skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are non top-tier universities really that bad?

Here is my experience in undegrad.

1. Most students simply don't care about their major's subject.

2. Most professors don't care about the subjects they teach enough to care about how students are doing.

3. Grading is aimed at punishing mistakes, rather than rewarding for learning things or doing things.

4. Guess what those things do to your group projects.

5. If you try to undertake ambitious projects or subjects for your papers, your grades go down, because of the things listed above. The most reliable way to get reliably high scores is to never experiment, never push yourself.

6. Degree requirements are pretty much arbitrary. For example, in my university, "IT" students (who weren't going to do any major programming on their jobs) were forced to take theoretical CS classes, while students in "Computer Engineering" (who were bound to do tons of programming) weren't.

7. Add to this the fact that you're expected to buy expensive useless textbooks that go from $200 to $2 once the next edition is out. (Of course, you can buy used books, but that's not the the point. The point is, they have no inherent value.)

Etc, etc. Of course there were some exceptions, couple of great profs, several enthusiastic students, some courses taught from an O'Reilly book, but such anomalies were a precious rarity.
I wrote a tablet app for GfK around '95 using some Fujitsu tablet running Windows 3.1
It was supposed to be creepy. You were supposed to be uncomfortable with the idea of a sentient sex-slave - which is supposed to get you to start thinking, at what point do you draw the line? If anything, I felt that line of dialogue was too heavy-handed.

Hard scifi is not supposed to make you say "Rah-rah, the future will be awesome!" It's supposed to make you think.
What I'm digging about HireArt is that companies using it seem to be more organized. They think more about the position they are hiring for at the start, submit interview questions to HireArt, write better job descriptions… If companies have a clearer idea of what they want, and they can communicate that to applicants, less time will be wasted all around. Here's an article from someone who has used HireArt, and makes this statement better than I: http://bit.ly/Abh6rj
To save with [Esc],w add the following to your ~/.vimrc

" remap <Leader> to ,
let mapleader = ","

" save with ,w
nmap <Leader>w :w<CR>
If so, then about a million other people "invented it" as well. Tablets are one of those "no duh" technologies that almost EVERY science fiction writer just assumed the future would have.

Apple didn't invent the tablet. They just made it not suck. The innovation didn't originate in the conception of the device itself.
thanks for the mention josh. it's pretty cool that you know we exist.

-jdg
How many people who use Windows on a regular basis know anything but using their mouse to interact with the OS? How many normal users do you know that know the current Windows shortcut keys? Expecting people to learn new ones is a bit silly in my opinion.
Nevermind the fact that there are no visual cues for the user to know that the corners actually do something. Same with closing a program, it's a hidden gesture. Those sentences deserve many exclamation points and expletives.

If this is supposed to be easy to use then it should be intuitive.
The indictment says they used a pen/trap device to monitor the wirless traffic. Does that mean they busted the encryption? I'm not saying that's a shock, it would seem more likely that they would monitor the traffic from the ISP's end rather than monitoring the wireless traffic.
You're right. I vote, but none of those bastards actually represent me.
How do U.S. Internet users spell 'search'? G-o-o-g-l-e
Isn't that going to be hard to scale ?
Also worth checking out, the free part of Railscast's Bootstrap Rails screencast two episoder: http://railscasts.com/episodes/328-twitter-bootstrap-basics
The book uses the excellent bootstrap-sass gem. I have personal assurances from the gem's author (tmcdonald) that he will keep it up-to-date with the latest changes in Bootstrap.
The Swedish Pirate Party doesn't suck as much as the Dutch one does. I wish we had a Pirate Party like Sweden.

The German one is pretty good also, btw.
Distributed Data Analysis with Hadoop and R
Show HN: Time Tracker Pro - Automatically time track and organize your tasks
Why PPC Won't Work for Everyone
We believe that mobile web apps need to become much more powerful than they are today. Developing
native apps for various platforms is not easy, and frankly, unnecessary for most
services. This is just our first step in bridging the gap between native apps and mobile web apps.

