skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've always been inspired by Arnold's story and his dedication to whatever he was pursuing, be it Bodybuilding, movie-making, or real estate (and of course being the Governator). While I don't necessarily agree with his politics, he's an inspiring story of self-madeness, and a great example of the heights someone can reach if they focus on their goals and dedicate themselves 100

This is a great list overall.
most of the CCTV footage you see makes it hard for humans to recognize people. So it's going to take more than just hooking up a computer to the cameras.
I can't imagine texting that much without some fast input device like a chorded keyboard, as stenographers have. It's many buttons to a character, but you get 2^32 characters for only five buttons. I've wanted one for my own phone, maybe even non-geeky teenagers might want one as well? :-)
Where can we read the original CO2Stats paper?
As a lesson in PR, it would be interesting to read the original CO2Stats paper and see how the Times spun it.

A search on IEEE Xplore for Wissner-Gross only gives one (unrelated) result at the moment: "Preparation of Topical Reading Lists from the Link Structure of Wikipedia"
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Barcode as an Art
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By working on something - think of something - anything, start building it.

Once you do that - find a better way to do everything you just did, it's called re factoring.

As other people have stated, don't be afraid to use Google, IRC or even forums.

Python seems to be the language of choice for learning and you can get started by using Google App Engine for free if you don't want to deal with Server Config (but please realize you can't dodge this forever).

If you go the rails route you can use Heroku, it's very good from my understanding. I've only used it briefly.

I'd say it's recommended that you learn how to install MySQL, PHP/Python/Rails on your server. That will give you a big heads up.

Good luck!?
This looks really useful. It's nice to see libraries that try to do just a few things really well without taking over everything else.

I have a couple minor quibbles about the crypto though (although, IANAC so take this with a grain of salt):

In your symmetric encryption routine, you include an HMAC of the encrypted IV and the ciphertext by computing HMAC_k($encrypted_iv . $ciphertext). This is problematic because an attacker can shift data from the end of the IV to the beginning of ciphertext without being caught immediately. Presumably it will garble the message in a way that will be noticed, but that's not a great assumption to make. At the very least it lets the attacker cause the script to spew warnings by passing an empty IV.

Using Triple-DES to encrypt an IV for AES also strikes me as a little weird. If you include the IV in an HMAC, you don't gain anything by encrypting it (since the entire point of encrypting the IV is to prevent someone from modifying it in transit).
Write blog posts and post them here.
"The research found that the traditional design was better - small, private closed offices."

They're not suggesting the use of cubicles - I know I wouldn't really consider cubicles to be much different than open plan offices.
You can learn computer programming in a lot less than 8 month, will take you years to be good at it!
Where do you get these numbers from?
Why He chose JRuby over Groovy
While your 8 month time frame is a little longer than most, the honest answer is that you don't.

Essential reading: http://norvig.com/21-days.html

The bottom line is that you need to work on projects you care about. You need some motivation for what you are doing. Wanting to learn to program is not enough. For example, I have wanted to learn Haskell for a few months. Being a busy college student however means that it's difficult to find time for such an abstract goal. Tangable, realistic projects are the best route to go. I never fully learned or understood C until I was hacking around Linux in my operating systems class last semester. Pick a small project that you want to accomplish, ask for advice about which language would be best, and then have at it.
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Normally I would recommend you hunker down and try to write a program, or join an open source project, but since you said that you've had trouble teaching yourself I recommend you look for an unpaid internship. Every few months we take a few interns from high schools and colleges and start them off on basic projects which eventually evolve into more complicated ones. This gives you concrete goals while you learn new and interesting things in order to complete those goals. Usually you'll also have the benefit of collaborating with other interns in addition to asking the more experienced coders for help if you've exhausted all other options. We've found that most of the interns improve significantly during this period, it might work for you too.
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I've responded to similar articles on HN with this, and I will do so again here. The way to stop procrastinating, of course, is to read a long article about how not to procrastinate.
I wish I hadn't read this article at 2:30AM.
8-yr-old Indian kid | World's youngest lecturer, Programmer
I'm not saying that they're wrong, but.. http://img355.imageshack.us/img355/8652/machovsgaydu7.jpg
One stop source for Camera survellance
Here's what Jake Appelbaum, one of the Noisebridge founders, said about this discussion:

There are huge differences. Noisebridge, a 501c3 in San Francisco, is tangentially related to the so-called "hackerspaces" movement. Coworking is a gym, Noisebridge is a community. Coworking spaces are quiet places to do your day job. Noisebridge is a place to learn why your kernel module isn't working by talking to the person to your left. The person to your left just happens to be a kernel hacker and she is totally happy to talk to you; she's there for both social and technical reasons.

