skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Who says that they don't already have a "real" PC? From what I've seen (anecdotal), many buyers are buying these netbooks explicitly as secondary machines because of the price-point/portability.
Incredible credentials would be 2400 SAT, 780-800 on 3 or more SAT IIs

Fewer than 300 members of class of 2008 worldwide scored 2400 on the new three-section SAT,

http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/sat_perce...

so that is a rarely encountered characteristic even in the applicant pools of Ivy League colleges. (Princeton's entering class of about 1,243 students is numerous enough to include all of those students, if they all apply to Princeton.)

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/41382...

And not all of the 2400-scorers on the SAT Reasoning Test have the specified scores on the SAT Subject Tests. So I guess I wonder if slightly less incredible credentials would still be noteworthy.

SAT fee waivers

http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/sat/calenfees/fe...

or their ACT equivalent

http://www.actstudent.org/faq/answers/feewaiver.html

appear to be the usual way that colleges identify low-income students. The specified income level

http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/sat/counselors-gu...

for SAT fee waivers is meant to match the eligibility levels for some federal programs, but might imply somewhat more prosperity than "food stamps, free school lunches, 3 pairs of pants." For sure, anyone eligible for the fee waivers would be shocked by the LIST price of any Ivy League college.
Did anyone else read the title as "Programmer from Finland has lost (finger replaced with USB drive)"? I have a tendency to lose USB keys...
I find zombies uninteresting. They don't really provide anything to a story, other than a thing to run away from. Especially the recent biozombie movement -- the lesson here is "you cannot fight the zombies forever." Eventually you either have to hide, or you will become a zombie.

Not particularly uplifting; the idea is that you HAVE to give in to other people's base instincts, or else you must retreat from life. It's really just an adaptation on an Atlas Shrugged type theme.
A/b test mallocs against your memory footprint
Is It Really All About Luck?
Android Versus iPhone 3.0: The Showdown
My advice to kids is always to go visit and see if they could see themselves hanging out on campus there.

How practical is that advice for the low-income families mentioned in your other helpful reply? I guess you come from the upper Midwest, as I do. Were your family visits to places like Princeton, Stanford, and MIT, or to colleges in your state and nearby states?
Open your terminal and type: telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
Open your terminal and type: telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
Probably.

Even at some steady state, an app has to come into their queue and be assigned to someone. Each of those folks is probably already busy. And the approval process requires going through all the major features of the app, checking for UI gaffes, profanity, etc.

So even if they had a perfect process, you'd imagine it'd take two or three days.
I thought 'the' standard said that 0 used in pointer contexts is interpreted by the compiler as a null pointer, even if the machine's representation of a null pointer is not 0.
Your company's name?
Keep writing. Thats all I found I could do with my blog. I just have to keep writing and the more I write, the more posts I create the more search traffic I get.

Keep working on it.

How long have you been writing?
Get $100 worth of Facebook advertising for free
No... Ed W and I did an interview with Andrew Warner and Andrew seemed surprised that we basically had no method for getting stories to the front page. At the time of the interview I hadn't had a high point story for a month.

The powers that be are very good at what they do. They usually notice things that are out of the ordinary.
Unfortunately, to get good performance you basically have to use different algorithms on CPU and GPU. This makes comparisons difficult.
HN(hackernews) Hacked : News.YCombinator.com hacked ?
CBW is amazing. unique atmosphere and some really good beer. if only I still lived in pittsburgh :(
I've found similar results.

Different schools use the GRE for different things (if at all). One coworker has a phd in English. Her math skills are astonishingly bad, and the grad school that she went to looked for low math scores && high english scores: because that combination turned out to be a good predictor for them of a good performer in that particular English program.

Almost none of the things I studied in grad school were used outside of it (which has some to do with why I dropped out). And some of the things I now wish I had studied "back then" also bored me to tears back then. Examples of what bored me to tears back then:
http://www.soa.org/education/exam-req/edu-fsa-req.aspx
(in particular, look at the classes needed to meet education requirements called "vee" by the soa).

