skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Coffee Today Keeps Dementia Away
Even stranger, it seems to have been black-listed from Google's index: http://www.google.com/search?q=gigapedia
my tag just sits at home watching tv all day...stupid, lazy tag!
How long after phones replace credit cards will they replace driver's licenses?

As both manufacturing and network costs fall, it's conceivable that anyone without an identity-document-compliant cellphone would be issued one, for free or no cost, by the same government entities that issue driver's licenses or other official IDs.
Yes, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

MIT's ESP is a program in which non-MIT professors teach students. I'm mildly obsessed with pedagogy, so I decided to have a stab at it. It was one of the best things I had ever done. I'd like to think that all of my students were enlightened and entertained at the same time.
hmm, i don't really think C# has anything to do with it, other than just providing a vehicle for implementation of fundamental ideas of NN theory (imho ofcourse).

in my opinion, using mathematica (or some such) would have been a far saner choice, to get to the essence of the subject. also, a dosage of classical (pioneering ?) work as described in (parallel-distributed-processing vol-1&2) http://www.amazon.com/Parallel-Distributed-Processing-Vol-Fo..., would be just great.
In my school, it was a projector, and although this was its use during lunch-time, it wasn't the only thing we did with it... after school, the Computer Club would raise money with DDR and Starcraft tournaments ;)
Ask HN: HN comments page does not display properly on Instapaper?
I bookmark a lot of HN comment pages on Instapaper, but it bothers me that I can't read them on Instapaper (I can see the link description but not the actual comments). I'm using text mode btw.

Other than that I really love Instapaper ;)
You list Tippingpoint Labs and Held Media Group as "current"--why wouldn't you work there, espcially if you're founder-level at the latter? Surely a serious internship would ask you to step away from your responsibilities at both of those places.
Alan Kay said it well:

Think about it: How many books do schools have—and how well are children doing at reading? How many pencils do schools have—and how well are kids doing at math? It's like missing the difference between music and instruments. You can put a piano in every classroom, but that won't give you a developed music culture, because the music culture is embodied in people.

On the other hand, if you have a musician who is a teacher, then you don't need musical instruments, because the kids can sing and dance. But if you don't have a teacher who is a carrier of music, then all efforts to do music in the classroom will fail—because existing teachers who are not musicians will decide to teach the C Major scale and see what the bell curve is on that.

The important thing here is that the music is not in the piano. And knowledge and edification is not in the computer. The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.

Source: http://content.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=5&pr...

(submitted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=448722)
An Interview with Alan Kay: "The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas."
To be fair, I'll probably be part-timing after work at Tippingpoint Labs and HMG, doing mostly development and the occasional remote troubleshoot, unless for some reason I am unable to.
There are not quite as glamorous as the start-ups you may have heard of but they have been around: http://sleep.fm/blog.html

Does that make DreamIt ventures automatically a great option? No. I think everyone who looked at the website noticed the spelling/grammatical errors, nebulous role descriptions, and laughable testimonials. Their 15,000 bucks may not be the same as 15,000 from YC but they seem to be a legitimate option. At the very least they are a "safety" incubator to YC one would think.
"Compulsory" projects to become a programmer
Hi. Just wondering what things you'd say one has to have done before one can be called a programmer? Sure, a person might know a whole lot about programming, but never have put it to good use, so what's the best ways to prove it?

(i.e. (simple) web app, 2D game, su-doku-solver, web crawler, particle collider OS)

Thanks:)
I still have to debug stupid errors, like calling a function with the right type signature but with the wrong effect

I wonder if a way of writing tests which is significantly easier (taking one or two magnitudes less time) would help here?

