skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a Harvard '04-'05 grad (two numbers meaning I left early) I think The Crimson, as per usual, misses the mark.

It is indeed partly the part of the faculty for not engaging with students (e.g. teaching) enough. But even if some of the faculty had engaged more with us as students when I was there, I might have run for my life even faster than I already did, because some of the faculty just weren't that great. In fact, some were awful. (I've written a not-very-popular book in which this is a major theme.)

Harry Lewis's attempt to protect the students from blame here is admirable, but similarly mistaken. Harvard's admissions office (which used to be run by his wife, I'm not sure if it still is) selects for the best and the brightest, but inevitable in such a selection process is a tendency to pick what William Deresiewicz calls "excellent sheep"--kids who do (or appear to do) what they're told extremely well. When you pair that with an Office of Career Services (OCS) that acts as a funnel to Wall Street--many people in my class ended up destroying the world at Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs--what do you expect to happen? You've got a huge population of smart kids whose end goal is a place in a culture where success at any cost is not just appropriate, it's encouraged.

A large portion of football team cheated on a midterm in Economics 1010a in 2003 (they took advantage of a scheduling conflict with Statistics 104 to get extra time on the exam), but no one ever got in trouble for it. My guess is that half of the people who knew about it wished that they had been so "smart."

The cheating scandal is major, but in a way, I think it's the least of Harvard's problems. They haven't even touched on the Adderall problem, or the kinds of faculty conflicts of interest highlighted in Inside Job, and they've only slightly addressed the draconian, opaque and backwards nature of the Ad Board. Even knowing about some of the important research that goes on there, in my opinion, Harvard's real problem is that its general role of late has been pretty far from a force for good, let alone truth. It's just been a rubber stamp for the broken society we read about in the headlines daily. Correcting that problem requires actual leadership which, since Larry Summers was President, has been sorely lacking.

P.S. If you think the Valley or even YC is disconnected from this dynamic, don't kid yourself. CS50 enrollment is way up because everyone thinks that they'll be the next billionaire like Mark. But CS50 is not why Bill Gates, Mark, Sheryl Sandberg (Summers's former assistant) or Nathan Blecharczyk sit atop billion-dollar companies (see http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=70). And with Jim Breyer of Accel now elected to the Harvard Corporation... You get the picture. Cheating has its rewards.
Your first paragraph is astonishingly untrue, and a comparison to Holocaust denial would not be unfair. Middle of the road estimates for those murdered by gulag are around 40 million.

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE4.HTM

That matters in Russia worsened after the fall of Communism is separated by decades from the nadir of Stalinist violence.
And this is why I love HN. There are so many interesting people lurking about. Thanks for sharing.
> but, unlike other dynamic (and many static) objects in most languages, do not offer any interfaces to manipulate and reason about them

Sure they do. You just need to start thinking of javascript as a functional language and all this stuff becomes much ... simpler.

First of all, why would you even need to reason about a function's internal state? That's a sign of a leaky abstraction.

Furthermore, every time you want to manipulate the internal state of a function, what you're really after is defining a better API to provide arguments to said function.

And if you still for some reason need to dick around with a function's internal state, just use partial function application.
From a shareholder's view, bankruptcy is failure. I believe that most bankruptcy cases end up giving ownership of the company to creditors and wiping out pre-bankruptcy shareholders entirely.
Oh, I forgot interoperability! I've grown so accustomed to connecting my Erlang programs to C++ libraries through the simplicity of ports that I erred.

Thanks for adding to my list -- the more the merrier. :-)

It would be interesting to make the runtime optional, to see how close together the two runtimey and runtimeless subsets could get. Or, perhaps it would be possible to mark a section of code as runtime-free. IIRC some work's been done on that but I don't think it's ever been practical.
This is what I have being thinking. These proposals for ways to refactor always back themselves up by using actual use case examples of callbacks vs toy examples of their fix

"there! See how much cleaner that is?"

