skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would make it simpler than that.

1. Don't procrastinate and get distracted. Even if you're taking hard courses, a college course load is rarely more than 50 hours per week. Average in hard majors is probably 35-40 all-in. That's not onerous at all, especially when you're only working 40 weeks per year (including internship).

2. Concentrate on learning interesting stuff, not on the grades. Good-enough grades (3.5+) will come from this for most people in most circumstances. There are hard-ass professors and even unfair ones (although I never had an unfair professor) but they are very rare and their damage is seriously limited.

I find it odd when college students claim they're going to sue professors over grades. Really? In college you're judged on the average of 30-40 (!) mostly independent grades. If you flunk a class and ace the other 35, you have a 3.89 GPA. In the real world, manager as career-SPOF is pretty much the default.

That said, I dislike grade inflation because it adds to the stress of college. If 2.0 were average, then acing a course could cancel out a failure. (When my parents were in college, a 2.5 was a perfectly respectable GPA and 3.0 was actually good.) With 3.2 as the average, flunking a course cancels out 4 As. That sucks. It makes people risk-averse and stressed out.
NoSQL Ready For The Enterprise
npm is an awful piece of cruft authored by a clueless, posturing cretin.
I'd just like to say that if you're too lazy for University, then you're fucked either way.
Startup Israel Documentary
Wouldn't that make college more expensive for everyone who was not a football or basketball player?
Piano wizard uses color coding to teach playing the piano and reading notes.It's seems pretty successful at that.

http://www.musicwizard.com/Music/Home/index.cfm
Why Not Turn Challenges Into Opportunity?
It's a bad anology if it excludes the majority of expression, though, isn't it? I'm not talking about some corner case here.

Software seem too malleable to me to characterize it in such broad strokes.
The manufacturer mentions that it has a link to the web and can consult weather forecasts. This should allow it to kick the heat on if the forecast calls for freezing weather and your not home.
At first glance, I balked at the title, saying to myself, "Who has the time to personally email 1000 people while doing everything else a founder is responsible for. "

However, after reading the article, I completely agree with this approach. The personal touch, ID of earlyvangelists, and starting a constructive conversation. Great article.
I have to disagree. A college education costs about $26,000 for Florida residents here in Orlando for a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. Compare that to my first year's salary which was roughly double that, and the cost begins to look minimal.

The opportunity cost is relative, since the people you meet in college may very well be the best resources you have for maintaining your drive, innovative spirit, and will to keep on. Just the discipline of finishing something is worth the time and money spent. That said, it depends on _you_ and your situation.

Personally, I wouldn't be who I am today without suffering with my peers through classes like CS1, Discrete Structures, and Computer Architecture. My first piece of real consulting work, the first proposal I ever wrote, was for an ad on our local university's job board.

Disclaimer: The total cost of my education was paid by scholarships, so I do not have first hand knowledge of how this works, just providing my anecdote. $26,000 figure was calculated using my in state invoices from 2003-2007 so they may need adjusting for inflation.
Pardon my ignorance, but: for those 1% : does the medical insurance cover you for any after-effects? Does the recipients insurance cover you for any medical expenses arising from the donation?
Very interesting story.

One question for any experts: why did he eject at such a high altitude? Would it have been possible for him to have taken the plane down to a lower altitude before trying to eject? Or was there a technical reason why he had to eject when he did?
We think differently as we age. Have you spent any amount of time arguing with old people? You can't teach an old dog new tricks, etc.

Ideas tend to propagate in generations - it's often necessary for the old guard to die off before a new idea will be accepted, whether this is in art, or science, or politics or whatever.

As new people crop up that aren't reputationally invested in a certain idea it allows more ideas to be considered seriously, etc.
IPod fathers unveil their next project, the Nest Learning Thermostat (hands-on)
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Since the comments seem to be full of Australian nationals, I'm curious if anyone can help me out with something. Any advice on the best way for an American to get onboard with an Aussie startup?

