skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
what schools? (I ask because I hope that my school was "reputable" but that was certainly not the case)
Like this: http://www1.alcatel-lucent.com/submarine/how/inputs/repairin...
But crossing the street does not require a heightened sense of consciousness. In fact, you are probably not even conscious of nearly everything that's going on as you cross the street, you are just doing it.

Now if you were sitting on your couch in dead silence in a pitch black room, what would be going on in your head with no language?
Anyone else click on the link for you.github.com, expecting a demo page?
As is real HTML. Wikis have simplified markup for a reason.
thinking and consciousness are different things. Thinking implies that you are evaluating your surroundings as all other animals do. Consciousness is the idea of self awareness: not only are you thinking about the situation, but you're thinking about yourself in the situation in relation to everything else around you.
100k is the MIT business plan grand prize. Clean Energy Prize is the energy track that turns out have a bigger prize on its own (200k).
someday... that 14.4 US Robotics modem will be mine!
Seoul home to world’s longest bridge fountain
I can't track how much of my thought is visual versus verbal -- because, of course, if I did so I'd switch to verbal mode -- but there are plenty of thoughts one can consciously have that don't require words. The category that most readily comes to mind is sexual fantasies. They don't require consciousness, I guess, but I suspect that many beings we think of as conscious have such thoughts, consciously.
I love the setup, but I have to say that all of the most awesome work that I've seen done has been done on couches, with cheap dell laptops that have stickers all over them.

I'm not one to talk of course. My workstation is a monstrosity that grows by the year, but I miss the purity of a bunch of guys sitting around a cheap apartment on goodwill furniture, all logged into the same server, perl and python flying, as a site almost magically congeals before our eyes. Guess I'm just sentimental like that.
ITunes DRM boycott: Does anyone really care?
From military device to life-saving surgery tool ("the perfect mirror")
I suspect all. If I go to Pandora.com it says this (amongst other stuff):

We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.
Bookending
Why not? If he has a good, or even exceptional, track-record, are you going to refuse to visit his office because he lacks a degree?
At Brown (where I went for undergrad), you are normally tracked into an intro course, but if you can convince a professor of a higher-level course to override the prereq, then you can take whatever course you want.

I have the sense that most universities will do this given enough prodding; you are, of course, paying them tens of thousands of dollars a semester. Sometimes there won't be an official documented procedure, but I would be surprised if you were qualified for a particular course but couldn't talk your way into it.
My "Introduction to Programming" course I did at Uni dealt with Ada shudder and I remember the very first things they were trying to teach were how to open, close and save files under Windows.

I played Quake 3 for first 2 weeks during that class while I waited for something of actual use.
Detroit gets its Bailout
If a "publication" that steals content needs $25 million in venture funding to expand, we're in for a wild ride.

VC source: http://is.gd/9I5M
I've been there a few times and can comment on Amsterdamn from a tourist perspective.

Counterculture: This is the best part of Amsterdam. The red light district and the coffee shops are both a must see. Go at night.

Museums: The Van Gogh Museum was good. But the Rijksmuseum and Anne Frank House were disappointing.

Other: Heineken was fun afternoon.

We also rented a car for a few days and drove up the coast, which was a lot of fun. Lots of little villages, some touristy, some not. Edam was my favorite (where they make the cheese); lots of people in traditional dress, cute cheese girls everywhere. But we were there on the same day the Queen visited, so it may not always be that fun.

Don't forget you can take trains to other cities on the weekends. Look into getting a Rail Pass--you have to order it in advance and it saves you lots of money on the trains.

I'm trying to think of something geeky for the HN crowd. But I can't. Sorry.
An excerpt from "Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance"
One of the favorite books I've read this year.
the homepage lacks punch, but I really like the clean design when browsing and comparing
I confess I know little of Python, so wasn't confident enough to list it.

From what I know, the Python mantra seems to be 'one way to do something', which I suppose would be less confusing for first timers.
I think many of the success stories of the last few years were built on the backs of plausibly deniable theft. YouTube was violating copyright left and right. Google was scraping everyone's data to use for their own analysis without asking etc.

The different here is that the editorial policy of this company is to steal. That's what they do. That's how they make their cash. That's a problem.
I think the problem with those languages is they're too different for a starting course. Scheme is obviously very powerful, but its syntax is wildly different than most popular programming languages used today. As for Ruby, don't even get me started. There's practically no syntax at all; merely reading it agitates me.

