skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"That is what I’ve learned from my students. Much like the generation before them, the only thing they are really interested in is you telling them how right they are and how good they are."

Emphasis is mine. I think we've seen this before. Snore.
Wow...quite ridiculous...and on cnn.com to boot!
I like the way you think! Email becomes another way to use your shortcuts though in this case. And we need a way to communicate service or account issues that aren't a priority per se without bugging you on your phone.
By making vents in the bottom of the structure it was found to be self-cooling in the summer too as the hot air rose and left vie the top sucking in fresh moving air.
Here at Cornell, the general consensus among students is that it's really hard to get good grades, especially among some majors. Cornell started a few years ago releasing "Median Grade Reports" so that students would see what classes were easy and hard in terms of grading. The idea was that students would enroll in classes with low median grades so that they could challenge themselves. Instead, people took the reports and took as many classes as they could with high median grades, so they would have an easier time and a higher GPA.

Sure, people come here because it's known to be hard. But once they're here that goes out the window. You're trying for grades, not challenges.
Facebook lets developers swap content with custom tags
Another Reason to Get that Walmart Application
I think I know how this came about. You can't teach something at all complex by constantly telling them "nope, that's not it." If you keep on doing that, you just shut them down. Positive reinforcement is the most effective way. The key is to set appropriate goals and rewards. Rewarding a kid for butchering a word spelling is not productive. Rewarding a kid for getting the spelling wrong, but successfully applying, "I before E except after C, or pronounced A as in neighbor or weigh" is worthwhile.
Sun Web Server open sourced (does it matter?)
Yet it is not a trifle.

Wasting what might amount to thousands of man-years by forcing talented people (who might otherwise accomplish something meaningful) to build workarounds for an inferior technology is every bit as criminal as, say, embezzlement.
Well... This is kind of bound to happen if you let the market rule your educational system.
Reminds me of my favorite example of a prescreening personality test.

Southwest used to put a bunch of candidates in a room together and ask each one to make a short presentation. But they weren't observing the presenter. They were observing the audience. They figured that if you paid attention to your competitors, you'd probably pay pretty good attention to your customers.

Must have worked pretty well. But the cat is out of the bag by now.
Reminds me of this DreamHost Blog post on the web hosting industries so-called reviews:

http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/05/04/web-hostings-dirty-laun...
Freedom Rules
Youtube was the only big sale? MySpace sold for $580M. Bebo sold for $850M. Last.fm sold for $280M, Facebook could (and probably should) have sold for over $1B. Surely there's more. They even talk about MySpace, just a couple sentences before saying YouTube was the only big sale.
I would totally use that service. You should give a web 3.0 name like US.PS or something.
Web Hosting’s Dirty Laundry
Clojure Discussion - When Performance Matters
Autodesk executive to lead Yahoo
Clearchannel has destroyed locally-owned radio. If he can break up their obscene grip on the market, good riddance.
LEGO is an end product.
7 Countries Where Graduate School Is a Fraction of US Costs
Ask HN: good interview questions?
What are good interview questions?

I have been asking questions about features in different languages that a developer or hacker might like. I think it does 2 things, 1. i get to know their style and what they favor in a language, and 2. i get to hear them talk about a language intelligently.

I think more than not I like looking to see if someone is willing and capable of mastering a language than asking them to perform a specific task.

I also asked someone if they could quickly draw a class hierarchy for a car and a driver. I am just wondering if that is too easy, or too hard.

I have been interviewed by a number of companies and it seems that the ones that will have you operating more independently ask easier questions.

So what do you all think.

PS. i have another interview to give at 3:30pm today so i might use some of these tips.
"Why build your own framework when there's one already there?"

Why learn woodworking when you can buy furniture at Walmart? Some people like craftsmanship and others like frozen dinners.
Enough pointless raging against "the machine" or "the man." Create something useful or beautiful or both.
Exactly. This articles implies if I take steriods, my T levels increase, making me a better trader. I think more likely it just would make me a bigger maniac therefore taking bigger gambles, when I win it will be bigger, but also my chances of blowing up are bigger (and not counted in the study)
I have a fascination with Bucky's works and the book recommended in the post is by far the best starting point.

Some things about his life that are interesting:

* He got kicked out of Harvard. Twice.
* He lived a 'normal' life until his late twenties. He thought his life was a failure
and was considering ending it when he changed his outlook.
* He tried to produce a catalogue of all Earths resources believing we would take
better care of the environment if we know how quickly we were consuming resources
* He wanted to build a giant model of the Earth outside the UN with live projections of
all current wars, resource distributions, population density, etc (aka a real world google earth)
I'm sure this is the case in some areas, but the No Child Left Behind act has a lot of administrators putting pressure on teachers to keep kids from failing, teaching to the minimum standard tests, etc.
I'm starting to see why a lot of people say all software development analogies suck. What does it mean to say its tools would break under duress, or they're made of balsa wood? You can interpret those analogies any way you want.

