skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When people say academia is not the real world they generally mean a few things. "Real world" might not be dictionary-correct but this is what is meant:

1. Many of the problems you're forced to solve are contrived. They're practice problems and often the knowledge required to implement the solution has been provided to you already in classroom or textbooks.

2. You are evaluated on the academic quality of your work. In the "real world" you're evaluated on whether your work meets the needs of the customer and how well you present yourself.

3. In college you are rewarded based on how you are evaluated. In the real world you are not paid based on how well you are evaluated you are paid what you're able to sell or negotiate which is dependent on what your skills are worth (not just how well you perform them).

4. Basic needs (food/shelter) are paid for by someone else or on credit. This is not always true but often is. In the real world there is pressure to provide for oneself.
The google cache link is not working due to pictures. Correct text-only link : http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zef.me/...

Nice nugget from the article : "Facebook uses MySQL to keep most of its data, are you going to get bigger than them"

You could rephrase as that as Djisktra did "Premature optimization is the root of all evil"

First solve the problem then optimize, unless it gives you a special edge that'll bring money.

When I started doing "stuff" I wish I had read such an article. It would have saved me both good nights of sleep AND unneeded worries.
I can point you in the direction of an open source project that does the same thing in a different way: http://www.python.org/about/success/cog/

That should get you going, be sure to read the introduction.

In the past I've used this trick for many different purposes (for instance, writing driver code for a large variety of graphic cards with various memory lay-outs and port setups, greatly reducing the amount of code to maintain, for performance reasons you don't want that code to be too generic), but lately it has come into its own in a project that I'm working on where the large majority of the code is generated.

Unfortunately I can't share any code (it's written under contract).
The rest of your life?
Strangely, adblock seems to block the tech demo on minteye's site. Or perhaps not?
Strange, I found exactly the opposite. I went to industry for a while because I was tired of goal-seeking and working hard all the damn time, but actually being there made me feel pressured as all hell.

What I really should have done was exploit my white male upper-middle class American privilege and travel for a while. After how much I burned myself out finishing undergrad the way I did, my parents were actually quite willing to fund it.

But no, I felt the need to get a job and try to "build an adult life". I had said, "I want my 9-5". I use the scare-quotes because I discovered that short of being married, with a house, with kids or dogs, there's basically no such thing, and any attempt to treat a real job as a 9-5 for funding your social life will inevitably collapse.

Now that I'm "back" in academia on the research-school side (which is, ironically, the stage I was already at by the end of undergrad, mostly), I'm actually a good deal happier. I was also pretty happy with my second industrial job because I got to live where I wanted and work from home, but I actually really like research and feel far more comfortable working hard in pursuit of an achievable goal (publish stuff, write thesis, accumulate credit-points, graduate) rather than just to maintain a hard-working image.

Big Life Lesson: you need to find a lifestyle and environment suited to you, and you also need to take responsibility for how you run your own life. I could easily get sucked back into pathological workaholism like many graduate students, even though I felt crushed by having to keep busy for eight straight hours in an industrial job. The right work environment is one that makes me feel want to put in effort, but I also have to cut myself off and go have fun at some point.

Hmm... that last paragraph sounds too pat.
Yes! Would love an invite to Lobste.rs too please. Looks excellent. (Don't have an invite as of 7pm EST 12/15).
PGP doesn't encrypt the recipient's address for obvious reasons. Subject and sender are useful for the recipient; it's a tradeoff, as all security is.
Full video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HpBHWUPa8Q
Hi, I'm the author of Riemann. This part of the documentation is aimed at people who already know what Riemann is, so your confusion is completely understandable! :)

In short, Riemann is a complex event processor, driven by Clojure configuration, oriented towards monitoring distributed software systems. There's an introduction to its features and concepts here:

http://aphyr.github.com/riemann/

You can watch me try to justify my crimes against computers here:

http://vimeo.com/38377415

And here's some slides!

http://t.co/9BKdufal

If there's any questions I can answer, happy to help. You're also welcome to stop by #riemann on freenode. Cheers!
Steam is terrible for most indie developers compared to android, iOS, windows store or Xbox (if we include indie games). All of these charge for entry, but only steam makes it a lottery with terribly bad odds (via greenlight)
Is it possible to build this iPhone app?
See an interview with Bunnie here: http://andrew.huang.usesthis.com/
> It's kinda weird to me as many in the UK wouldn't be particularly accepting of that sort of age gap now, particularly not for casual sexual liaisons. The age of consent for homosexual male sex was lowered to 18 in 1994 - that means that up until 1994 Turing's actions were illegal in the UK.

