skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: should I take a gap year?
Hey everybody,
I was accepted into an awesome university a couple of months ago. Not only are they one of the top science / tech schools in the US, they have a really good gap year policy. If I can come up with a reasonable plan, they'll let me defer my acceptance for a year.

That being said, do you think I should do it? Did you take a gap year and have it turn out to be great (or terrible)? I don't have the kind of money where I could just travel for a year, but I'd love to work overseas if I could.
If dealing with administrative stuff is too difficult for the entrepreneur, they could always try to find comparable talent elsewhere or to convince the established, proven talent to move where it's convenient for the entrepreneur.
Speaking as somebody that graduated from a lower-ranked school, I completely agree.

I learned a ton from my last failed startup. So much, in fact, that it took a six-month vacation afterwards to really digest the experience, and I don't think that I'm boasting when I say that one failed startup, one where you pour everything into it, is equivalent or better to an MBA.

What I didn't get, and I had to work for, was the credential.

The only people that recognize one of my schools (Waseda) as being anything special are all in either Japan or China.

So when I go to meet a client or a banker, I don't have the credential card in my hand, and have to rely on my network, history, and general ability to get along with pretty much everybody.

While these have gotten me along pretty well, I do regret making the naïve assumption that schools were about education, rather than about the people you meet.
i'm logged in and still see that error

edit: also, that person has to be logged in. they replied =)
It is not the ideal way, but would you rather they made a gamble and failed against the legal framework (their opponent is not really Yahoo after all), or spend some upfront capital now to protect both their customers, employees, shareholders and even end-users.

If it helps, you can think of software patents like a tax on business, especially the larger you become. If you were Facebook, would you take the risk of not paying your taxes, particularly on your public share offering?

At least, protecting themselves now gives them the option to fight however they think is most effective. Without it, they are just legal easy prey.
I'm uhh... guessing this is a joke, but if it isn't... they'd do brisk business in San Diego!
The best way we can attract our first users is with having a course that is so valuable for our students that accreditation concerns become secondary. In this case, if you are looking for a high level class in Web App for Mobile, you probably will never find it in the coursera, mitx, udacity or khan catalogs. They have no interest or incentive to put that sort of course together.

If you look at the value proposition for a student, our web app class is extremely high. The material covered in that class can have a direct impact on job prospects, billing rates, or internal promotion opportunities, and it is such a difficult area to self teach that saving tens or hundreds of hours fighting though online tutorials is well worth the $200 or $400 that the class costs.
If you can, do it. You might have this opportunity again once you have a 9-5.

Don't waste it (IE: do something cool and interesting).
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I don't think this is irresponsible, exactly. Mischievous, yes, but there's not a ton of damage being done and it's something we can laugh at and say "Hey, that was pretty good."
Obviously you don't have to list the details you don't feel comfortable with or the ones that could be a potential threat.

btw http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity
Dead link. Try https://github.com/andyhd/Logo-Tortoise instead.
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I can't tell if this is for real or not, but I'm praying that it is and it comes to Seattle.
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If you go to this submission and click it, it up-votes this:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742745
Post, discover and curate moments around the world.
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Humorously I am typing this on a 3rd generation iPad yet remarkably that doesn't necessitate that I be a raging idiot like so many. But whatever: proudly wave your flag. You belong, right?
I agree 100% with you that there is a large difference between search engine use by hackers/power users and by casual users. But given the frequency of the problems that I have, I definitely believe that 1) I can impossibly be the only one that experiences this and 2) therefore there may be a lot of room for improvement. Room for Google, or for a competitor. (I just don't expect it will be Google, since they are the ones that made it worse.)

By the way, the scapegoat tree search query was "scapegoat tree inorder append". Try that and observe 90% AVL tree results on the first page.
How do I know it's high quality, though? $400 is a significant amount of money. Without user testimonials or reviews, am I supposed to take it on blind faith that it will be worth my $$?

I'm not slagging you, by the way. Just offering my initial reaction as someone who would be interested in such a class, who is doing a CS degree at a traditional university, and who would like to see someone disrupt the higher education model.
I'm not sure why it's not working then. It may be because it's getting so many votes.
I don't know TFS, but isn't it possible to just use the ALM tools for project management and keep using mercurial, git, svn or whatever else you prefer as VCS?
Is the link between the two really required?
So this confuses me a little, I would be glad if someone could explain it to me: why does the MPAA get a voice in the proceedings, if they are not a party to it?
Apple bought CUPS
I don't know why I was downvoted, but the $6.67 per day cost is PER TERABYTE

I think whomever downvoted that thought I was referring to the per GB cost.
Really appreciate the feedback on the post, I'll be sure to implement them.

Re 1.), you are right, the writer already had heard of Buffer beforehand, I should have made that clear.

