skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An Eulerian Hoax (follow-up to an impossible puzzle)
Took the Stanford Database class online (while working) at the end of last year. It was one of the best technical education experiences I have ever had. That said...

Self study does not include credentials and evidence of specific work that traditional education does. If your future work is largely freelancing, this is probably irrelevant. If you are targeting work in the corporate world HR still looks for gaps in employment.
I agree, pick something you want to learn. I took about 6 months off. The first 2 I relaxed and didn't do much. Then, I bought a nice DSLR and got into photography. I would spend my days reading photography books, blogs, etc and my nights going out taking night photos of New York (http://www.flickr.com/photos/blakeperdue/sets/72157625542951...)

It was awesome to be able to have time to dive into a hobby and really soak it all in. I developed some great skills that will be useful to me for the rest of my life. It was also during this time that I realized what I wanted to do next.
I've read that rock climbers have a saying, "fun doesn't have to be fun."

(admittedly, I never heard that in five years of active climbing, but upon hearing it I immediately understood it to be true)
Apple seems to be taking another turn towards open source software. The spinning off of the cli build tools into an smaller package makes like easier for tools like homebrew and fink. Supporting projects like this is a very good sign.
First, the review is not fake; someone with an iTunes account really made that review. He just happens to work for Zynga.

I don't think there was any real attempt to manipulate here. He uses his real name and doesn't hide the fact that he is a part of Zynga.

Lots of companies do this with review. Lots of companies also clone other people's games. People just love to hate on Zynga.
Thanks jnorthrop.

I guess I should have added more detail. We've written out a full business plan, it's just very weak (knowingly). We've pitched a few different times and just finished up a Business Plan competition at our school.

It was a fantastic experience and we learned an absolute ton (a lot of it being how much we did wrong from the start, but still very valuable). It's just so hard to tell the difference between "quitting" and spending your time more wisely, i.e. on a new idea.
The title is a bit unclear. Up through Lion, Apple bundled XQuartz to provide X11 support. Going forward, they will no longer do so. Instead you'll have to download and install the XQuartz binary separately. Apple will continue to support XQuartz as an open source project. There will just no longer be an "official" Apple version.

[Edit: why would someone downvote this?]
from Clifford Stoll's Cucckoo's Egg (PhD defense)

http://books.google.com/books?id=9B1RfCAar2cC&pg=PA339&#...
I'm not certain I understand the author's point, but I think it might be in keeping with what Strength's Finder 2.0[1] says. Basically: don't try to improve your weaknesses, instead capitalize on your strengths.

[1] http://www.strengthsfinder.com/home.aspx (for the record, I heard about it on HN, bought it, did the survey, and was a bit 'meh' about the results. Basically, it told me I should be exactly what I already am, but I'm not happy as I am, so it was a bit of a wash)
What it's like to be a guy at a woman's tech conference (in 99 words)
IE did it right.

This problem gets exposed any time you try to do something like:

width:100%; border:1px

Cause you can't see the border. It's really stupid, the spec got it wrong.
In a decade when there is a google map for your entire year of travel that is public to the world, that you did not authorize but have no way to stop, we'll see how you feel about this.

There is zero overhead to running 1000 drones over a city once they get the technology right. Neighbors will be spying on neighbors in every detail.

Good luck closing the door on privacy once it's blasted open like this.
Summary spam.

http://growl.posterous.com/growls-response-to-notification-c...
"(although in Australia, lack of health insurance isn't the issue it is in the US)"

OT: When are we here in the US going to start listening to these comments, and fix it?

Job mobility is a great feature of an economy. When, because of health or mortgage or whatever, you can't move your brain from one job that isn't the best one for your brain or that job, to a job that is much better for your brain and that new job, that's a loss to the economy. Multiply that by however many and it's a handicap to the economy.
Yeah, we've been waiting for a while for Fortress too. It seems like a lot of time and effort has gone into a WYSIWYG IDE and not as much into the actual language implementation :-(

Chapel has made a lot of progress in the past 2.5 years (while we've been working on Julia) and is certainly a contender.

Julia certainly aims to be more dynamic like Clojure, but specially designed to be good for numerical and technical stuff, and yes, the begin/end is due to Matlab — scientists who have a lot of code in Matlab already are a major target demographic. As it is, a lot of Matlab code ports over with relatively trivial changes (see: http://julialang.org/manual/getting-started/#Major+Differenc...), which was the point of syntactic similarity to Matlab.
No, you won't. You'll just have to download and install XQuartz from http://xquartz.macosforge.org/trac/wiki/Releases
Why? You'll still be able to download XQuartz and it'll work the same.