We are looking to provide a suite of services around notifications that not just make it easy to
deliver the notifications, but provide better targeting, management and analytics.
No, Unix is a trademark. You can call your unix-like OS Unix only if you conform to SUS or something like that.

GNU is definitely not Unix.
Terminal IDE: full-featured terminal/shell/SDKs on Android
Simple function that abstracts sprite mapping in Three.js
This is why I stick with Rails; for the mindshare. There are many reasons to be critical of Rails, but the bottom line is that other people generously contribute work like this on a regular basis, making me instantly more valuable to employers or clients.
Yes, absolutely. Quiet hours will show up in a day!
I've been using Highrise for a long time, too, and think it's good at what it does, but the heavy contact focus doesn't fit well with my process. The lack of a real overview is also really limiting factor for me, too. It's really a solving a different problem, I think.

Great point about the pipeline concept being useful for different things. We have one early tester using it to track conference sponsorships.
It's an android being assembled. Of course it's going to be nude, to start with. This is a silly complaint.
> "* Increasing amount of specialization; liberal arts majors can be very smart and have broad understanding, but get shafted because paying for on-the-job training is expensive."

Liberal arts majors can be smart and have broad understanding but so can technical people. In fact, the technical people I've met on average have been smarter than liberal arts people.

While universities have quite a few problems, universities is where most of the world-changing research has been done over the past few centuries. If you kill the university before coming up with an adequate substitute for that function, you kill the future.
Typically, venture rounds are participating preferred securities (at least). So, the more likely scenario here is:
43.4 MM Sale
Less: 9.8 Cash Retention Pool
= 33.6 MM Available for Shareholders

Less: 17MM Preferred to VCs (Face Value of VC Investment)
= 16.6 MM (split among VCs, founders, employees)

VC Participating Share: ~35% * 16.6 = ~5MM

Available for Founders / Employees = 11MM

Total to VCs = 17+5=22MM
> inbox is a todo list. email is the protocol for putting stuff on it

I see these categories of email

1. Email from people you know that you're likely to respond to, and which therefore lead to "conversations"

2. Reminders and "things to do" that you need to act upon; once you have acted upon it you usually update the status of the task by mailing back

3. Read-only email: email sent by corporations that you somehow need to store but that you will never respond to (they often come from aptly-named "no reply" addresses; but mailing lists are part of it too)

4. Random stuff (close to spam, but not really): things you have to read because they may be important, but usually aren't

Gmail is optimized for #1 and does a good job at it. Lately it started to address #4 by trying to automatically detect "important" email; in my opinion this doesn't work well, but it could eventually work.

AFAIK nobody is seriously trying to solve #2 and #3, and in my experience #3 and #4 cause most of the clutter. Which makes #3 the most urgent problem with the highest ROI.

What if you could use a special email address for "read-only email" that would receive #3 mail and deal with it:

- organize it automatically by sender (or "topic") and period (not by subject / conversation / date: all my utility bills of one year are ONE object and not a dozen different conversations, for example)

- save all attachments (that deserve it) as PDFs

- notify you only when necessary (not easy)

- etc.

I've been toying with mailgun today, and it seems building a first version of this isn't out of reach; I'd be very interested to exchange ideas on this subject.
I can already connect my Droid 3 to HDMI monitor input and a bluetooth keyboard (actually Droid 3 keyboard is not too bad for development , I used VI many times via ConnectBot app). In the future, it will become only better: you will just put your phone next to the monitor and the keyboard, with no cables, and it will be like today's PC.
Congrats to Sam and the team. Green Dot is lucky to have him.

During last summer at YC Sam helped us quite a bit on different fronts. He has this amazing clarity in his thought process and is generally a really helpful guy.
You can find an earlier example of someone talking about any non-trivial invention. That's not the same as actually inventing it.
My observation has been that commenters on HN tend to be exceedingly pedantic, and strongly aligned with a worldview that believes in the intrinsic reality of a system of tightly-defined rules and regulations. The comments here enforce that observation -- this is a piece designed to show off a rendered character's emotional resonance, but most of the comments focus on a few words she utters early on.

