skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I went the other direction. After finding math and science easy before college, I avoided science classes in college to avoid being too nerdy.

By junior year I realized I loved science too much, overcame being bothered by what other people thought, majored in physics, and got a PhD.

My last two years of the PhD I ended up starting a company and became a successful entrepreneur in media, which is, I guess, the payoff to the economy of someone going into math and science.

Check out this irony. I've come to create art with my medium and taught a couple art courses at art schools to MFA and BFA candidates. The art students learn programming, circuits, entrepreneurship, design, and such.

I'm talking about programs like NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Project and Parsons' Arts, Media, and Technology program.

We created these displays, which is pretty techy and beautiful.
- http://joshuaspodek.com/tag/unionsquareinmotion
- http://joshuaspodek.com/new_bryant_park_in_motion_videos
Steve Jobs wanted Apple to build its own wireless network
At one point I worked on reviewing the code for an emergency alert system for a university. Our group made it really simple not notify 60k people of all sorts of emergencies, through a really simple UI. We had it calling, texting, emailing, updating Facebook and Twitter and displaying messages on TV screens.

We also had an equally important test system so the campus police could test their familiarity with the procedures daily. This is the kind of app that saves lives; hence the line-by-line code reviews of every single change to the application, and backup procedures for backup procedures in case something breaks.

It is true, not every day you get to work on something like that. However, when you do, it always makes the hair on the back of your head stand up each time you find a bug.
Actually, spelling might be the only exception to that rule.

If you genuinely misspell a word, it's nice to have it fix it for you in one motion.
You don't need to issue a cease-and-desist to choke the life out of a company through clouded regulation such is the case w/ FaceCash. Aaron is obviously going to operate his company within the confines of California law and wasn't able to do so...

I'll be following the civil suit very closely. Best of luck.
Why do you prefix HN usernames with a '?
Facebook was once one of those startups.
It's documented in the complaint filed with the Court.
Definitely agree with you on those points, what do you think of the type system in F#?
You wanna know what debit cards don't do that credit cards do? Help me build a credit history and a good credit score in preparation for buying a car and/or house. In absence of credit cards (ergo credit history), the only way to buy a new car or house (for the first time) is Cash or Co-signer.

If you already have a credit history because you already bought a car or a house, good for you, but how did you get there?
Fukushima radiation spread: wide dispersion and localized hot spots
Portable HD speaker from SPAR doubles as speakerphone and mobile phone charger
Why do you say "far behind"? I can go into pretty much any store in the world and bust out a piece of plastic to pay for the purchase. And I get frequent flyer miles.
My apologies for being redundant, then!

I have a hunch that the penalties for check fraud are disproportionately severe compared with crimes of a similar social impact. I wonder if the same would be true with ACH transfers. My point is that governments take bank crimes seriously as prosecute them aggressively.
Now that is a clever idea.
Brilliant reply. Most people don't want to read about technical pieces and when they are presented with them, they will most likely flip past.
Dancing with The Stars Semi finals
Dancing with The Stars Semi finals
Hampered by a sprained ankle in the trials Martinez scored a disappointing 23 for her Paso Doble with Karina Smirnoff.
James Burke: Why not AMD?
IPv4 was designed in the early 1980s. Are you saying Cerf et al. made IP addresses only 32 bits so they could cash in 30 years later? Or are you saying that almost all ISPs are delaying IPv6 so they can cash in (fairly small amounts of money) on IPv4 addresses?
Linux Today - Fedora 16 KDE: Improving Perfection
I completely agree that PhD programs in STEM fields have become extremely uncompetitive with the professions (a RAND study on the supposed shortage of scientists and engineers that reached the same conclusion Greenspun reaches, though with a more data driven, less anecdotal approach.)

But keep in mind, we're talking about undergraduate degrees here, which is a different beast entirely. Engineering and physical science majors really do have considerably better employment prospects on average than humanities or social science majors.

That said, I suppose you still have to analyze it from the perspective of a student who is sure to attend professional school. If you know you're law-school bound, you're at a reputable university, and you have high grades in humanities and the ability to ace standardized tests, you can still have a high paying career in law without ever taking a serious math class.

Engineering/Sci majors are often more desirable on the way out - a law school graduate with an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering has more options than one with an undergrad major in English.

Considering how much harder these degrees are, it could still be rational for a student to avoid these fields even at the undergraduate level - and if they harm your GPA, it might be best to avoid them (though some admissions officials do say they discount high GPAs in "easier" majors). And even if you can hack it, you'll work a hell of a lot harder in college. But if you're willing to put in the effort and have the ability, you do improve your job prospects with an rigorous Math/Sci/Eng major over a humanities major in almost every career scenario.

So on the balance, I think you can make a very strong ROI case for engineering in eng/sci/math at the undergrad level. MS, less so, but it's a short program. PhD? Well, the RAND institute already crunched the numbers better than I ever could, it's pretty hard to justify a PhD in STEM relative to the professions if you're going off career ROI.
Ebury, a sophisticated new SSH trojan
I contact Speech Language Pathologists personally, and it is their clients that purchase the application. Maybe 20% come from personal contacts in some way.

No, I haven't used AdWords yet.
It might be just my home and work connections and their latency, but for me the auto-complete has hugely slowed down my searches.

I type rather fast (as you can tell by all the typos in my posts) and today I type something in and then wait for all the auto-complete options to settle down.

Sure, I don't have to hit the search button to get results anymore. But previously it was faster to type, then hit search, then get results. Much faster.
> Also, the whole point of open-source is the right to "fork" which trumps all other freedoms you might have.

No. That is the whole point of free software. The point of open source is just that the source code is made freely available.
Exactly. It just doesn't make sense for me to have a checking account with $10k or $20k in it earning 0% interest just in case, when I can have a credit card with a $20k limit in my pocket all the time that I can use if I ever need it.
Mimicking the brain, in silicon
"Be yourself" is not good social media advice
I have a couple friends who are designers. But many more who are programmers.
I know that a lot of people state Isaacson's lack of knowledge in the technical area as a failing but I must disagree fully with the fact that the book is anything but a revelation.

For weeks afterwards, Hacker News and pretty much every other news resource on the internet was full of posts about how Steve Jobs had affected people, almost all were positive.

This book, although at times, the design genius of Job's shines forth, paints a very realistic picture of this demanding, hurtful person who painted a picture of how he wanted his own life to be, and never erred from that. Although said like that it seem's like a very driven goal, he neglected those he was supposedly close to, while again and again putting his need for perfection in front of everything including his own flesh and blood.

I completely disagree with the post, and think Isaacson unveiled the true person behind the visionary and wonderful facade.
Mine returns faster than I can finish typing and look down.
Researchers Develop Runway Anti-Icing System
http://www.ginzametrics.com/terms.html

Is linked during the 'Request Demo' signup (which should't need my phone # btw)..

I think you meant to link /terms/
Where exactly does he say that they didn't keep that stuff?
thanks. here's a couple bugfixes. fixed width calc & handles negative #s

https://gist.github.com/1368454
So true. I recommend every get themselves some smart, patient friends. Makes all the difference.
I seem to recall reading in prior discussion on this that +foo included stemming while "foo" does not? (And, therefor, some people were unhappy with "foo" not just due to the syntax change but also due to the difference in behavior.)

Some other people in this thread have suggested ¬ as a substitute (and no, it's not on a typical U.S. keyboard). Others point out that ¬ means negation in a typical context. Do you folks index backticks? If not, what about backtick? I guess that wouldn't be too *NIXy; however, most keyboards seem to have one, and if it's not currently indexed, might be a choice. (It's also "sort of quotish", in nature.)

P.S. Hmm... Backtick could cause unexpected results in the case of someone pasting a single quoted value from Word, or similar. Might not be the common, though, and I never did like Word's "smart quotes", anyway. ;-)
Does he, though? He's sort of saying that they evolved the existing system instead of jumping to a new one, but AFAIK OS X was NeXT with a compatibility layer, prettier GUI and some other changes. Saying that anyone upgrading from OS 9 would not see a whole new interface seems wrong to me.
Custom small-time boards get expensive quickly when you shoot for tighter tolerances, which are necessary for truly tight spacing. If Raspberry Pi expects to sell 10 million units, then even a fancy board will cost nothing, but I doubt they are planning on such numbers...
You still have to load jQuery through the client. What it does is expose RPC.

So in your situation I'd believe what you'd see is the server sending the command to attach event handlers to the elements you're clicking before you start interacting with it.
You have completely misunderstood the OP. Stop writing and re-read.
Dynavox is the largest of the companies. Just search for augmentative and alternative communication devices.
New Advancements Could Put DreamWorks on Top
> Someone else's life is on the line. They need to be sure.

I'm pretty sure if my life was on the line I'd rather get both bone marrow and HIV than neither. HIV is essentially a chronic disease nowadays in the developed world, and if there was any suspicion of HIV in the donor they could add antiretrovirals into the cocktail I'd already be taking.

It's not as if gay men are the only ones to get HIV, anyways.
Watch realtime microfinance loan activity on Kiva
There isn't a service behind the startup. You're right that one-time sales is the ideal model, but I haven't thought of a great way to do recurring revenue.
I disagree. The book could have been a seminal historical document of a major actor in business and technology of the late 20th century and start of the 21st century, the sort of thing that people could turn to for decades.

But if it's barely better than a celebrity bio, and didn't ask the relevant questions, then it's an opportunity missed.

Let's face it: yeah, the 'human interest' story of Jobs' fight with cancer is interesting and will sell books, but it's not what was of value for history.

If you read about George Washington, generally you want to know about the Revolution and the founding of the US, not his final illness and the bleeding treatments he underwent that may have killed him.

Too bad Jobs didn't pick someone a) more technical, and b) more experienced writing bios of living people.
"What I'm wondering is, how do more and smaller startups equate to eventual consolidation?"

It doesn't, if anything it slows down any eventuality of it. He's saying it does to try and scare talent on the fence and talent that has already gone the startup route by saying its a misguided and futile effot.

Ask yourself this, if this big companies werent hurting because of these loses, would they waste time making the comments in the first place? Its cheaper to try scare tactics then to offer them more money.
I don't think it,the curriculum, is too difficult, but the professors that teach the lower level general curriculum freshman year in most universities. I mean I had professors that were literally out in left field, and don't get me started on the foreign TAs. There was always major communication barriers during my first two quarters in EE. Enthusiasm coming from professors is contagious, but so is boredom.
Actually you're both wrong and a little right.

I think you both imagine that transfusions are 1 on 1. (1 donor, 1 recipient). In this case, the numbers you present kind-of work out. And sure, a risk of HIV (or whatever) infection versus certain death is worth it in any scenario. (Especially now that HIV/AIDS is chronic and treatable rather than terminal).

Many scenarios involve heavy blood loss and require more than what is normally given by a donor in a single donation. This means drawing on the pool of available blood, so multiple donations will be used of the same type, but they won't be from the same donor.

This raises the risk of transfusing infected blood significantly which is one of the reasons that the screening for blood donation harshly excludes anyone who fits in one or more higher risk groups.

I'm a donor and where I live you can't donate blood if you've received blood (inter-species tissue exchange), lived in UK in the 90s (mad cow disease risk), were born in sub-Saharan Africa (HIV risk) and a couple of others. This includes ever having had male/male sex (very high risk group). Ever been paid for sex? Out. Ever exchanged drugs for sex? Out. The list goes on and on.

The 'in the last 12 months' items are again a form of risk management (they include new partners, tattoos, piercings, infections, illness, surgery, travel to risk countries, etc).

All blood gets tested and though false negatives are still possible, most infections are statistically close enough to 100% detectable after 6 months.

Where I live it's also illegal to sell parts of your body (which includes your blood). The idea behind that is that legalizing this would create a predatory market between people with money and those on the bottom rung of the ladder (poor, addicted, high-risk, all of the above). That's not a hard sell, but it also acts as a filter in the blood donation system. People who are most likely to sell blood are the people you don't want giving blood in the first place.

A detail in my country is that the donation forms don't ask about your sexual orientation, which is irrelevant. If you identify as homosexual (male/male or female/female) but have never had male/male sex, you're good to go.

Blood donation is a region where you're just harshly subjected to selection based on statistics which place you in one risk group or another. Discrimination doesn't factor into it.
"compilable perl" has been "on the horizon" for 15 years. I suggest you not measure it by that rate.
Kindle Fire owners: Post screenshots/video of programming PDF on the Kindle Fire
I'm considering purchasing a Kindle Fire in order to consume the numerous programming PDF books that are all the rage these days. For cost reasons, I'm hoping the KF can do a decent enough job over the iPad so I can save the extra cash.

Would appreciate photos/screenshots/videos of a Kindle Fire with a programming PDF on it's display.
Null-terminated UTF-8 could be a type but in most languages that use such a construct it is not, and those languages where it could be a type, the designers are usually smart enough not to make such a type.

A null terminated UTF-8 string type gets into interesting territory when you want to add multibyte characters AND have a valid type at the same time.
I actually found the first half of the book more engaging than the second half. I think part of it was that the second half felt rushed - Isaacson covered too many things without going into much detail for any of them and he made more grammatical mistakes.

My main stylistic gripe, however (which Gruber mentioned on The Talk Show), was that you couldn't tell if Jobs' quotes from the interviews or from the time the events were taking place.

The book was originally scheduled to come out early next year, I believe, and was moved up to late October around the time Steve resigned. The publishers wanted the bio to coincide (read: cash-in on) with Steve's death and we got a rushed product.
Why You Should Prefer Dictatorship over Democracy
First controlled experiments on ocean acidification in the deep sea
Whoops. I apologize for my characteristically American cultural buffoonery.
Add the tag yourself! My profile [1] features EMBEDDED C, PCB-DESIGN, and DSP tags. EMBEDDED C existed, I created the other two. EMBEDDED and EMBEDDED SW were also extant when I got here, but there's currently no search feature to see who else uses these tags or what projects used them.

I think HARDWARE is too ambiguous; this could apply to anything from implementing a task on a breadboard to architecting a server rack.

That said, Thomas said that they were working on improved tag features as fas [sic, he's working fast!] as they could. [2].

I've suggested this on the UserVoice tracker [3].

[1]: http://www.weekendhacker.net/hackers/Kevin%20Vermeer

[2]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3238678

[3]: http://weekendhacker.uservoice.com/forums/138659-general/sug...
Apple Names Arthur D. Levinson Board Chairman, Bob Iger (Disney) Joins Too
Apple® today named Arthur D. Levinson, Ph. D. as the Company’s non-executive Chairman of the Board. Levinson has been a co-lead director of Apple’s board since 2005, has served on all three board committees—audit and finance, nominating and corporate governance, and compensation—and will continue to serve on the audit committee. Apple also announced that Robert A. Iger, President and Chief Executive Officer of The Walt Disney Company, will join Apple’s board and will serve on the audit committee.
omfg thanks! :-)
"Since all crewmembers will be expected to fly aboard the Soyuz vehicle and perform Extravehicular Activities (space walks), applicants must meet the anthropometric requirements for both the Soyuz vehicle and the extravehicular activity mobility unit (space suit). Applicants brought in for interview will be evaluated to ensure they meet the anthropometric requirements."

