skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps, try an alternate method of learning. Drop the course load, and instead think of some ideas that you really want to see happen (doesn't matter how trivial, or whether it has already been done). Then go make it happen.

Along the way you will definitely learn what you need to, and it should be a fun and rewarding journey. Using the free resources available on the internet, you may also pick up quite a bit of CS fundamentals and theory along the way, as well as see their practical application. When you show these hobby projects to potential future employers, your passion and motivation will definitely stand out, no matter how amateur the final result actually turned out.

It is scary to stray from the standard curriculum, and wing it. Who knows how things will turn out, what if you are doing things the "wrong" way, and you won't even have a piece of paper to show for it at the end. But that really is the most important difference between someone starting at age 12, and someone starting at 25 - the freedom to explore.
$550M in cash this week for a patent portfolio. $300M last week for Instagram (edit: typo). This has been a very expensive few days for what is still a private company. How much cash does Facebook have?
I think this is your best work yet Kyro. The re-design feels so much more professional and it looks gorgeous. I guess it's true what they say about design being subjective.
Life has awkward moments. It's better to take your bitter medicine and deal with it correctly than try to hide behind the safety of physical distance.

People can be vindictive, and breaking up with someone over IM is a fantastic way to get them really pissed off at you, and to wake up to find a brick through your windshield (if you're lucky).

As for asking someone to marry you over IM or SMS, pics or it didn't happen.
I like the quote "Digg is a service similar to Trejdify" posted on blog.trejdify.com. I'm guessing Digg, even now, is quite a bit bigger than Trejdify.

Let's take a look at the submitter:
SuperChihuahua "creator of Trejdify.com". Classy.
The paper trail of ownership and licensing for these things must be pretty obnoxious.
I thought there was? I mean, I keep reading about the age bias of hiring someone cheap at 18 or fresh out of college at 23, and that seems like a deathly blow to my success probability. I'm 25 now, so if I continued on the same path I'm on today, I would be starting out at 28.
I see the same issues the guy in the article has seen. Basically, I have a total of 8GB of ram in this here mac mini, and when my desktop session gets heavy things start going south.

For example: Let's take a large Chrome session (~150 tabs spread over several windows), an IDE open somewhere, Spotify, Steam and some background apps, and a small Windows VM.
Generally, Activity Monitor would show that Chrome in this instance would be eating 2-3GB of RAM, the VM would be eating 1GB + change of unpageable ('wired') memory, the random utils & spotify & steam & ide du jour & crap would eat another 1.5GB or so, and, long story short, there's very little 'free' memory left (think <100MB) on this 8GB system but a good >1GB of 'Inactive' memory.

Everyone agrees that Inactive memory should be freed when more memory is required by the system and we're out of Free. My own limited testing shows instead that opening more tabs during normal use to the point where the Free memory is consumed instead results in massive delays across the system as memory is paged out to disk, and the Inactive memory doesn't seem to noticeably change in size.

I don't really know what it's doing, but it will consistently make the system very unpleasant to use for a good 30 seconds until the hard disk stops clicking. (It's unpleasant enough that I try to limit my browser session sizes now, and only run the VM when I need to.)
15 minutes? Didn't it take about 5 minutes to fill the RAM from tape on a 48k machine?
Edit: It seems that 48k worth of ones (which were twice as long as zeroes) is about 6 and a half minutes.
Makes one think if Microsoft was acting as an intermediary for Facebook all along, maybe because AOL wouldn't sell the patents to a competitor?
As a grad student I was definitely a polygot programmer, but I've since really settled into an almost 100% python workflow, except when I used highly optimized simulation packages that run on massively parallel machines. The reason why python stuck for me was a combination of the simplicity of the language, its ability to just let me get work done and the robust scientific library support, not to mention that I rarely need to step out python to do things.

