skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This looks like to just want to create hype around something that is nothing yet by carefully placing big names all over the place. too much focus on "famous" investors and founders.
The latest changes to C# show us that asynchronous code doesn't have to be written like asynchronous code. Just have the compiler do the work for you.
ReactOS actually makes heavy use of exception handling in C. The wiki page is a bit messy, but here it is: http://www.reactos.org/wiki/PSEH
If a company can reverse engineer sha512 that easily, we got bigger problems that leaking device numbers.
The author has a strange view (and cares way too much) about what other people think. Reminds me of myself in high school.
I was a philosophy major, and dropped out after 2.5 years. My career had been evolving throughout that entire time, and at some point I had to make a choice. After my second job, of six or so, nobody was even remotely interested in my education background, to the point where I deleted the entire section out of my resume with no material consequences whatsoever.

In this profession (excluding academia and high R&D, or specialisations requiring scientific background, or management layers that are still highly credential-driven) , it's all about what you can do. It's amazingly democratic. A degree is only used to differentiate a candidate from a random person off the street, and only in the absence of any other information about them, any meaningful experience, etc. The moment any of that comes into play, the degree becomes vanishingly insignificant.

The caveat, of course, is that if your career path takes you in that direction of doing something more than slinging code or running a small company, which gets increasingly likely as you get older, conservatise, want to get married, the works, you will be faced with severe barriers to entry in many places that are highly credential-dependent, if only through sheer institutional inertia, the force of custom, habit, and tradition, etc. While I do find it likely that these barriers are likely to become less durable in the future, in keeping with the general existential crisis of the received universal higher education narrative and the tendency toward greater meritocratic transparency in many professions (assisted by technology-fostered structural changes), there are certain things you will almost certainly never be able to do without the piece of paper, whether or not you'll ever need to use what you learned to get it.
Good points. Instead of listing specific technologies as requirements for candidate one could include a paragraph about the actual technology stack and tools being used in company.
Wow, I'm so glad that I don't need to worry about such a mess when using duck-typing in Python.
Is this just chatroulette with logins?
What's new since 1991 -- multiplayer? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Construction_Kit
Every RISC vendor had their own little PC 'consortium' (except perhaps Sun SPARC). They never sold that well, and when te Intel Pentium Pro came out, it beat them on most specs, so the whole idea of a RISC PC died around 1996 (outside of Apple).
People pay for apps in the appstore. They just don't pay as much as you may want them to.
As a fortysomething I can tell you that I had a few friends who did this back in the day: Over the short run it didn't make a difference -- but in the long run it did impact some people in a very bad way.

The lack of a degree often became a stumbling point mid-career: People without degrees often wouldn't be trusted for mid-level management jobs. Now if you're a solo act or working for a small company that isn't an issue -- but in a larger company (you know the ones with benefits!) it becomes a dead end.

In fact I'm ashamed to admit it but I now feel at a disadvantage because I lack a postgrad degree; and what makes that depressing is that I'm a creative professional which should in theory be as "hands on" as you get in a career. I also had to say that I've watched folks with ivy university degrees have doors open to them which are often closed to others (look at the last four Presidents of the United States).

Another thing for techies to think about is the fact that there's a ton of ageism in tech that nobody talks about. So yes if you're a twentysomething who can program you don't have to worry, but twenty years later even if you keep up you may not get hired. And at that point having a college degree can open up doors that might have been closed.

But you say that you're the next Zuck: Well one should also keep in mind is that the natural state of startups is to fail. So even if you're brilliant, your company may still fail. In fact even if your company does well there's nothing that says that it can't go south after a few years. And if that is the case having a degree won't hurt you.

Lastly I'd leave everyone with this thought: The value of an education isn't a career unless you are studying business. The value of an education should be to make you a better and more rounded person. And knowing more about the world will make you better at everything that you touch. If you want an example think about Steve Jobs learning about typography in college and how it shaped the original Mac.
> Injecting the plugin broker for controller plugins into the action controller for use by all controllers that extend it

Awesome phrase.
From the Amazon reviews, it appears that the posthumous editions (4th and 5th) depart from the spirit of the earlier ones, and have become unpalatable.

