skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a popular theme these days. I think the college education used to serve several purposes: a) serving the Liberal (big L) ideal of creating the sort of well rounded, educated, informed citizen upon which democracy depends, b) vocational training, and c) indirectly, signalling fitness in a modern workforce.

A) and b) aren't totally at odds, but they're not exactly aligned. When the economy was healthy enough and tuition was low enough, that misalignment was basically overshadowed by the signalling value of a degree. Even your liberal arts degree would show you were of value to corporate america. But now, the misalignment is becoming magnified by high tuitions, the poor economy, and increasingly specialized and technical job requirements. You can achieve a) via your philosophy degree, but you'll never find a job. So the signalling value of a non-technical degree has been largely lost (top ivy-league schools excepted).

I don't have a good answer, but I'd argue that we shouldn't abandon the notion that education should be in part about creating a well rounded citizenry capable of critical thinking in pursuit of more economically grounded college education.
The bias in the user population for a site that teaches web development is going to be huge. The link you provide states:

"W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to the browser that comes preinstalled with their computer, and do not seek out other browser alternatives."
Off topic, but speaking of hellbanning and auto-dead, I'm also not able to reply to any comments along Udo's thread (i.e. the thread starting with comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3186917). Why is that?
Well, I've only had it for a month. No, I'm not going to try to do anything fancy, the machine will go down for kernel updates just like any other.
They probably don't.

http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf
Also mirrored at: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/90-errors-in-open-s...
How to Fail at the Internet
http://mobile.twitter.com/ saved me from having to quit using Twitter. The main UI can't even scroll smoothly on my i5 cpu with gigs of free RAM running Chrome.
Check out "Graphics Programming Black Book" [1] by Michael Abrash [2].

If you have not read his work, you are in for a treat. He has a wonderful writing style that is both engaging and illuminating.

There are a number of chapters [3] in the book that specifically discuss technology and development related to Quake.

[1] PDF: http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/graphics-p...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Abrash

[3]

Chapter 64 - Quake's Visible-Surface Determination

Chapter 66 - Quake's Hidden-Surface Removal

Chapter 67 - Sorted Spans in Action

Chapter 68 - Quake's Lighting Model

Chapter 69 - Surface Caching and Quake's Triangle Models

Chapter 70 - Quake: A Post-Mortem and a Glimpse into the Future
Lesson from Square: Solve a hardware problem (no NFC) with software (geofencing)
The restrictions of iOS make me happy: I have a simple consumer brick. I can wipe it and restore it on a different device without losing a single byte. It never stutters, never misses a frame. I never need to care which programs are running or the layout of the filesystem.

The psychological effect of this is surprisingly powerful.
#> psql mydb
I believe one of the major issues will be Doom 3's use of the "zfail" algorithm, which Creative claim a patent on. Generally, Creative license this patent to game developers in exchange for the game supporting OpenAL (a net win for Creative as it means their sound cards can make the game run faster and more people will buy them), but I'm not sure what the terms on a source release would be. Take a look at [1] for more info.

[1]: http://www.doomworld.com/vb/doomworld-news/45868-doom-3-code...
Can SEO Work Too Well?
> Did it matter that the hardware innovation of that era had to do with cost reduction? Yes.

Why is this relevant? If the hardware innovation had been about attractiveness or energy efficiency or portability or any other factor, would Microsoft have been unable to compete? Would Windows have been non-viable if Compaq had been selling sleek aluminum boxes instead of beige boxes? Have hardware manufacturers stopped competing in price now? Last I checked, that was still a major selling point.

> Did it matter that Microsoft was able to keep customers captive through closed document formats & protocols? Yes.

This has nothing to do with the viability of the software-only strategy. Would anyone be less locked-in by Microsoft Office if it were running on a Microsoft Machine?

> Did it matter that Microsoft both had and leveraged a monopoly position? A thousand times yes. Did it matter that Microsoft had OEMs over a barrel and got them to sign anticompetitive distribution terms? Of course.

