skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
UCSD has a nice 5 year master's program.

I get the feeling that the social life is a little lacking for undergrads. The campus is in La Jolla, a rich suburb removed from San Diego proper. It is not a college town.

San Diego does have some cool places, but you will want to have a car to get to them.

The hacker spirit (i.e. open source and entrepreneurs) isn't very strong at the grad school. I think the undergrads do more. There's an iPhone programmers club and a CS organization that has, among other things, built a Lisp RPG.
I went to UCSD for my first two years, majoring in biology, and transferred to UCI, not because it was tough, but because I HATED the school.

Please, please, please consider campus and social life. I held the belief prior to entering college, one probably inherited from my traditional familial roots, that social life and location really doesn't matter - it's all about the academics and doing well. It's not true.

I was admitted to UCSD's Sixth College, and I was even given a student apartment, which as a freshman was pretty amazing. Problem was, I got it in some forrest-like part of the school. I felt like I was going hiking every time I'd walk to the bus stop. I started off on a bad foot.

I tried looking past that, though, and tried to find the social scene. The school is very very disjointed, having 6 separate 'colleges,' all with their own dining hall, etc. You don't feel like you're part of one big amazing school. Come 6pm, the campus is pretty empty, as the main hubs where students are supposed to be hanging out are quite far from their dorms. Everyone hangs out in their dorm building. It's depressing. Very very depressing.

Sure, La Jolla is a beautiful city if you're a 35+ moderately wealthy individual who likes to kick back on the patio of an Italian restaurant and watch the waves go by, or if you're a surfer. Me, I'm a city guy. I wanted a bustling city, where there was always something to do. The closest 'city' to La Jolla is downtown SD, which is nice, but you won't find yourself hanging out there too often. La Jolla just isn't a college town.

I couldn't bear it any longer after two years. Home was an hour and a half drive away, all my friends were at UCI, there were more things to do in Orange County and at UCI, and at UCI, I just felt like I was part of one proud campus. Although I do commute from home now, I often stroll into campus with my friends late afternoon, and attend lectures, free movies, etc., that are always happening on campus.

My brother, and good friends attend UCLA and from what I've experienced there, the social life is quite amazing. If anywhere you feel proud of the school you attend, it's UCLA. You're a Bruin. And although I hate the school and everything about it, due to some residual hatred from being rejected, I can say that UCLA/Westwood, compared to UCSD/La Jolla, is magnitudes upon magnitudes more bustling, exciting, and social.

I can't speak to the CS part of your question, but I can definitely give you some info on campus life with respect to UCSD. I had such a crappy experience, and really advise people not to go unless they are that type of individual that enjoys the laid back, surfer type lifestyle.

Campus and social life matters. Big time.

BTW: Since some SoCal HN readers seem to be popping up in this thread, we should really network and maybe throw a little get together. I've been trying to find people on here from SoCal for ages, but no one really responded to any of my inquiries.
I think that it is interesting that despite the relative anarchy of the Linux development process (I think that at most companies, the fact that the author had already started working on this driver would dissuade any of his more talented co-workers from writing their own driver), it still works, mainly due to the intelligence of the dedicated kernel hackers.

I submitted my first bug to the kernel bug tracker this weekend, and was frankly surprised at the lack of formality surrounding the process. I am still not sure whether it would have been better to email the maintainer of the source file where I think the bug is located, or to email the main mailing list and hope for a response.
In computer system/networks field, nothing good at UCLA these days, apart from LA itself.
Thanks. This will help me.
Same with me, learned this in 8th grade (although I forgot most of the details since). 1996, Romania.
I think a debug command line switch to python would suffice. You could use the heap to store stack traces when TCO is in use.
> Stop dismissing credentials.

Err, isn't this the opposite of what you should be doing? Credentials are cached judgements of merit; bypass the cache and judge the merit of the arguments for yourself.
My mother's best advice was drink more water and get an early night. But yeah, both are good.
Neither of your claims check out. The black plague killed a higher proportion of the world's population, and the 1918 Spanish Flu was airborne, like other flus.
SIAI call for skilled volunteers and potential interns
The calorie density of vegetarian food being what it is, it's probable that if all of humanity went vegetarian, it would solve the over-population problem pretty quickly too because we'd run out of food.
Anyone offended by that needs to get out more. Seriously? It's hardly hardcore. There's more porn in the average copy of cosmo.

If there were minors in the audience, then sure. If it was a conference for nuns or something, then yup... the slides would be inappropriate. But it wasn't afaik

I can understand an argument that it's distracting, but offensive? nope.
I'm not the owner of that blog, only an occasional reader. My email is in my profile.
I inherently do not see this as such a big admirable success story.