The bottom line is the Ruby runtime has some serious flaws, but they are not so pervasive as to make everything in Ruby total crap. There's a good chance you could write an application in half the time it would take in Java and experience no problems ever. It's also possible you'll hit a memory leak and have to face an ugly workaround, partial rewrite or even scrap the whole Ruby project. Finally, you may have a memory leak and find an easy workaround, and then one day the problem is magically solved by Rubinius.

Those are concrete scenarios to consider. I don't see how a physical materials analogy has any value in analyzing your options. The pros and cons of languages don't align AT ALL with physical properties. Thoughts like, "Java is more like cast iron, and Python is more like hardwood" is just one-dimensional mental masturbation. In the end the reason to choose a language like Java because you are willing to tolerate more overhead for less risk.
I believe one of the main things that encouraged me into writing was because of people saying, "writing is hard work." It's mostly hard work because there's a 100 distractions to take you over and, I imagine coding is the same, it takes a lot of commitment to focus on working when it's quite simple to just do nothing.
The Next-Gen Databases
Thanks for that link. His site is very interesting, the functional programming patterns especially:

http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/patterns/recursion.html
Maybe I just got lucky, but I'm a millenial and I never experienced any of this stuff. I agree that more students are considered gifted than ought to be, but I also think that the whole three-tier gifted/normal/special ed thing is broken. It's a spectrum, so treat it that way.

That said, I've never gotten a gold star that I can remember, and I've definitely received my fair share of red X's.

I did get stamps/stickers on papers which were A's or, in the lower grades, check-pluses or E's. But I don't think that these in any way gave me a false sense of accomplishment; they only gave them out for top marks. (For the uninitiated, sometimes for minor assignments we were graded on a scale that went v+, v, v-, X or Excellent, Good, Satisfactory, Poor.)

Maybe this is a big issue in other places, or perhaps private schools (that seems likely to me, based on the accounts of some people I know who attended private school), but it's definitely not happening everywhere.
The problem with monads in Haskell is a chicken-and-egg problem. When an ordinary programmer (as oppossed to a mathmatician) starts toying with a new language, they usually start with some simple IO code (starting from "hello world") and play and explore their way deeper into the language. In Haskell, however, you don't get much further than "hello world" before you bang your head against the IO monad. Hence the monad totorials aimed at newbies. The problem is that to understand monads you have to understand a lot of other advanced Haskell features like type constructors, type classes, type inference, partial functions and so on.

I think the solution is to realize that you dont need to understand monads to write IO code, you just need to understand the rules of do-notation. Sure, do-notation is implemented using monads under the hood, but you dont need to understand monads to use it, just as you dont need to understand vtables to use objects.

I should propably write a do-notation tutorial to show how far you can get without understanding monads.
Vim: File Browsing
Nothing really wrong with that per se. The problem is if at one point you decide that's just the way to do things and you never learn new approaches. If you want to be a good programmer you have to try different things and learn the pros and cons for yourself. Best practices are a decent jumping off point, but developers often overestimate their own best practices that they've learned while working on certain types of projects. It's especially insidious among very smart developers who work in a narrow field, because their reputation causes their wisdom to be mis-applied by junior developers and cargo-culters.
Open Hacker House tomorrow in San Francisco
its really your call on what you value most and whats involved in the job. for what you say you value, your questions sound like they'd do the trick.

you might want to throw in some critical thinking type of questions, just to see what happens.
Can you email me about this? Address in profile.
I'm not such a big fan of Buckminster. Are geodesic domes really that important? I'm sure you could compile a decent sized list of what topics are related to geodesics, and I'm sure Fuller was really smart, notable, and oh-so-quirky.

But I'd rather devote time to learning about people who worked on stuff that had a larger scale impact. Henry Ford, Edison, Tesla, Feynmann, Einstein, etc.
Well its CNN Money, they are used to dealing with bigger numbers. Probably ignored everything that was less than 1 billion
Why'd the domain preview turn the IP into "104.9.102.66"?
why would you that kind of thing? i don't think snail mails are free. and what do you achieve by going this route?
We don't really pack people in or use laptops, we have clusters of 4 or 6 desks that form larger rectangles and which are then stacked back-to-back, so you can easily talk with the people next to/across from you in the desk cluster or you can easily turn around and talk with the people at the next cluster. We generally organize each sub-team as 2 or 3 clusters of desks, with 4-6 developers sitting back-to-back and QA and PM on the opposite sides of the cluster. It makes pair-programming much easier, since all the developer's chairs are in the same open area, so you can easily pair with someone to the side or that sits behind you.

