skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I went to Southern CT State University, which is basically a glorified community college. ("I went to college in New Haven." eyebrows "Oh, Yale, huh?" "No, the New Haven college you HAVENT heard of.")

You do not really appreciate the quality of universities in the USA. Even the university that you view as "second tier" is excellent by world standards.

Also - smaller universities that focus on undergraduate education often provide a better education than large research oriented universities.
PyCon ORM panel liveblog
Hmm good place. Fond memories of CMU and Shadyside Inn. But CMU hasn't succeeded in producing great startups like Stanford ! May be u guys can change that.
Slides from James Bennett's "What I've Learned about DVCS" PyCon talk
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The benefits of finding the best free keyword research tools online today are plentiful for you. With so many popping up online you often ask yourself which one is worth using for my basic keyword research needs.
27 here, working at Google and loving it, saving close to 80% of my monthly take-home pay. Debt free, with investments relatively intact.

However, I've got a friend from college (history major) who's about to turn 26. She's ensconced in grad school now, but previously had a string of temp/secretarial jobs. She wrote this lately:

"What's really got me bugged is the possibility that I might do everything right, I might have been a good student, good friend, good worker, good citizen, and still might not ever have a home or a family. That I might have done everything a "successful" person does,
yet end up with none of the things I truly wanted most. It's not that I have a specific image of that "picket-fence" life. I'm not worried about "having it all"; it's the fact that I might not be able to swing any of it.

"If I knew this in high school, I'd have done more drugs."

It seems like one's success in today's world is directly proportional to your ability to believe that all your elders are lying to you. I was always pretty contemptuous of authority, so I did the end run around all my teachers and school administrators and taught myself stuff - stuff that was useful outside of school, not just inside the academic bubble.

Perhaps this is as it should be - I remember in one upper-level physics class, the professor said "You should be getting most of this out of the textbook" and a student helpfully added "Or in class." The teacher said, "No. If you're only learning from class, you're in trouble. I should be mostly superfluous." The students were basically flabbergasted.

But if your success is proportional to how much you believe authority figures are lying to you, what does that mean for the authority figures? "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." What happens to the social structure when people realize their leaders are basically lying, cheating, and stealing from them?
My university copied one of MIT's old versions of Athena, and called it project Vincent. It was fantastic, so far ahead of anything else I'd seen in 1998. Too bad they started to phase it out and lessen support in favor of a big microsoft network. Though it happened when non technical students started to use computers too.
Dear A.I.G.: I Quit
Why do I keep writing C++?
Kevin Rose's people-powered Twitter directory - wefollow
That looks like give it away before you ask for money for it. The checkbox is interesting though.
2.5 Meg 64-bit OS With tools and all source
+ Uses Canvas + Javascript
+ Loads faster than flash based solutions ( balsamiq or IPlotz )
+ I like the hand-drawn look
- not enough tools such as align , snap.etc
- no multiple pages

Really nice work though!

I've been looking at these mockups tools lately and none really does 100% of what I want. Maybe I'll write one.
Well, for what it's worth, at Stanford every cluster I've used works just fine. I wouldn't mind a bigger quota (I don't think I even get 1GB) but other than that, no complaints.

Well, it would be nice (no pun intended...) to force people to run long MATLAB jobs with nice, but oh well.
Without needing to dive into the details, I don't think it would change things a bit if "regulators" were offering free cocaine to anyone who asked for it: it would not somehow absolve the junkies of the responsibility for their choice to snort it up.
That makes perfect sense, thanks. There are a few reasons why I posted it to HN:

* I had to pick my battles when I was there and this wasn't one of them. I've emailed this to friends who are current students; hopefully something will come of that.

* I wanted to confirm that this wasn't just a UT CS thing. As I expected, there are a bunch of responses attesting to similar experiences at other places in the comments below.

* I was also curious to see the discussion on what people think would be a good way to run the labs (or at all.)

For anyone who wants to take the lead in trying to get things to change at their univs, I hope this post will serve as a confirmation that you're not alone and you should be able to find many other students to join you in pushing for change.
I read the first couple of entries and still have no idea what/when/where this is. Instead of talking at length about SXSW, this page should contain all the relevant information right at the top
Basic Tips on Forex Trading Training
And how would you protect from fraudsters using your service?
After looking at the website, it appears that the software is not custom, it's just stuff you can already use at home already: lumosity.com, the art dealer game, brain age, etc.

It looks like they are selling the "experience" to seniors, rather than the software itself. This isn't a bad tactic, lots of retired people are looking for new ways to get out of the house and stay busy.
Not a bad idea.. you could write in your lang of choice, presumably Ruby or Python, Scheme/lisp with a syntax / DSL you like.. then generate obfuscated/compressed PHP to run on the many cheap LAMP hosting platforms :]
Disgusted is too strong a word, but I think people should be bothered. I know I am.

