skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe I'm just drinking the Kool-Aid, but as a Senior at a pretty damn good college in the US, I don't think that my years here have been wasted. There was a time where I wanted to drop out and start a business, but I would have missed so much if I had.

I do not intend to be an academic, nor a professional. I would like to start a business someday. College didn't provide me with a set of skills which I can sell to an employer or employ to sell with. Rather–and this used to sound absurd to me as well–it improved my ability to teach myself.

I'm speaking from personal experience here, but I do think college has the same effect on my peers as well. I was a fairly proficient autodidact, teaching myself how to program in everything from C to Clojure, as well as a sizable array of other skills (double-entry accounting, for one).

But now I am able to pick up a book on the subject of abstract algebra and really learn the material. I know how to handle tricky political situations, where not all information is present and one party wants to get more out of the other. I have been exposed to people, cultures, and ideas that I would have been unlikely to come across had I dropped out to hack together a startup. I know how to talk to people with power. I am better able to see things from another perspective. I am a better person now, all around. (This paragraph is uncomfortably self-congratulatory, but I'll leave it in for what it's trying to convey.)

Sure, college is not for everyone. Some college are better than others, and some are better for specific purposes. But I have improved myself and my skills here, and I don't think I could have done the same had I not gone through college. I'm looking forward to changing the world in a big way.
There are plenty of investors willing to back businesses that operate in legal grey areas. There are countless examples of this.
Show HN: MobileGamePatterns.com
I'm a big fan of mobile patterns sites like pttrns.com and mobile-patterns.com but neither cover mobile gaming. With oDesk's help and some patience with Tumblr theming, I created mobilegamepatterns.com.

What do you think?
clicky: http://mobilegamepatterns.com
Avoid alcohol three days a week
Jobs was out-innovating everyone when he was heathy.

Jobs was out-innovating everyone when he was sick.

Jobs is still out-innovating everyone even when he's already dead.
LeafStorm was talking about saying them properly. How do you say:

"That [thing] is Jess's"?

(conversely, is it Jess' or Jess's or should we be forced to say 'belongs to Jess')?

Now, imagine you're not a native speaker and you have to figure out how to say that. That's the difficulty.
Ask HN: Siri for Travel
Hello folks,

I am starting to make a website which is something like siri for travel effectively meaning that given the constraints like "I have 1 week of vacation", "I have 1000$ budget", "I am interested in hiking" or "I am interested in drinking wine" or even "I dont want to go farther then 100 miles" the app will plan a trip for you including details like which place to go, what attractions to visit there, what to eat etc?.

Just throwing my idea to you guys to see if you guys think people will like to have a minimal effort website for their travel plans which will give them recommendations based on their taste.

Thanks
Nishant
Memory Management Part 3: Memory Allocators Design
No maybe about it. The classic examples are beef vs. cow, pork vs. pig, poultry vs. chicken. The conquerers manipulating their food at the table while the vanquished were handling the animals.
Sorry then. I mean it sincerely though. Why are you letting yourself get bogged down in bureaucracy when you believe it was your undoing at Harvard?

Every day you spend on this is a day lost to making your startup successful.
Better idea: Drop out of high school to go to college. Then start your business at 19 after graduating.
Basically it just comes up and says that I'm not eligible for the free Windows Phone, because I need a Klout of 55 and to live in New York, NY (easily cheatable with Twitter, I suppose). My "Klout" is only 20. Not sure where that puts me on the newbie<->Bieber continuum.
> and Russians had great mail service.

Just wondering, have you actually used it?

I have and my experience is that it might have been one of the best free ones available in Russian, but it surely was not great. In fact when I stopped using it a couple of years ago it was terrible: routinely dropped connections to their POP server, a web interface overladen with copious flash ads that slow you machine down to a crawl, and on top of that your email address ending up in spammers' databases without being EVER used on the web (and I even tried registering a relatively random looking address to prove the point). But the worst thing I didn't like about them was that they had the terrible practice of spamming my contacts with invites to their new social networking sites making them look like it was me who actually sent them.
"There's no money in ebooks cause nobody reads"

Yet getting excited for textbooks on ipad? Strange.
ASK HN: What OS libraries are the best for automated image manipulation?
I want to develop image manipulation tool that can take intra oral photos (yes read teeth and gums) and find the edges, resize, crop and rotate those images to a specific template.

