skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It doesn't have to be free... it just has to cost less than 20k a year to be disruptive. This has the potential to be very disruptive.

One of the things that excites me the most is not only the potential to eliminate the massive load of debt that your average graduate inherits when they're finished with college, but it also lowers the barrier of entry to classes. So a person who already has graduated can study a cross-discipline a lot easier. I think the amount of people have an expertise in very different areas is going to increase. A lot of potential opens up if/when that becomes a trend.
I think it's pretty paranoid. Why would you do that?
I was trying to discuss a hack I made to my life. Something I've done to improve my own. And I'm a YC Founder... Seemed like a pretty good place to post this. imho
This kind of thinking is as useful to non-tech founders as it is dangerous to technical founders.

For the non-techs, it's important for them to get their heads around the possibility that they may be wasting large quantities of worker-days doing what could be automated with a bash script.

For the techs, just because you can doesn't mean you should. Deciding to automate something when there's a cheap SAAS offering is often a destructive thing, mainly because even developers are prone to underestimate complexity and maintenance costs, and to goldplate a solution that's already "good enough".

I'm not saying Don't Automate. I'm just suggesting to be very cautious about undertaking any automation initiative. The things to automate are the baggage which you will take on your journey, and as such, they should be directly related up your core product/service. Something like a mailing list handler is probably not, and typical of the kind of underestimation that can take place (what happens when you discover your homebrew mailing list is blocked by every big mail provider's spam filter?).
Ask HN: Moving to the Bay Area as a Student
I've wanted to move to the Bay Area for some time now and I think I'm finally at a point where moving is a viable option. I'm planning on transferring to a CCC for Fall 2012 to finish my basic studies and then transfer to a UC school. My reason for wanting to finish my basic studies at a CCC is that, while at the CCC, I will meet the requirements to reclassify as an in-state student for tuition purposes, drastically lowering the cost of attending any of the UC schools.

The biggest problem I face is money. One of the requirements for reclassifying as a California resident is that I have to prove financial independence. This means that I pretty much have to make it on my own for the next two years.

California isn't a cheap place to live, especially when I could end up working at Burger King making minimum wage. I was hoping there would be someone here who could give me some insight into whether it is possible and what it would require for me to support myself. I should qualify for a Pell Grant which will pay most of my tuition and I can use a series of scholarships/loans to pay the rest of my fees. I am already $30,000 in debt and I'm still looking at another 4 years of school because a lot of my credits won't transfer, so I don't want any more loans if I can avoid them.

Where would be the cheapest place to live? I'd like to be within an hour's drive of downtown San Francisco so I can throw myself into the startup scene and, maybe, find a good job.

How many hours a week would I need to work to support myself, assuming I was making minimum wage or slightly above? I'm willing to work full time if that's what it takes, but I'll be in school full time as well.

Any related advice/comments are definitely appreciated. If moving out West on my own is a silly idea, please, do tell me. I'm just a kid, what do I know? :)
Psst. We know they sell our personal data. Start worrying!

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/11/29/facebooks...

HN Thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3292225

"Facebook promised users that it would not share their personal information with advertisers. It did."

I wonder why so few news sites picked up on this.
Seeing how a lot of people on Facebook use fake names, I don't how the information Facebook provides for potential data buyers can be deemed as trustworthy enough to be used to lower credit ratings, or as basis for hiring. Granted, if a person has a history of bad-mouthing previous employers (which is the person's responsibility in the first place), it can be used against the person. But that can happen if an employer connects with the potential employee and checks the ever-helpful Timeline, without Facebook having to sell the data.
I know what they are, I also never said there was a conspiracy. But Google has, in the past, done weird things with US military bases and elsewhere. Replacing entire areas, repeating patterns, generally obscuring things.

Looking at the picture further, I think that those planes are on rails, which is what those lines on the ground are. Which would explain why they're all parked so perfectly.
Love it. Showed it to my 4 year old and she loves it too ;).
The point of Freedombox is that everyone has his data in his own home. If average Joe wants to share this data with his friends, average Joe is going to run a server in his home. If the server code has a 0day exploit, average Joe server easily becomes a node in a botnet.

How do you address the problem of managing a fleet of 800 Million servers running in 800 Million homes? Who are the experts that manage this problem and who finances their work? Why would average Joe trust them with his data? What is the technical device through which they have admin access to 800 Million servers in 800 Million homes?
Nice story! I can sense the strong optimism of the writer. I agree that everything happening is good. Even bad things happened, it is still good because it has a connection to a future occurrence to happen which is good. We may not understand it today, but in the future, we will realize that if the bad thing didn't happened, our good opportunity or luck will not come to us.
Http://www.locksmith-in-newyork.com
I don't know if it's a Finnish tradition only, but a lot of people (around 14% of population in 2010) stop drinking for the month of January. For some it's a way of giving a break for their livers, and some want to see if they are still able to completely stop drinking.

