skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a Ph.D. student in Computer Science. I originally only applied for Master's programs. I was rejected by all of the schools I wanted to go to. I eventually ended up in a good Ph.D. program, but that was largely by chance.

You're better off applying for a Ph.D. program, then bailing after earning your Master's. It's not good for the school, but it's better for you.

Your understanding of the problem is what's wrong, not your analysis. You're thinking of the Ph.D. pool and the Master's pool as independent of each other. They're not. Funding for Master's and Ph.D. students comes from the same pool, and many programs won't admit students they won't fund. So the question sometimes comes down to, "Do we admit this Master's student or this Ph.D. student?"

Ph.D. students are an investment: they eventually publish papers with the university's name, and in academic settings, the university's name will forever be attached to that person. Master's students often don't publish, and upon graduation are generally not in circles that care about pedigree.
Don't get that in mine. Maybe I got an older version since I didn't go through the US AppStore...
Ask HN: How do you track/solicit/manage customer bug reports?
Having released a desktop app (www.getjotbot.com) we've been getting some bug reports from users. One person asked if we were planning on having a formal bug reporting system (other than E-mailing us directly).

I've used assorted bug trackers for dev work, but none of them strike me as suitable for the typical end-user of a product.

Any ideas on how to best manage bugs reports/suggestions/whatever from customers?
So, if this is actually true, where do you get the 'ad' feeds from that are valid click-thru's? I guess it didn't occur to me to put ad's in free apps..
If they took programmers from offices, and made them sit together in a room together all of a sudden, then you might just be measuring how upset programmers get when you make them move desks! You could probably get the same result in reverse and conclude that less communication hurt productivity.

You're changing more than one thing at once, so you can't guarantee a causal relationship between the result and the thing you intended to change.
Just in case you didn't know, publish. Your research - as evidenced by publications - has more weight than your GPA when you apply to Ph.D. programs.
In the 1980s some Caltech students hacked the Rose Bowl stadium scoreboard so it showed "Caltech 38 - MIT 9" (typical Tech rivalry). That was more fun :-D

http://today.caltech.edu/today/story-display?story_id=11464
Even one line is noise. If I'm curious about you, I'll check your profile. (And I do check a lot of profiles.)
At the moment I'm just keeping tarsnap bug reports (very few) and suggestions (lots) in a "TODO" file -- but I'm thinking about putting up some sort of public bug/suggestion tracker soon. I'm not sure which system I'll use yet -- probably whichever I can get installed the easiest, given that my requirements (being the only tarsnap developer) are pretty minimal.
Buffon's Needle: Using randomness to estimate pi.
Awesome! So when/how can I view Obama's records as well...?
I get together with friends every once in a while to hang out and play board games (not trivial pursuit etc, but good Euro games like those found on boardgamegeek.com) and would enjoy starting a hacking group. Would there be others in the Arlington area who would be interested in joining?
i.e. the difference between becoming Ramen profitable and needing to push for funding?
> In general, making things harder to read can't be good, and should never become a standard.

It reminds me of comments here on HN which have very low scores: they get greyed out and effectively "disabled", like a disabled form field.

However, disabled form fields which demand no interaction, not even reading, from the user should not attract interest. It's fine to make fields which are unimportant less prominent.

As you say, real read-only content (such as the text on a web page) should both be easy to read, and not shown inside a user input control in the first place.
I wonder to what extent it comes from confidence, and engagement.

Not braggadocio nor naivete, but a self-assurance that one is capable of tackling problems that arise. And of handling the outcomes, whatever they are. I think this may lessen the need for defensiveness.

Engagement -- interest in other things and people -- might be separate, or it might be complimented by a lack of defensiveness.
The term script kiddy is rather dated.
Colbert is mad
Virgin America goes Slinkset...$25k going to a Boston non-profit
If it's the MIT media lab you really want, which always seemed like an amazing experience, then figure out a way to visit, meet the people, and understand what they are doing.

