skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There may be some parallels to physical exercise.
Instead of lifting weights or doing cardio, you could do backyard farming or small scale construction, or run to the grocery store. However such tasks usually come with a minimum work quantity required, so that you don't end up with a half built shed, or running two thirds of the way to the store. The same with learning a new subject or reading a new book.
Secondly, the targeting of the exercises may be different than real-world tasks. For example, it might not be as easy to work both arms equally when gardening as opposed to using dumbbells.
Third, the short exercises have faster rewards, and therefore is more encouraging than learning a whole new subject. Motivation is important when it comes to doing certain things, and having to learn new algebra and physics could kill the motivation.
Read it here to avoid the blog spam: http://www.uie.com/articles/magicbehindamazon

And yes, this is blog spam.
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I’ll use PHP." Now they have two problems.
Well there probably aren't that many people, if any, that are good at 3D programming, VM implementation and parsing theory - so if you can find a niche that will pay money for those specific skillsets then you're good to go.
You could compile down to PHP. A similar approach has become popular with JavaScript.
How does Opera make money? Paid by Google?
Northeastern's CCIS computer lab is a little bit like that. Lots of rows of SUN workstations with some crufty old default window manager (even though you can switch to Gnome).
That articles requires a login.Any other versions? Thanks!
There's nothing inherently wrong with fvwm2. I'm sure it was cutting edge back in your day. But it's ridiculously outdated in 2009. You might have learnt to use it, but today's students need to unlearn everything they've learnt. Even if they manage that, it's plain inefficient. By a big margin.

Whatever technology you grew up with, you're bound to think of that as the natural interface. That's exactly the point I was making about the professors.

There was a time when you had to do typesetting by typewriter. There was a time when all cars were stick-shift. There was a time when farmers had to plant seeds manually. That doesn't mean it's a good idea to do any of those things today.

I'm not sure if you were claiming you will learn linux better if you use fvwm2, but that's simply not true.

But that is not the main point I'm making. What you need to understand is that no matter what you, the admins or anyone else might think of fvwm2, it's turning away the students in droves. This needs to be stopped.
Agreed. I bought Brain Age 2 when I got a Nintendo DS, and while it's fun (and some games are more real world useful than others; the music phrase game, for example, is a good little music training tool, and it'd be cool to have a whole suite of similar games), I don't really feel any sense of accomplishment or like I've done anything useful with the time. So, it sits unused on the shelf, while Korg DS-10 and some homebrew music making software gets a lot of use on my DS.

There's probably a really big business opportunity in building software of this sort for home use. The "home gym" market is obviously a gold mine (which is why so many late-night TV shysters are mining it), so this one may potentially be an even better market. The cost of software is practically zero compared to building real physical gym equipment, so I suspect very few people will continue to drive to a remote location to play these brain games. One could even do it in a way that it actually teaches real skills in subtle ways (like the music phrase game in Brain Age).

Given that brain games aren't even all that graphic or sound intensive, one could even do it on the web. Though I'm guessing there's call for things like special purpose controllers and such, which would require installable products.
Startup Weekend: San Francisco #2
In my experience, the hacker qualities of CS undergrads fall on a pretty broad spectrum. Even if the majority of students have trouble with basic Unix tasks, I'm sure there will be 5% of them who will make excellent admins. And that's more than you need.
Could you assume a review was helpful because you saw that a user had read it and then purchased the item?

Interesting idea. That would tend to "upvote" reviews that sell the product, pushing the negative (or even positive but ineffectual) reviews off the page. That's a good thing if what you want to do is motivate sales, but a bad thing if what you want is to promote useful reviews.
This past week I needed to extract+merge PDF pages, looked around a bit. From my notes:

(PDF tools, pdftk 2006, toolkit is win/linux cli)

http://www.pdfhacks.com/pdftk/

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/PDF/GUIPDFTK.shtml

(using PyPDF)

http://pieceofpy.com/index.php/2009/03/05/concatenating-pdf-...

