skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would agree with you for the most part. Top schools ("T14" for us law nerds and "the Top 14 law schools" for the lay people!) are fairly easy to get B's in given effort is extended, but A's are still hard to get. I don't know many T14 schools that have curved and capped classes. I wasn't in an extremely lower ranked school (top 30) but it was a hardcore school in terms of the curve. They've since relaxed a bit (now A's are capped around 18% I believe). I do know people that went to Boalt and got D's so it's possible but failing out is pretty unheard of in law school, period. Also the legal job market has shifted dramatically in the past 4 years so those B students at high ranked schools can't bank on an offer from a big firm based on the name of their school anymore--I know too many who are unemployed for that to be the case.

Funny thing is my husband did his UG in ME at Berkeley and that department ( and the College of Engineering in general) was a sheer nightmare. The unimaginable things that took place and the workload he endured (while working 20 hours at LBNL) blew my mind and that was just a BS. I can imagine a PhD would be insane.

But my point wasn't that one is harder, just that law is hard and it's not an easy thing to grasp because they ask you to learn and be tested in a way that is very non-traditional, at least in my experience. It makes babies out of people who thought of school as a cake walk. It was actually funny at times to see the emotional breakdown over their first B or C because they were so dramatic about it.

But I commend you on your choice to leave law school, probably smartest thing you ever did! ha.
Well said! I don't think I found a argument in that article that I would agree with. The mentioning of Perl as a great example is probably the worst. The purpose of a programming language is to express things as precisely as possible, both to a computer and to a human. Perl's extreme context-sensitivity is what I dislike most about it.

Regarding Unicode support, I see it having some advantages, but current editors don't support Unicode input well. Emacs has an input mode where you can type \alpha and it replaces it with the appropriate unicode character, but I haven't seen any other editors with support for that. For some more obscure symbols, it can also be difficult to find out how to input them.

I'm wondering whether that article is actually meant seriously -- some of these claims are just so absurd.
One story that I think can help explain why many companies are stuck selling to Walmart is this one:
http://www.fastcompany.com/node/47593/print

The issue quickly becomes a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" issue. If you supply them, they quickly drive your margins to the point where you have to offshore to stay in business. If you don't supply them, you get cut out of the largest retailer in the US and lose that way. Either way, you are screwed.

As I mentioned earlier, if you replace your ERP system (or upgrade it past a certain dollar point), you have to modify it so that Walmart has direct access to the internals. This means that they're placing (and cancelling) orders directly in your system without intervention (if you aren't careful, this can foul up your staffing). This also means that they know your costs, expenses and margins. You aren't going to have any negotiating power when it comes time for them to lower your prices.
Ask HN: Hard Drive Shortage?
Has anyone heard about the coming hard drive shortage? I heard from our corporate parts supplier that "there will be a price increase on computers and computer related products that come with a hard drive because of supply allocation problems due to flood in Thailand", and today the local computer store is saying "Due to a global hard drive shortage, there will be a purchase limit of 2 hard drives per customer until further notice."
Nah you would be given a dosage large enough just to kill the invading virus. It could hurt the person, but killing them is unlikely. Actually wrote a paper on a something similar I came up with back in undergrad using HIV.
"rather than losing mainly students from disadvantaged backgrounds or with lackluster records, the attrition rate can be higher at the most selective schools"

I wonder if this is a visible effect of the fact that the most "prestigious" schools typically hire faculty solely on their research record and care not one whit about how good or interested they are at teaching...
Thanks for the reply.

It's a pity that there's nothing open source like the Tracelytics SaaS out there.

While it may be OK for a large company to build a full stack, not everyone can afford to build a full stack (write the web app, the monitoring suite, deployment, etc).
> you have to rewrite all your enrollment specs to respect that new interface now, regardless of if they were shitty or well-written.

No, not if you're doing it correctly.

Again, that's not a unit test, it's a functional test. Unit tests test really small blocks of code. If you're crossing class boundaries, generally, it's not really a unit test.

Let me show you what I mean with tests I wrote:

https://github.com/newrelic/rpm/blob/master/test/new_relic/a...

Those are unit tests (not beautiful ones, written to refactor, but I digress) - they mock cross-object (and even cross method, in some cases) and they really focus on individual paths through the code. If you change a method, only tests relating to that method fail.