Say for example, something like Python's doctests which run inside your IDE... it seems my standard way of development anyway - to write a piece of code, test it in the REPL, repeat.
For five (I think) years I've used nothing but ZoneAlarm, no antivirus, no spyware-removal-tools. And - as far as I know - I've never had a single virus/trojan. Being a geek surfing the net is something i do every day, and a lot of it, but my belief is that as long as you're carefull, you're OK.
Sir, It's actually costlier to sometimes buy from Amazon and other online bookstores for countries like ours.
The sequel, _Thinking Forth_ (http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/) is available free online, in PDF form. (After going out of print, it was scanned and OCR'd with the author's blessing...quite a compliment.) It's less about how to program with Forth, and more about things Forth taught Leo Brodie about designing programs for maintainability, (re)factoring, and the like.
Yep, but we're still fundamentally a cash-based society. Granted, the cell phone is easier to pay with than a credit card: most times when I swipe a CC at a restaurant with an average per-person price of less than $15 I have to wait 5 minutes while the cashier finds someone who knows how to do it.

The e-wallet cell phones are mostly used for convenience stores, which are sort of like what an American convenience store would look like if Bezos was running them. You wouldn't even believe me if I told you. Let's start with "If you work all day getting packages delivered is sort of annoying because the local equivalent of FedEx might show up before you're home, so instead just ship them to your local convenience store which is open 24 hours, which will happily hold them in your name until it is convenient for you to pick it up. Oh, did you need to pay for it, too? No problem, the convenience store can process payments for any Internet company worth their salt, generally pre-shipping but at-delivery for some products. Oh, haven't paid your taxes yet? Maybe you need to stop by the convenience store! We can also handle water, power, Internet, cell phone, etc etc. And if financial services make you thirsty, perhaps our selection of 760 different brands of liquid refreshment has something you'll enjoy."
>As an (aspiring) mathematician, I find the latter to be much more profound.

I'm not surprised. People usually find their own subject more <fill in the blank>.

I think you also don't realize how profound Einsteins relativity is. It's a lot more than acceleration and gravity (even if that's how it starts), the implications change an immense amount of stuff.

That's why people find their own subject more compelling - they understand it more completely.
I love the packaged foods in Asia... so many delicious options
And I disagree with your disagreement. If you have done plenty of coding on embedded systems, compilers, implementing data structures, etc., HTML and the like are very easy to pick up.

You can go on the web and find yourself some tutorials, and at the end you'll do some decent web programming. But try to find some good tutorials about processor architecture, memory cache, digital circuits... and it's much, much harder to end up proficient without any guidance (it sounds easy if you know these already - but imagine you had no notion at all of digital circuits, where do you start? how do you even know it's important?). University doesn't necessarily teaches you everything in depth but it does at least expose you to the various implications of programming, such that if you end up in a big project, whatever it is, you'll know the basics and where to find the information.

Web technologies are also hinted at during the process, so if you need them later, you at least have some basic notions (from building a web server, etc).
InfoQ: Debate: Prototype vs. jQuery
I just wanted to mention that I thought you certainly have an unorthodox resume.. not something that visually caught my eye when I first saw it, but as I read it I grew to like it. For this reason, I think you'll get to talk with some folks for some interesting positions..

Best of luck with your summer goals!
3rding Astronomy cast.
This Week in Science: http://www.twis.org
Actually, I think who you know has a lot more weight than what you studied. Just look at the rich and famous who barely finished high school...
Yeah, isn't 7-11 in Asia amazing? Not only can you run your life through convenience stores, but they are ubiquitous. It's hard to walk two or three blocks without bumping into one.
I have a feeling you don't have much CL experience...

There really aren't very many CL destructive (mutating) list functions, and I personally almost never use them except on fresh lists (like for example when I nreverse a list I just created with successive pushes) and I'm pretty sure it's standard practice.

