skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I look at the difference between a computer science major and physics major like the difference between an english major and a history major. The first has an in depth knowledge of writing & literature: its history, limitations, how it got to its present state. The later knows none of that, but has a lot to say about history and uses writing as a tool. I've rarely seen history majors worrying about competing with english majors for writing jobs. They bring something different, and valuable, to the table.

Being a physicist, you probably can't wax eloquently on the tradeoffs of functional v. object v. imperative programming styles. Or the subtle nuances between closures and Lisp and closures in Javascript. But that is Ok because you will use code to say something useful about the world around you.

Your physics training will help you do these things (and more) in the software world: identify patterns in large datasets; predict the evolution of a complex system; create models of real world processes; reason about how a black-box system might be working.

These skills are in demand. If you focus on these aspects from your physics training you should have no problem competing with the computer science majors.

BTW, I have a PhD in Physics. A little over 6 years ago I stopped doing physics and engineering full time and focused on what can best be described as computer science full time. I'm also an adjunct professor of Computer Science.
It's not radical, it's just occasionally more confusing than blocking io to implement, and doesn't really have any performance benefits in the multicore world.

I'm actually using node for a side project right now as part of re-learning web development (been back-end the last few years), and using javascript as a client language, server language, and db query language via mongo is a neat environment. Also, npm rocks. But don't listen to anyone who tells you they use node+mongo to handle their WEB SCALE PERFORMANCE. If they really had that problem, they'd be better off using the java ecosystem or, if they really wanted to go hardcore, using a lot of C. But Java's unfashionable and C's ridiculous to write a web app.
I posted this on TC's comments but that's next to pointless, so here:

Yahoo won't give up YSB. It's one of the few things they make a killing on. Aside from the monthly fees they charge their hundreds of thousands of customers, they also get a percentage of each sale on every store they host.
Depends on what they're writing about, of course. If the writings are religious, I'm quite allergic. Religion is a system of society, I'm not interested in that. On the other hand, if the writings reflect truths that aren't limited to a single religion or only some religions, and that can be found without subscribing to a religion, then certainly.
MIT and Harvard announce edX
I'm perversely glad that I never finished my degree and don't have the specific kind of skills that would make Google call me in for an interview. Everything I read about the interview process there fills me with a nameless dread. Come to think of it, since the nymwars debacle, everything else about Google does that too...
Likely derived from the well-known phrase "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans", as said by John Lennon.
When is cloudflare pushing out spdy for SSL users? Or can I beta test it? :)
Check out the Node Toolbox: http://toolbox.no.de/

It doesn't seem as fleshed out as the Ruby Toolbox (https://www.ruby-toolbox.com) and could use a bit more editorial for your purposes, but it's a good place to start.
Show HN: Dropbox Apps can be cool - BoxySign.com
It's a bit of a signal in some religious/evangelical language. "new atheism" implies a few things - there's a renewed urgency, an implied "new" "attack" on religion, etc. It's not meant as an insult so much as a buzzword to signal to the faithful that there's a 'new' menace to ward against.

Also, 'new' atheism is viewed as actively oppositional - loud, proud, 'coming out' in public, etc. Being aggressively atheistic is a hallmark of those labelled 'new atheists'. It's probably more accurate to refer to this more aggressive public movement as antitheism, but that would be another label/word which would confuse people. Putting 'new' in front of the old word, I think it becomes easier to rally the troops, so to speak.
One key part (mentioned by a comment in the story itself) that wasn't clear to me at first is that you're not purchasing a single reserved instance. The reservation applies to any instance of the type you've reserved. So regardless of specific instances running 24/7, it can still make sense if you generally have a specific instance flavor running all the time.

That makes it a lot more flexible, and a better value in a lot of cases, I think.
Ask HN: What CS topics are schools not teaching?
Do you guys feel that schools just don't teach you what you really need in the real world to be a successful software engineer?