Edit: also, "the problem isn't that my tests are bad," is a poor assumption to start with - you're assuming a priori something that we're discussing here, which is that you're complaining about problems resulting from not testing correctly. "Bad" is a loaded word in any case - I'm not sure there's a test I've seen that couldn't be improved.
Max Levchin phrased this very point beautifully on his Startup School talk (I think it was an advice by Peter Thiel): "A difficult problem doesn't necessarily mean a valuable problem". Your job as a programmer is to add value. Now if you keep working on super interesting stuff, that doesn't add value, what's the point really? You should spend your free time on the interesting problems that don't add value.
The difference between superficial knowledge and real knowledge is nicely illustrated in one of Feynman's little stories:

"So we went alone for our walk in the woods. But mothers were very powerful in those days as they are now, and they convinced the other fathers that they had to take their own sons out for walks in the woods. So all fathers took all sons out for walks in the woods one Sunday afternoon. The next day, Monday, we were playing in the fields and this boy said to me, "See that bird standing on the stump there? What's the name of it?"

I said, "I haven't got the slightest idea."

He said, "It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn't teach you much about science."

I smiled to myself, because my father had already taught me that [the name] doesn't tell me anything about the bird. He taught me "See that bird? It's a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it's called a halsenflugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird--you only know something about people; what they call that bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way," and so forth. There is a difference between the name of the thing and what goes on."
There's an analogy to be made to birth control - it's expensive up front, sure, but the long term savings...
You're forgetting the red tape that comes along with government agencies in bringing in non-standard tools and in submitting purchase requests. There's a lot more to it than pulling out your cash to buy something that's pretty much going to be a paperweight outside of mobile development use in an environment that's mostly windows based.
Winamp for Mac
Big German retailer mediamarkt/Saturn does this. So does French Carrefour. 90/120 days I think
'VOTE to keep us RICH and you POOR' hilarious New Zealand election campaign
BBC news has some articles:

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15534614)

Hard drives also need rare earth minerals for the magnets, and there are going to be greater shortages of those over coming years.
Yes, it's all over the tech news.
I'd say a hustler is a do-er. He's solution focused, knows how to talk to whom about what problem to get it solved, goes the extra mile and is just as passionate as the hacker (he just works on a different problem than you).
Fx 7.0.1, Win7-64, radeon mobility hd 4350 works great for me
Here's what I see when I tell my browser to pretend it's an iPhone:

http://imgur.com/QVpwz
The memory is what's holding me back from going with the Air.

The new Macbook Pro can actually take up to 16 GB RAM (though it's not a cheap upgrade). I've personally found that memory is the single best performance enhancer for the Mac - I've got a 4 GB Macbook with SSD now, but I'd love to have 16 GB RAM in a new Macbook Pro.
Pharmaceutical and other physical patents make sense and appear to work. But arguing that software companies won't innovate without patents ignores the fact that software companies did innovate without patents, for years. And software patents obviously haven't been working: see Microsoft's patent on "if not", among other things.
Some Ran­dom Num­bers of People Work­ing on the Web’s Fu­ture
Best of Vim: Showcasing the top Vim plugins
I've had good luck with New Relic* although on first glance I'm not sure if it offers as comprehensive a monitoring service as this system.

* http://newrelic.com/features/performance-analytics
cryptome.org has been around for a very long time. It's probably easier to just submit to them.
Well, it's what patents are supposed to be. In reality, it all depends where you draw the line between "problem" and "solution", and IMO this is where a lot of patents, especially software ones, go seriously wrong.

If the problem is defined as "send images of checks instead of checks", then DataTreasury is trying to assert ownership over the entire problem rather than their particular solution - they're claiming that any solution that deals in images of checks instead of physical checks infringes, regardless of how it's implemented.

If you define the problem as "don't send physical checks", then sure, the particular solution, "send images of checks instead" is what they're asserting ownership over.

But in that case, the non-triviality of the solution is seriously questionable. There's no engineering insight at all required to come up with that, and it's one of the first things any group of people would think of when presented with the problem. The entire difficulty is all in how to actually implement such a system (and pre-1994, those implementation details made it unlikely that such a system would work).

IMO, in a situation like this, what the patent should cover is the new stuff that DataTreasury actually invented (and I agree that there is some non-trivial content there), not the entire high level problem that their invention allowed them to solve.
would know abou it
Incidentally, I'm not just being cynical here: most selective universities have official policies where a) they bid for desirable students with grant aid (academically inclined students, desirable minorities, etc) but b) external scholarships decrease grant aid, typically at a 50% ratio. If someone external to the university subsidizes your education, the university acts to capture the subsidy, justified entirely by "Because we can."

I paid for a good portion of my college education with external scholarships. Each time I scrounged up another $2,000, the university financial aid department said "Great! We'll decrease your loans by $1,000 and decrease your grant aid by $1,000." (My mother aggressively negotiated with them on this, every time, and got the clawback rescinded "as a one-time exception" something like eight times. I thought this was embarrassing at the time. I plead youth and stupidity on that.)
You're still missing the real value, which is not the "degree" but rather the connections.