Let's see what destructive list functions I can find in CL (ref: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/c_cons...)

rplaca, rplacd, nsublis, nsubst*, nconc, nreconc, nbutlast, mapcan, mapcon, nintersection, nset-difference, nset-exclusive-or

I took some liberties but that's about 12/58 = 20% destructive functions (push, pop, pushnew are usually used on variables, not list structure). And good style dictates to use them very sparsely... Also, (loop for x in some-list sum (* 2 x)) is pretty functional, you're just mutating x locally but who cares, this is exactly like saying (apply #'+ (mapcar (lambda (x) (* 2 x)))) which is obviously functional.
StackOverflow podcast - http://blog.stackoverflow.com by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky.
Absolutely! I love Jobs. I've tried to watch every keynote he's given. He's magnificent. But I feel that if he was told to give a keynote about a worse product, he'd refuse outright. A part of his passion comes from his belief that his product is the absolute best.

It's also why he's such a good salesperson. He's got the best product. It's also how the Apple web site works: they have an almost pornographic display of their material. I love it. It sells better than any hype could.
Twitter is raising new cash at 250 million valuation
I'm sort of confused what the difference is. Care to enlighten us?
Or that Alexander the Great was a good general. Brin and Page aren't in the same league. One who thinks so measures impressiveness poorly.
I'm getting very confused as to whether coffee (and caffeine, for that matter) is good for you or not. Today I see this article, saying that it'll keep dementia away; A week down the road, I'll find an article that says that coffee causes cancer or something similar. It's a never-ending battle.
Try using Windows shortcuts. That way, you can see your entire desktop quickly. I don't know if they will work or not for Windows 7, though.

Show the Desktop

WIN + D

Minimize all windows

WIN + M

Restore all windows

WIN + SHIFT + M

taken from http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000378.html

Also (for Tiling Window Managers), take a look at WinSplit Revolution

http://www.winsplit-revolution.com/home

Did that help?
You mean sites that have not been publicly launched yet ? As the other comment points out you can install the browsershots code - it's open source. It has a stand-alone mode which doesn't even require you to install the server. Contact me off-line if you require any help in setting up the browsershots.
my friend (a prof) told me that publishers approach her with new textbooks (the 'new' stuff is really just the changing words, numbers and units on problem sets) ... she ends up using older editions so students can buy used

i remember that in almost all of my math courses (esp the graduate courses) i wasn't required to buy books (the prof wrote pdf notes and post in on his site)

i find that no-bullshit courses tend to less corrupt
Django SAAS: Subscription and Billing System
Another reason monads are cumbersome in other languages is that other languages use lazy evaluation. If you consider the naively implemented function

skipMany :: Parser a -> Parser ()
skipMany p = (p >> skipMany p) <|> return ()

and then consider how you might write it in some other language, you'll note that the translation, strictly evaluated, gives infinite recursion. To practically work with monadic computation requires some form of non-strict evaluation. Another, less catastrophic example would be the following.

printNTimes :: Int -> String -> IO ()
printNTimes 0 s = return ()
printNTimes n s = putStrLn s >> printNTimes (n - 1) s

Strictly evaluated, that would build up Theta(n) memory usage.

For this reason, the more computation-oriented monads cannot be used practically in other languages without added weight to avoid strict evaluation.

Ironically, it's the non-monadic uses that cause the problems -- those that don't need the full power of 'bind', i.e. uses where the monad's user doesn't pass return values from previous actions to future actions. When you pass a return value, you end up needing a lambda expression, which cuts off strict evaluation. When you only use them in ways that applicative functors can be used (which often applies for parsers), that's when you suffer. It's not the end of the world; there certainly are workarounds, but that requires adding explicit promises everywhere, which is just a pain.
Wow, what an interesting conversation. Tunde really does seem pretty intelligent - it's a shame it's being wasted on thievery. If I would have had that conversation, I would have tried to hire Tunde to work on my start-up. Maybe he could code, and I bet he's cheap.
They have these things called printers here...
As an avid Django user, this doesn't interest me in the slightest. Msybe if the name were better.
uni only exposes you the materials it deems important (or corrupted by industry)

nothing prevents a passionate person to google, buy the book if necesary, and email the experts in fields
Also very relevant:

http://openstreetmap.org/ (and http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/)
I wasn't aware this was a controversial point. Every humanities class I've been in had a textbook full of sciency sounding words that don't actually exist (the authors made them up). Most professors I've talked with have said this happened in the 60's and 70's when people first realized they would get more grants if they included a lot of math and science vernacular in their grant applications.
Which language will build the cylons
I am relatively new programmer and excited about the future of computing and computer science in general. I am now wondering what kind of language do you think future intelligent robots will be progammed in?
How to install services on linux? (so everything works cleanly on a reboot)
Linus Torvalds uses GNOME
Ask HN: How do you monitor your services?
I like http://www.cacti.net/, what else do people use?
The Talented Mr. Madoff
what was the facebook offer assuming that their stock is toilet paper?
You should read the whole paper, the abstract is not enough. Observational studies are extremely sensitive to the methods in which the data is collected.

For example I heard about a study linking meat consumption and heart disease. To determine if there was a link, the researchers interviewed people every few weeks asking them how much they ate of various foods. Do you remember how many kilograms of chicken you've eaten in the past few weeks? I sure don't. Also I suspect that there could be a bias in people reporting less meat, either out of shame or people overestimating portions. A portion of chicken is eight ounces, that is about the size of a deck of cards. These things made me suspicious of their findings.

Science is hard. Stay vigilant :)
It was $500 million total including $100m in cash -- http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/11/twitter-rejects-500-mill...
Ask HN: Good Hacker Cities
What cities are good for hackers that don't require a car? Being a hacker I can be anywhere, but I'm tired of driving across country in a car.

It would be nice to fly somewhere that has good public transit. Good connectivity, inexpensive cost of living, and good people.
Nagios and Cacti.
i agree with the editor

by definition, uni will always lag and revert to mean -> the graduates will be slow and average (or not unique)

most of the stuffs i used every day wasn't taught in uni.

i'll use python/linux paradox for filtering new hires; huge bonus for lisp/bsd
What made the Mac different
Correct me if I'm wrong but this is a PR piece about the podcast that Revision3 cut loose?

Presumably because it wasn't very successful? Even by the low standards of rev3.
Web-based payment/lending platform offers 0% interest loans to college students
peer-to-peer lending and microfinance are talked about a lot these days and lots of companies that have built lending platforms on the web have become super successful...here's one that facilitates alumni to student loans at 0% interest..
$100 million in cash? Passing that up looks pretty dumb right now.
No. Incompleteness is only true for logical systems that are sufficiently like the one we've got in our universe.

Regardless, your basic argument continues to be that "more general => more profound." Which is quite simply not a true principle.
Well, I guess that's one datapoint for the independence of Google's index from its advertising operations.

"Sorry, you're too sketchy to appear in our index. However, we'll still gladly partner with you to make a buck on advertising!"
Find a person who has a problem. Solve it using code. Now that person will call you a programmer.

A useful special case of this: Find someone with some buggy code, fix it for them, and convince them to accept and install the fix. Now you've demonstrated the ability to read code, understand it, debug it, and write a fix that works and that doesn't make the code's maintainer blanch in horror. You're a programmer.

When you can, publish your code with an open-source license so that people can read it and borrow it.
it's true, just look at the papers of less-hard disciplines nowadays ... more math ... more symbols, greek vars, less illustrations etc