(2 from softpedia, freeware - Junko OK, 1.3 MB zip)

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/PDF/silkodyssey-PD...

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/PDF/Junko.shtml

(uses C# free lib http://itextsharp.sourceforge.net/)

(Mac: PDFLab at:)

http://www.iconus.ch/fabien/
I'm hardly an inveterate punster, but I do bust one out from time to time when around my family - my Dad always laughs, proud of the turn of phrase, my kid brother thinks its cool and tries to remember it to pass off as his own, my mom never gets it, and my kid sister gets really, really mad.

I think people who hate puns do so for a few reasons:

1. Punning is self-centered, masturbatory humor. The punster is often not trying to entertain anyone but himself. He/She's playing a small but pointed gag on everyone listening, often to amuse no one but him/herself. Understandably, this bothers people. It's self-indulgent humor.

2. People who pun display a mastery and control of the English language that annoys and intimidates others. It's like guitar players who have the ability to launch off into a flurry of self-indulgent trills and finger-tap patterns. The other guitar players think it's awesome. Most people think the guitarist's a wanker.

3. Punning is a form of hacking, and some people are never comfortable with that. The punster hacks the English language to draw connections between words that aren't typically seen there. A lot of people are made uncomfortable by the idea that words have no meanings of their own, only those that people give them. The pun points this out.
Why would anyone use the computer lab? How many undergrads actually do any computing for which $500 desktop computers in their dorm rooms would not be more than sufficient? Do the labs require special, non-OS software? In this day in age, that would be really weird. Even if classes are taught using Microsoft stuff, the basic tools are all free anymore.

I recall reading that universities are doing away with dorm phone lines -- between cell phones and VOIP, students have no use for them anymore.
Indeed. Incidentally, why can't I downvote this? I've seen negative points on things, but I don't seem to be able to apply them.
At UT, perhaps it's a Dell plot to defend Wintel.
I also use a text login, fvwm2, and install things from source (albiet in Gentoo rather than Ubuntu). As a 19 year old kid, should I feel hard done by? :)

Maybe it's different in England, but I've found my university's computer labs (Uni. of Warwick) to be useful, and not insane. I know from experience that if I didn't have my own computer (as was the case when it was broken during my first week), I could get by without too much frustration using the university systems. I can even use dvorak.

(Noone else seems to have problems with them either, so it's not just that the admins are as insane as I am.)

Not that this is meaningful data. But I'm not sure your experiences are either. Whether computer labs provide value depends on the labs and the students. There's no answer that will apply to all universities.
Great work.

Is there any audio/video available from the PyCon presentation?
This 25 year old is keeping his day job (server admin/help desk) with a friendly boss who doesn't mind him working after work. I'm doing business/computer consulting after 5pm and on the weekends and am currently involved in a few projects for websites and small business server infrastructure. I've got very little credit card debt (under 2k - mostly operating expenses) and even though I never finished college I still have about 8k in student loans but should have them paid off in a few years. I save about 30% and have recently had to apply some of that to take on some extra family related expenses as my folks have been hit a lot harder then I have.

I can't say I'm enjoying the economic climate and watching all layoffs (At my day job and with my friends and family) but Its motivated me to take some hobbies and work that normally took a lot of energy and figure out how to do more with them. I can now go from sales/brainstorming to invoicing a lot faster and easier then I could even just a few months ago. I think that will pay off in the long run.

Also, saving now, and putting into my 401k and roth/IRA's should help a lot when I'm older. I'm glad I can put money in markets now when they're low! (and I'm lucky I got confused and pulled out about 2 months before markets crashed! They weren't making any sense to me.)
Wil Wheaton: Print on Demand Goes Mainstream
Yea, but they have the debt. It's still in the family. Heck it's still in the community, and the city. The biggest problem I'm having now is dealing with people who are making money but can't afford to pay all their bills. It's usually because they have some debt left over from when they were making more money, or when projections looked a lot better then they are now.