Need to set up a quick and dirty batch processing queue to churn through a series of simulations on my workstation: `import multiprocessing` and set up a worker pool. Need to automate the creation of several hundred simulation config scripts, simple with standard library string templating. Need to work with hdf5 files: `import h5py`, etc, etc. That and its been dead simple to wrap existing c code with cython and write small compiled modules for cpu intensive tasks when needed. And IPython for interactive data exploration and development.

So from that perspective, I'd be much more interested in calling Julia from within Python, or writing some small function that needs optimization in Julia and then calling it from Python, than the other way around.
HTTPS or not, Stripe accepting credit card data on a site they don't control is extremely worrying.
Intuos 5 wacom touch s
I don't recognize any of his symptoms anyway, and my OS X computers get pretty RAM-heavy use, with almost always a linux VM open, XCode, Safari with ~10 tabs, iTunes with a few thousand songs, etc.

I think you missed a key ingredient to this problem, which is heavy disk reads caused by either spotlight or time machine.

Reading a massive amount of data (that you'll probably not use again anytime soon) has the unfortunate side effect of polluting the disk cache with junk. Now if OSX is anything like Linux in this regard, it is loathe to toss out old disk cache (in response to all the incoming junk it's being asked to cache) and will instead start swapping to free up more memory for disk cache.

Linux has /proc/sys/vm/swappiness to control how aggressive it will be in swapping stuff out to preserve precious buffer cache, but I don't think OSX has any such mechanism.
then you will need to validate 2 things: the concept and your marketing tactics. There are many consumer app ideas that many people would love, but if you have no way of reaching that, it'll all be naught. So you need to come up with tactics for marketing, whether it be getting bloggers to write about it, spreading it thru forums, SEO, etc, and test those tactics. See if they are viable long-term strategies.
and here's the smarter answer from @tolar: Geofencing typically relies on cell tower changes, a coarser measure of location than GPS, but one that saves on battery life.
Well, are you assuming that no one applying for the McDonald's job has a degree? I think the situation has probably gotten to the point that there are so many "useless" degrees on the market, that it no longer even makes sense to talk about "fraction with degrees". So, let's try rewording it:

> but does anyone ever ask if the fraction of students with a particular type of college degree matches the fraction of available jobs requiring that type of college degree?

As an interesting aside, one advantage of providing a free university education is that you only need to provide it for as many students as you need to attain a certain degree. Need more doctors? Then provide more free slots for premed students. Need fewer lawyers? Then this year there aren't as many prelaw slots available.

Such a system may seem rather sanguine, but it's also worth noting that the rest of the world does not seem to equate career success with a happy life in the same way the US does.
I'm waiting for the XKCD live action movie
I made a bash script for it and I'll share it, hacker 2 hacker. Goes a little something like this:

#!/bin/bash

purge
123exchanges SlideshowBox.  Need feedback.  Let us know what sucks about it
It is Intagram, not Infogram. And the purchase price was $1B, not $300M. Facebook's trailing 12M revenue was a billion dollars, so it's not as if they have cash problems.
About $4bn as of the S1 filing. They plan to raise $5bn in the IPO. In other words, they have plenty of cash.
It depends on what they are looking for. For example, a company could gather information about your browsing habits using advertising. If a company like Google distributes ads across a wide variety of sites, they can use your fingerprint to gather lots of information about your browsing habits.

This is scary not because it enables them to provide more relevant ads, but because it enables them to sell personal information to organizations like corporations and the government. Imagine your boss being able to buy a package that tells him what type of porn you like, how often you view porn, your most visited subreddits, etc.

And often from this information, these companies (based on aggregate data) can make more sweeping generalizations (that are often incorrect, but also often right on the mark) like income bracket, ethnicity, drug use habits, sexual orientation, etc. These approximations can also be bought.

Imagine that your 'package' has some information in it deducing that you regularly use cocaine. Even if this is not true and the person observing this information knows it might not be true, the fact that it has been stated might be enough to lose you some important opportunity.