1. I don't see how continued discrimination against gay people into recent decades (and, indeed, the present) supports your claim about public attitudes towards 'age gap'. Unless you're suggesting that there's some kind of morally significant link between the two. In that case, maybe you can explain why the age of consent for girls (16 between 1885 and 1994) needed to be raised from 13 in the first place.

2. In a debate over equal rights, assertions about the moral sentiment of some presumed majority are completely irrelevant. Appealing to legality and the democratic process and in the same breath to some vague idea of mob 'acceptance' is hypocritical. You can't have it both ways.

3. Even if discriminatory age-of-consent statutes were relevant, it's not 1994. The age of consent in the UK has been 16 since 2001 -- that's one third longer than the preceding period that you suggest reflects current public sentiment.

> lifestyle choice

Oh.
Allen's mistake regarding AI is a failure to understand that it moves exponentially by leaps, and by gradual progression that enables the big leaps.

As an example, what comes out of Siri & similar AI programs over the next ten years will ultimately be viewed as a leap, driven by mass consumer demand. But Siri only exists due to thousands of small progressions that might have seemed trivial by themselves.
TLDR: There is no need for pointless agitation.

Solve your problems the Feynman way:
1) think about the problem really hard
2) write down the solution
>>>3. Exponential growth is bigger than space

Some people think that space is expanding as well. These people think that intra-galactic distances are relatively consistent, but inter-galactic distances are increasing in an accelerating fashion.

"Additionally, the expansion rate of the universe has been measured to be accelerating due to the repulsive force of dark energy which appears in the theoretical models as a cosmological constant. This acceleration of the universe, or "cosmic jerk", has only recently become measurable, and billions of years ago, the universe's expansion rate was actually decelerating due to the gravitational attraction of the matter content of the universe. According to the simplest extrapolation of the currently-favored cosmological model (known as "ΛCDM"), however, the dark energy acceleration will dominate on into the future."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space
I agree that it exists on two places on Google's servers, but a draft also exists on every device that has used that account (and viewed or edited the draft).
> And what do the interfaces to these programs look like?

You get a bunch of readably named functions that you talk to just as if you'd written a library painfully from scratch.

> Are they off the shelf programs or do you have to write (parts of) them yourself?

The interfaces themselves are generated, the code that uses the interfaces is written just like any other program. Unfortunately I can't generate 100% of the code, the business logic bits still need to be written. But even there we're making progress in identifying bits and pieces that are more generic. As more and more code moves to the generated input the whole thing starts to take on the guise of a very high level DSL.

The real knowledge is vested in the generator and how to keep it flexible and still be able to generate code specific to the problem at hand. This can be quite tricky.

> I'm guessing you still write code.

Absolutely, just far less of it than I would have to write otherwise. It's been slow going getting this set up but now that we have it the speed is phenomenal.
Spotify is Microsoft. Rdio is Apple. [March 2012]
But no tablet or phone have an HDMI input (only output).
I like Steam because of its selectivity. I can buy a game on Steam with a certain level of confidence that it will be a professional product. There's nothing wrong with selectivity on Steam because it's not the only option. That's not the case with the app stores on iOS or Windows Phone.
This is a pretty bizarre idea. You really want the government applying laws designed for historic buildings to software?

Even if this made any sense, when you declare something a landmark, you also make it nearly impossible to upgrade. You're saying that most of its value lies in preserving what was, not what will be.

Before you do the "waaaaah Flickr hasn't upgraded in a long time anyway"... http://www.flickr.com/services/developer/changelog/

They are hiring people to work on the API full-time, last I heard.
> Well, given that you can't travel backward once you've crossed the event horizon, can neural signals travel in a direction opposite the center of the singularity?

This is essentially the 'no drama' assumption the article is about. It means roughly, that there is no way to detect that you did cross the event horizon. And therefore the brain still works fine.
BPI sues Pirate Party members individually for TPB proxy
WriteLaTeX looks pretty cool. Have you looked at using the methods from Kile for better syntax highlighting? I noticed a problem on the (otherwise excellent) main page with the text boxes: http://imgur.com/SojY1, Chrome 23.0.1271.95, Linux, zoom 125% (though that doesn't seem to change it). Also, is Asymptote support planned? (The rotatable 3D figures probably aren't very feasible, but everything else should be.)
Whonix: Anonymous Operating System
Taken from Whonix home page:

Whonix is an anonymous general purpose operating system based on Virtual Box, Debian GNU/Linux and Tor. By Whonix design, IP and DNS leaks are impossible. Not even malware with root rights can find out the user's real IP/location.

