skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your Last Straw: Reusable Drinking Straw
> "git reset" has quite simple syntax, but it confuses the hell out of even experienced git users because it's very clever and potentially very dangerous.

For anyone who gets a panic attack before running `git reset`, this talk may help clarify how things are working under the hood: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/A-Tale-of-Three-Trees
I pay $42.50/mo for a 24h fitness membership, $80 per session 1-2 times per week with a personal trainer (same person the CEO of reddit uses, heh). I could probably do without the trainer but it has been a good investment so far.

I would like to join a rock climbing gym, maybe do crossfit, and krav magazine at some point, too.

I probably expend $250++ per month in ammunition, too, but I am drawing down a stockpile so I don't have to move it.
Most "top" universities receive their ranking for the quality of the research they produce, not quality of undergraduate education. There is likely a decent correlation between research output and undergraduate education, which one can determine by looking at schools that have some of the highest achieving undergrads (such as MIT, Harvard, Stanford) and noting that these schools also are major research centers. Note there are most certainly exceptions to this, ie schools without a ton of research output but with great education for undergrads (I'm thinking of Reed College here, but no evidence/just my perception) or universities that don't do much with undergrads but are major research centers.

However, I'd mostly like to address the fallacy of attributing the high international rankings of American universities to the high undergraduate tuition. At Caltech, I've heard many undergrads say that all undergrad tution is about 5% of Caltech's budget, with a lot of the rest coming from various research grants. At schools with less of a research focus and more undergrads, undergrad tuition might make 30% of the budget. I can't find the blog post at the moment, but there was a discussion a few years ago about what would happen if MIT gave a full scholarship to all attending undergrads, and the conclusion was that it would hurt (but not cripple) MIT financially, but appeared possible.
Yeah... I don't really understand what their issue is to be honest. It really is up to Skype if they want to release their protocol. You can't really force anyone into being open source. I actually disagree with their methods, its the same as a closed source company violating the GPL when they steal source code like this.
Montana kids win contest, choose first GRAIL photos of the moon
Definitely why he issued the in depth statement, but I don't think he's backpedaling necessarily. I took a brief look at his Twitter feed and it looked consistent with his opinions.
Quality is important, but still subjective. Not to say this won't be a great curated list.

Anyways, I should have known better than to just throw that out there. My bad.
How ironic, apparently in scandinavia they must not teach basic algebra, basic accounting, and basic tax law.

There is no free lunch in the world, you indeed pay for university.

The statement you make is so ironic because you are displaying an incredible amount of ignorance in basic math and taxes, thereby discrediting the scandinavian university system you are here defending!!

I'm sitting here cracking up and can't stop laughing at your comment.
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I'm back at school now after some time off and I'm happy to be back, though when things suck it's frustratingly easy to say "welp, just need to wait for the summer."

My goal for my remaining time at college is to learn things I cannot learn other places and take advantage of the opportunities I have. But after spending time in the valley, my emphasis has shifted from getting good grades (before my time off, I obsessed over this and was constantly anxious/depressed) to learning as much as I can - two goals which are, amusingly, not always aligned.

You'll get out whatever you put in.
You said feeling weightless feels like falling.

I don't know where you get the idea that being weightless feels like falling. Astronauts always feel like they're falling? Do you have a source for that?

They dive bomb a 747 to simulate zero g to train astronauts. I've done it is smaller planes. It feels like your are weightless - floating a pool. It does not feel like you're falling, like you just fell off a roof or a hot air balloon. When you fall, your stomach drops. You go from 0mph to fast.

When skydiving you do not feel like you're falling. Sometimes you get little stomach drop when you leave the plane (the 30mph increase in speed) but after you hit terminal you feel weightless and the sensation of falling is gone - you are no longer accelerating.

Now, we call this state freefall and you say freefall is the state prior to this, when you are accelerating towards terminal. I don't know the physics behind it, nor do I have a grasp on the nomenclature as you do.

That said, I have felt it with my body many thousands of times.

When you jump off something that isn't moving you feel like you're falling because you're accelerating (like a rollercoaster). When you hit terminal you no longer feel like you're falling, you feel weightless, an entirely different sensation, similar to laying in a pool. You have no sense that you are moving at all, let alone at 120mph.

I have never been in space, but I've been in zero g bouncing around the inside of a plane and I can tell you it in no way feels like falling. At all. Not even a little. No way astronauts feel like they're falling the whole time they're in space. They probably feel - weightless :)
We're in an icon-sharpness limbo
We must first establish the expectations of the value proposition of college in order to share a common ground for the premise of our argument for/against college. My value proposition for college has always been:

1. the ability to broaden your base knowledge: if you love science/tech, then you must also partake in liberal arts, fine arts, poli sci, social sci, economics, etc.

