skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Advice to Student Finishing School
I about to finish school and enter into an undergraduate course on CS. I have a few questions.
A little background first: I am a 16 year old guy and I really enjoy programming and every aspect related to it. I have been programming in C and C++ for a while now. Also, I have learned Allegro (Game Library) and (some) QT along the way.

Questions:
1. What should be the next language(s) that I should learn? And any specific order?
2. Where should I start to get a good mathematical foundation? (to say, understand algorithms and follow CLRS)
3. Any general advice to an undergraduate?
4. This might be a bit off-topic, but, do you as a hacker have a schedule for your activities?
5. Books that help improve programming skills and understand best practices(other than language specific books)?
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/07/25/0329226 for an IT worker.
I have been very pleased with Mantis.
I'm not sure I see the real insight here, but the data point is nice.

AFAIK, Social standing, group health/status are all innately part of humans, but our economic status is quite synthetic.

If it was all the food we had for 3 months instead of income, I think we'd see something different.
The only way I can reason with it is, that he's talking about large tournaments where you will likely never see the long term (10K buyins for example). Even for good/great players there is a lot of volatility there and you're probably not going to see 100k+ of these in your lifetime (Which would arguably not even be close to the long term.) With that said, I'd much rather play any WSOP with 6000 and me of the biggest fish then 4000 fish and 2000 pros.
I think http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futures_trading is same as gambling.
I think it's assumed that these are "real" dollar values (ie in the latter case the overall economy would be larger). The point of the study is that people care more about relative status than absolute wealth.
If the government takes >50% of your money, you make enough that you'll never be pissed about anything. You're somewhere over the $300k mark.
Except almost all games is played with blinds or antes. If you're too tight even though you win all the hands you play you'd still be a loser overall.
Why you should support Mac OS X and Linux
Why ever not? If you're writing an application in Ruby, you're going to need the fastest algorithms on the block to make up for the interpreter's less than optimal performance. I would think that Ruby (and other dynamic script languages) need this type of technique more than just about any other environment.
I must be missing something. Do people regularly turn down jobs paying double their current salary ... because others in the new department are getting more? I understand the cost of living in the new city might be higher, or that they prefer shopping around for a better deal, but that's not what the study's saying.
I want to ask people here thoughts on frameworks, this looks well suited to a project I have, but it is built on Twisted and the preferred option of frameworks seems to be Django, now I'm a PHP coder, who is just about to step up to the python challenge so I am thinking it would be better to start with a more established framework? Thoughts would be most welcome.
I've said that all along -- supplementation + diet change + chemo is better, and certainly no worse, than chemo alone.
If they were real dollar values and everyone else were earning double what you were, you might be able to maintain a good lifestyle by current standards, but by the standards of this significantly larger more advanced economy you'd still be relatively "poor" while earning twice today's income. I think the study shows people are inherently aware of this (or at least wired to act in such a way).
I was lucky enough to meet a co-founder at school who is a good complement to my skills, and we have good "chemistry".

That being said, it's really a matter of pounding the pavement. Meet lots of people, the types of people you'll make sure to follow up on.

Since moving to the bay area, I've met plenty of really great people. I'd be happy to give you some advice or make introductions...are you already working on a project, or is this more hypothetical?

Ping me - jamslevy@gmail.com
It still has classic Windows weirdness to it, like shutting a computer down by clicking a button that says "start".
Robert Cialdini covers a similar experiment with turkeys in his excellent book, "Influence - The Psychology of persuasion"

For example, mother turkeys, who are known to be caring parents (as far as birds go), tend to respond only to the "cheep-cheep" sound of their chicks.

"Hearing the cheep-cheep, the mother turkey coddles and cares for the young turkey chick. It is a short-cut response that nature has given turkeys to know how to behave. It tends to work well in nature. But, tricky scientists recorded the cheep-cheep sound and placed the recording into a stuffed Polecat, the natural enemy of the turkey, and found that the mother turkeys adopted the stuffed polecat. Coddled it and cared for it."
Feynman's Ants (speaking of experiments with animals...)
that's a very narrow and unrealistic view of a startup. some of the most phenomenally productive people i've known and worked with don't pretend to be working every hour of the day. they work in short intense bursts in the knowledge that they'll still get more done than the people who kid themselves into thinking that sacrificing everything so they can be staring at their screens for 12 hours a day is the only way to be productive.

the best blog post i've found on this is from naval ravikant, http://www.startupboy.com/journal/2005/11/29/the-80-hour-myt...
[video] The Case Against Perfection
An interesting lecture about the morality behind genetic selection and parents seeking to "perfect" their potential kids.
#14 is more important than all of the rest put together times 5, at least from the readership numbers standpoint.
Part 1 was an excellent read. Part two was a less excellent read, but deeper. I think the analogy of our universe being like an "embedded system" is a good one. I don't doubt that there's much more to it than we can understand, much like the betta can't understand why he's stuck in a fishbowl, or the hypothetical Mario who can't understand the invisible wall.

