skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Names of the colleges, please? The great majority of colleges have yields well below 50 percent,

Right, but regardless of whether the yield is 20% or 70%, colleges care immensely about maximizing it. Higher yield means less uncertainty about class composition and size, as well as higher prestige.

Your comment would be much more informative if we had some idea exactly which colleges you are talking about, and which persons affiliated with each college you have spoke to, and how recently.

Ivy League (x2), 3 and 1 year ago.
Elite liberal arts college, 3 years ago.
Mid-sized West Coast school, 4 years ago.
State flagship, 3 years ago.
Well Perl5 isn't disappearing because Perl6 is coming around the corner.... in fact the opposite there are lots of cools things happening right now in Perl5 world (see Moose, MooseX::Declare, etc).

So perhaps you should upgrade your Camel book or look at "Perl Best Practices" by Damian Conway. Also keep an eye on http://www.modernperlbooks.com

As for Perl6/Rakudo... no need to wait its already here! Clearly its still "beta" but that shouldn't stop you downloading and playing with it.
I don't know - I think there's a few things to keep in mind. First, when devs were faced with the prospect that for the next year Apple would not be providing a real way to write native applications for the iPhone, plenty of webapps popped up. Arguably this was a good thing, because some of the apps were better done as webapps rather than as native apps. Unfortunately a distinction many published app store developers seem to love ignoring now..but there's no shortage of iPhone-specific mobile sites out there. Also don't forget that there were effectively zero third party applications and webapps for the iPhone before January 2007. :P

Then there is the idea that before AT&T and the iPhone, AT&T wasn't liked, they're still not liked (especially when their network can't handle the influx of network traffic at iPhone-heavy events and locations), and the biggest reason why the carriers were freaked out was because of the popularity of the iPhone on ONLY one carrier. Perhaps Sprint could figure out a way to benefit from having a phone that could theoretically compete with the iPhone. Pricing a plan at cheaper than the entry level iPhone plan would definitely leave more people wondering if getting the iPhone is worth it...if the Palm Pre can live up to the hype and compete with Apple. I mean what the hell was the selling point for the iPhone that wasn't in other smartphones except for the UI and design? It's not like the accessories really existed either...all the cases were iPod specific, half the devices wouldn't work or pops up an incompatibility warning on the phone...

Lastly, a larger phone is not a bad phone. I find it hilarious that the only time I find myself typing fast and accurately on the iPhone is while I'm using the bulky external battery pack (mophie juicepack) that more than doubles the thickness of the phone. It's an extremely slippery and thin phone that's hard to hold.

All that being said, I love my iPhone and I can't imagine using a Pre, but that's because I've wanted a phone that would actually sync with my Mac with no issues for a long time.
I love this app already.

Guys, if you want to do a Japanese cell phones version, give me a holler. I might be able to help.
There was not one ugly or overweight kid in any of the schools.

When I left my public school for a private, east coast boarding school, the lack of any fat kids was the thing that struck me the most the first day I arrived. The second thing that struck me was the utter lack of assholes and bullies.

One other bit of food for thought: I ended up going to private high school and then ivy league for college. But today I consider myself less educated than my dad, who paid his own way through a lesser tier college. The reason is my dad studied engineering and had useful skills by the time he graduated. Very few ivy league students learn anything useful in undergrad. The college is mainly a big social club. Kids from a disadvantaged background can derive advantage from mixing with this higher social class, but the its not the classroom education that's value add. For this reason, I think people should worry less about inequities in ivy league admission. The schools simply aren't value-add anyway, so attending has little bearing on your life outcome.
So a student wants to look up a simple question on a math topic for a quiz or test coming up in 15 minutes. She's sitting in a hallway and doesn't have time to run down to the computer room to do this. Or the room is full.

Will students have access to the same material at home? What if they don't own, or can't afford, a computer?

What is the cost of all this compared to replacing the books? Take into account having to replace the outdated online material as often as replacing outdated books.