Doing your own projects/research and publishing them would help to get your name out there. I'm not an 'academic' by any stretch, but that's what I would do if there was a job/opportunity I really wanted.

Do something amazing and doors will open.

Apply through the 'machine' and there will always be hundreds of people competing in the GPA/undergrad arena, and chances are they all have a better GPA than you.
Ask HN: How does one prototype a physical product?
I have an idea for a product I want to prototype. It's a physical object, sort of like a plastic toy. It doesn't have a microprocessor or any electronics for that matter. Unfortunately, my background is in software, and I don't know zilch about industrial or mechanical engineering, especially when it comes to plastic manufacturing (unless you consider playing with legos as a kid relevant experience).

Where do I start? Any pointers will be greatly appreciated.
I think it was just a guess that General Dynamics made the device. Since no one was on the record about anything, they just did a Google search for "secure pda" and came up with that one.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's a regular BlackBerry with modified software.
"There is some denial amongst the startup community at the moment - this recession will be very long, very painful and few will be exempt"

That is not the consensus among economists: http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node%2F2785

IBM expects a good 2009: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/21/technology/companies/21blu...
Good idea, now just start refining it.

Users love a sparse UI, but you've gone overboard. You need to add descriptions to the different pricings; the labels aren't intuitive.
I assume you mean 3 brands = monitor three brand destinations (e.g. youtube.com mentions, twitter mentions, and yahoo news mentions). That is confusing to marketing people. Try to make it more clear that you offer increasing depth penetration for a single brand. The multiple users feature isn't intuitive either.
--Neither of these items were adequately answered by your FAQ.

I would revise your FAQ language, it comes across as too chatty and colloquial. Your trying to get into the wallets of marketers, act professional. Your design is clean and well done, now bring the writing up to the same level.
They don't handle it well. I haven't used Visual Studio in a few years, but Eclipse has plugins that you can get off eclipse-plugins.org. unfortunately, they are not all free :-( Emacs is certainly superior for most everything.
This is a good example of an article whose entire worth lies in the headline, and there is no real reason to actually read it.
20 blunders I committed in my career which I realised during recession
that's a rad looking site
Why so many dismayed comments? Hackers should be celebrating. Microsoft and its products are the antithesis to everything software and software companies ought to be. We've been waiting decades to see the empire crumble. Now that it's finally starting, we're worried about a few coders having to go find work with someone non-evil?
That's not entirely correct either. Revenues are indeed slightly up, but earnings are down: http://www.cnbc.com/id/28791677
Thanks for the pointer to the FAQ, I had never noticed there was one (there is no link to the FAQ from the threads themselves). So you're correct, it is policy of HN. Now I know.
Xbox Live is the only truly innovative product I can think of that MS has put out in quite a long time. And even Xbox Live is getting pretty old.
They mean why bother splitting a large server into a bunch of small virtual servers when it is cheaper to simply buy a bunch of small servers? I don't think they provide any management tools other than the usual IPMI stuff, so what you do with all those servers is up to you.

More details: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/01/15/TheCaseForLowCos...
Make a CAD model of it, then send that file to get it prototyped. I've used http://www.redeyeondemand.com and http://www.quickparts.com before; didn't have any extreme experiences with either of them (either good or bad).
Unlike emacs, kids actively seek out glitches. :-)
Anyone know if there are other options (besides AdMob) for developers to insert these kinds of ads in their app?
Maybe something like http://uservoice.com or http://getsatisfaction.com will suit what you need.
Digg to layoff 10% of Employees
So, er, this would be an XX/XY-combinator?
Is Microsoft no longer unstoppable?
Don't care for Consolas but the blue/yellow color scheme is acceptable with Monaco.
Ah thanks, I did not notice the itx part, somehow. That's cool. I had a 1U in colocation for a while and was thinking wouldn't it be convenient to put two mini-itx boards in there with a hub to have some real redundancy.
There is a difference between Obama wanting to base his decisions on actual scientific evidence (when available) and turning the decision making process itself (ie. policy) into a science, which is what Eisenhower was fearing there.
Nerdy Productivity: Covey’s Time Management Matrix Illustrated with XKCD Comics
vih@bluezone.no
Does anyone have experience with getting mechanical turk workers to test some specific OS+browser combination for you? Be it a screenshot delivery of a specific page, test a javascript widget and report, etc.? Seems like it would be a good use of .05 cents or what not to get some data on oddball platforms.
Defining the specifications of a form could be considered programming, as is defining formulas in a spreadsheet application. In this thread, I don't believe the definition of programming includes Excel users.