On another note, does anyone else find the "big bang" theory incredibly unsatisfying? I have no reason to believe it's not true, but as Yegge points out it seems to bring about more questions than it answers.
jmtame is right; work-life balance shouldn't be your top priority, it shouldn't make you question the time you are investing in your startup. as you make progress opportunity cost of your time increases, i.e. an hour of your time when you got funded is a lot more precious than an hour when you were just starting out. also, an hour you spend on the "life" side is an hour NOT spent on your startup, and the cost for this increases as you make progress.

luckily, things are dynamic and you don't have to choose between work and life or some arbitrary balance point and then live with your decision forever. rather, depending on your time constraints your radius of interaction widens or shortens. while working hectically on some feature you'll only interact with very few close friends or no one at all, and when things are going slow or when you need support, emotional or otherwise, you'll simply reach out to more people. thus, be flexible in terms of how you allocate your time but always with an eye on the prize.
Steve, I'm sorry, but the universe may not be a Von Neumann architecture!
#2 isn't true either. Wordpress is the slowest piece of software I've ever seen. You NEED the wp-super-cache plugin to make it able to sustain some traffic.
The funny things is that the same result for an orbit on a sphere doesn't need the Axiom Of Choice at all. It just uses the concept of actual infinity.

I had to read this several times before I understood what you were saying. But you are right. The point is that you can get what wikipedia calls a paradoxical decomposition of a groups of rotations, and that doesn't require choice. Converting that into a proof of B-T requires taking a member of each equivalence class, and that does require choice.

The proof on WikiPedia is pretty good, actually:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach-Tarski_paradox#A_sketch_...

The point about the orbit on a sphere not needing AC is really step 1 of the proof there, except using rotations on a sphere as the "location" of the free group.

As a side issue, B-T is proof that there isn't a finitely additive, isometry-invariant measure on R^3 that's defined for all subsets. Interestingly, there is such a measure on R^2, although it's now 26 years since I proved it.
Nonsense. The vendors set the price to maximise the profit from those people who buy their product. This is the same whether some people pirate or not.
Twisted is not a web framework, so I don't think there would be any problem with using it in a Django project.
This is rubbish. Companies set their prices to maximise their returns. If they could make more money out of you by raising their prices they would, piracy or not.
I think people here read too much into outliers.
Up until we have computers understanding speech in real time, I'd say the interface's goal is to give us links & just get out of the way.
How To Set Up A Caching Reverse Proxy With Squid 2.6 On Debian Etch
I'd pay 5 bucks for it. The last time I sprung for a game, The Ship, it was $5.
Kansas Private Golf Community
Discover Kansas golf course communities today! It's no surprise that Kansas private gated communities will surely impress
From what I could tell Facebook was only offering their stock not cash. I can't blame Twitter for turning them down.

Also, why would google care in the first place that they snubbed facebook (or any other purchaser for that matter)?
I can't speak about Mechanize, but I did a project with BeautifulSoup a few months back.

For scraping specific elements in a page, the xpath/Firebug integration is a huge win. Being able to highlight an item and grab the xpath selector in Firebug saves so much time, it's not even funny.
You "play" every time you're dealt a hand. Even if you fold before the flop, in Texas Hold'em for instance, you lost.

And to win every hand you play past the first street, if you want to ignore the semantics, would still make even the tightest player I know a humongous winner. The reason playing overly tight players lose (which is generally not by much) is that even the average hand that they play is an underdog to win. Make 100% of even the biggest nit's flop hands hold up and yeah, he's the best poker player in the world.
The "Ruby" label for this article is rather misleading. It doesn't talk at all about implementation, rather just calling into a library, which is written primarily in C anyway.
money motivates people in two very distinct ways.

1. as a means of material comfort. (the most common assumption)

2. as a measure of success against others. This comes into play once you have enough money to satisfy any reasonable material desire. At this point money ceases to be about absolute buying power and becomes a comparative measure.

some people are all about 2 even before they have any wealth. Cuban is one of them.
This would be great, except that it's impossible to "support Linux". You can support Debian, or Gentoo, or CentOS, or Slackware, or one of the many other linux distributions; but the fact that your code works on one distribution doesn't necessarily mean that it will work on another.

I'm dealing with this with tarsnap right now -- I know the code works on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, OS X, and OpenSolaris; but for Linux all I can say is that it works on Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Slackware, Gentoo, and RedHat. Does it work on SUSE, Mandriva, Xandros, MontaVista, or Linspire? I don't know. (But if anyone here runs any of those, I'd be happy to hear from you.)

