skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice! When I built the site (in Joomla, uck!) I think I ran a search on iStockPhoto for "university" and picked the stodgiest looking place I could find.
Has this really been established, or is it just presumed?

I vaguely remember reading something about the skype team saying they would "cooperate" with law enforcement officials, but I'm not sure if that meant actually listening in on encrypted conversations or just sharing the IPs and time of connections to servers.
I guess what I meant in short is: Please cite your sources.
I'm a CS PhD student at a large state school, and I used to be a CS PhD student at a small state school. From what I know from talking to my adviser, our grad school admissions are done entirely by the faculty, and such things as money and parents have no effect.

I'm not arguing it's anymore fair and meritorious, just that the rules are different. What they're trying to optimize is different. Basically, they're trying to evaluate if the applicant will be able to crank out a lot of research papers - this is what benefits themselves (if they take the student on) and the department.

Money does come into play, but indirectly. It's those research papers that let professors get grant money.
I disagree. I have an internet plan with 100 gigs of allotted transfer. I don't care if a few kb here and there come down. I understand that your position may be different, but in my opinion most use Adblock the way I do -- to not see advertisements.
If you are capable of writing a native app for the iPhone, you are probably capable of jailbreaking it too.
Awesome! A Pittsburgh Hacker News meetup, count me in.
Try pasting telnet://towel.blinkenlights.nl into the location field of your browser.
Thank you for your well-thought out response. All of what you've said jives with the advice I've been given. To immerse yourself is to learn.

> If you are simply aiming for some eventual goal, and view the process of getting there as a necessary misery, you are setting yourself up for failure.

I don't think I'm enjoying the process. I think the solution is to start going to Spanish Language meetups (break out of my one-on-one private tutoring) and maybe just walk around the Hispanic areas in my city and make smalltalk).
Or maybe the solution is there is no solution - take advantage of serendipity, go with the 'unexpected opportunities' as you say..

> studies have elucidated that a lot of language acquisition occurs before/below the level of words and semantics

"Impossible, because if you move somewhere foreign, you're going to learn the language unconsciously within 6 months. People who have only lived in the US don't know this. It almost takes no effort. The human brain is good at this sort of thing." from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=500969

One of my tutors recommended I buy the Spanish language audiobook and the book and follow-along - much like I see my friend's kids do (and as I did when I was younger - 'when Tinker Bell rings the bell, turn the page'). I could probably even listen to it while sleeping. What's stopping me? Motivation. Why do I want to learn? Do I really want to go through the pain curve of becoming competent?

I'm also tempted to buy the Spanish language voice from http://www.acapela-group.com/text-to-speech-interactive-demo... and put in in the background and have it read Spanish newspaper articles to me. What's stopping me? Probably the fact that listening to Spanish news now is very draining energy wise - trying too hard perhaps?

Total immersion is the best way to learn. In fact, I now think that toddlers learning language is the best possible total immersion program (e.g. their parents are 1) emotionally invested - encourage anything that represents progress with genuine admiration and smiles - e.g. 'Sigh' for 'Sky' is close enough, to begin - and 2) have the requisite patience and 3) the toddler wants to control/understand his environment [e.g. terrible twos] - so it is his/her incentive to improve quickly - as a side note, maybe that is why 'No' becomes a very common word for parents to utter..).

> the Japanese film "Shall We Dance" may illustrate this

Years ago, I saw the original. Loved it. A favorite, even though I've never watched it again. So much better than the remake (even though I've never seen the remake - I know it can't be as good). In retrospect, I think it may have inspired me.

An interesting comic about "Learning" vs "Knowing" (via another HN comment)
http://jackiesfridge.comicgenesis.com/d/20001227.html
I love listening to Salsa music, even before I could pick up the beat and the words - which I'm still struggling to decipher.

Beloit College's Summer Intensive Language School (not for beginners?)

http://www.summerlanguages.com/index.php
Related: http://zfoneproject.com/faq.html (from the creator of PGP software)
Virgin Galactic's New Departure Point
Moonshine is a great name!

