skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a recent graduate from UCSD CS program. You'll hear a lot that the UCSD campus isn't very social, it's true. This has to do with the focus on "academics" so we don't offer any scholarships to athletes and we don't have frat houses on campus (no parties on campus). On weekends, the campus is pretty much dead.

If you do go to UCSD, I hope you picked Warren college. You'll live right next to the computer labs. It was pretty awesome, I lived @ Black Halls which was a 30 second walk to the CS building & labs.

The CS classes are pretty easy, I managed to graduate in 3 years by taking 16-20 units a quarter and I know a guy who did it in 2 years.

I never met anyone who was interested in YC or doing a startup. The mentality seemed to be get a good job in the corporate world. I regret not meeting more CS students, especially looking harder for people who want to do their own startups. Luckily, I live in Silicon Valley and there are a lot of us here =].

A lot of the CS professors are pretentious, I got the feeling that they didn't care about teaching students. There were some awesome teachers though, like Rick Ord who teaches assembly and compilers. Plus there's a great "Games Class", where you're given a quarter to make a 3D network game.

If you're interested in getting some real world experience there's AIP (Academic Internship Program). They will hook you up with an unpaid internship but it counts towards your credits.

Also, the sweetest jobs in the world are at ACS (Academic Computer Services). It really helps when you have a full course load to have a job where you can study most of the time.
I keep hearing people talk about how "useless" discussing gender equality is.

I don't think it's useless at all, and I've yet to hear a cogent argument to the contrary. If you think the discussions are ineffective, then explain why. What should be done differently? What can we do to have less ineffective discussions?

If you think discussing the subject is pointless because discussing equality is useless, then... fuck knows, there's not much point in discussion is there :P

Additionally, it's worth pointing out that Matt, having heard and taken the criticism he was given, responded by removing a number of risque images from the presentation that is now posted on the ultrasaurus thread linked up here.
You have this completely wrong. It takes about 10 times the plant calories to produce meat calories. If the world stopped eating meat we would would be able to feed many more people.
Sensationalist Reporting

There is something odd about the glossy way business mags display entrepreneurs as heroes and even more when they are tragic. It's part of the same hype culture that I despise.

Growth Businesses

Google is a technology and product breakthrough - Pagerank, GFS, BigTable, MapReduce, AdWords, Server Design etc. Amazon - Cloud Computing, Recommendation Engine. Facebook - Social Graph. These are deserving growth businesses that have built out a true market niche. I don't see the beverage market in that same category.

Knowledge, Young People, Jobs

Building a beverage like this is not like hiring and training Master Brewers from Weihenstephan in Bavaria or red wine experts from Bordeaux. Packaging juice bottles is a minimum wage job like any other. I don't see the armies of new employees that will be created in this market segment.
I think to a lot of people, discussing sexism that doesn't really exist... is... well sexist.

It's creating more division rather than helping. Just quit moaning about it and get on with building.

We're in an industry where gender is pretty irrelevant.

Asking "How do we get more women into tech" though is like asking how we get more boys to play with dolls.

Let people get on and do what they want to.
It is pretty sad to see the knee jerk emotional response that many otherwise rational people have when it comes to the subject of impacts of meat eating. I guess you could call it another 'inconvenient truth'.
I always enjoy chatting with people about the Monty Hall problem. That separates the people with flexible minds (or statistics knowledge) from all the rest...
Reminds me of the Bloomberg UI approach, which is an established GUI that is an interesting blend of command line and GUI. I'm confident that this interface approach could be used to create a better hitchhikers' guide to the galaxy than the current mouse-oriented HTML+DOM+JS+flash horror. Part of the trick with a keyboard-oriented platform like this is that under no circumstance can something be allowed to hijack the keyboard to prevent you from getting back to the command-line in the way that flash does at the moment.

In Bloomberg, users type sequence of commands into a fixed console that is similar in concept to a browser bar. Pressing return causes the application to load. You get command-line power and more visuals than are possible in curses. I think this is so far the best example in common use of a blend GUI.

For the purpose of discussion, it's a shame its distribution is on an exclusive platform. If anyone has access to a Bloomberg terminal and necessary skills to export the video signal to a system whereby a video can be taken of it, it would be great to have some demos of this interface on youtube for demonstration.

My memories of it are weak - I've only had opportunity to play with it myself a couple of times. Every time I see it demonstrated I'm impressed by the model but think of a dozen things I'd want to improve about it.
The Perfect Server - Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope (Ubuntu 9.04) [ISPConfig 2]
I went to UCSD and did a shitload of drugs and lost my sexual innocence and had a great time for 4 years.

Just remember there are no campus parties at UCSD, but plenty of house parties thrown by campus orgs. You probably won't go to any until 2nd or 3rd year. In the mean time, steal liquor from the 24 hour Ralphs supermarket by campus and sneak them into the dorms. If you want to go to campus parties just drive to visit your friends at UCLA.

Every quarter there is an on-campus festival where everyone gets SHIT faced drunk on campus. Sun god festival is one of these - honestly I've never seen anything like it at any other college. It's kind of ridiculous how far people take it since they don't get to party on campus. There are 2 bars on campus though if you feel like getting a beer. Make sure you have a real good fake ID though.

The cliffs by Blacks beach is a good place to bring a girl at night. Just don't fall into the ocean. If you get kicked out of the dorms for smoking pot or drinking, don't worry, it's not a big deal. They can't even tell your parents. I had a friend who got kicked out so far into the year he just didn't even move out, they refunded his money too. He bought BBQ for everyone for the rest of the year.

Teach yourself CS on your own time and major in something that is less demanding academically. Learn how to surf. Use RIMAC to work out so you don't get fat. Spend your meal points at the convenience store in warren instead of the dining halls.

Here's a tip for when you live off campus: instead of buying a parking pass, park in the Ralphs parking lot and ride the shuttle 2 stops to the top of the hill. They may have started cracking down on this.

One more thing - STUDY ABROAD FOR HALF A YEAR.

I'm getting sort of choked up writing this post.
My ideal future will see Firefox as this little niche browser that developers use to debug their javascript (if they dislike IE enough to refuse to use its script debugger) and CSS, but no real people use as their daily browser. Chrome will take FF's 30% market share, and IE will keep the rest.

Firefox has done its job: It forced MS to release IE7 (and 8), and it inspired Google to build Chrome. That's a good run, and the web will be better off because of it. But now it needs to fade gracefully from the scene so that we move on to a world where we only need to develop for two dominant browsers.
Sure, but you can compare it to other things that people don't seem offended by.

The slides I saw were far less racy than most magazines/news papers.
>> "Really, his wife saw nothing wrong with this?"

Why is that hard to believe?
>> "Putting gratuitous pornography"

If you consider that gratuitous pornography, boy are you in for a shock some day.
Apparently, the brothers had just recorded evidence that a manned Soviet spacecraft somehow got off course and left Earth's orbit, permanently. </quote>

This single sentence is enough to discredit the whole story.

It is technically impossible for manned spacecraft to leave Earth's gravity by accident.
Yup. I just did an upgrade to Jaunty and it has been very pleasant.
Here's what these words mean to me:

Intelligent: capable of graduating from MIT.

Educated: studied liberal arts & sciences at any credible college or university.

Conservative: Pat Buchanan. "god and country." Not Milton Friedman. Not Irving Kristol. And not "right-wing", which is an ideology. Conservative might really mean Edmund Burke, but I think the linked article means Pat Buchanan.

Smart: is context dependent and means making the best decisions in a given context. In some forms of human endeavor being smart requires higher than average intelligence, like say being a surgeon. But most aren't especially aided by intelligence. Definitely not politics or business. Too much intelligence can even cause stupidity in some situations.

I'm not sure what the word liberal means to you, but to me, in this context, it's meaningless.
I'm not a big Twitter fan but pretty much this article is claiming "Twitter allows people to post what they might otherwise say in general conversation. People are saying things that can cause panic and so people who take what others say at face value without confirmation will also be panicked."

The most alarming statement in this article was "The question of whether we need to somehow alter our global information flows during global pandemics is not a trivial one". Fight fear with education, not with censorship.
This question is actually puzzling biologists. I think they found that the longer a granny lives, the better her grandchildren fare (and the more she might have). However, a similar relation was NOT found for granddads, so it is apparently still a mistery why men grow so old (last I read, there might be more info by now).
A different kind of hype culture exists here on HN, which glorifies engineering, discounts sales and marketing, and considers non-technology businesses unworthy of respect. I'll bet if you were stuck on a plane next to this CEO and were somehow able to talk to him with an open mind you would learn a lot.
I found it interesting that the Sciam article about these substances was published when she was already 70. Probably she had studied them before, but still, I guess she was still very active by 70.
Oh cool thanks that's helpful - both the bot and your idea.

I have a feeling this article may have even been deleted or something or maybe I just imagined it was on HN.
For those intrigued by this kind of thing, this book (paper only, but the web page has more resources) may be interesting:

Dead Reckoning: Calculating Without Instruments, by Ronald W. Doerfler (http://www.myreckonings.com/Dead_Reckoning/Dead_Reckoning.ht... )

More good stuff at http://myreckonings.com/wordpress/ . The nomography posts had caught my eye a while ago, and there may be more of those coming soon.

(Disclosure: I recently exchanged a couple of emails with the author, after leaving a comment on the Heaviside post which was briefly featured here.)
Relax, they're philosophy students, the only branch of university where you don't have to make an effort to understand the world.
Just a quick +1 to this post. Had some friends go to UCSD. Visited them on many occasions, and there is an undoubtedly strong sense of SEPARATION you get there. That's about as best as i can describe it. To put it another way, when you walk around campus, nobody really looks at eachother, and its weird because you get this sense of how not only are they not looking at you, but as if they do not recognize your existence.

I've visited, UCR, UCI, UCLA and have never felt the way i felt at UCSD.

Just one guys opinion, but have to agree.
Great article. I'd forgotten all about the Fortean Times which I used to read about 15 years ago. I always admired their ability to talk about wierd and wacky things without having to take sides and devolving into propaganda. They're kind of like "The Economist" of weird.
dark ages II: dark harder!
Ask PG: Can you paste paperwork used to get YC startups incorporated?
I'm in CA, and about to form a corporation. I've read lots of conflicting things on the web. I was going to pay to talk to a lawyer. Then it hit me, YC does this all the time, numerous times a year. They must have this process highly optimized.

Can you share the documents you use to get YC startups incorporated, along with administrative info (things like: pay franchise tax every year) that needs to be covered?

Thanks!
Given that the escape velocity on the Moon's surface is about 2.4 kps I can't see any astronaut having the strength (even if totally unencumbered) to jump up at that speed
no drinking establishments??

Downtown San Diego is packed with nightlife spots... too many to count ....

Then there's that street that Pacific Beach is on ...
if the virus spreads as well in the real world as it does in the virtual one we're screwed
Tamiflu is no vaccine but a antiviral drug. It doesn’t help with the current seasonal flu but it seems to help with the swine flu.

Vaccines won’t be ready for months.
And your outcry strikes me as Dr.Evil from Austin Powers: "I demand... one million dollars!"

The US spends around 650 billion USD on military toys, every year.

Using 0.03% of that for pandemic research doesn't seem unreasonable.

In fact I find that annoyingly low when you consider that we're talking about one of the few risk factors that could literally wipe us out as a species within a blink.

You know the old joke where two planets meet?

One asks: "Hey, how are you doing?"
The other responds: "Ah not so good, I have homo sapiens."
The first: "Ah no worries, you'll be better soon. They never last longer than a few thousand years."
(caught 'assuming', trying to pull pants up quickly ;-)

No, you're right - my basic arithmetic comes out with the same number, now that I've checked it. Good catch.

I assumed (thwack) that, since 'tarsnap' is only taking a small premium over Amazon S3 charges for real use, it would always be a better price. Wrong (thwack), if you do have between 30 and 50 GB.

Possibly Dropbox can beat the price because the buyers of the 50GB plan use less than half, in average. (Leaving aside considerations of Amazon vs. dedicated infrastructure costs.)
It really doesn't in the long run, but it turns out you get so many more net resources through trade anyway that even in a shortage you're better off with trade than war.
Here's an opinion on the sea level rise

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/06/basic-geology-part-3-s...

"The main reason why sea level rises is because the equilibrium between glacial ice and temperature is out of balance, and has been for the last 20,000 years."

"Note that from 15,000 years ago to 8,000 years ago, sea level rose about 14mm/year - which is more than four times faster than the current rise rate of 3.3mm/year"
in some topic I think is generally applicable to their lives.

No offense, but you have absolutely no business deciding what's applicable to someone else's life. Just because it's interesting to you doesn't mean it has to be for others. And if it isn't, it's still perfectly acceptable.

I sigh when people judge others for not caring about things that they themselves care about.
WOW, this made my day... this is AWESOME. Can't wait to try it out!!! I'll def be watching the webcast.
Yahoo to close down Geocities
Yahoo have publicly announced that it will shut down Geocities service in the Summer, which it paid a staggering $4 billion for over a decade ago. However, Yahoo urge geocities customers to move to another free service, “Yahoo! Web Hosting.”

Comscore Media Metrix reports suggest when Geocities was first bought by Yahoo in 1999, was the 3rd biggest site behind AOL and Yahoo. The report showed that in the month of December it recieved over 19 million unique visitors, which is really quite amazing. As times have moved on, Geocities has been surpassed by many other hosting sites such as Godaddy, though hosting costs dropped, Geocities could only draw attention to 177 milion visitors in 2008, way below par...
"For example, it would have been interesting to see 20 pictures drawn by girls and 20 pictures by boys, instead she only presented one each."
Well, yes, but to me it looked like she was trying to show a typical example from each category. This is a presentation, so the emphasis is necessarily on story-telling, rather than detailed analysis. I would imagine she could have shown a whole load of charts and graphs, but I that would have been rather boring.

"Honestly, I don't believe that girls are always only thinking socially, nice and eco-friendly, while boys dream of guns and bombs."
Neither do I. But I think there's a useful point she was making about thinking about the way things interact / what they allow users to do, rather than programs that work fine by themselves but do not play well with others (every morning I load a bunch of stuff and watch them steal focus from each other) and implementing features because it's quite cool that you can do this thing we'll find a use for it later (yay, bloat!).

"Also, where are the campaigns to make more men become school teachers and kindergarden workers?"
I don't know. We should probably ought to have some, but expecting them to be provided by the tech industry is a little optimistic.
> I don't understand how your self.worker example prevents tail call elimination, ...

If some_function calls a bunch of random functions, it is very, very hard to tell if those calls will execute "self.worker = some_other_function" as a side effect. This happens because everything in Python can be changed on the fly; languages with true constants don't have this problem.

> A call made inside try-catch block is not a tail call, almost by definition.

Right, and since Python makes wide use of exceptions, true tail call elimination is often impossible. The best you can get is partial elimination, and it is a PITA.
Indeed, Wolfram himself once solved a Google puzzle (to encourage job applicants) using Mathematica. It was, what's the pattern here, and what's the next row?

1
11
21
1211
111221
312211
i think the author didn't really mean censorship; altering is also possible on a micro-level with users adopting a higher level of editorial standards...
You're trying to make Windows into a Unix, but it's not. Most of your questions make no sense in a Windows context. It's very, very different.