Yes, I could install N different distributions of linux and test them all; but testing on N different distributions is much more work than testing on 1, and many people simply won't have the time.
Django is a framework for creating web applications. Twisted is a framework for network programming. Scrapy is a framework for scraping web pages.

If you're thinking about learning web development with Python, I'd suggest Django. Other Python web frameworks are TurboGears, Pylons, Web.py or Cherry.py. Django tends to have the best documentation and probably the largest community right now, however.
The Bloom filter algorithm is written in C anyway... http://github.com/igrigorik/bloomfilter/tree/master/ext/sblo...
I think the parent post was referring to choosing certain leaky abstractions on purpose in order to frame the phenomena you are describing in such a way as to elicit the desired reaction from an audience.
For example, you can change emotional response to a stimulus by using words with hot or cold connotations to describe it.
In my experience, Linux platform compatibility boils down to a few things:

- architecture (usually i686 or x86_64)

- availability of the right library versions in /usr/lib (however, you can combat this by "shipping" the versions you need with your app)

- (rarely) kernel version

- (even more rarely) glibc version

In other words, most of the time, if it's an Intel binary, it seems to work pretty well.

If a particular Linux distribution seems necessary, it usually just means that one of the above features of that distribution is important.
>The worst aspect in setting up this site was dealing with the templating engine Liquid.

The article author should look at existing ruby/rake based static website generator http://webby.rubyforge.org. It offers a choice of templating languages (ERB, Textile, Markdown, HAML, SASS).

Another killer feature is webby's ability to process LaTeX snippets and generate formula images for the web page.

So more templating choices and webby-like custom text processing filters (LaTeX, graphviz, tidy, coderay etc) are my feature requests for Jekyll.
Test a few the big ones (Fedora and Ubuntu spring to mind), play nice with native package managers and use a liberal enough license that someone can make a package of your game for another distro, even if they still need to install the data separately. This makes it the responsibility of package maintainers to modify the package you've already made to point at the right directories.

Another approach may be to use autopackage or similar.
How many newspapers have an API?
Does this in anyway imply that one day Wikipedia could be "Not Free"?

In other words is this just a donation request or is it a threat or extortion is disguise?
text adventure games

The first big programme I ever wrote was a text adventure, and the book that got me started down that track was "Exploring Adventures on the Vic 20" by Peter Gerrard. I can't find any references to it (in its Vic 20 form) online, but I did find this: http://retro.icequake.net/exploring_adventures_on_the_c64/
There are certainly a few serious, respectable economists who favor the gold standard - I said only that "most don't", not that anyone who does is a not a "serious economist".

Incidentally, I think the "because we did it that way for a long time" argument is a terrible one. There are plenty of things we've done for a long time as humans and as societies that aren't very good, and are worth discarding. I don't think the gold standard is a good idea myself, but in the arguments for it, there are better ones than that one.
Yep, they definably did in my town — cause they had massive speakers attached, and the people monitoring the cameras could (and did on many occasions which I witnessed) shout at people for littering and causing trouble.
Employing Your Customers for Fun and Profit - SlideShare
You don't click any button that says start. You click one the Windows logo, then the universal power sign. I can't think of anything more logical than that.

Was that a kneejerk "say something bad about Windows" reflex?
In much shorter form: Don't ignore the preferences of trend-setters and early adopters.
YouTube was a target before the acquisition, they just hadn't moved on it yet. The speed with which Google paid off all of the rights holders (at the same time they acquired them) would indicate that it was far from the first time they'd thought of that.
Most definitely. You can't squeeze blood from a stone. A suit by the RIAA calls major attention to the defendant, so it's not something they want to do until they feel they have to.
One thing I can see that Webby supports that looks interesting is ERB. How flexible is ERB as opposed to what seems like a more restricted templating language like Liquid? It looks like ERB allows for actual Ruby to be used in your templates which would have ultimately solved the issues I had.
Slate calls BS on the whole thing:

http://www.slate.com/id/2207537/
For the record, I had nothing to do with the writing or submission of this article. And I've never heard of the site.
Related sidetrack: Just came across this http://www.inform-fiction.org/examples/Advent/Advent_2_com.h... which is the source to advent (a port of the original Adventure).

I'm posting it here because it's a fantastic example of a dsl. This is some of the cleanest code I've ever read.
Oh, an article about global warming, let me get my checklist

☑ no useful set of data presented (anecdotal evidence, selection bias)

☑ failure to understand nonlinear, chaotic systems

☑ logical fallacies (we have other issues that have people more worried, so climate change is solved)

☑ sweeping generalisations

☑ a bit of conspiracy theory thrown in for good measure

I think I'll pass, and go for a walk outside, where unusually for the season, there is no snow!
Why Obama Can't Ignore Education Tech
ERB is simply embedded ruby, it has no limitations. It is also totally not secure when used on a server.