I think, in the beginning, people are most likely to understand concepts like Objects (Circle, Square, etc.) and how they relate to other stuff since it's so based off how we normally think. Also, since Java is statically typed, I think it makes things appear to contain less "voodoo". Then again, I could be completely wrong; I had been programming in other languages for years before taking my first Java course in college and only attended the class when there was a test.
That is how my school taught me, but I don't think this is really an option for non-majors.
I wonder why. Is the music market outside the US that much more lucrative that they restrict it?
That's an interesting move. The DMCA offers a wonderful save haven for companies who allow users to post content, but that safe haven is eliminated upon refusal to act on a takedown notice like this. The article says, "It's not clear Facebook is fully aware of what they’re stepping into". I'm shocked that they would risk being found liable for these user actions because they didn't act on the takedown notice. For a company struggling to find funding, now is not the time to make a stand that could bankrupt them.

/This is not a commentary supporting the DMCA or US copyright law, merely a commentary on the legal risk Facebook might be contending with here.
I can sympathize with the author. I "got" programming and generally found it rather easy (in college, I would look at some random student's code and just point out each bug; used to drive the random student crazy when I did that).

But there was one class I took, Unix Systems Programming (all in C). It was a higher level course with prerequisites of data structures (by that time in college, taught in C) and compiler writing (undergrad version). We were sitting there as the professor was going over the memory layout of a running Unix process ("the text segment is where the code is stored, the data segment were all pre-initialized code goes, yada yada"). One student raises her hand. The professor stops and asks if she has a question.

"Yes, where do the comments go?"

I think it took a full thirty seconds for the professor to reboot.

I do have to wonder how that student got through compiler writing.
Examples of successful Strong DSL (ie. standalone) are James Gosling's project for satellite control (I think it was), which he did so that users could make their own changes without bothering him (I doubt details are online - he mentioned it in an interview as a virtual machine that was a precursor to Java).

Our own pg also had a DSL for the Yahoo Store (was viaweb), so users could customize it. From the docs, it looks like it is implemented as Lisp with isomorphic friendlier syntactic sugar.

On weak DSLs (ie within a host language), I still think it's a virtue to try to make it as self-contained as possible. Mini-languages are surprisingly common: regular expressions; printf format syntax; XPath within XSLT. I saw a great comment recently [1] suggesting having DS error messages. I think this is an oft-overlooked aspect of the abstraction (it's not just syntax!), and to make the abstraction as non-leaky as possible helps everyone (programmer and non-programmer alike).

[1] http://debasishg.blogspot.com/2008/04/external-dsls-made-eas...
Ruby has quite a bit of syntax (parens, methods on objects, blocks, etc), whereas scheme has almost none (parens, special forms like lambda, #t, '()).

Of course both have less obtrusive syntax than Java, which requires the famous

public static void main...

just to get started. That is the kind of stuff that I think confuses true beginners. They look at that stuff and think "holy crap memorize these voodoo incantations" and never really leave that mindset once they get there. Even if they eventually learn what static means, they will always treat it as such.

I think once they get the hang of programming in something, it's easy to build up from there. I just think it causes people to focus on the wrong thing (syntax rather than semantics) when they are first starting out.
Digg is loosing $5 Million a Year
Does anyone know if they accept donations? I'd be more than happy to pay immediately. I loooove Pandora; I listen to it everyday. I can't think of a website I use more other than Pandora save maybe google/gmail.
I said, “That someone “saw an opportunity when most people did not” doesn't really tell you anything about whether exploiting that opportunity is moral or immoral.”. Your response was a complete non-sequitur, and furthermore it appeared to attribute to me a position including material facts that are probably false. In the comment to which I am replying, you have called me an “asshole.”

I appreciate your expressed concern for the constructiveness of the conversation. May I suggest that you try a different strategy if a constructive conversation is what you seek? Putting words in the mouths of other participants and name-calling may not be the most effective way to engage in a constructive conversation.

I was just pointing out that rokhayakebe's syllogism, “Secondly, he saw an opportunity when most people did not, so he should totally benefit from it,” depends on an absurd unstated premise. Whether this blogger who we’re talking about happens to be a robo-spamming scumbag or not isn’t really relevant to that.

And that is why you fail at reading comprehension.
Why You Should Try Django
My thoughts exactly... I can't wait for <VIDEO> tag supported by YouTube/Hulu. Once those two can be accessible without Flash, I'm done with this garbage: the front page of ESPN.com does nothing special, in fact it's devoid of any functionality, yet it consumes 35MB of RAM and eats 20% of 2.4Gz CPU at idle. Fucking insane.

Die, flash, die. And take all these morons who built businesses on top of this junk with you.
Proprietary message queues are a huge problem (and a huge business).

There are better ways: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Message_Queuing_Protoc...