I know I'm not alone when I say I learn much better with a book in my hand. I can "scroll" faster, index faster, almost everything is just faster. Yes, you can search on a computer faster but general reading is always more pleasurable with a book in hand.
I remember McNealy admitting they underestimated 32 bit architecture and placed too much on 64 bit.

Another error might have been overvaluing its vertically integrated SW/HW solution technically and financially, and not commoditizing it quickly enough through open-source and hardware cloning.

Spreading one's wealth goes against one's better judgement often, but the rewards come back in unseen ways.
TextMate vs AptanaStudio
Automatically scalable infrastructure has been available, and in use, I'm sure for quite a number of years. It's nothing new in terms of software.

AWS etc selling such a service, is newer, but it seems like cloud is just being used now as a new "web 2.0" buzzword. "Upload your photos to the cloud!" "Cloud based solutions" "Your music in the cloud" etc etc
Also, this is a terrible article. Only business dudes would support the worst option for the resolution of this dispute, settling behind an NDA so that Tom Tom can violate GPL and no one can know about it.

People like this piss me right off.
Link was broken for me... this worked, though: http://blog.weatherby.net/2009/03/startups-the-early-stage.h...
no, you could read the article:

"It is not attached permanently in to my body, it is a removable prosthetic which has USB memorystick inside it," said Jerry.

"When I'm using the USB, I just leave my finger inside the slot and pick it up after I'm ready."
What do you mean, different instances of text? Do you mean different types of text that get rendered differently? Or does this apply also when you work with a large block of text that's all rendered a single way?
Facebook changes again unpopular with users
Yes, you have made your bias very clear on Zones here on HN every time the subject has come up. Clearly they don't work well for you. However, people do use Zones and they clearly do work well.

I suppose you have figured out how to use a jail to limit memory and CPU resources of the programs running in a jail? Ooops, that is a zone-only feature; like the time I set up Oracle in a zone and limited it to using no more than 4GB RAM .
> It would be hard for many people to justify dropping $600+ for just those features.

Depending on your contract, the last iPhone hardware update was a "free" upgrade.
Sounds awesome - great niche! Also, love the landing page. You have a fairly appropriate target market here at HN.

Drop me a line (shafqat at newscred dot com) when you get a chance. Would love to stay in touch and maybe we could even find ideas to work together.
What can I do to be a great Computer Science teacher/professor someday?
hydrogen would probably be tougher to get their hands on for your average schoolkids.
Basically, each block tag (h1, h2, h3, p, li, etc.) would create a new instance of sIFR, thus creating a new flash object on the page. For example, you can't use just one flash object for a long stream of text, if that stream of text is divided into paragraphs, because sIFR cannot internally give you the necessary margins or tabbing required for marking paragraphs.

The only case where you would have one flash object is when you have a single column of text which has the same font, same leading, and no margins throughout. Unfortunately, that won't happen very often.
The main problem I have with Scribd is that it is often out-ranking the original documents in search results on Google and elsewhere. In order to find the document in the format I want, I have to redo the search with "-site:scribd.com".

The second problem with scribd is that gives you two choices for viewing documents: too tiny to see in a tiny little box with a bunch of junk surrounding it in the browser window, or full screen and blurry as hell. Their comparisons with Adobe Reader are laughable when Reader has been displaying everything perfectly since the 90's.

The third huge problem with Scribd is that they make you sign up to get the document in its original (inevitably better) format.
You will note it includes no standard benchmarks and only includes a vague hand-waving claim saying that its orders of magnitude faster. No real world numbers are quoted. Nothing is said about how good the CPU implementation was and so on.

After working in GPGPU for a while, I have become really wary of vendor claims. Vendors do all sort of tricks to make their claims look good : comparing against single core non-optimized CPU code, comparing different algorithms on GPU and CPU, not reporting the time required to transfer data between CPU and GPU, comparing only 32-bit float performance when 64-bit floats should be used and so forth.