My family and I would like to emigrate to Australia in about 2015, and I'd prefer to get hooked up with a startup instead of trying to get on with a big multinational.

Based on talks I've had while planning this, it sounds like the point-based immigration system isn't as sure of a thing as sponsorship. Are startups in Australia in a position to sponsor a visa? Would an incubator be interested or able to help with something like that? Anything I can do now to help ensure that I'm employed with a startup down under in 2015?
Maybe this is not the best place to ask this, but is there any SO clone written in Ruby?
3 Consejos Sobre Como Emprender un Negocio
could someone remove this spam?
As a dropout, I can tell you this: if you do drop out, you are choosing the hard way. Later on, even if you're wildly successful, you will wonder how much more successful you could have been if you'd finished. You'll also suffer from the impostor syndrome, and it will likely haunt you for the rest of your life, regardless of the outcome.

Young smartasses have a way of becoming old maintenance programmers ;)
We should thank the Chinese for giving us free solar panels which will eventually help disentangle us from the geopolitical mess in which our fossil fuel dependency involves us. We will be able to devote the intellectual and financial resources formerly devoted to those pursuits to more beneficial endeavors.
>There's a lot of evidence that there's no longer genetic selection acting on the human population

Sure there is. The fitness function is just different from what you or I consider 'optimal' or 'superior'. We're still becoming more resistent to disease, even if the future may have more in common with trailer park people than urban elites.
Show HN: Track your Git commit statistics
Nobel prize awarded to deceased doctor thought to be alive
Shapado [http://gitorious.org/shapado]
"Don’t worry about the student debt too much"

How about instead you should try to get a job to start paying it off asap? "Not worrying about it" could be interpreted as "debt is ok- it is what our government does, so rack it up".
It would be nice if the author profiled the code instead of just measuring the test templates time.
We had very similar experience with medical bill (insurance didn't pay, we moved, years later found unpaid bill on our credit report).

Collector offered to pay and clean up the records.

After going through some doubts (what if collector lie about clean up?) we did pay and within weeks credit score returned back.
I can't answer for agavin here, but I can tell you one reason why I write more code in Ruby than in Smalltalk: integration.

Smalltalk, more than Lisp or Java, is just not suited to little programs that get the job done. It is really great for rapid development of things that live in the Smalltalk image and play with other Smalltalk objects... but stepping outside of those boundaries is often painful and frustrating. Squeak, for example, is plagued by arcane and undocumented classes for socket I/O or HTTP.

It just feels like its own isolated world compared to a simple Ruby hashbang script that reads from stdin and writes to stdout.
It's okay, you'll come around. Really, it's not something worth automating and you'll realize that when you accidentally send your mom / investor / mentor / family friend a canned response.
I couldn't replicate the crash. Played a couple games. Died, started off where my points left off. Was over 1000 pts. Browser ran fine even with a bunch of other tabs.

Mac Lion 10.7.2 + Chrome 14.0.835.202 Regular Build
Would it? Loading a single byte should still be fast (in the absolute worst case, it's a single shift and a mask on top of the cost of loading 4 or 8 bytes) and using less memory means it's much more likely for the table to remain in cache (and evict less other stuff). In fact, I'd go so far as to wager that a uint8_t[16] (or uint64_t[4] or whatever) with one bit per character, manually extracted, would be the fastest way to do it. Not that I've tested this or anything, and I could certainly be wrong.
See I'm going the other way.

I'm in the process of applying for a Master's Degree in Computer Science. Historically I've been rather reluctant to do this since I can learn on my own, and have. However, I think the structure and the environment provided by school is worth the 25k a total cost. Having money on the barrel head provides a real sense of focus. Having a peer group that wants to really pursue the same topic is valuable and worth a portion of the 25k. Finally, it gets me to focus on a topic. Currently I'm flitting around from technology to technology, fueled by HN. I look at Node.js, then Mongo, then a plethora of JS libraries. I'm tired.

