skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you have about 1 year in industry before your academic cred is used up. Generally speaking, a research position in a company like Google, IBM, HP, etc. is definitely more in-line with what the admission committee will understand and respect than a code-monkey job at a web 2.0 startup or in finance. I think these latter sorts of jobs hurt your chances of getting into a highly respected academic program, though they may make you a better entrepreneur. I think status in the software community (e.g. at HN or in the open source world) matters little unless someone on your admission committee knows what that status means. My experience has been that many university professors at Stanford and MIT have no clue about this sort of stuff (though of course some are very well-informed).

You should probably ask your current professors for letters of recommendation now and have them sent to your registrar so they can be forwarded on later when you decide to apply. Unless you have a natural way to continue your connection with your professors it will likely be very difficult to go back to them even a year later and ask for the letter and have them remember you (unless you were a super-star of course). Just get your letters done now. You can always have them update the letter in x years if you feel there's something relevant they can add. More likely than not you'll just be thankful that you already have the letters since you never really maintained contact. On the other hand, remember that the longer you wait, the more unusual it's going to be for the admission committee to see a letter from so many years back.

If you're really serious about wanting to get into one of those programs you could actually move to Stanford/MIT and try to get a research position working with some of the people in those departments. Or perhaps going to them and asking if there's any companies they would recommend working at prior to a graduate program.
Hmmm really voting with your wallet to not buy DRM music and then supporting the release of not DRM music is a bad thing?
People have nothing better to do with their time
One of the more interesting highway behaviors I have seen was a huge backup on a 2 lane highway where truckers would block both lanes and prevent people from passing them. It's a slight cost the each trucker on the left but it significantly increased throughput.

In the blogs example one person 1 goes Start to A, then while person 1 goes B to end Person 2 goes start to A. etc. Worst case travel time is now faster after adding the new road and 2 agents can help this happen by limiting how fast people enter A.

Edit: with 2 people limiting traffic they can reduce their travel time by 25% (3x 1/2 vs 2 x 1) even if they are in the second group. 1/2 the cars do the first leg, then the other half do the first leg while the first set does the second leg.

PS: This is why we make traffic lights.
To some people C is just the 3rd letter of the alphabet. To others, it’s the grade they got in journalism, a measure of bust size or what pirates in movies sail across.
Fake fingerprints, formerly experimental, make real-world debut
Hmmm, we didn't even look at age when reviewing applicants -- so I am not I sure I buy your argument that a school would "flatly reject" someone based on age. Further, I am not sure if that would be even legal (in the US).
I have to agree letters of reference are the most important factor. Of course you need good GRE scores as well. Unless you do some academic research and publish a paper or two before you apply (senior thesis at least), there is little chance you will get into MIT or Stanford. A friend of mine prolonged his undergrad for a year or two in order to work on some undergrad research for a while and got into MIT that way. Of course, if you are willing to settle for something other than a #1 school then you could get by without any publications as long as you have an interesting class project or two that you can talk about and you do well on your GREs (remember to study your vocabulary). Programming experience will not help you get in. If you can find some kind of research position, that would help, but it could be hard to find a position like that at IBM or HP with your experience. A better bet would be to look for a prof somewhere that does something you are interested in and go work for him for a while (paid or not). Starting with a Masters is another route that can work.

Also, I have to put a disclaimer here that getting a PhD will probably not be worth it from a financial standpoint, and most likely you will not find a tenure track position afterwards.
Invalid (x)html puts some browsers into a "quirks" mode, which makes it harder to get some things to work.
"... Every ugly exam score, blown deadline and failed project provides the opportunity to try out new excuses. ... Q Are there any know solutions to preventing this behaviour?"

I think the real problem with trying to achieve something is a combination of not "knowing how" and thus having "no way to estimate" what it takes and just give up. For example, if I said to you, "go and walk 1000Km over hilly terrain" most people would probably give up because it seems impossible to do?

But if I said, "could you walk 10Km a day for 100 days?". This is doable. The second bit is the estimate. Could you "walk the distance in 100 days straight? Or 5 to 6 days out of every 7?" Breaking the big unachievable goal into smaller more achievable goals, you do regularly, means you have an understanding of:

- where you are now

- how far you have to go

- how much effort is required, right now

I imagine some peole still might flat out choose not to do 10Km/day five or six times a week, but I imagine quite a few could see that the effort is doable and achievable and not give up. Breaking down the tasks means you are not overwhelmed by the perceptions of impossibility. This could be the reasons kids give up for instance if you tell them to do a task and simply give up. Break it into smaller achievable tasks and you can hack their automatic flake response.