Of course, GPUs are certainly very good for some types of problems. But they are not magical solutions and are not suitable for most problems.
I met a lot of folks who took advantage of their advantages, and a lot who didn't.

But the real thing I noticed was that all these folks talked to their professors differently than I did. I was intimidated and afraid of them. I told myself that most of them were jerks, when in reality I was just really insecure about my ability to say something intelligent. My perception of authority was completely different than theirs.

I took a class with Robert George during my sophomore year, Constitutional Interpretation. It was considered one of the most challenging humanities courses in the school when I was there.

There was a 90 minute, fast-moving Socratic lecture once a week. George wanders the lecture hall, pointing at students and pulling them into arguments about the points of whatever cases you're discussing.

Then there was a 90 minute precept once a week. 20 students and either the professor or a preceptor (often a NYC lawyer friend of George's) would lead a conversation about the week's cases.

Basically, precept was a 90-minute, 20 person argument. And I just folded. I'd never been on a debate team. I'd been raised to think arguing and questioning other people in public was the height of rudeness. What happened in precept just did-not-compute. I'd read all the material. I'd make just as many notes as the other guy, but when it came time to "fight" about it, I just shut down. I was terrified.

Now, the other students were probably just as terrified as I was. But they'd also probably been in classes like this before. There was some precedent for talking about ideas in this sort of controlled, but boisterous way. What looked to me like a lot of fighting was really just a spirited debate. I was just completely psyched out by it.

That was a real wake-up call. I was able to see that there was a basic tool of "successful" people that I seemed to lack in the toolbox. I got a lot better at it eventually. But that's the sort of difference I observed.
A DVI port! And no VGA. Nice. Have only seen VGA on these types of small units 'til now. Will check this out.
They are a hardware company. Why would they want people to clone their hardware is beyond me. The IBM PC was cloned and the result is that IBM is a relatively minor player in the PC arena and one that has no meaningful power (much unlike Intel and Microsoft).
The notion that child abuse would end because there would be no market for commercial child abuse is a stupid idea.

It's also the kind of idea that so frequently bubbles up in law enforcement: the eradication of visible crimes is more important than the eradication of the unseen ones. It's also because the visible ones are so easier to catch and give so much more TV coverage.

Going after the producers/abusers is the goal. Going after users do next to nothing to protect exploited children.

I have seen a similar attitude when I followed the investigations after I had a laptop robbed here in Brazil. Police officials were much more worried about catching the guy with the gun than the guy who bought the computers to resell. If you take down the guy in the spike, the buyer can quickly recruit another. If you take down the buyer, the hub, the whole "market" collapses for a while and crime drops (or migrates to other activities).

An that brings me to another story: when bank cashiers here started to use ATM-like equipment in their desks and had no meaningful amount of money easily accessible, bank robberies dropped to next to nothing. Interestingly, shortly after that, kindnapping spiked.
He should get together with the 'Beautiful Prosthetics' guy: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=518860. Functional + Beautiful = Win.
How MIT Validates Its Admission Process
Cloud is a vague term, but like "web 2.0" is sorta does refer to some specific things. "Cloud" seems to be overloaded to mean both web services, outsourced virtual datacenters (e.g. EC2), and using virtualization/cluster technology in your own datacenter.

I think programmers hate terms like 'cloud' because they're fuzzy, ambiguous and inspecific. Marketers like them for the same reasons. :)
You're forgetting about all the Microsoft Certified people and their consulting services, e.g. http://www.microsoft.com/uk/services/consulting/adc.mspx
MySpace hires new exec to run developer platform, MySpace ID
Moreover, there is an important lesson to learn. Open source is not the solution for poor revenues. Sun has OpenSPARC, OpenSolaris, Java, OpenOffice, MySql and what not...But in terms of revenue, it hardly made a difference.
i wish someone would make a really nice cocoa IDE for ruby (or make xcode work with rails) make it work nicely with Git, Rails, Terminal and auto complete: Sold.

