skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And this is exactly why information like this never makes it to these types of arguments. It totally refutes the majority of the claims made. I say majority because unfortunately there are a number of very needy people who get denied access to the best institutions due to financial considerations instead of scholastic aptitude.
There is value in buying into a network of users, but it is in no way worth 100X multiples of sales. Since such deals usually happen within the Silicon Valley ecosystem, I strongly suspect that cronyism is involved. VCs in Yahoo decide to do the VCs in Tumblr a solid, and the favour probably returned in the future. This is what investors really mean when they tell companies that they have 'connections.' The VC business is tough, with average returns dwindling each year since the bubble, so there is motivation for this sort of thing to happen.
Better Specs { rspec guidelines with ruby }
Do you mean the 80/20 rule?
Millions of people use this exact system here in Hong Kong each day. It's amazingly convenient to be able to pay for train, bus, groceries, food in seconds without having to even take the card out of your wallet. People love it here.
Oh look, it's this article again..
> I consider myself pretty good; I honestly have no baseline...

This is your only blocker to success. I also had a lack of self confidence -- I put this up to the pedestal we put university degrees upon.

By what you've done so far, it sounds like you are better than most 90% of people finishing with Computer Science degrees. There are employers who can see that -- but most recruiters do not (though they do latch on to buzzwords).

Demonstrate your passion and your skill and you'll easily get a job somewhere in the industry.
thanks for the information. I never knew wordpress emails support adding tags like tumblr up to now. It was really helpful.

The reason I switched from wordpress to tumblr is wordpress started displaying ads on my blog as they do with some blogs at some times. But if yahoo buy tumblr should consider switching to wordpress or blogger or some self hosting platform
This still happens in cartoon/TV/movie physics: the engines of a space ship cut out, and the space ship coasts to a halt (even when the space drive is obviously Newtonian, and not magic).
I can't really think of how one gets around that link. I'm not sure what you mean.
Well this submissions is failing spectacularly :) I'm not looking for solutions, but other problems people have.

We have to enter our credentials into github each time for two reasons: we decided to follow the TOS of github and not create work specific accounts for everyone (instead you are supposed to take advantage of github's organizations feature). And almost all of our work takes place on pairing machines. Leaving our accounts open to github across random machines throughout the org is not something we want to do.
The rMBP premium doesn't just get you more power, though -- it gets you that lovely screen. If you have any eye trouble at all, a less-than-best quality panel is a real deal breaker.

(I speak as a former user of a 2010 4gb/256 SSD MBair myself. Couldn't go back to it, these days.)
I graduated high school last year and decided to forgo a $40,000 college to be an entrepreneur.

I regret nothing.

Unfortunately, my parents are doing the silliest thing imaginable and are forcing me to go to college now. I dread reading articles like this four years from now.
"Unfortunately there are a number of very needy people who get denied access to the best institutions due to financial considerations instead of scholastic aptitude."

Yes but the article is still completely wrong. They're making a very specific claim that on average students pay X, when in fact that's not true. Of course there are lots of cases where a person isn't able to get student loans or grants because their parents are wealthy but they're also highly abusive or whatever, but that doesn't have anything to do with what the article is claiming.
Graphene's high-speed seesaw
I don't understand this mentality and you at least are someone I know I can engage with. So, tell me, what makes you believe that you're qualified to determine what Tumblr's worth? "Billion -- with a 'B'"... so what? Tumblr's worth what they're worth. If they're intrinsically worth more than 1.1Bn because of stats we don't really know about or understand, there's nothing unseemly about turning down an offer that undervalues them.

Also: you can't judge what a business is worth solely by their burn rate or cash on hand. You need more information than that. Every year at a company that has a burn rate is an investment year; they could be reinvesting their income for growth, or forgoing that income for same.

(I have no idea what Tumblr is actually worth in 2013, for what it's worth.)
Agree with louder cues, or volume-adjustable.

Would also just let you set the time interval for cues and have ability keep them repeating indefinitely until you close the app. eg I have 3-4 stretches I want to do after working out and sort of count in my head to 30 seconds for each one.
Offer HN: Exchange DevOps mentoring for accommodation (Bay Area, August)
I'm the co-founder of a DevOps consultancy in London, UK (http://www.scalefactory.com/). I built the infrastructure for Songkick (YC07), and have worked with a number of other startups and large companies over the last few years.

I'll be visiting San Francisco to attend PuppetConf on 22nd and 23rd August this year, and whilst I'm in the Bay Area I'd like the opportunity to travel a bit, and hang out with other hackers. To that end, I'd like to make an open offer to startups or established smaller companies in the area:

I'll spend some of the day with you, talking about any and all of infrastructure architecture, automation, Puppet, continuous delivery, scalability, monitoring, and infrastructure testing as they relate to your business. All I ask in exchange is for you to show me some of the area's sights and nightlife; and contribute to the cost of my hotel stay.

If you're interested, get in touch: jon@scalefactory.com (or @jtopper on Twitter)
The "innovation" so far consists of making phones thicker so that they can house a bigger battery.
I just hope you're right. I honestly don't think we've seen the US Gov flex their muscles on bittorrent yet (not to suggest there's anything they can do).
He just used the Dreamcast for web access. He played Goldeneye on an N64 I assume.
I can maybe - maybe - understand not putting emacs on a low resource machine (something like a WRT54G, etc). This is coming from someone who loves emacs so much that I was considering posting a comment along the lines of "fire the non-emacs-installing sysadmin, or I quit."
OK, but then you'd uninstall vi before you'd refuse to install mg.
As I understand it, he played Goldeneye on an N64 and used a Dreamcast to access the internet and share his exploits.
So, nowadays if a tech community puts together an event, they had better call it a gathering, a tech meet, maybe coffee code & cookies, basically anything but conference.