No, I don't, and this stories solution in particular, is particularly ugly.
Victory for Bing!
A very related group runs Steam in WINE so they can launch and play Windows-only games. That must skew numbers significantly as well, and unless you only play TF2, Linux users are probably being counted as both Linux and Windows users because they play one game in Linux and another in WINE.
You do event driven programming every time an alarm wakes you up or you set an egg timer.
I think Mr. Ashton is trying to illustrate Sagan's dictum, "If you wish to make apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." Except it's coke, and he doesn't go past bauxite.
Evernote, you really messed this one up, and you're making it worse.
I totally disagree. The most expensive things I've ever bought have been terrible experiences. Car and house. Real estate agents are the devils spawn where I live.
I would say almost certainly no. Apple has clearly become a consumer/retail oriented company; few organizations ever really bought into the idea of the Xserve line, and to the extent Apple are still interested in "enterprise" sales it's for MacBooks and iOS devices.
Note that if you're doing the Spanish vocab test, you should be trying to say the equivalent in the language you selected, not the Spanish word.
Except for a practically limitless number of other ways to save money while being more environmentally friendly. For example, buying flour in bulk and making your own bread regularly, or repairing holes in clothes rather than buying new, or, y'know, not living 40 miles from your place of work while commuting by car.
Interesting there was no mention from him about how he was treated while incarcerated, or about being held for so long without charge/trial.
Computer Science Is Not a Science
"In contrast, I am energized by going into the office and working side by side with my peers to solve hard problems."

Let me know if you still feel that way in 20 years.
It's a difference in convention between American and British English. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_American_and_Brit...
Unfortunately just learning ruby, rails or any other programming languages doesn't prepare you at all for type of challenges you are talking about. I've been working on search, machine learning, prediction models, computer vision and so on and these are absolute cream of the challenging problems out there that I highly enjoy. Other my favorite areas are compilers, kernels, audio and image processing but I'm not actively working in it currently. But to even understand current state of art in these areas, let alone contribute to it, you will need solid foundation build on math (especially linear algebra, probability & stats, calculus), machine learning, distributed computing, graph algorithms, probabilistic data strutures and other CS areas. It takes years to build this theory foundation and perhaps more if you are not already enrolled in to any degree programming. Programming is actually the most trivial part of working in these areas.

Employers who do have these kind of challenging work are never looking for just Ruby or Java guy who knows all syntax, framework and how to code. They would need your experience and academic background to convince them that you do have necessary math and CS foundation to tackle their challenges. The best way to start out for "plain vanilla" programmers is to get in to open competitions like at http://www.kaggle.com/competitions. Also keep an eye out for any companies sponsoring such competitions like Netflix did years ago. The reason this is good way to start is because here would typically be discussion groups around this where experts discuss their approaches for real problem and real solutions and you can learn a lot from this. Once you select such a challenge to work on, give it all to it. Devour every piece of research, CS and math that comes in your way to understand what's going on. If you keep at it for 2-3 years, you would be in might be in good position to demonstrate future employers your work and worth to work on these challenging problems.
Braintree is one of the best international payments option around (aside from PayPal, but PP has it's own host of issues). I'd also encourage you to check out WorldPay. WorldPay's underwriting process is pretty brutal from what I hear, but their international reach is impressive

http://www.worldpay.us/
This is an example of the "stack ripping" problem, described here (section 3.2): http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs240/readings/usenix2002-fibe...
Haven't listened to the presentation but the diagram doesn't list this project which I learned about from a Misko Hevery post on the googletesting blog. http://freecode.com/projects/fio

Look forward to watching it.
Marissa Mayer’s decision isn’t about people at all
Jenn Vaughan's class notes at http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~jenn/courses/F11.html are really good in my opinion.
I would have even looser guidelines, but still suggest some facetime in the office if possible. Mostly the team themselves should be able to mandate their own locations and hours to fit their needs. If they are productive...