The good thing is having one month per year where it's almost socially acceptable to not drink any alcohol. Of course everyone could just drink moderately all year, but that doesn't seem to happen.
Also found a def of type classes that i like: automatic instantiation + constraint propagation

http://blog.garillot.net/post/15147165154/every-single-fresh...
Our startup has been looking at office spaces lately for ~9 people (6 developers and 3 business people), and based on these comments it sounds like the recommended layout would be two separated / noise-insulated areas, one for each group to work. Would love to hear whether people agree with this or not.
Really? I find Richard Dawkins to be one of the nicest and most polite people alive today.
Some good tips here, thanks. Shameless plug to follow..

For me I've just started back up on the diet thing but I use a gadget called a fitbit to help me. I did this a couple years back and it worked really well. Basically the fitbit (an internet connected pedometer basically) logs all my steps and calories burned during the day and I log the food I eat and as long as I keep burning more then I eat weight loss! Have already lost about 2 1/2 lbs since I started back up on this a week ago.

Ok now the shameless plug.. I'm running a contest on youtube right now sponsored by fitbit if anyone wants to win one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cWEn0RF3-Q
I do agree on that point, but I'm not sure if pragmatic is the right word. Need of a specialized work environment, perhaps. Programming needs one, too, I suppose, but it just happens to be a computer.

Approaching other subjects the same way we do math and programming would be quite monumentally stupid. Could you trust a "doctor" to make the right decisions if his/her experience consists of watching lecture videos on YouTube and answering quizzes?

However, should we completely give up on those fields that require specialized practice? I see it as more of a challenge than a reason to despair. For one thing, you can combine online education with offline practice (provided willingness of all parties involved to experiment with new approaches, which is certainly not a trivial thing to ask). Also, an approach I'd try is having games that simulate the real-world task as close as possible. At some point, you probably would need specialized equipment and/or test subjects. Reducing that to a minimum, though, is in my opinion a very good thing, as it would drive down the cost of education.
It sounds like you have a really high tolerance for alcohol. I've had a few friends like that, they could drink a whole case of beer. I myself drink 3 beers and I'm pretty well buzzed. Never could drink that kind if quantity. I do enjoy a great beer, though.

A few of my buds with the high tolerance seemed to get themselves into trouble eventually with booze, though. DUIs in particular, lots of legals bills. One turned raging alcoholic and is still in a shambles.

Not trying to say that will happen to you, I just notice of my friend for whom booze did become a problem - they share that trait of being able to drink a lot without seeking to ever get drunk.
Children lack ability for Dickens, says biographer Tomalin
How much would their service be worth to you without other user's generated content? If it's more important to you to see other people's content than you putting out your content, then you should be the one paying them to access other's content.
My thoughts on why a real university will always make sense, but for different reasons http://blog.siliconverse.com/2011/12/29/why-you-need-to-go-t...
If the general aphorism, "just build something awesome," is so bad, isn't a more-specific "just build something awesome (with unpredictable constraints)" actually worse?
Also, checkout http://www.9slides.com, which is not an university experiment.
I would add that you need to be realistic about what is possible. Realize you can easily fluctuate your weight plus or minus ten pounds. A pound of water isn't very much, and your body's glycogen stores plus water can amount to 5-10 pounds. So low carb dieting will lead to weight loss of that much very quickly as you use this up.

Don't succumb, like this article does, by treating this as meaningful or sustainable. Realistically, a pound of fat loss in a week is extremely good, and amounts to a 3500 Calorie deficit. Most people can't do much better than this without quite extreme measures, so you can not get demotivated when a 5-10 pound loss in the first week doesn't continue.
You could make the same argument against the masses being allowed to drive. The benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
It's more a philosophy of being present for every moment, and living life to the fullest.

Interesting that you equate living life to the fullest with not drinking. Drinking a great beer with some friends or having a nice glass of cab with a big steak is high on my list of things to do while living life to the fullest.
>This email-based expense system hinged on specific keywords would be great for a small business, but if you're a multinational with lots of legal oversight

Its still not necessarily bad, such a system could be easily expanded to be an quick input method to a system that makes the beancounters and legal happy too. Say I snap a picture of a till receipt with my cellphone and send it off to the expense account. The backend could also hook into our timesheet webapp. I already have to choose the account I'm billing my hours to and some accounts require I put in a note. My expense could show up right in the list of hours I've clocked, then when I enter my hours at the end of the day I double check all the expenses are there, are for the right amount, choose the account to charge and pop in a description.
Life is about trade-offs. In theory, the benefit of security for the masses outweighs the cost of confidentiality provided to criminals. There are also other ways of potentially getting the criminals' e-mails you need other than snooping (e.g., Google can disclose your e-mail to law enforcement) or getting the intelligence on criminals beyond e-mail altogether.
I hope you don't have any kids with slingshots in your neighborhood. You just invented the best game ever.
I think I would try the slow carb, it looks interesting to me. I hope this will be effective to me.
List of courses Udacity (www.udacity.com) is expected to offer in 2012:

1. Theory Of Computation

2. Operating Systems

3. Computer Networks

4. Distributed Systems

5. Computer Security

6. Algorithms And Data Structures

7. Software Engineering Practices

8. Building Web Applications

Courses that have been confirmed and starting on 20th Feb:

1. CS 101: Building a Search Engine

2. CS 373: Programming a Robotic Car
Judging by the replies, it seems to be a combination of preferring webmail and having poor ISPs.

Personally, I have run my own email server for several years now and have found this to require almost no maintenance. On the server side I use Postfix and Dovecot on Debian, and on the client side I use Thunderbird. For security, I only allow local IMAP connections and tunnel IMAP and SMTP from my laptop over SSH tunnels set up when I log in, and the server only accepts public key authorisation for SSH.

IMAP means I get any email within seconds and Thunderbird automatically sifts away 95% of what little spam I receive. The server is under my desk and the only downtime I have is for kernel upgrades and problems on the ISP end, which are both rare.
JQuery.extend deep not deep
Clear: An Insanely Slick Task List for your iPhone
Genius! The first serious (old school) sampler that i see on the web.

But for me it requires a metronome to record in right time. Then it will be perfect. :-)
Yea the water weight with low carb diets is significant. With cheat days on slow carb diet I'd usually gain back anywhere between 3-5 pounds.

I find that I generally feel better overall when I eat less carbs. My advice, however, is applicable to whatever diet you choose.
Awesome. I look forward to hearing how you like it.
The sociology of drinking
Awesome Version of Ah-Ha "Take on Me" by North Koreans
Not sure about that.

Android tablet market is also minuscule, despite Android UI fitting tablet use cases.
Why is this trending on Hacker News?
This could be built out as a service that is competitive to SendFile, DropBox and other file sharing services. If I understand it correctly the server between the sender and receiver never stores the file itself which is unique.
I thought HN might be interested in this based on the post yesterday challenging people to avoid getting drunk/live in the moment. I noticed there was a lot of misunderstanding as to how alcohol works on people/groups, so this might be informative to some.
Best book on fat loss and getting ripped is Tom Venuto's "Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle" - http://www.burnthefat.com

It's around 500 pages, but once you read it, you'll never have to read another book diet/nutrition. This book, and the title, explains it all.
This looks a lot as a JSON version of what AtomPub (RFC 5023) does for XML. Collections, resource manipulation... Maybe with a bit of coordination it would be possible to extract the common elements and have them a separate RFC.

Link to the AtomPub RFC: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5023
There really is no secret to losing weight. It's very simple: eat less, exercise more.

The food being served in developed countries are highly processed, and make us very prone to gaining weight. Highly processed carbs turn into blood sugar very easily, and if you live a sedentary lifestyle, like most of us, then that blood sugar gets turned into body fat. It's very basic biochemistry. The reason why we are eating highly-processed carbs is because food manufacturers get a high profit margin from feeding us from pre-processed food rather than original ingredients.

If you want to lose weight, the key is to either burn the blood sugar by exercising, or by denying your body the blood sugar in the first place, through a low-highly-processed carb diet.

But what that entails is rejecting the current 21st century lifestyle of eating quick, convenient meals, and working so much that you spend your entire life in front of a computer. You really need to change your lifestyle in order to lose weight and have a healthier body.

I spent several years working and doing nothing after college and gaining massive weight (over 50 lbs). About 8 years ago, I decided to lose weight, and just by exercising and eating marginally less, I went down down about 20 lbs. But the vast amount of my weight loss came when I did the South Beach diet, and lost another 30 lbs. That's when I realized how terrible highly processed carbs are.

I kept that weight off for about 3 years, until I started focusing on side projects and working about 16 hrs a day in total. I stopped exercising completely for the last 3 years and since then, I've gained back about 20 lbs.

My goal this year is to lose those 20 lbs (actually in the next 4 months, fingers crossed), and to work less. I've already started cooking the majority of our meals, and having complete control of the ingredients helps a lot.
We make the world
I think you'll find it difficult working at Burger King. I recommend learning something that is employable immediately in the start up scene. That could be as non specific as marketing/sales or as specific as let's say Ruby on Rails or Python.

Take out large school loans if you have to (to avoid doing work that has no learning curve: Burger King) and subsidize your learning for real employable skills.

HOpe that helps friend
Unless the drones can defend themselves...
Rethinking software inspections
I agree with one side of your message.

