skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This will merely reflect reputation. How many people in academia have been at Harvard long enough to have an actual opinion?

Question: if China built the best university in the world today, how long would it take to reach number 1 on the list? I think decades. So much for having a yearly list.

I looked for details, from http://www.thes.co.uk/worldrankings/story.aspx . It requires registration, but here's a part of the method section:

"Our rankings contain two strands of peer review. The more important is academic opinion, worth 40 per cent of the total score available in the rankings. The opinions are gathered, like the rest of the rankings data, by our partners QS Quacquarelli Symonds (www.topuniversities.com) which has built up a database of e-mail addresses of active academics across the world. They are invited to tell QS what area of academic life they come from, choosing from science, biomedicine, technology, social science or the arts and humanities. They are then asked to list up to 30 universities that they regard as the leaders in the academic field they know about, and in 2007 we have strengthened our measures to prevent anyone voting for his or her own institution.

This year we have the opinions of 5,101 experts, of whom 41 per cent are in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 30 per cent in the Americas, and 29 per cent in the Asia-Pacific region."

The rest of the score is split:

-10% which university do recruiters favor

-20% publication count

-20% student stuff, like teacher-to-student ratio (the only example they give)

-10% I couldn't find.

So there's definitely two selection effects: how did they collect their addresses, and who decided to answer a Times Online survey. I'm pretty sure my advisor wouldn't do it. Too busy.

Furthermore, they don't give the detailed methodology, and they admit to changing it since the first published results.

Overall, it seems like an honest effort, but what's the point? Would you advise a young person to make a decision based on this ranking?
I had it password-protected with .htaccess and then accessed via HTTPS, but I switched to using ssh+svn. There were some odd bugs with the WebDAV interface to svn where it wouldn't update my working copy properly on 'svn update', leading to a lot of manual deletion of .svn/wcprops to get going again. I finally said enough is enough and just switched to accessing it over SSH.
Thinking like this is what keeps people like me from enjoying charitable work.

One of the reasons I find myself with enough time to do a startup is because I cut down so much on my volunteer and charitable work. I just got sick and tired of putting in my own time and money and listening to people like you complain.

I suppose I should thank people like you for helping me refocus my energy on my own efforts. But I won't. Instead, I'll just say, "Shut up and say 'thank you'".
from Columbia University's various graduate and professional schools

There's a random sample for you.
Nerds are efficient, too. Just emailed this to everyone I know. One minute to give them all the data they ever need to know me. Pretty good return, huh?
It's cliched, but a [WORD_OMITTED] is defined by his computer

Nobody is defined by his computer, and nobody likes being called a [WORD_OMITTED] 500 times in one article. Can we have a downmod arrow?
Is Greed Good? by John Stossel [6 part YouTube video]
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5RPJkYU2Js

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FMD76SGLOg

Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QNo_OyF3Uc

Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01XeCoTWKtg

Part 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srodAPzdQdk

Part 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXQgl0eUzF4
I don't mind being called a nerd. I don't have all of the social faults described in the article, but I certainly have many of them -- enough that I immediately sent this to girlfriend with the suggestion that she read it.

Most geeks (people who have exceptional interest and ability in a particular field, usually technical) are also nerds (people who are socially awkward or abnormal). Rather than pretending that this isn't the case, why not accept reality and try to find the best way of dealing with it?
Now Bay Area Starbucks shops offer free iTunes access
Different survey uses different "filter".
function NotSureYouAreANerd() {

SenseOfHumor.show()

}
The ennui which pervades universities has only one beneficial (and pernicious) effect.

Those students who are ahead enough in their understanding to not need the education, will do fine . Those students who rely on the system to educate them will sink into the muck of mundane reality. So the system will cause a stratification of the students, into high-fliers and ordinary joes.

The only way to come out ahead in the university system is to reach a point where you do not need it.
Intel Official: Say Goodbye to Privacy
I don't consider these "social faults". A social fault is when you think one thing and say another to a person, or worse, talk about them instead of to them. Are these "nerd" or "human" phenomena.

