skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd be much happier if it only kept records locally, or had the option. As creepy as... every social network has gotten, I want my privacy and anonymity back. As interesting, and potentially useful as this seems, I don't feel comfortable giving every detail of my life to a private third party to store "forever." I don't make committing crimes a habit or anything (copyright infringement not withstanding), but with the US government's position that anything you choose to store with a third party being accessible without a warrant, I'd prefer to store things locally.
I doubt anyone is trying to cover up making a poor choice of SIS vendor. It is astonishing how absolutely terrible higher ed software offerings are.

That being said, the punishments are stupid. Cut off his app's access if charging money is a policy violation.
I would applaud the same campaign against Motorola/Google.

They publish the Linux kernel for their Android phones, complying to GPL. But the lock the boot loader, preventing everybody to install its own kernel.
Smart has the right number of syllables for the sentence I typed. Knowledgeable, too many.
http://president.ucf.edu/ContactUs.asp
http://provost.ucf.edu/contact-us/

A little more work to track these guys down, but doable with some searches: http://bot.ucf.edu/

Since its a state university, for those that are Florida residents: http://www.flgov.com/contact-gov-scott/
http://www.myfloridahouse.gov/Sections/Representatives/detai...
http://myfloridahouse.com/Sections/Representatives/details.a...
http://www.flsenate.gov/Senators/s26
Online Text Messaging – A New Mean of Communication
Text message is being used by advertisers and service providers to send text message online to notify mobile phone users about promotions, payment due dates and other notifications. Computer text messaging via Internet is also launched as a trial version.
If the goal is science literacy wouldn't it make sense to use a scientific approach to determining whether there is a correlation between spending and achievement in schools?
I wonder if some of the fear here is caused by the fact that this kind of tool would tend to get its users into classes first, before users that manually checked the original website on a regular basis... which seems unfair, especially since it has a (nominal) fee, and it removes the vague link between enthusiasm and ability to get in that manual checking entails.

But perhaps that's better stated as that the tool exposes the fundamental brokenness and unfairness of a system that allocates limited space based on who presses the refresh button at the right time.
Given how poorly courses transfer between universities, he wouldn't need to be very far into his degree for the switching cost to be more far more ridiculous than the cost of his punishment.
Sociability's value comes from privacy
This app sounds scary. No thanks.
Vacuum Silence: World's Fastest "random" Number Generator
> David Pogue can speak for himself

Translation: "I do not agree with David Pogue"

The phrase "speak for" is an idiom and is not meant to be taken literally.
I think it was good of you to cite No True Scotsman.

I still think any estimate, even hilariously broad ones, are useful. Watts Humphreys put it this way: when is an estimate going to be most accurate? When you've just finished. When is it most useful? When you're just starting. In between is a tradeoff between usefulness and accuracy. You accept that estimates are inaccurate -- that's why they're called 'estimates'. But even if you narrow estimation variance from +/- 400% to +/- 200% over time, that is still a valuable improvement.

When I'm working with clients I explain the cone of uncertainty and so far they've all been understanding of the fact that software work contains profound uncertainties that other lines of work won't.
Even the root has a .. entry, a link to itself.
SCVNGR, Inc. Series D round at $262.31 per share - Deal Terms & Valuations
(Of course I meant "the number of subdirectories in a directory" here rather than "files").
Saying that programming is 'spending all dap tapping in code' is like saying drawing is 'spending all day holding a pencil.' That isn't a perfect analogy, but programming can be equally about what is being created as it is the code itself.
>So yes, most people have given others the right to tear up their yard

To one cable company, one electrical utility, one telephone company, and to the local government-run water and sewage monopolies. Not to fifty startups.

A situation with a "genuinely competitive bid process" is a government-granted monopoly granted based on better criteria, and would certainly benefit consumers. It's still not a free market, which is my point: nobody actually wants a completely free market for last-mile utilities.
There was a guest access system for looking at class listings that his service used. It's mentioned in the slides.
With platforms like Arduino, you can in fact plug arbitrary components into your computer. For now.

There's nothing worrying about it. What's happening is what used to be general purpose is now becoming an appliance.

I find the prospect of Apple or Microsoft having veto power over how I use "my" computer extremely worrying.

Until Cory is out there petitioning blender makers to open their firmware, he's just grabbing headlines with this nonsense.

The manufacturers of blenders are generally not advocating that taking them apart should be a federal crime.
Decoding the Science of Sleep
This makes no sense. The actual act of programming is completely agnostic to what the bytes you're processing mean.

They could be the most boring data in the world, but if you're trying to juggle enough of them at once, at high reliability, you're going to end up with very deep technical challenges.

I'm sure somebody probably said "why would you want to write code for an online book store? That's so technically shallow and simple." And then we got Amazon.