Awesome stuff regarding 3.), I think I'm not doing this enough by far and will do it next time!

Anyways, really great to have these thoughts here, I think it'll be an awesome addition, for Buffer's next round of news coverage. :)
The article clearly states that the conversation happened before ip{o,a}d
Probably a joke since the batteries last around 15 minutes, especially when carrying a load.

It would be amazing if real though. Maybe someone can make a hydrocarbon powered version that would actually have enough range. It would use less fuel than a car, and get there faster to boot.

Startup idea?
They can add revenue by flying drugs back across the border!
I've been planning to build a quad-rotor to deliver food and beverages around my house, but I never thought that idea could turn into a delivery startup.

I can't tell if this is a joke (?), but the technology is definitely available to make it happen.
Of course it's real. I want my tacos brought from LA though..
While I agree, my complaint with it is even simpler: hit refresh and you can ostensibly keep adding kudos without limit. If that's not the case, then it's a UI problem because it doesn't tell you as much. If it is the case, then it certainly removes whatever meaning it has the moment someone starts inflating the count.
The baseline scenario had another similar take.
http://baselinescenario.com/2012/03/21/jobs-disaster-looms/

I disagree with both, are people going to scammed? Sure. Did Madoff scam a bunch of rich "intelligent" investors? Damn straight.

I personally fall on the line of personal freedom with reasonable safety nets, to me that is, allowing micro-loans, but continuing social security.
Very difficult to use on iPad. You end up drilling down when you try to touch the circle for the pop-up. It's also hard to hit the red part of the circle.
This is an analysis by a known startup lawyer in Silicon Valley.
From my point of view, it's good to hear pro and against arguments, not just the pro.
no, unit testing doesn't tell you if your constructs aren't safely composable. So: it will pretty much never find a threading bug, a concurrency bug, a reentrancy bug, etc.

I only know three ways to detect this sort of bug, and they all suck: 1) get smart people to stare at all of your code 2) brute force as many combinations as possible 3) move the problem into the type system of your language so you can do static analysis of the code
When I say fashion, I include all the press and showbiz world that live on selling beauty products, clothes and the like. "High" fashion is a tiny niche: Conde'-Nast is the mainstream; advertising companies are the mainstream; Hollywood is the mainstream. And they sell primarily sex; they sell it to me as a male but they sell it even more to you as a woman. Compare the ads you find on men-oriented magazines: they sell big cars, big watches, gizmos and
What Apple’s Money Can Buy
This is no longer the case, from my reading.

http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-bsd/all/all
There's clear value-add here: for some reason, I couldn't find a discussion surrounding the Wired article.

The real reason why the trend is pervasive is because oftentimes one article from one source doesn't reach all corners of the internet. Middlemen cascade the messages.
Have you considered displaying a collective feed of your networks' posts on the homepage?
Is there any implication here when it comes to using traffic cameras or vehicle-mounted plate scanners to monitor vehicle location? Or will they just switch to doing that more often?

In some ways that seems more broadly invasive than GPS, in that it captures information about thousands of individuals who aren't being specifically observed.
You hit it on the head. I used to have to deal with alot of litigation-related preservation of data... we started calling discovery "Mutually Assured Destruction".

The lawyers basically try to make things more and more onerous in order to encourage a settlement. It's amusing, as long as you aren't accountable for the data!
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PG could start using POST & CSRF protection to lock this down. Or we could just avoid doing this to each other.
I guess everything we do has collateral damages. The problem is how we minimize the damage without interfering too much. It's like the man on a wire kind of thing.
Carpathia wants to be paid $9000 a day like they were before the Megaupload case started and pulling the drives and telling the FBI that it's their problem doesn't do that.
how fast can a quadcopter fly, how far, and how much can it carry? seems like this would only work well in limited contexts, like, say, small deliveries on a particular campus or within a single large building or complex. not to be a complete nay-sayer, but the limits of battery tech are a bit harder to overcome than most software problems.
Can you imagine Stone Brewing getting into this? Hungry Marines would be sniping from every bush and the 15 would be littered with downed coptors.
The running cost is just part of the equation... those servers are depreciating away and generating no revenue!
Nice hack! We should call it 'Same-site request forgery'.
Pretty funny, I think the LobsterCopter gave the joke away.
I saw this but don't really consider it much of a problem. It's the kind of thing that you can't really exploit. It'd be obvious if you really tried to use it for evil and then PG would kill your account.
Whats a good group on Linkedin to meet engineers?
You're going up against Chess.com. They've got some serious network effects on their side, so yours is an uphill struggle. If you're going to make a decent go of it without a massive marketing budget, you'll need to work very hard on converting visitors to active users.