I liked the article. Even though it's tongue in cheek, anything that helps me help others understand me is greatly appreciated.

Now leave me alone; I'm busy.
It would help if you had the lead of the article (or the whole thing) visible in your RSS feed.
Six Ways to Write More Comprehensible (C) Code
A puzzle I made up that might be good for technical interviews:  "slider puzzle with a twist"
You are given an array of n x n integers.

The goal is to end up with an array in which all entries are equal.

Four kinds of moves are allowed:

(1) rotate a row

(2) rotate a column

(3) add 1 to all entries in a row

(4) add 1 to all entries in a column

Show the goal is achievable if and only if the sum of the numbers
in the initial configuration is congruent to 0 mod n.
Sure that open quote wasn't two words to the left?
makesLotsOfMoney = true;

isConfidentInAbilities = true;

function AmINerd()

{

if (isConfidentInabilities && makesLotsOfMoney)
{
return true;
}
else
{
throw nullSenseOfHumorException;
}

}
haha i think i watched this in my highschool econ class.
US Bot Herder Admits Infecting 250K Machines
It's not magic. DJ's do this every 2-3 minutes for hours at a time with completely different songs. There are only so many reasonable tempos, only so many keys to play in (and popular music sticks to a very small subset of available scales, and even if they didn't, all modern instruments are equal tempered and so only have 12 notes that are identical across all instruments and keys...and many scales can overlap without horrendous results). And, obviously, the same song is going to be in the same tempo and key (roughly)...so you can easily delay some number of beats and get a round out of it.

Try it with just about any song. It'll work fine. Obviously, instrumentals will usually work better, but even vocal tracks can work fine this way.
NIST has opened a public competition to develop a new cryptographic hash algorithm
Colleges must police copyright, or else
I found it, they hid it under the name "Introduction to Advanced Mathematics"
>Those students who are ahead enough in their understanding to not need the education, will do fine . Those students who rely on the system to educate them will sink into the muck of mundane reality.

You are forgetting the third category - those who _think_ that don't need the education.
feng shui is only useful to the extent that it makes sense, which would eliminate all the many mystical aspects of it.

For facing the door, if you are in a business where you get many visitors coming in the door to face, then that becomes an issue to deal with. In that case, you can slide your desk back to the door wall with monitor backs facing the window so that you can see people coming in on your side. For coders, I think being along the window wall makes the most sense as visitors are not a big part of coding (hopefully)
It writes fine, and erases pretty well. It does leave a faint "ghosting", but an occasional wipe with some whiteboard cleaner makes it go away.

It's hard to complain for $13. I mean, we covered a whole wall for about $40.
Sony CEO wants to go back in time, avert high-def format war
A Guy Installs Samsung's 64GB SSD Into a First Gen Macbook Pro
Oh no, please don't let Hacker News turn into Ron Paul News... I mean Reddit.
No. I am too young to know any McKinsey consultants personally. (As a rule they hold MBAs and I am only an undergraduate.) Although, many of my friends from back home seem to be eying the prize.

I am peripherally familiar because my father has done business with them and has told me a little about it. I do not know enough to evaluate the quality of their work (that hardly matters anyway). I can only speak to the ridiculous magnitude of their compensation.

You can read a little more about their compensation at
http://www.careers-in-business.com/consulting/mcsal.htm and
http://fisher.osu.edu/fin/opler/salary.htm .

I suspect Paul Graham could reliably earn several million dollars a year. But, I am sure, Y Combinator is more fun.
The YouTube video has been taken down. What was it about?
Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.
Or maybe smart men marry curvy women. At least that's what I did.
I know oliver stone was being ironic when he wrote that, but he was spot on accurate.

A great movie...
Is this supposed to be a parody of something else?

Anyway, I think this one tends to be a bit more accurate, for a stereotype: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/appendixb.html
No one else took you up on this, but my mother is definitely curvy.

John.