Just make friends with rich people and get them to hire you at their friend's giant corporation where their job is to undermine democracy and fool people. It's easy and pays well.
Math is to brain what lifting weights is to muscles. We teach math not because of some useful skills but to increase brain capacity. For the same reason languages used to be taught in the past. As same as with weight lifting it has to be hard to get results otherwise it's a waste of time.
This is how almost every movie about an apocalyptic mass pandemic starts.
Somewhat, but most liberal arts PhDs only get a small stipend from being a TA plus in-state tuition if it's a public University. Maybe what you're thinking about is being funded, that allows you to get your PhD essentially for free. I'm sure that is available for STEM as well?
Tablet Wars: Why Amazon Doesn’t Scare Apple (and B&N Scares No One)
I liked the points he made, but didn't like the title because it didn't seem to involve hustling or a manifesto.
This has nothing to do with patents.
This is a good learning experience for Anonymous. They've never faced an organization that has no qualms about kidnapping and brutally murdering them. Maybe there will be a change in their tactics?
The web as the gods — or at least Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen — intended! That content would even render and navigate nicely in Lynx.
The Non-Technical Founder's Nightmare
It might help to know that there is typiclly a design step and there is a slicing step. Former yields a pixel-perfect Photoshop sketch of the UI flow, and slicing is what converts it to the actual CSS/JS/HTML. You may try and check if divorcing these steps by using a designer for one and a dedicated slicing service for second (there is a lot of them out there) - if this would help reducing the cost.

For middle-tier designers, design students and affordably priced wannabes have a look at Forrst. That's the core of their user base and they have also recently launched a job mediation service.
Works here on FF10, Linux, NVidia.
No...many ambitious people are also perfectionists, and perfectionists are often horrible procrastinators as they wait for things to line up perfectly or wait to refine it one more time before releasing, putting off the next phase over and over.

Also, one very dangerous form of procrastination is doing real work...just work that is less important than what you should be doing. Paul Graham touches on this at http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html
Sounds like Australia's system [1]: "This funding is in the form of loans that are not normal debts. They are repaid over time via a supplementary tax, using a sliding scale based on taxable income. As a consequence, loan repayments are only made when the former student has income to support the repayments."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loan#Australia
DRONES and US Internal Security
Motorola Announces Xoom 2 and Xoom 2 Media Edition Tablets
Highlights at HighScalability: http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/4/27/paper-dapper-googl...
Because presumably it contains things that nobody wants released like confidential informants?
How are agencies threatened by Google and Facebook? They aren't creative ad agencies. They provide publishing media (Google's AdWords, PPC ads, Facebook ads, fan pages, etc) and tools (Google Analytics) that agencies use to advertise more effectively. If anything, I'd say Google, Facebook and the like are helping ad industry grow.
Hmm, not sure I'm following you here.
I love NewRelic, it just costs too much per server. We run a bunch of slices over at Slicehost and it would costs over a thousand dollars a month to monitor them all.

For now I'm just running the NewRelic free version on two of the slices.
The stricter schedule in advertising vs work whenever probably has little to do with it. Advertising by its nature is more predictable, it doesn't have long term, world changing impact. The ultimate problem of selling is easy enough to crack, even if a campaign flops you try again. They're satisfied with their efficiency so no need to invest in neuroscience yet.

In software/science/math there is more variety, some problems are hard to crack. There is also more motivation to improve efficiency by orders of magnitude, to disrupt the market, like Google/Facebook do. Ad agencies don't develop new tech, only adapt to it, so they're vulnerable to obsolescence. At some point advances in neuroscience, behavioral economics and tech will outpace the rate at which most agencies can adapt.

There are agencies that spend crazy hours polishing up their work, or more often mismanaging. But the end result of such effort is more polished work, not necessarily effect, or a larger quantity of work thrown out on a whim. In technology the end result of crazy hours has more potential impact.
Debug node.js applications on Windows with iisnode integrated debugging
Khan Academy Gets $5m to Expand Platform & Build a Physical School
Ask HN - Bank Transfer Day API
I love the idea of bank transfer day, but switching auto-bill pay is a huge PITA.

Has anyone developed an API to import / export bill pay data from one financial institution to another?
I'm not sure what relevance that has to my dislike of unnecessarily gender specific pronouns.
Wait I thought they called it off for a different reason about a week ago. EDIT: RTFA! Sorry.

The Zetas actually released the guy? Wow!
NfS The Run Key
You can check pidoco https://pidoco.com/
Gender Studies (along with Critical Theory, Intersectionality, etc) are some of my non-programming educational pursuits, and I agree. That stuff is hard. And not just because of the density of the language, a lot of it is conceptually very difficult to grasp, especially for those whom it does not viscerally effect.

Maybe engineers should be required to take an intense, no-hands-held Gender Studies class, if the other departments are required to take difficult math classes.
I think you've hit the nail on the head.