It took me 5-7 years to learn what I now know and I wished I learned some of these things way earlier (like version control, MVC framework, less, haml, node.js, mongodb, and many others). These were not difficult to learn but back when I first started, I just didn't know about these technologies/tools and lacked guidance!

If you were to go back in time, what things do you feel you have learned earlier in schools that would have saved you months/years of time in the real field?

I will combine everyone's feedback and develop a list so that future hackers can use it as a reference guide to help them save time.
"However, I think that anyone who dismisses religion as worthless is blind or stupid."

We've learned a great deal about our world and our nature since the primary texts of the most established religions have been written. People who dismiss religion are not denying the value and wisdom in it, but are bringing to our attention that this wisdom is discoverable, and maybe better understood, outside of religion. More importantly, religion comes with dogma, which causes a great deal of harm and suffering. Much more relevant than "worth" is the fact that religion can be a very dangerous weapon in the hands of people who cannot dissociate the wisdom from the dogma.
The most popular *nix UI is the one you get with OS X and it's toolbar is at the top. So is the standard toolbar on Ubuntu.

And there are not thousands of linux interfaces. Having the ability to customize does not mean there's a new interface every time you adjust something. Leave the hyperbole on 4chan.
In most cases I'd think affiliate ads would be a better way to go than AdSense anyway.
Blackberry to give $10,000 incentive to build apps(with conditions)
Betali.st is awesome, we used most of the Free Startup beta listing for Dropdock ( Startupli.st, betapunch ,etc ) and betali.st was definetly the best!

Here's the Goal completion for the Week we got featured on those website.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/149780/Overview%20-%20Google%20Analy...

Also, I chatted a little bit with Marc who run the site and he's a great guy. ;)
We're Back Barcelona Developers Conference 2012 - "At world's End"
We're Back!! Barcelona Developers Conference 2012 - "At world's End"

BcnDevCon is an initiative of a group of entrepreneurs to create a conference in Barcelona for cloud, mobile, indie game developers and robotics.

Here is a video of the 1st edition with almost 1000 attendees!!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zo08WhbTuM4 and a link to the old website http://2011.bcndevcon.org
Great article. At first I thought "What a nice read for my morning coffee". But it certainly has gotten me thinking about my own experience with standards and committees and working groups. I should note now, I've never been a big player in any of these, but have participated - so my experiences are a bit different than Kent Pitman's, but related.

I think a big takeaway from this should be: if you are interested in a subject and get involved, you can influence it in unexpected ways. My name is not on any major specs or standards, but some of my ideas or suggestions are there. Not because I am all that important or super smart, but because I was involved and therefore able to influence and help decisions. Simple things like asking questions about ambiguity can have unexpected influence. One time I asked a question about a line and it turned out half the people involved thought it was one way, and the other half thought the opposite. Clarification ensued, but what a mess it would have been if no one had asked!

Another thing that I find to be a useful lesson in this article is that sometimes the dog wags the tail, and sometimes the tail wags the dog. Frequently you see people on committees arguing over some detail that matters, but not as much as you might think. Frequently the decision comes down to someone just implementing it one way in a pre-release. Those implementations will become either a great example of why the other option is better, or of why the choice taken is better (or at least that the choice wasn't that big of a deal after all). Committees take on a life of their own, and exist in a bit of echo chamber, so sometimes scoping of issues gets disproportionately wrong.

A final personal observation that doesn't come through in this article, but I think is important. If you do research or cutting edge work, just hanging out at these types of meetings provides tons of fodder for exploration and research. Ideas are usually just floating through the air in the form of "if $THING works we could $X, but if it doesn't we would have to $Y". Every time you hear that, there is a paper to be written. Other times you hear great ideas for companies - "The $PROBLEM is a major source of concern", but it turns out $PROBLEM isn't really a problem, it has been solved in a different corner of the world nicely. Porting $SOLUTION from one domain to another is a starting path to profitable companies.