It's fortunate you aren't immediately bound by the debt of school, take advantage of it. But the debt does still exist.
Damn, I miss the CBW. Great food, great beer, great space. Have fun!
Another option is to use the existing ability that you have to solve a problem. You don't have to be the world's top PHP/Ruby/Python hacker to create something useful.
Michael Hudson: How the Scam Works
Given Expert Advice, Brains "Shut Down"
Article here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0004957
I think your point 3, and to a lesser extent point 2, describes humor as a whole. I mean, what's "That's what she said" but drawing connections (albeit surely sexual) that weren't immediately obvious?
Article here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...
I downloaded it and what I saw was the very empty beginnings of a game engine.

Edit: Also, the documentation persistently says "it's very simple to ---" and then dumps a code example on you without actually explaining the concept.
You are not your brain
I guess USB drives now come in a "creepy and finger-like" flavor.
BANCStar
They don't mention my favorite idea: move the Earth. (I first saw a tiny blurb about this idea in a magazine, then saw it mentioned as an idea Russian scientists had considered.)

Apparently if you detonate a nuke on the moon, it will eject some of the moon's mass. The resulting change to the Earth-moon system alters the Earth's orbit around the sun ever-so-slightly.

However, 'ever-so-slightly' totaled over months or years means the Earth is thousands of miles from where it would have been otherwise, converting a direct-hit into a near-miss (or vice-versa!).

With enough warning, this could be a preferable approach, because it's assembled from things we already know how to do (like reach the moon), rather than targeting some tiny object at an extreme distance (an all-new challenge).
Is that the prosthetic finger from the guy who had a finger-flashdrive in an article a few days ago?
Google Checkout still unfit for business: I got my money, but would you?
Mistaking UI/UX design for graphic design is very highly correlated with not paying enough attention to user experience. I'm amazed to still meet developers who talk about getting a designer to skin the app after they do more development. That's entirely backwards.

The great news is that you don't need to know photoshop to do UX design. Thinking harder about the tasks for a user's perspective is most of the process.
In PHP the backslash is also an escape operator, but only when used within the confines of a string. In this case, you're not within a string, so it shouldn't be confusing. But like you said, we'll soon get the chance to find out.
A tweak on the "let the students run it" idea would be, for undergraduates at least: Let each year's class run their own systems. I could list a bunch of benefits (and a few drawbacks) that would fall out from this, but they seem pretty clear, probably no need to list them - they range from the social to the technical to the logistical.
So how do you propose we set things up? Most of the need for CS labs is conformity in grading/teaching. I see the appeal - both fiscal and hacker-practical - for dropping the Uni labs, but I think that forcing 95% of CS majors to rely on 5% of their peers for support would cause enough grading and deadline ("I couldn't get the package to compile in time!") arguments that both faculty and undergrads would come to hate things even more.

Granted, there are obvious upsides to forcing people to learn systems other than Windows for their own use, and I think enough people would eventually adapt, but I think the initial hurdle would just be too much to overcome in a decently sized department.
This links in a lot with the other computer lab thread, but for some CS teaching the software setup is particularly arcane, and classes are taught in the labs themselves, using that setup. You can't really avoid them, setting it all up on your own machine, learning to use it without the practicals and so on is just pointless extra work.
That (search engines) and licensing their mobile browser among a few ways.
"PEOPLE, of course, sometimes like to keep secrets and maintain separate social realms - or at least a modicum of their privacy."
There is a nice Java implementation and community at

http://games.asobrain.com

It's called "Xplorers" for copyright reasons.
There are a few ways to get around nytimes.com logins. My favorite is setting my referrer to google.com. Runner-up is BugMeNot.
But you could be. "$foo = "Bar\test"; $foo();" is entirely plausible but doesn't give do what you expect; you need to escape the \.
This seems like the perfect event to hold online. Everyone wants to remain anonymous to the point that the "most serious bidders made bids by phone" while the rest "stay in their hotel rooms and have representatives in the audience who send them text messages."