Do you have plans for handling rollbacks?
You're assuming that Chrome extensions can do cross-domain XHR... which I'm not sure about.
So basically you say that you didn't read the article, don't have any privileged information, but because of your beliefs you strongly disagree with it? And of course, you're not biased because you're a libertarian.

As far as little arguments you provided, the article's author would probably agree with you. Nine is too young an age to make career or sexual decision (he mentioned post-puberty at least 3 or 4 times), as for people with Down Syndrome or senility...

The thing we really should have an open debate about (not on HN, though) is how much of a scar CP leaves on the children. There is a lot of "common knowledge" floating around and way to little fact.

Also, some of the technical part was really cool. At one point he mentioned how zombie computers can be turned into something like Freenet, offering distributed storage and hosting. I always thought this could be one possible future for the Internet (a real "cloud"). It's somewhat a shame the first people doing it are outside the law. (Not that i dispute that they should be - most of them do stuff much more obviously harmful then porn).
There's a perverse relationship between Master's and PhD programs in the same department.

A PhD student is an investment: they will crank out papers with the school's name on it, they will carry around the school's name for the rest of their academic career, and their projects are more likely to bring in grant money.

Master's students are shorter term, don't go into as much depth, so there's less opportunity for papers and grants. They're less likely to be in academic circles after graduation, so the school's name doesn't get promoted.

Funding for Master's and PhD students comes from the same pool, so in many cases, getting into a PhD program can be easier than a Master's program in the same department.
Good point. But it'd be great to have a little bit of perspective from TechCrunch.
I'm so-so at this skill; I'm much better than when I was 22, but not great. I'm not at the level of proficiency where I could enter a large, elite firm at the entry level and become the CEO's protege within a month... and most rich kids can do this.

I'm in a startup, so there isn't this concept of authority or hierarchy in my case.

What I'd say is that you need to be able to go to work without fear. Fearing the boss antagonizes him on a subconscious (if not conscious level). He doesn't want to be a boss, in most cases. Fearing co-workers can socially isolate you. Careful confidence is one thing, but fear is professionally crippling, and the vast majority of people from middle-class backgrounds have way too much of it for their career's sake.

So, to answer your question: I don't personally go to work with fear, but I'm not in a hierarchical environment. I don't know how I would handle one if I went back into one.

One other trait I've noticed of Ivy League graduates in the workplace is that they handle grunt work pretty gracefully. You might think the opposite; having come from prestigious schools, they might act as if they're "too good" to do menial tasks, but the opposite seems to be the case. They handle it gracefully because it doesn't damage their confidence. (Of course, if you give an elite college grad only grunt tasks for 6 months, he'll leave because he's not learning anything; but that's different from the ability to take on an unpleasant project without getting insecure about being assigned it.)
Exactly. You're optimizing for a different outcome with graduate school.

The undergrads at Princeton were largely all generalists. The PhD students were all specialists.
I'm out of my league here, but as far as 'on-demand supercomputing' goes, I think Plura Processing is pretty close: http://www.pluraprocessing.com/
It's useful because we have a common-sense post to upvote. Common sense is much underrated.
I'm not sure what your point is, but Chrome doesn't use WebKit for JS, it uses Google's internally developed V8 engine, so don't expect JS to always run identically in Safari and Chrome.
So what does this do for me beyond all the other "cheap flight" websites?
I hate to play devil's advocate, but that kind of crap is the reason Facebook apps exploded. You don't get viral growth without supporting friend-spam.
The thing is that for browser extensions, I want hooks into the UI (even if fairly limited), not just modification of page content.

Hopefully chrome moves in this direction. I realize that it's a really hard thing to get right, especially in a browser.
http://redemptionincorktown.blogspot.com/

A friend of mine's blog about buying and fixing a house in Corktown in Detroit. It is very interesting to see a dilapidated house that is from 1856 be renovated to a 4000+ sq. ft. place. He is very handy and has done habitat for humanity for years so it may be a stretch for some people to do.