Creating an application for building forms (e.g., Wufoo) is programming, building a form with Wufoo is not.

Note, I like the idea of getting non-programmers involved in programming activities. However, just because you work as a programmer and get stuck with things a non-programmer can do doesn't mean programmig is boring, it means you have a boring job.
Digg to Cut Staff and Hire Direct Sales Team
Pro + Bitstream Vera Sans Mono (10pt) for me.
> why bother splitting a large server into a bunch of small virtual servers when it is cheaper to simply buy a bunch of small servers

One word: flexibility.

VMs can grow up to the size of the dedicated server they are on. These tiny hardware platforms cannot. They must resort to parallelism much earlier than more beefy servers would.

(Not that I was accusing you of supporting the claim... merely pointing out that I think their idea is flawed... even if the hardware is neato!)

Given a sufficiently parallelizable(is that a word?!) workload, these things could be total win though.
I don't have any insider knowledge of the Bush admin's controversy, but I have seen and heard of cases in the corporate world where similarly draconian admin policies that forced users to jump through hoops in the name of security often had the effect of driving users to adopt easier and less restrictive external services instead. I suppose it's not impossible that something similar happened here, but to be honest senior admin officials really should have known better even if that was the case.
Digg downsizes, fires 10% of employees
Making unusable inputs harder to read is an affordance that makes it easier to scan the page for things that are usable. If your page has a scattershot of usable and unusable controls, the problem is probably more fundamental than how you grey things out.
Thanks, I felt with all the grand talk that maybe there was more going on...
Ah, to be 13 again.
I think that fun is the wrong word. Fun would imply laughing and smiling, I think.

Many works of creativity happen when there's ideas or feelings inside that are dying to get out.
New job challenges in the White House
Shelby SuperCars Makes Wild Claims About Ultimate Aero Electric Car
Wow. This really beats the hell out of w3schools tryit editor.
It also has very consistent asymptotic performance... ie. doesn't degrade as badly as Quicksort when the data is strange in some way. (When a list is already in reverse order, naive Quicksort degrades to O(n^2)).

Also oddly interesting, according to some page I was reading on Quicksort before this, there exist adaptive algorithms that generate worst case data sets for Quicksort no matter what the partitioning scheme is.
Are the parameters (like container size) sensitive to the cache design? They picked 8192 elements by hand-tuning; this is what Judy Arrays tried to accomplish too, and they ran aground on code that got too complicated as it tried to accomodate different architectures.

This is basically Radix sort (radix sort : tries :: heap sort : heaps) with a cache optimization, which is neat.
What are they called now?
That seems to be his point. "Like the pop market, it's hit or miss; sometimes it will work, sometimes it won't."

Basically he's just managed to find the immature market. The thing about that is, it's extremely difficult to reproduce.

As much as gagware pollutes the market with bright colors, loud noises, and minimally functioning apps, it obviously has market value, so it won't be going away anytime soon.
"disabled form fields which demand no interaction, not even reading, from the user should not attract interest"

This would be an argument to not show them at all. Requires no interaction, conveys no information and doesn't attract interest? Then it is only cluttering your UI, consider removing it.
Cash for Lisp
This sounds like a good recurring opportunity:

TopCoder is launching a number of upcoming private bug races in a large, rule-based expert system, and we need more bug racers! The system is written primarily in LISP and C, so if you've had exposure to LISP in school and always wanted an opportunity to improve your knowledge, this is it. We are planning to deliver a steady stream of bug races for the coming months, so joining now would be a good opportunity to get ahead of the rest.