Btw I'm at my 330/1000Km.
Edit: Boy, do I feel stupid. What I proposed exists, and is called RDFa. (http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-syntax/)

It occurs to me that the W3C already has an extensible semantics framework: RDF. This framework can be represented in many different languages (primarily N3 and XML), and is quite well-understood amongst semantic web people. The trouble is how to associate RDF 3-tuples with (X)HTML elements.

To take the date example from the original article, <span id="date1">May Day next year</span> could be represented in a machine readable format be the following 3-tuple. (I am not an expert in N3, so please pardon any mistakes. Also, if there's a good existing vocabulary for "equivalent to", please let me know.)

<#date1> <http://example.com/#equivalent>; date"2009-05-01"

In turn, this 3-tuple could be encoded in <meta> and <link> elements a la Dublin Core, or could be stored in an external RDF/XML or N3 document referenced by a <link> element. Perhaps a new element could even be introduced (just one) that allows the direct embedding of RDF content in a manner similar to the embedding of CSS content via the <style> element.

This solution would have the benefits of being extensible, flexible, robust and well-understood. The biggest drawback that I can see is that developers would have to learn RDF along with some common ontologies.
This is why ideally you only make your admin tools available on your private network, accessible only via VPN. The very minimum is restricting access to admin functionality to specific IP addresses.

Limiting password check attempts is important too, but if all a bad guy could get access to is user accounts the damage is significantly less.
You owe it to yourself to seek out and find these people who are smarter than you. You must do this. Go find them. Confirm.

Then go back to working your tail off.
In my experience preemptive fixes are akin to procrastination when there's no empirical evidence to necessitate the change.
bite

can't think outside their own dogmatic beliefs and realize that they, too, employ many powerful background assumptions which are grounded in faith alone

The point is that these "powerful background assumptions" are common to both 'macro evolutionists' & micro evolutionists(?). The latter simply have more, additional 'faith-based' assumptions. I assume we are talking about things like 'I'm not a brain in a vat,' 'tomorrow will follow today' & other unresolved fundamental issues.

It seems interesting to me that recently whenever I get into these discussions (I know, bad habit), 'God doesn't exist' is countered with (metaphorically) 'maybe you don't exist' or 'Maybe you call red what I call green'

While that is a good question, it's not really relevant ( I don't think so anyway). In fact, it's cheating. Define your fundamentals however you lie. I'll admit our fundamentals are all shaky. But lets move past that. Especially if if in the same breath as macro evolution (Do we really have to say macro now? Feels like the term is under attempted hijack). Yes, we assume that human logic works & that our observations are reality & that we are not a brain in a vat.
What do you mean by "SAS isn't about science, it's about administration"
DG is an unique place.
You could just throw recent login attempts into a table, but that might get big quickly.
Hey Rick, I didn't see your email in your profile but I'd love to hear from you (erwaller at gmail). I'm a developer/sort-of-designer and a senior in college.
Tell me about it. Mine was $430 and I had a serious double take. On the up side, a decent chunk of my music was purchased with the gift cards you get from having an Apple Visa card.
it would be nice to be able to use an xml parser to screenscrape, i mean, missing alt tags dont really matter, but not having to write silly regexs to strip out the data you need over simple xml queries is a plus
Something about your argument is not making sense. You say that as storage needs increase, the costs go up dramatically (that there are significant DISeconomies of scale).

Yet Amazon is acting as an aggregator of all those ever-increasing storage needs, operating at even higher scale, yet is able to turn a profit providing a service at scale. Amazon almost certainly isn't building their own hardware.

It seems you're arguing in circles somewhere there...
HN also uses tables. (gasp)
So 70% of the time your using the laptop screen.
Maybe spoiled, narcissistic, layabout parents have the same kind of kids?
In fact, MSN seems to be the only site in the Alexa top 20 that does validate. (But Live.com and Microsoft.com don't validate, so Microsoft isn't consistent about validating)
w3c is a joke!

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.w3.org/TR/
Digital TV streams have error correction so you are likely to experience either a normal picture or none at all. When I was growing up, even a slightly fuzzy ghosted Analog picture was better than no picture at all.
Since it's Alpha you can get away with alpha explanations but as more and more ppl use it explanations might have to be "pitched around the office" and get them to "say" what JS is doing then write them down. I'm crappy at writing at the best of times but my stab would be:

FROM

JobSyndicate is our way of getting jobs
in front great candidates where they already
live online.

