skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing to keep in mind is that large schools like UCLA tend to have different admissions policies for different colleges. So somebody interested in engineering would have a harder time getting into UCLA than somebody interested in anything else.

I don't know exactly how it works for UCLA, but for Berkeley the admissions percentage for the EECS program is much smaller than the general admissions percentage. So, even ignoring differences in the application pools, getting into the EECS program is going to be much more difficult than getting into most other programs. And if you don't get into the program you applied to, you don't get in at all.

So perhaps the different students applied to different colleges at UCLA? I know that from my high school, some fairly smart people didn't get in to Berkeley Engineering while some who weren't particularly gifted got into, say, the College of Natural Resources. This was just a reflection of the different admissions policies than any discrimination.
I've been through a process of changing my emotional reactions, and I think my experiences are interesting enough to share. Just to situate you, I'm in secondary 5 (I'm 16), and back when I was in elementary school, I was super shy (I rarely ever said a word, and I hated talking because I would always notice some imperfection in what I would say which would make me feel stupid), and I was quite empathic (if another kid would cry, so would I). Also, I'm much happier now than back in elementary school.

In grade 5, I realized that life was meaningless and I might as well stop caring and just enjoy myself. So I started a long process of emotional change. The easiest thing to get rid of was my empathy, which I got rid of in grade 6. I can still feel sad or happy for others, but it's by choice. I can easily stop myself from emulating their emotions, and in fact I don't anymore by default. Then there was the huge stress that came up whenever I had to get into a social situation. That took a much longer time to remove. For years I would tell myself "who cares what other people think of me?", and try to get myself to do something which would put me into a social situation, but it had very slow results. It wasn't until secondary 4 that I had (mostly) gotten rid of my shyness. And interestingly enough, the first thing to go was the emotion, and then the physical reaction. At some point in secondary 4, someone insulting me would not make me feel a thing, but it would make my eyes a bit waterry, and it would make me gulp.

Though I am now mostly not emotionally affected by bad situations, I have not been able to get rid of the effects of emotion that come from physical things, like pain or being tired. Being tired just zaps the joy out of me. Perhaps you can learn to withstand pain by trying to replace it by better emotions (for example, by cracking jokes), though I haven't experimented with that.
3 UX Ideas to Help HelloFax
Solution: Use an IDE plugin for vi-style bindings.

Dudes on assembly lines use screwdrivers.
We're not there yet, but the early 2020's should begin the era when power starts to shift to our generation.
Here's a parallel situation at the high school level.

At Stuyvesant High School here in NYC admissions is 100% test base, meaning the only criteria for acceptance is your test score. Here's a quote about their acceptance policy (from an article called "Paper Tigers" in NY Mag last year):

"Entrance to Stuyvesant, one of the most competitive public high schools in the country, is determined solely by performance on a test: The top 3.7 percent of all New York City students who take the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test hoping to go to Stuyvesant are accepted. There are no set-asides for the underprivileged or, conversely, for alumni or other privileged groups. There is no formula to encourage “diversity” or any nebulous concept of “well-­roundedness” or “character.” Here we have something like pure meritocracy. This is what it looks like: Asian-­Americans, who make up 12.6 percent of New York City, make up 72 percent of the high school."

Not sure if this article ever made Hacker News, but it's worth reading if you have a chance. It's long-winded, but being Asian-American myself there's a sort of poetic-truth to it:

http://nymag.com/news/features/asian-americans-2011-5/
Very doable. You just need to put something interesting on top of that
How is this different from and/or better than Dropbox?

Also, from a marketing perspective, I'm sorry but the synthesized "actor" voices in your promo video are disturbing and off-putting, in my opinion.
Project Shellter: Can the MakerBot community save Hermit Crabs?
But that's not what people are saying. What people are saying is that Vi is better for Vi experts than Blub editor is for Blub editor experts.
Agreed. For me, arrows would be better to imply movement. Specifically, arrows going from city with the lightness/darkness (tone?) indicating how many are going where. Circles just don't connect with the data part of my brain very well. It's hard to compare the area of circles to gauge just how much bigger one is than the other.

But forbes probably had a team of people working on theirs for a few afternoons at least.
I'm not immune to that concern, but 'ruined' seems like a strong word... it's not like I've injected that code into their page.