I was just trying to draw a parallel between false advertising on the internet by individuals, and false advertising we see through mainstream channels every day. I don't think we should give the latter a free pass because it's been around longer.
It seems like one's success in today's world is directly proportional to your ability to believe that all your elders are lying to you.

Rather than outright lying, much of it is due to the generation gap. Parents and other elders are just suggesting what worked for them. Doing everything right by being a good student, good worker, and good citizen was almost a surefire way to a successful, stable life until "Generation X" started to come of age.
Would You Trust Less a Business Partner Who Cheats on His/Her Spouse?
Why is that your favorite idea? It sounds like the most potentially harmful to us, long-term, by far. I'm no ecologist but I have to imagine changing our orbit could screw up the balance of our ecosystems pretty badly.
Sadly, a bunch of Googling and Yahooing hasn't turned up a reference. I'd seen the first blurb in print possibly as far back as the late 80s/early 90s, perhaps in 'Chemical and Engineering News'. (Their online archives only go back to 1998.) The later followup that suggested Soviets had done similar calculations might have been early-to-mid 90s, might have been online... but unsure.

Yes, the moon-mining disaster in 2002's 'Time Machine' was pretty cool. The Orlando Bloom computer that still works 800K years in the future was more far-fetched than the moon collapsing, though.

Turns out both the US and USSR considered demonstration nuclear explosions on the moon before thinking better of it:

The US:

http://partners.nytimes.com/library/national/science/051600s...

The USSR:

http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/histind/E3/E3orig.htm

And more recently, scientists have suggested a series of other-body-flybys could move the Earth to a further orbit:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1154784.stm
"NASA's goal is to find 90 percent of those that are one kilometer across and larger. We're at 82 percent right now, and we've only been aggressively searching at current levels for eight to 10 years. Those ones just haven't flown into view."

Can anyone work out/explain how they know they're detecting 82% of them?
> Regulatory capture is a consequence of regulation, so its effects are problems with regulation.

My point was that if we are looking for people to blame, whether we chose to point the finger at Wall St or at "regulators," it turns out it will be the exact same group.

> And they were hedged by contracts that were of comparable size.

Not at AIG they weren't, which is why so much of our taxpayer money is flowing through them to the counter-parties of their CDS contracts -- e.g., Goldman Sachs.

> Note that the foreign banks that bought AIG policies did so with the express permission of their regulators.

So when a regulator gives you permission undertake an activity, by doing so they also lift all responsibility from you when you choose to go ahead with it? Regulators have made it possible for me to drink, does that mean it is their fault when I contract alcohol poisoning?
That's a much better way of putting it.

But will people my age see it that way? Well-intentioned or not, it's still wrong. All that many of my friends see is that they do exactly what their parents said to - in some cases, spending years of their life for it - and they're doing worse than people who ignored it all and happened to get lucky.
This is a really interesting idea, but I'd like to see more examples with some actual data. For example, how many people check the box? Of those, how many actually sign up when the service is available?
This is a more banal explanation, but majoring in something more useful than history might have helped. My sister is about to graduate with a BA in history and she can't find a job either.

Put another way, I study CS and I've never had a hard time finding work...and I don't owe it to mistrust of my elders.
Let's say that there was an article saying that C++ is a great language because it supports templates, so you can easily customize your blog style with it.

That's so far beyond wrong, I'd consider it spam. This is the HTML version of that error.
The 10 cents to the dollar allows you to absorb some fraud. You also check the applicants records, and for those cases where there is too much uncertainty offer payment only after a successful lawsuit (you my want to pay out 25 cents to the dollar in these cases to reflect the reduced risk).
It's my favorite because it's unique, plausible, and thought-provoking -- not just 'blow up or deflect the asteroid' (as just about every other idea is).

The essence of the idea was that it only takes a tiny, tiny change for the Earth to wind up far away from the collision location, though not necessarily any different in its average orbit. So climate/ecosystems wouldn't necessarily be affected.

But now that you mention it, the second mention of the idea I saw -- ejecting moon mass to subtly change the Earth's orbit -- may have been in the context of intentional climate engineering rather than asteroid defense.
"Easily"? I suspect that since C#3 offers lambda expressions that you'd need to use something close to (although probably different from) full H-M inference... in fact, it seems like it may need to be nearly as complicated as Scala's type inference, which is saying something. =)
I noticed a similar effect on my opinion about movies and books. I am extremely influenced by what I hear, to the point that a movie that I love when I see it for the first time is completely spoilt the second time if I heard a disparaging comment by someone I respect. The same thing almost made me stop listening to music. I've heard so many bad things about Houellebecq that I know there is no point in even trying to read his books.

