skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Neither yet, but I feel like I've been accepted by the academic community and the opportunity is mine to lose.

I dropped out of my undergrad CS program to do my first startup. That was 15 years ago. When I decided to go back for a PhD two years ago, I still had to complete my undergrad. I'm finishing up this spring and will be starting at a top 10 graduate program in the fall. My grades from 15 years ago were not particularly good and my background is rather unusual. I wasn't sure how I would be viewed as an applicant. This was not a easy year for admissions and I feel I did extremely well.

I know two other people went back to study math after working for a while. One is now a grad student at Brown, the other is a postdoc at MIT.
EU Rejects ‘3 Strikes’ for File-Sharers
"fast food restaurants"

this are, in many ways, more a product than a service. It's the same few things, with the same price, with the same organization, replicated N times in different places of the country.

Btw what's wrong is that if you are creating a successful product you should focus on the product. This is how sofware works.

Photoshop is cool? It wins on the market, sells a lot of copies, they can focus more on the product. Immagine this turned into a service.

Photoshop is cool? You run a service of help desk and consultancy about it. Tons of people needed and high costs. Want to serve N customers? You need N/K people. Does not scale, you don't focus anymore on the product but on the service you are selling.
exactly right. And the system will be the same as before - nothing will have been done to address the heart of the problem - banks that are "too big to fail".

Anything that is too big to fail is just too big.

We have successfully broken-up companies that were too big before - AT&T comes to mind. Do you think we would have an open internet if one company controlled all access to long distance communication like AT&T did before 1984?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System_divestiture
As for Tibet, it is quite similar to what we did to the Native Americans, the Chinese are just doing it more quickly.
In terms of economic freedom, China has the edge. The cardinal rule is, "you cannot write, read, or do anything that threatens the legitimacy of the party." That kind of limit on free speech certainly does not appeal to me, but I don't think it in anyway cripples the economy.
Nanogenerators Could Charge Your Electronic Devices Using Body Movements
This is what apple is offering but the phone is locked to AT&T.
AT&T is also said to start offering iPhone at full price to existing customers (limit one per customer) with no contract for iPhone.
The last is indeed significant. Something that the rise of reality TV has shown us, is that humiliation is an American pastime. Asian men often get to see this hidden sadistic side of mainstream North American society. I just turned 40 at the end of last year, and I've been looking back at my life and reflecting on this more and more in recent weeks. The way that one ethnic group can talk about another when they think it's safe for them to voice what they're really thinking can be shocking. It makes me want to play around with hidden cameras and microphones.
"No toilet, no bride"
Kill -0
Here's an interesting example of the insights and changes he's made as a result his time spent at the fulfillment centers.

http://www.shmula.com/987/jeff-bezos-5-why-exercise-root-cau...
It might be dangerous to substitute intrinsic motivation of a programmer by money.

Psychologists talk about two kinds of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation is what drives you to do something regardless of whether you will receive a reward. Why do you spend an hour cleaning the inside of your stove? Nobody looks in there. Your intrinsic motivation compels you to do a thorough job. We all have it -- in fact, most people start out with the desire to excel at whatever they do. Extrinsic motivation is the drive to do something precisely because you expect to receive compensation, and it's the weaker of the two.

The interesting thing, according to psychologists, is that extrinsic motivation has a way of displacing intrinsic motivation. The very act of rewarding workers for a job well done tends to make them think they are doing it solely for the reward; if the reward stops, the good work stops. And if the reward is too low, workers might think, Gosh, this is not worth it. They will forget their innate, intrinsic desire to do good work. </quote> http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/how-hard-could-it-be-th...
I am working on this.
Well, all I know is I enjoyed the article and that I believe I can find value and knowledge from disparate sources regardless of their topical relevance.

I also realize that HN is trying to remain topically focused.

To much of the world, the thought of making life more difficult by forging your own path/company/livelihood/etc, as opposed to settling for an easy job, seems akin to choosing make your life more difficult through addictions. I know it may appear I'm stretching it, but it's a fun mental exercise.
One of the posters (Lupe Christoph) turns to job board statistics to show that Perl is doing okay, but I think this is a poor measure. The ideal language for popularity in job board stats would be a legacy language; one that is attracting few new developers but is vital to some part of operations. Sadly I think Perl is headed there, if it isn't there already.

I've worked with lots of young developers and they always know PHP, and they never know Perl. Lots of people put Perl on their resume but it isn't deep knowledge, it's just enough to script a cronjob or whatever.

You can argue all you want, but if the kids aren't learning it, your language is dead.
I'm not sure I agree that China actually offers more economic freedom to most of its people than America does. Most people in China don't even have a formal legal right to move their residence to a new town.