Some teams may prefer heavy pair programming and thus may need to be most of time in the same location. Others(most) would use some sort of hybrid where the 5 hours 3 days a week probably works well. And then some will be very much independent tasks where then locations are mostly irrelevant apart from whenever syncing is needed and general communications with other teams and stakeholders.

But teams and even when pairing you do not always need to be permanently physically in the same location if they know each other well and can communicate freely across chat and screen sharing etc. However mostly in person will trump all communications.
Jerks finally decided to cut off indexing -- there's been a spate of lawsuits involving housing maps mashups in the recent months. One of the arguments used in defense of such mashups was "but google scrapes craigslist". Fairly recently CL rolled out their own housing maps (finally, they figured out they need to keep up with the times), perhaps this is a second salvo?
Doesn't the authority of the copyright owner to descramble, decrypt, or otherwise bypass a technological measure extend to those who own a legal copy of the copyrighted work? That is, the rightsholder implicitly transfers the authority to decrypt the work when he issues a license to view the decrypted material, even if the medium of transfer stores the work in an encrypted format.

Under this interpretation, the authority would extend to viewing the material on any platform or player, but it wouldn't extend to saving a permanently decrypted copy (as you had a license to view the decrypted material, but not to keep a permanent decrypted copy) as in a rip of the DVD to one's hard drive.
Author might want to learn about soviet laws about mandatory work & punishment for 'absenteeism'

"On 8 January 1939, the government made clear that an unauthorized lateness of 20 minutes (or taking a break 20 minutes too long, or leaving 20 minutes early) counted as absenteeism, grounds for mandatory dismissal (Pravda, 9 Jan 1939). Transportation breakdowns (a common event) were no excuse; a doctor's certificate was required, and doctors who gave certificates too easily themselves faced prosecution and prison.

Some workers still found it worthwhile to be absent and force a mandatory dismissal, so that they could seek work in a place where labor books were not closely read. Stalin put an end to this with a remarkable law,

Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, 26 June 1940
"On the Transfer to the Eight-Hour Working Day, the Seven-day Work Week, and on the Prohibition of Unauthorized Departure by Laborers and Office Workers from Factories and Offices2"

This replaced the civil sanctions of the 28 Dec. 1938 decree with mandatory criminal penalties: 2-4 months imprisonment for quitting a job, and 6 months of probation and 25% pay confiscation for an unauthorized tardiness of 20 minutes. Both managers and prosecutors were themselves subject to criminal prosecution if they did not enforce this law strictly."

Russian - http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%BE%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BD%...

English http://www.cyberussr.com/rus/labor-discip.html
Reminds me of a passage from Richard Powers's novel "Gain" where the process by which a disposable camera is manufactured, packaged, distributed, ad sold serves to explain everything that is at once miraculous and broken about our world.
Nuclear.

Well, you could say the supernova that created our radioactive heavy elements billions of years ago were once "suns". But that power didn't come from our sun.
I'm not an expert on this, but I have a different take. I think that "is" happens when there is an implicit gerund before the plural noun.

- [Working] five days in the office is too much (I do think that the title should be "too much", not "too many")

- [Having] two hundred students is better than [having] none.

That is, there is an implicit subject, and it is not the plural noun, which is actually a direct object.
zxcvbn is great. We actually use it for people registering on https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com
Yup thats what I was thinking of.
Can Guy Kawasaki save Google from Samsung?
(Balanced employee)

A lot of the successful marketplaces these days (e.g. Airbnb) have decided to fully intermediate the payments on their platform for security reasons. They find escrow is a way to promote trust and security on their platform. Most third-party payment platforms don't allow for this. Even eBay, which uses the most popular 3rd party payments platform of all (PayPal) had to initiate a $5000 "PayPayl guarantee" to encourage sales. Other marketplaces, like Etsy, are moving away from PayPal and building their own intermediated payments system to have a similar experience as Airbnb. My understanding is that Stripe Connect is great for store builders like Shopify, which are disaggregated, but less attractive to marketplaces like Airbnb.
Please, if you're starting a new Java project, and have any say at all in the build process, don't use Maven. Go with Ant. You'll thank yourself later, and anyone else who ever has to build the project will also thank you.