It would be so much easier to buy a book than to browse the web. That's how people learn the basics in the Windows community. Web sites are for news, documentation, etc., not for learning.

Documentation is at Technet and MSDN. It's messy and hard to search, so I'd buy a few books instead.

But anyway, some basics:

Most of the tools are in Start -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools. That's where you'll find Computer Management, Services, Event Viewer (logs), etc.

Most administration is done using the graphical administration tools. There are no config files. You point and click, use dialog boxes, double click installers, etc. Scripts are certainly possible, but don't start there.

Remote administration is done with Remote Desktop. You can mount a local drive on the server, and that's how you normally transfer files, not using SFTP.

The web server is IIS. It's already installed, but you must enable it.
Keeping Abreast of Pornographic Research in Computer Science
It's funny you say that I'm "not understanding what it really means" because that was actually the point of my criticism of Git.

Maybe it's just me that's stupid, but that doesn't explain the million blog entries saying either Git Sucks because it's impossible to use, or that they've had a eureka breakthrough and actually Git Rocks but you just have to understand that [reams of random gibberish] is what you need to achieve simple task A. The latter type of blog post usually has at least two comments pointing out that what the blogger suggests is both wrong and dangerous and suggesting two conflicting solutions to the same problem.

Apparently it's not as bad as it used to be. Again my knowledge comes mostly from blogs but every couple of months I read that Git is no longer perversely and unusably obscure. The fact that its unnecessary complexity is now being used as a defence against criticism doesn't encourage me to think that anyone is actually going to finally fix the human factors of git anytime soon.
My dad and I were on a backpacking trip and while hiking we calculated how thin the atmosphere was compared to sea level.

It feels more elegant sometimes to solve a problem simply (in paper, in your head) without bringing out the computers.

See Dijkstra on sum/product puzzle: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EW...
This is twitter - that's like asking people to have a higher editorial standard on SMS messages to their friends.
There are properly more people living in Washington DC than in Europe during the time of the plague.
Its fascinating how idiotic a board of directors can be. You have _Steve Jobs_ as your CEO, he's literally resurrecting your company in front of your eyes, and you're not making sure that he's happy? I mean, what do you want - to fire him, let him start another competing company, take all the talent with him, let you go nearly bankrupt, and have to buy him back?
Oh wait... this hasn't been the most insightful board of directors, has it?
Twitter (with a little help from Facebook) is bringing blogging to the mainstream by making it brain dead simple (blog writing, that is, not simply reading).

As tragically irrational as it may be, it is undeniable that the secret of Twitter's success has something to do with its dearth of functionality compared to the myriad blogging and chat platforms that came long before it. As such, there is no reason to think that adding a ton of features will make a Twitter killer.

However, once people get the hang of it, they may gradually start to demand more. Since Twitter is likely to be paralyzed by feature-phobia, there would be a tremendous opportunity for someone to ride the learning curve and provide what people want, just when they are ready for it.

On the other hand, this is a market destined for commodification, especially with an API. The more Twitter becomes a defacto standard, the more the collective will of the internet will try to wrest control away from the company and like gravity, this is a force that always wins in the end.
Wikipedia article says that after report was published, ExxonMobil stated that they would stop, but they still continued.
The problem is that education about the current situation is not reaching them very well. The author suggested that health organisations put updates online as soon and as often as possible. Injecting education into the online information stream if you will. Maybe directly into Twitter even. If some (hopefully recognised) experts were to start Twittering "pork does not kill you", the fear would be culled.

Anyway, I doubt this mass hysteria will really be all that huge if things don't get worse. The current situation is still pretty new.
well - how about stop sending messages if you can't trust the information you are spreading? that's what i meant by editorial standards. so yes, it's censorship of sorts, but it's more like self-censorship - or self-restraint to be more exact.
I don't understand, how could the wedding guests wander into the adjacent room and not remember how to get back?