OK, now I know why no one else replied. I feel weird about talking about my mother that way.
He always seem so sad and wistful. He always seems to be lamenting things.

But, he's still so influential that he can't be ignored.
Finally, a generous donation to our home soil.

We need to stop giving to other countries so much and fix our own [mounting] problems first.
Wierd. I can't figure out how to make it spin the other way. It spins counter-clockwise to me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgQToMKIiSo
Tracking People Using Bluetooth
In addition to what's been mentioned, you should definitely take a solid Linear Algebra course. Besides the uses for computer graphics (vector stuff) and artificial intelligence applications (singular value decomposition et al), it is really philosophically useful to internalize the concept of transformations and how many non-obvious applications they have.
Seconded. I predict this will degenerate into a flame war. I hate censorship but I doubt if we need political posts on YC news.
Can You Clone Tangler For $1,500?
What's with the political threads? This and Ron Paul... what happen today? I wish I could downvote these threads....
Installing MySQL on Mac OS X
It was kinda the obvious joke there. But funny. And true.
I think you took a wrong turn on your way to http://politics.reddit.com
Why? Because it's not "reality". The described "nerd" traits are largely a self-imposed condition, and glorification of them only makes them worse.

There are plenty of people out there who are exceptionally good with "nerdy" subjects, yet whom also have social lives, enjoy travel and human contact, and find a life spent locked in front of a computer to be extremely limiting. And those people are often the most respected and honored by their peers.

The common thread that I sense in these kinds of articles is one of defensiveness -- here's why I'm different, and why you should treat me with kid gloves. And I suppose that's a natural behavior for a group that perceives itself as marginal, but it's not anything particularly insightful or life-enhancing.
reading this paper makes me think society's (British at least) emphasis on consumer culture has serious flaws. however, it seems the government is more to blame through using this ideology to avoid paying for education.

it may be a nice way of saving money (from the government's perspective) but the dumbing-down of universities and consequentially the higher of degree owning citizens serves to vindicate the real problem, the pre-university education system in the UK.
You don't need a Google source to recognize a patent troll. Honestly, I don't know why the media even bothers to cover these stories; there seem to be more of them every week and they're virtually all irrelevant.
Have you ever been tempted to sell your soul and go to the dark (MBA/money route) side?
Ask Hacker News: What is the most undervalued web technology? (2me RSS)
What about you?
Read "Blink"... Thin slicing can work REALLY well if you do it right.
I'd add to this: When you are pitching to friends/family, ask them to pepper you with questions/objectives/concerns AS THEY OCCUR TO THEM... The flow of the interview is going to be decidedly outside of your control. If you can't gracefully handle rapid fire questions, it won't go as well.
Debate the Skeptic
A friend of mine built this in a day or too. The funny thing is how often the skeptic finds a legitimate argument for why something doesn't work.
Relaxation tips?
I love my startup job but, since starting it, my jaw clench has become bad enough that my front teeth are shifting. Does anyone have some good tips on how to stop that?
It's actually pretty easy -- you can only change the total value of the board by n at a time (takes care of the "only if" part, because the "all equal" state also requires the sum mod n to = 0). You can increase a single cell by n in exchange for increasing all cells (including that one) by 1 (by hitting the column it's in, then the row it's in, then rotating the column, repeat). You can spread the n part of that "increase" out over any number of cells you like, in any (whole) allocation you like, because it's clearly easy to put whatever cells you like in one column. So that lets you equalize everything as long as you move the deltas in clumps of n, which satisfies the "if" part.
Why did you post this here rms?
The Dark Web Project Seeks to Track Terror Web Posts
If only this had existed when I was doing my senior thesis... and if only I had known Python then...

I can't wait to play with this.
Without looking too deeply into it, this might be due to a limitation in the JVM: it has no "tail call" instruction (Sun's claim is that it would mess with the security manager, though the workaround for this is pretty obvious), so this Lisp probably has to use an exception trampoline, which imposes a significant performance penalty. So, it was probably made manual to give the developer a choice.