if you can't convince, confuse them
Linux Assembly and Disassembly an Introduction
Ask HN: Afraid I've dug myself into a hole
Hello guys. This is my first time writing to HN so I'm not sure if I'm stepping out of line here in any way, sorry in advance if I am.
I'm a Computer Engineer and right out of college I started working as a SAP Consultant (BW/BI in case you are familiar) and I have been doing that for the last 4 years. Now I want to change the course, I’m no longer satisfied by the work I do and by the SAP environment and would like to try something else, because after all, SAP is all I’ve known since college and I cannot say if that’s what I really want to do for the rest of my life. This is the point where I find that I might have digged myself into a hole because once I started looking around I realized that apparently all the technical skills I gained during this four years are only valuable in a SAP environment and that outside of that I have not gained anything that a non-SAP recruiter might be looking for. To complicate things even more, this particular hole I’m in seems to be particularly lucrative, and the SAP market is really huge with very good perspectives in the years to come, so that makes the whole "try something else" plan sound like a bit of a pipe dream. I’ve considered going back to college and get a Masters degree but I’m not sure if that’s gonna help me with my situation or if I'll end up worst than I am now.
Now, my question to you is, do you think is possible for a person that has only worked in the SAP market in the last 4 years to find a technical job (developer, programmer, designer, etc) outside of the SAP world where every job description seems to require "3 to 5 years of experience with [C | C++ | Java | Ruby | Python | PHP ]"? I know that I’m a really good programmer/developer and I could be very productive in any of those languages, but any potential employer would have to take my word for it.
What do you think, am I or am I not in a hole?
I guess running the company is more fun than doing whatever you want everyday for the rest of your life.

edit:the alley insider article implies that the deal was ALL facebook stock. I would probably turn that down too and wait for a non toilet-paper offer. I mean how much can you sell facebook stock for? Are there any buyers?
I really like the idea of having lots of YC imitators to open up options, but there's ONE thing that makes me want to stay away from DreamIT.

When you apply, you have to be an "innovator", "strategist", or "hacker."

The implication is you can't be, for instance, both an innovator and a hacker. Either you're calling the shots and designing products, or you're just some code monkey that's hooked up with some people who are.

For me, part of the reason I'm an entrepreneur in the first place is the rejection of this kind of dichotomy.
Back when I actually did research, I heard a nice way to summarize journalism's take on research. They always pick stuff that's controversial. But if it's controversial, it's because there's still ongoing debate on it. By the time something is accepted in the scientific establishment, it's no longer news.

The takeaway is - if it's in the news, it's probably not in any way scientifically valid.
From watching Stargate you can clearly see that the Cylons are programmed in Javascript.
Learning From The Mistakes Of Kmart, Motrin and FedEx
Is it possible that he was just a bad fit for rev3 and not a bad guy?
How does that look dumb if they're raising at a $250m valuation? Seems smart to me.

That article made it seem like it was about $150m (at the more sane $5b Facebook valuation) stock only. I wouldn't take that if I owned Twitter.
I interview entrepreneurs often. I think many feel that way. And I admire the ones who come out and say it.
Ask HN: Bottom Up Programming Question
One thing that I have never quite grasped about the concept of bottom up programming is how to come up with the most basic components of a program without doing some kind of top down analysis. Perhaps I can illustrate my confusion better with an analogy.

Let's say you're designing a duck (in other words, an animal that can fly, has a rounded beak suitable for bottom feeding, webbed feet for swimming, etc). In a Bottom Up approach, you would start with cells. You would need to create skin cells, bone cells, eye cells, nerve cells, etc. In order to even get to this stage, however, you would first have had to have divided the duck up conceptually into different parts in order to know that different cell types are needed. Thus it seems impossible to do bottom up programming with out first doing some top down conceptualization.

So, once again the question, how can bottom up programming work without some level of top down design?
Aren't the best Food Channel chefs both childlike and committed?
Write something in one of those languages. If you can show people something you've done, you've pretty much got it made.
Yeah but this guy seems to be actively trying to lose users. I don't think anyone hiring social media consultants would do that.
419 Scammers Set Up Roost on Facebook
> doing mostly development

isn't that exactly what's most time consuming and be most responsibility? I feel like saying "just mostly development" is like saying, "I'll just mostly be doing real work" in this context.
Portland, OR - meets all your criteria except maybe cost of living. Though that really depends on your standards. But the public transit is top notch, it is also a great place if you like to commute by bicycle. Check it out...
So you would say that the whole "3+ years of experience" is bogus, and whats really important is that you have something to show?