skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't watch the videos, but I have a copy of the book they're using. From the preface:

* You should have some programming experience. In particular, you should understand recursive procedures and simple data structures such as arrays and linked lists.

* You should have some facility with proofs by mathematical induction. A few portions of the book rely on some knowledge of elementary calculus.
I have a PhD, and left grad school directly after graduating because I had no real interest in pursuing a career in either research or teaching. I also joined an industry that is only peripherally related to the field I studied, and don't use much of the knowledge I gained on a day-to-day basis. However, I don't regret doing the PhD, and would recommend a similar path to people in the same position as me.

Like the author, I learned a great deal during the years of my (European-style, not American-style) program. I learned how to explain complex ideas to experts and laymen alike. I learned how to present data to make a compelling argument, both in text and in graphics. I learned how to read complex technical writing and extract the author's point. I learned how to ask a series of questions that got to the core of a complex matter. There are all soft skills - but I have found that the complement the set of skills that I got from the subsequent years in industry very well.

I also had three years to meet and talk to some extremely smart people, which has helped me in several big ways and many small ways in the years since I graduated. Maybe the biggest reason I don't regret doing a PhD was that I got to spend two years gratifying my intellectual curiosity about a topic that I was really interested in. Few people get such an opportunity, and for those who enjoy that kind of thing it's an opportunity not to be missed.
If only there were a way to get the truth of that statement across to patent advocates.
Is 2012, Elon Musk's Annus Mirabilis Year?
I was in Europe last summer, and the tomatoes I got on sandwiches in Denmark and Germany were 100x better than the ones we get in Canada. I really don't care for tomatoes here, but I just loved them in Europe.

Maybe it's the high quality bread, meat and cheese that they use in Europe, but I'm still shocked that I had the best sandwich of my life at the hauptbahnhof in Munich.
I seriously need a 1TB SSD (which either don't exist or are still way too expensive) for my laptop because I am constantly moving files off my local system and onto my file server which could also seriously use some 4TB drives, which also don't exist. I am running out of space on each of my systems faster than I ever remember.
Can any attorneys out there explain how altering computing devices to redirect and intercept email is not a criminal act when done without the knowledge or consent of the owner?

If any of us pulled the same stunt, even if authorized to access the system for other reasons, would we not be subject to prosecution? Hopefully, the same will happen to FB.

In addition to the Federal communications and cybercrime statutes, there is California Penal Code 502:

(c) Except as provided in subdivision (h), any person who commits any of the following acts is guilty of a public offense:
(1) Knowingly accesses and without permission alters, damages,
deletes, destroys, or otherwise uses any data, computer, computer
system, or computer network in order to either (A) devise or execute
any scheme or artifice to defraud, deceive, or extort, or (B)
wrongfully control or obtain money, property, or data.
...
(4) Knowingly accesses and without permission adds, alters,
damages, deletes, or destroys any data, computer software, or
computer programs which reside or exist internal or external to a
computer, computer system, or computer network.
(5) Knowingly and without permission disrupts or causes the
disruption of computer services or denies or causes the denial of
computer services to an authorized user of a computer, computer
system, or computer network.
...
etc.

It remains to be seen if there is a prosecutor with the backbone to go after this.
Perhaps I should further qualify the question, and this is how I possibly should have phrased it in the beginning: how do you determine quality of teaching before enrolling?
Your mistake was buying into FB. Honestly it will take a major acquisition to reach 38.
Would you use a doctor who had not been to college?

As you hopefully would not, therefore your argument has a flaw in it, you might like to enumerate the list of professions or activities you believe do not require college level education.
looks up to me
Any time you want to use OO abstractions, share methods between many objects, inheritance, encapsulate related actions, etc. You can do purely functional programming in JS, but more complex projects require OO least they turn into spaguetti.
Let's say I invented a new antibiotic 12 years ago, and I'm collecting monopoly profits due to 17-year patent protection.

Since the patent term expires in 5 years, I should invest $1 billion in R&D right now, and work around the clock to get an innovative new drug on the market before my monopoly turns into commodity.

But if the patent term is extended for an additional 17 years, I'm no longer in such a hurry to put $1 billion at risk.

Instead, I'll milk every last drop of monopoly profits from this drug. Even though superbugs are becoming more resistant every day, my product is still one of the best on the market.

Maybe I'll invest $100 million a year in R&D, but I can certainly afford to take my time, and more importantly, to take fewer risks.