Edit: One reviewer who has used the 3rd to 5th editions prefers the fourth one, which is less terse than the 3rd one.
Heads up: The philosopher Frederick Copleston's name is misspelled on the entry under philosophy texts. I didn't spot an email address for the project.
Ask HN: Which authentication app you use in your django application?
I'm sure there are many django hackers out here. I'm exploring which authentication options are available in django for my web application where I plan to use both regular registration/login and facebook login.

Which django app you use for authentication? Any live websites where I can see it in action?
So Zynga goes banckrupt? Let me see where I put that timy violin...
Awesome, indeed. What does that mean, though?
What's the decision procedure for whether a certain expression is "concise?"
This reminds me of the standard problem off measuring programmers'' productivity. If some high level manager gets to do what they think would work, you end up with something like counting lines, or bug fixes per day without any regard for the bug size. You'll get measured that way against the other teams/members. Isn't that pretty close to what you're describing? Maybe it's a similar issue? Maybe people are just fooling themselves that you can reduce this problem to any meaningful single dimension?
All good advice. I agree that before pursuing this path, one should be reasonably sure (as much as that is possible) that one will never wish to do something in a profoundly credential-driven setting.

However, I also would venture a guess that a lot of doors hitherto closed to non-graduates are going to open in the future, as the realisation slowly overtakes the next generation or two that universal four-year education has been greatly oversold relative to its price, at least, to the 90% of undergraduates who are going to university out of the sincere conviction that this is necessary in order to make a career in something decidedly "vocational", such as PR, advertising, real estate, insurance, accounting, etc.

Markets do have a way of rationalising around these types of inefficiencies eventually, if allowed to do so.

Also, if one cannot sustain a great deal of self-motivated, omnidirectional intellectual curiosity and well-roundedness as a matter of disposition, of habits of mind, then this path is probably not the right one. On the other hand, can college correct these deficiencies? I have never seen an example of schooling instilling these life-affirming traits in someone who did not already possess them in some measure. I realise that, pragmatically speaking, incremental improvement is the goal. However, you and I both know that the overwhelming preponderance of undergraduates shuffle in, through and out of college without experiencing a great deal of this ostensible intellectual growth.
Numbats in Space [podcast]
Exploring the Australian Space community. Interviews with Marco Ostini from the Lunar Numbat team, Michelle Clement from the Australian Space Policy Unit and Professor Christine Charles, head of the Space Plasma, Power and Propulsion Laboratory at ANU in Canberra.
Man, this looks like Zope 3, err, BlueBream.
8 Must-Have Good Habits for Mac Users
An old saying goes first “Precautions are better than cure”! For Mac users, maybe you still have no idea how important it is to protect your data.
Nice way to tap human anxiety. Sean(s), the God of puppets :)
NASA's Cassini Space Probe Finds New Saturnian Ocean
I've had bad teachers before, and I've had good teachers before. What I've observed is that the tests tend to prevent the good teachers from being good without really detecting the bad teachers. A few of the best teachers I ever had were forced to waste a month ticking boxes on the "get ready for the test" list, a month that they could have spent teaching things that were actually useful. Meanwhile, the bad teachers went on doing exactly the same thing they were doing before, because even a doorknob could have checked off "students must have studied the following important people from the civil rights movement".
Two things:

Another door that opens with a university degree is immigration into other countries. Most countries want skilled workers to immigrate, and the way they rate that is through your education level. I have a MSc, and even though the bulk of what I learned at university is impractical, I don't regret it one bit, I don't regret sticking with it until I got my degree.

It is never too late to get a degree. When I started uni, most were straight out of high-school or military service, but there were a bunch of older people who had worked for ten years or twenty, who went back to get a degree. Some were even partly sponsored by their companies. There are advantages to getting a degree when you're in your 20s and haven't got any serious committments in life yet, but it's never too late.
In this day and age, introducing such technology to the world would be an immensely destructive crime against humanity.
> Most of the time, your exceptions are coming from low levels, like IO libraries, that don't know anything about the memory that you've allocated.

Yeah, but that's why you put exception handlers around anything that you expect to throw an exception, IO being a big one. Dealing with memory cleanup is definitely something that should be handled in the function allocating the memory.
No, iAds aren't popular (Apple is more secretive about iAds revenue than Google is about the Android Market... I mean the Google Play Store).

