correlation to within a certain accuracy. Correlation below the detection threshold could still exist, and could still be due to causation. Correlation above the detection threshold does not exist, and rules out causation above the detection threshold.
It looks like the most commonly-used adjective to describe Jobs was "great" - I wonder how many of those instances were actually "insanely great".
A jazz lodges a transcript below a defensive hello.
MOTOROLA XOOM Android Tablet (10.1-Inch, 32GB, Wi-Fi)
I'm not sure what dividing by population is trying to prove. Using very fuzzy numbers, there's almost 100m (or about 30%) people not eligible to vote in those population numbers.
Having played with OpenGL, DirectX and XNA (which is really just a managed wrapper around DirectX as are other managed libraries such as SlimDX), I'd suggest that learning any one of the above is really as low level as you want to go - At a basic level they simply provide an interface to the graphics hardware by allowing you to create and manage the vertex/index buffers and shaders which you load up on your graphics card which then does all the work of transforming the lists of vertices into what you see on the screen. With any of these low level libraries you will still need to develop the 'engine' itself which will deal with scene management, lighting, ai, physics, animation etc. You can still have a load of 'fun' and learn a huge amount by writing things like your own deferred lighting engine (which is what i initially did, there are plenty of tutorials online and it's a good way of learning some of the vector/matrix algebra which you'll need and pretty satisfying when you get first get hundreds of lights on your models), Even if you use libraries for lighting/physics, you'll still need to learn HLSL/GLSL for shader programming which is where a lot of the cool stuff is being done these days especially with the advent of geometry shaders.
sounds to me like yahoo is spreading rumours to drive up their stock a bit. there's no way that google actually wants yahoo.
I think the point is to minimize launches. 2 launches per mission as you suggest is eventually going to cost more.

If it takes 10 launches to initially set up and 1 every say 5 fuel ups, then it's only going to be 12 launches before it breaks even.

Given the Space Shuttles did 135 missions, doing 135 additional launches definitely isn't cost effective. Not to mention you wouldn't have to re-enter a vehicle or do another launch if you wanted to extend a mission.

It would pave way for transfer and potentially one day freight transfers in space. Also it gives the potential for "Oh Space X you need fuel, well look who has a fuel depot bitches."
Where were you 15 years ago when I scratched my itch? Consider me an early adopter of this sentiment. :D
How Debt Deleveraging Killed the Economy
You can find C code for the Goertzel algorithm at:
http://www.exstrom.com/journal/sigproc/index.html
Depending on what the business is, dropouts might be just as capable as graduates. If the post-industrial economy demands more hairdressers, cooks, and barristas, then the ability to make a low-cal hamburger could be more useful than the ability to write a 3,000 word essay on why Hitler was possibly not solely responsible for WWII, but still a bad person (or whatever kids in college do these days). It depends on the course, and the student.

That said, a degree in a technical field from a good but inexpensive college will always be worth it.
WISDOM TEETH
In addition to working on something yourself which takes off, the external business cycle might be a factor.

Dropping out (or at least going on leave) 1998-2000 made a lot of sense; probably the same 2006-2007 or even 2010-2011. Assuming you could get in with a company like Akamai, Google, Facebook, Square, ...
Steve’s Final “One More Thing…”
I guess it was taken too far, but the main point is that school doesn't teach you a lot of really important skills you need to succeed.

I have no intention of dropping of school until I get a degree, but I also know that I will have to learn a lot of things that school won't teach me.

How many schools are actively teaching how to function in a post-industrial economy? Not many, I'm guessing.
I have fedora 16 running on a similiar laptop (dell inspiron 8600). On a laptop like that, i think the graphics card is what will make the most noticable difference. Hopefully you have an intel or ati card with supported drivers. Nvidia let their drivers for that era go "legacy" and nouveau (the open nvidia driver) might be lacking even basic hardware acceleration.

Sadly, Windows XP might actually be your best bet if have an nvidia card and you want to do things with flash and expect it to be somewhat performant.
This seems like a pretty clever promotion. Worst case, it's not that expensive and there's no real risk. (Well, unlikely worst case: influential people get these phones, hate them, and tell everyone not to buy them. But Microsoft's data shows that when people try WinPhone they generally like them, so they can afford to take that risk.)

Best case: some actual influencers take them up on their offer and generate lots of influence about how great these phones are. And even if very little of that happens, early adopters (i.e. people who've heard of Klout in the first place) are likely to hear about the promotion, and generating even a little buzz among early adopters is a good thing for them.

And for Klout, having sign up and climb leaderboard = might get free stuff can only be a good thing.
+1 For being a Rails hipster that we all love to hate.
I think Microsoft will.

Yes, Microsoft has opposed it so far. But WebGL is gaining traction and will soon be enabled in all web browsers but IE. Interesting websites using it are starting to appear, and that will only accelerate.

So Microsoft will lose out by being the only browser not supporting a useful technology. People will prefer other browsers. Where Microsoft has nothing to lose by implementing WebGL.
UT-Austin. I completed my undergrad at UCLA, so their reputations are similar. I'd like to move back home near my family, but Austin is a much better place for startups than LA
Here's a good explanation: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1096

http://scene.org/ is very active with news. http://pouet.net/ is the canonical site for searching demos, you can find most demos here. (Demos really should be run in real-time, but you can find video links if you don't have the hardware or don't want to download the program.)