This sounds like I can be easily influenced, but it may also be that I am more conscious of these effects because I find it very important to judge things by myself.
The $99 netbook is this decade's $400 MSN rebate
This is extremely wise. There are too many people bankrupting themselves by having a too large wedding. What is worse is that some people delay marriage for a few years in order to save up for the reception. Another approach for this "fancy" weddings is to keep it small or not to allow children (which is stupid).

The best marriage I attended was in a farmers tractor shed (don't know the direct translation) - everyone was welcome and it was all around fun.
The fact that they're both in the spec (as I said, for backward-compatibility reasons) does not mean that they're both useful.

There is a dead horse that the web development community has been beating for ages, as to what exactly is the difference between an ABBR and an ACRONYM, and if there even is a difference. http://tinyurl.com/d9vngz Is HTML an acronym, or an abbreviation? HyperText is one word, so it's not an initialism like FBI. What about radar or Nabisco, or other words that were once acrobrevinitialisms but are now treated just like regular words?

The general consensus seems to be: every acronym is an abbr, but not every abbr is an acronym; IE6 supports acronym and not abbr; but abbr is better supported by JAWS and other screen readers, and is supported by IE7+ and the other major browsers. Therefor, abbr is always at least as semantically appropriate as acronym, and better serves the people that the tag is designed to serve. Use abbr, and avoid acronym.

The HTML spec only one definition of the language; it says little to nothing about best practices or trade-offs in using various tags.
Facebook: The Road to 200 Million
Agreed...the about page isn't much better.
C++ is in itself just a tool. Some of the choices in programming involve using the right tools for the right job. If all you are need is a quick and dirty app to do something quickly, using C++, or even Java, it is like pulling out the bazooka to swat a fly.

Not many apps these days need C++. You can do many things without it. But C++ is needed for certain situations and there is no getting around it..it could be requirements on speed, size, performance and sometimes even portability.
Especially when you're manipulating something that looks like you drew it with a pencil anyway.
Yes, it often seems that SCSU's only failing as a university was that the landscaping and architecture weren't as nice. The bureaucratic hassles were often pretty annoying, and from what I've heard, they aren't so bad at private schools.

But yeah, there are lots of very good, very cheap schools in this country. I have almost no student loan debt to speak of, and I got a great education. Not to mention that you can watch a lot of lectures on youtube and whatnot.

The main advantage of a prestigious school seems to be that you get to rub elbows with rich people's kids.
"Bottom Line: I think less of a person who cheats on their partner, but in a professional context I do not distrust him/her altogether. I just trust them less."

Personally, I probably wouldn't know. People dont confide such things in me and I dont look for it. If it is just one more example of untrustworthy behavior, probably I would take it into consideration. If it's just something in a relationship, it's none of my business.
The best and most obvious defense against an asteroid strike would be not put all our eggs in one basket and diversify our planetary holdings. Colonizing other worlds seem to provide the most bang for the buck in terms of protecting both what we have and what we will achieve from catastrophic failure of the earth.
I did just fine as a mathematician... then again, I spent most of my free time hanging out with the artists, because they had better parties.
There's a famous music sharing group where you can only become a member if someone vouches for you. If someone snitches, then they are thrown out of the group along with the person who vouched for them. (Or something like that.)

This sort of system seems like the right idea for preventing fraudulent sellers.
I agree with what you're saying, and would like to point out that I don't think this marriage ethic is America's alone.
Yeah. And the changelog for the tzdata package is quite interesting in that regard. Usually changes in timezone information occur months or years before they actually need to occur (including recognizing leap seconds).
Ah, yes... the recession. I keep hearing about it, but I'm just not feeling it.
One more question:

I wonder if there could be some anti-intellectualism somewhere in there.

Like: If you do math & such for health reasons, to keep your brain fit, that's cool. But if you read a bunch of history and physics books (without being forced to) just to know lots of things, that's pretentious and you're just trying to be better than us normal folks.

Not sure it's a very strong argument, but curious to know what others think.
Is it possible to reacquire a wifi signal from an iphone app?
It seems that you have to exit the app so that your iphone/ipod touch will try to reacquire the signal.
If nothing else, you've got a list of hot sales leads. And if you've got halfway decent analytics, you could figure out that, say, people who come to the site through a google ad are more likely to check the box than those from TechCrunch (or whatever).
Same here. And he wants me to work all the time.
Scientists film HIV spreading for first time
Even with mulligans, I'd argue that mana screw is one of the biggest failings of M:tG. Make your best estimate of what percentage of games you think are decided by mana screw or mulligan-reduced hands, then ask: "Is that too high?"
Twenty-eight, working for a startup in SV, and building a product in my spare time. Debt-free, in spite of a row of some bad fiscal/personal disasters and paying for school. Putting about 60% of my take-home in the bank at the moment.