Nonetheless, a personal look at white middle class living in Detroit.
You must have been a very impressive applicant to have gotten into Princeton without a campus visit in 2000.
I downloaded it and tried it out and it was way too slow. For a simple, local, static web page, it took more than 3 seconds to see the results. It is much faster to run IE 6 in the VirtualPC image Microsoft provides.

Is this using some kind of online, BrowserShots-like service? I was expecting that it would have some specially-packaged internal version of IE6 inside of it, so that you would be using two local browsers that download the content through some kind of tee-like HTTP proxy (that is, everything downloaded once, and then sent to both browsers).
Not billions, but I could certainly imagine them paying millions if someone provided them with a passive break.

Much easier to tap a few fibre optic cables (either with or without the cooperation of telcos) than to crack individual systems -- and the risk of discovery is much less, too.
Yup...you're right. Maybe the URLs or even embedded within the script. An extension update mechanism (if any?) could bring in new versions.

But now I'm way out into conjectureland. Just thinking out loud here.
Linus unveils new "Tuz" logo
http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2009/03/new-logo.html
Seems like we still don't get to see ie7 and ie8 together, which makes this far from perfect. I'll stick with IETester for now and keep hoping that we can all drop support for IE6 soon.
From what I've seen, this is something with a lot of hype. I've seen a lot of smoke, but little fire.

Anecdotally, I've heard and seen that it helps, and that it hurts. I've seen people praise it as the answer to all productivity problems (along with TDD and ATDD, of course) and I've seen people curse it.

My opinion? It's good for leveling out the programmers on a team. If I had 6-8 team members I might have one pair going at all times -- usually the pairing up a weak/new developer with somebody who can help him. But I wouldn't expect productivity improvements -- I'd simply use it as a way of level-setting the team. It seems like a good mechanism for bringing people up to speed quickly.

Having said that, you have to let the team be the judge. If they like it, do more of it. If not, don't. Whatever you do, don't let hype and religion get in the way of the team performing. Life is too short to make it miserable by doing something everybody thinks is stupid.

Some of the TDD guys are doing ping-pong pair programming. That's where person A writes a test for new code, then person B writes code for the test and then writes a new test for new functionality. It bounces back to person A, who writes the new functionality and then a new test for new stuff, etc.

That at least seems more interesting for folks.

Personally, I don't like it. But I try to be open-minded about it (especially since I teach this stuff!)

Be aware that in some anal-retentive shops, pair programming is a security violation. (You're not supposed to be sharing your terminal session with anyone)
is that how they feel, or is finding their ID too much of a pain in the ass?
Just to make sure my memory is right, I did a GIS, and yup, that's what it is: http://www.flickr.com/photos/80823321@N00/466827649/

Stodgiest looking place? You just made my day. W&M has a chip on its shoulder when it comes to the Ivies. It's not an Ivy, and it's usually not thought of being in the same class as the Ivies, but they've been around as long. Every official document from the school says "Chartered 1693" because while Harvard started first, W&M got its charter first.
I'm sure there is a standard which says that... but the nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. :-)

It's not something which you should rely upon.
Discovery Files Patent Infringement Suit Against Amazon over Kindle
I liked that until I found out it was an ad.

It isn't logical, but after seeing the Samsung logo I felt used.
Transfer totals has no bearing on bandwidth speed. When I'm on wireless connections, or at work where I am forced to work from a connection shared with 400 other employees, the bandwidth required by ads actually takes up a significant amount of time. I don't even have any caps on my usable bandwidth, in any of the above situations or at home, but the speed can still be greatly affected by the number of ads being loaded that I don't even see. Even my cable internet provider still gives me only a measly 384kilobit upload speed, and that now has to be shared between even more outgoing connections?

