skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "No, the value of a college degree is that, at least when the graduate has taken college seriously, it provides education"

My post never said anything to the contrary. In fact, I am just starting graduate school so I certainly believe in the education it provides -- at least to me.

* To elaborate on my original post, what I was getting at is that not everyone who goes through college will make a good employee, and not going to college doesn't automatically make someone a bad employee.

For instance, my degree is in chemical engineering but I have been programming since I was twelve. I could probably do a good job in a programming career despite the fact that I don't have a CS degree just because of the sheer amount of free time I've spent learning about programming.

At least in the US, you're more likely to get someone better suited for a technical job if they have a degree in that field. It's not at all guaranteed, but there's a decent chance.
It's not entirely useless: I think it at least could be used to provide beginners with some feeling/visualisation for how layout of a webpage works.
App.net and a paid user ecosystem
One thing I just don't understand, is how "show any page" is a better than "show random page". Other than that I love it.
You don't get it. :)

Where reason is king all the flowers are black and white.

Good luck.
They asked for $500,000 to make a Twitter clone and they got it. Who's laughing at whom?
Twitter’s changes: Thinking Ahead
Amazing student project !
Programmers for $2K per month, More? or Less?
Just install Tonido (http://www.tonido.com/application_download.html) on top of your slackware and make it a personal cloud. You will thank me after the fact :).
Graphical Timeline. A new Developer Tool for Firefox
1. Install the add-on from the link in Firefox 14 and above.
2. Open the UI for the developer tool "Graphical Timeline" using any of the following method:
a. Ctrl + Shift + Q
b. Tools/App Menu > Web Developer > Timeline
c. Shift + F2 and then click Timeline
3. Click record to start recording events.
4. Have fun :)

PS: for more info, visit http://grssam.com/2012/08/gsoc-comes-to-an-end/
Sure. That's why they get away with selling bad coffee. If you're going to load it up with sugar and cinammon and whipped cream and three shots of caramel the quality of the coffee is largely irrelevant.
5 stroke engine
Love this speech. Thanks for linking it to the discussion. Neil Gaiman is incredibly talented and very intelligent. I was pleasantly surprised, the first time I saw this, by how good of an orator he is. That was my first exposure to him, outside of his comic books, and I found it very moving.

Highly suggest this speech for anyone; creative arts or otherwise.
An old trick but a neat one, especially on the more technical articles where you want to explain something to friends but the article is jargonized to the point of being useless outside of that specific domain.
Their opinion matters in the sense that you can use some points that you probably agree with but do not notice as being an issue for others.
Wow. What an awful read. The topic should be interesting, but this guy comes off as an idiot: basic grammar errors, sentences that trail off into the void, etc.

Required "job skills" classes sound like insanity. What would they teach? A semester of Excel is not a computer science / statistics double-major going to make, nor will a semester of Hadoop help anyone without the background to use it.

Yes, increased use of centralized analytics in large businesses is polarizing the job market. Some things that once required a layer of middle-management to comprehend can now be done directly on the raw data. This is the layer that's at risk.

However, not all companies are big. Some things focus on actual personal relationships. Some things require actual creative output (design, either engineering or artistic). All of that is still around. And none of that will be helped by "job skills" classes.
Thanks.

You managed to say it all better than I did somewhere here.

Let's just hope the message gets trough.
I have a better idea. Two better ideas, actually: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396091
a 230MB executable is no fun.. it needs to be read from disk to be executed, and bigger code means worse cache use (for instructions) when running.
Twitter is ultimately infrastructure

Bullshit.

To reinforcer this point: in the early days of Twitter it kept falling over under the load - the one thing infrastructure should never do. It didn't matter.

To further reinforcer this point: OSStatus/Identi.ca has a widely deployed, API compatible implementation of Twitter. That really is infrastructure, and yet it has had approximately zero impact on Twitter's growth or strategy - because Twitter isn't infrastructure.

(Unless you mean it in the way that every single online service is ultimately infrastructure - but I don't think this is what you meant).