I don't see who the fancy location is intended to impress. It sounds as though all the "serious bidders" are just going to be inconvenienced by it.
First of all, root access to the machine should be granted to anyone at a terminal. Physical access bypasses any sort of realistic security placed on the system.

At MIT, the computing infrastructure is largely a collaboration between students and admins. This has worked incredibly well, and led us to have a continually evolving system and created a great system for tech support.

Right now we're in the process of testing Athena 10, a ubuntu-based overhaul to our old redhat system. It's a huge task, and a majority of the bugfixes and patches have come from student hackers.

You're running linux, so that's a start. I'd suggest seeing if you can get some of the defaults changed (such as fvwm2), and maybe start a discussion about moving to a more user-friendly distribution.

#

Here's a few resources about Athena@MIT:
http://web.mit.edu/ist/isnews/v24/n02/240203.html
http://blog.spang.cc/2008/01/10/mit-athena-not-dead-yet
This has been around for some time now. Since it relies on OpenDHT, it has been really unstable and unreliable lately.
Next time, please point to print version: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/03775904-177c-11de-8c9d-0000779fd2...
Even high-profile complaints will only ever result in case by case resolutions.

Now if someone was able to start a business where they bought the rights to seized google checkout accounts at say 10 cents to the dollar and (now representing sufficient monetary sums to make action worthwhile) launched serious legal campaigns to retrieve the funds, then google would revise their policies.

If I were owed money by google in this way, I'd happily give 90% to a third party, just to see google get nailed (particularly if it helped force a policy change so that no more 'little guys' were victimised).
3 things - it makes you expertly qualified to write a new programming language for manipulation of 3D video streams...
Have you seen "Time Machine"? There's a scenario where a moon-based mining project goes awry, causing moon fragments to fall to Earth and basically destroying all advanced civilizations. I didn't think that was remotely possible, but maybe it is. Would love to see the article you mentioned.
Yeah, I do wonder about that. It seems to me that wanting to do significant work is either inborn or a sort of acquired taste.

But that's a self-fulfilling prophecy -- if you don't expect kids to do significant work, you won't give them opportunities to do so. So maybe we should try it the other way for a while.
Because the language already has :: copied from C++. But rather than continuing to use :: for both namespaces and static class access, exactly like it's done in C++, they added yet another operator. To solve a problem that doesn't exist.

So rather than simplifying the language, they're making it more complicated (especially by choosing the escape character). It's just dumb.
Java still has javac. I suppose an IDE could hide this from you. Of course, Java also has lots of static analysis tools written for it so many errors are caught way before compilation.
It seems django would benefit by brining some of this "in-house", either officially or through blessed third-party tools in the same way that rails does.

If deployment and testing is something that everyone has to do in a very similar way should it not be a problem that is solved by the framework the same way that sessions are?
I'm well aware of the HuKuo system (most of my extended family live in China). It doesn't restrict movements at all, and you can move to any city you wish for work, vacation, wandering, whatever. It's just a zip code system to track where people live. I don't know the exact process, but you can have your HuKuo changed if you want to move (of course, you have to go through the requisite paperwork).

There are a lot of injustices in China to be angry about, but I don't think this is one of them.
OT: every time I bump into Rebol, I make a mental note: "would like to find an excuse to use this language someday."

Some many cool languages...so little time ;)
The strange thing, to me, is that I seem to hear this a lot from people I know who go to "top notch" CS schools. Cambridge, Austin, these are supposed to be great schools!

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.") I left in 2002, so maybe things have changed, of course.

For a college that felt a lot like a high school with dorms, we had fantastic computer labs.