We can get targeted distribution for jobs
by combining our ad widget technology
with contingency recruiting “bounties.

TO

JobSyndicate is an online service that
matches the best candidate to their
geographic location.

JobSyndicate acheives targeted distribution
for jobs using a combination of our "Ad widget"
technology and "recruiting bounties".

Replace the quotes with hyperlinks (and bold typeface) for "Ad widget" and "recruiting bounties".
Add permanent keyboard shortcuts to Google.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEZxgEgG5Cg#t=1m52s
Use any decent HTML parser.
they arent anywhere near as ubiquitous as xml parsers
or memcachedb, or just use mollom.com
And the unwashed masses would put up with 10 different traffic sign symbolic paradigms and roadblocks by the local owners because they simply felt like blocking traffic for better prices...this wouldn't cause the slightest stir among the millions of people and commerce it would affect...would it?
at least not worse than msft:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://w3.org/
Validation is by far the least of this site's markup concerns...

* Font tags
* Tables For Everything (tm)
* Inline styles
* Inline Javascript
* Crazy URLs (&whence=<gibberish>)
* Deprecated tag attributes

I could go on. I mean, it doesn't even have a Doctype. Technically, you could self-invalidate it by looking at the first source line.

I've given up caring and just accept the numerous annoyances, such as the entire page having to load before seeing anything (thanks, tables!)

Edit: Actually, the only thing I still care about is that other sites don't see this as acceptable and do it too.
and thus could also be archived/truncated frequently as it is only relevant within a certain time frame right?
To be picky, snake oil/crank rather than perpetual motion per se by the sound of it.
Yeah, but then he says they launched with 30,000,000 Web pages indexed two years ago. This appears to be a bunch of quotes compiled from different interviews over a span of many years.
though I'm sure pg's concept of object code is outpacing-ly more resolute than my own,... I really do think I agree.
Are All Web App Platforms Doomed by Fatigue?
Blu-Ray's future uncertain
You could double the response time for every successive attempt from the same IP. You'd still need an absolute limit on the account, in case of a distributed attack.
Maybe not, but as with most "not Hacker News" articles, the commentary is worth reading in itself.
That was during the era when hardware was going from MHz to GHz creating a vacancy of software for running on these new systems. Now that things have settled down, so has growth.
The Perils of Zero-Gravity Videography
It would probably go farther toward validation if "<!DOCTYPE html>" was stuck on the top. :) And, since that's HTML 5, there are a lot of tags that don't need closing.
"You graduate at age 32. That's over the hill. Many grad schools will flatly reject you for this reason"

I hope this isn't universal. I am planning to apply in 2010 and I'll be 38 when I do. Oh well one more wall to jump over, so what's new? :-)
Many Languages or One?
There are a number of packages for relatively obscure statistical techniques (say, nonmetric multidimensional scaling) that are available for R, but not for python (that I have seen).

I also believe R is easier for statisticians who cannot and do not want to know how to program. There are many advanced techniques that are one-liners.
Feature request:

It would be cool to have the option to see HN comments in chronological order (with second order being hierachy) but still with otherwise standard point-marking/voting. I think this is a feature I've been secretly wanting in sites like reddit and HN, because I think it is fundamentally different to watch a conversation unfold. Like pure chronilogical markers so one could step through the conversation as it happens; hopping from anchor to anchor in the order they first appeared...

because that would be sweet...
Richard East Flex London Group
Richard East is an member of Flex London User Group and he has made that group so enigmatic through his search Ideas.
Billionaire Merckle commits suicide
Ugh. Hopefully they're as entertaining as the Steorn idiots, those investors should get SOMETHING for that money.
The EU practically is a country. There are plenty of other counter examples, mostly countries that were formally some part of an imperialist empire, or essentially still are (many countries in the Caribbean).
Even in certain areas of computer science (specifically, machine learning) nearly all recent articles are open. I find in most cases that both statisticians and computer scientists tend to post links to pdfs or ps on their websites as well.
Digital guru Clay Shirky's media forecast and predictions for 2009
Did Google Just Expose Semantic Data in Search Results?
Scene But Not Nerd
Grounded in faith alone? Unlike theists and deists, atheists reach their conclusion through critical, rational thinking.
> Distressed investment opportunities were rolling in the door that could make me multiples of what any sports team could.

As Kiyosaki notes in "Rich Dad, Poor Dad", wealthy investors have access to lucrative deals we can only dream about.
Look at how programs like Fail2Ban, and many SSH-specific monitoring services work.