School will focus me on Software Engineering with a focus on Grid/Distributed computing.
How Much Do Genes Matter? [in connection with intelligence]
Do you have any trouble with people reporting your drip emails as spam? I found that some people are reporting emails instead of clicking the unsubscribe link. Unfortunately, many email clients make that button more convenient than tracking down an uninstall link within the email.
"Physical interfaces (and by extension, GUIs) cannot combine at will to create new behavior."

Or should it say that we don't yet have good enough GUIs that allow combination at will, to create new behavior? I don't think it is correct to say that this is impossible.

It's difficult to image what this would mean for GUIs, but maybe we could get some ideas from the DSL stuff for example Microsoft and JetBrain were doing some years ago.
Some of the arguments in that article are repeated in the book, but it's not the main thrust of the chapter I was referring to. I'm afraid I gave the book to my brother after I read it, so I can't give you an authoritative summary of the arguments in the book. As best as I can recall, the argument was renewables generally have such low power density (W/m^2) and high energy cost ($/J) that they are unlikely to be an effective solution to climate change, should climate change be as severe as we fear it might be. (Ridley is not a climate change denier, but he does think scientists' worst fears are exaggerated.

Here's an audio interview with Ridley that might cover some of the same stuff in the book: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/10/ridley_on_trade.htm...
Colleges That Do The Web Well
Sales up by 50%, subscribers down by 3%.

Not a bad deal, reputation damage aside.
If you've had jaundice as a kid in India, it was probably hepatitis A, in which case you are allowed to join. Probably worth double checking.
> I think that getting someone to pay you for your work is the hardest. Deceptively hard.

Agree. That's why I think people aiming to make money from software should look more to advertising income. Much easier IMHO ;) Anyone can make a good income with a little effort.

I dropped out of uni after a year, with no idea what I was going to do. I dread to think what I'd be doing if I'd stayed. Probably some corporate drone at a bank.
Watch The Son of No One
watch The Son of No One
The film was shot in New York and written by Montiel who produces with Avi Lerner John Thompson and Holly Wiersma.
There are 7 billion people in the world not 6, yet approximately 50% of all food produced is thrown out uneaten. Sorry, you'll have to find another drum to pound.
Which I think are only your own comments... at least for me, I only see the "by" for my own.
Wow look at all the games! Are these all made with JavaScript and HTML5?
Libraries and implementation do matter, that's why I've stuck with Clojure. I couldn't imagine starting a project in Common Lisp today.

Are you using Ruby in game runtimes, or just tools? How do you feel the use of Racket worked out in the Uncharted games? It seems like an embeddable Lisp (like Racket) might just hit the sweet spot for enabling DSLs and dynamism without bogging you down in an outdated platform like CL.

(P.S. big Naughty Dog fan here... I've always wondered about these sorts of details. I think a lot of programmers are very curious about your war stories.)
I've tried, but I can't find the reference.
But, it doesn't work.

Your code can only be as good as the platform you're working with. You can't code features beyond what are supported, and if you're trying to do too much, you need to scale back. If you based a games design on the idea that every computer was quad core with a huge graphics card, it would be pretty amazing, but no-one except a select few could play it.

Short of it is, you're code doesn't work, whatever is wrong with it, it doesn't work. And you can't expect browsers to change to suit you, if you really don't know how to improve it, scrap it and start again but at the moment you can't blame the browsers for not being able to support your, probably brilliant, game.
It ain’t called catching, its called fishing.
Will Amazon Kill Off Publishers? Not the big ones. Did Apple kill off record companies? Not the big ones. Did Walmart kill off the other merchants? Not the big ones.

Large companies at some point suffocate the smaller ones. The big fish eat the little fish and there is talk of the government needing to step in and trust bust. Then the little fish comes along that can outdo the big fish and the big fish gets hurt and the little fish propagate again. This is the circle of life in capitalism, and there is nothing wrong with it.