If you're not familiar with bug races, they are short competitions to fix identified bugs in code. You will be presented with a description of a bug, instructions on how to reproduce it, and access to the code to fix it. You'll be asked to implement the fix and commit your changes. More information on the process is in our Wiki here:

http://www.topcoder.com/wiki/display/tc/Bug+Races

These bug races are private, but you can find the public ones here to get an idea of what they typically look like:

http://www.topcoder.com/wiki/display/tc/Active+Bug+Races

The only way to participate in these private races is to express your interest and be granted the necessary permissions. So, if you want to be added to the list, please respond directly.

p.s. If you need a little refresher, Peter Seibel's excellent "Practical Common Lisp" can be read in its entirety here:
http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/

Note: I have no affiliation/endorsement of the above names. Top coder has been a good experience for me and I think it's great that they are offering a chance to work one's Lisp skills--after all, use it or lose it!
When 5% means 5,000 people without jobs, it's a lot. I don't work for MS, but I live in Seattle. I guarantee you every tech company in the area is affected in some way by this.

Within MS, the uncertainty will be detrimental to the entire culture there until all they layoffs are done and probably for quite awhile after that.

Outside MS seeing the largest company in town, one that rarely lays people off, axe so many jobs will have everyone nervous. No matter what your feelings about MS are, their influence in Seattle (not to mention elsewhere) is huge and a layoff of this size means a lot.
That was my thought too when I saw the 8192 number, but they deferred with "subject to further research".

I wonder if you could crudely determine a number based on inspecting the size of the cache of the machine at runtime.

I think the most impressive part about the whole thing is that the cache optimization flows naturally out of how the Trie is constructed rather than any voodoo on their part. (Since each string is handled once, rather than m times, where m is the string length, as in a pure radix sort.)

It makes me wonder if the cache optimization aspect was foreseen or accidental.
How complicated is it? Can you make it yourself? It's probably best if you do. If you have something you want to make in quantitiy, you'll want to hire someone who is experienced with tooling up a factory efficiently. What you're doing is not really engineering, but more like "drafting".

If you live in the bay area:
http://techshop.ws/

If it's relatively simple, you can find a CAM house that will build the part for you, but then it becomes expensive. This place has an FDM house (wikipedia for details):
http://www.emachineshop.com

You can find cheap drafters on craigslist who can make a solid model of your part that you would ship to the machine shop.

good luck
Nitpick: make a PNG logo from the original and replace your JPEG - it is your brand, after all. (the fuzz is annoying, and stands out against an otherwise very clean site)

http://mightybrand.com/img/mightybrand.jpg
It is peculiar that we congratulate people on completing a compulsive bodily function.
US Democracy Server: Patch Day
Also consider that if things need to be read, high contrast is better. I think github, as an example, suffers from low contrast colors on many things, the file list being one; it's relatively hard (I need to put more effort into it than I think should be necessary) to see on every LCD screen I've tried it on. Obviously, I can fix this myself using greasemonkey or user stylesheets or something, but it seems to be a growing trend.
I'm surprised I haven't seen blackberry capitalizing on such a prominent spokesman in their advertising.
Making money off ads while giving away something for free didn't occur to you?

But no worries. I believe a lot of companies use Ad Mob, although there is another well-known company whose name I am forgetting right now. Combined with analytics suites from a company like Pinch Media, and its possible to have ads served and track click-through rates and impressions.
I agree with you, but the reason is because the managers see four of the iterations as wastes of resources.
from visiting techshop, i found out that google SketchUp (plus a plugin) can be used as the CAD tool for their Dimension SST. SketchUp tutorials: http://sketchup.google.com/training/videos.html
This is the algorithm used in Hadoop's record setting TeraSort benchmark:

http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/07/08/HadoopWinsTeraSo...

http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/hadoop/core/trunk/src/examples/...
Great question.

There is very little magic to the prototyping phase. Google 'rapid prototype' (maybe add 'plastic' to it) and find a shop that has a price that is in your budget. (The price usually has to do with size of the blank they will work on for you.)