This is because Whonix consists of two (virtual) machines. One machine solely runs Tor and acts as a gateway, which we call Whonix-Gateway. The other machine, which we call Whonix-Workstation, is on a completely isolated network. Only connections through Tor are possible.
rorrr's message is unnecessarily rude, but I don't think he's wrong.

It's a very interesting feat, but it's just a showcase of his realizations, unrelated to computers or science. His thought process or his planning for making such patterns would probably fit here more than this post.

I don't think it's a problem either, because such posts are rare, but I would be disappointed if Hacker News was filled with this kind of post.
Several months ago I noticed Wikipedia's Ganglia (cluster performance monitoring software) is publicly accessible. Check out db59 (mentioned in the note) amongst the other servers:

http://ganglia.wikimedia.org/latest/?r=hour&cs=&ce=&...

If you want to see a bunch of other cool public Ganglia instances you can do a search something like:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22show+only+nodes+matching%...
Just because you discovered a few cool hacks that happened to work well in very specific problem domains doesn't mean you've "solved" symbolic thought. The way a chess program works is not the way humans play chess. It does a brute-force search, rather than learning patterns.

Go is a good example of a game that can't effectively be brute-forced. There are a lot of other examples out there; that was just the one I happened to pick.

The point is that something like crossing a room and picking up a pencil seemed easy, and to this day is still a significant achievement for robotics, still requiring fairly controlled circumstances.

Just because you failed to do one thing doesn't mean you succeeded in doing another.
Would the Last Blackberry User Please Turn Out the Lights?
Mmmh ... What exactly is you point, here? Why « startup », and not « start-up » or « start up » ...? Do you have any etymological argument, here, or is it just a matter of taste and "being special"? Do you really make any sense? I don't think so. Please, don't make people loose more time reading your ineptness.
Interested in thoughts from the hn community on this distro.
Meet Microsoft's professional muckraker, Mark Penn
Great UX advice
I would say no, it is not possible.
Even if this were possible, which it isn't. A landmark has to be a physical place/structure. It's a stupid idea.
From the start, the article equates "concentration" and "mindfulness", with no backing for that assertion.

From everything I've heard, they are not the same thing. Concentrating on a crime scene you are not present at, for example, would mean your mind is not focused on the here and now -- in other words, concentration of the kind they're speaking of seems to be the exact opposite of mindfulness.
There is a misunderstanding in todays youth that college is a
social club with the side effect of gaining an education. Few
kids choose their school on quality of education, but rather
how big the parties are/what the scene is like.

Source? This seems extremely anecdotal.

Life after college isn't hard at all. This generation is simply
not used to feeling ANY discomfort or pain in their sheltered
little lives.

This is hyperbole and personal opinion presented as fact. HN is not the place for this kind of writing.
Sync the bookmarks of any desktop browser with your iPhone
"These effects make sense: the core of mindfulness is the ability to pay attention. That’s exactly what Holmes does when he taps together the tips of his fingers, or exhales a fine cloud of smoke. He is centering his attention on a single element. And somehow, despite the seeming pause in activity, he emerges, time and time again, far ahead of his energetic colleagues."

I'm not sure I trust scientific conclusions drawn from the behavior of a fictional character.
That's how Star Wars treats all of its engineering things. Just give it a kick and it starts up.
Imagine a battery-powered C64-like device (ie "all in one", the motherboard just below the keyboard) with a tiny LCD screen (no bigger than your smartphone) and a real-sized keyboard.

Now imagine doing RDP or VNC to "display" the screen on your tablet or your phone - there are browser-side VNC clients that are easy to use, you wouldn't even have to install a VNC client.

Unless you want to playback movies, IMHO there is no need for an HDMI input

No big LCD = longer runtime (or throw in an eink display - framerate is not that important).

I would be willing pay a premium if it also included a breadboard connecting to the various internal ports. That would be a real hacky laptop, a workbench for geeks.
You're picking up lots of downvotes, including from me. I'm going to explain why.

* Your first point is trite. Everyone says, "find your passion". Guess what? Most real people don't live lives structured around the pursuit of some driving passion -- just like how most people don't become start-up millionaires. You or I in specific may or may not be special, unique snowflakes, but any Life Advice premised on the recipient being a special, unique snowflake is very bad advice.

* Your second point combines workaholism with straight-up brown-nosing. Nobody likes a brown-noser, and contrary to your apparent thinking, bosses and professors can in fact spot them. Especially professors, actually! My stepfather is an old-hat Electrical Engineering professor, and he has told our family the occasional story about undergrads who were obviously just looking for a nice letter of recommendation or graduate students who could not complete PhDs because they were better at sucking up and obeying orders than original thinking.

* Your third point is trite.