I doubt anyone, least of all the CEO or his wife, would disagree with you. But their failure is instructive, and telling the story of their failure takes courage.

sensationalist reporting

There was nothing sensationalist about this article.

Why doesn't he believe in the strength of his product? If it's good, people will buy.

I'm sure he did believe in his product. But to think that you just set a new kind of beverage on a few shelves and then let the product quality take care of all of your sales, marketing, and brand-building for you is incredibly naive. Apple's products get a lot of acclaim, yet Apple still spends a fortune on advertising and on its distribution outlets.

He has not created any new knowledge on how to make beverages

Whether he has or hasn't is not evident one way or another from the article.

growing big fast

Economies of scale are present in beverage manufacturing just as they are in online retailing, search engines, and social networking. So all of your objections to his high-growth strategy also apply to Amazon, Google, eBay, Facebook, etc. But this guy is an easier target for you given the outcome.

young people

He did a great service to young people by replacing all of the crap chemical-laden sodas sold in California schools with his 100% juice alternative.

I don't want to ever again create a business plan and pitch to VC's based on the growth curve of the Internet

The Internet will remain the best bet for growth in the world economy for generations to come. Choosing not to leverage that will only hurt your future business prospects.
I just finished my CS degree from UCLA a few months ago, and I have to say that it's a much better choice.

College is not all about the academics, it's about the complete package. UCLA has a crazy sports history with lots of school pride, there are a bunch of activities to do everywhere, and LA is much more fun the SD.

With that being said, the curriculum at UCLA is rigorous and be ready to pull a lot of long nights finishing projects.

And if nothing else, UCLA is ranked higher than UCSD. Why sell yourself short?

Here are some tips:

1. ALWAYS look up your professors on bruinwalk.com

2. Get out of engineering, do more with college.

3. Do NOT get a gf.
Come on now. There's racier images in each issue of Cosmo. People should stop being so offended by everything.
On top of that it suggested two similarities between the 1918 flu and the current swine flu, without explaining in much detail why it happened.

"There were 3 waves of the 1918/19 pandemic. The first was in summer of 1918 - very unusual, as influenza normally falls to extremely low rates during summer. Note that the current outbreak is also highly unseasonal.

The 1918 pandemic killed with a very unusual age pattern. Instead of peaks in just the very young and the very old, there was a W shape, with a huge number of young and healthy people who would not normally die from influenza. There are various conjectures as to the cause of this. The current virus is also killing young and healthy adults."

In the first argument it isn't even clear why and if it's dangerous. Did the 1918 flu kill so many people because of something related to it being a summer outbreak, or would deaths have been even worse if it were a winter outbreak?

Those were just similarities just mentioned to make people think "Oh no! It's 1918 all over again!" without actually having to prove that it is. Pretty low debating tactic.
this sounds like something that spans the (rather wide) gap between google and aws + public data sets.
I wonder how far you can go in terms of combining data/hacking on it?

For example they mention real-time financial data. So can I write something that would connect online discussion/activity to stock movements?

A platform for doing large scale, real-time data analysis in a rich descriptive language without doing any of the dirty work would be quite something.
If you try not offend anyone ever, you'll be incredibly boring.
"It's the concept that society is the way it is because a process of darwinian selection has settled on the arrangement and it is dangerous to wantonly mess with this complex system."

An economist sees a $100 bill on the sidewalk. He neglects to pick it up because it can't possibly be real. If it were, an efficient market dictates that somebody would already have picked it up. A five year old follows behind, picks it up, and exclaims "Look ma, I just found $100." The economist turns around and says, "See? I was right."

Just because Darwinian selection gives better results than any individual decision does not absolve you from making individual decisions. It works because of the presence of mutations: take away the mutations, and evolution ceases to give useful results. You see the same problem in finance: the market is efficient only to the extent that people do not believe it is efficient, because once people start believing that it's efficient, they'll invest in index funds and nobody will actually scout out the information needed to drive good stocks higher and bad stocks lower.

In short, I think that culture is a complex, self-regulating system, and that alone is why it should be messed with.
I rarely read such grossly misinformed posts on HN. A shame you spent so long on it.
I'm currently a UCSD comp sci undergrad, and overall my experience here has been great.