2. the ability to improve your social skills (personal growth) with like-minded peers: high school was a fail for most people in terms of maturity and dating (especially the geek set) and so college is an opportunity to get it right without the stigma; the experience and maturity gained in this key skill include romance/dating/heartbreak/bad-sex, etc.

3. Social Networking (related to 2, but more about your professional objective): most kids today rely too much on internet social networking as the answer and assume that this is the best - wrong - true social networking involves taking the interpersonal initiative to shake hands with those who have the authority, connections and knowledge to help you along in your studies, career, interests, and it's not easy to go up to total strangers whom you admire and say "hi".

These three qualities of college can not be easily replicated outside of a college environment (Number 1 is most easily replicated). However, the assumption is that all colleges possess the above opportunities for you to pursue, and therein lies the problem. How many colleges have the networking leverage that makes it worthwhile to attend that college?

So, at the end of it all, what does it come down to? Prospective Networking. The individual student MUST TAKE FULL ADVANTAGE of the one resource they cannot easily replicate outside of college: networking with the "right" crowd, including your peers (future CEO/visionaries/tech co-founders), professors, researchers, guest speakers, etc.

The problem of course is, outside of the TOP 50 Universities and colleges, what is the value of attending the second tier schools other than sex, booze and cram sessions? Nothing. If you can't get into a Top 50 schools, I believe that the value proposition does not merit the tuition paid for the other schools out there.
Note the important caveat to my recommendation of the Blair: it is the best text on drawing IF YOU USE JOHN K'S EXERCISES. By itself it is a good book on cartooning; with the addition of John's exercises it becomes an awesome power tool for building skill.

(And honestly the real value here is John's exercises; you can get almost as much value out of them by freeze-framing great cartoons and drawing off of them. In fact I know for a while he was trying to package his course into a book, copiously illustrated with examples from the classic cartoons to work from, but ran into rights issues.)

Loomis is awesome too, I learnt a hell of a lot from him. I also learnt a lot from Bridgman's "Constructive Anatomy". But I feel the simple starting point of John's exercises for the Blair book really make it a great place to begin, and work up from.

(Of course I may be biased, as as I'm a cartoonist who's passed through Spümcø.)
Why? With that much work and grey legal areas, it's much easier to embrace WebRTC and just try to evangelize it or applications that use it. I think Skype will be a thing of the past soon enough. WebRTC is already quite impressive for a few lines of JavaScript (and optionally C++ if you want to do server side muxing and reduce the number of connections needed in a multiparty "call").

In a couple days I wrote a pretty simple, but functional multiparty video chat web-app. I'm just waiting for Chrome to support multiple PeerConnection objects.

I guess I don't understand the obsession with trying to interop with Skype.
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And who's fault is this for choosing to go to a private college? There are plenty of community colleges that are a viable alternative, quit bitching when their are plenty of cheaper alternatives available.
It is interesting to watch a giant PR machine go into action. I hope Mr. Margolis' legs are ok.
Chicago Is Beating Silicon Valley At The Patent Game
Beautiful hair through Moroccan hair oil…. | Argan Oil
Yes thanks to hacker news I have come to know about Udacity and can't wait to sign up for next terms CS101. I am always reading I can't seem to get enough... per your recommendation I'll definitely check it out.
> I guess I don't understand the obsession with trying to interop with Skype.

Massive existing user base?
I just got hit with this one too — they called themselves SayNow/mxtelecom.com on the bill, but MobibroIQ in the message itself.

The real culprit appears to be Bullroarer, Inc: http://www.bullroarer.com

mobibro.com lists the email address support@ihelpmobile.com and the phone number 888-890-6150. Googling either of those reveals many other spammy SMS services, one of which is clubmorty.com. Their contact page says they are owned and operated by Bullroarer: http://www.clubmorty.com/vm/pge_contactus.vm
That's the exact need things like Khan Academy, MIT OpenCourseWare, Codecademy and Udacity are addressing.
I completely agree. I hope to add a `verbose` mode that prints every git command that is being run under the covers.

It could be a good teaching tool perhaps?
A good college experience is better than a bad college experience or no college experience. No college experience is better than a bad college experience.

What is a good college experience? One that opens doors; one that provides specific knowledge and skills; one that gives you a background of knowledge and skills that you can build upon; one that leads you to a strong network of like-minded professionals; one that leaves you with debt that you can manage reasonably in the profession that you have been prepared for.

What is a bad college experience? One that does not lead to meaningful skills and knowledge; one that does not give you a foundation you can build upon; one that leaves you a debt that is not manageable within the profession you have prepared for.