I don't know how common it is for someone to buy this information, but I know that the information is already out there and the potential for things like this is very large.
For really quick one-off scraping, httplib2+lxml+PyQuery is a pretty neat combination:

import httplib2, lxml, pyquery
h = httplib2.Http(".cache")
def get(url):
resp, content = h.request( url, headers={'cache-control':'max-age=3600'})
return pyquery.PyQuery( lxml.etree.HTML(content) )

This gives you a little function that fetches any URL as a jquery-like object:

pq = get("http://foo.com/bar")
checkboxes = pq('form input[type=checkbox]')
nextpage = pq('a.next').attr('href')

And of course all of the requests are cached using whatever cache headers you want, so repeated requests will load instantly as you iterate.

Just something else to throw in the toolbelt ...
Katalyst vs Singularity
I initially did start out with Zed Shaw's book when I got out, but I was inevitably channeled into C++ because that's all colleges teach here. I guess they're a bit behind the power-curve, as always.
The casting is quite faithful to the comics. Though yeah, I don't know about the acting.
I received the same error.
Python Punchfork Recipes API
Show HN: Super simple social poll app
I recently launched my first web app, polls.io. It's a super simple polling app that doesn't require sign-up. In my opinion, this is the most simple/social polling app out there.

There are certainly many similar apps out there, but I think this one stands out as it straight-forward and doesn't have any unnecessary "mess" getting in the way of the actual poll.

From idea to inception this took about a week. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. We'll be listening to feedback in the coming days/weeks in order to make the proper changes.

I'd love to hear your guys' thoughts and feedback!

Here's a little sample poll:

Pancakes or Waffles? http://polls.io/cdrbe
I don't think one should do something just because it is familiar syntactically. Having left MATLAB for python, there were enough compelling reasons to ditch the familiar.
Seriously, I have the same problem
The student hacks from the Rutgers Hackathon
This looks a lot like print in old books.
Most experts who don't have an agenda don't believe Iranian want the bomb or even want to create one. But they do want the ability of being able to create one on short notice.
The US Iran history goes a bit back. Do remember CIA hired bunch of street thugs In 1953 that led to overthrow of the democratic elected government.
Then in 80s when saddam hussain invaded Iran US provided Saddam ( yes that guy) with satellite intelligence and worst with chemical weapons to fight against iran. It's been estimated Iranian losses was around 1 million death in the war.

During that time saddam also got financial backing of Saudis and other rich Arab oil nations.

Prior to 9/11 Saudi-funded Taliban in afghanistan killed bunch of Iranian diplomats which almost lead to war. Iranians then backed the northen alliance which ended up tramendously helping US in overthrowing the Taliban and Al Qaeda. At that time Iranians even reached out to US to provide additional support but the bush administration turned them down.
> Microsoft: Champion of the persistent web!?

what?

Here is the google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ge0OdZ2...
Thanks for the inspiration...I was pumped after reading this since I find myself in roughly the same frame of mind. I'm in the process of wrapping up Hartl's tutorial and preparing to do my first Rails project. I am so happy to read about your excitement with the projects you're working on and your employment prospects. Congrats!
I strongly feel that this depends on whether the 40 year old likes programming for its own sake, or they feel that it's just part of a 'clock in' and 'clock out' job

Your right. It is. Then again it's equally true of the 20 year old in my experience. Most people in their forties who are still cutting code have been through three or four "fashionable" languages and have done serious work in all of them. You'll be amazed a the number of fresh faced young folk I interview who just know Java.

more open minded ... to things like longer hours

Nah. It's just that folk in their forties have figured out that longer hours aren't more productive :-)
Similar for me. Chrome 18.0.1025.151, Mac OS 10.6.8. I see the 'exit' sign and the music volume icons, but the screen is otherwise blank.
I always found the Public folder annoying, you always end up copying stuff around. Having a list of what files/folders are shared in the web UI would be enough to keep track, I think (depends on how many shares there are I guess - but one could still do the 'one Public folder' thing)
Introducing David 8
Easier: don't use your real identity online if you don't want to be tracked.
It seems like the biggest information leak is installed fonts. If I install one extra font above the default for my OS, I am leaking a good deal of information:
https://panopticlick.eff.org/