Job one is to implement good tracking and A/B testing. Job two is to get rid of the signup. View every mouseclick and form field as a machine-gun nest that's mowing down your potential users and be absolutely ruthless about removing them. Do the work for the users. You need a huge "PLAY NOW!!!!" button that takes me straight to a game, with me playing as black against a weak engine. I respond to white's opening, then you grey-out the screen and prompt me for my e-mail address (and only my e-mail address) to receive white's reply.

I'm now committed, so I'm far more likely to give you my e-mail address. Use the response e-mail as an opt-in to a mailing list. Remind me daily that I've got a game on the go, whether I'm actually playing or not. If I'm not playing, send me tutorial messages, ask me what's stopping me from playing. If I am playing, invite me to start another game after a couple of moves. Tell me about other new users, drive me to engage with them. Match me by location, match me by rank, just get me playing. Push, push, push. If you want to see how the experts do these sorts of e-mails, sign up at OKCupid or Vistaprint and wait.
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They've probably already upvoted it so they can't vote it up again.
I worked with Leftronic back in August and again last month for some demos we did at Splunk (for our SDKs), and it was a joy.

Lionel and Rajiv were always very responsive and very accepting of feedback, and they actually fixed all the problems I had found back in August. Triple-A team here :)
Thorium MSRs process nuclear waste from current production reactors too. Sorry, I assumed people reading about this article new that.
How would people be mistyping "www" as "ww1"?
This was my sticking point as well. University doesn't just teach you facts, it teaches you how to think constructively, liaise, and how to research. Who is going to say "I need JIT Learning to teach me the scientific method"? That's an example of something that most people need to have introduced to them; folks just aren't aware that it exists as a process, let alone why.
Pretty scary--the same tech could "deliver" a pistol, which then delivers a bullet more or less just as easily.
imagine your self at 30, do you think looking back you'll think anything but "I'm glad I took that year abroad when I was 18"
I like the Stack Overflow system of downvoting

Downvotes remove 2 reputation from the post owner.
Downvotes on answers remove 1 reputation from you, the voter.
Downvotes on questions are free.
You can vote 30 times per UTC day. You get an additional 10 votes on questions only.

On Reddit, people just tend to downvote when they don't agree with something. That's really it. The only times that I've downvoted posts have been when it's a repost from recent, and on comments I only downvote if it's something that's hateful or doesn't contribute to discussion.
Yes, but it's just because it sounds different. IMO both the absolute and relative number of people lay in a range of what I would expect to be random fluctuations.
Also: maybe we'll see a rise in LinkedIn profiles of people calling themselves programming / designer superheros.
Why are options that would destroy any chance at Megaupload conducting business in the future even on the table before a trial is finished? I suppose a large amount of damage is already done, but it would be a gross injustice to kill their business before anything started. The government should pay to keep this up until they've conducted their trial. If they don't, and they lose somehow, I hope they get hit with a massive countersuit.
The domain is registered to Star Simpson of MIT, formerly notorious for this story: http://boingboing.net/2007/09/21/mit-student-arrested.html
If HN has some sort of redirect to any URL page (eg, redirect.ashx?url=http://www.google.com I don't know if HN does but a lot of sites do in some form) then it could be exploited possibly
If permitted by the law if and when it does pass, I would start a portal that co-invests in EVERY startup that is presented for crowdfunding through the portal. As an investor there is no better indication of legitimacy than when the sponsor has money in the deal. Then if and when your portfolio companies have success you have a real track record to build on and grow your portal.
Plus you need to be logged into google account
Not necessarily. You could make the CSRF request on, for example, 80 percent of the views to make it look legit. You could even take a more sophisticated approach and start by automatically upvoting for 100 percent of logged in users just to get on the front page and dampening once your story rises in the rankings.
Sometimes no matter how stupid the idea seems at first if it's executed brilliantly it might just work!....lol
Why was Mourniho sent off in the match against villareal?
Google bought X.

X being pretty much everything they do besides Search. Not sure if that is much of an argument.
It is illegal for the startup to take investments from non-accrdited investors under many circumstances. It's not illegal for the investor per se.
I had always assumed this was impossible because my votes have an auth key attached. Does this mean that the auth key is not used and is just there to trick casual observers into thinking there is security?

vote?for=3742852&dir=up&by=citricsquid&auth=478876d54494692615d9f2ca184fa9fab2fb9ff7&whence=%69%74%65%6d%3f%69%64%3d%33%37%34%32%37%34%32
It seems silly to be opposed to Ponzi schemes that affect only the wealthy investors who buy in, but in favor of Ponzi schemes that affect everyone who pays payroll tax.
The Facebook Fraud
That's a little too vague, man

Linkedin is not a great place to meet engineers, maybe the worst. Most engineers have taken down their profiles from too much spam from recruiters.
It's a good thing we haven't yet invented drones that can shoot a missile at you.
Actually, I've really come to enjoy seeing a "Discuss this post on Hacker News" link at the bottom of a blog post. I've become annoyed by loading a blog post, only to discover that 3/4 of the page is just comments.