I also want to do the same thing for frontal and profile face shots.

Can anyone suggest suitable libraries/tools to do this?

Any coders out there interested in a contract job?
AHA - thanks. That's probably the root of it.
Apparently my new phone is on the way and my spot is reserved (if anyone else is going and wants to meet up, I'm in NYC and picked the first day). I'm curious as to which phone it is, though; I've been looking to replace my HTC HD7, so I'm hoping that's not it, which I'm assuming it's not since that's a previous generation. I absolutely love WP7, but the HD7's hardware is just not very good build-quality-wise. Pretty excited to try out something new.
Elemental Rise Competition
Should be interesting seeing Apple's version of Google TV.
That seems consistent with California having their own crazy laws about this, though; you are subject to California jurisdiction as a California company. It's insane, and someone ought to fight it, but why do you want to spend your time fighting it rather than working on your business?

I'm suggesting that you could go somewhere that doesn't have their own crazy laws about this, and only bother fighting it if some other state tries to claim jurisdiction over you.
No, they already have that. The new thing is a complete physical TV, with likely every component and service from end-to-end reimagined and controlled by Apple.
Javascript have had a massive popularity explosion yet the graph doesn't show any sign of it.

This kind of metrics has limited value. Not only popularity is not an absolute thing, it's also difficult to measure.

Us, hacker news readers, have fun with our javascript, coffesecript, ruby, etc. projects. But if you're in the corporate world you need to pull the heavy guns, not the good looking ones.

Many are saying tat java is the new cobol, that's a good metaphor IMO. And if it is, it's not going to go anywhere.

As for me, I wouldn't mind continuing firing up eclipse every day and proceed with my daily usage of java for the next 5-10 years.
The thing is, I'm not a native speaker; it's not really something I struggled with when I learned English. I believe the general rules I learned were:

plural & no possession: no apostrophe

singular, possession & name doesn't end with s: 's

singular, possession & name ends with s: '

plural, possession & name doesn't end with s: s'
If yield on giant displays is the problem, couldn't they stack smaller displays side by side?
I do think Java is losing popularity. And in my mind Java lost a lot of reputation when Sun was bought by Oracle.

But I see programming languages as just means to an end. For me popularity is not as important as other things to consider like maintainability, ramp-up time, etc.

If a developer can choose what to code on, he should choose the programming language that he feels comfortable with, and one in which he can get the job done in the best possible way and with the least amount of resources.
the people willing to drop out and try to succeed on their own are also willing to fail, over and over again (dropping out of school being a pretty big failure in itself), until we get it right. i don't think people should be naive and think that they are going to find success out of the gate just because they want to succeed on their own.
Are you taling about CSS3 fonts: http://www.designcourse.com/articles/1/css/55-CSS-Custom-Fon... If so, this will work.
When I was in China I saw a cyclist go head first through the windshield of a van. While their driving probably isn't the worst of any country, the cars are horrifically unsafe and traffic patterns are erratic at best. I think what it comes down to is that seeing a kid get run over isn't especially surprising to anyone, and since the kid was already almost certainly dead or about to die no one really cared. I don't think it's just an issue of the liability.

A good analogy would be in NYC the reason they built the high line was that in the 1820s literally at least a dozen kids were getting run over by the train every single week. No one cared because everyone was poor and life was cheap, and a good day was one where the local neighborhood gang didn't try to douse you in gasoline and light you on fire for entertainment.
Read the well documented example of Twitter. This is the kind of scale I'm talking about.
Would not a helium balloon tethered to the floor/dash solve this problem for basically no cost?
>Revolutionizing textbooks may seem a bit ho-hum by Jobs’ standards, but it’s pretty clear that Jobs was passionate about the U.S. education system, and felt this country was falling behind.