The cardinal rule is, "you cannot write, read, or do anything that threatens the legitimacy of the party." That kind of limit on free speech certainly does not appeal to me, but I don't think it in anyway cripples the economy.

But this I very specifically disagree with. The ruling party of China intervenes in the economy in very many ways in China, and leaving criticism of the party off-limits in public discourse means that sound discussion of economic policy at a deep and detailed level can't happen. China has had a bubble economy over the last decade or more, but it's unclear this year how much of the bubble is popping, because the state-controlled media are not engaging in vigorous reporting about what is really happening to real estate projects invested in by local governments or many other government-intertwined economic projects. An economy thrives better with more transparency.
Java: Coming Soon to Google's App Engine
Look, I'm all for open source software
...
Open source makes me angry.

May I kindly suggest a sticky-note at your desk: Don't drink and post.
> Heck, how realistic is this for the average programmer? Even if you're the type of macho, gung-ho programmer who can master an alien code base just to get some small pet feature or bugfix in -- do you honestly have the kind of time it would take to do that?

Actually, I have submitted lots of (mostly small and inconsequential) bugs and minor features over the years, to projects such as the Linux Kernel, Tcl, Erlang, Ruby, Rails, Apache, and probably lots of others I'm forgetting right now. I actually enjoy it quite a bit, come to think of it - there's something cool about diving in and studying something new and different, and a thrill that comes with nailing the bug. Sometimes, the knowledge required to actually fix it is too much, and you have to settle for sending in a good bug report, but in other cases it's very much possible to hack up quick, useful things despite not knowing much about the system in question. And, no, I'm not really that great a programmer... I'd consider myself fairly average.

I suppose where he might be right is in more end-user oriented things. All the things I've listed above are programmer tools or closely related, where this sort of behavior is the norm (a cynic might note that Jeff comes from the world of Microsoft, where it is not). Things are a little bit more complicated when it comes to things that are not by/for programmers. I should write more on my own site about the economics of open source...
I read all the links from Wikipedia entry and searched for more articles before submitting, but I liked this one.

But all articles I found beside the Wikipedia one, had something I didn't like; they were boring, less information, or had needless speculation. But the submitted one despite the speculation had extra detail.

I never heard of Fortean Time. I didn't know of their reputation.
I would say the scale at which he pulled it off made him a mastermind.
I hate these kinds of summaries. I am sorry to be picking on yours specifically right now, which is no worse than any of the others that are posted to every article longer than three paragraphs, but I just have to say something.

These sarcastic little snippet summaries take all the meaning and value out of the stories. What you wrote is factually correct, but completely misses the point. Much writing is not about the information you extract from it, but the process of telling the story.

People like me (and I assume you too) who have technical backgrounds often miss this, because we're so used to a reducible world where the value of an expression is simply the output it evaluates to. Biography and fiction do not work that way, and that doesn't mean they're less valuable.

You can learn much more about human nature, the thought processes of great minds, or different world-views and cultures (to name just a few examples) by observing how they reach their conclusions and how they tell their stories than you can from the mere factual outcomes of the stories themselves.

In short, these summaries miss the point and are nothing but aggravating because they make the mistake of thinking that the article is about the facts of his life. I don't know this guy, and I don't care about how he made it through high school. I do, however, care about his experiences, thought processes, value conflicts, and the world view of someone in a situation like his. Your summary has taken the meat of the story out and left us with a dried out bone, lacking even the marrow of the context.

Dave Barry has a very humorous example where he intentionally makes the same mistake:

I'm told that Dostoyevsky wrote "The Brothers Karamazov" to raise the question of whether there is a God. So why didn't he just come right out and say: "Is there a God? It sure beats the heck out of me." Other famous works could easily have been summarized in a few words:

* "Moby Dick" -- Don't mess around with large whales because they symbolize nature and will kill you.

* "A Tale of Two Cities" -- French people are crazy.
This happened when I was in college when our local "hippie-goddess" chick met this guy from the Pacific island of Yap. They were in love and he wanted to marry her, but she insisted on having "American style" plumbing before she'd say yes and go and live with him on Yap. The guy got his hands on a backhoe and put in a septic system himself. Guess it really was love.
Ask HN: Would you consider polling your users for the right monetization method?
Advertising, Subscription, Value-Added, Virtual Goods, Donation...

If you are not sure which route to go, wouldn't it make sense to just poll your users directly? Has anyone done this?