Twitter has eyeballs too

You say that like it is a minor point, whereas actually it is 90% of what matters.

It also has the publishers people want to follow, for whatever your particular niche is.

social platforms seem fickle at best

Actually, social platforms aren't fickle: they are usually incredibly sticky (see the huge number of forums that have been running for 10+ years). Most people just look at the "social network" category and see how Friendster/MySpace/Bebo/Hi5/etc all got destroyed by the Facebook juggernaut.

They never talk about the success of LinkedIn/PInterest/Twitter/Reddit/etc.

In every case, those overran competitors of their own (including Facebook in some cases) to dominate their categories.

That's not "fickle", that is platform strategy and product development.

There is nothing preventing Twitter from becoming the next Myspace.

MySpace sold to News Ltd, and then went downhill. Maybe Twitter won't sell itself to a company that is actively internet-hostile. But yes, you are correct: potentially any company could fail.
Oh come on, it's not that bad. There's never more than a few articles at once, and it's a legitimate hacker topic since anyone would have to be a fool to build on Twitter these days, and yet it is a very ripe API that people want to build on.
My concern here isn't the breadth (who is covered), but the depth (what and how much is covered). That is, regardless of the number of people we're covering -- whether it's everyone, or excluding the poorest 20% who can't afford insurance, it is impossible to cover every conceivable treatment.

Consider, for example: a headache could be a symptom of brain tumor or other problem, the best diagnosis of which would be through an MRI. We'd like to catch these things as early as possible, so we'd like to do MRIs on everyone who is a possible victim. But imagine that every time a patient walks into the doctor's office with a headache, the doctor orders an MRI for him. How long do you think this practice can be sustained for?

The fact is that in a world with scarce resources, we must make decisions about how to allocate those resources. When the field of medical care is controlled by politicians, then politicians will be making those decisions. The questions over who is covered for what maladies with how much treatment becomes a political question.

So you can expect that maladies that cluster on easily-identifiable demographic groups will receive a disproportionate amount of funding. For example, one might expect that because gays may comprise a voting bloc and suffer from HIV more than others, politicians will pander to them for votes by allocating funds for HIV treatment that are out of proportion with the number of sufferers and the severity. By contrast, other maladies -- say, my Crohn's disease, which has weaker demographic ties -- are likely to be relatively overlooked.

And in the end, although the GOP is certainly using hyperbole in referring to "death panels", someone is going to have to make a decision at some point that treating this 90-year-old geezer just isn't going to have the ROI in terms of quality-life-years saved, and that it's not cost effective to continue treatment.

Anyway, my claim is that when the politicians can decide what and how much you're getting of something, it's difficult (in my mind, at least) to call something a "right". What other rights do we have for which the politicians get to make the decision about how much of that right each of us is entitled to?
Analyze terabytes of data with just a click of a button
Or, of course, you could work to raise your English reading level. (For instance, after reading simple.wikipedia.com, go read the same article on en.wikipedia.com now that you know what it means.) Ultimately, a larger vocabulary is better -- it allows one to convey information in significantly more compact form including subtle shades of meaning that would otherwise not be conveyed at all.
I work at a Dutch registrar and we have monitored .at terminations in the past years due to this issue and making sure contracts get terminated. Since recently we are able to delete a domain for our customers through EPP so our customers don't have these problems after terminatin their contract.
Valve Opens Wide, Delivers (Strangely Familiar-Looking) Steam Community Updates
And 50 dollars to save the rain forest. 50 dollars for starving children.

50 dollars for social problems, like states that still have death penalty. 50 dollars to allow people to get education and make the world better.

Oh, if everyone who has 50 dollars spare would spend them, we could transform the world into a global utopia by just using what we have and waste anyway. You know what? It could even be done for free if everyone would spend a little of time and his/her skills. Like really, we could just fix problems by moving things around. Best example: Current (as inefficient as it is) food production could RIGHT NOW feed everyone on this planet THRICE(!) (says the WHO, not some random person). It just needs to get there, which also isn't a huge deal if we simply would use the infrastructure we have RIGHT NOW. I don't know, maybe we could even do it without much effort if we would just take use of what's wasted here anyways (because nobody invests into people using that infrastructure, because of the financial crisis that (in a way) forces people to do nothing).