It's good news for my bank balance, and bad news for patients suffering from drug-resistant bacteria.
If the stuff you're moving around is going over a network, then you obviously don't need SSD performance for it, since your laptop doesn't have a NIC capable of more than 1Gbps. If you can't fit two drives in your laptop, then you are exactly the kind of user that hybrid drives are targeted at.
The moon's influence contributes a continual and steady slowing of the Earth's rotation. If that's all there was, the graph would show a basically constant deceleration over time. Any variations beyond that are due to other factors. Changes in the distribution of mass on the Earth contribute small but measurable changes to the rate of rotation of the Earth. Large earthquakes can change the length of the day significantly (relative to the scale we're discussing). Glaciers melting would do the same thing. Large dams do it too, but oppositely. It's not a large leap at all.
Philip, I first read your blog 2 years ago when I was starting to think about a PhD and I had a decent academic admit season in Fall 2011 when I finally applied (headed to CMU later this year). Recently, I was going through a slump since a paper out of my undergrad thesis I submitted to a conference was tossed out with very harsh reviews. This manuscript once again has come at a very opportune moment. You are an extremely gifted writer. Congratulations on finishing.
It's not melting at the poles, but melting of glaciers. The meltwater flows downhill, causing a net movement of mass closer to the center of the planet.
Problem is, what else can you measure numerically?

If you can come up with a single, simple-to-calculate, unambiguous, measurement of happiness or fulfillment we could use instead... please share it with us!

At least salary gives a basic idea of how much your skills are worth to other people in the free market, which is better than nothing, though it may not be very correlated with how happy that makes you...
That doesn't make it less likely for violence to break out; it makes it more likely. If Libya built tons of photovoltaic arrays and started selling power to the EU power grid, now any political instability in Libya will affect prices for coal, natural gas, petroleum, uranium, thorium, hydroelectric, and wind energy as well--since a boycott or sabotage in Libya would spike demand in every other fuel.
Dr. Mike Ruddy from last week would appear to disagree strongly with you:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/im-not-one-of-those-fancy-c...

;)
If you're not capable of actually pinning down the social graph, just cut links until you get to something tractable. Excellent plan.
With respect, should HN really be about posting every time a site (as opposed to a major service provider) goes down? This isn't really useful information.
Reddit is showing its emergency maintenance page sporadically, I wonder if the root cause is the same.
They're only within our lifetimes if you require the devices to be the size of modern day silicon chips. There's nothing preventing us from building bigger devices - I mean, my laptop and smartphone's SSDs already essentially act as caches for much larger remote storage and compute hardware.

And given that nature has managed to cram this amazing sentient device into a space the size of our skull, using a pretty inefficient design process, I'd say the problem will be not the quantity of the building blocks, but how they're organized :)
Umm? If you go to the cheaper school, you won't be crushed by debt, even though you may make less money in your lifetime. This is what the article was about...

I really don't understand what you're arguing for here, Jerf. The article posed a question: is going to the better school worth the debt? You seem to be saying yes, you should focus on the monetary aspects, while simultaneously decrying student debt. What are you arguing?
So, LinkedIn down. Reddit currently down too. Also StumbleUpon, Yelp.
Also down early today Heroku, Netflix, Instagram, Rapportive, Pinterest ...

Not a good day for the Internet.

Are these all EC2 issues ? Leap second issues ?
$5k is pretty reasonable in my experience
For me the link is an unreadable low contrast website. Come on folks; make your websites accessible.
Sorry for the late reply. Yes, it's 80% in Spanish but now and then some foreigner comes asking questions in English and that gives place to lengthy threads in English, mostly written by argentines.
Really? Is still down to me...
Why You Need To Hire Great Developers
Gmail: Now With Custom Themes
Let's not post when sites go down, even if it is a large site.
leap second crashed some of our cassandra nodes, looks like the JVM is the common denominator for most of the leap second issues.
Well I suppose you could ask the people already there and see what they have to say. Along with visiting and the usual stuff.

Otherwise, what can you do?
Let's not post when a site goes down. Not interesting.

In particular, check http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/.

It says reddit is up, so it is just down for you.
As are linkedin, stumbleupon, thepiratebay and fark.
I'm not sure the EV charging at night thing will continue forever; Germany has already had a Saturday where their solar panels covered 50% of their electricity needs for a few hours, so if they double or triple or quadruple their solar capacity, they may start finding they need EVs to soak up all the excess solar energy in the middle of bright days.

Solar panels seem to keep getting cheaper; distribution via the power grid does not. This may lead to property owners with enough land eventually finding an economic incentive to get most of their power from solar panels on their land instead of using the grid.
That's more along the lines I was thinking. Don't fighters still do evasive maneuvers?

Of course, the SR-71 Blackbirds had one of the most effective solutions. Fly fast and unpredictable vectors. Anything on an interception vector would be miles off by the time it reached it's predicted location.
We also had issues with ruby processes pegging the cpu
This is exactly why I bailed out on my Chemistry career and switched to coding. In the lab I would always be a second class citizen without a PhD, no matter how experienced or capable I became.