Academically, our curriculum is one of the best (although, IMHO it is getting a bit dumbed down, focusing more on Java than C/C++ as it did when I was a freshmen). We're in fact one of the few schools that requires you to take the compiler construction class, which is perhaps one of most grueling (yet intellectually stimulating) classes in the CSE curriculum. We've also got Dasgupta, the guy who practically wrote the book on algorithms, teaching algorithms here (http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/~dasgupta/book/index.html). For research we've got Calit2 (http://www.calit2.net/about/buildings/ucsd/index.php) which has a bunch of cool projects going on at all times (just pop on in and ask around, people there are always happy to show you what they're doing)

Socially, I'd have to admit that if you're the "bustling" city sort of guy, La Jolla doesn't really cut the cake. But if you like the laid back "chill" attitude that comes with being practically right next to the beach, then we're pretty much the place to be. Picking the right college is also an essential part of the equation. For comp sci (and engineers in general) Warren seems to be the best choice, and basically surrounds you with students in similar majors, which really helps when you're on those late night study/hacking sessions because they'll be people across the hallway doing the exact same thing.

As for students with interest in YC, I think there's plenty. In fact I'm one of them. The trick is getting into the right circles, talking to the right people. Joining orgs on campus that have especially dedicated/passionate students is the best way by far. I recommend orgs like TESC (http://tesc.ucsd.edu) for engineers in general or CSES (http://cses.ucsd.edu) for comp sci. Both these orgs are filled with people who like doing what they're doing, and usually have fun projects/events that enables you to meet the right kind of people.

Now, I don't really know what life is like at UCLA, but hopefully my post gives you an idea of what its like to be a current comp sci undergrad here at UCSD.
I've been meaning to learn about CouchDB for a while after a few people mentioned it positively at PyCon (I'd held off since I've had negative experiences with ASF app quality).

After finding another useless gender debate, I wanted to find out what the 'offensive' presentation was. Instead I found something no ruder than a Sunday newspaper, got distracted by the CouchDB content, and learnt.
This is actually a pretty interesting case as the virus is such an odd mix. For those who aren't aware Influenza has a multipartite genome (separated segments), I think we're pretty lucky this didn't show up during flu season in which case there would have been a very high chance of it mixing with another strain that easily transferred among humans but still resistant to antivirals.
Yes - their sample selection is a little interesting. As their definition of conservatism included valuing hard work, I wonder if all the study has shown is that 'if you work hard, then you don't have to be as intelligent in order to get into the same university as someone who works less hard'.
It was actually a UCSD cs professor, his name was something like Rohan Preturi, who introduced me to YC!

I think at the time, my friend and I were probably the only two at that school to know about YC, but it's great to know a little community over there is sprouting. SoCal YC'ers need to get together.

Email is in my profile if you guys wanna chat!
Hah, I think I might have met you before ;)

In all seriousness, can you give me an example of the sorts of arguments you start?

In a more idealistic phase of my life, I used to start political arguments at the drop of a hat. Not to verify someone's political leanings were like mine, but to instead verify that they had thought about (the) issue(s), and developed any opinion at all.

Now I just sigh when people say they don't take an interest in some topic I think is generally applicable to their lives.
In these sorts of situations, people who have mild cases of the same strain don't even seek treatment. That means the denominator -- the actual number of infections -- is much higher than initial/limited reports, and the fatality rate correspondingly lower.

So far, all confirmed cases in the US have been mild. And they probably caught it from others who got over it without triggering any alarm. So don't head for the hills based on early fatality extrapolations from Mexico just yet.
Yeah, it should read "repeat step three".

Oops, quite right.

So it looks like the algorithm calculates an inverse square root instead, and then multiplies it by the original number (step 5.)

Exactly. The nice thing about this method is that it converges nicely even if you make errors (arithmetical or rounding) along the way -- so you can start by working with only a few digits and only use full precision right at the end.

You could compute square roots using a direct NR iteration (Y := (Y + X/Y) / 2), but that requires that you perform a division at each step -- most people find multiplications to be easier and faster.
Two dollar bills were also common currency in Canada in the 90s, until we replaced them with two-dollar coins.
I think the bigwigs call this a "brand" or "voice"
Twitter has an great branding: happy, fun, lighthearted, and yet still cool. And it accomplishes all that without trying too hard and remaining a neutral utility.
Lunar Lander 3D in 5K
Haha, i think you mean Mohan Paturi! That explains how he knew his stuff when it came to new startups, especially web 2.0ish companies.
Sorry to be a pedant, but shouldn't it be one of either:
* I am Toto, this isn't Kansas
* I'm not Toto, this is Kansas

Dorothy does after call say "Toto, I don't think we are in Kansas any more..."
Yes, that's him. He was pushing rails and all that stuff a good 4 years ago. Seemed like a sharp guy.
None of those seem difficult; in fact, I'm doing one of them right now.
Thanks. This will definitley help me.
Context is really important. What you and your friends may not have a problem with, and find funny/playful, can definitely be alienating to people who don't know you (and your intent).