So, if it is that simple, why don't we and change things to finally be able to do something we all want and can be really proud of?

Maybe I am a dumb idiot, but I honestly don't know.

What about getting together and just try to do it? Anything we've got to lose? I mean most people here I guess know to value the experience you get from failing.
> So ls -i should show they all share the same inode number?

It would, yes. Another useful tool here is du which by default will screen out files with duplicate inode numbers. So for an example where I have two 100M files each with multiple hard links:

me@swann:/tmp/tmp$ ls -lhi
total 701M
180277 -rw-r--r-- 3 me us 100M Aug 17 13:44 zero.file
180278 -rw-r--r-- 4 me us 100M Aug 17 13:45 zero.file.2
180278 -rw-r--r-- 4 me us 100M Aug 17 13:45 zero.file.2.link1
180278 -rw-r--r-- 4 me us 100M Aug 17 13:45 zero.file.2.link2
180278 -rw-r--r-- 4 me us 100M Aug 17 13:45 zero.file.2.link3
180277 -rw-r--r-- 3 me us 100M Aug 17 13:44 zero.file.link
180277 -rw-r--r-- 3 me us 100M Aug 17 13:44 zero.file.link2
me@swann:/tmp/tmp$ du -shc *
101M zero.file
101M zero.file.2
201M total

du does this duplicate ignorance trick across whole trees so the links do not have to be in the same directory, and you can have it scan a whole tree and it will show how much space it really taken, not how much is nominally taken. Like so:

me@swann:/tmp/tmp$ cd ..
me@swann:/tmp$ du -shc tmp
201M tmp
201M total

The reason I'm getting 101Mb instead of 100Mb (and 701Mb in total in ls) is that it is counting each link as taking a small amount of space, then "100MByte-plus-a-bit" is being rounded up to 101Mb (and 700-and-a-fraction rounds up to 701).

Also the number in the 3rd column of the ls output above is the number of links to the object, which can be helpful in understanding this sort of situation too.
The Simple English Wikipedia has a preference (not a rule) that words be chosen from the Basic English lexicon where possible. See http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Simple_English_Wi....

It may come as a surprise that the word "random" does not show up in even the quite inclusive Basic English combined wordlist, http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Basic_English_com....
Oops, should be base 25, obvs.
The mistake is prevalent.

or

You see this mistake frequently.

I don't normally do these corrections, but I can't help myself in this case.
Dremel is a query tool, not a database.
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This is why I don't base my entire business on someone else's platform. They could make one little change and destroy your entire business overnight.
Android Open Kang Project Nearing Jelly Bean Release
Because it's not an app, it's a platform, and for a social platform to be cool it needs to have critical mass.
I don't see how this is a "trick". Moreover it won't work most of the time. Simple English is just another Wikipedia lang, just like French or Spanish. There can be articles existing in Simple English but not in English and vice versa.
Programming from the ground up is free, recommended by Joel Spolsky, is grounded in GNU Linux and covers 32 but not 64 bit ASM.

http://ftp.igh.cnrs.fr/pub/nongnu/pgubook/ProgrammingGroundU...
At times not losing is as important as winning
True. I'll add that tradespeople like plumbers, electricians and dentists will always have enough work. I'll bet that on average they make more than most programmers do.
I'm also one to use logging and error management to help my way through a program. I don't understand how anyone else does it any other way. But surely the debugger helps a lot when no other way to reason about your code exists.

I have a lot of problems explaining this to the people I work with. Most of the errors we make are in some way related to having imperfect information through the debugger.

