skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Menopause has for a long time been believed to be unique to humans, but today we know better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menopause#Menopause_in_other_sp...
Your question reminds me of what I (and a lot of people I know) went through in grad school, figuring out that academia wasn't what I had been hoping for. In the end, it's the same human nature in both places, so the grass isn't greener on either side of the fence.

But not all environments are equally bad. There are green patches on both sides, or at least greenish :) Your job is not to settle for a brown one.
Agreed. I was scared of C for a long time, but it's actually a beautiful language. Deitel & Deitel's 'C; How to program' is a fine tutorial in both C and structured programming. YMMV.
I'd say, depending on your scale, the best power generation you're going to get out of sound would be to use a very large and light membrane to catch the sound and tie it to piezoelectric cells.

You want to produce the maximum deflection possible on the piezoelectric cells as this will produce the largest amount of electrical energy. This will probably be cheaper to do by connecting something like a mylar sheet (a cheap place to look would be the foil wrapping-paper at the dollar store) to some piezoelectric cells.

I'm unsure if piezoelectric cells alone would receive enough force to produce a noticeable effect.

An alternative would be to produce a very large cone and place a piezoelectric cell in the tip of the cone. This would perhaps be a lot less work. However I have a greater understanding of electrics than acoustics, so I'm unsure if it would be better to channel the sound to a small surface or to simply use a large lightweight membrane.

Hopefully this helps you some.
I think the real test of learning something is being able to teach it to others.

I used to volunteer teaching after-school middle school classes with an organization called Citizen Schools and one big part of their methodology was trying to get kids to demonstrate their knowledge and pass it on to others in the end of whatever lesson they were doing.
I wonder how the broadband market and cellular data services will interact in the future. Broadband is more expensive in the US than here in the EU, and the same is true for cellular data. You can basically get a month unlimited (fair-use) cellular data here for €10 (~$14), in any country (though sometimes you're not allowed to tether). I think 3G is much more expensive in the US (but haven't really checked).

As far as I understand it, the broadband is pretty much monopolized in the US, while it's pretty competetive over here. Perhaps the cellular providers can provide some competition? It's happening here already, with for instance 3 providing 3G-only services for use with your laptop.
There are all sorts of things that you won't get arrested for that aren't legal.
This falls more into the "tips and tricks" category, but I wish someone had mentioned this to me earlier. Once you have a good book on C[1] install all the man pages for the standard library. Once you start writing code, being able to say something like "man strlen" is amazingly useful.

I made the most progress in C when I took a class on OSs. Mainly, we wrote systems programming sorts of things like a simple shell, our own version of malloc, a simple user-space thread library, and so on. This really gave me insight into how these things would be done for real. Also, writing something really linked-list-heavy gets you a feel for pointers really quickly.

[1]: I have K&R ANSI C and I found it very concise and well-written. It is probably one step up from the "raw newbie" class of books in terms of difficulty, but should feel just right for someone already acquainted with (an) other language(s).
I'm homeschooling four children, and describe myself as an eclectic homeschooler with strong unschooling tendencies. My youngest is now six years old, and she spends a lot of each day drawing, building Lego constructions, doing kitchen chores with her mom, playing with her brothers, talking walks outdoors (with various members of the family keeping her company), or occasionally watching videos, some educational, and some not. She is close to being an independent reader. I give her a reading lesson each school weekday, and a math lesson. (My favored materials are Bloomfield and Barnhart's Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach

http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Linguistic-Approach-Leonard-Bloom...

and the Miquon Math

http://www.keypress.com/x6252.xml

series.)

So I guide my children's activities, but they have a lot of free time and a lot of control over how they spend their time. I like promoting QUIET activities like drawing and reading, because much of my work is done at home.
Google Maps - Track The Spread of Swine Flu
I don't get it. It didn't do anything. It just says this:

[img: Ready now?]

Correct? You bet [...]
If you enjoyed reading those 29 pages, you might find the entire book a decent read as well: http://www.amazon.com/C-Traps-Pitfalls-Andrew-Koenig/dp/0201...
Best beginner text after K&R is Kelly and Pohl's "A Book on C"; very newbie friendly and at the same time uses traditional C examples (i.e. memory management, serializing and reading-back record-oriented data stored in structs, file and directory manipulation, string manipulation, etc.)

Most other C books will just treat it as a stepping stone for C++ which is a different beast, and a few awful offenders will stretch it to Java!

To see a few Algorithm implementations in C, there is no better friend than Robert Sedgwich's polyglot tome; it's the applied Knuth volumes that everyone keeps on their desk (quickly swapped for the actual Knuth volumes when expecting hacker guests.)