Specifically, Fail2Ban follows auth logs for various services, and when it finds clients exceeding per-service configured limits, it adds IPTables rules that ban the offending IP address for a configurable amount of time.

Fail2Ban is packaged in many distributions, including Debian and Ubuntu, and can be compiled on just about any system. I personally use it exclusively to thwart brute force attacks on SSH, SMTP/Postfix, IMAP/Dovecot, and HTTP/Apache.

It should be trivial to add a new set of filter/jail rules for any web application that can log bad authentication attempts to a file, and then you have instant "protection" from most brute force attacks.
STOP THE PRESSES!

I swear this comes up every few months. Afterall, this site is so non-compliant, I am surprised anyone even comes here!
Apple's Keyboard-Free Laptop
libxml2 has an html parser. Everything(ish) has a libxml2 binding. The real PITA about scraping HN is that there's hardly any id/class attributes and you end up with td:nth-child(3).
I've had the privilege of meeting Hemant Mehta, the Friendly Atheist,

http://friendlyatheist.com/

at a talk in my town, and I think he gets the issue of communicating with believers very well, perhaps because he was brought up in the Jain religion. It is quite an art to understand where the other person is coming from and to communicate with that person.

I realized it better explains the true situation - that it simply comes down to where you assign your faith.

At the risk of showing I'm not as smooth a communicator as Hemant, "permit me to not completely agree with this opinion," in the words of my favorite mathematician. I think what religious belief (which I used to have) and secular rationalism differ in is HOW they assign confidence to what they rely on, and I think, properly speaking, the natural scientist doesn't have faith in the sense of faith in a body of religious doctrine. I think the truth-seeking of the scientist, and of the members of the general public who learn from scientists, is different in nature from the truth-assuming of those who put faith in religions. I've been there, and I've done that. I have a LOT of compassion for people who have deep religious faith, and I appreciate gentle efforts to communicate with them, but I don't think people who go through life in active, fact-tested truth-seeking are just putting their faith in a different object.

Thanks for making an interesting early comment that got me thinking about my rather recent "conversion."
I like to argue that people should take pascals wager to the next level and believe in absolutely every possibly permutation of a higher being/afterlife. you know... just in case.
So, a distinguished but elderly scientist says it's impossible, eh? Where do I sign up?! ;)
[geotargeting isn't live yet, but it's coming, btw]

The idea of "putting jobs in front of candidates where they live online" is a fairly explicit pitch to HR managers & internal recruiters. HR folks are used to distinguishing between "active" and "passive" candidates. Active job seekers will, for example, apply to jobs at sites like Startuply and Craigslist (um in that order). Passive candidates - who are often the best - don't go job hunting, usually because they don't need to. JobSyndicate is for getting jobs to them without really changing their behavior; it's a premium service.

For pitching around the office, I'd say that JS is kind of like an inverted job board. Employers post a job once, it syndicates everywhere, and they pay only for results.

A pretty sweet startup CEO I spoke with also came up with the (very) unofficial elevator pitch analogy: it's like Adult Friend Finder for jobs.
Salmon Run: More Java Actor Frameworks Compared
How to Say I Love You in Sign | eHow.com
I don't know anything about applying to PhD programs. I would like to add something to point three though:

You could grab a research position with the government. Lincoln Labs at Hanscom AFB is associated with MIT for example.

If you work a few years as a program manager or bench scientist in the government civil service, you will network with prominent folks and have a chance to gain their respect. After all--where do you think that research money that professors love so much comes from?

I had a positive experience. I was able to network with people who wrote papers I really liked. One particularly touching experience--months after I left, someone contacted me to let me know that a Professor whose work influenced me quite a bit would be in town. I was (as an outsider) given a slice of his schedule to meet with him and have lunch. Its like a family, once you're in... you're in.
Nope. Clearly Reddit.
A big one is normalising atheism. Making sure it's not something foreign or taboo.

That's an interesting perspective. Having once been an evangelical Christian, I now as an atheist have more than a little desire to proselytize. I haven't found any of the "new atheist" literature that I could give to my many Christian friends with much hope that that literature would communicate to their concerns. Probably a lot of incrementalism here and there on different fronts will help more people have space and gumption to begin examining the world without the assumption that this or that religion is an accurate description of reality. Then more people can join in the great human enterprise of investigating reality and sharing what we find out.

I do like friendly, even concessive-to-a-fault statements over harsh, in-your-face statements, and I think that is a winning approach for many atheists to take.
For Python, use BeautifulSoup: http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/

Otherwise, try HTML Tidy: http://tidy.sourceforge.net/