Moreover, it seems that many commenters can't distinguish between a) an author's intent to portray a possible future reality, warts included and b) what the commenter thinks is morally and ethically incorrect. More than a few comments are bizarrely attributing to the author sexual depravity that derives from the motives and setting of the characters in the video.

I thought it was plainly clear to anyone that the piece was designed to provoke questions about objects, created for consumption by humans, which approach the edge of distinction between thing and person. From observing commentary elsewhere on the web, it's clear to me that the excessive focus on the fact that she was created as a sex object is peculiar to HN.
Do they actually work for coder-style usage? Would I actually be faster in Emacs if I was constantly looking to see what my keyboard had been redefined to this time?
2001 did it before that, in 1969.
Absolutely--I think I was a bit unclear on that. I'm absolutely in the small biz bucket now, but I think my past freelancer self would have paid for it. But you're right, we have some work to do around finding whether our target is freelance and small biz or only one of those.

I really appreciate the thoughtful feedback.
A MRI machine is probably not included in the $99 kit. :)

I was skeptical that simple, unguided tDCS could have significant effects so I searched some more and found a very nice overview paper: http://www.aipass.org/files/TDCS_State%20of%20the%20art.pdf "Transcranial direct current stimulation: State of the art 2008"
That's good to know; the "Missing Bluetooth HID Profile" bug is still open:

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=9708
By the way, we're specifically focused on non-technical hires right now. There are a few great tools out there for assessing coders (coding tests, Github), the likes of which the non-technical hiring process mostly lacks.

So far, we've designed a bunch of questions in marketing, customer service, sales, writing, etc., by getting input from people in those fields. But in the long term, we'd love to measure the correlation of our questions with actual job performance, and use that info to tune our interviews to be maximally predictive.
Lockheed: Prototype Space Fence tracking orbital debris
They have a policy of printing & scanning documents for archival purposes.

It also seems they have a policy of using Courier, which is probably a carry-over from the days of paper records. It isn't the most readable font ever, but it is surely one of the most legible- a good thing for documents meant for preservation.
Because I don't use Firefox and the Chrome version says it will access any file on my computer if I install it, which I find unnecessary.
>typically, venture rounds are participating preferred securities (at least)

That is increasingly false for A rounds, at least.

This 2 year old discussion talks about that, but from what I hear these days, any startup that doesn't "desperately" need money will not agree to participating preferred in the valley.

http://www.quora.com/How-common-are-participating-preferred-...
And it also ignores that a lot of these interventions seem to have U-shaped curves: the smartest benefit least. Iodization shifted averages up by like 13 IQ points - and did little or nothing for the smartest people since they didn't have iodine deficiency almost by definition. Modafinil, ritalin, or nootropics - all have similar results. This even holds true with the elderly, where interventions almost always report strikingly larger results than in young people at the peak of their intelligence.

To the extent that class issues genuinely match up, these interventions ought to be greeted, especially as this tDCS is cheaper than I remember my programmable TI-84 calculator in high school being!
It's using my bootstrap-sass gem. [1]

[1]: https://github.com/thomas-mcdonald/bootstrap-sass
Another issue: if you ever use Ctrl-C in a macro, and then try to rerun it, the macro ends on Ctrl-C.

I use ^[ to end insert mode.

This only happens when you use macros like I do. I took a look at my registers and here's a random one I did four months ago (using Surround.vim to wrap an indented area in div tags).

V/^[ ]\{0,2}[^ ]/-1^MS<div class="question"^M
The difference I'm pointing out is between these niche apps - sure they exist on both platforms. Plenty of professionals produce music and art with computers, I don't think I need to prove that. But nobody will do this stuff on tablets.