>Of course it’s taking inordinate length of time but the experience is really enthralling and edifying.
Yep. That's oooh! shiny! in action. And I find that what's "shiny" changes a lot over time.
Dying Days of March Madness
Please don't put the blog name in the story's title. The domain is visible to the right hand side for those who care.
I wouldn't be so quick to judge. I worked at an online casino a few years back and we were heavily invested in Sun. Simply because of the virtualization. (Probably for some other reasons as well, but I found the virtualization the coolest.)

Here's a PDF presskit about Sun's Virtualization: http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/presskits/2006-1017/virtua...
This is a known HN bug; any page that is really huge only works about 10% of the time. My threads and saved pages are pretty useless as well.
It made me think of the little switch/port Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation has on his hand which he accesses flipping a fingernail upward.
Howard Bloom thinks capitalism is getting a bad rap; what we need is messianic capitalism. Every day we praise the food we can do for our fellow man. His heart is in the right place, but depending on the goodness of corporate board members isnt going to do it. Both democracy and corporations are much too susceptible to the aggregated influence of money. Aggregated influence creates "too big to fail banks", senators for hire, and Microsoft-like bullies.

We also have an enormously creative and productive society that encourages things like the YC entrepreneurs, or Google, or even Microsoft. The enormous challenge is to keep the creativity, productivity, and personal freedom while preventing undue influence. Personally, I dont think fine tuning a chaotic environment is possible, but maybe mitigating damage to individuals is. In any event I dont think Howard has the answer.
no idea about radio stations... checkout some podcasts by people behind stackoverflow.
Revision3.com -- checkout some shows related to hacking.
Sony Ericsson W380i Purple Unlocked
Sony Ericsson W380i Purple a fantastic Tri-Band phone to great acclaim. Its takes the media controls that are typically found on Ericsson and Up to 4GB of memory is supported through the use of Memory Stick Micro Cards.
Barbara Liskov Wins Turing Award
NSA offering 'billions' for Skype eavesdrop solution
laughs at himself
Guest post on similar blogs with more traffic. If done right, they get free content, you get a link or two back to your site.

Use blog carnivals. blogcarnival.com

Make sure you point users to the subscription option clearly. That helped my numbers rise...
This exactly reinforces the advice from a talk Bob Metcalfe gave a year ago.

The bottom line, and the secret:

Great sales people create an opportunity to fulfill a commitment -- even when one doesn't naturally exist -- and then fulfill it.
Read the design document on the _real_ extension functionality which is coming soon:

http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/extensio...

I'd expect announcements in May:

http://code.google.com/events/io/
So, have you learned to do this? If so, has it worked for you?
Well, I see that none of the "libertarian" downmod tribe wants to actually argue the point. It's so much easier to engage in groupthink and hit the little down arrow than to actually defend your assertions against someone who aggressively questions them.
How not to talk to the press
How are people still so naive? When a teenager posts something they later regret to facebook, I can rationalize it as the folly of youth and not thinking about the consequences of their actions.

But someone hired by Cisco, using a service explicitly for publicly broadcasting a message? There is no excuse for why they don't know better.
There is already an HN discussion on this topic; http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510520
Do a little reading next time, Hank.

http://kenai.com/projects/suncloudapis/pages/HelloCloud
I'm still a PC user and buyer - ducks ;)

Although a lot of my colleagues and friends have moved over to the Mac, I'm still a PC user. I've heard all the great things about the Mac - one of my buddies has been a lifelong die hard Mac user who goes ape shit on me about my PC usage(in a fun loving way), but I still have not made the switch.