It's a safe space for asking questions and it's a safe space to find the answers together.

It's the kind of place where you drag a safe in off of the street and learn how to crack it. Because you're spending your spare time with ten other people interested in understanding mechanical locks, it will open.
The Problem with AIR: A love-hate rant
This is caused by the economic problems, which came mostly from economic isolation.
I almost always check comments first.
No love for the binary formats?

Let's hear it for ASN.1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASN.1), so good that google can reinvent it as protocol buffers (http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers) and get people interested.

More seriously, yes, binary formats have their problems. And ASN.1 in particular suffered/suffers from being pre-unicode (and thus having a number of different + mostly useless character set types).

But it seems to me that this nested tag-length-value structure (ASN.1 and protocol buffers) occupies a design sweet spot.
The Buddhists have a belief that I find intriguing: Before you are born, you get to see what your life will be. You are then asked if the life will be acceptable. If you give your OK, your memory is wiped clean and you get to live that life. Otherwise, you get to look at another life. So, the life you lead, with all its suffering and challenges, is the life you chose on that day.

Not to put too fine a point on it, as this is clearly just a fluffy inspirational quote, and the article itself is worth reading, but this quote kinda sorta makes no sense. Here's why:

You are then asked if the life will be acceptable. What you find acceptable is a function of who you are. Who you are is also largely a function of the experiences you have had in life. What I find acceptable now is not what I found acceptable 10 years ago and probably not what I will find acceptable in 10 years. So, acceptable from what perspective? The perspective of the person who has lived that life, or the perspective of someone else? Those are two very different perspectives that will lead to very different answers.

Another big hole is that there are only a finite number of existences out there. So surely someone has to be stumped with a life they didn't like. It is condescending and incredibly insulting to tell someone whose life really, really sucks that they chose it.

So, a nice article, with a nice fluffy thought at the beginning, but the gaping holes in that fluffy thought kind of bothered me.
in a libertarian USA, most if not all of that $1.2 trillion would stay in the hands of the people

Including $11 billion that would otherwise have been spent on tax collection.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2009/treasury.html
Aside from being a strong candidate for virtually defining Correlation Is Not Causation, the paragraph

"Even within high-frequency trading, comparing the finger ratio only works if traders have equal access to capital and information, and similar risk limits, said Coates [who] was able to adjust the study data to minimize the influence of these factors."

gives me pause. You know, with the right correction to the data set, I can make ANYTHING look statistically significant. (Particularly when I'm allowed to try out an arbitrary number of corrections and discard the ones which fail to produce a data set that supports my hypothesis.)
I often fail to provide enough examples when explaining my intuitions to others.
Nuclear was easy to sue.
I'm a counterexample.
1. - 0.2 = 0.8 is typically a B-. Is there a different grading scale there?
And, in a virtual age, what is the point of a physical school?

Answer: there is no point.
Problems with Mobile Security
Whilst we all love to hate overcrowded offices, I really don't think that there's any problems with open plan offices. I worked in those for 4 years and never had an issue with them. Sure, there is a slight decrease in your personal productivity due to the likelihood of distractions and interruptions, but that is balanced by an increase in team productivity thanks to an increase in communication.

Work is not all about your own personal work. In fact, in the large organisations where I worked, I'd say at least 50% of the work that people ended up doing was a result of miscommunication, and so there are clearly huge benefits in finding ways to decrease that miscommunication.

Even programming work was largely dependent on communication. The projects where I worked didn't do any rocket science that required weeks of solitary work to chew through, but it did require a good understanding of arcane, bizarre business (finance) rules and interface requirements, and the bottleneck there was definitely communication rather than concentration.
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I believe the paper discussed is: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/01/12/0810907106.abst...

There is this related paper which looks interesting: http://www.pnas.org/content/105/16/6167
The transmission of illnesses would be greatly reduced if companies gave decent sick time benefits. At my company, my sick time is rolled into my vacation time. If I am take off work for an illness, it counts against my vacation time.

I once was sick with mono for 4 weeks and went to work miserable everyday. I did almost nothing but sit and stare at my monitor all day.
What I was trying to say was: "I don't believe it's even in the same general region as the truth".
Follow the commit history for a language and project that interests you.

http://github.com/languages
An oldie (2005) but goodie.