To top it all off, from an ad-provider's perspective, why should I be paying for ad impressions that the end user doesn't even get to see? At least with Adblock, my server bandwidth isn't used, and my impression statistics aren't being impacted by users who aren't actually getting the chance to view the content...
Seedling - a pre-configured Joomla package plus extensions and modules
Iam not sure if NSA is serious about the money. However, iam sure NSA can force skype to provide them with the encryption algorithm for wiretapping. So instead of spending billions of money on third-party vendor, they might as well can work with skype. My 2 cents
If you're going to game a site, might as well make it a high traffic site- I'm sure Digg and reddit get the vast majority of the bots/fake users.

That said, I see no ethical distinction between asking your friends to vote for a story and asking a bunch of random people on the internet to vote for a story. Either way, you're stuffing the ballot box.

One only has to look at the myriad submissions by Alex Jones/truther "bots" on reddit to see that.
Moneyball meet Baskeball.
Richmond is a town of about 20,000 people, rust belt, some local industry still surviving. It has Earlham College, a Quaker liberal arts college. In terms of "scene", well, from comments here I'm sure all you young urbanite whippersnappers would be disappointed. In terms of sending my daughter to Earlham College for classes at $100/credit hour through the local high school's talented-students program, though, I'm totally pumped. Also the concept of not paying rent or mortgage at all, well -- thank God I can work entirely online, but y'know? This is really working for me.

Yes, the huge is freaking huge. I didn't actually think to look at aerial photography until after I'd bought it. I could probably start my own artist's colony just with the one house. Or hacker colony, whatever the hell that means. I guess with a big enough pipe, that would work out.

See the half-hexagonal bay window structure on the second floor? That's going to be the library.

The neighborhood is mostly blue-collar, mostly rentals now. In the early 1900's, or 1890, when this house was built, it was the Place to be Seen. I'm told there's a slight trend towards gentrification; these houses are truly stunning, and they built them to last.

I guess for the sake of fairness, I should quote city-data.com:

2007:
Murders	0.0
Rapes	37.7
Robberies	153.5
Assaults	255.9
Burglaries	1220.1
Thefts	3668.3
Auto thefts	323.2
Arson	115.8
How fast is your server? use just ping.
I don't understand how he can say that a CPU is as efficient as a GPU at floating-point operations. Yeah, maybe on a per-core basis, but you are comparing (like) 8 cores to (like) 240.

The basic difference is that the silicon used for hiding memory latency (cache) in a CPU is used for more raw computational power and memory bandwidth in a GPU. So if the data are structured so they fit into the data-parallel paradigm, the GPU will kill a normal CPU. Not because of some magic, but because they were designed to do that.

You wouldn't try to run an operating system on a GPU, or a web browser, or whatever. But to say that a GPU only can handle rasterization is to vastly understate the realm of applicability. There are plenty of fp-intensive, data-parallel tasks that fit very well into a GPU paradigm. A lot of scientific calculations, for example.
not currently, since the underlying configuration engine, Puppet, doesn't support rollbacks
It appears that this is Australian-based at this time? Not of much value to US consumers until it gets populated with relevant data from US airports (I cannot even pick "Seattle" as my home airport at this time).

I'm not sure how this brings me more value than Kayak or Farecast, but I did think the integration with facebook connect was nifty - nicely done! :)
Startup Founder On Google Entering Their Market
Ask HN: Review my Co-worker's startup, Finds live music events
Startup Hell - Everyone Wants Leadership
OK: s/always/often/
Also, this is JUST snapshots! (DOM and image) They stop running Javascript after the onLoad, and then stop. Thus, you can't examine any sort of interactive element. I want my upvote back...
these days it's pretty much impossible to get into the Ivies without a campus visit on record (or two, preferably).

I doubt that completely, as I know plenty of counterexamples. The eight colleges in the Ivy League

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League

mostly don't have any policy at all of tracking student interest when making admission decisions. All eight of those colleges know that they will get a good yield out of the smallish number of students that they admit.
How are you sure? It's not a U.S. based company- it doesn't appear NSA would have any holding over it.