Sure, and you still haven't explained how any of this makes Microsoft's software-only business weak now. Microsoft reached their dominant position as a result of their software-only strategy. Software-only allowed them to partner with every PC maker to make sure that 95% of people would buy a Windows machine.

> I would be reluctant to point to Android phones as an example of a software-only success, because that knife cuts both ways for Microsoft. How is Microsoft going to sell Windows Phone in a market where Google is dumping a free operating system as a loss-leader for potential ad-revenue?

That's a good question, but I think the end answer will come down (partly) to price. If Windows Phone is a better experience than Android, but it costs an extra $15, will anyone care? Is anyone going to reject Windows Phone because it adds a couple percent to the price of their phone? (Especially when many Android phones are probably paying as much for patent licensing anyway.)

> Regardless, here's a great illustration of the effects of Android's software-only model:

That's an illustration of how crappy the carrier lock-in model is. Or perhaps how little Google cares about its phone users. There's no intrinsic reason Android couldn't use the Apple model and push directly to consumers. Nonetheless, Android is selling extremely well in spite of this.
Bank of America $5 Debit Card Fee Repealed
With Microsoft only supporting ActiveX technology to enable most features of their Remote Web Workplace Sharepoint websites, IE is going to be around awhile still. Almost one quarter of my small business clients for my service business use Small Business Server.

And until I move away from Exchange Server (email), I still keep a Windows virtual environment going just to run Outlook on.
Yes it was different in the middle ages, it has changed now. Only 10% of UK government ministers went to Eton and only 70% to Oxford and Cambridge so the power of the old-boys network is disappearing.
Ask HN: San Francisco Therapist Recommendation?
I'm a startup founder working through problems with anxiety, depression, and procrastination. Exercise and cognitive therapy have helped, but I've realized that I'd really like to work with someone who is more familiar with the pressures of a tech startup. Anyone have a recommendation on this? I would also consider a 'life coach' though I'm suspicious of them..

EDIT: Realized some people might not want to post their therapists publicly (I'm using a throwaway myself). If you want to message me privately, use Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/user/mentalhealthday/
How does lead generation software do the job?
This is true, but I'd be sacrificing the silence, the portability and the battery life. And the hipster factor, I guess.

A 11" laptop, particularly the new MBAs, is less cumbersome than an iPad + keyboard and far, far more useful as a real development tool. Other than battery life I just don't see the point of doing this other than the "hipster" factor.

Just the ability to spin up a Rails instance on my own machine or run XCode alone keeps my iPad on the shelf when I'm working.
... and good riddance!
Do other people have this much trouble with Google Docs? I sure don't, and I consider myself a heavy user.
Show HN: Plusify - Power your Blog or Homepage with Google+
It's a fairly long and pretty sordid story that ended with a certain hacker's employer sitting down with us and saying "We're not admiting that he did it, but just hypothetically speaking, suppose he did. What do you want?"

And we said "we want him to stop his illegal activity". And he finally did and we dropped it, we're not on the lawyering business. We could have made a pretty big stink about it, it's not one of open source's finer moments, but all we wanted was a level playing field, we got that, we moved on.
How Your iPhone Chip Will Reinvent the Internet Data Center
FYI, I estimated 5 years when I was talking on reddit about how IE damaged XHTML, and by then XHTML was already 10 years old.
Combine it with Siri and google map searches: "Where can I walk to for lunch and not get wet?" - I'd buy that!
I agree that the discrepancy is unusually high. The idle power consumption for other drives reviewed by them is lower and more in line with expectations.