Although it is less about frameworks and more about a disease which was largely contained to Java enterprise-y architecture stuff. (I say as a practitioner in that field... remind me why we are using the Factory pattern here, again?)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=431772

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digit_ratio#Sexual_orientation
Paraphrased:

With regard to the delay in evacuating...Hudah Hawajah (sp?)...the Army had this to say:

"It is a mistake."

I really didn't expect this. In the world of PR and bullshit, this is noble. It is for wiser men to judge what happened, but this one snippet, I found, was refreshing.
Without the till you can't make change, process credit or store cards, or read bar codes. Making the sales "by hand" was not really an option.
Obviously if you can't process things fast enough then to get the same work done you need more time, but the staff are unlikely to agree to stay behind in a store that's open to 22:00. Slowing down the sales to match the processing capability seemed the only option. The point then is to make the degradation smooth and graceful, not dramatic and catastrophic.
Agreed about errors. A good error-handling design for system X often needs to be nearly as complex as the design of X itself, and more importantly, needs to have the same "shape" as that design; it needs to fit the problem that X solves, speak the "language" that X and the users of X speak. Typically the amount of work involved, and the importance of it, are badly underestimated. Usually people work on what they think of as the cool parts and neglect the rest. (This is the reason DSL error handling tends to suck.) Maybe they try to hack the rest in later. By then it's much harder -- you have to rework the kernel to allow for the right kind of hooks into it so your error messages can have enough meaning. The advent of exceptions, by the way, was a huge step backward in this respect. It made it easy to just toss the whole problem up the stack, metaphorically and literally!

Getting back to XML... it's unsurprising that XML Schema isn't resilient. It's one of the most rigid technologies I've ever seen. Rigidity gets brittle as complexity grows. The error-handling fiasco of XML Schema isn't an accident. It's revealing of a core problem. Don't think you can sidestep the issue just by saying, well it's hard. :)

Would using JSON or sexps have made this problem any easier?

Sure. I've done it both ways, there's no comparison. It's not the data format alone that makes the difference, but the programming and thinking style that the format enables. These structures are malleable where XML is not. Malleability allows you to use a structure in related-but-different ways, which is what error handling requires (a base behavior and an error-handling one). It also makes it far easier to develop these things incrementally instead of having to design them up front. So this is far from the only problem they make easier.
Hm, I personally found shell scripting very frustrating.

Out of the 2), I'd pick Ruby. Feels the most newbie-friendly.

C? Hm, yes, maybe. But I doubt you can manage C in 8 months if you never coded before. And for a "startup engineer", it might not be that relevant anyway.
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I'm so tired lately I've gone beyond "cold risk" and have crossed into "sanity risk."
Re your first paragraph: we're talking about the same process. I just expect it to be slow. Very few people past a certain age change their way of thinking. It's possible that some kind of disruptive effect will occur that suddenly rationalizes corporate IT. I sure hope it does. But that's a tall order: even the internet didn't do that.

Re your second paragraph: Oh, come on. The XML standard doesn't allow two different programs that use XML to interoperate or one to be substituted for the other. It was never going to allow that, and it was obvious from the beginning that it was never going to allow it. It's like saying that if you're French and I'm German and we publish books using a standard font, we'll understand each other.
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Google Code Abused by Hackers
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Seconding this. I was going to post that link if someone hadn't already.

You can make 8 months of dedicated learning and practice count for a heck of a lot if you're persistent and tenacious, especially early on. But if you get to college, find that you can already do everything they're teaching at the intro level (possible, depending on you), and get bored, it could impact your studies negatively in several ways.

Go for consistent growth and find things to work on that will hold your interest for long stretches of tme.
While I can see where you're coming from, a few other factors need to be taken into consideration.

One of MIT's greatest strengths (and arguably weaknesses) is the sheer "atmosphere" of working on your classes. The line between directly school-related stuff and other stuff is very blurred. While of course it's true that homework and tests impact the lives of students at any and every school, I think it's fair to say MIT takes it to another level. And not just with direct things like giving lots of homework and tests - I often felt like it was easier to find an Athena cluster (what MIT computer labs are called) than a drinking fountain or a snack machine. Because of this atmosphere, the emphasis on necessarily attending lecture is lessened, as there is more of a "continuous" feel to each class, which might include going to lecture, recitation (which is often much more valuable than lecture but doesn't get included in the "50 percent" quote from the article), study groups, office hours, and more. Now, does this devolve into problem set copying for some students? Definitely. But overall the atmosphere was definitely there. Because of this, it's misleading to focus on a number like "50% of students aren't coming to class", as attending lecture is just one part of the equation.