For a good introduction check out http://google-ukdev.blogspot.com/2008/09/rabbitmq-tech-talk-...
Yeah, law firms in the U.S. are generally never venture backed, although lawyers in Silicon Valley involved with start-ups get paid a lot in stock options or get given stock in companies they do work for.

Most of the time its like Petercooper said, there are rules preventing ownership by non-lawyers. The idea being that a lawyer should not be controlled by a non-lawyer, because that person might pressure them to take actions that are not in the best interest of a client. Its not as much a privilege question (as tons of non-lawyers work in law firms) as much as it is a perceived problem of having a non-lawyer control the lawyer's paycheck (although that article does mention a public law firm would have disclosure requirements under the SEC which could conflict with attorney client privilege)..

For instance, in your example, a VC who controls a law firm will have vastly different goals than the lawyers, whose goals should be to advance the best interest of the clients.
Don't forget Dan Farmer also worked on SATAN. And FWIW the name history on Postfix was: VMailer, then (in parallel) IBM Secure Mailer (forgotten) and Postfix (alive). Wietse's previous work (tcp_wrappers?) didn't have particularly suit-unfriendly names either. Maybe it was Dan who suggested SATAN?
Which Netbooks can handle Mac OSX?
If anyone can satisfactorily answer these questions, chances are they have done science

Coming straight from a distinguished neuroscientist:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=396215

... this unempirical component of consciousness being posited shares common heritage with...

Past performance is no indicator of future results, and one theory's individual case of validity has no bearing on the validity of the next one to be tested. I do like how you tried to dismiss it by grouping it in with the other theories, but as we both just examined, that is faulty logic and merely supposition.
I don't mind downmods on political subjects (too much), which are matters of opinion to a degree. But when I correct somebody's laughable mistakes, please either correct me in writing or leave it alone. Thanks.
You can already pay for a premium service. It's $36/year, removes all advertisements and increases the "timeout interval" (how frequently you have to interact with it before it pauses) from 1 hour to 5.

I love the service; listen to it everyday at work.
I've found that students who breeze by in these introductory classes have no desire to skip over them. Easy semesters are hard to come by. College students generally don't have the attitude of "I'm paying so much for this so I'd better get something worthwhile out of it". They are there for the paper, and they don't feel like rocking the boat. They know this and the system knows this. They are normally so inundated with work from other classes that they're forced to take as many shortcuts as possible.
That's what I thought! Thanks.
So why do you think that I am having such a hard finding gainful employment myself as a hybrid business/code person?

BTW, when I said I consider zentu.net to be "successful," I just meant that it works, has decent Alexa rank, I get lots of thank you emails, it produces slightly more income than cost of running, etc (we're talking strict hosting costs here, assuming I've been working for "free" for myself on it). It's not like I actually attempted to get actual VC or anything like that.
Accounting software, alternatives to Quickbooks
Quickbooks is driving me nuts. The online version of the software only works with IE and I got bring up my VM just for that. It doesn't connect to my bank half the time. The service goes down at least once a week for maintenance. How do you'll do accounting? Are there any alternatives?

The reason I choose quickbooks was cost. From what I understand it cost a lot more to hire someone but after three weeks with the program I'll have to reconsider that.
facebook is not the infringing party and has no liability nor obligation to comply with any takedown notice.
"A change of context is worth 60 IQ points"
(Alan kay)

So, I think that the first step towards requing the last third of the group will be to teach them
LOGO… yes LOGO
once people “get” for loops drawing squares and stars and circles etc. etc.
making the shift to other programming languages is easy.

If the curse requires OOP
then start with Smalltalk and Etoys.
They are intended for kids… but you are trying to build fundamental concepts here.

best of luck..
I am pretty sure it was your tone.
Students range from couldn't-care-less to passionate, not from stupid to smart.

Wow, I never thought of it that way, but it really makes a lot of sense.
I'm not so sure about that gear theory. I think you can have new gears installed. When I took some higher level courses that required new kinds of thinking, I didn't get it. I looked and felt retarded for a while, because no matter how it was explained I didn't get it.

Then by continuing to study, and thinking about things, eventually I was able to see it, and it started to integrate itself into my thinking. It's almost like I can feel my brain being rewired.

I think that what's required is enough exposure and determination to reset some neural connections and eventually the idea will integrate itself into you.
I think that programming is indeed something that you either get or don't.

I had an interesting expereience a while ago where I helped a friend doing a website. There was a backend involved where he would have to type some numbers into a table (how much of x, y, x... do you need when you are a certain age). I spent hours trying to explain to him why he couldn't just draw a graph on the screen, like he would on a piece of paper, and let the computer find out what the values were. He simply didn't get the basic concepts behind it and thought that the computer should easily be able to see the graph and decide what to do. He thought that is should be just as easy to draw a graph on screen and get the numbers from there as entering numbers manually.