Though http://www.tastycocoabytes.com/cpa/index.php is ok for very basic stuff.
I agree that the function of spectral intensity depending on position and direction would be interesting. It's clearly non-trivial to calculate: it's a 5-dimensional field for any given wavelength, so the whole thing is a 6-dimensional function. I wonder if it could be represented and simulated in terms of a finite element system. Otherwise there's always the myriad ways of solving the rendering equation. :-)

I'd love to know what physical effect causes this red haze. As you say, if methane weakly absorbs red light, we should be seeing green/blue, not red.

A cursory search of mine also revealed the Titan example, but I couldn't find anything terribly specific linking it to methane in particular. (Titan appears orange, methane is present in its atmosphere; it's not clear to me if and how the two are connected)
Yeah it sucks, but posting this on HN is a bit much. As the guidelines say "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Your account probably got shut off by a bot by accident, and it will probably be fixed when the weekend is over.
I think the tendency on HN is going to be to pile on this guy for not believing in his dreams enough, but I think he's got a point. Tenacity may be a necessary condition, but it isn't a sufficient condition. Resources matter.

But anecdotally, I don't see a strong correlation between celebpreneur status and repeated success. I suspect that any correlation might actually be negative.

There are a few people who defy the odds, though. The one common trait I've observed is that they are laser-focused on the product, so they are less prone to self-delusion.

UPDATE: Brandon Smietana wrote a good answer for this on Quora, reviewing some empirical studies which suggest my intuition is wrong. Entrepreneurs with previous success are probably as likely, or more likely, to succeed in the future. But it's not a given that funding inevitably flows to the more experienced entrepreneur.

http://www.quora.com/How-much-does-startup-pedigree-matter
Bad science journalism.. clearly trying to oversimplify and the author, didn't seem to have re-read it at all...I wish i had downvote on HN :(
If you could go back in a time machine, I confidently predict that, despite being orange, it would still have looked relatively blue to you.

Why? Our eyes are very, very good at adjusting to ambient light and factoring it out. Thus things still look to us like they have the same colors when viewed under natural light, or when viewed under incandescent lighting (which is far more red). Ditto if you wear colored glasses or goggles for a bit. Even though the ambient light would have been orange, Rayleigh scattering says that the sky would still have been blue relative to the ambient light, so would look blue.

The exception is if the sky actually reflected light from the ground or blocked it out. Then it would have looked white or dark, and the natural color would have become evident. (This happens with clouds, and is why a cloudy sky does not look so blue to us.)
Mozilla to CAs: revoke all MITM sub-CAs by April 27
Doubly so if it's a big company :)
The X11 that comes with Lion is XQuartz anyway.

All this changes is that the first time you run an application that uses X11 a dialog box pops up directing you to the XQuartz project page.
I think i've been waiting for Chapel more than X10 or Fortress, but scala and clojure are assuming the mantles as general purpose languages.

http://bartoszmilewski.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/supercomputi...

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4405
Box sizing that works in every browser
Yeah it looked like a direct copy to me to, but I always like to highlight any doubt before I assume guilt.
What is good enough?
Agree—I think it's perhaps the largest part of chicken-and-egg problem here IMO. You need to be genuinely confident if you want to convince people. And being really sure that you're right is the best way to act confidently.

AFAIK having some mild mania helps in this regard. Probably there are also ways to hack your mind to temporary ‘disable’ doubts that can tone you down.
My opinion is that you should never make a threat (even an implicit one) that you can't follow through on. No root DB maintainer is really in a position to play hardball with the CAs--at the moment the whole system is just too big to fail. So, I don't see this kind of saber rattling as productive.

That said, the CA situation is rapidly evolving. Chrome 18 has opt-in per-site certificate pinning, and the IETF pinning standard is on track. Plus, we're starting to see consensus around using broader reputation-based components as an additional form of certificate and CA validation. So, I think things are headed in the right direction and we can fix the system in the immediate term without replacing it entirely--meaning that we'll be able to catch bad acts from CAs and actually hold them accountable.
"Maybe someone working at a browser vendor can reply to this comment and explain to us why any one company is trusted to make a decision like that for the entire Internet?"

I don't work on security (although I do work at Mozilla), but I'm sure it's basically this: SSL/TLS PKI is the system we have, and if Firefox stops working with people's banks because a widely-used CA was distrusted, users will switch browsers. Once they switch browsers, the security benefits of distrusting the CA are lost.

Instead, Mozilla has to work with the CAs. As you say, we're between a rock and a hard place. The best we can do is a message like this:

http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.security.policy/b...

Which not only requires action on the part of all CAs to prove that this cannot happen again, but also clearly explains that abuses in the future can and will result in distrusting of the CA.
love somafm! ...a bunch of great stations for programming.
Not really, but it's not important either way.
I was going to make a joke about someone doing a web based wireshark but it looks like someone actually bothered doing that.. http://cloudshark.org/ go figure.
Is it just me, or is Macrumors by far the best Apple-news aggregator out there? Their reporting is clean, straight-forward and thorough (e.g. I wasn't aware that X11 was important for scientists). They present the rumors and their validity(looking at past rumors and the sources) and that's it. No non-sense subjective babbling like you see on apple-insider.