Programming is much more meritocratic.
I'm with you. This is one of those things people use because it's there, which is how we get Everests of complexity.
And 4square.
>Array.prototype.slice.call is the way to go.

The point was to demonstrate that the API is somewhat flawed since it doesn't return something usable. The "clever" short version was used to show that you have to write quite a bit more code - even if you make it really ugly.

>For such a simple query I'd use getElementsByTagName instead.

It's a generic example. The selector was kept short and simple for the sake of brevity.
Does anyone know what the original reasoning was for Unix timestamps to not account for leap seconds? So that one timestamp can actually point to two physical times a second apart?

I mean, I know leap seconds aren't scheduled, and it's convenient to find a day by dividing by 86400, but it really seems like "physical seconds since the epoch" is the "fundamental" amount of time, as opposed to physical days, and the function that calculates datetimes (including time zones and DST) could just handle the leap seconds too.

It's obviously not changing now, was just wondering about the historical context of it. It seems like Unix time and leap seconds both come from the beginning of the 1970's... was Unix time defined before the concept of leap seconds were?
It's a pretty useful abstraction. Would you rather measure dopamine levels? (Because there are some good hacks for that one too).

Seriously though, given that an increased earning potential is the big rational reason to go to college, how else should it be measured? If you're criticizing the current paradigm for valuing college, or even for valuing life, those are significantly bigger societal issues than a one liner does justice.
Those aren't fundamentally different decisions. In both cases, you are determining your rate of return on your educational investment and making a decision to prefer high debt/high earnings, and lower debt/lower earnings.

If you don't think the school itself matters enough to justify the increased cost, you'll prefer lower-cost universities. If you think it does, you'll prefer the school that can net you the most income.
Leap second for sure
Small site for which app server is overkill and s3 charges will be minimal.
Yep. I also do electronic music production. Like Pretty Lights, I've sat at my desk late into the night working on a track. I'll have to check out this ReGeneration thing.

It's definitely tough to do. There are so many parameters that you have to tinker with, both in designing your sounds and beats and then the (ugh) mixing/mastering process. It could indeed be compared to web design in a number of ways.
In fact it's become quite difficult to land a job as a recent law graduate if you didn't go to a first-tier school, at least in the U.S.

There's a huge glut of unemployed lawyers, most of whom racked up a lot of debt getting their degrees.
Box-Sizing and CSS Sprites
All this leap second stuff reminds me of Y2K, except its actually happening and actually taking the internet down...
I think the key here is 'good criticism'. It's important to be critical, but it can still be done in a respectful way.
I hate to agree too, but he is right. Now, compared to him I don't have a lot of people following me and even I got a lot of weird event invites. I can only imagine the number of invites he received from his 1.8 million followers. This feature was not Scoble tested.
Yes, we can of course reinvent our own untested and undocumented triangular wheels.

But is that really the best possible use of your time?
Increased earning potential is not the big rational reason to go to college. Our society seems to function that way presently, but some people actually do enjoy learning.
Always two there are, no more, no less: a master and an apprentice.
Thank you for such an amazing first comment after 966 days on Hacker News! Please keep them coming...
This is a very difficult market to break into, and lots of people are trying right now.

My first piece of advice is to build up your size and trustworthiness as much as possible. Large companies won't buy from you if you have no standing in the market. That's what you need most, after you have quality software to sell of course.

I'd recommend starting with smaller companies and building up from there—the long tail contains a huge untapped market that you can take advantage of and build up your size.

Next, know your domain exceedingly well. Don't show flashy software, solve problems. Find out what the true problems are with their current software, and solve those. Unfortunately, their problem is NOT that their users don't like using it (well, it's a problem, but not the top problem). The top problem is likely that it isn't fully capturing their process, or it misses certain savings or benefits to the bottom line that it should make obvious. Business problems are the real problems, never forget that.

Don't be afraid of investment. Use it to grow when you need to, because your small size will be your biggest downside. Even through all that, never forget that your software quality holds up the rest of your business in the end; you must balance all these factors at once.

And lastly, buy a really sharp looking suit. Sorry.
Same here. Set ntp to restart in 12 hours.
Careful, Twitter — remember what happened to MySpace and Digg
Seems this will be fixed in some manner. From Wil Wheatons post on the same topic -

+Vic Gundotra says "We are doing exactly what you requested. We should have contemplated and anticipated how people would abuse this and how painful this could be for celebrities with large followings.