It's because personal computers will always be more sophisticated than tablets, both in terms of hardware and input. On an iPad you can play with a fake 6-inch guitar with your fingers in Garageband. That's limited gimmickry, and will only be fun/interesting the first few times. On a Macbook you can directly record an actual guitar and produce an album in Pro Tools. Nobody will ever produce an album on an iPad.

The same goes for visual and physical art, nobody will ever use iPads for Photoshop or AutoCAD. These are just things that require complex UI that you can't use without a precise, physical form of input like a mouse and keyboard. Touch input is too bulky for things like that.

There are good fields to go into with tablet apps - we're already seeing this with the watered-down photo editing Apple is selling. http://i.imgur.com/HUBeu.jpg Some apps, like this and iBooks, can still be useful to typical consumers when they're this simple. But a lot of the other stuff is just gimmickry that sells on shallow novelty.
How many normal users have multiple monitors? There might be a lot, but we're going up a notch above normal users and towards power users here.
This just makes me think that the market is ready to be disrupted. Probably not head-to-head with Google but in a way that goes around the current concept of web search.
Software Translates Your Voice into Another Language
Awesome. Thanks for the update! Next nitpick: the readme on a github page is "below the fold". Your current description is about the codebase, not about the product.

You might consider changing it to something like "Candor - Javascript simplified" or something.
Those six cases cover somewhere upwards of 700,000 patient-years; the final estimate I found was that the risk roughly doubled from 3 SJS cases per million people to 6 cases per million people in modafinil users. (None were fatal, incidentally.)
I disagree, I have interviewed graduates of both for positions in my team and I have not found that the applicants that came from a prestigious university where inherently better than from a small obscure college. What you get out of your College experience like anything in life it's highly dependent on the personality of the person.
I keep hearing how difficult it is to build a standalone email client which integrates with gmail. Does anybody have a link to any good discussions for why it's so hard?
I work for an app company and can verify his comments.

Apple has done a great job at getting its users to pay for apps. They've done this via:

1) Encouraging Developers to not price free apps (this happens sometimes in review, in their literature, etc.)

2) Capturing device owner's credit card info at the start (so buying an app is frictionless)

3) Removing low-quality, buggy, copycat, and junk apps from the store via their review process

Google, on the other hand, has done just about everything wrong if you want to make money from paid apps. I suspect this is because Google wants to make money via in-app ad impressions and with free apps that's the only way you can make any money (in-app purchasing notwithstanding).

1) No review encourages spyware, copycat apps, buggy or broken apps, etc.

2) Android's "return policy" (which has since been tweaked) encourages people to pirate apps anyway (it's super easy to do so)

3) Initially (I'm not sure if this is still the case) you could sign up for a market account without a credit card, thus leading to a lot of friction when it came to paying for an app (entering your CC information was a royal pain).

Also, I share the frustration with the internal v. external/removable storage problem. Our apps are traditionally larger (content-centric, with lots of high quality images, audio, video) and have always ran into problems with Android devices' limited on-board storage.

This was purely a cost decision by Google and a profit decision by vendors/carriers as vendors wanted to produce devices as cheaply as possible and make a killing on SD cards - sell a device with xxxMB storage and no SD card, then force the consumer to go out and buy an overpriced SD card (usually at point of sale).

This all makes Android a developer-hostile environment; yes it's easier to initially get setup on Android (no provisioning profile, etc.) but it's all pain after that. If I had a choice, and didn't make cross-platform apps w/ PhoneGap, I'd write iOS apps first/only.
This is Elli, one of the co-founders.
We also launched on TC:
http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/09/resumes-are-bullshit-hirear...