My current part of the floor has maybe 35 people in it, and there's kind of four sides of a rectangle to the building, so overall there are about 140 people or so on the floor. Generally, the clusters are spread out enough that you can't hear conversations that are happening more than about 20 feet away anyway, so the primary conversations you'll overhear are from other people on your sub-team, which are exactly the conversations you really want to be overhearing anyway. It really helps to keep everyone on the team in the loop about what's going on.

We have offices around the perimeter of the building that are unused so that people can grab them to have impromptu whiteboard discussions or make phone calls, which also keeps the general noise level down.
check www.alertpay.com
This articles implies if I take steriods, my T levels increase, making me a better trader.

No, it doesn't. The factor it cites is testosterone sensitivity:

Previous research has found that the digit ratio reflects how much testosterone an unborn baby was exposed to in the womb. Those exposed to high levels of the hormone are more sensitive as adults to testosterone
Ask HN: What do your require in your JS framework?
I'm working on a new JavaScript framework that will (hopefully) incite a better web. The framework has very basic functionality right now (but works well/fast). It's a more chain-friendly way of doing things:

var x = function () {
this.each(function (value, i) {
value.innerHTML = i + "...";
});
};
$('id1', '#id2', '.class3').show.then(x);

A great framework includes:

* DOM selection, helpers, and manipulation
* AJAX capabilities
* Ease of use and documentation
* Extension possibilities
* Some animation framework extension

My question to the Hacker News community is what you'd consider the bare minimums I should release version 0.5 with?
To this day, I swear that Netscape Enterprise Server 2.01 was the best web server ever written. Fast, stable, powerful. I can scarcely imagine how it would fly on hardware 15 years later.

Unfortunately NES 3.0 was a complete dog, the only thing less reliable than it was the watchdog process they included to restart it when it crashed. That's why Netscape as a company collapsed; the quality of their expensive server products took a nosedive. 2.01, tho', worth every penny!
Mavis Beacon taught me two spaces. Since two spaces is syntactically equivalent to one in the text processing software I use (mostly LaTeX), and it's semantically meaningful, I'm going to stick to two.
BT offer an SMS SDK that allows you to send and receive texts on from your app. Their pricing is not what I would describe as really competitive, but there is (or was the last time I checked) a trial account that allowed you to do some small number of operations per day.

http://web21c.bt.com/services
I remember awesome Google Tech Talk about sleep that mentioned sleep debt requiring full repayment.

Dr. William Dement on "Healthy Sleep and Optimal Perfomance"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hAw1z8GdE8

It was linked from an older HN sleep thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=359041
Tutorial - Backing up EBS Volumes via the AWS console
Industrial Education
I strongly favor Americans going overseas while they are students, and going overseas as part of a degree program is one way to do that. But another way to obtain an affordable graduate degree is to obtain that in a field that has sufficient third-party support that all graduate students at all the better United States universities are fully supported. Most science and engineering fields, including mathematics, are like that.

See

http://www.amazon.com/Mathematicians-Survival-Guide-Graduate...

for tips on how to obtain an affordable graduate degree in mathematics without having to leave the United States.
I have my own problems with Dreamhost, which I think hurts my business sometimes.
Great milestone, and I thought functional languages didn't have practical uses. Shame, shame.
The essay itself is funny and rings true, but then in the comments the author says:

"What I'd really like to find are some appropriate libraries that I can use to provide several kinds of functionality for my project."

And then lists a bunch of high-level website functionality requirements (user accounts, content management, etc). I realize that the J2EE landscape was drowning in complexity and was pretty dismal in 2005, but this guy doesn't understand the issues involved in developing web applications.

First, to suggest that individual libraries can provide re-usable high level web application code is completely ludicrous. It can't work for so many reasons:

* All those libraries will have to interact, and the interface between them will be complex. If they do work together they will end up being tightly coupled and before you know it you have a framework.

* High level functionality that includes data models, persistence, and presentation layers is not generic enough to effectively be a library. The complexity and configuration would quickly balloon out of control before it met even the requirements of 5% of web applications.

* Such libraries would end up being far more constricting than a traditional framework. A good example is Drupal, which is a very powerful framework/CMS with an impressive hook system, and an extremely high code to functionality ratio. Anything you might want to do with a website can probably be done in Drupal using a combination of existing modules, and you can write additional modules that access almost any part of the system and modify its behavior. The problem is that fine-tuning of the interface or certain kinds of customizations become very difficult under the crushing weight of the underlying assumptions that Drupal makes to enable it's magnificent generic-ness. The result is that all the various sites made with Drupal end up feeling very Drupal-y and there's a disincentive to really design your UI from the ground up and create a very optimized application.