We have pushed a number of fixes yesterday (some were bug fixes that showed up at scale). Expect more fixes today. Sorry for the trouble Will."

https://plus.google.com/108176814619778619437/posts/BC8NZR8b...
Hard drive supplies back to pre-flood levels, but prices aren’t
Because most of my social contacts are on Facebook? And by keeping my address book synced, I don't have to keep track of every time everyone gets a new phone number or email address.
Ah, but how much is that, exactly? And is that amount publicly known?
I think it's an interesting question in many respects. Those that are there already might not have the necessary experience and knowledge to correctly determine the quality of education being offered.

I assume education's like headphones: if you've never had headphones before it's hard to know whether the ones you have suck, unless you've had the opportunity to experience many others kinds.
All of the vendors are still using power-of-two MLC (i.e. 4 or 8 levels) right? I wonder when we'll start seeing 3 level (1.58 bits/cell) or 5 level (2.32 bits/cell) MLC start appearing? It's more complex to visualize, but the controller already abstracts the details of the storage quite a bit so it's not hard to imagine it spreading your 512 bytes across 2585 instead of 2048 cells. Some implementations are already doing compression so you could even have the algorithm's output be a tristate stream instead of a binary one if that's marginally more efficient for the silicon.

Another thing I wonder is how much neighboring cells interfere with each other. If that's the case, the most efficient data packing might even rely on bit encodings for multi-cell groups that avoid the combinations that are most likely to cause interference (similar to the 64b/66b encoding in gigabit ethernet, for example) Again, the controller has to do this type of thing already to implement ECC so it seems like a straightforward extension.

Note that I'm not saying that either of these techniques avoid the "dead end" you're talking about -- they're both just ways of squeezing a tiny bit more out of the density/reliability curve at the margins. I'm just imagining how complicated flash controllers might get as they try to capture the last bits of life in the technology.
Leap second insertion causes futex to repeatedly timeout
Does this fix any device synchronization problems, where someone you know had their record of your e-mail address changed to the @facebook one automatically?

It doesn't seem to be clear, as I write this, exactly what is going on there and how much is completely automatic/without consent vs. how much was "expected" behaviour. It's pretty clear that a lot of people aren't happy about it regardless, though. Even if some contact originally got onto your phone via integration with a third party service, that could have been years ago. If you weren't aware that the contact was only remaining there/unmodified because the third party chose to leave it that way, it's understandable that you might be upset if that changed without warning after a long time.
While I appreciate anyone taking the time to share their thoughts, I also find it very distracting that nearly every sentence contains some sort of grammatical, orthographic, or structural error.

Does this make me the grammar police, or do I have a valid complaint?

Update. Putting my time where my mouth is: Next time someone has a real time crunch (as Coe notes at the end) but wants to publish a helpful post in a timely manner, contact me with a draft or CMS credentials and I’ll take at least a quick look. Expect no miracles, but I will catch obvious errors.

I also keep wishing I could send pull requests to bloggers with suggested edits.
because I need financial support for my education. it's difficult for a master degree to apply for TA and RA positions.
Where are Seagate and WD SSDs in the market? Why are they sitting on the sidelines while Intel, Samsung, and smaller players eat up market share?
Physics perfectly well knows what time is. This is an issue with keeping track of time in terms of seconds, minutes, hours and days, and has nothing to do with not knowing what time is.
I'd usually say just Google it, but coincidentally enough one of the front page results is someone asking the same question on this very site:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2261637

It means 500k, or there abouts; 400-600k would probably qualify, with anything higher or lower being mid to high or low to mid six figures, respectively.
Not even the offshoot technologies that have been (and will be) invented and improved as part of space exploration?
How's the stock supposed to get back to 38 now?

Sorry to be cynical, but: it was never supposed to be at 38 in the first place. Facebook isn't worth anything close to its nominal market cap, it's just the latest very high profile pyramid scheme, or rather it would have been if they hadn't gone in so absurdly high with the IPO that even the heavyweight investors interested in risky tech stocks have mostly run away.
The iPhone in Pure CSS
>I think you'll be hard pressed to find a single category in which contemporary Americans have less than 1970's Americans, for any reasonable value of x. If you dispute this, go ahead and find that single category.

I hear this argument all the time, but it doesn't seem to match reality as I've personally observed it. Example: my uncle, who had only a high school education, was a delivery driver for a bakery, and he had a wife who didn't work, 2 kids, a house, and a car. The idea that somebody like him (like, say, his son-in-law, who works the same job for the same employer to this day) could do that now is laughable - unless his family qualified for government assistance, which might actually be true for a family of four on that income.
Dilbert has full text search. Remember part of any phrase from a relevant comic, and you can find it in short order. Not sure how the grand-parent poster found it of course.
Actually, http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/, will tell you it is up, because it is showing the emergency maintenance page.

And it is interesting, because as far as we know, it is all caused by the one extra second. It's a mini-Y2K. If you saw Google's solution to it, it is easy to see, that is not at all intuitive, and that bugs like this will continue to happen.