skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: College internships?
Hi HN. I'm a college sophomore and I'm in a quite weird position now - I started off college thinking about medical school and essentially took a bunch of bio&chem classes. However, I recently had a change of heart... I'm either going to major in physics / minor in cs, or just cram the cs major into the remaining two years. I had some CS background in high school (took the AP course, learned some languages on my own).

The thing is, I'm looking for internships now in tech stuff and it's pretty hard to find anything that I can apply for. It seems like most of the stuff require 2-3 years of CS experience, something that I don't have. Does anyone have any ideas on how to pursue this? Can I get an internship in tech? How would you recommend I proceed?
Steve Wozniak Wants Your Vote
Stop the Presses? Many Americans Wouldn't Care a Lot if Local Papers Folded
When I say Dreamworks, I mean Dreamworks in terms of PDI Dreamworks Animation SKG... the animation division.

That article you quoted is irrelevant, it talks about Dreamworks Pictures (the non animation division) which is doing horribly (can you name anything of late that they've released that did well?)

Perhaps instead of reading an article from a blogger and becoming an instant expert, it would be wise to read the annual reports sometime which are freely available. Or even just read some of the press releases from the company itself.. I'll give you a headstart.

http://ir.dreamworksanimation.com/dwa/opencms/company/news/n...
This is true for now. But software sells, and the big software companies (Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Oracle, Google, etc ...) practically have unlimited financial power. I do understand why most computers come with a Windows-tax, but it's not because of technical superiority.

The only thing that's stopping them is the fast progress of technology, and the inability to scale your production by hiring all the programmers you can get your hands on ... thank God it's still an industry that requires talent, making it very hard to beat a handful of talented engineers with 100 day-workers.

But I wouldn't bet against such groups in the future. DRM is failing because it's a poor technological solution applied to a social problem, but I'm waiting for the day when the Internet will be regulated ... it's already happening.
That's kind of the point, nothing was said that wasn't already public available information, yet people got angry at Xach for saying it.

The lack of trust is not trusting the community not to abuse an explained hack, and the whole is made dumb by the fact that anyone can figure out the hack for themselves even if it wasn't explained to them.
Whenever I see a webapp that's popular and has no ads, I can't help but wonder why. Sure, maybe they have a non-ad-based business model further down the pipeline, but what do they lose by putting up some ads? I doubt that they would lose many users, and it would slow their burn rate, at least.
Thanks for your comments, this is really helpful!

- Good point, we used the 'D'-icon to show other team members that a discussion was needed before this task could be completed, a sort of specific 'waiting for'. Conversely it would also indicate when there was no discussion needed. We could make this more clear.

- The "broken blinking 00h00 thing" :) is indeed currently the only actual timer in the app. It counts hh:mm you're currently working on something. So it does time, but we know there's room for improvement there. The name Thymer also fits with the names of other products we're working on, we'll blog about that soon.

- You're right. Sorry it should be made more clear that the name it meant as a short tag (which you can type fast to assign tasks to it), whereas the description can be used to add additional information and a longer name.

- True, it's used as a separator with some nice visual touch, but I realize it implies some relationship. I'll look into it, thanks.

Good point about the real examples. That was actually the idea but the tag/description thing is obviously very confusing. It will be fixed.

[edit:layout]
He didn't necessarily say he was mad.

He did say it wasn't cool - which is a fact.

What xach did wasn't cool, although perhaps inevitable on a public site.
People you think who are full supporter of capitalism, are actually supporter of bastarized capitalism.

You want people who are called anarcho-capitalists.

These group of people litterally believe that everything should be run by the free market. IE. polycentric law system, private courts, and private defense agencies.

One interesting study of free market anarchism is midevial iceland. It managed to last for centuries.

Basically, the title and office of cheftain were litterally for sale and anybody can buy the title. However, those cheftains doesn't collect taxes. No, they compete for people to follow them. This creates virtual jurisdictions rather than physical. Cheftains's job is to appoint judge and keep the peace.

It work well too. In fact, abritation was so deeply embedded in their society, that they even tries a ghost for trespassing a house, making it haunted. They were confident that a good icelander ghost would respect the court.

Even murder was treated as a private matter too. The dude that murdered the other dude have to pay the family's such and such fines after settling. If the family is too poor, they can sell the claim to somebody who can persecute the murderer.

Otherwise, if the murderer refuse to pay his retribution fines. He will have no protection under the law and anybody can kill him with no consequences.

A murderer also can be punished even harsher if he tries to conceal his guilt. Upon the murder of a man, he have to announce the fact and not travel beyond a certain distance.

The eventual collapse of system is due to the fact that cheftains voted unanimously to convert to Christianity. So they got the first real tax in the form of a chruch tithe, which everybody is bound to support. The cheftains, no longer contrained by competition, can start misbehaving. Eventually it got so bad that the icelanders choose a Danish king over those warring cheftains.
I've been a Ruby guy for years and I loved Erlang right away. It's a splendid language.

