skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In fact, my experience is that most people regret what they "didn't do" rather than what they did.
What proportion of football-related revenue subsidizes a university's academic department, and what proportion is just plowed back into the football program?
I emulated the control scheme I proposed by rotating the keyboard 90 degrees and guess what, I made it through all the levels by losing only one life on level 40. I never made it even close to half this before.

The problem with having up + down instead of left + right is that (like most people?) I alternate pressing up and down with only the middle finger, while I have 1 finger on each key in the left + right scheme.

Considering that it doesn't take away anything for anyone to enable this additional, arguably superior control scheme, I think this is the crucial next feature to implement.
Well as long as I'm playing Bodhisattva, commit yourself to something that forces you to leave the house and do something at least once a day. If you don't forcibly inject randomness to break up your days they tend to form a tightly-packed crystalline lattice of self-similar negativity.
market forces also determine CEO salaries

Not really. A theoretical market requires unlimited buyers and sellers bidding. A company like the NYSE does a good job simulating one, but once you get to the back-slapping/rubber-stamping/cult of personality world of board room politics, the market-in-theory no longer exists.

For comparison, I tried researching minor league baseball coach salaries (which would more closely reflect the market) but came up dry. I'm guessing 100K tops, and probably less. The prices relating to college football are propped up just by being officially part of college and the environment.

I don't remember a single person talking about minor league baseball during college, and the same would have been true of football if its professional proving-grounds were the minor leagues rather than universities. Too bad.
A look at some of those perks:
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/football/2006-11-16-c...

"About 10% of coaches get a cut of ticket revenue; Oregon's Mike Bellotti got $631,000 [in 2006] under such a provision."

I read somewhere that the football revenue from some universities can support the sports programs for all the other sports. That's probably true for the big college programs that have large fan bases, like Notre Dame and many SEC schools.

Sadly, a significant part of alumni contribution can be earmarked for sports and football/basketball in particular. [Sad because this is the state of affairs, not that contributors can donate to specific programs.] Those boosters pay for the new locker rooms and stadiums. It's an arms race to get the best facilities to attract the best athletes and get wins. (I heard the facilities at NC State were impressively professional.)

NY Times recently profiled Stanford's additional compensation to coaches for Palo Alto real estate:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/10/sports/ncaafootball/10stan...
Go for it. The object is to get in the game. I am assuming you have checked out your company and seriously awesome fellas means they have quantifiable accomplishments. Have you negotiated with them at all? 100% of the shots you dont take, dont go in. Tell then you will accept the offer if they can up the salary to $70K. Wait and see what they say. read this http://tinyurl.com/2bb8ve
I don't know, but I guarantee Ohio State makes hundreds of millions and pays Jim Tressel one or two.

The article left out an interesting factoid, which is that many of them are the highest paid state employees in their state.
Well, yes, I'm sure that college is much different as a 30-year-old with a nice car, the right to buy beer legally, a worldly-wise attitude and a pile of money saved up from your ten-year hacking career. For one thing, girls may actually want to talk to you!

But, seriously: I agree that the college experience may be most enjoyable when you're in your twenties, if only because that's how old most of the other students are. You may not want to be so old that you feel a generation gap with your own classmates. But the guy is nineteen. He's got eleven years to go before he's thirty. He can afford to work at three or four startups and still graduate from college before he's thirty.
That's absurd. I'd be willing to wager big school football makes orders of magnitude more than minor league baseball, hence the coaches do as well.
From the USA Today article I linked above:
"At Texas, for example, the return on the sizable investment in Brown is a pre-eminent football program that last season won the school's first football national championship in 35 years and accounted for 62% of all the Longhorns' athletics revenues, turning a $42 million profit. Football essentially underwrote 17 other sports at the school that don't make money -- all but men's basketball and baseball."

I'm not sure if the profit takes into account university merchandise. Powerhouse football programs sell lots and lots of university clothing, and the universities make money off the licensing.
I think the big difference between CEO's and football coaches is that the coaches' products are more easily subject to scrutiny.

The average joe can watch weekly football games and judge for himself whether a team looks disciplined and prepared.

CEO performance is documented in complex financial reports released once a quarter. The reports aren't as readily available as nationally televised football games, and the connection to the CEO's contributions isn't as immediately obvious. Also, recent history is replete with incidents where the bottom unexpectedly dropped out of a company because of unbeknownst-to-the-public mistakes or transgressions committed under the CEO's watch.

I think public perception about the differences in transparency is what drives distrust in CEO's but not in college coaches.
I'd be willing to wager that football, set up like minor league baseball, would make roughly the same as minor league baseball, or worse:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFL
This blog entry does have a good message. Good grades are nice, but nobody has every asked me about my GPA, either. I actually think there comes a moment in most people's lives where they find themselves choosing between good grades and focusing on what they are most passionate about. In grad school, I got so into programming that I started putting less effort into my coursework, and my grades suffered (a bit). I still got my MS, and nobody has ever even once asked about my grades. One of my professors was so into one of the software apps I wrote that he agreed to sign off on it as fulfilling the MS project.