I'll just highlight one example that shows application to CS research: Numb Res by CNCD and Fairlight, video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTOC_ajkRkU and explanation https://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/numb-res/
Thanks! At first I wondered about efficiency but it seems like I can allocate lists with tens of millions of elements this way without any spike in CPU so it is obviously implemented efficiently. I knew there would be a better way :-)
The word probably comes from the French-speaking professor, for whom "manipulate" would be a far more natural choice of words than "handle".
A "best practice" is an optimal way to do something in a given context. An "idiom" is a commonly accepted way to express the thing you want to do. Best practices and idioms overlap, but are not identical.
Top reasons why users unfollow you on Twitter
What's going on with Google Reader?
I do, but typing in a long passphrase every single time you unlock your phone kind of sucks; if I had a 4 digit passcode I might set a shorter relock interval.

I'm not so afraid of someone's stealing my phone, then coming back and cutting off my thumb. If I were using the phone, it'd be easier to come up at gunpoint and grab the phone while it's unlocked, if you're that paranoid (one of the reasons highly sensitive data isn't unlocked "in the wild" in sensitive organizations).

Simple theft or losing the phone is still the most likely, and a biometric+PIN, securely stored on device, solves this.

High-end luxury cars have great engine immobilizer systems, which led to a lot of carjackings, since it was easier than unattended theft, which is basically the problem you've identified.

There are LOTS of other issues with biometrics, but they mainly come up when they're part of a centralized service and can't be completely controlled by the user.
Steve Jobs would be the notable exception to this, he dropped out well before creating Apple
(also a TA for the course)

I took this class while it was still taught in Scheme, and I loved it. Now I'm teaching it in Python. I am also sad to see Scheme go, but I think we gained as much as we have lost in our switch to Python. For example, I argue that Python dictionaries are more intuitive to use than the old "association lists" implementation in Scheme (we still taught the implementation). Concepts like MapReduce and concurrency that we cover later on in the course are also cleaner and more elegant than the Scheme implementation. The above-the-line OO syntax is also much, much easier to use.

We are still covering interpreters as our last unit. It will be for a "calculator" language, with conditionals and assignments. We are hoping to cover a lot of the same concepts, but we decided that a metacircular interpreter is obviously too difficult. We are keeping project 4 the same (Logo interpreter) but we have ported it to Python and wrote some new questions. Personally, I think the OO-centric interpreter is an improvement over the old Logo interpreter in Scheme (we can have Environment objects that now contain Frame objects, for example. Before, environments were just a list of association lists).
Seems to me that Google would of course want to buy Yahoo, they would be most able to monetize the search.

The question is whether the government would allow it, due to antitrust.
/\ That is exactly why some people would rather die than do CS course.
They didn't drop out of some junior college or public high school either, but from Harvard following an education at elite private schools.

[edit] Brin, Page, Hewlett, Packard, Moore, Shockley - the list of people who didn't drop out is far more extensive.
Won't it be WebDirectX then? DirectX is a direct competitor to OpenGL.
It would probably be very thick, heavy, expensive, and have a high rate of failure.
Will Be a Great Day - Our Only Success is the Troops Are Coming Home
Yeah, that is kludgy (you're creating two lists now!).

First thing I would do is ask why I need that; I've never come across a case where I needed a pre-built list of items all initialized to a common or empty value - if you're doing that, I would explore some sort of custom generative process (building the items of your list as you need them). But, just because I can't think of a good use case for this (where I couldn't use generative recursion or iteration) doesn't mean you haven't. Weigh what you are doing.

I would do this one of two ways: create a function that will produce an object that will generatively build the list (like xrange, but pass an "initializer" value, like myxrange(0, 100, initialize=0)). See the source for Python's xrange to do this it should be quite easy.

Or do this in a while loop (flat, easy to understand, and you aren't being too naughty by producing more than once list):

ls = []
cnt = 0

while cnt <= 100:
ls.append(0)
cnt += 1

Alternatively you can do the above with a for loop but you would have to iterate over a sequence (which means creating a list to do it); the while loop is going to be the most efficacious way of doing what you want I think, excluding building a custom xrange style implementation.
Nice. They're learning from clang.
Would you prefer it if they had taken more steps to locate the machine and find the owners, then turned that over to law enforcement? If they had done so, would you still prefer they had done nothing and let the authorities handle it? Also, would you regard it as a net win if they took down a majority of CP distributors this way (feasibility aside)? I'm really curious about your position.
A collection of short programming questions
Sigh, there is a lot of misleading stuff in there. First of all, the whole article relies on conclusion by examples. But if you look at the data the successful start up entrepreneurs are overwhelmingly college graduates.

Secondly, even if we look at the examples of the successful dropouts we notice that even most of them get some significant advantage out of school.

Gates is the prime example. Everyone says he is dropped out of college, but he had the advantage of going to one of the richest high schools in the nation where he had access to a computer (which was an incredible luxury at the time). It is the skills he learned there that allowed him to actually create something useful and to start his company.

Jobs dropped out, but if Jobs was all by himself he would not be Steve Jobs of Apple Computer, and there would not be an Apple Computer. Jobs is Jobs because he met Woz, and Woz went to college where he ignited his passion for electronics and gained the skills which would later enable him to create the first Apple computers.

Now about Zuck. It is utterly obvious to anyone that followed the rise of Facebook that there would be no Facebook if Zuckenberg did not go to college. Sure he dropped out, but being there allowed him to assemble the team that build the site and be part of the culture that made the site useful and used. Facebook was a college phenomenon.

So things are not that simple. To be a successful entrepreneur you have to build something people want. And to do this nowadays you usually need to deal with machines and computers. And to know how to make computers do what you need them to do you need education. Now it is not certain whether formal education does a good job at this or not, but to say that all you need to do a successful start-up is gumption, can do spirit, "street smarts", sales skills, etc., is a dangerous lie.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgcxGFmYyPs