skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Elite schools are judged, in part, by how many applicants they receive each year.

Knowing this, the top schools have done two things:

1. Aggressively market themselves to students earlier and earlier.

Many of the top schools begin mailing material to students with desireable profiles as early as freshman year. When I left admissions in '06, people were starting direct mail campaigns to sophomores and we were all wringing our hands over the icky-ness of it.

2. Make it as easy as possible to apply.

For all the griping they do, applying to college is crazy easy compared to the process even just 10 years ago. All the top schools take the common application now. And top schools will often waive the application fee if you ask them nicely and tell them you can't afford it.

The impact?

Kids are applying to more and more schools each year. I don't cry for the kids who get rejected from Harvard. 60% of them applied to at least 7-8 other schools if not 12-13.

When all you have to do is check a box, why not apply to 15 schools?

This works out great for the schools. Their yields go down, but they get their hands on more applicants than ever.
It is luck. It's a big dice roll. If you're admitted to a place that you're excited about, then declare victory and hustle on to learning and making great things there. Leave all this silliness behind as soon as you can.
If the 17-inch MacBook Pro carries a Mac Tax, there's also a Dell Tax and an HP Tax.
Actually, they knew what they were doing wrong. Merton and Scholes pulled much of their money out a few months before it crashed, walking away with a decent profit (they, of course, lost nearly everything on the money they still had in the fund when it was recapitalized, eating into their returns). That's all in "When Genius Failed" too.

Technically they didn't start it either, they were just on the board of directors.
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>> "Clicked the wrong button in your adsense campaign? No appeal, we take your money."

Perhaps you mean Adwords sigh.
The user selected all of the campaigns, some of which were deleted, and clicked [resume]. I'm not really sure who else you could blame.

It also takes a second to check through afterwards to make sure you resumed the campaigns you wanted.
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage. -Anais Nin
One can't generalize from your personal anecdote. Medicine doesn't work that way.
I found this on Reddit http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/88ou0/cs_recomm...

It's a 400 page book to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2009.
It's starting to come up a lot in Google searches, which is better than paid-for sites, say. Make an effort to read through all answers and up-rate those that are lower down but you think are better. Sometimes they're newer and better but people ignore them and just consider the top one.
They even have Malayalam, that's quite a surprise, I thought maybe Bengali will come in before Malayalam, not that Bengali is any simpler to do than Malayalam.
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Maybe this is a way to provide more degrees of freedom to some of the more promissing 20% projects that don't make sense internally?
Trust, but verify.

No matter how much you trust your co-founder (and you should definitely choose someone you trust a great deal) make sure that there are adequate legal documents in place to protect your interests. If, years down the road, the person you trust ends up not being so trustworthy, you don't want to end up screwed. (I speak from painful experience....)
Stackoverflow is informational, educational & addictive!

Its "PerlMonks" for the general programming community.
"And I think the Xbox 360 is a bona fide hit in anyone's book."

That's an odd book you have there. The last I heard was that at least they are profitable now. However, there's 6 years or so of vastly unprofitable to pay back before they actually make any money from the venture. By that time we'll be into the next console war, and who wins that is anyones guess. (Whoever stops using discs for the love of god).

People hate MS for a variety of reasons. My top 3:

1. Taste - they consistently implement bad solutions rather than good, elegant solutions.
2. The internet - they show consistently that they do not understand the internet.
They loose enough money on it. They don't get advertising, building webapps, browsers, etc
3. Bullying - Squashing the competition and giving users a worse experience isn't nice.
It holds back progress. Suing people because they use the FAT format is ridiculous and indefensible.
The FAT format is so simple it's trivial.

They are irrelevant to most people in any event. Unless you work in the corporate world.
Maybe I'm not making myself clear. I realize you can in principle debug everything, know the state of the machine completely, etc. What I am trying to point out is that it is too much information to handle at that level of detail. It doesn't matter if it's written in Lisp or Swahili. And the fact remains that even if you convinced 90% of the next generation of programmers to use Lisp, you still have 50 years of legacy code lying around in other langauges. These are practical facts that can't be washed away with a new (or old) programming paradigm.
By the way, not very well known but benadryl (OTC antihstamine) and Chlortrimeton (OTC antihstamine) are some of the oldest substances, known to have serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibition features. In fact Prozac was synthesised from benadryl, in attempt to make it more potent antidepressant. Chlorpheniramine was researched by swedish scientist, who won Nobel prize (not sure for what exactly), in 1950-s and was found to have SNRI effects. But I beleive these will never be researched again - it hurts potential profits for Pharma.Who needs month of supply of antidepressant for $10, when you can sell it for 200?
>> "...translate "user error" into "design flaw." A mistake that is easy to make is a design problem."

How easy is it to make? One person has blogged that he made it. It's not easy to make IMHO at all.
If you translate "user error" into "design flaw", then your product will always have flaws. If you have functionality, someone will get confused and misunderstand.
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as someone raised in a family of 5 and now with a family of 5 of my own I'm not entirely convinced.
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>> "The folks on IRC ignored a polite request"

People do tend to idle on IRC :/ You may need to try a few channels, or wait until someone is awake ;)
Stack Overflow is ace!
Ask HN: Re-implementing an Open Source project in another language
If someone reimplemented a popular Open Source project in another language (say someone rebuilt PhpBB in Django), what would the license on the new project be?

Specifically, say it was reimplented as a black box (only page flow and maybe some shared ui assets css/js/img), and the final product looked the same but no web code similarities or database implementation details are shared.

Would one still have to release it as GPL? Could they release it as BSD instead?

Would you recommend a lawyer for this type of question? If so, please let me know if you have a referral.

Thanks in advance
I don't know how SO implemented their solution, but it's a solved problem, see bittorrent.
Considering every musical genre is at or below my final SAT score (1380/1600), it could only mean:

1. SAT's are not an indication of intelligence.
2. There is no correlation between type of music and SAT scores.
3. All music, including Beethoven, makes people dumber.

Author claims this is funny? What's funny? People that listen to Soca, Jazz, Hip-Hop, and Gospel make the dumbest students? Here's a correlation, which diaspora pioneered all four of those musical genres?

This is inaccurate. I love Lil Wayne. I don't remember the last time I enjoyed Beethoven.
I've tried to get something like this for the math/physics communities, but they're lagging behind a few decades. That code release by cnprog was painful to watch.
It means no such thing. The fact that a correlation exists on average doesn't necessarily mean anything for an individual.
This one is pretty simple. If you were to write a clone of (say) PhpBB without looking at the original source code but just re-engineering the functionality you wanted to replicate then you would have a new piece of software over which you could claim copyright and which you could license as you wish. This is just the same as sitting down to write (for example) a new word processing program that emulated key features of MS Word.

However, porting an existing GPL code base to a new language would I strongly suspect be seen as a simple "fork" of the original code and you would (quite rightly) have to release your new code under the GPL license. This is fair and just - you can't just rip off other peoples intellectual property no matter how much work there is involved in doing so.
How to Think Outside the Box
Not really user error. Deleted means deleted.
I dislike C++, but I like how sometimes it allows me to solve problems that everything else cannot do as efficiently.
Here is what happens when you talk to strangers:

You're now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!

Stranger: hi

You: hi

Stranger: sup boo

You: not much

You: 4am i should be sleeping

Stranger: exciting

Stranger: do you have a d%$^ or a c^%$?

You: so is this a bot or a per...

Stranger: person

You: ok its a person

Stranger: you?

You: or one sick alice bot

Stranger: not sure what that means

Stranger: but thanks?

Stranger: i take it you have a d%$^

Stranger: girls don't really know about bots and what not
Could you give me a source or the name of the algorithm, that allows this running time?
OK, if you want to pick the dangerous part of this, folks, it is NOT the construction. It is the fact of there being a pool, itself. Standing water kills children. It is one of the most prolific killers of children in the United States -- not as bad as that noted scourge, plastic buckets, but almost there.

Seriously -- we have REALLY warped senses of what is dangerous. What is the scenario for the pool "collapsing" when his children are playing in it? A 60 pound girl waves her arm displacing perhaps 2 pounds of water at a few inches per second, which then pounds the surrounding concrete to dust, causing it to fly at supersonic speeds into the water, in the direction opposite the water pressure? I didn't exactly do so great in physics but I'm finding that sort of unlikely.

The most likely failure -- his pool springs a serious leak. The garage gets written off. Oh well.
Very useful answer. Thanks!

One quick clarification.. what if I reused CSS and Image Assets from PhpBB? Its sort of strange there because there are many templates that are under different licenses than the source code itself.