I support people going to college when it is set up to be a good experience. I support people avoiding college when they are headed for a bad college experience.
Please also take into consideration the importance of peer discussion and debate. Just reading the books without an intense follow up discussion and debate makes it less likely that you can apply this new found knowledge. So maybe we can create a peer discussion Hangout API to go with these recommendations such that people can attend a common platform and coordinate small (3-5) discussion groups for elaboration and discussion.
These classes aren't simply verified intelligence tests that employers can use to screen job applicants. If you learn something useful, you can use that knowledge to make money.
Peace Out, Encyclopaedia Britannica
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The amount of links per line of text in this article is really distracting.
You should look into the Bloomberg Terminal and try and build something similar to it.
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/204898
http://www.bloomberg.com/professional/

Keep in mind that the bloomberg terminal costs like $1500 a month. So if you do manage to build something even remotely familiar you should stop trading and sell the machine.
I find it hilarious how some of the mentioned bloggers have 0 sense of humor. Why so serious?
Steve Jobs said yes to the iPod Hi-Fi, the Nano fatty (I was fine with this design but others were not) the Apple TV Take 2 UI (Again widely disliked), and several other small and larger 'missteps' in hind site. The reality is that Apple made many other far better choices which overshadow these errors.

Honestly I don't think in 5 years we are going to have an Apple thats in shambles and we'll point back to the AppleTV3 UI as the turning point.

This was a statement made by a man with some influence that hits on the misinformed fear that Jobs was the only one doing all the management, design and engineering work at Apple.
http://blisscontrol.com/

It allows you to change your password and other settings for popular websites.
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It's people. I'm slightly blinded by their motivation. Something inside me wants to believe they're 14 year old mischievous scriptkiddies, but I bet they're really just guys and girls like you and me.
Those same universities have selection criteria which predict success after college independent of the college attended. So it's not like they are masterfully teaching anything; rather, it seems very much like they are simply rebranding the best students.

To the extent that they also teach students more and better, this is actually damaging socially because it sucks secondary educational capital into a few locations. Lower end schools could do more and better if they housed many more bright and ambitious students. But if they're all going to a handful of schools, they're not improving the social networks at Random State.
I'd be curious to see a few examples. Git is guilty of using a bunch of non-standard nomenclature, and of using existing terms in non-standard ways ("checkout", I'm looking at you). But I certainly wouldn't call the interface or syntax "inconsistent" or "random". It's actually very tersely designed and very well put together. The "actual concepts" are, for the most part, first class citizens in the interface.
Javascript game of tron in 221 bytes
I like the idea here, but see one significant problem that will prevent me from using these aliases. The git publish alias doesn't take a branch name, so if you have multiple remotes for the repository it will just publish to one of them. Which one? Well, the code in legit/scm.py reads

return repo.git.execute([git,
'push', repo.remotes[0].name, branch])

so it just pushes to whichever remote is first in its array. What if I want to publish to a second remote?
It's "Xv6", not "X6v", btw. It's a kind of portmanteau of x86 and V6.

Edit: (For context, the submission title was originally "X6v".)
Disruptions: At Amazon, the Robot World Comes a Little Closer
Note that the criteria are weighted heavily towards luminary faculty and not towards student results.
Every CEO should take note.
Yeah, I just started doing the course way late, since I just recently heard about it myself. You can still access the materials. It might be good motivation to haul through everything in time for the final exam. That's what I'm trying to do.

The way it works is that if your final grade is higher without incorporating your homework grades, they just take your final exam as your grade for the class. This is nice because I'm turning in every homework late and getting a 0.

I don't care about the grades anyways. I like the structure of the instruction for learning. You should sign up and just rock through Unit 1 and see what you think of it. It goes fast at the beginning.
I used to have this same exact issue while working for a large porn company. We needed to make zips of hundreds of megs of images. We were creating them on the fly to start with, which sucked for all the same reasons mentioned in the blog post. After doing a ton of analysis and not finding a good streaming library that didn't require either C or Java (this is long before Node came along), we realized that as part of the publishing process, we could just create the zip and upload it to the CDN. Problem solved with the minimal amount of complexity.
What ... the ... f*? Blindly pushing pair programming is bad enough, but deliberately _trying_ to avoid 'flow' ? That's about the worst idea I've heard from the cult of mediocrity that is 'Agile'.

Pairing on everything is a disruptive waste of both programmers time, unless one programmer is hugely less experienced - in which case, it's not pair programming, it's coaching, and coaching is a different skill set that you can't expect everyone to either WANT to do or to be any good at.

