skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How do you quantify the importance of a major compared to another? Certainly poets, historians, artists, and writers have more than a monetary importance in society. How do you measure the inspiration a great writer generates? How do you objectively compare the societal benefit of a mathematician versus a historian so that you can mete their funding accordingly?

I see a lot of "bootstraps" comments in the tech field— specifically about the liberal arts— and it's a shame. I wouldn't be in this field if it weren't for some of those "worthless" degrees like English (great writing helps the learning process) and Design (people are attracted to good-looking websites).

My apologies if I got a little ranty. It just irks me to see someone putting down another field of study as though they're a drain on society.
Quoting from the talk page:

> Given the extensive list of sources covering this individual above, please explain exactly how the subject does not meet Wikipedia's notability criteria. If others agree, the tag can be restored - but you cannot tag an article that meets the criteria simply because you don't like them. --Jezebel'sPonyo

And the tag has been removed.
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Thanks! That's an interesting edge case I need to think about.
What are you looking for? Both PyPI and opencomparison have decent offerings IMO
"You'll promptly be asked to leave if you don't comply."

That is exactly what he just said....
OK I switched the focus to "favorites" instead of "downloads", does that help?
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I strongly disagree. You just might need to be the kind of person that finds a Ph.D appealing to start those companies. I think any datapoints you're thinking of are merely correlation.

Now, Ph.D level research is an important catalyst for certain "hard tech" companies. But I don't think the founders need to have done the research, just be aware of it. An undergraduate degree is sufficient formal training to figure out and harness something specific revealed by others in advanced research.
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Very clever, thanks for the encouragement.
I was just reading this yesterday http://steveblank.com/2011/09/22/how-to-build-a-web-startup-...
Same, except for FF. I wrote a theme to make it look somewhat like IE so my dad wouldn't notice a difference.

Thank god my mom uses a Mac.
>* 2 Safeties
If you've figured out there are two safeties then this implies that the defense is looking to take away big passing plays but give up the middle of the field.

2 safeties is pretty standard and is just as much a run stopping defense. For example the corners in man on the exterior with the safeties in man on the interior is a run stopping defense. Backers often cover the apex or a safety roles to the center taking away the middle. Nice overal explanation but the strategy in football is to "show" one thing and do another which is why a pre-snap read only goes so far.
Here's a bit better article: http://www.greencarcongress.com/2011/11/wessells-20111124.ht...

This is a very early lab result, loooot can still go wrong from here. However 40k cycles is pretty awesome (side note: "everlasting" is an annoying headline writer hack statement)

Key point: this is not for electric cars, this is for grid storage...

"Much recent research on batteries, including other work done by Cui’s research group, has focused on lithium-ion batteries, which have a high energy density; however, energy density really doesn’t matter for storage on the power grid. Cost is a greater concern."

"We decided we needed to develop a new chemistry if we were going to make low-cost batteries and battery electrodes for the power grid."

—Colin Wessells
Whitepaper: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v2/n11/full/ncomms1563....
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For what it's worth, the article did end with a mention about humanities majors in the closing line, "psychology, U.S. history and military technologies". While not humanities, Military technologies is an easy one to work out why people are unemployed. There are few people employed in military industries who weren't in the military, hence difficulty finding work. So it is easy to see why comments are about humanities when the article's closing line singles humanities out.

Thanks to the grandparent poster for the deeper insight.
I love the idea of buying and reselling the same item to see if you can make money. Very good.
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I'm actually pretty curious about what causes battery wear at a fundamental level. Presumably, traditional LI batteries are not "leaking" Lithium. So why does their electron-storage-potential decrease with time?
I didn't. I don't have any additional information, though. Sorry; I wish I could be more helpful.
The problem is people complect education with college, most egregiously in the private sector with companies requiring BS/BA degrees to do any job (and reasonably above minimal wage). In the US, most education is free or nearly so, especially in the humanities, if you're willing to do it on your own. College on the other hand is obscenely expensive, both in opportunity costs as well as the actual loans and so on. In order to combat that expense, you should have "something to show for it" that's applicable in the job market when you're done. The purpose of college has become making money, via getting that piece of paper, social connections, etc. If you sign up for a liberal arts degree priced at $100k, you're doing a bad job at making money (and a pretty bad job at educating depending on where you go--even with Computer Science if you pick a bad school you could have learned everything and more in 1 year that the school took 4 years to teach you). Since you're doing a bad job, you should be mocked in the way a person whose goal is to profit in a yard sale and who ends up paying people to take stuff away, should be mocked.
This might sound like a big deal but it shouldn't be a headliner. Whatever the details (and we don't have many) companies use and drop technologies on a fairly regular basis. Sometimes it's a good fit and sometimes it's not. Obviously in this case Couch didn't do everything Canonical needed (I think someone else actually pointed out that Canonical mentioned that their needs were unique).

For every Canonical that drops Couch there will be 10s of other companies that adopt it because it's a good fit there. All this should reinforce is that every tool has a good fit and that smart implementors pick the one that jives best or moves to a better one when the opportunity presents itself.
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Don't be so quick to attribute saneness to IP protection laws. Don't they still do the whole "any rebroadcast, retransmission, or account of this game is prohibited" thing?
Someone should start a website to anonymously survey the following for US grads:

1. Years since graduation
2. Major
3. University
4. Employed/Unemployed in related field
5. GPA

At least this way, there could be some basis in informed decision making by potential students.
Deutsch, Espa?ol,?????, Fran?ais, Italiano, Portugu?s,???
I've lived in a communist country for 10 years of my life so perhaps I am biased, but I've had a similar suspicion that there's a media war going on against China and their policies (whether intentional or as a side-effect of stereotyping).

Certainly there are some Chinese policies which deserve serious criticism, which is why I get really suspicious when numerous articles mockingly talk about about other, less-relevant flaws in China's society such as imitation (fake Apple stores, imitation American jets and cars), developing advanced tech in a careless, half-assed way (high-speed train crashes), or carelessness about the environment (3 Gorges Dam) and then applying this mindless, careless progress as something unique to China.. or dare I say communism. The truth is if you looked at the advancement of any modern superpower you will see nothing but the same kinds of flaws. I'm not saying this kind of crude, unstoppable progress is a good thing.. but passing it as something that's just part of the Chinese mentality is probably a poor representation of the true values of the culture as a whole.
If you have an xbox or playstation buy Madden and try learning to play the game it a bit. The formations, plays, and strategy are pretty much all real. You'll learn about different formations, routes, zone defense, etc.
est's comment (which may be true) notwithstanding, this does not surprise me. China is a communist country of the Cold War mold, if not in all the particulars, then at least in some of its centralist, autocratic ways. Communist countries of this type have outright told people what they should study, to fill particular state needs. That there is freedom to choose in China is a sign of course that this is 2011, not 1970, but still... it makes this kind of thing not at all shocking.
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This is one of a couple tantalizing stories I've seen on that site over the years, something that sounds really promising but then leads nowhere, calling the whole story into question. The other one is the lawnmower engine retrofitted with a magnetron in place of the spark plug, turning the engine into a type of steam engine running on water. Poster acted like it was no big deal, and apparently moved on to more interesting things.
Ah Congress. Always aiming for that perfect ZERO approval rating when single digits isn't low enough.

Maybe he should ask Facebook for a "vote this person to gitmo" button so we can turn in neighbors we don't like.

How is this joker who changes party affiliation with however the wind is blowing still around?
I heard http://127.0.0.1 is gonna be pretty awesome too.
In this specific piece, Chinese domestic media started the bias first. The Chinese media (including the State-run ones) industry always bend things to a most ridiculous dramatic angle.
They're actually targeting a specific category (shanzhai diploma) of scam degrees, not legitimate liberal arts degrees.

The majority of the degrees in question are not Art or History, but vaguely sciencey sounding ones like "Life Science" which are designed to bait the Math/Science/Technology oriented Chinese public into paying for them.

This is an anti-fraud effort not a cultural one. The free market doesn't allow for defrauding people.

In general, it's best not to pontificate about a problem specific to a culture that is unknown to you.
> If the objective is to create well-rounded, cross-disciplinary citizens, then no, that is a horrible idea.

Why is it that everyone thinks a STEM education means you are automatically not well-rounded or cross-disciplinary? There are universities with STEM programs that mitigate this problem successfully by creating the right requirements for the degree.

As an example, the requirements for breadth were FAR more stringent at my university for technical fields than for the humanities/social sciences. The 'science' breadth requirement for a humanities major could be satisfied by first-semester courses like the introductory Nutritional Science course, but the breadth requirements for technical majors required that students end up taking at least a couple 3rd/4th year courses in liberal arts fields (which in turn had lower-level prerequisites, naturally). This resulted in the inverse problem from my POV, whereby the majors generally assumed to create well-rounded students actually failed to do so.

Furthermore, being well-rounded is a lot more than what you study in college IMO. A well-rounded citizen has to continually invest in 'upkeep' that earns them that label. The most well-rounded folks I know read throughout their life (often across a broad set of topics), continually invest in their education on their own time through this reading, keep up on current-events, and so forth. I don't see a lack of liberal arts education precluding these activities or any other activities that might contribute to being well-rounded.

> And why can't someone get both a liberal arts education and a "practical" education?

I generally agree that this would be ideal, but it is also constrained by how much money we have as a society. Remember - you and I are contributing our own funds indirectly to subsidize this same education, and it is certainly not cheap these days (see other comments on cost of education). The trick of course is to strike the right balance and realize a good return on that educational investment. Personally, I can see value in something like a Minor in a field that is completely different than one's Major, but I don't see the benefit being much greater if one were to get two full degrees.
Yes, for me personally caffeine and loud music also work. Didn't have a cite, which is why I removed it.

But: next time I feel like procrastinating, might self-prescribe a Red Bull with vodka plus some music at 120bpm. Let's see what happens.
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I literally laughed out loud... ty
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As the ball is being snapped:

Watch the offensive linemen. If any one of them fires forward and crosses the line of scrimmage, it's a run. If either guard (guys to either side of the center) starts running to one side or the other, the play is almost certainly going that way. If the offensive linemen stand up and move backwards, it's probably a pass.

The quarterback and running back do a lot of things to disguise which way the play is going, but you can almost always tell what kind of play the offense is running by watching the offensive linemen.
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Is this the same kind of light you can make from the static electricity in say a polyester blanket on the couch?
Least my son could do, after all those years of editing the ROM BIOS serial port interrupts so he could play Warcraft against his friends; editing config.sys files so he could play Final Fantasy VII or FPS Football Pro '95. He's now got a CS degree and is a web app developer -- and he's usually an OS version or two behind me.
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What is evolution?

Is it adding features? (to use the software lingo)

Or is it subtracting ones that have no real benefit, striving toward greater efficiency?

Like terse lines of code in a concise, well-written computer program, every bacterial gene seems to exist for one or more reasons. There is no bloat.

I'm biased, but to me bacteria, chloroplasts and mitochondria are life's most amazing machines and the tasks they perform are ultimately life's most important ones.

Thanks Dr. Margulis for the great thoughts.
For it to work, each of the drives would have to be both a mass storage device and a USB hub. Can USB hubs be this small? If each segment has to be 3 inches long to accomodate the dual functionality, a foot long chain of USB drives sticking out the side of your laptop is a bit less elegant than the concept.
Here is a good, basic description: http://gizmodo.com/5681005/giz-explains-why-batteries-die

Basically, batteries are chemical reactions. Even though the reaction can be run in reverse (to recharge), no reaction is 100% efficient. Charging and discharging corrodes the anode/cathode and alters the structure. This makes them less capable of accepting ions. The electrolytes oxidize and decompose as well.
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This advice is horribly outdated stuff from the 90's.

With Ebay and Paypal fees eating up at least 10% of your earnings, it is highly unlikely you can just resell iPods or anything else on Ebay and make a profit.

"I love doing this, because there's no real risk involved."

No real risk except losing all the money you've invested and wasting a lot of time making Ebay entries and repeatedly learning how to pack and ship.
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Easy to mock someone who lists a key skill as 'talking & listening' :-)

That said, there are plenty of people who aren't good at either! My concern would be that the tone of the post seems to indicate that conversation could be as focussed on the author as the post is. Not so useful if you're paying.
Nota bene:

1. Informal fallacies are highly sensitive to context. Even ad hominems can be valid under the right circumstances.

2. In actual arguments, trotting out fancy-sounding fallacy names is rarely the correct play. You'll either be wrong and look foolish [1], or be right and look like a bully. It's lose-lose. Better to think of arguments like debugging: you need to explicitly step through the other side's statements, locate the problem(s), etc.

(These are general observations from a former rhetoric and argumentation teacher. They're directed at no one in particular.)

[1] Straw man, ad hominem, appeal to authority, and appeal to popularity seem to be the most common offenders.
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There's also the problem of power. I doubt these devices could be usb spec compliant since what is essentially happening here is an endless chain of bus powered usb hubs.

It is pretty though.
I don't think size would be much of an issue. Random googling finds USB2512[1] which comes in a 6mm x 6mm QFN package. It needs a crystal and a few caps. There's probably an equally tiny flash + USB SoC around to bolt onto it.