People would benefit from studying history, but I don't think that "history of business" is taught. It should be.
The problem is that you need to move the content, user accounts, ratings, etc. from one system to another. The existing system has to had an API to export that information in a format that the new system can understand. If you have that, then it is easy, the problem is most systems out there do not have that :) Situation is a bit better with extremely popular projects for blogs or forums, like Wordpress or phpBB, which have an ecosystem of exporter/importer tools.
Here is my plan: in a year I'm finishing my army service. I'll be 21. Instead of going to the university I'll take three years off.

Right now I practice my software development skills. I practice BDD, pick up new mainstream languages, practice writing good and concise code, working with people, etc.

When I'll finish the army I'll have three years experience in software development. I've worked at a couple of start ups already, I'm lead dev in the army and we are pushing a new project every month or so, I have my own start up and hopefully by the time I'll finish I'll have the elusive paying customers.

And then I'll learn whatever I want for three years. All the math I want, all the algorithms I'm interested at. I'll design a language, I'll write my own compiler, I'll meditate on data structures and work on large open source projects.

That's far better than university. And it's gonna be fun.
"A shithead who sucks"
People seem to look at this and see it if Netflix would not survive this. The difference between Netflix and cable companies is that Netflix doesn't tie you into a 2 year contract.

Try cancelling your cable as fast as you can with Netflix.

The reality is that cable companies are starting to suffer from Netflix and the likes of it. Their slower decline will come to a surprise to many.
Why Google reader (Gooder) matters for us (Iranian)
It sounds like he was losing control of the airplane, which was diving towards the ground, increasing its speed. The faster the plane is going, the more dangerous it is to eject (all of that onrushing air hits you really hard, and supersonic ejections are not at all entertaining). Before too long, it's likely that the plane would have broken up due to excessive speed, at which point the pilot's chances of survival would have dropped dramatically.

In the absence of a thunderstorm, it would have been no problem to eject at that altitude. Since he didn't realize what the storm was going to do to him, I think that's the rationale behind the choice.
It's articles like these that make me yearn for traditional prose and bulleted items. Very hard to digest.

With that said, the article title was totally misleading. I was expecting it to be about colleges who have good programs to teach students about the web. Instead it was about which college websites and such have the most Facebook Likes :-/
I mostly lurk, and I watched this exchange with interest. If anonymous internet votes count for anything, please count this as one for the writeup you just mentioned.
Don't confuse having lots of operators with being unclean. They're syntactically more internally consistent than Common Lisp, for example.
> And the owner of such a system does not need to worry about utilities increasing their rates over the years.

That's not how it works unfortunately. Most of the cost of a utility are fixed. If more people are using PV then the fixed cost get divided over a smaller number of kWh and the cost of the remaining non-PV kWh goes up. Since peak usage in most countries is when it's dark the utility will not be able to reduce its fixed cost until someone finds a way to store energy in an economical way. The utility will simply have to stop paying for electricity delivered back to the grid because they will no longer be able to afford it (the only reason they do that now is politically motivated).
Oh, I don't know about that. I don't want to get all Kanye about highed ed, but I never understood why university teaching methods are so dependent on the final exam. All the work students do throughout the year is worth very little compared to the final exam. Its a system, imho, that encourages skipping class and binge studying.

It rewards people who can cram well and have good memories, but punishes those who do good work and who aren't good at last minute cram sessions. I've always thought it borderline cruel, especially when the workplace doesn't reflect this. I rarely jerk around M-F and stay up until 4am on Sunday to perform some big task. Its all about rationally addressing problems, breaking them into chunks, and performing those chunks. At universities, its all about irrationally fucking around and doing a last minute cram to get by. I can see why so many talented young men and women would consider dropping out to enter the startup workforce, especially in a down economy that isn't hiring and the sudden realization of having a huge loan debt for the next 10-20 years.