Great hackers redefine the problem in front of them, and that act of redefinition is the interesting part. No program is interesting if you're simply translating a flawless spec into code. Any program is interesting when it's entirely up to you what the spec should truly be.
> Order them, unpack them, ruin the paper and cardboards, and send them back with a note: Can not install Linux.

What a stupid idea.

What happens next, you think? OEMs will hug you and other Linux users and kiss you? No, they won't issue driver updates. And your graphic card is useless. If you (Linux users) cost them too much, they'll dump you. It's business, nothing personal.

But, of course, it's open source. You can always write the drivers yourself.

-----

By the way, it's very funny that a "forward-thinking, open source-loving" guy who (supposedly) wants to make computing world better, doesn't think it's absolutely immoral to do such a stupid thing. You ruin the cables, and the company has to pay for it. The CEO doesn't pay the money from his pocket you know, they increase the price for "all" customers a little bit, so it's Dell (or other OEM) customers pays who are paying money for your stupid "cause".
How to make money as an independent online publisher: interview with Paul House
Parent asked why you are against it in general.
Signs of a born entrepreneur
People tend to think in very small boxes nowadays. Partly because they are more interested in getting rich quick than in changing the world, partly because they have their nose too close to tiny details to see the big pictures.

Want to make a mark?

Focus on energy production and storage!

Want to make a mark?

Think about generation ships!

Want to make a mark?

Design a way to reform government!

Mankind does not need another social Web site.
Analyzing the email that gave birth to a 7-inch iPad
Specifically what the article says, and which I quoted in my opening post here on this topic, is "the Falcon 9-Dragon combination will be the safest spacecraft ever developed".

This article is not just the unqualified opinion of the blog SpaceFlight Now, the article is a word for word printing of the following official Space-X corporate Press Release, exactly as quoted. It is an official claim by the company.

http://www.spacex.com/press.php?page=20120803
Electronic Arts sues Zynga, says it copied 'The Sims Social'
You deserve a scholarship.

Plus, you are obviously smart and capable enough to be fine if you didn't finish your degree. Better yet, as cantankerous mentioned, transfer.
But he jumped on the train back on July 12 - well before Limited Run and every tech news outlet jumped on.
Facebook has muscled in on literally everything but games, other than their ex poste facto 30% revenue share, and during their earnings report they intimated that they may get into games directly.

And, I'm shocked at your statement about the older platforms. I don't know if your entire background is on your LinkedIn page, but what you say is simply not true of Windows, DOS, the Mac, and is very tough to credit to Sun or SGI in their heydays. Those vendors cherry picked their ISVs all the time and with no more rhetorical consistency, stewardship, or charity than Dalton describes. They did so because they had market share in their segments and could.

That's why I specifically included this in my post: Playing naive to that reality went out the window in the mid-1980s with PC software and has been reproven by the platforms at least every 24 months since.

Everyone from RedHat to BeOS to Sega who behaved (somewhat) better did so because they needed their ecologies to grow. If they'd succeeded in building market share, I'm pretty sure I could predict their changes in policy.
If having an unlocked bootloader is important to you, stop buying locked phones. It really is that simple. The Galaxy Nexus is $350 unsubsidized on the Play Store[1], and is completely unlocked (okay, I admit, you have to run fastboot oem unlock).

[1]: https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=galaxy_nexu...
I only brought up Contacts as a joke. :) It's a little crass for my tastes but meaningless in the greater scheme.

I agree that the law enforcement issues and tax holiday aren't really registering in the public consciousness, but they're important to me and the PR downsides for Apple could be significant.

I'm not backing down on the phone cycle or the security issues. A poorly received iPhone loses Apple the substantial market for "status" phones, poisons the next two years of 'budget' iPhones, and takes them months to a year to recover from. Those aren't small stakes.

And the security thing could be an apocalypse. Think bigger than just a single ID: someone finds out a way to silently break their way into Apple's infrastructure and start pulling databases. It's not just your Gmail or easily reversible banking information walking out the door: it's every text conversation you've ever had with a loved one. It's your voice, it's your passbook, it's your email settings, it's your contact book, your calendar, your billing address, you name it. It's all tied to a single ID and password. And there's hundreds of millions of them. That's incredible value, and there will be those who will go after it. The consequences for a major breach are severe.
A similar thing was done at Iowa State when I was there.
Just talk to people. Ask everyone you meet what they hate about their job, what stupid program they're forced to use, what boring repetitive task they do.