Oh please, Steve Job showed very little -- if not zero -- passion about the US education system. He was an inventor and entrepreneur.

If these guys want to talk about someone who is passionate about the US education system, talk about Bill Gates. It's time to end the Steve Job's love fest.
I'm probably being short-sighted, but I fail to see what else could you add to a TV that you couldn't already by attaching some device to it.. it's like saying Jobs will revolutionize the computer monitor. It's just a display.
This isn't a gray area. It's automatic jail time.

http://www.plainsite.org/browse/index.html?id=14426
OH DEAR GOD - can you imagine how if Goog bought Yahoo, Carol Bartz would take credit for "having set the company up for such an awesome acquisition".
My 100k college education didn't teach sales...which is kind of everything. If you can't sell yourself or your ideas, what good is your education.
Poemas de amor Cortos
Poemas de amor Cortos para compartir con esa persona especial. Envia estos poemas a todas las personas que quieras.
So why don't you work through Bancorp as well?
People don't buy textbooks because they like to read. They buy them because they are required for their classes. And they can cost thousands of dollars per year.

Typically there is one specific text approved for a course, so there is a serious lack of competition. And the publishers will release new editions every year, with trivial changes, to prevent reuse of old books. It's definitely a sketchy industry, in many ways, and there is plenty of opportunity for disruption.
No one "lets" themselves get bogged down in it. Bureaucracy happens, as it did in this case, when you aren't planning on it. (This law only recently went into effect and didn't exist in 2009 when I started on FaceCash.) I keep going because when it does happen, it's a sign that you're onto something important. If anything, I think it's a shame that more startups don't tackle problems like these.
I'm a native English speaker and my name ends in 's', yet even I waffle about whether I just use an apostrophe. I generally include an apostrophe just for consistency.

My heuristic is: if I would pronounce the extra sound, then include the apostrophe. Unfortunately, this would not help non-native speakers.. <:)
Well, if you agree he's right, why not write emails to the bureaucrats persecuting him rather than argue in a comments thread with him?

Looks like the head capo is Jacob Appelsmith:

jacob.appelsmith@abc.ca.gov [be polite!]

Emails from the general public to regulators that cc reporters (especially reporters who have quoted Mr. Appelsmith before) actually carry a lot of weight.

This is because American regulators intimidate the businesses they are regulating into silence. They have complete power over whether or not your products are approved, and criticizing them will piss them off and ensure that they sit on your application (at a minimum) or start finding various kinds of violations that they can cite you for.

That is, unless Mr. Appelsmith feels that the public and/or the press can (a) identify him by name and (b) do not support his actions. This is one of the vanishingly few scenarios in which a civil servant can actually lose their job, so they really hop to it[1].

During the whole process while you are waiting for approval you have zero revenue, and so it looks to all the world like you are just a loser and a whiner. In the biotech space this is why a lot of companies nowadays debut in Europe, so that they can say with some justification "well, we have a legit product but the FDA is holding it up". And because the threat of zero revenue for an arbitrarily long period of time means you might not make payroll, it's very unusual for someone to fight the power like Mr. Greenspan is doing. And he really could only do it as a one man software company without any employees that he needs to feed.

In a less sympathetic sector like oil or pharmaceuticals, or even just a slightly larger company of 100 employees, he loses the sympathy associated with a one man operation. At that point the regulators just go to the press and get them to write a story on what a terrible company this is for practicing without a license. Thereby justifying further regulation.

Basically, someone needs to stand up for what is right rather than just retreating. Mr. Greenspan is a pain in the ass in the same way the Don't Touch My Junk guy was. Everyone else tolerates these sorts of step by step encroachments on liberty till there is none left.