Spend a bit of time looking at the different methods of creating a prototype from plastic. Some use a type of "printer", others carve it from a chunk of plastic. Find out the pros-and-cons of the different methods. (Cost vs accuracy vs material.)

Find out what software format they import from and build your prototype in software that can export in that format. Email them the data, your credit card number, and in a few days, you should have your prototype!

Enjoy this phase -- the tricky/expensive part is going from the prototype phase to production.
In other news, I hacked my Microwave by entering a duration and pressing start.
For the better or worse? (I know I've seen you identify your startup in the past, but I don't recall it right now, so I don't know whether you're doing well or have gone back to the drawing board.)
I haven't looked closely at this 'burstsort', but have read previously about 'cache-oblivious' algorithms, that benefit consistently from memory caches whatever their size. (No tuning for different sizes required.) See discussion here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/devdev/archive/2007/06/12/cache-oblivi...
Wow, that is really sad and not something I would have expected from MS.
Running the Numbers, An American Self-Portrait
if I correctly remember that movie it didn't end too well for the professional ;)
Clay, paper mache, foam, legos, wire, sheet metal, balsa, glass, wood. You can carve a mold and inject molten plastic (styrofoam beads) at home (preferably well ventilated). You can also melt soft metals and use sand molds.

Thats simple prototyping. To get an exact replica, in the same materials you want to use for final production, there are shops that will make plastic or metal molds from CAD files, or can carve with lathes, etc.

Edit, I should add wax. Its actually an incredible material for prototyping. It carves especially well, and you can add pieces if they fall off accidentally, or you decide to change the design. If you don't like it, melt it down and form a new block. Lastly, when you're ready to make a mold, you can encase it in sand or another substance, and then melt the wax away to leave your shape.
Weebly, a YCombinator startup, was made by PSU IST students. I was a PSU CSE student. I'm jealous.
A Peek Inside Apple's Design Studio
I'm very curious about the things that will be declassified after his term in office. This is a Big Deal for openness in government. Most presidents have sort of dodged the spirit of the Presidential Records Act by not making any records.
IBM and other major hardware companies will still be living off budget spends that were set in 2007 and 2008 - these will not be reoccuring in 2009.

Enterprises now have vast quantities of surplus desktops and servers because of redundancies and contraction in the markets they operate (a recession is a contraction) - whatever you needed 3 servers for in 2008 you only need 2 now.

IBM are also living off the massive defence and security budgets under the Bush administration - this is all coming to an end. They are in for a very painful 09 H2 and 2010.

Any tech hardware company who thinks they are exempt from this is off their heads.

And any economist blogger who thinks this will all be over in 09 H2 is just whoring for pageviews.
Tactful Error Messages in Web Application Design
A discussion of some steps to make error messages for tactful, by Shawn Adrian.
congrats and best wishes!
I'm using the IR_Black style which can be found here: http://blog.infinitered.com/entries/show/6
How about a RepRap, the Replicating Rapid Prototyper? http://www.reprap.org
Well, IKEA probably buys 14,0...0 feet of aluminum tube a year, and their volume allows them to take lower margins than your local metal place, so it makes perfect sense, really.
Google does :p

I am just saying that because I wondered too what company does iPhone ads. I guess any "mobile ad" thingy will do it for you.

Anyway, in my 45 seconds research I found one called JumpTap.

What I didn't find is how much a publisher can expect to earn with any company. If it's around the same rate as websites, let's speculate because it's fun.

To achieve $200/hr at .50 cpm

$1 = 2000 "page views"

$200 = 400,000 "page views"

400,000... that's probably how many "sessions" with the app. Now with a:

10% ctr: 4,000,000 sessions per hour;
25% ctr: 1,600,000 sessions per hour;

Free app... 20 million possible user base... ah, whatever... that's getting complicated :p But I bet a spreadsheet where we could tweak the numbers could show what's the potential of popular apps to earn with ads...