It doesn't make it any better, per se, but that's probably why it's like that.
agreed: almost useless as a guide for prospective founders unless it takes into account the statistics for ventures that _failed_. For this reason I would be more interested in the stats for ycombinator funded companies that either succeeded or threw in the towel.
We're getting ready to launch our product ... skribit.

http://www.skribit.com
Could you give an example to illustrate your method?
Ron Paul responded to Paul Graham's claim that Ron Paul will only be remembered for gaming social news sites.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=76477
Startup weekend atlanta ... anyone here?
I'm here at startup weekend in Atlanta. Are there any founders here?
I'm here (as I am with all the weekends). Good to connect with you on HN.
At UCLA, students are graded with a bell curve. They have become masters at figuring out exactly how much should they study, relative to their peers, to fall within the right tail of the curve. Students no longer share notes, neither talk to each other beyond superficial matters. They find their college party and romance partners in other disciplines, unsurprisingly.

And as a T.A., don't even _dare_ to not give an A to a student. He'll grade _you_ down, and your chances as a T.A. (that is, the means to get a salary or an extra as a PhD student) will vanish.

The paradox here is: how can everyone get an A and still be graded on a Bell curve? To this day, I don't quite get it.
In any case: students get A, but they all need one or two years of lab internship before they can do else other than harm themselves in the lab.

The author of the text is totally right. And there are no politically correct solutions. None at all. We all expect the system to somehow collapse at some point, and then restart.
BTW, he'll be speaking in NYC on Tuesday:

http://groups.google.com/group/jvm-languages/browse_thread/t...
See a therapist? If you don't have any underlying issues that need to be addressed, they can teach you relaxation techniques better than a Google search for "relaxation."

You could also see a dentist to get a mouth guard made.
"economists marry economists, probably not because they actually prefer to do so, but because those are the people they meet in daily life."

That pretty much sums up my feelings toward economists as well.
DARPA race pushes robotics forward - CMU beats Stanford
I saw it turning counterclockwise and could not see how it could possibly spin clockwise. Then I tilted my screen a tad and am now seeing it spin clockwise, and cannot "make it" spin counterclockwise again. Very cool.
I wanted to do something like this a couple months ago but on a larger (although anonymous) scale, but haven't gotten around to it.

I live pretty much right at the corner of the 10 and 110 freeways in downtown Los Angeles, two of the busiest freeways in southern California, if not the country/world. The idea was to set up a high gain antenna pointing at the freeway, and track all the thousands, if not millions, of Bluetooth enabled cell phones that pass by every day.

Maybe I'm just a sucker for random statistics, but you could get some interesting data, like the relative numbers of phones from different manufacturers (I believe Bluetooth MAC address ranges are tied to manufacturers), traffic stats like the number of cars per minute, or even the speed of the cars determined by the period that a device stays within range.
Actually, if you watch the clips, its more about economics than politics, although one could make the stretch to politics / morals.
This is a really hard thing to bring up. I want to sugarcoat this as much as possible, because I'm running the risk of flamebait. Maybe it's better we don't think about this, but as a community perhaps it's something we have to face. I don't know, but for better or worse here it goes...

Does a user voting this up become smarter or dumber in the eyes of the algorithm?

What does the answer to this question mean?
it's fitting considering the storage format electronic giants (and movie studios) like Sony should worry about more is the hard drive + internet ...
>> You should try taking a logic course. Apparently it makes you think more clear and argue better.

Prove it.
I have the impression that Paul Graham hasn't implemented that algorithm yet and/or turned it on because the community hasn't yet degenerated enough. I can't find the specific post where he said that.
Making a happy developer house
Exchange Rate and Silicon Valley
email for me.
Sports.
Hey man,

I am having serious relaxation issues also. I'm working a fulltime job and a startup. I have definitely helped me to start running and working out.

If you are at all spiritual, read the book Be Here Now by Baba Ram Dass. It will put things in perspective and calm you down a bit.

Cheers -
I think if you're blessed enough to be entrusted with great wealth, you should pass it on to others so they too can enjoy the benefit.