In two of the dorm buildings, there were labs full of Macs and PCs (20 of each in each lab). There were another 3 PC labs in the science building, and another PC lab and Mac lab in the library. In the CS department, there were 2 unix labs, one with about 20 BSD+KDE machines, and the other with 10 SunOS+OpenWindows. There was also the VAX/VMS system that anyone could use from anywhere via telnet, and provided access to all university services (including the ability to ssh into the Unix mainframe.)

Though I didn't really appreciate it at the time, the computer science education I got there was fantastic. I've talked to friends and coworkers of mine who have masters degrees from "good" schools and I'm aghast at the gaping holes in the curricula. Many of them never had to compile a program until they entered the work force, had never seen O() notation, and so on.

I think the moral of the story is that you should be wary of judging books by their covers: the campus might be beautiful, and the reputation might be sparkling, but take a look inside the buildings before choosing a school.
I suspect you're right, dmaclay, but high-profile complaints might inspire more people to complain publically which might build the base for a class-action lawsuit like the one against PayPal. Or maybe reform. (Ha!)

That's my hope, anyway.
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Bringing Cloud Computing Down to Earth
If you still think it's all about a "killer app idea" and not timing, execution, marketing and a million other things, you're doing it wrong.
Apple uses a jailbroken iPhone in patent application
Sell it before you build it
And here's a library for Python: http://pybrary.net/pyPdf/
You make some excellent points. My experience have been with Windows. The situation is this – they install shitloads of programs on these machines (most of it BS) . This all run at startup – the system tray is half the taskbar.

All this crap makes the machine maddingly slow. Then they mount network drives on the machines (20 or so). This means that if you use a flash drive you must start unmounting the network drives until your flash drive appear.

While you log-in 10 or so programs give you error messages (for which you must press the Ok button).

The quotas are still a problem – why must we have 100MB quotas? Hard-disk space is cheap – google gives me 7GB for email.

The worst is the internet costs. They give you 200MB for a year. After that you have to pay R2 (20 US cents) per M.B. That price is four times as expensive as GPRS through your cellphone.

Oh – it is crap working on CRT screens with a burned in log-in bar.

---

Ranting aside – the admin for the clusters in my dept. really knows his stuff.
Go fliggo!
This is a cool app but why not just muck around with the iPhone App interface builder that comes with the SDK. It is basically a much better version of this web app.
You make some good points.

I think another thing that has an impact is the lack of a PR machine behind "picking up a good non-fiction book" or "doing something constructive that is also a good physical exercise".

Or more precisely, the lack of a PR machine that specifically tells people it's good for their brain.
Ok, you're right. That is a better explanation of monads than the one I gave.

I intended my example to represent cases where you want real mutation, in the sense of modifying a data structure in place. Your code using the State monad, if I understand it correctly, just abstracts functional updates in a way that looks like mutation.

Anyway, my intent in my original comment was simply to explain the practical consequences of pure functional programming. That, for instance, if you have a pure function that you want to randomize, this change must be reflected in all the code that depends on it. My intuition is that this is a bad thing, but I don't have enough experience to say for sure. However, it is apparent to me that purity

1. adds a lot of complexity to the language, and

2. has no clear practical benefits,

which is why I say it's a waste of time.
Devalued Prime Minister of a Devalued Government
I hope this isn't considered improper, but I wrote a few things on this topic and I think I go a bit more in depth than this Wired piece. Here they are:

http://michaelgr.com/2007/04/14/near-earth-objects-are-we-wh...

http://michaelgr.com/2007/10/28/deflecting-earth-bound-aster...

http://michaelgr.com/2008/01/27/near-earth-objects-we-cant-b...

http://michaelgr.com/2008/01/31/target-earth/
"Patrons pay $60 a month to work out on 20 computer stations loaded with "mental fitness" software, including a "neurobics circuit" that purports to stretch the brain."

This seems a little ridiculous. Why aren't they just selling the software? Or is some specialized hardware required as well?