People love to talk about themselves, and they love to gripe about what's broken and annoying, so it's much easier than you might think. Finding problems to solve is actually extremely easier. The harder art is doing the follow up to understand if there's a good business model for someone who solves the problem.
He could only do that when his opponent is a couple of levels lower than him.
"Components" as in individual transistors, resistors, and capacitors as opposed to integrated circuits. And MS already has veto power. You can't run device drivers that haven't been OK'd and cryptographically signed by them. DRM is baked into the media layers (e.g. you can't watch a blu-ray movie on a non-HDCP monitor).
So your link was for the special usage note to the last entry on the page that begins with "sometimes"? Furthermore I have never seen this idiom used when it is preceded by "can."
Lint Center for National Security Celebrates Five-Year Milestone
University policy like this isn't uncommon. Last semester, the campus police called me in and told me I was to receive a letter of warning for "bad behavior". When I asked what I did, they told me "we can't tell you because we need to protect privacy".

On an IT related incident, my school's IT department claimed that doubling the email inbox for every student (25mb to 50mb) would cost 4 million dollars.

Schools are terrible, and there's no solution in sight. Every university campus is like a mini dictatorship.
Heck, they don't specify the page size, merely the margins.
Just because a person who names herself a feminist doesn't mean she's not also a hypocrite.

Some people are just for stronger rights for women (and should be poo poohed for this stance). Some people are for equal rights for everyone, and similar expectations for everyone.

If you use "equality" to mean "direct all services to women" you not only are misusing the term in the vein of some of the best bullcrap propaganda that came out of Lenin's regime in Russia, you're also a flaming asshole.
He mentions around 0:36 how he picks things to review in the check-ins - it sure would be nice to see a "John Carmack's Style Guide".
A nominal fee unfair? The "lab" fee for an ENGLISH class could pay that fee 20 times over. Colleges and university costs have risen faster than nearly every other "industry" -- including healthcare. I wouldn't say a nominal fee was unfair, not when a textbook can cost $150. What's unfair is a state university paying jackass administrators 6 figure salaries, yet it takes a kid to create a notification system that actually works. What the heck are all those IT administrators actually doing with their day? One would think class registration would be single most important IT task of a university. After all, if students aren't in classes, what's the point?
As a ovolacto vegetarian, I'll tell you vegan bacon is still fantastic. Hickory smoked vegetable protein is still mighty tasty.
Olympics: Shooter Vijay Kumar wins silver medal for India
> There was already the case that Microsoft implemented a backdoor in NT export versions for NSA 13 years ago

There was conspiracy theory speculation that they did so, if it is _NSAKEY that you are thinking about, but few competent cryptographers or security researches took that seriously. Typical responses were like this: http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-9909.html#NSAKeyinMicros...
This is so gross. It's basically extortion to provide free labor for the school.

A decent (morally) school should offer this kid a scholarship.

He "may not represent the university in any official capacity"... yeah don't use an industrious entrepeneur to reflect the school. Let their athletic department do that: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/football/ncaa/07/31/ce...
Yeah, it's a bit handwavey (I'm a little tired)... but your claim that the web platform can't be taken seriously is exaggerated in turn. Unless you're using unstable features (or possibly writing for mobile devices - but that's a separate issue), you really don't need "all kinds of browser-specific tweaks and workarounds". The definition of "unstable features" is a bit nebulous, and it depends on whether you're trying to support all browsers - WebKit is apparently dragging their feet on unprefixing, say, CSS transitions, but Internet Explorer doesn't support them at all - but for most of the relatively old features like that, the spec is settled, so a combination of shims for existing browsers, which libraries can and do provide, and preferred use of the unprefixed feature should pretty much work forever.
I really like what you did there. Looking forward to see what comes out of it.
To really get this right they'd need to add some auto-rebalance / sharding magic and have it integrated much more deeply. This is really only a head-nod toward NoSQL.
This is not a problem with higher ed, this is a problem with bureaucracies staffed with incompetent people who are so terrified of losing their jobs that they resort to things like this.

This is incredibly common in IT, not just at Ed institutions, but in corporations in general. If you've never worked anywhere except at a tech company, your view of the average IT experience will be skewed.
Bam! I was thinking the exact two same words. That would be awesome if the dude did that. He could pay-per-view when he hands in the paper -- I'd pay to see those sanctimonious assclowns get owned by this guy. These are the kinds of students you want in your school -- creative, a little rebellious and intelligent. Of course, the admins want good little worker bees that adhere to proper margins and typography.

I would be tempted to even dust off the 'ol Comic Sans just for this. They definitely wouldn't deserve a real font.

Yes, I realize he'd likely get kicked out of school, but when Wired does a story on the guy, he won't have any problems getting into a better school.
There's something to be said here for consumer choice. Why go out of your way to prevent me running something that I'm willing to put effort into running?

After all, it's my goddamn tablet that I'm buying.
I think it's time you jailbreak that thing and install cyanogenmod on it.

I've done so on mine and it's solid, fast, no sense, and no annoying boot sequence.
The comparison of thinking small to mom and pop shops is dead on accurate. And there are probably more small-visioned entrepreneurs relative to big-visioned entrepreneurs than there have been in the past.