[1] Though afterwards they will hate FaceCash for all eternity and look to trip it up whenever possible, but Mr. Greenspan has no other cards to play at this point.
Computing plays a role in all sciences, but to say all science is computer science is a little far-fetched.
Google and Sony worked together to create integrated "Internet TVs" (which hit the market a year ago) although I don't think they sold well.
Thanks for the video. I'll take a look.
Catch.com

I wrote a whole freaking design, business case and mockups for a FANTASTIC mobile note taking app with all these features - esp. tagging and then some...

After I completed many HOURS on this, I found Catch.com is EXACTLY what I designed and was needing... :(

Seriously though - its great.

Check it out.

(Mine was called JotBox)
If you could build a one-state only payment system and convince Best Buy to adopt it, that would be a valid argument I suppose. The reality is that Best Buy has one nationwide point of sale system. Same with Staples. Same with K-Mart. Same with every large retailer. You add a tender type button in one state and it shows up in 50 states. That's a problem when pressing the button in 46 states is a federal crime.

Moving to Massachusetts now would be great until either A) The Money Services Round Table lobbied the Massachusetts legislature for a repeat of the "successful" regulations implemented in California, or B) we wanted to expand to large businesses to compete with Google Wallet and Visa. So it would be of limited benefit for a short while to move.
http://www.uploadscreenshot.com/image/514689/3393856
They might be juxtaposing Jobs and his wife, who apparently does have a strong interest in education.

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=laurene+jobs+education
There is also an article consisting of an excerpt from the Kahneman and Tversky book here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/dont-blink-the-ha...

(Empty) HN discussion of it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3141022
We can say that Shenglong's rules are "English", and then whatever you do in real life is your "dialect".
Reality TV; survivor, weakest link, etc. Vote the worst person off. Appeals hugely with democratic cultures.

The more subtle ones I know of are related to prisoner's dilemma. However, it varies per cultural areas.
I think the answer is simple, he wants to control his own damn company.
This was very well said and I hope entrepreneurs at least stop to think about this before accepting his money.
Bain Private Equity report for 2010
Shows it was promising year. Should be entrepreneurs be happy with the current state of affairs? I think good people and good ideas always made their mark in whatever economic situations we dealt with.
Hmm...

$ wc <text copy of this article>
66 4283 31540 <text copy of this article>

Anyone care to write at TL;DR?
You're right, the 'television' is just a display, but the concept of 'TV' which most of us consider is the entire ecosystem of content, delivery and consumption.

To try to give you some context, think back to 2005, and question 'how can you revolutionize a phone? It's just a speaker and a microphone'. Of course, there had already been inroads into making your phone much more than a phone, just as set-top boxes and other connected devices have added capabilities to your television.

I don't think we'll see a 'rebirth' of television so much as we'll see television joining mobile, tablets and computers in the middle.

Really, the revolution of the phone was making it more like a computer, but more portable. The revolution of the television I suspect will be the same, but less portable. Just like the portability of the phone expanded the things we used our phones for, a less portable large screen product could expose similar capabilities.
I used to be a grammar nazi, but now I accept that we are witnessing hyper-evolution of written language. Before the internet, I didn't realize how pervasively people confused its/it's and lose/loose. (I knew there/their/they're was a common problem.)

I previously assumed languages typically evolved through "erosion" by dropping letters or spaces as a matter of saving time or space. But in today's computerized world, time and space are cheaper, so grammar exceptions seem to what is eroding: its/it's is an apparent punctuation exception and lose/loose is a pronunciation exception.
But Apple did revolutionize the computer monitor, by permanently attaching it to a computer and thus effectvely making it not exist.

Whatever they have in mind for the television will similarly be not about adding things, but about taking things away. They will simplify it in a way that geeks will consider a downgrade while opening up a world of possibilities for mere mortals.
You vs. John Poulson
Medicine Hat Real Estate agents | Fort McMurray Real Estate agents
I wish MG would just stick to the crunchfund - that little guy is the most annoying writer.
its/it's, they're/their, and you're/your are easy to remember: Possessive pronouns never have apostrophes.
Dead simple background parallax scrolling in javascript.
Everyone in Russia with tons of money did shady stuff to get it because in the 1990s there were effectively no rules. Anyone in Russia who wants to keep there money has to avoid pissing these people off today.