Everything is more expensive in Germany, energy in particular. A rather high VAT (19%) in addition to taxes specific to energy, including gasoline and eletricity, cause this. Part of this is due to a conscious political decision to encourage energy conservation and investment into renewable energy; in fact, of the 0.2 EUR/kWh, about 0.03 EUR are a flat tax/allocation towards renewable energy. This has spurred photovoltaics, but particularly wind energy, which in 2010 accounted for 6.2% of the total electricity.
The last time I tried to use SSH under iOS with the Apple bluetooth keyboard (trying different SSH apps including iSSH and TouchTerm) I found that I could not comfortably use Emacs due to various key combinations not being transmitted (I guess Vim isn't as much of a problem). One of the SSH app developers said that they were not able to trap certain keystrokes that were iOS keyboard shortcuts. Looks like this may still be an issue, as moconnor says this:

> Ctrl-X is my screen’s ‘hotkey’; it defaults to Ctrl-A but on a wireless keyboard that leaves unicode characters in the terminal - I assume this is related to Apple’s support for some common Emacs key bindings in iOS.

Is the situation any better now? Any workarounds to make this work better (e.g. configure the shell on the remote end)? How is this on Android?

I was trying this on an iPhone, but I'd imagine it handles bluetooth keyboards the same as the iPad.

Another issue I had was latency of the cellular connection (AT&T 3G); there was a very noticeable delay between keystrokes and the server receiving them and transmitting back. I imagine if you're on wifi most of the time this isn't as much of a problem, though. Or maybe you just get used to the latency.
If you only need persistence, look into dtach. That's all it does.

Both screen and tmux offer multiple persistent sessions, the difference is the command syntax.

Back when I was deciding on a terminal multiplexer I picked tmux over screen because session sharing seemed to be done in a more sane way. But then again, had I used screen for any length of time I'm sure I'd have gotten used to it.
I was there on Sunday and I have never been to anything like it before. It was so well organised, fantastic companies working on some brilliant projects. Big thanks to SK guys.
WebGL is pretty much OpenGL ES as far as I know...
How long might it be until these bills are passed and can be acted upon?
Got the Gold Bug?
Phoenix life insurance retail
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I have an English degree an am wrapping up a CS master's relatively soon (going very part time for essentially free). I've never regretted my English degree, and have actually found that it has provided me a lot of really useful skills working in more technical areas. Not to mention that as you go higher and higher up in the level of classes, the ability to write and communicate becomes increasingly more important.

Everyone one I know that has become reasonably successful with an English degree has also added some type of more pragmatic masters on top of it. IMHO this should be how we view liberal arts, a solid base to build more pragmatic skills off of. Additionally I find when you look at great technical minds you usually find a solid knowledge of the humanities along with it (usually not through formal education of course), the term 'quark' is pull from Finnegan's Wake, Feynman was a passionate fan of Tuvan throat singing, the quoted the bhavagad gita after the first successful nuclear bomb test etc.

Education definitely needs reform but the simple "less humanities more sciences" formula would do potentially more harm than good.
linux has this: http://cryopid.berlios.de/
Yup. Also, he had Lean Startup groups throughout the country that helped promote and sell the book (and Lean Startup vision).

Also, he gave up his speaking fees and asked event organizers to sell books instead.

Also, he found a way to bundle book sales with ticket sales.

Also, he had a proven idea.
Perhaps there's a distribution deal or popular website in South America that requires Chrome to function best (Orkut?). Or perhaps, as you said, it's just a network effect.
This is an awesome idea.

Scenario where it's useful: I walked to the grocery store and it's raining outside. Should I wait it out by staying inside or is it going to continue for more than 30mins?
> 9 times out of 8 many STEMs <X>

So, 112% of the time 60% of STEMS <X>? What a strange way of phrasing it.
Brace yourselves: the doomsday articles/memes/stories are coming..

PS will it be visible to naked eye? if yes then when and where and for how long and where in the sky? can there be a real time Google earth 3d simulation like NASA did for space shuttle launch?
Let's hope it has enough velocity to escape Earth's field and carry on. I'm sure it does, but I'll keep my fingers crossed, just in case.
13 Best WordPress Plugins you Should Have on Your Blog
More About Google Drive
In other words, yet another frustrated Mac user converted to Linux.
> When a council of countries are involved, may be governments wont resolve to such unilateral acts.