So many patents these days (in software, at least) are just as you describe: cases where someone realized that a problem existed, came up with a quite straightforward solution, and patented it.

We need Congress or the courts to tell the PTO that "obvious" means "the solution is straightforward given the problem". And then, of course, we need to get the PTO to hire software engineers who actually know how to build things, so they know what that means.
Yeah this is very common and it's one of the reasons why Apple is so good at managing their cash.

By delaying payments Apple can use the cash for other short-term investment opportunities. In Apple's case, their accounts payable is probably in the billions. As an example: If Apple has a $10 billion accounts payable and instead of paying it right away they waited for 3 months and invested that $10 billion on short-term securities with a 10% return, Apple would earn $1 billion in that 3-month period vs. ZERO if they paid their liabilities right away.
> There's nothing special about this - pull up any newspaper or online news site and you'll see the same thing.

I'm pretty sure that this is not in disagreement with the author's point.
Exploring JavaScript’s Logical OR Operator
Ooops. I don't know why I said the 15" maxes out at 8GB. What I meant to type was.. "My wallet maxes out at the price of 8GB's". The price on individual 8GB sticks are astronomical.
This is actually pretty awesome. Nicely done.
I like you they underlined the Android part, why take on iPhone, that's dominated by iTunes when there's such a great market for Android.
That's a pretty standard usage of gravitational lensing. It's a giant magnifying glass in space, and they've used them as such since like forever.
Ira Glass on disappointment and creative work
(Disclaimer: I'm one of the engineers at Tracelytics)

Tracelytics has two big features that New Relic doesn't have:

- Support for service oriented architectures. We'll show you what called what, and how the caller affects the callee's performance.

- More flexible filtering throughout the app. We let you filter on URLs, controllers/actions, custom-defined apps, even memcache keys or SQL queries, and carry these filters around with you go from page to page. It really helps isolate a problem with, for instance, a memcache call that only originates from one URL.

Now, obviously I'm biased, but I think that these two can make a big difference, especially when you're trying to track down a performance problem for the first time.
What would you suggest as a primer on marketing a Saas or online marketing?
Since I've been downmodded about 100 times for this comment, I thought I'd point out that it's Stockholm that's trying to get him extradited.

It was a play on words, guys.
I put up some of the Rust-Oleum paint last year but I wasn't a huge fan. If you didn't erase within a few hours, your marks didn't just wipe off, which made it pretty useless. I didn't try any special cleaners though, so I don't know if that would be a solution.
iisnode is one of my top 3 favorite projects of the year. In my experience with hosting a few production Node apps on Ubuntu and on Windows, I'll be hosting future Node apps on Windows any time I can (i.e. when they don't rely on C modules). There's no comparison. I highly recommend checking it out if you're working with Node and have a Windows server handy.
Yea, I know. In fact, I believe the culture of greed of legacy MBAs is closely related to rent-seeking.
Sure, but that doesn't mean that everyone switching out of STEM courses "failed to measure up" or was "afraid of facts".

If I attempted to teach Computing Science to people by having them sit in 400 person lecture halls while I read K&R and CLRS at them for 4 years, any number of bright people who could succeed in comp sci would rightly get fed up with the uselessness of my shitty curriculum and drop out or switch majors. And yet a surprising number of Engineering curriculums are structured this way, because it's cheap and easy for the professors.
I don't think Justin Frankel has worked for Winamp for some time. He's over at Cockos these days.
How about a new Mac App Store?
Because of the recent sandboxing issues which will take place from coming March and on, how about an indie Mac App Store — people will submit .dmg files, users can download.

Thoughts?
Do you have info on how well dry markers wipe off after a week or a month?
On The Way To Work
I like Marc Andreessen's post on productivity, especially "structured procrastination" where procrastination is actually encouraged (there's a good chance that the things you procrastinate on aren't all that important).

http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-pers...
How to win a pitch competition: not with the best idea
I think it's short hand for this blog post which popularized the term.

http://learntoduck.com/micah/hackers-hustlers

A startup can consist of two hackers - but one has to function at least part time as a hustler.

FYI locally at Michigan State the student entrepreneurs group is called hackers and hustlers and it was named after that very post.
This assumes anonymous is a unified collective, when they are really much closer to a flag of convenience.
Is its top speed really the snails pace shown in the video? For heaven's sake, why not ride a bike?
Looks promising, but very basic so far. No shuffle/repeat, enqueueing, or really anything beyond play, pause, previous, and next. It did import my iTunes library in <2 seconds though, which seems impressive compared to iTunes', what, 15 minutes?

Excited to see a hopefully serious competitor to iTunes, it's actually great to see them starting simple. What's there works well.
No doubt Cryptome is great, but they only post information of a very specific theme. It'd be good to have more places to put data - hopefully places without gatekeepers.
True, but "directly" is rather relative anyway.