There is a downside though, is that there is a bit of self-hyping that needs to be done in these processes. If you have been paying attention, writing papers, doing exploration, sometimes your contribution gets lost into the general idea space. People will start talking about the concepts of your work as if they came from nowhere. This isn't intentional, ideas seem to have a life of their own like this, but if you wrote a paper, and someone is now touting the concept as something that just came to them (even in changed form), you need to gently point them at your work, so you can get some credit. Basically it's personal branding, and a bit uncouth, but necessary unfortunately.
There are so many 'start-ups', everyone and their cousin has a web product/company. How can I even know what ones to try when 20 'groups' are doing the same thing?
>You might want to hold off on the ideological rant and re-read. I think cageface was talking about application markets.

The same hold true for application markets. In any market where money are involved and parties with interests of their own can get a stronghold on the rules, the results are the same.

>I didn't know Google was using their market to bail people out and wage a secret resource war.

Well, pushing their own apps to users with "picks" and front-page promotion is akin to a bailout. They can restrict apps that compete with their core businesses in a snap, they can change the rules of the game anytime, etc. They use it to do whatever offers them a competitive advantage.

Apple's marketplace is an even better example, as it is more closed. Google cannot close the Android marketplace at the same level, because they cannot do all the stuff Apple pulls and still attract developers away from more lucrative iOS at the same time (developers are the "scarce resource" here).

Btw: "ideological rant" implies that something I said re: "free markets" does not hold true and I say it because of my ideology. Can you point to it? Else it's not "ideological", it's mere empirical observation.
is any geometry point?

I mean, when you have a loop (say, around the manhattan grid), then I can understand how everything works when you have one hard(er) constraint such as, "the two farthest points visited are 2nd street at avenue C and 112th street at 12th avenue" - and get everything else aligned accordingly.

But if no external geometry constraint is involved (roads being the most abundant, but not the only type of external geometry constraint), then this reader has been unsuccessful with the exercise.
Harvard and MIT team up to launch $60m edX for online learning
Practical Pump Technology: Selection, Applications, Operation, Troubleshooting,
I would guess your app assigns out tasks, maybe a better todo list?
I do not think your name is too long. More important than length is spelling. Can you tell someone your domain name and have them type it in correctly? Yours consists of 2 fairly common English words. Thus I think your name is good. Here is my only suggestion: buy common misspellings of the domain name and redirect. taskmesenger.com for example
I guess this makes sense: if your skin makes Vitamin D from sunlight exposure, your body being flooded with Vitamin D at night is going to confuse it—the body must be thinking "Why am I getting so much sun right now? I must not be sleepy."

Taking it in the morning is going to be like getting a shot of morning sunshine whether or not you're actually getting sunlight.
It's a redflag for the stability of Facebook being able to maintain their dominance; A blog post I did related to this, http://mattamyers.tumblr.com/post/22070489398/re-how-twitter...

Google's might be overvalued but I don't think so. They've had 10 years of search data to analyze and understand human behaviour. They're working on solving mass consumer real-life issues; Maps, Chrome, Self-driving cars, etc..
>>because we view it as permanent

Given an infinite time and an infinite universes, there becomes a small possibility of existence again after death.

(I'm Christian, so I admit that I may be a bit more optimistic than is warranted)
Opera Mobile Emulator build with experimental WebKit prefix support - Dev.Opera
and HN's signal-to-noise ratio is lowered once again
I like the idea of Dropbox Apps. A user can consume your web service without even leaving Dropbox (almost). To demonstrate the concept I built http://BoxySign.com.

- Drop an unsigned document in your Dropbox BoxySign folder, and you receive a link.

- Share that link to receive a signature.

- The signed copy is then delivered directly to your Dropbox BoxySign folder on your computer.