I'm not sure you read the article; the point was not that That Yuri is a shady guy but rather that he is acting as a conduit for shady money from people who would be red flagged if they tried doing big things in the US.
That's kerning, not hinting. Hinting changes the glyphs themselves to lie more regularly on a pixel grid.
I know some are going to hate on you here, but you're a real hero man. Darwinspeed to you. You're helping all of us little guys here.
Ask HN: Where is the best place to learn .php?
I've tinkered with editing a line or two in wordpress, but I want to get proficient.

I found a couple resources via google:

http://www.w3schools.com/php/
http://devzone.zend.com/article/627

however, I am curious is the community knows of a better resource...for someone that learned best in school from hands on and personal attention as opposed to text and home work.

I am actively coding a project that involves Wordpress and a site built on the yii framework.

Any advice is greatly appreciated!
What about at 30?
Microsoft Research shows off HoloDesk
This reminds me of Keith Houston's wonderful blog, Shady Characters (http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/). Keith has written at length on the pilcrow, interrobang, and sarcasm marks (all touched upon briefly in this article) amongst other punctuation marks.

I am somewhat surprised that Shady Characters was not cited by the article. There is simply no better place to learn the surprising, entertaining histories of our punctuation.
World Becomming Less Violent
Skype lets hackers track your BitTorrent downloads
well if someone else already tried, I guess there's no point. It's not like Apple has ever entered into a market segment already entered by rivals who are doing poorly and shown them how it's done.

Oh wait, they did that with the iPod. And iPhone. And the iPad.

But you're right, there's no way they do make a successful tv if Google and Sony already tried it and it didnt go well </sarcasm>
Business partnerships with massive companies are not exactly easy to get, especially when you are dealing with regulatory uncertainty.

Aaron is doing the right thing.
There's a good derivation in
http://www.mstarlabs.com/dsp/goertzel/goertzel.html
Threadir - Have a conversation with your Twitter network
I would not be surprised to see such an obviously mistaken comment upvoted on reddit, but it is an alarming sign to see it happening here.

This comment implies you peek at the number of points a comment gets before responding. Do you?
you mean the Google TV that had terrible user interface and a remote control that looked like a keyboard? no wonder they only sold about 5 of those. they suck.
I made this site. Hoping to get some feedback from HN.
These posts remind me of the "put a bird on it" sketch. All you need to do is "put a 'web' on it" and suddenly it's amazing.

Color me unconvinced, but we're looking at graphics that are roughly on par with what we saw desktops games in 1999: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R2nCrsDHeA

I realize that this is just a small tech demo, but even still -- GL is only part of the equation. The kind of platform optimizations that are eeked out in the game industry are substantial and extend well beyond just the GPU.

The interest in web (flash) games was largely driven by the difficulty of distributing casual native games -- and that's quickly becoming a solved problem.
The article highlights a handful of wild-success examples and thus suffers from selection bias. The difficultly of tracking failed start-ups has been discussed, but has anyone studied that failure rate? Seems there's a paucity of coverage in popular press, even if any actual sources exist. Playing up the genius, or the under-dog, seems common-- maybe there's a rule similar to "man bites dog".

The subtext of the article seems to be that US education doesn't give kids all of the tools needed ("Skills like sales, networking, creativity and comfort with failure."). But that doesn't imply we need to discard education whole-sale. We probably just need to iterate (more often)-- cull obsolete topics and start testing new subjects.

Perhaps a passionate, motivated person can find and digest useful materials more effectively on her own than if she is distracted by formal schooling most of the day. But we won't make progress in the information age without a good degree of careful thinking. "[B]etting on the engines of future job creation" may make for a good read, but historically-informed updates to standard curricula would probably do the job.