Auto-complete is a lovely way to learn a new language.
http://www.fuzr.com
Bonuses: A VC weighs in
You can make hydrogen with a glass of water and a battery. It is not hard to get.
> Please ensure your email is correct and that your username is longer than 5 characters and your password is longer than 5 characters.

why do you care how long my username is?
You need to examine your school and students before you start making real plans. Online or e-books are great, but if you're looking at $20 per student for the line item you mentioned. You may need to spend a lot more on infrastructure to make online books work.

How many families have computers at home? What kind of computers? How about internet access. Do they have enough computer resources so each child has a computer for textbooks access a large part of the evening? What kind of support would the school be willing to provide, say if someone had a computer failure at home, or difficulty using the specific book? Pay close attention to any disadvantaged families, children in foster care or living in shelters, etc. How would you make this work for them?

How are the existing textbooks used? Do students read them or do homework on long bus rides to and from school? Do they attend homework or tutoring programs at different sites? Do students do homework at school during breaks? Are there enough computers available for "peak demand?"

How about in-classroom access, discussing literature in English class, or looking up material during labs? How many computers do you need in each classroom for this sort of use? Would a small number of in-class paper books be enough?

I love e-books, but I also worry about the unintended consequences for some students.
IBM + Sun = Perfect for open-source monetization
Hm, I'd say the Apple brand awareness is very high (at least in my country), so for me they don't fail on the marketing department.

I think it's probably just a matter of price. At least that's what used to keep me away from Apple... Until I met the hardcore fanbase. Nowadays they are the ones that keep me away from Apple. Hmm... maybe it's marketing, after all :P

Anyway, it was also important that I couldn't run key apps (read: games) in a Mac and I could on a PC. And sure, I could run Windows on a Mac, but if I'm going to use Windows (or Linux, whatever), why can't I just go for a PC and save money for something else? :)
It really feels like some sort of joke talking about how much faster they could go bankrupt would be appropriate here.
General Catalyst Lands Facebook Co-Founder to Help Create Next-Gen Web Media Startups
Except that IBM has been selling their hardware units off for years... hard drives to Hitachi, laptops to Lenovo, etc. IBM's core competency now is consulting services supporting software.

I think Sun makes sense for them to acquire (their business models are becoming quite similar already)... but IBM's days of having a hardware focus are over.
He should make it into a Live Finger so he can boot Linux wherever he goes!
while true, its probably easier/safer to go buy a tank of helium. and easier to get the approval of a school
I wouldn't go so far as to say it's pretty good across the board. I was proud of the work I did at my employer, but who knows, maybe they pick names out of a hat at Yale! Evidence suggests as much :) Die Yalies.

I read a good number of Indian applicants during my short stint in admissions. They were, for the most part, completely indistinguishable from one another. Perfect scores. Perfect grades. They all faxed in 20 pages of certificates, honors and awards. They all had the same list of leadership positions in school clubs.

We had a few folks on the team who had traveled over there and were able to parse through these applicants to find the really good ones, but it was crazy how similar all the applicants from India were.

I figured the schools had imperfect data about what we were looking for, so they had all constructed some sort of a rubric and were sending kids of type X to Princeton, Y to Harvard, Z to Williams, etc.

If I were to meet a 16-year-old promising student in India, my advice to him would be the same advice I'd give to the asian students in the U.S. Go to clown school. Join a circus. Build a rocket. Do SOMETHING that could not have come from your parents or teachers.
If your architecture is designed such that changing the web layer is hell, you probably should reconsider the architecture. Your other points stand. The channels of communication around nginx are not as clear and robust as Apache.
Then there is the idea that before AT&T and the iPhone, AT&T wasn't liked, they're still not liked

That simply isn't borne out by numbers. Before the iPhone, AT&T was adding customers at a rate comparable to Verizon. AT&T's churn rate (the rate that customers leave) is the second best in the industry (marginally higher than Verizon). What are you going off of? Vocal detractors? Heck, even going back to the 4Q 2006 (before the iPhone was even introduced), AT&T was having greater net additions than Verizon.