Personally, I can't begin to describe the awfulness of Maven in words. I'd sooner use makefiles and shell scripts, or manually type in build commands written in pen on a stack of notecards.

But you don't have to take my word for it; here's an SO discussion about how much Maven sucks:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/861382/why-does-maven-hav...
Here's the other side of the story, from Heroku: http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/28/heroku-chief-opens-up-abou...
but I'm more curious if the reaction by the US government and other officials to the leaks would have been the same if those papers had published the material, instead of Wikileaks?

Manning would have still been fried, but then NYT would not have released all of them wholesale. Some things just need to be kept secret but Wikileaks released them (lack of manpower was one issue)
This is pretty frightening.

Banks are too big to fail and now too big to jail; it follows that the top 1% also has these attributes. Does that mean the American government is powerless to affect change?

What's more likely to win their vote? A pile of money, or lots of phone calls? I hope we figure something out before it's too late ... this trend is only going to get worse.
Maybe you'll be able to finally pay your tuition online with a credit card
There's a (perhaps surprising) amount of engineering happening in the tabs to soda cans.

(http://www.enotes.com/aluminum-beverage-can-reference/alumin...)

(http://www.engineerguy.com/videos/video-pop-can.htm)

Also, Pinjarra is doing the teal-orange thing too (https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=Pinjarra,+Western+Australia...)
Would "200 students are better than none" be invalid? When you swap out the number with some other word i.e. "Some students is better than none", using "are" is the correct choice.
Read Almost any Amazon book for Free
Find the ASIN of an Amazon book on Amazon's site then put in this url:
https://read.amazon.com/?asin=REPLACE_ASIN_HERE
Try:
https://read.amazon.com/?asin=B0064CPN7I
https://read.amazon.com/?asin=B003H3IOXM
https://read.amazon.com/?asin=B0045JKJ7G
"The rape of the Sabine women", to give an example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_the_Sabine_Women
> The number of individual nations that could produce a can of Coke is zero

While I understand what the author is trying to say, I don't think that is true at all. I'm pretty sure that if they had a good reason, any number of advanced economies could get it together enough to produce the cans themselves. Seems like the main hard part is the aluminium.

While I'm nit-picking, I believe natural cryolite has not been used in aluminium processing for decades.

Thought-provoking article, though; I typed this with a can of Diet Coke on my desk.
Technically, he's charged with espionage and giving aid to the enemy. With the stated motive of "sparking a public debate" regarding current war policy, a more targeted leak would have achieved the stated goal, in line, with, say, the pentagon papers or the AT&T/NSA leaks or even the his own later leak of the gun-cam video.

I have a hard time believing the flagrant and wanton release of material was and is not suicide by Court Martial.
Your point is well taken: we can't just assume this stuff, and it really does have to be measured. And I'm not remotely an expert on this stuff, so I can't provide thorough evidence for this. However, I've heard plenty of people who have studied this stuff much more than I have present this connection as being pretty well established by direct evidence, and given that the theory is generally plausible I've seen no reason to think they're lying.