Along with C materials you will also need Unix materials. The two are inseparable and fuel each other. You already have a decent Unix in your Mac, and your FreeBSD is the best of the Unix breed bearing the original blood. For that there are no better companions than the books by Richard Stevens, both for system and network programming.

For larger scale software engineering you will need a few small to mid projects of your own. You will deal with header file and Make dependency problems, a few unix and processor portability problems and a few other stuff. The solution to those problems along with a fat library of useful routines are found in "C Interfaces and Implementations" by Hanson. It's a literate programming text where source code is interwoven with prose documentation and it's very self evident.

Along with productive C programming you might need to look into the darker side of C and Unix and follow the papers of the hacking underground (yes, HACKING, dispute the terminology all you want, but I think some blackhats deserve the noble noun more than javascript and CSS jockeys.) Unix and C have plenty of Not-TODOs to motivate plenty of caution. Hoglun and McGraw's Exploiting Software is the canonical C-Do-Not text books.

If you want to read library source code, your FreeBSD source code should give you plenty to keep you busy. Start with the sources for the games; I spent an enjoyable summer porting Minix games to DOS and taught me allot. There is also "The Standard Function Library", or SFL, google it, it has the cleanest C sources you ever seen. Highly recommended.

And should you ever want to write a C compiler, like I attempted, here is some advice: implement Oberon instead. Everything you could possibly learn at 1/100th of the headache.

Just the 2 cents of a guy who will only write C code again if there was a gun to his head ;-)
Duplicate.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=580394

(The comment to the previous thread included a request not to post on this subject, which I wouldn't make myself, but I'll note for the record.)
On reading more, perhaps it's because I don't keep history and clear private details every browsing session.
Leo Babauta has a lot of that stuff on his blog.

E.g.

http://zenhabits.net/2007/07/how-to-actually-execute-your-to...
Randy Pausch on time management: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTugjssqOT0
Get rid of distracting bookmarks / hide your bookmarks bar.
If you think it's important enough to break the rules, chances are we'll hear about it elsewhere.
That's a strange comparison to make. Perhaps a better one would be "Are your 'peers' in academia worse than your competitors in industry?"
Typical nerd. I love learning, so everyone else must too! Fact: the majority of kids don't give two toots about learning and never will. Most kids need order and discipline. The follow your passions message is great for those with good judgment and disastrous for those without. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/iq.htm
Absolutely, to teach something doesn't only test your mastery of a subject, it helps reinforce it.

I've noticed that in the case of the older child, it reinforces their identity as "someone who knows about X", which feeds back into their own further study of X. It also subtly evokes responsible behavior from the older child simply by putting them in a responsible position, and harnesses the younger child's tendency to look up to older kids in service of their learning. Seems like the kind of thing we ought to do more of.
First official Android netbook will run $250
1. The HN title is completely misleading. 2. The linked article is reporting some odd numbers. Eg. Facebook has reported several hundred thousand operations / second for memcached, the article is reporting 120. Also, the article is only reporting numbers for disk-based BDB, but BDB also has an in-memory mode, google for "bdb in-memory". I don't actually know how it performs, but it's possible.
Is your company ready for 3D applications...?
Do you normally depend on your competitors to fund your business or evaluate your products?

In academia, you write grant proposals and research papers that are evaluated by your peers.
I also wanted to learn C, not to learn specifics of the language per se, but to better understand the C/UNIX ecosystem. The book I chose to follow was Computer Systems: A Programmers Perspective. You can get a draft at: http://lsec.cc.ac.cn/~tcui/download/draft.pdf .
UI suboptimality: the dotted markers should be deaths -- something additional happened -- rather than the dotless markers meaning deaths.
I presume you sampled the kids?

I think kids should be made to understand that learning is very very interesting. That word understand is the most important, if they are made to feel they have to then sure they wont like it, but if they are made to understand its extremely interesting well sure they'll like it.
The issue isn't raw downloading power. The issue is request latency, overloaded DNS servers and overloaded data centers. In other words it's not just about quantity, it's (as always with life) mostly about quality.

In 2000-01 I briefly had a relatively modest (2mbit/sec) DSL line from a local mini-ISP with crazy fast ping times and DNS on steroids: nearly everything on the Internet would load under half a second.

That mini-ISP got acquired and disappeared, and my internet experience has been deteriorating ever since: my guaranteed 6mbit/sec connection allows me to I download hundreds of front pages of HN per second, yet I wait for up to 10 seconds sometimes to load just one, and google maps always gets stuck at one or two map fragments when I look something up.
I think a lot of people are scared. And with some sites, like drudge trying to make it seem like the sky is falling RIGHT NOW! that fear is spreading to other places.
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Because "Classified Ad Killer" Doesn't Have the Same Ring
Flagged for utter nonsense.