It's going to be a while before Reia can completely abstract the OTP platform so if you want to work with it any time soon, learn Erlang.
(Edit so to speak :-)

This guy is so wrong that it is hard to know where to begin. He is arguing from
a false premise to a false conclusion. It's like a creationist argument. He says
that things were great in the late middle ages. Wages were the highest ever.
Well that is true for a few hundred years either side of the fourteenth century. But the
real reason is not the superiority of economic system, but because everyone else was
dead. Sure wages were high. but that was because the hundred years war, the black plagues,
and the little ice age had killed off 2-thirds of the population. As soon as the
good times were over, it was misery all over again. Contrast that with now. Half the
world's population is middle class. Three billion vs a few 10's of thousands in the
late 14th century. And middle class today is a lot better than well-to-do of 600
years ago.

Then he conflates a whole bunch of things, government monopoly with corporations, the
British East India with American trade. Government monopolies have a history as long
as history. The medieval guilds are an example. The American patent system is another.
Before the invention of corporations, investors were partners in an enterprise and all
were liable far beyond their investments in the event of the enterprise's default.
Over the long run the two are independent concepts. If he made the argument that
large corporations tend towards monopoly, he made it in an exceedingly roundabout
way. As far as I know the British East India Company had nothing to do with the
Americas. There was a lot of tension because of a British law that all trade to
and from British ports had to be on British ships. The Americans sent their cotton
to England because we did not have the manufacturing capacity to produce fine
woven cloth. (IP restrictions also.)

He also argues against government monopoly of currency. You get things like grain
based currency when there is no stable currency. Early in US history currency was
privately issued by banks. That proved to be a pretty lousy system. If the bank
went under, not only did you loose any deposits, the value of the currency went
to zero. Yeah, I would really like to be holding AIG currency right now. It's
bad enough they have my life insurance. I live in California and we damned near
had California currency, because Republicans refused to allow a budget. Nobody
here was looking forward to it.

I personally think we have a huge problems with monopolies: the banks, the energy
companies, the information infrastructure, the drug companies. And the recovery
financing is making it worse. Good stuff for HN discussion. It's just that this
guy is so wrong in so many places that he pollutes the discussion.
I know Y Combinator is about starting up companies, but what about existing ones? We're less than six months old and would love the experience, however we are "ramen-profitable" with a bootstrapped investor structure. I think we're too far ahead for YC.
I don't know about ABC, but I know when we did the thing last year with Rick Astley that MTV fudged the votes.

One of the IT people from MTVNE showed me that within the first week, we had managed to do more than 100 million votes for Rick (he showed me hits on their web servers/databases and then told me the actual number). By the end of the voting period nearly four weeks later, the "Official Tally" was that Rick had only 110 million votes total (80% of all votes for all categories though) and having seen the actual ouputs of the votes/sec on MTV's database servers and doing napkin math, this just doesn't add up.

Lets hope that ABC doesn't do something similar, but it wouldn't shock me if they did.

EDIT - sidenote. I've been asked and emailed by several people if I could spearhead another campaign to do the same thing for Woz that we did for Rick. Autovoting on a sked and emailed by several people if I could spearhead another campaign to do the same thing for Woz that we did for Rick. Autovoting on a very large scale. To be honest, we proved that it was possible, we showed that online voting very large scale. To be honest, we proved that it was possible, we showed that online voting was inherently flawed and really...once was enough.

Besides, Woz has said he wouldn't want to win that way so we really should respect his wishes.
The load is low and Thymer is on a fast server - but our hosting provider reports package-loss and higher latency for a users in our data center, so I hope this is only a temporary problem. Responses are instant here, so we thought it didn't affect us.

If it isn't we can always lease servers in the US, so even if the latency doesn't improve we'll figure something out. Thymer is instant for us, and it should be instant for everybody else. I doubt we'll get around to leasing servers in the US before we launch though -- so please bear with us.

And thanks for wishing us luck. We want Thymer to be great too -- creating passionate users and all that.
These days, reality is breaking left and right. Notions like prestige will be left in the dust until society someday reorders itself. Right now it's a continuous chorus of "What! You can actually DO that?" coming from the people who play those games.
Interesting paper, but I think it has very little to do with cable tangling behind computers. It seems to me that the latter is more a function of manually plugging and unplugging cables over time, where we are manually forming knots--like tying a shoe very slowly.

The main difference I see is that the strings in this study were allowed to move freely, while cables are connected on at least one end, often both.
Battlestar Galactica is a subject of a panel discussion in the UN
I can't help but submit this story, since BSG is probably quite popular with Hacker News community.

Battlestar Galactica has finally found the real Earth...

--
The last episode of this wonderful and thought provoking sci-fi saga will be shown this Friday, March 20.
Those figures for companies given as examples seem off.
It is a potential legal problem, but not a nightmare. The solution can be fairly simple: include a clause that says that the "legalese" is the contract, and the summary is not. You could even summarize that contract in non-legalese, saying, "Pay attention to the main text, not to this summary column; the real legal action is over there."
Startup Lessons from The Snowball
I think we know exactly how you feel. I've spent countless hours trying and installing different applications, and they ultimately all disappointed.

Thymer is by no means finished -- but we think it shows promise. If you want to invite your girlfriend to Thymer create an account and team for her via the "settings" link in the upper right corner. It's not intuitive -- I know, this will be fixed in the near future.
Twine Could Soon Surpass Delicious, Prepares Ontology Authoring Tool
Yeah, I mean clearly the cupboards aren't bare in his house. I just watched him come down the stairs and I thought it was Cartman from South Park dressed up & rollin' with a hot chickie.
A friend of mine used to ship things to his office for much the same reason, it was cheaper to ship a large load to a business address (something to do with rates for freight). Once he ordered ten huge CRT monitors, and then sold nine of them to his friends. Ended up both getting a new monitor and making a profit.
It's interesting that on HN, this domain is listed as (.informationarchitects.jp) . Maybe there's a bug in the URL parser that's incorrectly grabbing the ".info"
Well, Google was being silly, too, for keeping that open. But, yeah... nice.
Legal, accountancy, merchant accounts, angels, acquisition structuring, location, hiring, student loan implications, insurance, company formation, IP, visas, data protection compliance. These are a small selection of topics (taken from Gabriel's AskYC archive) where local advice is important.
Ask HN: How much would you pay to keep your local newspaper afloat?
I asked my roommate this question today. We both decided $20.00/year (in addition to any normal subscription fees). How about you?
I'm not sure it would take something extraordinary ... just something else. I've seen these cycle through universal usage a lot: LiveJournal, Xanga, Friendster, MySpace and Facebook have all come in and out of vogue among the hordes I'm acquainted with. Perhaps it's generational, or perhaps it's something else, but it seems that every three or four years something supplants the old gathering place. It'll be interesting to see if Facebook stays at the top of the wave longer; I think there's a case that it's different and/or better and therefore less likely to lose audience, but I dunno. I do know that many girls I know can spend hours upon hours upon hours looking at Facebook every single night, whereas I don't really notice the same effect in males.
This might make a contract more expensive to develop but if courts started holding these sorts of contracts in higher regard, perhaps it would justify the cost. I'm not a lawyer but intuitively it seems that if a contract has a big summary that says "we're allowed to eat your baby", it will more likely withstand a challenge than one that hides that clause in page 30. No one could claim they weren't aware of that clause.
Would this be an improvement to the iphone keyboard?
To correct an error, you can drag a button to another one. For example, if you press W instead of Q, you can then drag the W to the Q to correct your error.

This is actually already supported but not in an after the fact way. Once you take your finger off the screen, you won't be able to correct your error in this way.
I'd be shocked if there aren't already a thousand startups in london. They're just not connected.
how much are you willing to work for? what skills do you have? what hobby cs projects have you done? (when I hire, that's what I look at. If you don't have hobby experience, you are probably a 'just a job' type, and you are at a serious disadvantage competing with someone who is actually interested in the technology. I can give you production experience. I can't make you think it is interesting.)

If you don't need money, your options are wide open. you can do a starup with $0, if your living expenses are taken care of.
Glad you like Thymer!

We definitely want to build an iPhone app, but it is a lot of work to make, so we're probably first going to iron out the flaws in this version and then release version 1.
While I agree that Jim Cramer got ripped apart... and I don't really care for Cramer anyway, I didn't care for Jon Stewart's attack on long term investing. People on Wall St. were not engaging in long-term value investing, but in short-term speculative BS that led to the mess we're in now. When Stewart directs blame at CNBC for not acting like more of a watchdog, he should really look at the ratings agencies. When previously reliable entities tell you something is solid, why would you look further? CNBC is getting its data from ratings agencies and regulatory bodies like the SEC. If they've never had to dig deeper before, why would they have started in the last year?

There is just way too much blame to go around to even get started here.
It isn't so much that legalese is a separate language with its own subtleties; it is just that it is language with predictable effects in courts. Think of contract language as code, except the only time you get to run it through a debugger is when someone sues. Only then do you get to find out whether your code runs as intended, i.e. whether a judge interprets it to have the effect you intended. Once language is proven to have a certain effect, lawyers like to re-use that language in the sometimes naive belief that it will always be given that meaning. The tradeoff here is that the language can be difficult for laypeople to understand, especially as usages change. Some of the most notorious legalisms are redundancies, like "free and clear," that according to some scholars date back to the Norman conquest, when contracts were written simultaneously in two languages (free being Germanic, clear being Latinate).