What J2EE has blinded the author to is the fact that web frameworks exist to solve the most common problems that come up over and over again in web development. He needs to go write a few PHP applications to get a feel for the issues, then try something lighter-weight like Django or Rails that confronts those issues directly and then basically gets out of the way. In the first half of the decade it was hard to find a good lightweight framework because people were still wrapping their heads around the actual issues that needed to be solved. Nowadays, not so much.
Try most state schools. For example someone with an A+ at University of Illinois is going to be 1 in a few hundred. They were the very top in that class, and most of the classes are large. Even people with A's are likely to be top 10-15%. And there may be no one with A's. Heck, it's likely some people completely failed even when they were trying. Why? Every professor grades how they see fit. Yes, this is department and degree specific. If a department wants to make their degree tough then they do. If too many people are applying - raise the bar until you end up with only the best.

It's the difference between an elite education and the rest of us educated people^. Now, this doesn't apply to all the big name schools. I think there is a market for schools that make it tough. Look at which schools hackers think are the best in science/math/enginnering schools CalTech, MIT, Stanford, CMU, etc. They are still tough with less grade inflation. (I apologize if I left your favorite top school out of the list, assume I included it)

^I may not agree entirely but it's an interesting read: http://www.theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-el...
Why would you go for challenges, your first job isn't going to ask you for how challenging your classes were, but for your grades. Higher grades == more pay.
> not that the constant advertising from universities, corporations and society at large helps.

Indeed.

It also seems to me that a large part of the university experience is 'finding yourself'. Unfortunately, I don't think this process fully materializes in the vast majority of students.
The Yaris is based on the Aygo. Sorry, why is hybrid "nonsense"?
2009 may bring some temporary respite, but the Internet startup culture is part of a larger pattern of technology startups in general, which for decades have tended to be started by young people, some of whom proceed to get far richer far faster than their age, experience, and attitude would indicate that they should.
Yeah, none of the lazy people I know watch sports.
how does that comment warrant downvoting -3 points? It's insightful criticism with some logic behind it. I'm fine with downvoting, but at least give me some feedback with a good argument.
I think they need competition.
Because those who are not are self-taught ;) Credentials are losing their power.
I agree with all your points, the OP just had one sentence and I wasn't sure what was meant by it.
I had one teacher was trying to teach us about the moon landings. She threw up a picture of the Lunar Lander and said, "Oooh, look, it's a Moon Walker!"

That's wrong on three levels at least.

Mush-for-brains imprecision is one thing when teaching history. Now imagine that applied to teaching about technology. Ugh.
Isn't that conditional learning? Pavlov; stimuli, the dog salivates.

Was not aware that hypnosis uses it though, sounds rather strange to me that hypnosis uses conditional learning.
Not to mention many people intend to go to grad school - where grades are king, and nobody really cares if your marks are low because you were challenging yourself.

The system shares as much blame as its users. If challenging oneself was rewarded then we'd have more of it.
If you care only about total cost of ownership and/or ecology, my intuition is you'd be better off buyng any small second hand car. The milage would be worse, but the up front cost would be much smaller. Also you'd be extending the lifetime of an object that has a big environmental cost to produce. The carbon footprint would be worse, but at least there will be no extra toxic batteries to dispose of.
For the most part, yes. Interesting speech on the same: http://wwwcdf.pd.infn.it/~loreti/science.html
if you want to go to Asia and willing through an HK LTD. we can help you in asiapay.com (full disclosure: I'm a director) :)
Hosting is a 'market for lemons':

http://www.welton.it/articles/webhosting_market_lemons.html

Interestingly, one of the ways to get around information asymmetry problems is testing, certification, and, yes, reviews. But if the review sites are corrupt, that kind of brings you back to square one.
Class hierarchy is vague, do you mean a class:object sort of thing or something else entirely? Specify, don't use meaningless words like hierarchy. It's academic fluff, and this is coming from a philosopher.

Reapply what I've said here to everything else. It sounds like you know what you're doing, especially as regards, "talking about the language intelligently". That means you're way ahead of the curve in hiring already.
I see. Test on animals first and then on humans. :D
The movie is great and was filmed in ~2005, released in 2006 I believe.

http://beforethemusicdies.com
btw, you have a URL for that band website builder that has an MP3 store? :)
i wrote an article about this same subject, http://newsolareclipse.com/2008/12/micropayment-systems-the-...
I remain convinced that the only reason they require those clickers is to charge $70-$100 to each student for them.
I find that I can quickly get a feel for a candidate's general reasoning ability through a game of 20 questions.
The bullshit of outage language
the difficulty of modifying somebody else's code is proportional to your own programming skill.
Ok, agreed. It was your "or any other state" that confused me (as in: "including mine").
If I remember well, his change of outlook was to recognize that every project he undertook for his own interest had failed. He then decided to work only in the interest of everyone (or something like that), without even asking himself how he would pay his bills. Apparently, he managed to pay his bills from then on.
He was also the founder of one of the YC clones, Launchbox Digital. Wonder how this affects that?
When the Education Bubble Finally Pops