In the end, you may have to let go of grades to truly follow your passion. Some of the top grad programs are set up in recognition of this.

Now that said, I have no idea how or why this blogger needed to sacrifice her time or sanity to get A's in English. I double majored in English and Math, and I think I got one B in lit the whole time (my overall lit gpa was someting like a 3.85, because there were some A- grades in there as well). It took a bit of doing, but really, you don't have to go to the wall to get A's in a most lit classes.

The Math, on the other hand, was really tough. I got about a 3.5 in the major, because the undergrad calc series throug differential equations made sense, and I could handle applied math pretty well. But math theory (real analysis, abstract algebra, and so forth) was hard as hell. I really struggled for even a glimpse of understanding of this stuff. I studied hours every day, spent hours working in student groups and in office hours solving problem sets, giving it everything I had, and I still got B's in plenty of these classes. In the end, I'm glad I did it, but I could tell I was not Ph.D material in Mathematics.

I agree with edw519 - unless you're doing serious math or science, don't tell me about your super high GPA.
This is true. The problem with the logic is that everything has an opportunity cost (i.e. if you're doing one thing, there's something else that you're not doing). So on the face of things, using this argument to advise someone trying to choose between a few mutually exclusive options is tantamount to saying nothing at all.

For example, suppose that in the near term the OP will either move to San Francisco for this startup or attend college.

If he takes this full-time job, he'll miss out on the unique educational and social opportunity that is going to college full-time.

If he takes this opportunity to go to college, he'll miss out on the unique educational and social opportunity that is working on a startup full-time.

Obviously these two seem symmetrical. I'd argue, though, that after going to college for four years, it would actually be easier to replicate the startup experience he'd miss now than it would be to replicate the college experience four years from now when he'll be "the old guy" in his freshman dorm. Unless he's Van Wilder, that may not be the best social situation in the world.

Of course, this is all a red herring if he's not interested in going to college right now.
Yet many hackers can't write well enough to pitch their ideas to others and can't design a website that's usable to save their lives. There's utility for more subjective judgements even in the geekiest of pursuits.
Actually, I think Beacon is what Beacon should have been. The problem with apps like iGot is that it takes effort and time on the part of the user. Beacon is effortless. Yes this can result in privacy issues, but if the user is worried about privacy s/he can easily change the settings.
The author compiled ErlyWeb and YAWS with HiPE (http://www.it.uu.se/research/group/hipe). Are there any issues with using HiPE instead of the Erlang/OTP compiler?
Perhaps, but simply putting my face in a news feed next to a product doesn't mean I like it, it just means I bought it. If you really want to know what I think about something you need to hear what I have to say. iGot let's you tell your friends to stay away from a product just as easily as it lets you tell them how much you love something. I think that's an important distinction.
The last commenter on the original thread is absolutely right: Rails follows different "concurrency model", i.e. it needs multiple processes to run well, especially on multi-core CPUs. He needs to create a cluster of 4-6 mongrels on 2-core CPU and the margin will shrink.
I love this kid - he knows what he wants and is able to get them without whining to his parents.

I think the parents have done a pretty good job.
Ask YC: What's the best way to resize images for web applications?
So our web app is starting to deal a lot with images of various sizes... per user. So lots of images. We've already ran into FS issues and whatnot, but now we're trying to decide the best way to 'code' resizing images functionality.

No, we don't want some Java applet. Yes, we'd like to do this all in the background. Ie: as soon as a user uploads a photo, a script would resize it, make copies of diff sizes, etc...

What languages have good image support? What about compression?

I heard Facebook is doing / did research on this to retain image quality when they do their resizes... any thoughts?

THANKS!
I don't know if this was accidental or not, but thanks for linking to the printer friendly version... Gets away from a lot of the blinding ads...

Good article...
Watch this video--excellent summary of SV at the end of 2007
The XFL had a lot of problems, but very few were related to the business structure.

The biggest problem was that the best players in the world weren't playing in the XFL. Div I-A college football doesn't have that problem. The lower divisions do, though. I doubt many Div I-AA or Div II coaches are making $1MM.
Intro to Dvorak keyboard layout (improve your typing speed & reduce RSI)
I will try running the test after recompiling without HiPE and see what difference it makes.
I was browsing Amazon and I came across the same book. I think I certainly will look into this one, though some of the comments (on Amazon) made it sound like the authors jumped from one topic to another, and skirted around a lot of the in-depth discussions that you would normally expect from a book like this... Has this been your experience?
How often do you buy products you don't like?