There is another comparison here: recall how Joel Spolsky criticized the Netscape team for throwing out their old code and starting over? Lawyers can make the exact same criticism about people who want to disregard legalese.

(I should really start blogging about this).
Thoughts on the new Facebook Homepage
Not hilarious if we start getting swamped with budding script kiddie attacks. This is a nice community, it would be great if we didn't start attracting that type of attention.
About niche based social networking?
Viagra could kill you
I believe that's the reason that the Mono project specifically disallows contributions from anyone who has laid eyes on any of the .Net source code, although it's still a somewhat gray area AFAIK.
Social Media: Culture = f(UI)
Does anyone(anything) package php-fpm (or whatever you are supposed to use) together with nginx?
I would rather know what other people think after I decide what I think. Nothing is contributing to groupthink on this site more than the fact that we don't use blind voting.
$0 my newspaper isn't going anywhere. It's just going to bring 3 major papers in my area down to 2 and get rid of some of the smaller papers.
> I read your post to mean that you were not considering
> the payoff, and only the probabilities.

Ultimately, the payoff is just acting as a constant offset to the break-even point (assuming the payoff doesn't vary with some other parameter). The skewed payoff may mean that you only need 25% accuracy to break even or it could mean that you need 95% accuracy to break even. It doesn't matter. Either way, you can effectively ignore it and consider, for a given payoff schedule, how your prediction algorithm will perform.

If we live in a universe where you can under-perform a coin toss and still make money because of how the bet is skewed, then I can do better by flipping a coin!

If the bet is skewed the other way, then we will both lose money but my coin toss will lose less.

Let me restate that: you can completely dissociate your prediction algorithm from your cost function

> As for the rest, what does "opposite trade" mean? For
> instance, going short versus going long carries very
> different risks. It's unlikely that your payoff would
> simply be mirrored.

Here my (lack of) knowledge of the various types of financial transactions that can be made puts me at a disadvantage, but the way the "article" describes it, the rats were trained to press a green button (long, betting prices were going to go up) or a red button (short, betting prices were going to go down).

There are only four outcomes here (as I understand it):

* Predict Up, Moves Up
* Predict Down, Moves down
* Predict Up, Moves Down
* Predict Down, Moves Up

It's possible that you can better predict upward movements than downward movements, but lets assume for simplicity that you (or the rats) are equally bad at both.

If you were able to predict at 25% accuracy, I would take what you told me (up or down) and flip it-- because you are actually performing at 75% accuracy, you just don't know it. Then I would make a trade. I don't know what the most clever trade that could be made based on that knowledge, or what the various payoffs associated with them are, but as I showed above, it doesn't matter for the analysis.
In nearly all cases you won't make enough money to increase your burn rate at all.

When you're focusing on growing your user base, its not worth it to lose a few users and generally make your site a little less usable and appealing for $100ish dollars a month.
It's already been written: The Book of the Book by Idries Shah (1969).

http://www.amazon.com/Book-Idries-Shah/dp/090086012X
Creative Commons takes the same approach. Each license comes with a "Deed", which is a human-readable summary of the full legal code of the license. A disclaimer points out that the text of the deed has no legal value.

Given that CC was started and is run by lawyers, I doubt they would shoot themselves in the foot like this if they thought it would cause problems.
SXSW 09 Even Faster Web Sites - Steve Souders
I'm glad you like the way we try to hide features until you need it, and some good points, thanks!

1 - we use the comments ("discuss") section for this as it also allows for all this formatting, but it might be nice to bring this to descriptions as well

2 - Yep, we also need those. Attaching files is part of a bigger problem - managing, indexing, finding and sharing digital documents. Uploading and finding back attachments can be really frustrating. We're thinking about solving that problem in a more fundamental way, while keeping it really simple to use.

3 - We want to keep the design 'clean'. the interface should not interfere or distract. we also want to continue on this line when adding new features.

4 - Someone else also commented on this, going to look into that.

Right now our priority is fixing all the glitches but we're definitely going to look into this. Thanks.
It's been cleaned up a bit since that was posted. The release notes have a nicer, more concise example:

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/2_3_release_notes.html
Flex and Bison come to mind, but they are tailored more for the point of generating new language parsers and compilers. You could, however, attempt to use them in another fashion, considering they are open source (BSDish and GPL respectively).

Although I have looked, I've been unable to find much more than a bunch of whitepapers and various incomplete projects.
As a kid I never understood why some of the kinds made it a hobby to trash the sandcastles built by the others. It was an interesting phenomenon to watch :)

Maybe they thought that if they wanted to, they can do better, but they never did.
All of them are almost orthogonal.