The hard part would be the board layout (USB2 requires some line impedance matching, afaik) and the actual packaging.

I reckon you could (conservatively) fit the necessary circuitry into 1 or 2 microSD sized cuboids, maybe one above the plug/socket, and one below. Maybe even less if you eschew some of the spec and only support daisy-chaining your own devices.

[1] http://www.smsc.com/index.php?tid=295&pid=23&cid=...
Steve Sounders is a wealth of information. His http archive (http://httparchive.org/) is already showing fundamental changes in design, as well as regularly giving good tips on high-scalability sites. I am jealous of those who get to take the full course. =]
> Key point: this is not for electric cars, this is for grid storage...

Yes - and your link is much better on this. The first article seems quite off with insinuations such as 'could the days of the humble lithium ion battery be numbered'... As far as I know one of the main advantages of lithium-ion is their light weight - hence their use in weight-critical devices (phones, cars, etc.). I didn't see anything in either of these links mentioning weight, but I assume a potassium based battery is likely to be much heavier than a lithium-based battery...
> Kinlan also said that an OnLive-type streaming video/game service is in the works at Google, which should come as no surprise. Google + integration is almost a certainty as well: “Blank is playing Modern Warfare 3! Click here to watch. Click here to rent.”

This could be pretty cool if Google can execute well. If there's anyone with the infrastructure to make this work it's Google. I imagine they'd do things like let you click a game's trailer on YouTube and start playing a demo immediately, with some kind of psuedo-Hangout integration with Google+.
> "Shouldn't university be about learning, and being recognised for learning."

Not when it costs six figures and puts people neck-deep in debt.

I want to live in your utopian world, where people get educations just because. We would all be better off.

But the truth of the matter is, for a lot of people there are two choices after high school:

A - Pay $[bignum] for education that has high employability and will give them the knowledge and qualifications necessary to find work, which is absolutely necessary if they ever hope to repay said debt.

B - Pay $[bignum] for education that has low employability and will not give them any of the qualifications sought for in in-demand jobs. They will still owe $[bignum] which will compromise all other aspects of their lives.

I see your line of argument a lot whenever this topic comes up. My challenge to you is: besides a lot of feel-good platitudes, how will your system work? How will people feed themselves, clothe themselves, and put a roof over their head - their head full of wonderful perspectives and understanding but no job?

The "we can all get comprehensive" education idea died when education became expensive. It died when globalization squeezed the American middle class to become more desperate and ever more critically reliant on continued employment. Far from being the norm, the age of comprehensive college education was a brief blip in thousands of years of human civilization lasting no more than a few decades. The gravy train has come to a full and complete stop, and it's time for industrialized nations to clue into something: life is tough. You scramble to survive. High-minded ideology comes second to the survival of yourself and your loved ones.

If, in this topsy-turvy struggle you can find time to fit in a comprehensive education. Good for you - you won. The rest of the world isn't so lucky.
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Yeah, what a tragedy it would be to have too many engineers, doctors, or other useful people. If we want to plan for the future, we need more poets.

Liberal arts educations are expensive for the same reason lobster is expensive. They're a luxury item, nobody needs one. If you can afford to be a philosopher, you can afford a philosophy degree.
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losing some respect for stanford's vaunted CS program here...this is devry territory. i would expect material for a stanford degree to be a bit more rigorous than regurgitating the recommendations of yslow.
Out of curiosity, how does g+ collect any more useful personal data than, say, google reader's follow lists or google buzz interactions?
Is it about the circles and people who you "add"?
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Yup. I have installed Ubuntu on a number of computers for members of my congregation and provide them technical support. After one or two calls, it gets real quiet and they just enjoy using it.

My mother-in-law has Ubuntu on her laptop and brought it with her while they visit for Thanksgiving. I'll show her a few new things this weekend, but that's about the size of my technical support burden.
>> why can't somebody with a good camera phone buy a seat in the nosebleed section, set up a tripod, and charge for the stream?

They can but they'd get sued.
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the interesting thing about corporations having free speech rights is that one would expect that they might use them when standing up in cases like this. I would agree that Microsoft's silence here is probably tacit support.
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I think bzImage and bzip2 were approximately contemporaneous - I certainly remember using bzip2 in the late 90s (it was not real fast on a P90!).
>> Um, no? There is nothing copyrighted about the on-field action of a football game. All they can do is kick you out of the stadium.

The NFL leases exclusive rights to TV stations to broadcast the action.

Anyone else who broadcasts the action will get sued and shut down.