Sorry for the derail, it's just something i've been noticing. I wish more people would like to them.
This always happens: we get a cluster of articles which serve as summaries for a central 'canonical' one. I would love a service which, given an article, would link me to the best article on the same subject.
"Putting direct IP access to the broadcast channels on the cables is a much better approach"

And how is that supposed to work? Everyone needs a DOCSIS box/router and some kind of multicast-IP-to-HDTV converter? That seems a lot more complex and equipment-heavy.

Or is that where portfolio-company Boxee steps in to save the day?
I really like the design of the site (unusually so) but I am annoyed with the 'aesthetic' part: http://www.musicforprogramming.net/?c=aesthetic

"the most effective music to aid prolonged periods of intense concentration tends to have a mixture of the following qualities:" is too clinical to describe something as personal and emotional as music...
Random browsing of questions led to this one: http://mycareerstack.com/question/120/

...where the following advice is given: "But your strategy while answering this question should not be directly this answer. Generally in the interview you should start with the worst answer and then improve upon it.

If you directly give this answer then the interviewer would know that you had done this question before and may not give credit to you for the answer."

Hmm....

Sound advice, but there's something morally off, IMO.

Do you hate the player or the game, I wonder?
Or the online site that helps the player play the game?

As others have commented, interviewing is broken.
With 1-based indexing, length == last index.

Does 0-based indexing have any advantage, beyond ability to do pointer arithmetic with indexes?
this chiptunes station is pretty great:
http://tunein.com/tuner/?StationId=127100&;
> Mozilla is between a rock & a hard place here, but there is no spin I think you can put on this story in which Mozilla stood up against abuse of trust

I'm not sure it's worth our energy to be so disappointed in Mozilla here. That "they're between a rock and a hard place" precisely is the spin within which they stood up against abuse of trust.

They have sent out a letter so far. One of your worries appears to be that it sets the precedent that companies who do what Trustwave did can expect (only) letters in the future. But (iirc, and perhaps even in the bugzilla thread) one of the stated purposes of the letter is to set the opposite precedent: to publicly warn commercial CA's that future bullshit will result in distrusting.

I happen to think Trustwave had plenty of warning without the letter, but this particular hard place is particularly thorny because Mozilla is such a central policy hub. That's a problem you touched on above, that we agree needs a fix, but it's the way things are today.

The other half of the hard place is that before Trustwave pulled this BS, they issued a whole lot of legit commercial certs to a predominantly innocent user population. And you know, they can and should all go acquire certs from someone else, but they can't do that overnight. So if we really want Trustwave to get distrusted, I feel like we should focus our energy on a) telling people that Trustwave sucks and urging them to migrate, and b) paying attention/effort to initiatives like the one you mentioned from MM.
This is quite unfortunate, but was probably inevitable as you guys are really trying to move heaven and earth. Thank you for being disruptive.
I did something like this to study math after a startup exit (so money wasn't an issue), around 2005, well before the recent spate of free online courses. I did a combination of self-study (reading books), informally sitting in on classes in the local university, and some small study groups I organized. That was all well and good, but it eventually became clear I'd make much faster progress in a more formal setting, so I went back to school. Formal deadlines are a powerful motivator. Also, reading math is hard and conversations with experts can often speed along understanding. Five years later, I'm in my 3rd year of grad school in a pure math program.
It's the same as the difference between "0.1% of non-spam messages are marked as spam" (false positive rate) vs. "0.1% of messages marked as spam are not spam" (false negative rate).
Not that long but I did take 3 months vacations, or 2 weeks to learn something.

It feels absolutely great to be able to just learn for the sake of learning (but that learning can be: build a product etc too).

Now you have to secure your finances: know your burn rate, define a date in advance to start looking for work etc.
> If you’d like to contribute, please use the PayPal donation link at the bottom of the page

Hope PayPal doesn't freeze their account. There've been several stories on HN about people doing a donation fund-raise and suddenly getting frozen accounts.
Udacity courses seem to be delayed, as well.
probably not without serious security implications. I don't think there's a distributed java compiler available so you'd also have to write that first
Sounds like a good idea. It'd be a lot cheaper to do in text (and wouldn't require any technology that didn't exist in 2000); has anyone done it? If not, why not? If so, what happened? Does making it video greatly change the value proposition?
I don't think anyone is disputing the fact that guys in coffeeshops can't make successful startups. I don't think that is the point the author is trying to make. The ecosystem, much like the rest of the world, is centered on averages and unfortunately, it becomes a LOT easier to start a company and not FAIL when you have something to leverage. In the startup world, there is the deadpool and avoiding the deadpool is very unlikely when you have a plethora of experience to play.