Anyway, this is more of a product/service review application than a notification system like Beacon.
In that case, I guess it's impossible for CPU to be the limiting factory in this universe. ;-)

(And, technically, there is still debate about whether the universe is infinite or not. And, our universe may yet reduce to a singularity. Just because it hasn't happened yet, doesn't mean it won't. The universe is tricky like that.)
All the time. The PS3 comes to mind ;)
"The topics to study really depend on the programming task"

I agree... My day job does not involve any heavy mathematical problem solving, but a good intro to discrete or concrete mathematics (IMHO) proves to be a good foundation for programming in general.

I studied in an Indian curriculum and have had a lot of math schooling, but it was always done "wrong", with more emphasis on getting the answer right with no need to understand _why_ that answer is right, hence my reason to ask for a good book that others found an enjoyable read and one that teaches the concepts right. I always found math to be interesting, though sadly haven't done much of it since graduation...

Thanks for the link to the Springer series. I have never heard of it, but I will look into them, though honestly, the Knuth book does intrigue me. Looks like a time to hit the local bookstore...
I wouldn't go quite that far, but the folks at The Economist have made a good case that a few tweaks to the system wouldn't hurt.
Emacs hidden gems: Version Control
Postgres for the win
Why would that surprise you? RoR is stunningly slow and PHP is pretty damned fast (in general--though I've seen a lot of pathologically bad PHP code in the wild that sucked for performance, usually due to database abuse...of course, I've also seen RoR apps that are even slower due to database abuse). Luckily, most applications built in RoR (or PHP, or Catalyst, or Django, etc.) never have to scale out very much, and by the time they do, the revenue is hopefully there to help fix the problem by brute force.
Article about redesigning Half-Life nearly from scratch, with tremendous results
Homosexuality Turned On and Off in Fruit Flies
LinkedIn API "Sometime Next Year": 6 Words Of Advice
Having built many different apps in Django in the last year, I strongly disagree with this. Django has a clever admin interface that gives you easy access to every data model you can dream up, but this is only a really neat hack.

Django provides a very clean layer on top of the database, and a great approach to structuring a system (apps, included urls.py, template dirs, templatetags, middleware). As with anything, though, the more complex the task, the more you need to be aware of what it is doing under the hood. Understanding when Django does lazy queries, where things are processed, etc. is very important.
The Seattle Start-Up Index
Williams Syndrome.

One of its major symptoms is also mental retardation; while the article didn't delve too much into that sector, not mentioning mental retardation is a bit of a glaring omission.
This is kind of a pointless exercise. Nobody on this site is using RoR (or whatever) to build a few mildly dynamic pages. Even if you were to compare an identical application built in each language/framework, you'd still be testing just that application. And no one should be surprised that RoR is "slow" in comparison to these other options. By the time you slap a framework on any of the others, you'll find they're an order of magnitude slower--maybe not as slow as RoR, since the Ruby interpreter is pretty slow, but still much more comparable. In fact, CakePHP is known to be pretty comparable to RoR performance-wise. Likewise for Catalyst, and the Perl interpreter is significantly faster than the Ruby interpreter.
Well, this Economist story explains why executive pay is unlikely to decline: http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=...
I worked there as well. Like any company, I think it really depends on your team/organization. I've heard horror stories about certain orgs at Amazon and nothing but glowing reviews for others. Perhaps you had a terrible time on your team under a specific manager - others could have had the opposite experience.
Since when should we consider universities as for-profit institutions?
Spokeo 2.0: A Feed Reader For Your Friends
very interesting. invited my friends to show them i play intelligent games.
I'm happy that the NYT has finally opened up, but I find the answers.com double-click "feature" incredibly irritating.

For full disclosure, I must admit that I highlight and click around computer text that I'm reading almost uncontrollably.
The Ultimate Office Dub Video (the original)
The ultimate office lip dub. If you don't know what that is, you have to check this out. Entrepreneurs having fun! Apologies if this was posted before, but I just discovered it and can't help but share. Well done to the team at Connected Ventures!
This is the next thing I'll test.
They seem to go back and forth, don't they?:-)

http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=...

I certainly wouldn't favor any broad laws meddling in that kind of thing, but a tweak here and there to open things up to shareholders probably wouldn't hurt.
If you're using Rails, I suggest using attachment_fu with RMagick or ImageScience.
The assertion, though is that grades that subjective aren't worth much.
Sure did! With this type of enabling behavior at such a young age, who knows what might happen? He might be president one day!
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/compensation_daine...

This study did a peer comparison:

[First, the researchers defined a way to measure CEO skill. Although many studies have examined the relationship between CEO pay and company performance, Daines and his colleagues wanted to isolate specific evidence of executive competence. After all, company performance can depend on a number of factors beyond the power of an individual CEO: the economy, regulatory constraints, or industry conditions, to name just a few.