You can do all this directly from your Dropbox folder, but there is also a web interface which the video demonstrates - http://boxysign.com/video

Additionally (depending on how you architect it), it saves big on storage costs. You can store pieces of data in hidden files on the user's Dropbox.

I think this has neat potential for many types of little Dropbox Apps. Thoughts?
> Bad Use Cases: CPU heavy apps

I wouldn't say that Node (i.e. V8) is a bad use case for CPU-heavy apps. In math/statistics for example, V8 stacks up well against other scripting alternatives. See e.g. the benchmarks here:

http://julialang.org/

Of course it's still not as fast as C++, but not terribly off either. Expect dramatic improvements here thanks to the push for making web apps faster.
FAQs

What is edX?
An organization established by MIT and Harvard that will develop an open-source technology platform to deliver online courses. EdX will support Harvard and MIT faculty in conducting research on teaching and learning on campus through tools that enrich classroom and laboratory experiences. At the same time, edX also will reach learners around the world through online course materials. The edX website will begin by hosting MITx and Harvardx content, with the goal of adding content from other universities interested in joining the platform. edX will also support the Harvard and MIT faculty in conducting research on teaching and learning.

Who will lead edX?
EdX is a priority for the leadership of both Harvard and MIT, and it will be governed by a board made up of key leaders from both institutions, appointed by each university’s president. MIT Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Anant Agarwal will be the initial President of edX and will report to the board.

What technology will edX use?
An open-source online learning platform that will feature teaching designed specifically for the web. Features will include: self-paced learning, online discussion groups, wiki-based collaborative learning, assessment of learning as a student progresses through a course, and online laboratories. The platform will also serve as a laboratory from which data will be gathered to better understand how students learn. Because it is open source, the platform will be continuously improved.
SEEKING FREELANCER - London, Front-end designer/developer (remote work possible)

Award-winning UK campsite booking site Pitchup.com is looking for a front-end designer/developer with expert HTML/CSS/Javascript skills.

Front-End Stack: jQuery / blueprintcss / django templates (no objections to introducing coffeescript / lesscss to the mix)

SEEKING FREELANCER - London, Back-end developer (remote work possible)

Looking for an ambitious developer to join our friendly team, to help us manage our current site and tackle tough geo, online booking and search challenges.

Backend Stack: Python / Django / Postgres / Celery / nginx / S3

Apply here: http://www.pitchup.com/jobs/
It's great until you get a text message...!
Excellent points!! Always keep an eye open towards the advantages and disadvantages of anything new. Don't immediately dismiss something because it is new, just as you wouldn't immediately start using something new. Research and learn.
Never mind the length; that name is bad because of the rhythm.

Consider the current big players. Facebook, Google, Apple: all trochees (two syllables; stress on the first syllable). Microsoft, Oracle: dactyls (three syllables, stress on the first). These flow better than some other rhythms. If you write trochees as "- _" and dactyls as "- _ _", then yours is "- - _ _". It stumbles. It's the same rhythm as Stack Overflow, if that cheers you up, but the consonents are clumsier -- the k followed by an m is claggy and clumsy.

I'd try something with a better flow to it. Even "totalmessenger" ("- _ - _ _") runs better, and the l/m is much nicer than the k/m. Length isn't the issue, because people can type that perfectly well.

Try employing a poet to help you. We're an underrated breed with useful skills...
I imagine the contrast issue is one of raw power. stuff too large a set of laser diodes in there and you end up with it stealing all of the battery life easily.
How to Make Cheaper Calls Internationally | Telecoms
Branding aside it's usual a good idea to make the most used elements of the UI big, it makes them easy to click.
Changing software without breaking it is the central problem of software engineering, as Rich points out himself.

In what sense can you have encapsulation when your entire data structure is exposed to every function that touches it?
John Carmack on Functional programming in C++
Does Gmail leak the contents of my email via ads?
So this is interesting. What happens if national (eg. polish) law specifically disallows reverse engineering? Which law takes precedence?
In that example, V8 javascript was 400x slower than the alternatives for matrix multiplication. That's because it's not binding to the BLAS libraries like the 'real' statistical languages. Of course, node supports calling out to C APIs, but that's not an argument for javascript, dynamic languages will naturally be terrible at math compared to C.