At some point complexity gets so high the debugger isn't even capable of handling the system under inspection. What are the tools we use in these cases?
The division of labour enriches all of us.
Garry Kasparov arrested
There is publicdata.samples.trigrams in the public datasets.
``[While] Sagan lost the suit, Apple engineers complied with his demands anyway, renaming the project "BHA" (for Butt-Head Astronomer). Sagan promptly sued Apple for libel over the new name, claiming that it subjected him to contempt and ridicule, but lost this lawsuit as well.''
To all employers in HN comunity
If you have a web-based tool that connects job applicant with potential employer by tapping into vast and trusted social network of the company’s current employees and alumni. Using in-built and customizable parameters it quickly narrows quality of potential match. Would you use it?
The question wasn't about "where's HURD" as in where's the "download URL". I ran most of the Debian flavors. I'm still interested in their progress as well. But the question still remains: if it's so difficult to write an entire userland, and so easy to write an entire kernel, then why the GNU didn't deliver yet "THE" HURD? Why they don't have a completely free GNU OS that I can install on my completely free hardware with an open BIOS, etc. You know, the same old story that doesn't seem to progress anywhere.

Some people are sick and tired to be "corrected" by the FSF gang. I use the term "Linux". Some people, in a very impolite mode, interrupt me with: "the correct name is GNU/Linux" or other unholy mess that RMS could think of.

> If it wasn't for those companies, Linux would be toy kernel now.

I'd say that without the funding of the Linux kernel, GNU would be a toy OS right now. RMS and co. managed to put together an entire UNIX clone at the time, but they simply didn't grasp a proper kernel for their stuff. Bummer.

The "open source software built by volunteers" meme is long dead by now. Fun fact: people need to eat. The problem with FSF is that they see the World in black and white, when everything is mostly shades of gray. I'm an advocate of the free software, but I got sick and tired of the FSF crowd. Their black/white philosophy won't let them see the forest for the trees. I even had a debate about GPL. Seriously, a software license that protects the freedom by restricting the freedom? Have I passed into a parallel reality where this kind of logic works? The argument of a FSF zealot was: "you know, the train is free to move in any direction guided by the rails". That was the moment I stopped arguing with the FSF zealots as there's no point.
We (at our company) don't use pagination anywhere now. But we do have extensive search abilities. We have found, very few of our users just scroll. They use the search. But the "infinite" scrolling is there if they want it.
I had to send a fax to cancel something once and I used one of the email to fax services. It was quick, easy and pretty cheap for a once-off fax. I don't really think its a big problem, even though fax is clearly outdated.
I stopped reading when the guy talked about licensing.
C'mon, it's a home server!
Just pick something you feel comfortable with and go with it.
After all, the entire world economy isn't depending on stability of your home server setup. Or is it? ;)
There are far, far too many, and 95% of them are not very good. Even if you wanted to evaluate them all to try them out, this is actually quite hard - my searches start returning a mix of completely unrelated apps and relevant apps after a small number of results.
Zynga accounted for 15% of Facebook's revenue in Q1. Although Zynga's contribution declined compared to last year, payments and fees revenue (mostly from apps) doubled over last year to $186 million. That's not an insignificant amount.

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/23/zynga-made-up-15-of-faceboo...
What does it have to do with XSS vulnerabilities ?
Voluntary charity can of course be a noble and merciful thing.

That said, strike at the fucking root people.[1] The problem isn't slavery. Slavery is a symptom of the problem. The problem is bad economies, which come from bad government. If you're not working on trying to find ways to encourage good government you're a hobbyists, not professionals, and you should take claims like "Our goal: to end slavery in our lifetime."[2] off your website.

If you are interested in improving bad governments then for God's sake don't listen to intellectuals. Read the people who've actually done it.[3] It's not as good as a controlled experiment, but it's way better than pure talk.

[1] I'm actually not sure about 1st world countries like the U.K. There might not actually be a root to strike at there.

[2] https://www.freetheslaves.net/SSLPage.aspx?pid=285

[3] http://www.amazon.com/Singapore-development-policies-and-tre...
I don't really think of them as banks since they don't have access to your private keys (and thus your coins).
I feel an anti-intellectualism tinge when I read this. This is what hyperlinking was invented for. This is why we have search engines. Don't understand something? Digress with a new tab, open the extra links, use your favorite search engine ... get some answers and learn something. Finally, return to the original equipped with your newfound powers of understanding.