However, there are are a lot of people with enormous visions right now that are simply in such early stages that they appear to be small. You have to start somewhere.

There are also two reasons that many big industries are not appearing to be disrupted right now. The first reason is that many of the huge industries are backed by so much money, poltics, and legality and so ingrained into society that they are virtually impossible to disrupt. That said, there is still a slow but steady disruption attempting to take place in education... Open Courseware, Khan Academy, etc.

The second reason is that much of the "low hanging fruit" of the economy has already been picked. This one is controversial. 50 years ago, we were doing really hard things, but things that did not necessarily require as deep of an understanding of an industry or science as we do today.

There are people trying to pick the "higher up" fruit today, but their pickings are not as obvious or exiting as they may have been 50 years ago. We are not seeing startups for flying cars or capital-intensive projects, however, small, simple software startups can sometimes solve incredible inefficiencies in the economy. Example: craigslist has revolutionized the rental market simply by making information easy to transmit and access.
Google Fiber gets a fast start in Kansas City
Sure, and that's (very sad to say) where it ends. There's not much a student can do to a University administrator. They hold all the cards. Want an education? You gotta go through them. Have a grievance while in your program? You're already invested with time and money. Unsatisfied with your courses? They've already taken your money. In my opinion, the problems with higher education almost all trace back to the rotten-ness of the administrative section of higher education as a whole. Power corrupts, indeed.
Ask HN: How to get started in consulting?
So I'd like to do some freelance programming work in my spare time, and maybe full time at some point in the future. How does one get their feet wet? Where can freelancers find opportunities when they are just starting out?
I'm just wondering how such an obviously intelligent and enterprising young man ends up studying at an institution with only marginally more academic credibility than Hamburger University.
> $67k.

Not in Silicon Valley. In Ohio, maybe.
Thanks for the calc rec. I learned calculus over twenty years ago, so I was flying by instruments on that one.
Overworked miserable people caught in rat race can be highly productive and contribute to successful businesss. That doesn't mean they are happy.
Change is hard. Having any fee to get into classes "the best way" makes the university look bad, but for the university to change their code to work properly out of the box is too much work (after all, they didn't write it in the first place, and probably don't understand it). The result is fear. ;p
A Glossary of University Speak
They've sold 84 million iPads, 44 million of which were sold in the past 8-10 months.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/259829/apple_earnings_disappo...
He can't. The veiled mentions of "holds" on his records prevent him from transferring, because the University will not release a transcript until he submits to their punishment. No transcript, no transfer.
If the point of the experiment was to determine whether Facebook ads are primarily clicked by real people (as opposed to "indiscriminate clickers"), the author should have used something so bland no one except bots would click on. I'd be interested in seeing what kind of users click on ads for "Moist Lint", for instance.
I find this debate interesting. However, it's ultimately is up to the individual designer on work they choose. If you're an art director at an agency, or don't need to be on these crowdsourced sites, then don't.

Sales folks spend time on presentations and prep for business they never close, and some of the top tech companies the Valley require engineers and designers to complete projects as part of the recruiting process.

As founder of a crowdsourced design site (fantastic.me), we see this issue often. Here is a blog post I wrote on our position, and how we think there is business model where everyone wins.

http://blog.fantastic.me/2012/07/is-crowdsourcing-design-rac...
I would like to offer up what is probably a bit more provocative than I want it to be but here goes.

We should totally endorse secure boot for "webiances." I have to invent a word here because we haven't coined one yet, but its a device you use to surf the web, read email, chat on facebook, edit our resumes, Etc. It is something hobbiests and experimenters never ever need to write code for. Its the thing our grandparents use and we don't have to worry that Rico from Brazil is going to clean out their accounts with. It is an information telephone/tv/typewriter, it is an appliance.

Few people complain that you cannot boot unsigned code on the computer in your BMW, that is a good thing, you want to trust your car.

That said, there should always be (and no doubt will be) computers that engineers, hobbiests, and others use which are completely programmable. Those will be distinguished as being "General Purpose" computers as opposed to "Task specific" computers. They may even share the same instruction set architecture with their counterparts, but it should be perfectly Ok for a task specific device to refuse to run any code that hasn't been verified though some system of trust.

The comments about unlocking phone bootloaders, or the iPad, are quite relevant here. Those devices, when locked, aren't general purpose computers. Locked they can be task specific and reasonably safe [1]. Without such barriers they put their users at unnecessary risk and for users who have neither the ability nor the time to understand the risks that is a good thing.

[1] "reasonably safe" - This discussion will often jump to 'nothing is 100% secure' which is true of course and not the point. Planes fall out of the sky and kill people, but they are 'reasonably safe' which means that the risk of them killing us is acceptable given the benefit returned. Similarly with cars. Computers these days are not 'reasonably safe'. Huge swaths of non-technically literate people are harmed every year by the inability to create a reasonably safe environment for them to use.