Looking at trying an experiment at the end of the year and 'going homeless' for three months after my lease expires. The worst case is I find out that it's hard and I don't like it, but it'll cut my monthly expenses down to nothing for a few months. Will look at buying a home in a few years, as I plan to turn into a traveling hacker for a year or two once my full-time gig is up.

I have zero sympathy for liberal arts majors who spent years in school, sans job, and now can't find a employment because they lack both marketable skills and the gumption to start a company.
Yup, I'd wait for the next version. I tried it a few months back and it was far too flaky to rely on.
I think it is. I was too distracted by the photo to even read the article. Oh well..
Aikon Project : Reverse concept-art
I wasn't talking about "many CEOs", just Joel. If you bother to read his blog posts, you'd notice that he constantly talks about how he's delegated away a lot of decision-making responsibility.

He functions as the public face of his company. His companies' products are marketed towards developers, and I gather that most find out about them because of Spolsky's blogging -- he's a very effective salesman.
I loved this article. We're doing exactly that with our B2B product for NewsCred. Just getting it out to and seeing who's willing to pay for it, what people think of current features, but also to prioritize the medium term feature roadmap.

This all fits quite nicely with Steve Blank's Customer Development methodology/framework.
Build for long term growth.
Also annoying: when the signal was lost, the http request took quite a long time until it failed. I'm using stringWithContentsOfURL.
I remember a chapter or half a chapter in a compiler construction book or article that was effectively titled "Why spend time on compiler optimization", a delightfully ambiguous term. The point was that doing so sped up the compiler which saved time for a large number of users (this was back in the days of compilers as commercial products). Clearly the discussion was targeted to self-compiling compilers.

But the lesson here would be that some effort spent on the speed of compile could positively impact developer productivity or at least negatively affect swordfight time. And yes, I think that very short compile times, like you see in CL (sbcl as an example) or Smalltalk can have an avalanche effect on development. And yes I do believe that small incremental changes are th3e best way to do software development. And yes I would expect to recompile a function in a running image serving web pages as a routine part of development.

But maybe that is just me.
Hi I'm 18. I read this article like two months ago. It struck me as important but I moved on. I was thinking about the phrase that stuck with me "Do something hard" and came back and have reread it 3-4 times over the last month.

I also recently watched a Disney movie called "Meet the Robinsons". It has a great moral and at the end there is an amazing quote:

"Around Here, however, we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths." -Walt Disney

I was so struck by this quote that I printed it out and it now hangs above my desk. I don't think I've fully internalized these two quotes, this one idea. I'm working at it and its greatly affected already how I do work at work. How I view where my life is going and how I view the activity that I'm currently working on (speaking of which I need to stop reading HN and get back to work).

Even if this article doesn't fully sink in I think it can start the cogs running in the minds of our youth. I strongly encourage all of us to push high schoolers to read this article. There is a chance it could make a difference.
In this particular case the ideas weren't particularly new - when I first heard about Map-Reduce I thought people were talking about MPI's AllReduce function http://www.mpi-forum.org/docs/mpi-11-html/node82.html from the 1995 MPI spec and even then it was nothing new. Teradata and others shipped systems operating on the same principles a decade earlier.

But to answer your question: all large companies need to publish the central technical ideas in one way or another to ensure their own current and future technical staff understand how their systems work (e.g. IBM Systems Journal).
USC had a couple big (by 1990's standards) time sharing Sun machines we used for CS and EE classes, which you could login to via SSH or VNC. Or you could use one of the few dozen Sun workstations in the lab which had the same software but ran locally, I guess.

The window manager was CDE by default, which sounds about as bad as fvwm2. You could run Gnome but I don't think most of the software worked very well with it (ePD! Cadence!)

Fortunately most CS projects could be developed locally on any Unix/Linux/OSX machine, then thrown up on the time sharing machine for testing.
Not necessarily, I think. If you have lots of memory, a second compile where stuff gets cached might be measurably faster.
The when is prominently displayed in the header.

... so prominently that though I did find it, it was only after skimming the main content on the page looking for it.
This is pretty standard advice actually. The reason you don't hear more about it on HN is because most of the case studies are B2B startups, and HN seems to be less interested in those. The obvious example that comes to mind is DOS.

Another good example is a guy I met who started a business putting pro sports logos on car seats. First he went to the national retail chains and got them to order a hundred thousand units. Then once he made the sale he used it to get the rights from the sports leagues to use their logos. Only then did he go out and find a manufacturer, and by then he was already guaranteed to make money on the deal. So his only startup costs were a couple weeks making phone calls, and he made a ton of money.