Would it not make sense for my OS to sandbox which fonts can be accessed by my browser? If a webpage wants to use a special font-family, I could be prompted to allow/block access to my greater font library.
Cops Would Be Liable Arresting Citizens For Recording Under Approved Conn. Bill
>we already went through this a few weeks ago. . . . Back then, I thought the conclusion was that there is nothing broken about OS X memory management

I read through the comment of a few weeks ago, and I did not see anything conclusive or even anything that would outweigh my subjective impressions that something about Lion on my (stock) 2011 Mac mini is causing unnecessary lack of responsiveness.

You might be uncomfortable with subjective impressions and many pieces of weak evidence, but given the popularity of OS X on this site, not all of us want to wait for what you refer to as "hard facts" before engaging in a discussion of the issue.
Isn't there anything to do about kernel_task using up so much memory? Since it's nonfree, is apple planning on doing anything about this?
Yeah, I'm sure if you just read the Darwin kernel there's a '#define USE_LOTS_OF_MEMORY 1' in there that you can change.

The class of problems described in the original post are not the sort of thing you 'just find' by glancing at kernel source code. The problems described sound like they could be an issue of poorly tuned heuristics/thresholds, or necessitate some extra machinery inside the OS X memory manager that isn't there currently. It's not like you can send Apple a pull request on github.
I'm not saying it will always be that way, but rather there is a large gap so, barring incredible breakthroughs, silicon's got at least a decade or so left.

Why couldn't we have incredible breakthroughs tomorrow? Well, we could, but they've been working on non-silicon tech for at least thirty years now- and we are still using silicon.
I had a similar problems with my Mac slowing down to a crawl with certain instances of disk access.

I tried turning off spotlight (which was taking a very long time to complete) but it did not help.

For me, the problem turned out to be a failing hard drive. After replacing my system hard drive, things returned to normal speed.

I'm just posting this in case it might help someone else.
I agree with you, and I would love to actually have the time to dedicate to such a focus. What ends up happening in reality, however, is the tradeoff between having a roof over your head, and learning. I'm not sure I'm well versed enough yet at being a civilian worker, and still having enough time to dedicate to learning what it is I want to know.

In other words, I look at your post and thing "YES, Great! I would love to do all those things!," when I come back down to reality and realize that I'll need to spend the majority of my time making slightly more than minimum wage to support myself, just to have a place to sleep. While some learning can be accomplished in the downtime, we both know it can't be done as fast or as efficiently as a full-time student's dedication.
Web scraping: Reliably and efficiently pull data from pages that don't expect it
Anecdotal data point (against the article): I have almost the same setup as this guy (2008 Mac Pro with 24GB and a 2011 MacBook Pro with 4GB), and even though I torture those machines with many hungry apps running concurrently, I haven't run into the same issues. Furthermore, I can't reproduce the high Inactive RAM count nor the high page-out activity, even after weeks of uptime.
Many people are graduating from law school with the same amount of debt as your sister and no job. While programmers in general seem to have a better shot at getting their first job.
I also have major memory problems. 8GB RAM total in the system and I have 4GB sitting in inactive and it's paging out? http://imgur.com/VE4GB At this point the system pretty much thrashes until I start closing apps or perform a manual `purge`
This is excellent. Really demonstrates trust and confidence, and brings attention to Meaningful Use certification, which is a big deal. Clear call to action to get started and quick points to jump into product views. Really good work, and I hope the DrChrono team jumps on this! In fact, I think their entire EHR -- while excellent -- could use a YC Facelift™.
Well, no. Given your number of customers as a function of price D(p), you aren't necessarily trying to maximize p D(p). It's not completely obvious, but in principle you can get ∫ D(p) dp out of those people, if everyone paid what they were willing to pay.