Really, I just thought it was a funny little hack worth sharing with the community. I doubt anyone from Parse sees it as hugely threatening to their recruitment strategy.
Now You Are a Geek: Saying Goodbye to Wave
This is basically a desciption of Clojure, in particular:

- Explicit model of time (http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Value-Identity-State-Rich...)
- Homoiconic / Extensible syntax (shared by most Lisps)
- Math-oriented numeric types (Clojure maths is arbitrary precision by default, and it has nice things like rational types)
- Immutable (Clojure data structures are all immutable)
- Garbage collection (inherited from the JVM)
- String manipulation (Regular expressions are a built-in type)

Most of the other features actually seem more like libraries than language features, but given that Clojure can access the entire Java ecosystem I think you can do all of it from Clojure with relatively little pain.
I was hoping to find a responsive / touch-compatible plugin (for swiping through image collections / slideshows) on that list. I'm sure it was posted on here a few months back. Anyone know of anything like this?
VAN HALEN IS BACK
I recently wrote a pretty detailed list and review of Git GUIs for Mac.

It includes 3 forks of GitX, Tower, SourceTree, and Gitbox.

Hopefully people find it of use.

http://harrywolff.com/2012/01/the-best-mac-git-gui/
Project Shellter: Hermit Crab research
Show HN: Weekend Project - SSD Price Tracking
So you change your argument from monopolies are fine to monopolies are fine unless they're corrupt, that's fine I'm happy with that clarification, but you must realise that these regulations are there to stop abuse by the corrupt monopolies. So guess what a judge found that google had a monopolistic grip and in this particular instance were abusing it. It's fine to disagree with the judge or even these specific regulations but you obviously believe large enterties(such as the US government) should have restrictions placed on them to stop abuse yet seem to say a little later that large entities (businesses) should not have restrictions on them to stop abuse. I can't understand how this is logically coherent.

I'm also confused by your highlighting of the definition of the word monopoly, are you saying that equating governments to regional monopolies is a flawed analogy or are you just highlighting that one form of monopoly relies on legal enforcement and therefore pointing out that governments are monopolies. Maybe you are saying that google is not a monopoly in this instance, I'd be inclined to agree but would point out that "exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action" as far as geographic data and infrastructure in place would be an arguable position. If you argue against that on the grounds that others could sink in capital to create there own method of supplying data, then I'd argue that the government is about equally removable in that the customers can vote for change (I to believe that's a joke just like your statement on how reliant the monopoly is to any given customer).
That's because the Emacs comment missed Emacs's greatest feature: elisp. Adding functionality--even fairly complex functionality--to Emacs is much easier than extending any other editor I've used. Here are a couple of great examples from the last week for me:

I am currently taking a compiler course where we are implementing a particular language not entirely unlike--but not entirely like--Lua and Python. As part of the process, we need to churn out quite a bit of test code. Naturally, Emacs does not support this language by default because this language only exists as an implementation exercise for a couple of projects; however, creating a useful mode that does syntax highlighting and indentation--basically all you need to program comfortably--only took about 100 lines of code and less than an hour of programming!

Apart from my studies, I also work part-time at a startup. As part of this, I have to use and maintain a bunch of remote AWS machines that do all sorts of things: hosting, continuous integration, staging... I noticed that I was opening a lot of shells both locally and remotely. Writing up a command bound to a global key-stroke that prompts me for a name, opens a shell in the current directory (including remote directories!) and sets the prompt of the shell to its name literally took five minutes. And now I've saved a lot of time managing all my shells.

Being able to make my editor do exactly what I want with a trivial amount of effort is magical.
Reuters totally clueless about the meaning of "hacking"
OK, I'll bite. Are there tool/design flows out in the wild using HDLs in the PCB design process? I guess describing basic connectivity is relatively easy to imagine, but it's less obvious how you would do things like PCB layout etc. Would love to be pointed towards examples.

(FPGA guy here - used to using VHDL/Verilog for digital logic simulation and synthesis, never considered it for board design)
you don't mention whats awesome about the proxycommand to go through hosts:

here's what! it uses the intermediate hosts as a tunnel, which means no ssh agent is listening on the hosts (the regular way to do this is ssh -A hostx ssh -A hosty ssh finalhost)

This means no attacker can use your agent while connected.

Additionally, its less cumbersome when its setup.
How does miso make money??
Anyone tried IE9 ? I wonder how much it scores.
Udacity's model
ADzero's Bamboo Phone and the Mystery Blonde
I put this together over the summer, and have had it tracking prices for lots of different SSD models. Prices fluctuate quite a bit, so I added alerts so you can be automatically notified when prices fall below a set level.
People are pointing out the fact that Asians may not be getting in because they are focused too much on their studies and do not spend enough time in extra-circulars. If that's the issue, why not remove the race category on the form? That way, it is completely merit-based. I don't the admissions officer needs to see the race of the applicant to determine if he/she is interesting and has diverse extracurricular activities. The name could still hint at the race, but it should be much fairer than currently.
San Francisco, CA (near Ferry Building). Full time.

Kontagent is building analytics for social and mobile apps. We are handling billions of daily messages and growing.

We are looking for engineers (lots!), account managers, data scientists, graphic designers, a controller, director, and more. We have a small-ish sized group and are rapidly growing.