Anyhow, last month I ordered and purchased a super souped up Sager notebook (I had one previously that I really liked too) for about 1/2 the cost of a similar Mac setup and it includes the latest Nvidia 9800 GTX video card. I was very very close to getting the Mac book pro, but went with what I knew. Yes, I can run windows/PC apps on the Mac, but preferred going with my comfortable setup and development environment that I have been using for what seems like forever.
Pyramid builder? Really?
There is already an implementation of Ruby on Parrot called "Cardinal". Don't know its status but it can now be found in GitHub http://github.com/cardinal

There is also a Python implementation called "Pynie" http://code.google.com/p/pynie/

List of language developments are kept on the wiki at https://trac.parrot.org/parrot/wiki/Languages.

If language developers get behind Parrot it could become a very interesting alternative to JVM & .Net
iPhone App Beta Testing Problem:  People not willing to give their iphone/ipod touch id.
Out of five people who expressed interest in testing my app, none seem willing to give me their iphone/ipod touch id.

It seems that this is a problem with the beta testing method required for iphone apps. People feel as if giving away their device id is a privacy/security risk.

Info on how beta testing works (see section on adding beta testers):
http://furbo.org/2008/08/06/beta-testing-on-iphone-20
The source for the appjet app is at http://appjet.com/app/696731359/source
Anyways can anyone please point me to any official word about it?
Could you elaborate on this?
I've always been curious what is going on in the admissions dynamics such that it will result in one person having the choice of 10 top tier schools versus 1-2. They all fall on the interesting side of the continuum, but what is going on that leads to these thresholds of admissions success?
> My impression is Alan Greenspan specifically nixed regulation of CDOs around 1999.

As I pointed out, Greenspan wasn't in a position to make that call. However, his successor is a source of misinformation on this point.

From http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/05/as-regulator-wa...

A lack of regulatory oversight has been suggested as a reason why a relatively small group of A.I.G. employees in London were able to hobble the entire company with risky bets. Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, testified this week that "there was no regulatory oversight because there was a gap in the system."

But Scott Polakoff, acting director of the Office of Thrift
Supervision, which was A.I.G.’s primary regulator, told lawmakers Thursday that his office knew about the A.I.G. unit in London and had oversight over its operations.

Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat who sits on the Senate Banking Committee, drove this point home at Thursday’s hearing on the government’s A.I.G. bailout.

"The perception that this London operation was some rogue group that were unsupervised, that you had no access to it and that your regulatory authority didn’t reach there is not accurate," he said to Mr. Polakoff.

"Correct," Mr. Polakoff responded. "That would be a false statement."
But what is the throughput of people in detroit? Detroit has fairly few residents compared to the number of people who go into detroit to a casino/dining/sports game. The chance of one of these robberies happening to a resident is much less than 9% I would argue.

Also, you're forgetting about the "Broken window effect" which says that crime flees an area when the surroundings simply look better.
Pretty much being done already or a good way to go broke. Free rental listings? That's how CL pays the bills. On demand super computer weather forecasting. Ah, these mothers are expensive.
A history of CLU http://publications.csail.mit.edu/lcs/pubs/pdf/MIT-LCS-TR-56... is a very interesting read. CLU is a classic language and it was the first language that provided linguistic support for abstract data types. It also included iterators, exceptions, and a mechanism for polymorphism.
What? You don't want to share a cell with Madoff?
s/iPhone/iPod Touch/, then.
Dying languages seldom get the attention that monuments and historical artifacts do even though they are more indicative of history and culture
This must require an unbelievable amount of patience.
Yes. See pg's comments in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=518752 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=518752.
Was reported in a couple of threads. The most detailed was here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=519433
A lot of Firefox's bloat comes from the XUL interface. It's their cross-platform GUI which is written in XML and Javascript. It's what allows add-ons to reach in and modify some very deep elements of the browser. For example, I run the Tab Mix Plus extension which radically changes the operation of tabs.

However, XUL and Javascript is a very heavy-weight way of doing things. Chrome and other browsers have a native UI. That is partially what makes Chrome a light-weight browser. It also means that the deep level of cross platform add-on's available for Firefox will not be possible for Chrome in it's current state.