More to the point: Node does nonblocking i/o but cpu work is in fact blocking. This means that a CPU-heavy request queues up all requests behind it, waiting to get access to the CPU. You're better off using a threaded architecture for CPU-heavy work.
Coursera, edX, and Udacity.

First one to award real degree credit per course wins, I suspect. The Open University already offers this, so it can be done.
Apple’s iOS head sold 95% (worth $38.7M) of his stock on Friday
just add &cc=us at the end of your query string.

http://www.bing.com/search?q=hn&cc=us
I'm an Atheist, but I often find beauty in religious artwork, writing, or music. In fact, I find myself listening to Christian music fairly often. It's very difficult to divorce yourself from all things religious. We're constantly surrounded by it (next Christmas time, try putting yourself in the mindset of an Atheist.) As an Atheist I can either become embittered by that fact, or I can find value in it despite core differences. I choose the latter option. That said, I take issue with many religious concepts, hence the Atheism.
MIT and Harvard have committed to a combined $60 million ($30 million each) in institutional support, grants and philanthropy to launch the collaboration.

This makes it bigger than Coursera and Udacity.
Is porn the 7th result down for anyone else?

Screenshot:
https://twitter.com/#!/gee_totes/status/197695446821519360

At least, I think that's a porn link. Don't dare click on it because I'm on a work computer.
Ce inseamna anvelope auto run-flat?
Couldn't upvote this more.

And regarding Node: it rocks, just try it and you see what eye opener you missed before.
Show HN: Million Short Day 3 - Version 3 - SiteBoost Feature
Probably just disk contention - locking is unlikely to be a problem since you're just adding rows.

The disk contention issue could be a problem because writes are hard to scale, but depending on the regularity of logging and the indexing used (I'm assuming it's done by timestamp here) it's probably not actually the biggest of deals - you should end up mostly doing append-only writes. In oracle, for example, all that'll happen is that for each log transaction some stuff will get altered in memory (i.e. a block of the table will get appended to, and an append will occur on the index) and the roll forward log will get written to on disk. Every so often the table and index blocks will get written to disk, but that will be much less than once per transaction in an appending case.

That said, overall I'd still recommend having the logging done on a separate system, or at least having profiling set up on your log table/user/whatever such that logging can't eat your production server if someone decides to excessively ramp up the log levels.
The Big Doubt Over Facebook's IPO
Blackberry 10 "Perfect Moment" camera feature..
Are you sure about that? Since one of out ten searches would fail, I'd think one would quickly develop a bias and start saying "Bing never works for my searches and I always have to go back to Google anyways."
The Great Ars Cloud office suite shootout
I recently built SAJAK (Simple Authenticated JSON API Kit) to suit my own needs: https://github.com/jed/sajak
Not featured on...

I chuckled out loud.
I like the "Not featured on Mashable". :D
I generally find religious writings to be either neutral to my atheist sensibilities, or (in the case of scriptures or apologetics) sometimes quite fascinating. The only time it dips into the negative end of the scale is in the case of glurge.
Microsoft sends GitHub DMCA shutdown for Skype open source project
Well yes, it's a detail but it's in my face all day long. Also, on XP (that I still use at work ...) it has that ugly xp-esque blue.
Sony: Internet video service on hold due to Comcast data cap
A graphic timeline of high speed Internet in the U.S.
EdX - Harvard & MIT
This project was recently discussed on HN at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3899829
Tea? Fuck Yea
About Fuck Yea is a series of four-pane cartoon strips featuring a stick figure looking rather self-complacent and quite frankly, for all the right reasons.
Essential Tips to Grow a Successful Community: A Talk with Brian Rice