But really, the same thing could be accomplished by having the comments page be separate from the article page, yet still be hosted on the same blogging platform.
I'm guessing this security hole is a regression because I could have sworn I tried this before. But I don't remember for certain.
Is your Apache Server Status wide open for the world to see?
Why didn't they start out with flying spaghetti?
w3schools has a lot of misinformation...

http://w3fools.com/
Of course, because other women are competition. Or would you be so happy to meet three friends with the same exact dress, at some social occasion with other people in formal wear? Most males would love nothing better than to wear exactly what everybody else is.
I write tests to confirm basic functionality. Then I wait for the bugs, write tests to tickle them, and then fix them.
It was, but the workforce was severely slashed, and (due to low market necessity) would have been moreso if not for a unionized work force.
I really hope they weren't backing 25TB of data with RAID controllers, this is well out of RAID league and well into the territory of distributed file system techniques. I ditched RAID years ago for ZFS for only an 18TB file server at home. Start talking about thousands of servers and RAID is pretty useless.

That said, IANAL but I think the interesting thing here is that just making copies of the hard drives is likely not enough from a evidence standpoint. With such a data set there are likely layers of data abstraction software that would be need to be replicated to make any sense of it.
Is that how this story became number 1 without a pg comment? If this was serious you would think pg would have commented.
Regarding the point: "Just-in-time learning is the future. No ifs, ands, or buts. Any argument you might have to the contrary is not only wrong, but dangerously wrong."

I don't think I agree with you there (or perhaps I just didn't interpret the point correctly). In certain fields of study - and perhaps software engineering is one - this might be true, but it does not hold generally. If tomorrow I find myself needing to write a good zero-finding algorithm in a new language, then yes, I can probably absorb that material quickly. If I find myself needing to model the temperature dependence of something using an esoteric branch of quantum mechanics, then good luck to me without 3 years of prior study in topics that didn't seem relevant to anything at the time.
I emailed PG about this a week ago, his response:

"It just seems to."

Normally loading the vote URL directly doesn't work because votes that don't have a HN referrer don't get counted. By submitting the URL to HN and getting people to click through a HN referrer gets sent making the votes look legitimate.
Claude Shannon and juggling
Step 1: Set up a company.
Step 2: Sell equity in that company.

Boom, you've just broken the law. Right now the number of intermediate steps between 1 and 2 are ENORMOUS. It's very, very difficult to do #2. The regulatory burden is significant and the limitations on who can invest and how much are also significant. Even something as simple as, say, trading 1% of your company to a friend in exchange for $100 is illegal. Your friend isn't a qualified investor, for example, and your company likely isn't set up properly to be traded.

That's why we have the standard investment track that we do today. There are co-founders and employees (who can have equity) and there are angel investors and VCs. But there's not your friends and family, there's not interested individuals on the other side of the country, because those people don't meet the requirements to be "qualified" investors. Essentially, the system has been set up so that at the level below a publicly traded company investors have to prove that they aren't going to go broke by investing, they have to be rich enough so that the risk of losing investments won't risk putting them in the poor house. That's why angel investors are all rich. There's no such thing as a working class angel investor who just barely manages to take home mid 5-figure incomes per year.

But with this law that's changing. You will be able to set up a company, with some hassle but not nearly as much as before, that will be able to take $100 from your friend in exchange for 1% ownership.

Think about the implications of that. A site like kickstarter is very much dependent on pre-orders being a big part of the "donation" / investment aspect. But what if you could not just donate or put in pre-orders for projects on kickstarter but merely help finance them in exchange for a piece of the action? Think about all of the projects on kickstarter that you think are a really good idea and seem likely to be successful but that you don't actually want anything from. Or think about projects you would like to support and think would be hugely successful and you do want whatever they're making but you can't justify a higher level of support because the return doesn't seem worth it. Or think about projects that could potentially earn revenue but that can't easily do pre-orders. As a really "out there" example, let's say I had a new way to build giant dump trucks for mining. Pre-orders don't make sense because only a few mines are going to buy the things, but showing people that I know the business and proving I have a good idea and soliciting funding in exchange for equity and profit sharing might still be worthwhile.
I miss the Hacker News from four years ago - Dustin Curtis
Don't go to the cliches places in Europe, go somewhere that makes you stand out. I lived in Vanuatu (South Pacific) it was a blast.

I worked (and made money), but many friends regret borrowing money to take a pleasure trip. You decide.