That doesn't mean they're "better". Just that they are perceived as the company that customers want to sign up with and stay with more than any other company (combining the two metrics there).

Arguably [widgets were] a good thing

I totally agree that widgets are better for certain apps than applications. However, the iPhone can do both. And it's true that there is a buildup time. However, that makes the Pre's case worse. If the argument is that it took Apple 6 months to really get apps, then the Pre is even further behind given that their delay will probably be even longer since they're a smaller platform to develop for.

Pricing a plan at cheaper than the entry level iPhone plan would definitely leave more people wondering if getting the iPhone is worth it

This is what Sprint needs - at least initially. They won't draw people from what is seen as a superior device on a superior network by charging the same. If they sell the Pre at $200 and service at comparable pricing, they won't sell many of them. However, to undersell the iPhone would be hard for management to stomach. The Pre is unlikely to cost less to manufacture - in fact, scale would probably make the iPhone a good deal cheaper. If the Pre can get up to the status of the iPhone, then they could sell it at parity, but it has a long way to go that includes proving its reliability, getting applications, etc.

I like Apple, but I'm starting to dislike them more as they become more powerful. I wouldn't trade my MacBook Pro for a PC and the iPhone is just so nice, but I'm getting tired of how they try to tie everything together to rake in more money. I'll be really glad if the Pre evens the playing field a bit and provides Apple with competition they never saw in the MP3 player arena.
All That Twitters May Not Be Gold, Analysts Say
I've read Perl Best Practices. Good book. I don't agree with every single one (the deep ?: structures in particular) but everything in there is very sane. I've also found that with http://perldoc.perl.org, I don't have to refer to the book much at all.

However, these days I favor Ruby over Perl. Especially now that the interpreter is not dog-slow anymore.
"Teaching to the test" and "teaching calculus" were basically identical.

I'd argue that if that's how math is being taught, there's a problem. "Teaching to the test" taught me to hate math in high school. In middle school, we were given a brilliant teacher who was allowed to teach however he wanted, and we left 8th grade understanding trigonometry better than most of the high schoolers we were with.

Have you read Paul Lockhart's "A Mathematician's Lament"? That highlights the problems fundamental with the current math curriculum. From the tests that you linked me to, with all due respect, it doesn't look like you're doing anything different: you're spitting out formulas to be memorized. That's not math: that's mechanics. I hate that students are taught like that.
Good point. Cloudkick is kind of like the guy who sells food to the guy who sells shovels.
For balloon buoyancy it's not the atomic mass which matters, but rather the gas density. Hydrogen is about 50% less dense than helium. Obviously there are some safety issues, mostly with handling a pressurized storage tank on the ground.
I'm totally of the opposite mindset. I think auto-complete is a terrible way to introduce someone to a new language.

Yes, you may see results quicker, but I've found all that happens is you become reliant upon auto-complete to do the thinking for you. All too often I have seen people use auto-complete as a tool to help them just mindlessly code away rather then taking the time to actually figure out what it is they are trying to achieve. Forcing yourself to actually look at the API and type out a function name cements a concept so much more then autocomplete.
>after crashing his one week old Ducati Monster 696 motorbike.

doh!
If you don't live in this area, you may not realize that while Detroit proper is a wasteland (and Detroit proper is very large), the metropolitan Detroit area is doing OK. Not great, but OK, and it has a lot of other stuff in it. In most of the Metropolitan area, you'd never even know that the theoretical flagship city has been destroyed. There's still a big market for national acts to come here and draw from the rest of the metropolitan area, the Lansing area, Ann Arbor, and so on. For concerts, Toledo residents can reach, too.
Intelligent Mistakes: How to Incorporate Stupidity Into Your AI Code
Resubmitted with new link:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=521789