I've had these habits from the moment I had access to the Internet. It lets me quickly learn new things. I think the people around me see this and want the same thing. Well, you can't have it-- you can't read and understand that quickly unless you're willing to put in the time to learn to operate like this.

It's going to take time, so stop being lazy and invest the time.
The SEO Process Is What It Is
How to connect to remote JVM with JProfiler
Stop Fixating on Your Search Engine Rank
It's also zero-sum, which is self-defeating.
Not sure why this is on the homepage. It reminds us that Slackware linux and FreeBSD are great server platforms regardless of how old your hardware is. What gives?

I was actually really amped to read this! I've been a linux nerd for a long time. My buddies and I, instead of getting laid in high school like normal people, would play with trying to make Slackware look like OS X. Remember the infamous digital blasphemy mushroom wallpaper? -- http://digitalblasphemy.com/graphics/previews/fluorescence6_... (cc @aprilzero if you are out there haha)

Anyway ... point is I'd really love some more resources for someone who has been a linux person most of their life/career but is open and interested in learning more about FreeBSD. I have a micro instance running cperciva's 8.2 install and it's waiting for me to give it more attention. Listing the processes or running top and seeing just how incredibly lightweight it is ... makes me happy. It feels so zippy. I realize this same thing can probably be accomplished with linux by installing a very baseline operating system, but it's refreshing to see nonetheless.

I'm looking forward to playing with FreeBSD this weekend ... any tips are welcome!
Best Game
Oh! I get it now. primitur: It's supposed to be GNU on (or over) Linux, like TCP/IP.
A Must Watch Interview: Sarah Lacy Talks to Reid Hoffman
Noir tutorial(Part 1)
Billionaire Peter Thiel’s Latest Investment: 3D-Printed Meat
Arch Linux.

It's fast like Slackware (which I liked when I tried it), very customisable by using PKGBUILD/AUR (similar to Gentoo portage, which is amazing for absolute control) and has an excellent wiki (https://wiki.archlinux.org/).

You'll also get the most up-to-date packages, and roll along happily.

If you feel you need a little more stability, then go with a Gentoo or Funtoo Stage3 install. :-)

Re FreeBSD, the best thing about it is the Port system, but you'll likely be hating the non-GNU userspace!
The UK 'Government' is just a lapdog for US interests and they are scared of pissing them off. So they can get away with it. The English courts in particular are weak compared to others in the UK as well. I think they need a change of Government.
I'm using it in MOAI with harfbuzz. Its a brilliant font and makes adding simple HUD-style GUI's to my app very fun, indeed (hint: using a "printf" to get -> a graph == fun!!)
Yeah, but what's the purpose? Are you editing text files (source code) on the iPad and you need to keep track of the changes?
The Philippines is a fun and interesting place to live. Actually, lots of places in Asia are. And some of the biggest / fastest growing economies are in the area. You could get a group of coders from the U.S. and set up shop there. For USD 1K per month* you could rent a really nice / big house and get helpers to do all the cooking and cleaning for your group (live-in helpers charge as low as $6 per day.) Actually, you can hire people do do pretty much everything so all you have to do is code. Bootstrapping is relatively cheap due to the cost of living. Outsourced development, but from U.S. developers. ;)

Houses are actually far cheaper than that. You can get a really nice house for USD 500 per month and a one bedroom can go for as low as USD 150. If I were to come with a group, I would have everyone chip in to get something big. For 1K, you would be living in luxury. ;)
aha, I second that
why get used to writing stuff wrong, when I can get used to writing them right

In that case....

"wrong" and "right" are adjectives, while "writing" is a verb which you are using the words "wrong" and "right" to modify. However, adjectives should only be used to modify nouns and pronouns, not verbs. In this case you should use an adverb:

why get used to writing stuff incorrectly, when I can get used to writing them correctly

If you prefer, you can use "writing" as a noun and continue to use "right" and "wrong":

why get used to the wrong way of writing when I can get used to the right way

I hate people who correct grammar on the internet, but you did make the mistake of asking. Sorry.