That being said, here's a link: http://psp.sagepub.com/content/32/3/286.abstract At least from the abstract, it sounds like it's addressing exactly the question you've asked (and that previous studies have found related results). (I took that link from a recent blog post by Jim Hines, which includes quite a few others worth reading, too: http://www.jimchines.com/2013/03/preventing-rape/ .)
Dear Stack Overflow, the ads you've allowed are literally ruining your website
OSX is virtualizable, but they only let you do it (license wise) on Mac hardware.
If we could effectively get the oil out of ground in CA (total four hundred billion barrels, that's half of oil in all of Saudi Arabia), it may completely change the game. http://money.cnn.com/2013/01/14/news/economy/california-oil-...
I am a current student at Dartmouth, and it's the same here as well. Especially in a class with a curve, a student is at a serious disadvantage if he/she doesn't collaborate, copy, or cheat.
Google thinks doioig.gov is StackOverflow.com. See what happens when you do a search for info:
http://www.google.com/search?q=info:stackoverflow.com

Note what site shows up as the result and for the links for "similar" and "link to".
Do people often vocally make excuses for rapists? Not something I can say I have ever heard, at least in western culture.
Idiots include also that vocal part of population longing for - and getting - Nobel prizes.

One ought to realize how different SU was in 20s, 50s, even 70s from Russia today. People in SU thought about themselves and their country very similarly as it is in US now - the most progressive country, and of course, the smartest and overall best people. Little doubt about that. Tokens were much more serious then - in US one says "if you smart, you should be rich", in SU it was "if you're good, you can perhaps show an Order" - and they weren't easy to get.

Imagine the life in the South, pictured in "Gone with the wind", without slavery - because almost everybody was in the same conditions - and stimulus responses will be different. Again, what use would be for a pile of cash in SU? Not much - you can't buy proportionally, since the whole economy is targeted to "regular people", and you'd get people looking at you funny pretty soon.
dude, that is your computer - its fine on mine.
I'm being pragmatic. One of the goals of the Go language is to be an alternative for C++. It has ended up an alternative to scripting languages and failing to attract the programmers who use C++ the most. http://commandcenter.blogspot.se/2012/06/less-is-exponential...

So my question is the same: Why programmers should try to eradicate C++?
Yeah right, you had access to free healthcare, 3 meals a day and a lot of leisure time in a Soviet gulag. You are delusional if you think you can compare them.
What advantages do you get in deploying something to OS X vs deploying to Linux?
Many previous submissions:

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=Bitter+Pill
T-Mobile to Dump Contracts in US - Go Month to Month
I would have appreciated seeing "(2006)" appended to the HN title.
Lies. Don't see the point to argue, just couldn't let someone lie through their teeth without calling them on it.

But if anybody wants to understand that Stalin's USSR was pretty much a mirror image of Nazi Germany (they were evil to same degree - Stalin actually pulled genocide on Ukrainians before Hitler did it to the Jews), please make sure to read this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Bloodlands-Europe-Between-Hitler-Stali...
How exactly does that make them jerks? It's their web site. They can decide to run it how ever they please.

You don't have to use their site if you don't like them.
Well, salt being common (now, not historically) is probably sourced close to production to reduce its transportation costs. There is a large salt mine within 35 miles of my house, and they are located all along the gulf coast in salt domes, a by product of oil exploration.
This policy hasn't been set in stone as a permanent measure. I'm sure it is being put in place for now to help the company get its act together to help bring it back from the sub par arena it has been swimming in for so long. Once that hopefully happens then the policy could be lifted.
(I'm the author.) What makes you think I'm not aware of those? The essay is in effect an attempt to express skepticism about gamification by pointing out that it looks awfully similar to something that was tried in the '20s/'30s in the USSR. Admittedly I make that point more clearly in the expanded paper version of the essay (linked at the bottom), where I discuss the descent of the '20s / early '30s gamification experiments into late-'30s Stakhanovism.

I think there is overall (including today) some pretty strong internal difficulty when claiming to "gamify" work but still retaining the context of a hierarchically controlled workplace where work is mandatory, with penalties tied to the "game". Then it devolves into just another method of workplace accounting & control.
Mac Minis are an absolute niche and will get buried by the "cloud" anyway.
At what price?

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
One theory was that he was the original Mini Microsoft. No clue if true, but the quality of mini's posts dropped around the same time he left.
Facebook conduct job interviews in a hot tub? That could feel a little awkward.. especially since programmers not generally known for body confidence.