I should add as a disclaimer that I never took a TEAL class at MIT, or even a physics class (something I regret). So, while I have perspective on the school as a whole, my perspective is still that of an outsider when it comes to the physics department.

As a side note, personally, I kind of hated the atmosphere because people often adopted a "woe is me" attitude as semesters went on. You'd be amazed how hard it is to get an MIT student to commit to spending an hour or two attending a potentially worthwhile event, in spite of the fact that they'll easily burn that much time complaining about their workload in just about any given week. At the same time, I liked the overall philosophy which really seemed to encourage pushing yourself to the limit. The Institute allows things a lot of other schools don't, such as for a student to take 6 or more classes in a term without special petition or paying extra, as well as for students to take classes that conflict (it's pretty hard to fit 7 or 8 classes into a schedule otherwise)....
Not much different, but somewhat. Someone is unlikely to sneeze over your cubicle wall unless you're competing with them for a promotion =]
Strangely the paper makes no reference to any correction. Instead stating that, "Traders had equal
access to capital and information, and their risk limits were
determined by their track records."

The methods give no further information on any corrections applied:
Subjects.During recruitment we approached potential subjects on the trading ﬂoor and invited them to participate in the study. They were given an introductory note that explained briefly that we were looking at the effects of prenatal testosterone on the shape of their right hand. No information was given about our hypothesis. Interested traders were informed that they would receive a summary of our ﬁndings; they were not offered payment. Of the traders asked to participate, all but 3 agreed. Before giving a handprint, all subjects completed a short questionnaire asking their age, years of trading,
P&Lhistory,numberofolderbrothers, and whether they had broken the index or ring ﬁnger of their right hand. They also signed an informed consent form. All handprints, questionnaire data, and P&L from the bank were coded by an
independent laboratory technician in Cambridge, so our analyses were conducted blindly with respect to the identity of the traders. The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the School of Biological Sciences at the
University of Cambridge.
Five of the traders volunteering for the study could not be included because they had broken either the index or ring ﬁnger of their right hands. From the remaining49 subjects, 2were subsequently excluded because their handprints were of insufﬁcient quality to be assessed, and 3 were excluded because they received a different compensation package from the other traders,making it difﬁcult to compare their P&Ls (although retaining them in the study left all results signiﬁcant).

It would be useful to know how potential subjects were identified though. Were they just the first 52 people they bumped into in the office, randomly selected from the 200 people who work there (would be nice) or was there some pre-screening?
The article suggests Lispers could have used sexp as a front-end to LaTeX

How does he know they didn't?
Not everyone is motivated by money
> Also, binaural beats are pretty cool. You can induce altered states of consciousness pretty easily with these technologies.

For anyone interested in this see sbagen: http://uazu.net/sbagen/
I wince everytime I see something like this pop up. The JVM is an awesome piece of technology, and the Java language is a good replacement for C++ in a lot of cases. There's also a neat little ecosystem of alternative JVM languages sprouting up.

Unfortunately, it's hampered by Sun's TERRIBLE marketing and crappy design on things like the installer. I'm glad they finally open-sourced Java, as it gives us the option to fork the platform instead of constantly worrying that Sun's going to screw it up.
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If the high earners are the high risk takers, the study should also consider the high risk takers who went broke and therefore are not traders anymore. Still, it is interesting that behaviors differ so much.
Traditional design may be better for health, but it destroys collaboration. IMHO the best office design I've ever been in were simple team rooms - everyone on a team (or sub-team) would work in a large office that they can tailor the way they like (lighting, decor, etc). This really helped build team cohesion, and since everyone is just a shout away it broke down the walls preventing collaboration.

And I suppose it has the added benefit of only getting one team sick at a time :)
An "Enterprise RSS Strategy"? Is that like an "Enterprise HTML Strategy"?
As a rule of thumb, I am three times more productive at home than in any shared workspace. The actual workspace, getting there, dealing with the politics, background noise, for office work is incredibly unproductive. For collaboration use skype and email, and meet up once a week with colleagues. The technology for monitoring homeworking will be a very big sector over the next five years, to root out the slackers. Bring it on.
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