In order to pursue this goal it is very common to make a finer approximation to ∫ D(p) dp by creating several price-points. You see this all the time on Kickstarter for example, "donate some extra and we'll send you a copy of the source code." And one of these ways is "donate some extra and you'll get to see the finished product first," which is one of the solutions given above: charge $15 when it first comes out, then reduce to $5 over time.
It seems like you're kind of a jack of all trades. This is an awesome skill-set to have while working in a datacenter. Call it IT/dev-ops whatever.

The tech field isn't restricted to just people that code for a living.

I would ignore Norman Matloff. Some 15-20 years ago he wrote a series of articles claiming that H1-Bs, outsourcing etc would kill off the careers of all US programmers. That didn't happen as far as I can tell.
yes I know, that's the point of my question ;)

everyone is all positive about "open source" until they have to dive into a few millions lines of complicated system-level C code and then...
What you are describing sounds like plain old memory starvation, not really a problem with the memory management.

You don't have to fill up every last bit of RAM before the OS starts swapping, as there could be pinned memory pages or processes that want to do larger allocations that are only held for a short time. If you have less than a few hundred MB of unused RAM with all the stuff you mentioned going on, it only takes some kind of scheduled OS background job to push the OS over the line where it decides it needs to swap in/out.

That said, from the comments some people posted here, it does appear that at least in some situations there seems to be something going on in some versions of OS X Lion. If Snow Leopard and the Mountain Lion preview are unaffected with the exact same usage pattern, maybe there actually is some kind of bug in the OS X memory management. But I'd still like to see some kind of evidence, facts or statistics, as I have never experienced anything like it myself, not even on my MacBook when it still had only 2 GB of RAM.
Not sure why, but if you go to http://diznix.com/2010/07/27/ instead, it works just fine.
Top notch hacks and thanks for everyone that showed up!
To make it visible on the web.
Cool Tech: Websites, hardware and apps for written word enthusiasts
Having previous military experience definitely helps get your foot in the door at all the military contractors as well. Often times when developing new features we don't have the benefit of really having a good idea of what the soldier wants. Putting myself in their shoes is tough to do without that experience and having an expert can really allow us to develop features that get used. Also, if you had or have held a security clearance that can carry some weight at the defense contractors as well.
I would absolutely love to dedicate the time to doing this the way I think, and know, it should be done (I taught myself html, javascript, early css when I was 11 because I thought it was fun, like everyone else my age probably... but I remember how it felt in comparison with what I'm doing now, and I know that teaching yourself through sheer passion was far more fruitful and entertaining.) Unfortunately, time ends up being the most precious commodity, and I'm not sure I've learned how to juggle that properly and still maintain a roof over my head, yet.
IBM fires Power-powered Penguins at x86's weak spots
A review of the latest Internet surveillance act: CISPA
Scientists discover the first white killer whale in the wild
But given enough eyes all bugs are shallow! Are you implying that ESR is full of shit?
I love that she took the time to paint the words and scan them in. It makes a very big difference I think.
This appears to be just some words from PG's article written in nice handwriting in front of a picture of a mountain.

Am I missing something?
Pretty simple.

Are you trying to make a business out of this? Or is it just a project?

Clickable poll: http://polls.io/ugoht

Suggestions:

- It's not clear that after you select an option, you then have to also click "Vote" to apply your vote.

- Often in Polls, I don't want to vote. To avoid selection bias, you should allow people to view results without voting.
The title "33% of Software Engineers no longer writing code at 40" doesn't have the same ring.
These Prismatic posts have been popping up every couple of days. I'm not even certain if they've even launched yet ("Request an Invite"), but this seems to be a textbook example of good 'launch' blogging. The consistency and depth of these posts is actually making me consider using this service.