For engineers, we are looking for C and/or C++ engineers, python engineers, and more. Quality of the person of course trumps any buzzwords.

If you feel you may have something to offer but are unsure about a position, don't see a position listed, or even just want more detail about what we are looking for and what we're like to work for, please contact me. I'm a developer here myself and would be happy to chat w/ anyone who would like to know more.

Please contact me at david.arcoleo [at] kontagent.com
This article doesn't really say much, does it? Averaging fuel consumption in daily driving isn't a very good testing method because of variations in conditions.

It's really not that difficult of a decision for me. According to the engineers that designed and built my engine, I should use fuel rated at 91 octane or better. Why should I presume that I know better than those engineers? Imagine if you, as an engineer, told a client they should not use a particular technology because it is unsuitable. Then, imagine the client flatly ignored your suggestion. That'd be pretty frustrating, right? So why do that with the advice of automobile engineers?
Unless you are an Australian who can get the E3 visa which has about 8k go unused each year.
SAT scores above a certain threshold can become a negative signal, if they aren't paralleled by equally exceptional performance elsewhere. It suggests a certain misallocation of effort. "Why did this person spend all his time on the tests?"
yeah, been using that for a while, and its quite handy.
I want to switch to the cryptostick tho, because having a pinpad/reader around sux.

don't you have one of those?
This is one of the founding ideas behind Positive psychology.

Some good books that go into depth on this insight: Antonio Damasio's "The Feeling of What Happens, Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness", and Jonathan Haidt's "The Happiness Hypothesis". In a nutshell Damsio gives a framework for what consciousness is, and Haidt gives some insight on how to hack your consciousness to do better at life. (I'm unsure if Damasio is actually considered related to positive psychology ... but it is great background.)

Another resource is to research Viktor Frankl. His story and writings put most any common day issues into stark perspective.
I started attempting to properly learn vim a couple of weekends back, watched a load of vimcasts (http://vimcasts.org) and got my vimrc file all set up, but rushing to get things done before a release meant I switched back to sublime within a couple hours. Perhaps not the best timing!

Can anyone recommend a good plugin for switching between files frequently - as in the Command-T shortcut in textmate/sublime. I did try the CommandT vim plugin, but didn't find it as good as the implementation in sublime.
It's a heck of a mixed bag, but most of them are orthogonal and would coexist nicely, especially if libraries are allowed to seriously extend the syntax and type system. Seems hard but doable to me.
Senator Ohanian has a nice ring to it. Even "the Senator from Reddit" :)
I think that the publicity is worth more, because it says "come work here, we're interesting enough to put job offers in HTTP headers".
This doesn't feel like the author is trying to actually help Java programmers, but rather is just an excuse for him to patronizingly describe a language to those he considers less fortunate.

I also don't understand the reason for writing the code in an intentionally non idiomatic style. If you want to convince someone why something is better; show them how it would be done properly. The way it has been presented instead insults the audiences intelligence by presupposing that they would be unable to understand this material, that the author has admittedly only recently picked up himself.

I don't think (reduce min list) is going to blow anyone's mind, and writing a function to iterate through the indexes of a list will do more to confuse than to enlighten.

not to mention; we've been here before haven't we - http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SmugLispWeenie
The Tao of Badass: An Honest Review
So, is there money in this? Doesn't it make more sense to go after the HDL synthesis design flow? I can see a few hobbyists and PCB makers interested in this. But the market for those interested in digital design but not wanting to fork out a fortune to synopsys/cadence is huge, right?

I suspect you can innovate quite a bit on the HDL front and then doing everything server-side should really give you a cost advantage as well. I can also see the open source aspect of this taking off - a high quality of library of plug and play cores that can be seamlessly integrated into your designs might prove to be a significant competitive advantage.
I agree, and I am aware of it. I was about to get into another example to show something that only macros can do, but the post was getting too long.

So please hang in there ;) I'm getting there.

Also, there are different levels of audience. Diving straight into complex macro structures might just be ineffective.

Above all, I'm not trying to preach to the converted. You seem to be well aware of the powers of Lisp, so not my intended audience. But thanks for reading and your input anyway ;)
Mark Zuckerbergs facebook user id is 4 (https://graph.facebook.com/4), so its always fun when you have a nil bug and then you think Zuckerberg is using your site.
Video: Edible, Super Insulating Foam Protects Man From Welding Torch
There's a big fail here, but I don't think it's the lack of native support.

What percentage of highly successful, heavily used Android apps rely on native code? It seems that 99% of the dev community is fine writing Java.