There are very few people who have just learnt functional programming. I have met a few in academia, and they tend to be as "bad" as the pure Java/C++ programmers, but in a different way. They have trouble understanding how their code will boil down to CPU instructions, and so have trouble with performance, particularly (unsuprisingly) mutating algorithms, which are vital for performance in some situations.

After I have defined a high-performance algorithm, they often want to modify it to make it "more beautiful" (which means functional) and in the process destroy the performance.

Also, I had quite a lot of exposure to Haskell, and I haven't found C++ hate. I got some Haskell hate, because doing some things (mutating algorithms and bit fiddling) were really, really hard, while I found most of the things I loved from Haskell I could do in C++, with care.

I work on low-level algorithm design in A.I., where performance is everything and there are many interlocking, low-level and complex algorithms and data structures. I know that other problems might well have very different characteristics. For example, I have no real ideal how Haskell vs C++ would compare for the average web app for example (or of course, something like Ruby/Python which seem to be much more popular).
They're closer in concept (and presumably in deployment scale) to mobile CCTV cameras than they are to police helicopters, and there certainly have been privacy issues with those.
I'm curious, what exactly kind of software do you work on? I suspect your approach might work okay for fairly simple apps where the main question is getting the requirements right, but not so much with anything that requires serious thinking. Or maybe you're just all a bunch of extraverts.
For fun! I think it would be pretty cool project to program those drones, etc. I'm pretty sure the security benefits would be low, and like someone else said, kids throwing stuff at it would suck. But then you can program in counter measure, maybe a water cannon, etc...
You can prove it had an effect on the employees that worked there, and to a fairly exact number. The agreement covered all employees, not just tech workers. Combined that makes up about 350k employees, and you can then extrapolate how many were engineers in silicon valley, or engineers in general. That means that there was at least a proportion of the population that was affected very inversely by these agreements. If you then realize that other companies use the larger more successful companies' salary policies as the model for their own, then it would have impacted other companies as well, and the employees that work there.

That alone disproves your implied statement: That these agreements did nothing to anyone. It definitely did something, and just the fact that those companies amount to tons of employees and tons of salaries is enough to show it had an effect.

You however are pulling the oldest trick in the book. You want conclusive proof that these completely illegal actions by corporations had a measurable effect before you'll admit that they were wrong. But, it was a conspiracy. You're not going to get exact numbers. It's not like these guys are keeping a ledger of money saved by not-poaching. You are basically demanding the impossible.

But, you are also demanding more than you give yourself. Where's your proof this did nothing? I know, you didn't explicitly say it did nothing, but that's your clever trick. You just imply your counter argument and then run around dumping links to logical fallacies on Wikipedia rather than give real numbers.

So, Paul, stop being a hypocrite and give us your bet on what impact this really had. If you demand exact socio-economic evaluations before you'll believe this did anything, then I demand that you give the same evidence it did nothing.

And your first task will be to disprove what's already been proven in court: That these agreements did impact all the employees at these companies, that it did reduce salaries or they wouldn't have bothered, that reducing salaries was their goal, and that they did fire employees over it.

Until then, your demand for exact evidence violates the standard in philosophical argument that your own argument can't be used against itself.
Your snark actually raises a good point: The optimal office arrangement probably depends on who works there.

Last Friday our team presented some of our dev proceses to the local agile group. We had 5 devs and a product person there. Someone observed that our team seems to have really good personal chemistry and we all agreed. We chalked it up to careful hiring. If you wouldn't function well with our set-up, we probably wouldn't offer you a job.
+1 on everything on the post. I lost 17 kg on the paleo diet( net loss, as I have gained a fair amount of muscle following gymnastic bodies WODs), but it's sometimes difficult to follow when you are traveling a lot, as I do. You don't realize how the vast majority of food you find on bars, cafeteria and restaurants is based on wheat or sugar till you try to avoid them!

Since january i am following a semipaleo Lean gains diet( semi paleo in the sense that I mostly avoid grains and sugar, but drink some milk or have some pasta or a cookie every now and then). I had regained some 4 kgs before chrismas due to really poor diet( only 3 months that I didn't take care of the diet and ...bam!). Now I've managed to lose 2 kgs and improved strenght(only cardio is 15 min once or twice a week as active recovery).
Definetely experiencing a nice body recomposition...
Lets see if I can get to 10% body fat this way...( now I am more on the 20% :/
This reminds me of a paper I read a few days ago. Melatonin, when bonded to MT1 receptors, can prevent cell death from neurodegenerative such as Huntingtons and Alzheimer's. The melatonin prevents the mitochondria from releasing an enzyme which lights the fuse on cell death mechanisms. Very, very cool.
A police helicopter can't easily land on your window ledge and observe (with audio) what's going on inside for an extended period of time.
We’re ripe for a great disruption in higher education