It became apparent that he just didn't think sequentially and logically. Notions like if x is larger than y and y is larger than z then x is larger than z were extremely difficult for him to grasp. He isn't stupid by any means, he simply thinks about the world differently. And he would never get even a simple program to run no matter how much he tried.
I wouldn't say they knew it. I mean, they seriously suspected it. But there's a big difference between 99 and 100 percent certainty.
why not rank it by money brought in rather than volume of sales? So it would be sales * price. Then the only way for someone to get into that top 50 is to maximize their profit, which is what they're trying to do anyway.
Then the app store encourages people to try to make the most money all the way along, rather than selling a lot and only making money BECAUSE they make the top 50.
Thanks. I had submitted a bug report, but didn't realize that it was the ticks that were causing the trouble. They may want to fix that anyway though...
What's wrong with Ada?
There are people who attain native-level proficiency in foreign languages as adults. It is true that children more often do it, but it also seems to take them longer.

How many hours a week did you study German in college? I think children growing up in Germany typically study it about 70 to 90 hours a week if their parents are foreigners, or 110 hours a week otherwise, and it takes them about six or seven years to reach a high level of proficiency.

By contrast, an acquaintance of mine studied Mandarin Chinese only 40 hours a week as an adult (22-year-old I think) for six months, and then spent the next several years transcribing and analyzing intercepted Chinese telephone conversations 40 hours a week for the next couple of years, thereby achieving a native level of proficiency.

So my alternative hypothesis is that kids learn languages well because they try really hard for tens of thousands of hours, while adults rarely do.
He said that he writes distributed software for datacenters.

Presumably he runs all that hardware so he can have a lot of VMs running his distributed software at once. It's generally cheaper to buy a lot of commodity boxes than one super-beefy box, hence the large collection.
I actually like the Herman Miller Mirra much better than the Aeron, and it's several hundred dollars cheaper to boot.
That graph is nearly identical to the distribution of youtube videos with X number of views:

http://christopherhan.tumblr.com/post/61871360/how-many-vide...

(not my blog, it belongs to Chris Han: http://vimeo.com/2519605)
The stacked area graph is perfect -- if you check the "% of items shown" option: http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/visualizations/e...
So that's what people who are terrible at their jobs tell themselves: that everybody else is a fraud too. I've always wondered how they got through the day...
Cloud OS Rundown: Ubuntu Eee 8.04.1
You know, most ELF executables do have a .comment section, and IIRC Java includes comment text in its *.class files, and comments are included in the HTML and XML DOMs. So it's not a completely insane question.
Merry christmas Linux
Java is a whipping boy, and I also have my problems with it, but one of its minor strengths is that it is clean enough for a teaching language (especially for total neophytes). Here is the much lambasted manner of outputting:

System.out.println("Hello world");

...in fact, this is well organized. "System" is a namespace. "out" is a static variable. "println" is a static function. "Hello world" is a String. These things all exist in an orderly world. A professor could explain a lot of key elements of language design with that one line. What's this:

print("Hello world")

...it's shorthand for much the same. Easier? Yep. But it's glossing over a lot of details that students need to know.

So when you come at it from a teaching angle, you're maybe making a mistake. Python/Ruby/LISP all have their WTFs that will throw off students, even if they're all better languages than Java.
true, but as we have discussed, the apps at each position can get tenfold the sales of lower positions. selling 13k apps a day for 99c a la Ocarina is obviously advantageous over selling 200 a day for $10 each if you have the number 100 spot. No one is saying its impossible to make money with apps priced > 99c, its just a lot easier if they are
New York hits iPod users with tax on downloads
Ask HN: How do you invoice - especially you freelancers out there?
Hi guys, I'm a relatively young bloke who does some freelance web development around my university and part-time job. This mainly means me either working from home, or driving out to an office or house with my laptop.

I'm interested in a simple invoicing solution which generates a professional PDF. I don't mind if the solution is a downloadable program or webapp, however something which I can have running real-time that takes away the burden of monitoring my time would be great, especially if it's integrated and not in itself a separate application. Something that goes further and monitors time spent on a single task would be great too, both for me so I can evaluate time management, and for the customer so they have a much more detailed invoice and are better able to see where their money is going.

So, how do you guys invoice, and (if you have time to detail further) what would you suggest for my circumstances?
This topic comes up here every now and again. Here's the most recent instance: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=317131

The quick and dirty list via ryanfelton:

http://liteaccounting.com/

http://gobootstrap.com/

http://www.netbooks.com/

http://www.freeagentcentral.com/

http://www.clarityaccounting.com/

Also, you might look into http://www.lessaccounting.com.