I remember more than a few classes that were structured as 90% final exam and 10% everything else (or more typically 80/20). I never felt this was fair to the student and only encouraged lousy study habits, procrastination, and cheating. Its almost as if the American college experience is one big exercise in not doing things the proper way.

I feel this made me a worse procrastinator than I already was and that it took me several years to shed these bad habits.
> <edit> This segment made me literally tear up,, his entire speech.. it is clear that they were best friends. </edit>

You were not alone. I teared up quite a few times during the whole thing. A tragic loss, not only for the things he invented/led others to invent, but by the example he set of perfectionism. Al Gore's words summed it pretty well "keep on insisting that good is not enough, that even great is not enough, keep insisting that Apple products truly be insanely great". I don't work for Apple (an iPod and its companion iMac, I don't even use their machines that much), but I can relate to that. I am nowhere near the perfectionist Jobs was, but I would gladly work with him (and I know it was hard) for the selfish reason I'd become a much better perfectionist myself.
Whoah - Resty is awesome. Wish I'd known about it before
$300 down to $80 in a span of a couple of months on news of a known/expected 3-5% of users leaving, while profits are increased, I would say count as "disproportionately large".

The way insiders work is like this... If they know they need to get out, but can't due to SEC insider rules (you can't sell a stock about to tank "just because", without getting in trouble later on), they take the first public opportunity to do so... On the release of any public bad news, that way their asses are covered.
Be On Fire
I think I remember that list indexing "list[x]" is o(n), while hash access "hash[x]" is o(1), but my Martelli is not here around.

If I were the guy, I'd first ensure the final escaped result is cached in a key-value store, then I'll check if this func is the real bottleneck. If so, I might also have tried accessing it's content as a byte array. Then, if the file is of Asian origin (ascii being very low minority), I'd bulk escape it with the "&#x%s;" trick. It is rare to have documents with even mix of ascii/latin and other glyph, so I makes sense to have two functions, like he did.
How To Effectively Co-Author A Book with Erik Decker (3x co-author)
After one of my articles (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2965626) got on HN, I built this little website with a friend. It's very simple and only tracks the commit count with the help of Git hooks.

Looking forward to any comments!
6 Primes that increase your conversion
People didn't have obvious, specific problems with their CD players either. Or their cassette tape players for that matter. Are you saying the iPod was a bad idea?
Jobs had a way with words.
An Introduction to Foldit, a Game in Which Players Help Solve Protein Structures
Unfortunately Florida is much, much less expensive than almost anywhere else. A college education from a decent university in Pennsylvania will run you about 15k a year (University of Pittsburgh or Penn State). Throw in living costs and tuition increases, and you're looking at 80-100k easily for 4 years.
Nokia Maps 3D
Cut it out Instagram Cheaters
If you're a taxpayer and a cyclist, you're already paying way more than your fair share -- most infrastructure is paid for via property & income taxes.
Well, the next sentence clarifies with "Take what you need and no more". Debt isn't all bad, it has it's uses, particularly when young and has got a lot of bad press these last few years.

If leveraged correctly, debt can be used to significant advantage.

I think the core point of the article stands. It's a bad idea to quit college for most, even if student loans are building up.
Sprint iPhone 4S useless in Europe?
You are taking the "expression" too far. We are talking about expression at the time of doing, not at the by-product of doing. GUI constrains you, it limits your expressive ability to tell the computer what to do. CLI is extremely expressive, it allows you to tell the computer what to do in very elaborate way, not only by having more options available for each command, but also by allowing you to combine things in ways GUIs simply can't allow for.

We are not talking about end products of this communication between computer and person, its output which could be images or software you created with the computer and which also allow you to express yourself in the more broader sense.
A few Germans ejected into a thunderstorm during WWII and got lifted by the updraft... They were turned into hailstones and thrown miles away.