Of course they will. They'll make all sorts of unilateral acts that benefit countries.

Consider the UN. It's all about govts, not people. It can't be anything else because it's a group of govts.
Samsung requests depositions from Jony Ive and other key Apple inventors
Cool but way too expensive.
That certainly eased the pain - thank you. Still took 15 minutes to sort out, but now tomorrow I can watch a video.

Thanks.
Agreed. My area's companies typically offer $50k for entry level developers. You can swindle more out of companies if they've been looking for someone for long enough or you have a special skillset that interests them.

I have one friend who got $75k off the bat but that was a job in a company that employs 4 programmers for the entire company (national) and is energy industry related.
It's pretty rare that you actually need to use ifconfig/ip directly in Linux. For every distribution that I know of there's a specific way to setup network interfaces (e.g. /etc/network/interfaces, /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-*, etc.)
from NASA's gif, it doesn't even bend its trajectory.. and also it's gravity will not affect earth's tides and tectonic plates :)

EDIT: although from the gif it appears that it was a close call on the moon. But i close my eyes and i see a world where i get out and see a small piece of rock hit our moon with a decent explosion when the moon is full. Man if it does't affect out planet in any way, i would really like to see that happen. Gives me goosebumps every time i visualize it! amazing..
Check out the Philippines: IE at 8.6%

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-PH-monthly-201011-201110
A degree in Philosophy or English, let's say, is a luxury that would be incomprehensible to many in the developing world. If I were to suggest to the Vietnamese I know here, for example, that they spend their tuition on something that doesn't directly correlate with a roof over their head or food on their table they'd worry about my mental health.

Thanks to globalization that luxury is going to start to seem just as extravagant to Westerners.
""Perhaps even more than adding an extra display, which is often said to be the cheapest way to improve productivity.""

And which can also be a way to decrease productivity, with distractions etc. I am more productive on a smaller screen laptop than I am on a 2 screen set or even one larger (21, 27") screen. Mainly because it helps to focus on the task at hand.

We also didn't have 2 large monitors to each workstation back in the day, and somehow we did fine. Spoiled much?
http://progit.org/book/ch6-7.html
Stanford is Stanford, and Knuth is Knuth, in part because both know what issues are important.

Silverlight is reasonable and has market share. Since their goal is to get distribution....
This is a very well-written article. I really enjoyed the "What it is", "Why I like it", "How I'd use it" format. It is much more helpful than a simple list of features.
What is Shared Hosting?
Demographic still makes all the difference. I have one site that gets ~1m visits/year, targeting older folks. IE numbers:
2007, 86%
2010, 67%
YTD, 62% (ie6 still 4%)
At first I thought it was a bit silly eye candy but I have found that it really is useful for longer documents. In longer documents and code, the syntax highlighting along with the "shape" of the document gives a nice "gestalt" sense of things.
I wonder if at least some of them are enterprises who switched after the Asa/Kaply fiasco.
Blackhole Exploit Kit attack on WampServer & Wordpress sites
How to Prevent Acne?
> You're working with the edge case

The only people on this site, by definition, are edge cases. I really don't like mental masturbation, so I was really speaking to everyone reading this thread.

Your post absolutely applies for the average person.

Even for the edge cases, I'm not implying you shouldn't go to college. There is still the social aspect to consider. But, honestly, it's about time people started thinking about the option of not going to college. It's not such a terrible option and does not spell immediate doooooom.
What a load of rubbish. I suspect that the author has a very highly opinion of his intelligence and failed Physics. Rather than accepting this, he makes up a tall tale about how the way Physics is taught is deliberately made to make people fail.

I highly question the value if this link to Hacker News... I would downvote it if I could.
shrug Maybe. It's all about what's valuable to you.

I switched to tmux because it is better maintained and it has better screen splitting functionality. I also mapped screens commands over to tmux, so the switch was basically painless. Took all of 15 minutes.