I've never heard Matt say anything misogynistic, and his wife Heidi is extremely friendly, intelligent and polite. Really, i am positive there was no ill intent here. This was a failure of judgement, not a failure of character.
Didn't knew that something like that could be coded in Mathematica.
It's not our problem that you don't want to read cnn.com or corriere.it or whatever every now and then. It is our problem when the home page gets filled up with "doom! gloom!" stories and various other things unrelated to Hacker News.
> you cannot easily tell at compile time which function will be called at run time: the code can call a function that rewrites the name space as a side effect.

I think you don't need to know which function will be called at compile time to do tail call elimination, in general. As far as the compiler can see a function call, and can see the caller has nothing to do except returning the result of the call, then the compiler doesn't need to know which function is called (It doesn't even matter if the callee has some "wrappers" like decorators. The caller can just jump to the wrapper entry).

Is there something peculiar about Python that makes it difficult? (I don't understand how your self.worker example prevents tail call elimination, but maybe that's because I don't know enough about Python.)

> Secondly, it is difficult to deal with a tail recursive call inside a try-catch block.

A call made inside try-catch block is not a tail call, almost by definition. The compiler may perform something clever, but from the programmers POV, it's sufficient to regard them as non-tail calls.
Oklahoma City Teabagger Arrested for Threatening Bloodbath On Twitter
Facebook’s Site Governance Vote, was it an unfair poll?
In late February when Facebook declared that it was going to produce its own site governance to user poll, Facebook CEO said this action was a unprecedented effort to enable participation on the web. Now, can you stand here and say you believe that? I thought you might not.

To support this theory, huge global privacy watchdog, Privacy International revealed to the world that they thought this was only a “publicity stunt and a massive confidence trick on its 200 million users.”

Back in February two documents were unveiled for site governance, the Facebook Principles and the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. After Facebook took back the terms of use change, Mark Zuckerberg said publically they needed feedback leading to these documents being released.

This meant users could either for the current Terms of Use or the Facebook Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities....
Guys, here's the thing. Matt isn't an asshole. He's just not, by any definition (except maybe some right-wing nutjobs, given that he's French and all, but then they'd probably call him a morally loose, cheese eating surrender monkey, more than an asshole).

He promotes tech, he contributes to the community, i've never seen him be mean or rude to anyone. If his wife and the others he keeps company with are any indication, people like him and thinks he does well by others.

I saw the title and thought it was tasteless (i wasn't actually at GoGaRuCo), and maybe i should have said that it would have been upsetting, but i genuinely just thought it was going to be tasteless, not something that would offend (There's a book called "How to make love like a porn star" with the subtitle "A Cautionary Tale").

It's possible that Matt's presentation could have been executed in a manner that didn't offend. Nor was his intent juvenile, as you have asserted. From what he's said, he seems to have thought that people would be liberal (i don't mean that politically speaking) enough to handle the subject matter, which i think is a mistake he is not likely to make again.

So, there's the disconnect. Matt had one impression of how his presentation would be received, and that assumption did not go challenged until after he delivered the pesentation. The audience, not knowing Matt, have different assumptions and boundaries on what is and isn't appropriate in a presentation. I'm willing to go so far as to say Matt was wrong on this. He made the wrong decision. But he didn't do it because he's callous, or mean, or misogynistic.
Swine flu: Twitter's power to misinform
According to what I've read Tamiflu won't do you any good. There's no vaccine for this strain yet.
Recession changes our definition of 'necessity'
Not to be dismissive, but arguments about what is and what isn't offensive never get very far on the internet.

It's a topic that requires empathy, and most people come around to someone else's point of view only through seeing their body language when talking about an offensive topic.
This isn't the 1.0 spec. They haven't updated the files on the website yet.
Think about how much food a cow eats in the 2-3 years before it gets turned into burgers.
Thanks for pointing out that specific comment. It wasn't there when I first read that post.

The only correction I'd make to his post would be to state that people in nearly all communities (perhaps not the members of the Professional Association of Honest Apologists) are unable to apologize gracefully.
I spend more time than I'd like in Eclipse these days, and am consistently underwhelmed. It just can't hang with the intellisense features of VS.NET.

I spend entirely too much time in Eclipse hitting ctrl+space and getting nothing back. Often even when the thing I'm looking for is in the same file, let alone included thru an import. ReSharper will find references for things I haven't even imported. It really is that much better.

Oh, and VS.NET does have open source and commercial plugins (of which ReSharper is a good example.) It's every bit as open as Eclipse as far as extensibility is concerned.

In general, I find it's best when offering comparisons of two products to have actually used both products. That is the basis by which I consider VS.NET to be superior to Eclipse. I'd suggest you try them both before making up your mind for good.