...or you will be charged for two seats.
Seems like a good option for people frustrated with Netflix...
Steve Jobs reportedly wanted to build own wireless net
I'm surprised that you were able to decide to major in physics your junior year. At my school, if you didn't take physics your first year, you simply could not graduate as a physics major in four years (at least without getting a special exception to double up on courses, which would require you to be nearly super-human). Perhaps this phenomenon contributes to the low numbers of science majors, as well. Lots of people don't figure out what to major in until they are a year or two into college, which rules out a lot of STEM possibilities if you happened not to take the correct courses in your first year.
Entrepreneurship is our revolution (Steve Blank)
A good paper came out a few years ago that defeats ROP by adding protections to ensure that returns/calls/jumps are only taken if the function was entered at its entry point, and rearranging register allocation if the compiler creates unaligned instructions that can be used to ret/jmp. They say the performance penalty isn't huge, but I guess it must be enough if people aren't implementing it.

[1] G-Free: Defeating Return-Oriented Programming
through Gadget-less Binaries (http://iseclab.org/papers/gfree.pdf)
I used to think the only argument in favors of credit cards is that they offer credit.

However, from a purely selfish perspective, they also reward people who pay on time - if you play the "rewards" game, which I have avoided throughout most of my adult life. I regret that now. The rewards are pretty substantial and based on my math they almost make up for the transaction fees (I would say you can get 2% cash back - which offsets most of the 3% the card company takes).

The question is will merchants offer discounts for dwolla? I doubt it. Instead Dwolla will have to offer cash back or other rewards to customers. Given their financials as described in this article, I don't see why they couldn't succeed. Clearly their model works better for merchants. Does it work better for consumers? Only if they offer rewards, which would cut into their attractiveness for merchants. Still with a flat $0.25 they could gain serious traction with large item merchants.

I am hoping the likely outcome of this is a further weakening of the conventional financial industry.

It will be fun to watch. I wish them the best of luck.
The problem isn't that you did a far better job than the drones you go to class with, or that the teacher doesn't really actually know the material they're required to teach, or that the politics of the system dictate that a marking scheme exists that is as unimaginative as it is explicit.

No, the problem is that as an autodidact 16 year old in a government run public school, you have a very limited if nonexistent ability to discover that fact. Take solace in this F, and know that you have a disfunction that public schools and universities are mostly ill-equipped to handle -- the ability to learn for yourself.

Take patio11's advice: don't spend your awesome points on tasks that are ultimately unimportant. Or as some dudes from way back said, "don't give your pearls to swine lest they trample it and then turn on you."
ThinkUp Reaches 1.0: Own Your Social Network Data
Can't speak much about new MBA grads, New grad lawyers are doing pretty awful these days (IANAL, but I have several friends who graduated from decent-but-not-amazing law schools this year, and had/are having a hard time getting fulltime jobs as supposed to temp/contact work.)
Aha I had assumed that it was an error on the part of the quotee -- this was not the case then? Either way, no judgement on my part, I'm not pedantic about such things.
I think the best bet is JQuery - it's not bad but definitely not as quick for GUIs. Browser compatibility is still a crapshoot when working with html/css/js and it will only get worse with HTML5. Good luck.
That is a bizarre argument though, you are saying that capitalism works fine so long as companies are run as soviet states? The Soviet Union showed basically no benefits to the command economy... And the great leaders of large businesses look rather more like command economy leaders than products of a free market.

I think you need a better argument than that that large corporations are here to stay, not a passing fad due to factors like transaction costs... There have been few great leaders running large corporates, although not none, and many people just enriching themselves for doing little.
> Was the divestiture of their investment in ARM a mistake, looking back?

Do you think there's an even remotely interesting, non-obvious answer to that question? And do we really need Steve Jobs to answer questions about PA Semi? Is that how you would spend your limited time with Steve?

Antennagate. Isaacson chose to focus on Jobs's the response to the problem, and I thought he did a great job. It is a book about Jobs after all, and for the most part I found it fascinating.

I can recommend better books about Apple history, but there are none better about the man himself.
Tim Draper's 8 Rules for Start Up Success
no surprise there.