They decided that a firm run by a skilled CEO should consistently do better than its industry peers. More specifically, a skilled CEO should continue a firm's prior good performance and reverse poor performance. Conversely, a bad CEO would be more likely to continue a poor showing and to reverse the firm's prior successes.

The results were instructive: The study, which reviewed CEO pay and economic performance between 1991-2002, found that in small firms, highly paid CEOs generally are more skilled than their industry counterparts. The correlation is even stronger if the firm has a large shareholder or if the CEO has been paid largely in stocks and options. Conversely, pay is more likely to be negatively related to skill in larger firms. "In many large firms, the highest paid executives actually performed the worst," said Daines.]
Comet-enabled web applications with lift and Scala
Nokia "was" far ahead of Google on new cellphone technology
Ten Things To Do First If You're Looking At Starting Your Own Business
I've had the opportunity to launch two successful small businesses in my life. Here are the ten things you should do before starting any sort of small business.
Yahoo to Start Web Show for Technology Investors
Heh, I was just wondering the same thing.
Michael Dell's one-trick pony
I have to wonder if the attention he gets is because of his age. He certainly wouldn't get away with a lot of the things mentioned in the article if he were, say, 20.
Heh, yeah, I do that too. I'm not sure why, but yes, it makes reading nytimes.com frustrating at times.
You too, huh? I almost came up for an excuse why, but it's basically just a nervous tic.
My bet is on alcoholic.
That doesn't make any sense at all.

College football programs rake in huge money, and therefore the people responsible for their success do too, whereas minor league baseball teams do not, and therefore their coaches don't.
The Robbers Cave Experiment
What I.Q. doesn't tell you about race
I've bought some product, mobile phone accessories for one example, that have worked okay for a while but after while have become completely useless. I wouldn't want Beacon to advertise them, especially not until I've used and tested them for quite a while, which is unfortunately exactly what Beacon would do.
Talk is cheap, Nokia.
Wow. Thank you, Techcrunch, for proving her point about "inanity".

If you actually bother to quote this paragraph accurately, Doris isn't saying anything that Merlin Mann and his fans haven't already said at much greater length [1].

[1] e.g. http://wiki.43folders.com/index.php/Blog_less
DO NOT listen to the song if you have any intent to play the game!
Anyone from Seattle active on news.yc?

Ian
Any pratical application for yield that you couldn't do just as simply with a for loop? I'm not criticizing, I'm just curious.
I think it is up to the posters. Just happens to be that everyone chooses to have it off.

Makes more sense logistically - it's more convenient to have all questions/mails about the job coming in to an email address.
Changing the face of science
The Crysis of Integrating Next-Gen Animation and AI
I'm a little troubled with: "[a]nd it's not with a text-editor." I'm all for evolution but essentially you deal with text. So no matter how much you augment that you still deal with text (unless you propose a completely pictorial system which he doesn't appear to do). So in essence you still use, at the base, a text-editor.

He calls Emacs a glorified text-editor - and he's right, but the glorified part, or the extensible part, is exactly what he should look at. SLIME mode makes a good start, but one could do much more if they were motivated like one may expect he is.

I also fail to understand: "...so terrible that you have to re-write it. Because basically, you didn't iterate your design." If he's arguing that we should always rethink our design after a while and not continue on regardless I agree. But I'm not completely sure what he's getting at. Thoughts?
Windows Live file-sharing inadvertandly moves files to the trash bin, oopsies!
Voyager 2 probe reaches solar system boundary
Your answers remind me of "The Game of Life." The three goals in that game were Fame, Fortune, and Love. Pick two.
I am :-)

Drop me a line kirubakaran@gmail.com
PHP is definitely a good choice. The GD library pretty much does everything you'd conceivably want to do to images.

http://us2.php.net/gd
I don't think Beacon's job is to suggest products to other people, just to notify them that you have made a purchase. I wouldn't consider someone buying something as an endorsement for the product, but I do think it's an interesting, though useless, thing to know.
Well, I can't guarantee that this is was a good use of block and yield, or even if it was advisable, but here's what I did one time...

I needed to construct a bunch of polynomials from a set of 20 odd coordinates (x,y) coordinates. I decided to use langrange interpolating polynomials, and I wanted the polynomial to match three of the twenty points (otherwise they bounce all over the place). The idea was then to select the polynomial that minimized the least squares difference with the other points that weren't used to create the curve(I'm not sure if this counts as practical, since there are other approaches to polynomial curve-fitting that would have been more appropriate). Anyway, I had a method that evaluated the least squares, and then I constructed the polynomial as a block of code and yielded to it in the iteration that evaulated all the point for the least-squares fit...

There are other ways to do it (always are) - I could have broken the polynomials into terms and reconstructed them in the method, for instance - but block and yield were very convenient in this case.