Author doesn't know what he's talking about, much less what he's measuring.
Submitter put link-bait title that is not even related to the article.

How did this get voted up?
It's unlikely, but far from impossible. The delta v to get to low-earth orbit is about 10 km/s (more depending on drag), while the delta vs from low earth orbit to the Lagrangian points, low lunar orbit, or even earth escape velocity are of the order of just 3-4 km/s.

Neat Wikipedia graphic that shows this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c9/Del...
I know that this is highly tangential to the discussion, but I think it's worth sharing...

The author mentions Acquire, which is a brilliant board game of particular interest to this startup crowd. Sure, it is a gross oversimplification of the equity markets, but it is still oddly relevant and a whole lot of fun. It is very easy to learn and games have a bounded duration. Highly recommended for expert gamers and complete non-gamers alike.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/5
The subsidies are quite low, actually. NPR itself only gets between 1-2% of its funding from the government.

Member stations average about 11% from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is government funded. The rest comes from listeners during those annoying, but necessary pledge drives, private grants, and corporate sponsorship (and I can tell you from experience, they place a lot of constraints on what they'll say in that underwriting spot you pay for).

Details here: http://www.npr.org/about/privatesupport.html
Mozilla say Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 will be here on time within next week
Surprisingly, the Mozilla corporation will actually be in the position to release the highly anticipated, Firefox 3.5 Beta 4. This new update will most likely be the last of its kind until the real big browser comes into play, Firefox 3.5.

This came as a big thrill to me as you all have realised over the last few beta releases, they have been remarkably late! To refresh your memory,they stopped Beta 3 being released, not just once but twice and then moving on to Beta 4. In additon, the fact that they got rid of Firefox 3.0 demonstrating how amazingly different the two versions, 3.0 and 3.5 actually are.

Why were there always delays?

The obvious reason for the delays are the time management issues, that they did not stick to their target plan. However, the most important reason was from TraceMonkey, which is the new Javascript engine established by Firefox. This seems to be vital for Firefox as it is supposedly meant make pages load 2 times quicker and 9 times quicker than Firefox 3.0...
James Bach turned QA into an independent gig. There are a few others who have significant public personae. I haven't checked in on his blog, lately; it's here:

http://www.satisfice.com/blog/

http://www.satisfice.com/recommends.shtml

I don't know whether this will be any use to you. Hope it helps, though.
The Feel of Scala (Video feat. Bill Venners)
Magazine Inspiration #1 bright colors
I never really thought about this when working in academia. I had peers shoot down work of mine, but I never considered them to be the ones I work for (ie. get me my paycheck) but there is a direct comparison there.

Unfortunately, the current system in academia of peer-reviews always felt awkward to me simply because you are not aligning self-interests. Any researcher in a field knows that by approving someone else's work, he is creating more competition for precious funds. Sure, a terrible boss can shoot down a good idea of yours for pride's sake/other reasons, but that would hurt the company in the long-run. At least when you are working for a boss in industry, your self-interests are aligned and you both are aiming for the same goal.
I had not thought of this and I congratulate you on being so clever to think this up. I don't know if it would work but it's well worth considering.
I think your analysis is correct. I'm kind of torn between the business person in me telling me to find a good solution and use it as an advantage and the programmer in me that hates anyone duplicating work needlessly.
Found Objects from the Future
You'll never find a four-year-old who doesn't love learning. Our culture does something to screw most of them up sometime soon after.
I'm currently in the progress of writing a novel (not my first, but the one I want to get published) and I believe your quote from pg is possibly the most influential factor upon me.

It's extremely difficult to sit down and write when I can easily make a living with what I can already do. However, writing is what I've always wanted to do and when I first committed I knew I was not going to get paid for it for a long time. I believe it's been about 7 years now, and I finally know it's time to finish the job.

Right now, the reward for my current actions is likely to pay off in maybe 2-3 years. There's always the chance I could make a tasty advance, however this is highly unusual. The first book usually doesn't matter anyway, it won't be until my third that I get a true pay-off.

I believe you have to have incredible determination, planning skills (so you do feel somewhat rewarded, I do this by printing out a chapter as soon as it's complete to give to my wife to read). It's very hard to do, however it helps a lot that I find doing it incredibly enjoyable. When you wake up dreaming from a different world, it's quite an amazing feeling.

I also don't believe that sitting at a computer screen is work. My brother is an excellent programmer and from what I can perceive is that his processes are entirely the same as mine. In fact, I learnt a few tricks from him. Ideas and solutions usually appear when your mind is relaxed, simply piling on the pressure by stressing out isn't likely to help.