* Your fourth point is... ugh. I don't even have commonly-understood words for this concept. It's like trying to find a word for water in Fish Language. Puritanical? Anti-Spiral? There's something really fucked-up about telling other people to avoid enjoying a valid, valuable part of their life.

Overall, your post comes across as if you're someone who kicks puppies, sucks up to everyone above him, and only cares about career advancement. If people in your field say "you have to be crazy" to mean "you have to be a joyless, semi-sociopathic workaholic", tell me what line of work you're in so I can avoid it for the rest of time.
The main goal of migrating to MariaDB is not performance driven. More so,
I think it's in WMF's and the open source communities interest to coalesce
around the MariaDB Foundation as the best route to ensuring a truly open
and well supported future for mysql derived database technology.
Performance gains along the way are icing on the cake.
I think this is the real let down prediction:

In 2008, Ray Kurzweil said in an expert panel in the National Academy of Engineering that solar power will scale up to produce all the energy needs of Earth's people in 20 years.

lololololol
So little content, so much fanboy-ism.
Thank you for digging that up!

Interesting, he mentions that he'd love to have a triple screen capable laptop, but then when he has a chance to make his own it has two possible monitor attachments. Or did I miss something? Anyway, with USB->hdmi adapters this may no longer be as much of an issue.

For instance:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812119...
Minteye wants to put an end to the CAPTCHA as we know it - The Next Web
It would be great if this had integrated gpg signing and encryption, especially as firegpg doesn't work w/ gmail any more.
This is flawless. I have a little script that I've been working on that has helped my life immensely and I know it could help others too. I've been too lazy to make it into anything more, though. This is giving me just enough to actually write down what it is and why it's helpful, and if I get it will totally make me go further.
Thanks!

We are working on better syntax highlighting. I'll have a look at Kile's, now that you've mentioned it.

Thanks for reporting the issue with the text boxes.

I hadn't seen Asymptote before, but it looks very good, so I'll have to think about it. Thanks for the link! :) (Edit: note that we do support pgfplots, which also makes nice plots.)
I think this was also one of the first applications that could qualify as an instant messaging tool. I remember it coming out well before ICQ and AIM.

I hope the guys working on this project don't end up mired in trademark issues.
> It's a win-win. We get to keep building and Yahoo can say they're the first tech company to have one of its creations declared as an official national treasure.

Typically win-win situations don't involve threatening force (government) to get one side to comply. If Yahoo wants to deprecate the Flickr API, they are doing so because it is not a win for them.

Are developers willing to pay to keep the service running? If not, why should Yahoo be forced to?
>Why would you value a shortcut for assessing quality more than an actual improvement in quality? The fact that design is better is a huge all around win for everyone.

I don't think that's the interesting point. The problem is that the focus on design means that developers spend too much effort on design and not enough on quality. We build tools to make design easier rather than making quality easier for developers, result in a market full of worse software that only appears better on first impression.

In some sense it's an evolutionary necessity: When people make choices based on eye candy, suppliers who provide better eye candy make more sales, and the rational supplier then spends more effort making better eye candy and some of that effort comes out of what could have made a better product in other ways.

But in theory, if there was a way to throw a wrench into that dynamic -- a better, faster, easier way for users to evaluate overall quality rather than relying on superficial aspects of design quality -- then we should welcome it (or work to create it, if you're so inclined).
A good resource on this same subject is the book 'Code' by Charles Petzold. It is also a bottom up approach to understanding computers.
I use rdio because it was available in Canada when I signed up. It's a good service, but I'm getting a little sick of them revamping the android app and introducing major bugs every few months.
And this yet another reason I don't have a facebook. Although, it seems the news media seems to think anyone without facebook is a psychopath as well. Lose, lose.
I have nothing to add, except that the post reminded me of this http://xaharts.org/funny/i/Microsoft_Linux_ad.jpg MS ad ( from the GPL-is-cancer days).
Ask PG: What Changed?
Two years ago, you referred to the question, "Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage" as "one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications."[1]

But, as recently as a few months ago you said, "How you hacked some real-world system to your advantage is not a super important question. Probably not even in the top 10."[2]

So, why is the question not as evocative as you once thought?

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html
[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693870
Mapping with D3
In other news, a poorly supported thesis with a well constructed tag line got on the front page.

Reword title to reflect content: "I like Rdio, I don't like Spotify. I cannot describe why, but I am also going to rag on Microsoft because apparently that is cool".
In Buddhism, concentration and mindfulness are considered to be distinct concepts:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Eightfold_Path#Sam.C4.81d...
Original Pong Schematic
A "hacker"? He makes art in the snow.
I guess the author has missed the news about Valve's Linux based gaming console.