I've read the proposals for expanding Chrome extensions and it sounds like they want to go a similar route to XUL. It probably won't be as low-level because they'll want to keep their native UI code. That will help Chrome to provide some more complex plugins with their own UI but still won't allow for some of the more radical and interesting plugins available for Firefox.
In a weekend I coded the virtual business card idea a few months ago, but it didn't catch up at all. Basically the click-through rate of the tiny link in email signatures is below 0.1% so its virality is basically none.
http://www.tinyvcard.com i thought it was a brilliant name :-)
The right kind of linked-in profile photo
My economic recovery package - or take these apps and run
any idea what was the is exploit used to raise points of the post?
Reviews of Atom-based boards I have seen show that it doesn't do HD content well at all. 720p is hit and miss, and 1080p is just a no-go.

So it'd do DVDs and divx/xvid for you, but to play Blu-ray and mkv files you'll probably want to wait a bit and snag the new Nvidia ION platform, which pairs an onboard Geforce 9400 with an Atom CPU, and does full 1080p video with only 20% cpu utilization.
Peak Oil Happened
There's another risk, namely "community activists".

If you succeed in rehabbing in a depressed area, various rent-seekers will demand that you "share the wealth".

These folks often have considerable political clout, which has something to do with why those areas are depressed.

For some of them, your success is a problem because they're been paid to "improve the area". Since you succeeded without help, something is wrong, and it's not them. Or, you owe them.
Simple and beneficial, but hard for greed-minded people to grasp.
I dont know if you are trying to be comical or not, but the experience on 360 or ps3 is miserable when compared to most
PC gaming, especially if you game consistently and prefer aiming over auto targeting. Very distinct from the Wii, which fits well and has its own niche.

So yes, most people who buy powerhouse computers do it either becuase they think they need to, or they really do need to to play the newest games.
> Are foreigners allowed to purchase property in Detroit at such prices too?

How many places don't allow foreigners to buy property? (I've heard that Mexico has restrictions on foreign property ownership within a certain distance of the ocean.) How many charge more?
How to Incorporate Stupidity Into Your AI Code
The star quarterback of his smalltown football team goes down with a career ending injury during preseason practice before his junior year.

Instead of standing on the sidelines with a headset and clipboard and having the local paper write a human interest piece about how he's "helping the offence," he takes a job at a local marina taking care of the boats.

He's quickly put in charge of the place. While doing this, he learns he's fascinated by the boats, their lines and curves and decides he wanted to study architecture. (I fudged the details here but that's the story.)

Let's break this down:

1. Kid faces setback.
2. Kid responds in unexpected way.
3. Adults recognize his competence and give him considerable responsibilities.
4. Kid handles this well (his boss wrote a great letter of recommendation)
5. While working on his unusual project, kid discovers passion for something.
6. Kid wants to come to your school to engage with that passion.

That's kind of the textbook example. Admittedly, his social circumstances (middle class white kid with lots of connections via football) helped him make that decision between steps 1 and 2. I bet he had a parent who was like "son, you're done with football. Let's go on a new adventure." And that can make all the difference. But still, the kid executed.

We didn't admit the guy. That's why the job's tough. Because there's 1000 kids with stories as good as his or better.

But he certainly got more attention than the average kid.
Wundrbar is like 70 apps in 1. Maybe they were testing each app separately?
In other news, Google is launching a free phone service called Google Voice. Perhaps this is their monetization strategy.
Oh wait, I also did the stalker ads idea, or sort of. I believe that someone will come up with a successful solution for location-based mobile coupons. What we have seen with our project is that this idea clicks with customers, but it is hard to develop a scalable model to acquire local advertisers. Local business owners seems extremely reluctant to embrace the internet medium for some reason (even with some free limited service, free pilot programs, etc.).