My guess security of GitHub Pages is the reason for using Liquid in Jekyll. For generating static pages on your desktop before uploading Liquid is simply not needed.

I am a bit surprised jekyll is so heavily promoted as a static site tool(saw it twice on HN front page already) while an elegant and seemingly more powerful ruby application (webby) already exists for this purpose.
I can't follow either of the proofs yet, but one question does pose itself: given a decomposition of the sphere, don't you get a decomposition of the ball, just by projecting towards the origin?

Of course what happens at the origin itself is not clear. Perhaps there's no way of getting around that difficulty. If you could deal with that, however, a proof on the sphere would be equivalent to a proof on the ball.
Yeah, Webby totally kicks ass! There's no point of re-inventing the wheel, especially when the "current" wheel is so nice...

And since everybody thinks the GitHub guys are cool, lots of people are going extend Jekyll with all kinds of features that Webby already got.
Agreed, but read your post again:
...But prevention is not a treatment. You can't raw food your way to a cure to cancer. It just doesn't work. People die because they become so deluded....

"It just doesn't work" is a statement of fact. I showed you some research that refutes this (lifestyle change alone can cure in certain cases). What more do you need to change your opinion?
Twitter meets Facebook's news feed
If you mean "on the spot" in its "at the scene of action" definition, then no, almost certainly not. I've not heard of that sort of CCTV monitoring in public.

If you mean "on the spot" as in "at once, with no delay" then yeah, totally. That's really common in the UK and I support it as it's been shown to have positive effects on crime (often by pushing the crime elsewhere, sure).
Well put. This is one of the reasons why Tarsnap supports BSD, linux, and OS X, but not Windows -- people who run Windows are generally not trend-setters or early adopters... nor are people likely to take the advice of Windows users where security is concerned.
Amazon.com: How the Online Giant Hoodwinks the Press
From what I have just read about Webby, it seems like it does not support topics and categories like Jekyll does. However it does have a wide range of rake tasks which do some things like offer a variety of deployment options, logging to growl, and validating links.

There are differences in the philosophies behind the 2 projects. They are both static site generators however Jekyll is more oriented for maintaining blog-style sites. Webby lacks the ability to organise content the way that Jekyll does.

Perhaps most importantly, Jekyll is now available as a free, hosted solution with GitHub - a great way of inviting the large community of developers active in that community to contribute to the project.

I am not saying one is better than the other. They seem to accomplish slightly different things although the method in which they go about it is somewhat similar.
This has strong parallels to the coworking movement. Most of the coworking spaces offer drop-ins at a day rate, and the chief bonus is the support of the community (not just getting out of the house). All the prominent ones are self-sustaining.

Linkies:

http://coworking.pbwiki.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coworking

http://blog.coworking.info/

And two spaces run by two of my very best friends: Indy Hall in Philly (http://independentshall.com/) and New Work City in NYC (http://www.nwcny.com/).

Indy Hall is especially interesting wrt the hackerspaces post because it has a fascinating project/LLC called Indy Hall Labs (http://labs.indyhall.org/) set up to handle collaborations between IH members.
Which college are you going? But, college doesn't matter much.

If you think that you want a head start before starting your CS degree, you can learn Java right now. Most of the 4 years college will only require you to learn Java, C++ and C. They may have some others languages that you have to learn. But, I am sure that these are the main three.

In fact, you don't have to learn tonnes of language to be good in CS. From what you describe, you may be lack of some practical experience on programming. Try to work on some open source projects or your pet projects. But, I strongly recommend you to work on open source projects so that you can learn from other good programmers in the project.

For Math, it is good for you to learn some basics of Discrete Math before you start learning some deep algorithms that may require more advanced math than high school math. I don't know any book that I can recommend to you. But, I am using "Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications" in my first semester in UIUC. The author of this book tried to relate Discrete Math with Computer Science. So, it may be a good head start for you. From the book, you can learn some basic algorithms and some Math theories such as graph theory, number theory, etc that will be very important in your CS degree. You will learn CLRS usually in the last year of your CS degree.

Remember: Books are good to learn a new knowledge. But, practical experience is always more important in real world.
There are two aspects to money. Money as a goal and money as a reward.

Rewarding people with money with bonus' just doesn't work. People become dependant on the bonus, growing to expect it for no extra effort. fail.

Using money as a goal works as part of a package of goals (for most people). If you sell it as 'solve this problem, save the world and we'll be rich' it works. The money is a result of their efforts.

There are a few people who are purely motivated by making money for themselves and that's fine. They will either be very rich or very unhappy (that's a logical or so they can be both rich and unhappy).
My only frustration with 'shut down', 'log off' and 'lock screen' in vista was the lack of confirmation dialogue. All to often I would lock it rather than logging it out.

And clicking the windows sign and then shut down is awfully like clicking an apple sign and then clicking shut down. Quite a nice standard really.