But then neither is the iBookstore and Apple keeps plugging away at it (and their competition) nevertheless.
Ever left a semicolon off of a struct definition? Forgetting end statements/tokens will frequently lead to debugging pain, but that doesn't make it any less valid. As noted elsewhere, ReactOS uses a very similar structure to great effect.
Brain size may determine whether you are good at keeping friends
And that company sure as hell isn't wasting time developing iOS apps.
That makes more sense. I assumed he meant to free memory before throwing the exception.
Warning, link is to a right wing propaganda website.
I'm guessing — but that's really a guess with no knowledge of the thing — it's some sort of middleware thingie: the "plugin broker" is used to register plugins, and in this case any controller inheriting from `Zend\Mvc\Controller\ActionController` will get the same broker, therefore all plugins registered into `Zend\Mvc\Controller\PluginBroker`. I'm guessing it also handles calling the right plugins at the right moment in the controller's lifecycle. Something like that.
> Not much of a difference, but I wonder what was wrong w/ZF1's less verbose alternative?

Might have wanted to reduce the API surface for the `this` (by removing extra methods which can be reached indirectly).
Consider Mercurial (Yes, Mercurial, not Git)
Mini Dresses: The Benefits of Online Shopping Stores - eFashioClothing
Missing a semicolon has a chance of giving a useful error message. Without knowing what ETRY translates to, you have no hope of finding here it's missing.
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I read Sean Parker say awhile back that this is the 'cure for loneliness' and somewhere else it was mentioned as chatroulette done "correctly"
But they could change the kind of UDID returned to apps installed after the OS update. That seems like a reasonable compromise?
The concept of "bad" is subjective and can't be proven. Don't blame the tools for what the people do with them.
Pet Supplies shoping 007
Pet Supplies shoping 007
HR Block At Residence Deluxe is the proper option for those with way more complicated tax scenarios to quickly complete their federal and state returns.
So every function now needs a try/catch? Doesn't this kind of defeat the purpose?
I think design has to be well thought over. If you design the way people use information and not notice actually the design than you've made great design. This is just my opinion.
I cannot up vote you enough for this insight. I'd like to add a couple of thoughts:

To all the developers who think they wouldn't learn anything in college - how are your English skills? Marketing skills? Do you understand the theories behind price elasticity or scarcity of resources? Do you know enough about accounting, finance, revenue, and cash flow? How much would you benefit from a couple of marketing classes?

It boils down to this: how much difference would a basic understanding of other subjects (marketing, economics, English, other languages) make on the success of your startup? What about your career in general?

So much of what I learned in school, both undergrad and graduate, came from subjects where I did not already have experience. In subjects where I already knew a great deal, I still gained from learning the theory behind the practical knowledge I already possessed.

I can't stress enough how much more well-rounded college makes a person.
The Power of Keynote for Mockups
It looks like a holly war topic about Mercurial vs Git

I like the last words from this article http://importantshock.wordpress.com/2008/08/07/git-vs-mercur...

"Shut up about the tools you use and write some code".
Luckily: https://github.com/bartsidee/boxee
No offense but I think your post is wrong in pretty much every respect (and I say this as someone with an ivy league undergraduate degree and nearly done with a Top 10 law degree).

You say people are harmed in their careers by lack of a college degree. This may be true in some of the more traditional, salaryman-type career paths. But there's lots of people who are harmed by college/graduate school! Tons of debt and years wasted on useless degrees are a tremendous drag on people's development and growth in their knowledge and careers. And if one has a positive and open attitude, there's way better opportunities one can find than the traditional salaryman type office jobs.

Also, as someone with an Ivy league degree I find your citation to "doors opening" and the recent Presidents just kind of amusing. It's true that you can go to an Ivy League school and do well and do things coming out of it. But the people going into an Ivy League school are often either 1) hard-driving people who'd do well in any setting, or 2) connected people whose families are going to make their lives easy no matter what. So it's not the school doing any of the heavy lifting in terms of these people's success. And on the flip side, there's way more Ivy League barristas then Presidents!

Finally I've always found the "well-rounded person" thing to be a huge myth. I've gotten way more out of the Internet -- reading forums, learning about books, interacting with interesting people, doing online courses etc -- than I ever did in college. And not like 50% more, but orders of magnitude more. The "well-rounded person" thing is just some sort of conventional meme/rationalization for school attendance that doesn't have much content. They don't teach quality ideas in the humanities or social sciences (except maybe economics) -- so you don't really become a well-rounded person, and if you're not in some hard sciences or math program you don't really learn anything at all in general (for context, I was a social sciences major). You just become a person who's been exposed to some weird mixture of stuff taught because of Tradition, and whatever faddish developments are going on in your field.