This was inspired in-part by this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=534766
Many of those projects were started by college students. Linux was a fork of another flavor of unix started by Linus Torvalds when he was a masters student. Apache started as a proof of concept during the early days of the internet and morphed into what it is. IIS is better. The only reason Apache has more installs than IIS is because Linux is free.

MySQL is not as good as either MS SQL Server or Oracle and you can pay for MySQL Support from the company that produces it. PostgreSQL was also started at a university by professors getting paid to eat and buy clothes.

PHP doesn't hold a Candle to either .NET or Java, which you should have listed if you wanted to really try to convince me I'm wrong. Java is pretty good, but is commercially funded and those programmers get to eat. There's a lot of fanboyism around PHP and I'm not one of those.

Perl is awesome. It was created by a programmer at a publicly funded organization - NASA. It should be open source and he also got to eat while writing it.

Ruby is a great language if you know how to "drop down into C."

Firefox is commercially supported by Google search results. They make millions of dollars a year and honestly, it should be way higher quality than it is considering the budget they have to work with. Opera kicks firefox's butt all over the place. Firefox is good, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't change my mind.

The examples you give are a tiny fraction of the open source environment and most of them do not contradict what I have said.

Here's a challenge for you. Get a fresh laptop running whatever operating system you want, then see how long it takes you to fix an open bug in at least 3 of those products you mention.
Kevin Kelly on "The World Without Technology"
That doesn't make it any more right
I'm not sure you and I share the same reality.

90% of everything is crap that includes open source.

People do get paid for open source software. If you have a known OS project on your resume you will get better economic opportunities.

If woods was as cheap easy to copy and share as software, carpenters would be building giant Trojan horses in their spare time, to show of their skills and simply for the fun of it.

OS software does not devalue quality software.

If software is important to you, as in bottom line important, then you are not just happy to pay for it.
If the software that works for you happens to be free you STILL look to pay someone to make sure it keeps working.

OS kills no-quality software.
Dimensions of compelling mobile experiences
A week might be long enough for the employees to get used to his presence and fall back to their normal behaviour.

I also expect Bezos to have thought of that and of the alternatives and to have made an informed decision.
I would love to be able to pay someone to squash some bugs for me. I've been suffering with a gnome vfs bug for months and fixing it is way beyond my capabilities. Someone do a startup!
If you move a unit to a new location in the timeline-present, then go into the timeline-future... wait a little for it to propagate... then, when it appears, chonomove it to the timeline-past in the same location... wait a little while for it to propagate... and BOOM, it chronofrags itself.

Lets say it 100% destroys itself (it doesn't in the video)... wait a little while for its absense to propagate into the timeline-future... now, when it arrives (and not before), there is no unit to chronomove into the past, and so the unit does not appear in the timeline-past... wait a little while for its absence in the past to propagate... And now there is no chronofrag to destroy that unit, and so it exists... and the cycle repeats.

I like this time-paradox being resolved by becoming a cycle, due to the delay of propagation.

(However, in a video they imply that you need to manually manage paradoxes, by chronomoving it to the timeline-past for each loop.)
>> "The end result is that every open source project out there has a system that is so different from all the rest that it would be almost impossible to participate on more than one or two without 6 boot partitions and 3 servers. I have tried to participate on multiple open source projects, but I only have 40 GB on my windows partition and I don't have the time to manage all those environments."

You seem to be complaining that people are diverse. That's a pretty odd rant to be having. Also, why are you using a windows partition to participate in open source?
3 or 4 hours - made a crypto token - but it was 90% playing with IB and look and feel, because the iPhone ships with crypto and base64 stuff out of the box.
Don't like it, use commercial software or hire a consultant to customize your open source solution.

Either that or you're a hobbyist in it for love and fun and you want to try doing it yourself.

What's being suggested here? Don't pay but then do pay? Atwood is so confused.
didn't this kind of rants die off in the last millennium when they were disproved by successful free software projects and companies making money off free software (ie hiring programmers to work on free software projects)?
> you are pissing in the wind if you think you can treat a system with 100M LOC the same way you wrote assembly on a 6502

I would be, if I actually believed that it is possible given current technology. However, I believe that the problem is technological rather than fundamental, and that we can arrive at a solution. Let me give you an example of a problem that was once thought to be fundamental and inescapable yet ceased to be viewed as such. Before the advent of high-quality structural steel, no building (save a pyramid) could exceed five stories or so in height. Towards the end of the 19th century, metallurgy advanced, and the limit vanished. I believe that we are facing a similar situation with knowledge. The conventional wisdom is that the era of "encyclopedic intellects" (and now, human-comprehensible software) is gone forever due to the brain's limited capacity for handling complexity. Yet I believe that the computer could do for mental power what steam engines did for muscle power. I am not alone in this belief - here are some pointers to recommended reading, by notables such as Doug Engelbart:

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

Additionally: why do you assume that any system built to date necessarily must contain 100M LOC? Does this not in itself suggest that we are doing something wrong?