If I ever had money I'd want to give it away in unique ways that specifically help people - whether it's education, healthcare facilities, churches, etc... Seems like it'd be more fun than just buying $1 billion in Ramen and shipping it somewhere.
Try meditation. I do it though not as regularly as I should, but it helps to calm you down. You start to notice more around you, mainly because you stop analyzing everything to the 'T'.

Read "The Power of Now" for a better (and lengthier) version of what I just said.

And yeah, try and take it easy... :D
Meditation and yoga. Seriously.
cold shower
Cool idea - I am sure everyone has thought of this a few times. Cool that someone actually did it.

I could see something like this working even better with pure javascript web frameworks (what with there being javascript in the browser). But they aren't as popular as rails (yet).
i was about to say that!

the campaign need stickers like "I spammed 1000 message boards for Ron Paul, 08"
yoga works wonders for me. Started it 5 months ago and the mental side has been amazing. Sure I am not super flexible, but its not competitive - give it a go and remove any preconceptions you may have about it
Guns. Seriously. Marksmanship is a simple thing that takes a lot of focus. Concentrate on the front sight, mind your breathing, squeeze gently .... it's like meditation, only less sissy. (j/k!)
Your body has a built in mechanism for repairing itself mentally and physically: Sleep.

Some people experience alertness, relaxation, and a refreshed sense of well being. Ask your doctor if Sleep is right for you.
Martial arts - get out and start fighting yourself, people, and bags. You'll not only de-stress but you'll also learn to defend yourself - physically and mentally. I wouldn't have made it through grad school without 6 - 8 hours of practice a week.
Are the Most LinkedIn Really LinkedOut?
It's some indication of the greatness of James Watson that he shows up even in a talk about OO programming.

E pur si muove
NYT on "The 4-Hour Workweek"
Try a little book called "The Calm Technique" by, I think, Paul Wilson (?).

Simple, excellent introductory meditation.

But that takes time to build momentum. As at least one great yogi said "water will clean the mind faster than the mind can clean the mind."

Hot tubs and swimming, particularly in natural water (not a chlorinated pool) will get most of the junk that meditation will take care of eventually in a much faster and more expedient way. Oh, and consider a mouth guard when you sleep, so you don't grind your damn teeth away!
I recommend Yoga as well. I asked (almost) this exact same question to another forum back in January. I got a variety of good recommendations, but the best was definitely Yoga and Meditation, followed by organizational/time-management ideas. Exercise wasn't a problem as I was already exercising hard 4-5 times a week. Sleep wasn't really an issue either, but sleep is basically a prerequisite for any of these ideas. If you aren't getting enough sleep, you won't be able to focus on anything.

Just as a sample, try this:

Find a quiet, clean room with a hard floor that you can still lie down on and be comfortable. It should be softer than a hardwood floor, but harder than a mattress. I used a throw rug on top of a carpet. Get a small blanket or a pillow for your head. I used a $5 fleece blanket from the drugstore.

Lie flat on your back, with your arms slightly away from your body, palms-up. As you relax, your feet should dangle away a little, and your fingers should curl up a bit. Take a deep breath in through your nose by expanding your diaphram. Exhale slowly, and listen to your breath. Continue breathing easily. You should settle into a rhythmic pattern eventually. Keep listening to your breath. Eventually you'll notice that your arms and legs are getting heavy, as the tension drains out of them. Your mouth and eyes and face should relax too. Your mouth will probably hang open. It can take a long time. The first time I did it, it was 20 minutes of lying on my back and breathing before I was really relaxed.

Decide in advance how long you will permit yourself to meditate. I recommend 30-60 minutes. While you are meditating, do not think about anything else at all. If, while you're trying to relax, you begin thinking about your startup, or any other problems, stop and go back to listening to your breath.

The advantage of meditation and Yoga over guns or sports or even martial arts is that you can meditate almost anywhere, and mental discipline is useful for virtually everything.
Everything stossel does is political.