Hell, why are WP7 devs clamoring for native code anyways? It's because the .NET performance is terrible. The failure IMO is in .NET, not the lack of C++. The capitulation and addition of C++ support isn't a strict win either - devs now have access to performance, at a substantial engineering effort cost. Doing things that would have been simple on other platforms now requires C++ hackery.
I would be interested to see their definition of "all other credentials equal". My assumption is that it is some very simplistic compilation of grades and test scores, because the article barely mentions any factors other than these. Also, many of the things that drive college admission are not easy to objectively compare - is a great cellist equal to an 3 sport letterman who was also on student council? How does a rich kid whose parents send him to math camp compare to a kid who had to work full time during the summer? And so on.
040 RR Text Editors and IDE's
Might also want to use 'last' instead of 'first' in this part of your explantion

> tag the first bit w/ 1

I was confused with your explanation until I went and redid the binary on the original, then I got what you meant. sorry if its nitpicky. ignore if you got it.
Fundamentals of Ruby on Rails
Heh, not at all related, but do you really find it harder to type qwerty? I personally find that typing a bunch of letters that are all beside each other is actually harder than typing normal words.
Fish Eat Fish: 5 Lessons Learnt in Building an App Engine Game Server
Honestly, when I was younger, I used to use vim when collaborating with other programmers to impress them, and then use an IDE most of the time when noone was looking. But then something strange happened, I began building up the muscle memory and eventually preferred using vim over an IDE. It seems like every year, if I take the time to learn more about vim, I become twice as effective as the year before. There seem to be an infinite amount of new things to learn, constantly making my life easier. I've been with it 4 years now, and will never go back to an IDE.

The coolest thing I learned this year is the '. command, which will go to your last change. So, you can be editing a program/script, run it, and it has an error. Most of the time you want to go back to the last modification, so just type:
'.
This even works, at least on my system, after closing and re-opening the file. Related to that, you can type g; and g, to go through next/previous modifications.
One of Parse's founders follows the repo for a Ruby script for applying[1]. </reddit_starstruck>

[1] https://github.com/albertovilla/aparse
"Under civil forfeiture laws, the person losing the property has to prove that the items were not used to commit crimes."

That seems a bit backwards to me. I thought people were supposed to be innocent until proven guilty?
Have you written a post on why you guys failed? I'd be interested...
I guess this comment is going to be pretty unpopular, given the comments that most have left before it, but I find this post creepy in the extreme.

For one thing, it's naive. Any attempt to assert that "X is entirely my fault" is naive. How can you eliminate the impact of your circumstances? For instance, you're here in 2012, working in San Francisco - one of the most exciting times/places ever.

For another, it's happiness-centric, which is boring. I basically don't trust anyone who says that the point of their life is "happiness." Frankly, the idea creeps me out. Sure, happiness is nice. So are transcendance, admiration, comfort, contentment. I also like nostalgia, gloom, longing, ... Life is not some simple game where you can just declare yourself the winner.

Finally, it's positivity-centric. One of my least favorite things about the ethos of the bay area is its inability to bluntly deal with negative feelings/ideas. Everything's always supposed to be getting better all the time - feeling better, running faster, etc. It's boring and unrealistic.

I worry about what will happen to someone who has this sort of mindset when they are older - when the illusion that they are in control of their happiness begins to fade - what happens when calamity strikes.

The universe is very old and you are a tiny speck in it. Concentrating on yourself in this way is like a dog chasing its own tail.

PS - God, and it's so arrogant. I hate this type of "I've figured it out! Eureka!" post/sentiment/essay. It's like a Buddhist claiming that they've been enlightened. It just smacks of self-aggrandizement and insecurity. Blech.
- This seems to almost invite abuse.

- Surely a better challenge would be to publish a brief but involved spec, then say "implement this API that returns your job application details." Then they can retrieve the job application from the applicants. Ideally, applicants also publish the source code somewhere, so they can see how you code.

- Oh wait, this is #1 on HN and getting tons of views. It has already worked out perfectly for them, and I should stop criticising. :)
Ah, I missed that- thanks!
Sbd.vim "Smart Buffer Delete" — a new and much useful Vim plugin
Geek Heaven: BigWorld Technology
Thanks for the feedback guys!
Upverter: Our Y Combinator Experience
Verbosity is not as big a deal

Except that empirical evidence says it is a big deal: code size is the best measure of complexity we have, and error rates grow superlinearly with it.

It's interesting how nearly everyone in the software profession pooh-poohs that finding. What we "know" (i.e., what we're used to) is more important to us than evidence. If we took the evidence seriously, we would work seriously to find ways to make smaller systems.
Here's one. Can you get the software to recognise circuit topologies as they are being drawn, and suggest better topologies or components, based on what other circuits have been entered?

It strikes me that the difference between Upverter and any other EDA software is the collaborative/community aspect. Consequently Upverter's competitive advantage will arise from features that exploit the community aspect.
I grew to love vim after being introduced to it in my data structures class.

One of my favorite tools is much older than me - which seems kind of weird in the current state of technology. I find it very humbling.