If you're cool with screen, you're cool with screen. No worries.
Good question - an aircraft carrier nearer than the moon? I can't imagine that'd be visible to the naked eye - even ships on the horizon disappear pretty quick. Then again you can see satellites sometimes, but that's like 4 orders of magnitude closer.
That's brilliant, thank you.
One more nice piece of infomration (I'm sure it was out there before, but the consequences are now more interesting): If .js files referenced in your page are disallowed by robots.txt, googlebot won't load them.
Does anyone know how to tweak the windowing behaviour so that it doesn't open up all your previous windows (or group the new file in the same window as your other project)? Other than the lack of usable options, it's pretty nice!
So on one side you run a T-test to see if the correlation is significant.

On the other side you have the ability to phrase it as a question in the same language as Aristotle.
Stanford Researchers crack Captcha code
I'm on wifi, there's rarely noticeable latency, even on full screen updates.

Ctrl-a and friends still don't work properly. However, iSSH has an option that lets you use the option key instead, and for me that did work just fine, but escape didn't.

Now in version 5.x escape and ctrl work for everything except the most common emacs key bindings, and option-A doesn't any more.
Introducing the Gmail app for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch
Achieving a baseline of financial success is, in the average case, about acquiring some useful skill and providing value to someone in exchange for money. Going to college and not acquiring a useful skill cannot be anything but entertainment (and very expensive entertainment when we come to it). There's nothing depressing about this, it's just common sense, albeit common sense that very few choose to apply until it is too late.
Don't overlook the cost difference as well, the iPad2 is half the price of even the base MacBook Air and if you include the cost of the keyboard you still have a couple hundred bucks left over.
downvote!
GR stopped working for me on Chrome (works on Safari). Weird
The Moon is much larger and much farther away from the Earth than you are probably imagining when you hear this.

Still cool, though.
Just pause it for a few minutes (I did accidentally for about 10). It should be pretty smooth afterwards.
I completely agree with this:

> That learning curve is often too steep given our secondary education system . . . we need to redesign our education system taking this objective and the preparation of our students into account.

However, I vehemently disagree with this:

> If we want to increase graduation into STEM fields . . . I place the blame squarely where it belongs: on STEM departments

No, no, no, no, no! This would be a microcosm of the very issue we're talking about.

"Graduation rate" is meaningless. We want to increase the population who are STEM-literate. Like it or not, physics is calculus-based. Thermodynamics is important. And, certainly, by the time people are adults and have gone through over a decade of education, it should be within reach.

I don't blame the STEM departments at all, and would be aghast if they started churning out STEM-lite graduates as the result of some misguided new policy to increase graduation rates.
yeah that's so annoying - if you look in the Net panel in firebug, you can get the flv file url and download it from there (it's about 2GB)
well but if it comes when its night and it has a tail long enough and is also bright enough,and is close to moon from the perspective of someone on earth and hence moon light makes it more visible, then.. who knows??
Dave McClure: Why Not To Do a Startup
We keep our main repository in under dev/$PROJECT and backup repositories under user/$USERNAME/$PROJECT. Then we set a post-commit hook to push to the backup server on commit. Setting up the backup and creating the hook is done by a shell script you run after cloning.
$800 gets you a pretty nice laptop. I don't see the advantage of this approach at all.
The authors hail from Troy NY, perhaps their app simply says "freezing rain" and sets the chance of precipitation to 100% between October and May.
I don't know of any off-hand, but there must be; Knuth is usually collating the work of others.

The abstract for the lecture is here: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/musings.html
Give science a little more credit :) The n-body problem is hard, but it's more like "we don't know if this same asteroid will hit the Earth 20 years from now" hard than "this asteroid could shift course at any moment!" hard.
This guy clearly had shitty teachers. Unfortunately, this has caused him to conclude that his bad college experience is a manifestation of a global international conspiracy to suppress his awesomeness. I bet it would shock him to learn that college doesn't really care about him that much.
It is not free, but neither is my time. I find that Navicat is awesome.