However, if you don't have the motivation to start a project, I wouldn't necessarily call it procrastination. It's quite possibly it could be atychiphobia (Fear of Failure), as not starting a project is entirely different from losing your way during it as the start of a project is usually immense fun, until the real work kicks in.

If anyone has a fear of failure, I don't believe I know how to help with that. I have no real fear of failure, I jump into everything from the deep end. I've lost a large number of projects along the way to attrition, all are failures but a failure teaches you and I have learnt a great deal. The first time I'd ever hit a golf ball was when I went out with my future father-in-law who had no clue I didn't play golf. I've found that sheer confidence can usually make up for nearly all lacking. So to anyone with a fear of failure, I'd say fail on purpose because after that it can only get better.
I have stumbled upon this on slashdot ' it is a rather interesting article, Upon further linkage I've found this other submission http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=580391 - it carries even more interesting stuff. However, I am still trying to find the book "Game Over" I've had... seems like I've lost it somewhere, which makes me extremely sad. That book, my friends, is full of suspense, nostalgia, business know-how etc.

edit:
the book I'm talking about is this: http://www.amazon.com/Game-Over-Nintendo-American-Industry/d...
> Teaching is a skilled craft.

In the 1800s they used to enlist prisoners to teach the newly-minted public schools, as their community service. These people had absolutely no qualifications to teach; however, the children produced from these schools were more equipped for the world of the time than any child today. (This is something from Gatto, so I have no idea if it's true, but it's a good argument if it is.)
Yes. CS107 is the class that made C and assembly finally click for me. I have access to the assignment files; email me (in my profile) if you want them.
I've overcome procrastination by doing the following: 1) Never make a long TODO list. Having a long list makes choosing something on it overwhelming because you're simultaneously not choosing the other things. Often the path of least resistance is to choose nothing from the list. So keep short lists. After all anything that's really important will get done whether it's on a list or not. 2) When sitting down at your computer do a tiny bit of work first. Do this before surfing the net, checking email, etc. Often times this tiny bit of initial work will make doing more work easy. 3) Simply don't surf the net on 50% of days. Getting things done really comes down to choosing your project over, say, learning things by reading HN.
At least in computer science, most of the major conferences are double-blind reviewed. This means that it's more difficult to figure out whose paper one is reviewing. This helps curb some of the abuses you seem to be worried about.

Another thing to keep in mind is that academic papers are supposed to be about the truth, and so there is ostensibly an "objective" standard to which papers are held. Of course this varies a lot by quality of the conference, but the best conferences will generally do a fairly good job of letting the best papers in and keeping the bad papers out (most of the confusion/"unfairness" comes at the borderline papers, where it is understandably more difficult to make a judgement).

That being said, I think some types of competition will always be a problem in any discipline, although it's not at all clear that the corporate world is at all better.
Agreed. Those numbers make no sense whatsoever.
OMG! This is so awesome!
The tryruby website is great, especially the tutorial! Wow! All programming languages should have such tutorial interfaces. ;)
This is an awesome resource.
The way I see it, your typical VC-backed startup needs 3 different teams from birth, to growth, to exit:

1. startup team: visionary founders, mad hackers getting little sleep to push the envelope on the product, great bizdev, amazing product people that understand their market.

2. growth team: operations people (ceo/mgmt team), larger engineering team to stabilize product and continue pushing features, more of everything.

3. exit team: people with relationships in key positions that can then make the connection for acquisition/exit.

(This is all anecdotal and I'd love to be corrected)
Here in Canada, 3G is double-sold: I'm on with Rogers, and they charge you once for a "data pack" for your phone ($30CDN/mon for a 1GB cap--there was a $35/6GB/mon point for a while, but it was promotional) which absolutely disallows tethering, and then charge you another $30/1GB/mon, on a separate plan, to use their "wireless internet stick" (a USB 3G modem.)
You're right, it's quite simple, but it does its job :)
Self-employment is much better in that respect.

And BTW, it is exactly the desire for objective evaluation that has penalized interesting ideas (e.g., for web 2.0 apps) that are hard to evaluate using experiments/proofs. That's rather unfortunate.
I think Montessori is unbelievable. I went to a Montessori school through third grade and loved it. But I don't think it works for everyone. My brother didn't enjoy it or do as well in the unstructured environment as I did.

So I think multiple kinds of education are necessary. The problem is that there's a lack of information about education options for most people. And perhaps an issue of affordability. You might say that the public school system ought to offer alternatives to the structured model. And maybe it should. I don't know how much that would cost. But I'm sure a lot of people would take advantage of it.
Flag 'em, don't nag 'em.