Everyone starts with nothing and people succeed based on merit, there is nobody who is creating a shitty product and succeeding just because they are Kevin Rose. BUT, Kevin Rose can start a company and get millions in funding with the snap of his fingers and average Joe has to work and work and grind and grind before that happens. And probably, there are average Joe's out there that do all of this and still don't make it because of some other reason, that may even be out of Joe's control.

So conclusion is that success in the startup world is still about making a great product and building a good business but getting funding in my opinion is just as equally about product as it is about selling the founders to the investors and if you have something good to sell, like 'I created Flickr', it's incredibly easy to raise money. And one could argue that with money comes another level of huge advantage, and the sooner you raise money, the more advantage you have. SO in the end, having experience is a huge differentiator when looking at averages across the board.
The whole point is that cable companies are lobbying the FCC to remove the requirement that lifeline be unencrypted, with the ostensible purpose of "reducing truck rolls".

So, maybe your cableco isn't one that is lobbying, but several of the major ones are actively currently lobbying the FCC to remove the clear-lifeline requirement.
The real issue with which one "seems right" in some sort of intuitive sense is that it varies with what I'm doing. If I'm sizing something that is fundamentally a container, then I care about the size of the whole box, including padding (and probably also border), for all the reasons that the pro-ie-box-model people have said.

On the other hand, if what I'm sizing is something that is fundamentally content, then it's the W3C box model that seems more appropriate. "I want this paragraph to be 25em wide" probably means you actually want 25em worth of width actually dedicated to the letters themselves. "Scale this image to 320px width" makes a lot of sense if the image is natively some multiple of 320 pixels wide, and if the actual width the image itself gets is only 314 pixels due to border and padding, well, your image quality degrades.

The really-right solution is to be able to say "assume this box model for certain types of elements, and assume this other box model for other types of elements, and also let me override it on a per-element basis." Which the new CSS lets you do. Win!
All credits to Jorge for a neat introduction!
Scrup - like Droplr, but using your own server to host files
I don't want to speculate on why, but I suspect the two are strongly related.
Wish I could help, I am a big fan of CM. I have a spare newer poweredge, but I don't have any more room or power in my 1/3rd cabinet to rack it :(
Yes. I dropped out of high school during my sophomore year, I spent the next 18 months of so teaching myself to program, economics, and a bunch of other stuff. It wasn't taking a break from work, but I figure it's relevant.
Does Xquartz install the launchd component that listens on /etc/launch*/org.x and then launches the app on demand?
That gels pretty well with the general observation that the sky becomes "bluer" at angles further away from the sun. IR scatters even less than visible red, so you'd expect its angular distribution to be more strongly skewed as well.

I'm having a hard time trying to qualitatively estimate the angular distribution of perceived spectrum at a particular location, as opposed to the distribution of the angles of scattering events. I may have to try simulating this when I have some time.
Why do they need 50+ builds a day? Is that one configuration per handset? Do end-users need daily builds?
The U.S. government has already shut down non-U.S. .com domains (PokerStars, Fult Tilt Poker, Cereus).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg
Udacity's CS101 is still slated for Feb 20 from its website
I huge part of the goal here is to reduce the need for the "unholy mix of C, C++, fortran, matlab, octave, R and python routines" in both academic research work and machine learning / data science code in industrial settings. The whole project kicked off with me ranting about how I was sick of cobbling things together in six or seven different languages.

So interop is a very, very high priority. We have pretty good C ABI interop now. You can just call a C function like this:

ccall(:getpid, Uint32, ())

and it works. It works in the repl too and you can dynamically load new libraries in the repl. See this manual page for more details: http://julialang.org/manual/calling-c-and-fortran-code/.

We still want better C/C++ interop though. I've already looked into using libclang so that if you have the headers you don't even have to declare what the interface to a function is. That was very preliminary work, but I got some stuff working. Making Julia versions of C struct types transparently would be another goal here.

Another major interop issue is support for arrays of inline structs (as compared to arrays pointers to heap-allocated structs). C can of course do this, but in any language where objects are boxed, it becomes very tricky. We're working on it, however, anyone who wants to discuss, hop on julia-dev@googlegroups.com :-)
What Is Misogyny: A Male Perspective
Sounds great. Were you happy enough whit them to recommend them? Are you located in Singapore our outside of it? (one of the issues is we're located outside of Singapore)
Indian hacking group - Indishell denies hacking into Bangladeshi websites
I was going to make this point as well. The corollary is that, to overcome the implicit bias against the unknowns, your first success must be a genuinely great or useful idea. The unknowns who became the knowns often had a breakout success with their first successful product. Caterina and Flickr are the poster child example.
Pinwheel: Social Networks, Digital Geocaching, Online Treasure Hunt. Gold, Baby.