> clinging to the idea that it is reducible and manageable

All of technological civilization rests on the assumption that the universe is ultimately "reducible" to knowable facts and "manageable" in the sense of being amenable to manipulation (or at least, understanding). The alternative is the capricious and anthropomorphic universe imagined by primitive tribes, run according to the whim of the gods rather than physical law.

> We don't rely on quantum mechanics to build bridges

I must disagree here. QM is entirely relevant to the science of material strength, which is ultimately a branch of metallurgy - arguably a discipline of applied chemistry. In any legitimate science, there really are "turtles all the way down." And when there is a discontinuity in the hierarchy of understanding - say, the situation in physics with the need to reconcile general relativity and QM - it is viewed as a situation to be urgently dealt with, rather than a dismal fate to accept and live with forever.

A computer, unlike the planet's atmosphere, is a fully deterministic system. It is an epic surrender to stupidity if we start treating programming the way we treat weather prediction - as something that is not actually expected to reliably work in any reasonable sense of the word, or to obey any solid mathematical principles. It is a disaster, to be fought.
The answer is not faster charging, but rather, swapping out a depleted pack for a fully-charged one. Standardize on a form-factor for battery packs that mount on the underside of the vehicle, which can then be hot-swapped at service stations in under a minute.

Hawaii seems to already be testing this out... (don't have the link handy)
Some 19th century romantics and beatnik writers went on about tortured, artistic souls and their double edged but ultimately damaging relationships with drugs. So we're stuck being forever subjected to these stories about downward spirals and tortured souls. See any movie about drugs.

Newsflash: drug use and drug users are not interesting. The vast majority of drug users are normal people with a normal boring relationship with drugs. That is, they do drugs for fun and it has no meaningful bearing on anything else in their life. These endless stories about whiny nut-jobs who can't keep their shit together wrapping themselves in the mystique of drugs annoy me to no end.
My favorite line:

"But, I don’t think this is the only reason Frugality is a core value. Amazon’s focus on customer experience means that they are always trying to lower prices. If the company can do something more cheaply and pass those savings on to the customer, they will."
So long as people are paying, what's wrong? This tends to lead to a crappy product, but there's no law of physics or economics mandating that. (If the product is crappy enough, people will stop paying for both the product and the service.)
I come here to kill a few minutes while recompiling. If I want a literary experience I'll go to the library, or bartleby.com.

I quite like being able to flip to the comments and confirm that the rest of the article was a waste of time, as I concluded three paragraphs in.
Absolutely. It's similar to those Kia commercials comparing themselves to BMW or Lexus.
you think users will be honest when you ask them how are you going to give me money?
That's equally true of all the scripting languages though. Python or Ruby will handle those jobs just as well.
What I'm talking about doesn't take any fancy mathematics. Earlier in this thread, someone else was talking about functional programming. You could do the same thing with OO, deterministic pseudo-random generators, and a few patterns like Action. All you have to do is support multiple time-shifted simulations in parallel, and you are mostly there. The complicated part is displaying "overlaps" but that is also not "fiendish." (And the game dynamics discussed in the videos would make that much easier.)

What is truly clever is the introduction of the propagating "Time Waves" in the first place! Once you have that insight, such a game becomes easier to envision implementing.
I don't know, that's why I'm asking. Maybe. If your product is good enough.
I think the Chinese view the Tibetan mission as one of colonization and modernization, while violently putting down groups opposed to Chinese rule. Their internal media, at least, views it as a humanitarian mission, not genocide.

Don't know who's right. Could anyone point out information that China's goal is the elimination of the Tibetan people, instead of rule over them? Seems like they could have finished by now if they just wanted to kill them all.
If their numbers are real.... lets just say I really, really, really hope their numbers are real and that win some contracts.
My method of dividing the tasks into two buckets is very simple. Is it fun? If it takes me more than 5 seconds to answer that question, it's not fun. Fun is easy to categorize. So the complement of fun is thus easy to categorize too.

The reason I break it down into two is because of how I look at tasks with respect to stress. Nearly every task either adds (even if slightly) to my stress or relieves it. Very few are on the border and if they are on the border, I'd say they add to my stress just because they're not actually relieving it. My goal is to mix it all up in a healthy balance that best suits my personality.
KISS. Smooth steel wheels on smooth steel tracks has extremely low rolling resistance, is inexpensive, and works great. Bonus: if the power goes out you gently coast for a while. :)