And yeah, Jobs took a typography class before dropping out. But if you want to learn stuff, there's way more effective ways than college now.

Our culture has a very strong pro-school bias, though that's starting to break down (LSAT takers were down 16% this year!!) People bucking the norm like OP are a big step towards a better and more critical attitude towards education, and one which I think would help lots of people be happier in their lives.
i just had a look at their homepage (in slick 3D). My initial reaction was--ok these guy are attempting what Linden Lab was trying to do with Second Life-in-the-enterprise (a project that LL eliminated about two years ago, but which showed promise for a while as evidenced by IBM's sponsorship); in other words, a virtual workplace rather video-conferencing (eg., gotomeeting.com). But then reading the typically perceptive and relentlessly skeptical comments from the HN community pretty quickly convinced me that my interpretation was a little over-extended to say the least, but as a former Linden, probably inevitable.
They are your latency bottlenecks, but your throughput bottleneck is almost certainly PHP.
A flow state by definition is when you only focus on the thing you are currently working on. I would say this is quite the opposite. You are busy with something else, but your mind subconsciously continues to think about the problem. Just like when you suddenly think of the solution for a problem, while standing under the shower. Sometimes you just need to get away from the problem to solve it.
Awesome idea, very clever! Any plans for an Android version?
Well, since you didn't graduate, you are missing an important part of college. As others have mentioned, this may be a problem later in life. I would agree with your main point.

Also, I am not sure how you could go to college for 4 years (my comp sci * maths courses were 3 years), and not graduate?
Do you understand the theories behind price elasticity or scarcity of resources? Do you know enough about accounting, finance, revenue, and cash flow? How much would you benefit from a couple of marketing classes?

I learned all that from starting a business, though I had an abiding interest in the underlying principles and came into it with a great deal of self-taught theoretical knowledge. But I agree that if it weren't in my disposition to do so, I'd have been at a huge disadvantage. It takes a certain kind of person to learn what he needs to know in spite of formal education, otherwise tunnel vision and compartmentalisation become a substantial hindrance.

Bottom line: you can compensate for lack of college, but it's not a smooth ride. It takes real work. It's mostly a question of cultivating the right kind of habits of mind.

Also, I have a hidden advantage not shared by most of my fellow dropouts: I come from a family of academics, and spent most of my childhood and adolescence on or near college campuses. The imprint left by the organic outcome of chronic exposure to the background radiation of this kind of ethos probably made dropping out more survivable for me than for many people.
I saw this some weeks ago and this proposed formats makes no sense to me. Why the full text, but NO LINK? And 'tweet' instead of 'twitter' will just go away once we have more of services we want to quote.
First of all,

I'm not an idiot

No, you are. Everyone is an idiot; it's a sliding scale. Some people are more or less depending on their circumstances. And you become a little less of an idiot the older you are and more mistakes you make. But that's beside the point.

Skipping college has nothing to do with whether you're successful professionally (unless you plan to work in a field where degrees are prerequisites). Anyone can make something of themselves without that piece of paper. You can be the next Bill goddamn Gates without going to a single lecture. I think being successful is relatively straightforward, and that achievements are just a product of how much effort you put into them.

On the other hand, college can give you all the weird shit that matters later accidentally. For example: [Steve] Jobs later said, "If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."

It's really like a really tiny specific version of the internet with walls and faces and casual random interaction that you don't get if you're on your own. People need outside stimuli that they would not normally obtain just by living their life and trying to get a specific job or going after what they think they're expected to. Jobs was a big proponent on experimenting and exploring (not trying to suck Jobs' dick here, but he was right about how outside influences are so... influential)

And it's also a great place to get laid.
I forked, and created a Canvas editor here: http://cormacrelf-water.heroku.com/

It has a <canvas> element instead of the D3 environment, so just grab canvas with $('#c') and start canvassing away.
Yeah, it's soooooo complicated!
It's a well known psychological fact that people overestimate the amount of attention other people give to them. Besides, I was only quoting a song (by garbage).

What experience do you have? That people avoid you because you avoid them?
Every call to a function that can throw an exception should have a try/catch block, so that things can be properly cleaned up. Global exception handlers are seldom useful outside of reporting the existence of an error for future usage.