Pairing on all design / analysis spikes is just about bearable, and maybe there are benefits to having everyone switch around spikes quickly.
Legit - A Command-Line Interface For Git, Optimized For Workflow Simplicity
"Is it just me or is there a trend of reactionary posts (or just submissions?) on the same topic? A few days ago it was Go (why Go is awesome, why I'll never use Go, why Go has its pros and cons) and now it's college's turn."

it's not just you. it's a signal/noise problem. I read HN through a filter site I made and I've thought about clustering these types of stories on my filter site, because I don't think they really deserve separate billing. it's kind of like the site wants to have trees of links, instead of one flat list.

anyway, the reason I call it a signal/noise problem (and of course this is just my opinion) is because often the reactionary posts feature very, very unimpressive reading, and are really only there to serve as a focal point for discussion, or maybe to serve as something to upvote, for people who disagreed with whatever the story is reacting to.
At 15 thousand lines, git-annex is only 5 thousand lines less of haskell than darcs. I happen to know, since I wrote git-annex. I'm not sure where you're coming from with your statement about there only being two large haskell programs.

For that matter, I don't know if I'd consider darc's 20 kloc very large. Or that I'd consider another haskell program I wrote, github-backup, to be small -- that 2 kloc program sits at the apex of a lot of libraries, and probably combined they have more lines of code than darcs. Your whole premise about lines of code feels thoroughly flawed to me.

Anyway, As a git extension, git-annex is expected to run quite fast.
I've never had any difficulty, in writing git-annex, with the speed of haskell code. I'm sure darcs is slow due to its patch theory thing, not due to its implementation language.
Creator of Legit here.

git-flow is awesome. I use it every day.

This isn't so much of a branching model tool, but a tool that allows you to switch branches and interact with remotes very easily.

When you switch branches with Legit, any pending changes you have made are stashed automatically. When you switch back, they are unstashed. This saves me a lot of typing.

If you're following Vincent's branching model, switching from `feature/x` to `develop` happens quite a bit. So, they compliment each other well.
Tim Ferriss posted a very good article on this matter [1].
Personally though, I would advocate for everyone to at least try college, before deciding that the college path isn't for them.

I think especially in the tech community, we expect superb technical instruction to be handed to us. But as many commenters have already pointed out, most of the value of an undergraduate education comes from what you learn outside of the classroom, not from the instruction you receive in class. Those lessons in social interaction, personal growth, and commitment typically will serve as a strong foundation for you as you go after the next big thing.

And that foundation I think can be very reassuring, especially if your dream is to start up your own company. If your start up doesn't pan out, you will still have your college degree as back up, which will make it much easier for you to apply for a job or network with old friends to find one.

Yes, it may be expensive, but there are a lot of financial resources there that you can take advantage of if you look hard enough. Many colleges (like Stanford) have an amazing financial aid program that make it very affordable for you to attend.

As cletus correctly points out, college is a means to an end, but you will only know whether it can be a mean or not unless you tried it.

[1] http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2011/09/29/8-steps-to-g...
You are free to doubt item 3 as much as you like, but reality has already reached the point where runtime optimiziations with profiling and JIT are starting to beat even "carefully crafted" statically-compiled programs. Yes, there's overhead, of course, but there's also overhead in C. Much of the gain from JIT and profiling lies in the fact that you can do heuristic optimiziations such as live inlining that simply can't be done by a static ahead-of-time compiler (which can't prove that those optimiziations are safe). Over the life of a sufficiently long-running process (like a web application, for example), those gains easily outweigh the overhead of the system, and can quite easily beat statically compiled code.
Wasn't this the manner in which Google pursued its research initiatives under Schmidt? Total secrecy as to the revenue numbers in order to spend as necessary on research without objection from the shareholders and analysts. Something changed when Larry Page took over, or maybe it was a coincidence of circumstance, but for a short period, Google was an "Idea Factory". Maybe Facebook under Zuckerberg can be the next Idea Factory.

The clear inference is that the leadership must be strong and unwavering in the face of shareholder objections that only care about quarterly financials rather than long term vision. Ellison also comes to mind, but he's lost much of his visionary spark. Jobs may be the last unless Page and Zuckerberg truly take on the mantle to pursue fearlessly the vision of an Idea Factory as an end in itself.
Gbye-mstr -- Goodbye, Master: A Tribute to Dennis Ritchie
Cool move.

And, something off topic that I'd very much like y'all not to interpret as sexist (it's quite the opposite): I love how many women are in engineering in Romania. 3 out of the 13 on that list, if I'm not mistaken, a ratio which matches my personal experience (my employer in the Netherlands has 100 engineers of which 3 are female).

Somehow, I feel that being nerdy is simply more generally a part of mainstream society in Romania than in most of the rest of the western world. If only the pay wasn't so ridiculously low, I'd gladly move over. In the summer. I think.
Here's a wonderfully-written takedown of this old screed from a linguistic perspective:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992
A vivid first-hand account of how the Titanic sank
The purpose of Legit is to save time for developers that know Git well. It is not intended to be a shortcut for newcomers.