I end again with a shameless plug: http://www.moqpon.com
Accepted organisations for GSoC 2009
The titles are exactly the same even. Perhaps titles should be unique and checked. It might be a quick hack to reduce duplication.
I stayed away from that, but at .1%/year, within ten years you will attend the funeral of murder victim. Murder will be "real" for you, not just newspaper fodder.
Emboss Text with CSS (Simple Rule)
You only need to read a few books on the history of spying to know GCHQ, NSA et al have repeatedly made major technological breakthroughs and kept them hushed up to exploit a new edge over their adversaries. You wouldn't expect them to say Skype was easily compromised, would you? They would say the opposite.
The Register on Cryptography and Security is always a good laugh.
Chrome is WebKit, WebKit has an amazing inspector/Firebug clone. In using both, I actually prefer the WebKit inspector. I haven't used Chrome yet, so I'm not sure what magical incantation is required to activate the inspector (in Safari it's part of the "Develop" menu"), but it should be there.
IPhone 3.0: A brand-new iPhone in a free update
I understand the concept of infrastructure enabling more economic activity. But this isn't an automatic free pass to building as many dams as you want. You have to assess how much infrastructure is needed.
if people needed that infrastructure then it would become profitable to build it and you wouldn't need public spending to do it. look at dubai.
profit is a measure of demand. if you aren't making any profit that means that there's no demand at the price you're charging.

as for the rest of your post...government saves us money? this is nonsensical. government takes money and provides services. You claim that these services are a net gain, I disagree.

as for the "libertarian mob"....you haven't been around any actual libertarians obviously. Mobs are the #1 things we hate. The whole point of libertarianism is to negate the power of mobs. read a book.
Last I checked Cardinal was dead... and even if not, is it 1.9 compatible?
did you look at the source? it's like 200 lines. basically key shortcuts to mplayer operations. you could have done it in a couple of days (less if you know elisp). but my point is that everything starts small. so just start ;)

incidentally for truly impressive emacs packages check out: gnus, erc, slime, org-mode, tramp, magit, ido, paredit, nxhtml, yasnippet.
Actually, JavaScript would be kind of interesting as a First-among-equals language. The more I work with JS, the more I get the feeling that it's a wonderful language crippled by a tragic standard library and a horrible run time.
Wait, I thought only 96% of apps got approved at all.
Yeah you're right, but not "human" its better if we call it "society" its not human nature to be like we are.
Thanks for the update... it's been a good 6 months or so since I last checked on Perl 6's progress...
Vacuum tube "Integrated Circuits" were built in the 1920s.
The irony is that the word "winnowing" winnowed the students.
This can only mean that they have already broken the Skype encryption - and want their opponents to use it.
"To get full FREE access to all our most exclusive coupons, you just need to get 2 friends to sign up."

#fail
It's not practical at all. But it's not impossible.

It's just being relentlessly resourceful as PG explained last week.

As an officer you're on duty a few days a week. This means you greet the visiting families. It also means you troubleshoot any weird things that happen in the waiting room.

Probably once a month you'd have a kid who hitchhiked across country to come visit and who would ask about where he could stay nearby. Or kids who would cut school to make it there for a visit.

Also, if a family's hiring outside help with the admissions process, then they've already blocked out time to go visit colleges.

I only visited Princeton after I was admitted. I applied blind. My father had almost had a chance to teach there while he was in the army and had always thought highly of the place. I applied to all the big Midwestern colleges and we thought, what the heck, let's apply to one of these fancy Ivies.

It's kind of a classic story of a dream deferred.
Aside from a media center, any ideas what this class of devices could be used for at home (or as a portable device)? It seems like an awesome solution, but to what?

Augmenting laptop CPU (compilers, 3D apps, etc)? Mesh wifi? Better routers/firewalls? An alternative to VPC software (i.e., just remote desktop in and take it with you)?

I'm betting there's a cool startup that could be formed around a device like this...
That is a cool name, but it seemed really hard to actually see someone's business card. The codes didn't support vanity URLs and it looked like there was a $10 signup fee. Physical business cards are designed to be read easily and shared easily. They are even pretty cheap.
No, a learning curve has incremental knowledge on the X-axis and effort on the Y-axis. The more effort you have to put in to learn that next important feature makes the curve steeper. This is also why learning curves typically level off at some point.
Kind of makes me want to play a MUD