I'd love to hear from any of you guys who are hiring non-technical people -- what are the biggest things you wish were different?
Whether this is an apt counter to the article's thesis depends on whether you perceive that thesis to be "This guy invented it and therefore should get acclaim/money/patents", or "This guy invented it and therefore Apple didn't and therefore Apple shouldn't get acclaim/money/patents." In particular, as yet more evidence that Apple's design patent on the iPad is totally bogus, I think the point is valid---and your point that "about a million other people 'invented it' as well" only contributes further.
I think the difference with smartphones was that before Apple entered the market there were already many well established phone companies. What were they going to do, just shut up shop because Apple had shown up with a superior product? They just had to start selling better handsets, and since buying or developing a mobile OS is tough, they of course pounced on the free Android offer. The only way that market could have worked out any different would have been if all those companies somehow decided they'd rather just die off. Continuing to sell old-fashioned handsets indefinitely was simply not an option.

With tablets on the other hand, where were the established players prior to Apple joining the fun? I can't think of any companies whose bread-and-butter was tablet computing and who would need to compete with the iPad or go out of business.

For phone companies, failure to adopt Android would be disastrous (unless they had access to another half-decent OS already eg. Palm or RIM). For consumer electronics companies, trying to enter the tablet business and compete with Apple could bring disaster. Android does not play the same role here.
That's where kerning comes in. It's a designer's job to manage the spacing manually.
A startup that saves the moms 
It’s a out-and-out “family assistant“, always with you on web, iPhone and iPad!
From today it’s available for free for 3 months. Sign up at www.savethemom.com!
Hmm, that actually makes sense (I was about to complain that you were the fifth start-up to do the same) but you should properly consider dropping the video -- it is too easy to get sued for discrimination and it forces people who don't look good but are great writers (as an example) to operate under a disadvantage.
nice app!
Turing's test has no provisions about human rights, or other legal rights.
The FBI has TOR network experts? Hmm. I wonder if they use it themselves?
I'm partial to Grails, and have been finding an increase in demand for Grails devs over the past 6 months or so.
Well put.

Very few modern inventions have a singular "inventor" in this day and age. It's a romantic notion that there is some genius somewhere who had a light bulb go off and suddenly a product is born.

Unfortunately, that's simply not how the world works. It never was true because invention always took a lot of hard work. You need time, money, and skill. However, this romantic notion is especially not true now that timelines, budgets, and skill-requirements exceed individual inventors' minds, wallets, and lifespans.
Quants tend to be highly technical, although they are not exactly web programmers.
The way I see it is that non-mobile application owners can recommend their customers to install this app, rather than create and publish a new one just to listen for notifications.

That's why I don't see the chicken-egg problem.
> In fact, the technical people I've met on average have been smarter than liberal arts people.

That's a standard technical person bias. I'm betting that its not true on average, that a good philosopher, businessperson, or history student is equally smart, but it's not as discernible due to the falsifiable nature of technical work.
Pinterest - Nova Rede Social
"Due to popular demand,"

Wait? What??
YouTube open letter to ECAD (Translated)
Have you heard of possible cure for migraines with a ketogenic diet?
Reading your comment I recalled I read this story:
http://perfecthealthdiet.com/?p=1543 (also related: http://perfecthealthdiet.com/?p=2921).
maybe the world is big enough now for multiple internets
I'm not convinced that Apple has played the "supply chain" card yet. Look at their prices. They get set on release and don't change for the rest of the year. Their margins probably get slightly fatter over the year. The iPhone starts to look over priced at the end of its life cycle.

If you look at their profits in phones last year, Apple are making (by my estimate) $31 for every $1 their competitors make (8.7% market share 75% profits).

Look at how much Apple can slash prices and still have the majority of profits. We have not seen Apple get aggressive on pricing.
My approach to #3 in gmail is to have filters that auto-archive, and then use multiple inboxes to show them under my main inbox email.
This is totally awesome Ray. One quick suggestion - integration of Rel=Author (http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/how-to-implement-rel-author) which I think is huge in the content-based SEO world.
+1 for a more continuous medical system.

I'd be curious to see the percentage of deaths caused by delayed diagnostic.

Genomics prices are heading down, let's make it easy, fast, and integrative.
Default Huawei U8100 USB Driver and PC Suite