How does one define GPL on CSS and Images? They are open by default (since anyone can view source on a browser). I'm guessing this IP is governed under a different set of laws (copyright?).
Do you see the future of YC investments as being acquisitions or building profitable companies?
Hmm.. not really. But its ok. andand is much cooler since you can call functions directly, and with arguments. Try is good for sending simple messages like :size and :errors and not have to care if the object is nil
Congratulations on getting in.

I graduated about 15 years ago. I'll give you a quick summary of the top people in my class. I went to an "average" midwest public high school with about 2000 students freshman year and 450 students graduating senior year.

If it is at all reassuring the one person I knew in high school who went to Harvard is now unemployed. He's also a schmuck and I wouldn't be surprised if he ended up in politics in the near future... no surprise.

Out of the other top ten in high school that I still keep in contact with three went to state schools on full rides and one went to a second tier ivy league school. They are a chiropractor, a vet and and two doctors. This is also no surprise if you saw them in AP Biology. I think I was the only one in the top 25 to go into Engineering (actually Computer Science). Everyone thought the best way to succeed was to be a doctor, which was largely due to growing up in my home town. The doctors appeared to be doing far better than most engineers or executives at engineering companies.

The most financially successful (as far as I know) is the girl who ended up at google working in the Marketing department pre IPO (I'll take luck over skill any day).

As for the admissions process, it's just the beginning of the journey. So don't get to wrapped up in it. From my experience: In a six months no one will ask you where else you were accepted... In six years no one will ask what your college GPA was... and in twelve years no one will ask where you went to college. Or at least they won't care much.. only in idle conversation. So use it as an opportunity and enjoy it while you can.
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Now, I'm not a structural engineer. However, if at the bottom of the pool you can crush/shear/buckle/etc concrete, you should also be able to crush/shear/buckle/etc six-year-old-girl, right? I'm betting the bending and tension load resistance of 6 year old girls are decidedly suboptimal for residential construction.

I see photographic evidence of six year old girl, decidedly uncrushed.
I wasn't trying to troll, I merely answered in the same tone as the submission title. Let's not blow this out of proportion.
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Not very interesting.

edit: Is it possible to have some filtering according to interests or whatever? Otherwise conversations are exceedingly random.
A more practical article was already posted on this topic:

Continuous Deployment at IMVU: Doing the impossible fifty times a day.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=475017
Ok I can't be the only one that doesn't find answers at SO.

The question that brandnewlow submitted was relatively simple and thus you found a quick answer. Try asking a challenging question and you are just as likely to find an old blog post with an answer as a StackOverflow answer. Now, I think SO has it's place. For instance when you are picking up a new language that is used in the industry. But I've rarely found answers there recently (C#, VB.NET or Lisp...).

I agree that they are improving and that some of the these rare challenging questions are beginning to be answered (Woot no complaints). And that when they are answered the answers are usually correct. But it's far from terrific.
I get the impression Harvard & Co. urge all high school students, whether they have a realistic chance at getting admitted or not, to apply just to decrease their admission rate. It's not very meaningful.
The difference between Twitter and bit.ly is that Twitter users greatly benefit from the network effects of having all the people they care about on Twitter.

With bit.ly it doesn't matter at all if I use the same URL shortening service they use or not. The second something better comes along, or Twitter decides to switch to something else, or they attempt to monetize it by inserting ads or something there will be a mass exodus.

Of course there's always the possibility that the bit.ly folks pitched some grand vision we don't know about to their investors.

On a related note, I have a feeling our reliance on URL shortening services is going to bite us in the ass in the future. When one of these service goes out of business you're left with thousands or millions of essentially dangling pointers. It also throws a monkey wrench into PageRank type algorithms.
First thought about the name: Phone-f*ck-you
Getting more complex now you are into the detail. Partly, things depend upon the laws applicable in a given instance. In some cases copyright has to be explicitly claimed and in other jurisdictions it is implicit. This has been touched on at HN before - CSS code (and JavaScript, HTML etc) is effectively open in that it is generally available to be read by all but it may still be 'owned' in the sense that copyright will often still apply.