"The company won't disclose details of its encryption, either, and isn't required to as it is Europe based."

Hence, their alleged offering of "billions".
Ones as uncommon as this are quite entertaining. I also like:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=571012
Offering "billions" sounds a bit ridiculous. Wouldn't you start with a couple million and see if there are any contenders before you break out the big blank check? Something's fishy...
We did not track visits. We still recommended them though. A lot of kids would either get fired up once they came to visit, or they'd realize they didn't want to go there. Either way, they had better info.
The income range you mention is eligible for SAT fee waivers

http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/sat/counselors-gu...

and is heavily recruited by Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, at least, being well within the scope of their financial aid initiatives.
While Apple's app approval process has been well-established as opaque and cruelly arbitrary, no one can be surprised that this app, of all apps, should have taken a long time to review. Almost by definition it steps on an awful lot of toes; I'm sure that if Apple has, as I think they've been documented, an interest in preserving the use space of their own apps AS WELL AS certain high-powered partners, then surely no one at Wundrbar can be surprised that their app, which in many ways is nothing more than a series of front-ends to other people's data, might have raised more than one eyebrow.
Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, Penn, and Stanford Go on Road to Recruit Students
I don't remember that specific episode, but for being on Nickelodeon, that show was quite frightening.
I'll chime in with counterexamples also; I have an ex-girlfriend and a number of cousins who got into multiple ivies (and Stanford) prior to campus visits.
I'd just like to add that at the per page printing costs of more efficient consumer class laser printers -- not to mention business/professional class -- self-printing hard copies of open textbooks could still be cheaper than purchasing printed textbooks at the prices I see mentioned these days in news stories. The current, large hurdle in this is color.

So, for black/grayscale print, your students might be able to have a printed copy (in addition to electronic) while you still come out ahead, in terms of cost.

I mention the consumer class printers really just to emphasize per-page costs and perhaps with regard to one-off copies. If you are trying to outfit several hundred students, you would probably want to farm the printing (and binding) out to a professional, on-demand printer. I'm unfamiliar with what happens to color costs in that environment.

My main point is that open textbooks may make economic sense, even without dropping a computer in front of every kid.
I'm late to answer this, but there are a few major tutorial aggregation sites: http://www.good-tutorials.com - http://www.pixel2life.com - http://www.tutorialized.com/
Don't know. When I asked them to send me their device ID, I received no replies.
What computers will look like in Utopia...according to Microsoft
I can't wait to see how many people pick the unique number 00123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF0123456
Yeah, I can deny it. I've worked in java shops for 2 years. The "good for enterprise" argument is bunk. All its lead to is inefficient and disastrous technology decisions, an inability to be agile and flexible in software development, and a general dumbing down of any smart engineers that happen to be stuck working there.

As a language, the best metaphor I can imagine is that Java is like the language of some Amazonian tribes. They don't have the concept of numbers bigger than 2. Its not about their brain power, just the way their culture and language has shaped their minds. That's basically what Java does to software engineers.
Looks more like in the eyes of Apple if you ask me
just sent you an email with my uuid.
Other people live in Pittsburgh?
That's a pretty good point, but requiring it for signup seemed a bit much. It was more than "now invite your friends."
Location location location. If you fear/hate your neighbors that much, why move there?
Oh wow. I just looked at the source. It's incredible what you can do sometimes with just a bit of integration!
What does Windows have to do with anything?

The NSA is hoovering up packets at AT&T switching stations and now they want to listen to some encrypted phone calls.

Here's my interpretation of the offer. They have no intention of paying for an attack. If somebody attempts to claim the reward they will say "Oh, no thanks, we don't really want your attack" and then rediscover the attack themselves.
I'm evaluating it atm. If you know of something exactly like TextMate that is just a text editor (syntax highlighting), and not an "interfering code suggestion tool", I'd be interested.
Foursquare Scores Despite Its Flaws
I visited there actually when looking for schools. Stodgy is the right word for it! Great school, too.