Perhaps one should apply a 'moral' filter. It seems OK (if not inevitable) for one's designs to be strongly influenced by the layout and colour schemes of existing sites but it also seems proper that one should not copy CSS and layouts wholesale from elsewhere. There are plenty of tutorial sites demonstrating the most complex of CSS code - copy from them where it encouraged and then apply your own unique 'spin'.
SO is just amazing, pretty much useful in every aspect of programming and software development.
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It's cool, but I couldn't get into it - and I usually get into all of these sorts of sites. Why? People seem to answer questions almost instantaneously and as a new user I can't do anything to flagrantly incorrect answers. As a new user, I am next to powerless on there - at least on HN the only real "power" held back is downvoting. So I'm just a reader of SO and not a contributor - which is a shame really.
Clones FTW. Until we can clone and adjust environments to experimenters desires, the jury is out.
I always find it fun to imagine things topsy-turvy:

What if the Nazi's won, and we were now looking at some device built by famous Nazi crypto experts.

Suddenly it's Nazi propaganda! What does that say about us?
I'm surprised 41 comments have been posted and nobody has pointed this out...

From Drugs.com...
"What should I avoid while taking Paxil?

Avoid drinking alcohol, which can increase some of the side effects of Paxil."

http://www.drugs.com/paxil.html

From rxlist.com
"...Alcohol

Although PAXIL does not increase the impairment of mental and motor skills caused by alcohol, patients should be advised to avoid alcohol while taking PAXIL...."

http://www.rxlist.com/paxil-drug.htm

There usually a pretty good reason for medical warnings. Sherlock here made that pretty clear. He was warned not to drink alcohol. He drank. The side effects of the medication became more intense when mixed with alcohol just as he was told would happen.

If you are warned by a doctor and/or pharmacist not to mix alcohol with a medication, then don't mix alcohol with that medication.
The brain is not a general purpose computer running the "me" program. The brain _is_ the "me" program - the software is in the structure of the hardware. Different software yields different results. IANAN(...euroscientist) though, I just like reading Oliver Sacks et al., so take that opinion with a pinch of salt.
I use some chairs that were in use by a local supermarket and which got thrown out due changes in the interior. It may sound silly, but keep in mind that the people behind the counter need to set for long periods of time just like your average hacker. These chairs can be lifted to the point where I (my height: 1.96m) cannot put my feet straight on the ground anymore, have several 'joints' to setup and are the most comfy chairs I've ever used. I don't know the brand, so you probably need to ask at your local supermarket. Best of all I got mine for free.
#9 is especially important. The parameter parsing code in Rails < 2.3 was painful to work with for all but the most rudimentary forms. Great to finally see it in there!
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Indian languages are from the same family as English. Chinese is not.
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That's nonsense. I know at least 50 people with 1400+ SATs (on a 1600 scale) and only one of them is really into classical.

That statistic is wrong on so many levels. In particular, SAT scores correlate to the level of education, which correlates to the wealth of the family, the area they live and, therefore, the music they would be exposed to.
They are open by default (since anyone can view source on a browser).

That doesn't make them "open" in the sense of Open Source or Free Software. It merely makes them open in the same way a book is open...you can read it, and you could even copy it without technical impediment, but it can still be a copyrighted work.
Given the history of Google acquisitions killing products... is it silly if I'd be a little hesitant to chase their money? Doing business with Google seems iffy.
What do you mean by "start outsourcing their jobs on SO"?

I've had situations where instead of spending another day struggling with an issue on my own, I post a problem description on SO before leaving work, and have a good idea or two waiting for me when I get back in the morning. Sometimes it was there already when I did a late night check. SO makes me more productive. My boss does not exactly object to that.
Which only confirms the correlation. The author clearly points out he does not intend any causation.
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I just typed in a really long question on StackOverflow and pressed 'post', site is down and now I lost my question :(

it's nice if it works though
Life: a medical condition
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How I Duped The Sun Into Writing a Fake Article
The elephant in the room of this whole OnLive games thing is, why the heck are they bothering with video games?

If they have a technology that's capable of remoting games (which are some of the most demanding consumer applications imaginable), then the whole "Linux vs Mac vs Windows" debate is moot. If it can remote 3D, fast action games, it can remote whole OS's with ease. That's surely a 100x bigger market than games.

That, to me, casts huge doubts on their claims... it's like someone claiming they've solved cold fusion and are using it to power really strong, long-lasting flashlights.
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It doesn't make sense to "delete" campaigns in the traditional sense. How would you then get stats on your total spend over time, etc. Those stats are needed, and to remove them would cause even more confusion.
Relentless Resourcefulness ;)
Correct, however, it might make sense to have them more or less 'read only' without flipping a switch or two and being alerted to it.
Exactly I have already read this before and had thrown out all my Lil Wayne music !
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