Because once you have a conference you have to deal with feminist dogmatic gynosaurs, ducks, bloggers, community backlash, mainstream print filling their idle pages with judgement on your efforts, and basically a regret for even thinking of doing something good in the first place.
> But an Emacs user shivers at the thought of losing all their elisp.

For one's own machine yes, for editing on somebody else's or on a server... meh. I'd sooner have a barebones emacs (aka mg) than have to use vi, if only because I'll corrupt half the file in about 10 seconds in vi.
Everyone has a different interpretation of what it is "to be a dick"; whilst a nice sentiment, it's like a politician using the phrase "hard-working family" or "common good", and other such glittering generalities[1]. Everyone hears the same words but interprets them according to their own personal values.

As such, can you give concrete examples (actual, not hypothetical) of "dickish" behaviour that has been dealt with in this way?

[1]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glittering_generality
I like your analysis, but why throw the 4 million estimate on the number of people killed in your Avenue 2 scenario? To give a number like that for such a speculative scenario seems ridiculous to me.
>That's why college tuitions are crossing the $50,000 barrier

Maybe for out-of-state, Ivy league education, or maybe Medical School, but this is outrageously untrue for the average college.

For example, Georgia Tech, an amazing public college in the South, costs $5325[1] per semester for instate students.

Community colleges, in the area, cost thousands less as well (in the $3000 range per semester?).

I can understand that maybe MIT and Stanford are getting pricey, but hopefully people understand that there are literally thousands of other colleges out there.

[1]http://www.bursar.gatech.edu/tuiandfee.php
Poll: What Text Editor Do You Use?
PSPad
Ultraedit
Yes while I'm certainly not an expert in game theory (which is still an evolving field) my reservations with it are with the core principles of it mentioned above. If you notice an inefficiency in the marketplace, you might be able to exploit it before your competition even knows what moves you made. In many cases they won't care.
I checked the nature paper - no plots!
(Well, no multi-line plots in the fashion of the one in question).
Actually, you're in a position to get more out of university than most of your peers. So let's say you're going for a CS degree, and you already know a lot of programming. Cool.

Ignore the intro programming classes and take higher-level courses. Treat prerequisites as suggestions, and don't be able to ask for permission (if needed) to skip courses or take grad courses. Grad-level cryptography, machine learning, PL theory, etc. can be great. Choose classes based on how good the professor is. Try to do some research work as soon as you can find a good professor. Working alongside upperclassmen and grad students is a great chance to learn and get tips from them. Chances are, you don't know as much about algorithms/unix/Lisp/HPC/graph-theory as you thought.

The fact that you can skip or breeze through some of the basic undergrad classes gives you flexibility to really explore new things. Hell, get that linguistics/history/art second degree you've always wanted. Go on backpacking trips or play intramural lacrosse or whatever. You should be the least concerned about the piece of paper at the end (but make sure you get it anyways).
This is my main reason for preferring to do it nonviolently (Avenue 1). We need to be building things that give power to the currently powerless and decentralize control, not the other way around. If we take power "for ourselves", we find that what we call "ourselves" is infiltrated by the worst kinds of people, and then they push us out.

I don't have any moral problem with killing the current global elite. For what they've done to this world, they're effectively our property, to do with what we wish. That said, I prefer to offer them full amnesty so long as they decline peacefully. (They'll even remain fairly wealthy; just not dominant anymore.) Even if it's abstractly morally acceptable, there is a major moral cost to violence nonetheless. Once we start it, how do we stop it? Also, violent revolutions tend to draw in the worst people (who are attracted, as noted, by the power). Our side is 99.9% of the world; not everyone in that set is good.

Best is a nonviolent revolution centered on decentralization of power (giving power away to the currently powerless in order to build a healthier and more robust world) because the sorts of people who are attracted to such a movement are the kinds you want. When you start killing people and blowing shit up and "ruling" old-style (see what happened to communism) then you are taking power (perhaps with the stated intention of giving it back some day) and you get a lot of mercenary assholes in your effort who don't really care about the ideals and just want to cause harm.
The simple architecture is actually what PHP got right. For comparison, if you were using mod_python with the default settings, you needed to restart apache whenever you changed a file.

The insane part of PHP is the actual language. It's an overgrown template language. Half the functions are based on C, half the functions are based on Perl. There's no regularity or consistency.
Quite. Furthermore...

From the article: "Consider this: You have just paid about three times as much for your degree as did someone graduating 30 years ago. That’s in constant dollars — in other words, after accounting for inflation. There is no evidence that you have received a degree three times as good. "

The assumption is that you would expect the cost of higher education to track the CPI. As a good that we get through labour-intensive means, in fact you should not expect that, but expect the cost to depend on the amount of face-to-face time students have with instructors and the growth of real wages.

I thought the WSJ was supposed to get these kind of things right.
Wow, thanks for all the thoughts! Really appreciate it when people who have already dealt with my problems can provide insight. I guess that's a perk of being young.

You're right, though. It's an opportunity, and my goal needs to be to make the most of it, even if it feels unnecessary from the outside.
Which college in Finland are you at? Isn't the University of Helsinki among the best in the world? (just curious)
My problems:

* Payment. Indirectly related to coding. Credit cards aren't common in my country and debit cards often are not visa or mastercard compatible. Fortunately prepaid credit cards are available at nearly every bank. With PayPal and a normal credit card tied to my account I just don't feel save carrying my wallet and laptop around.

* Spread of knowledge. I need to know so much to be able to choose the right tool in every situation. Right now I'm working on a blog/portfolio. I like to use a static site generator. Despite there beeing thousands of comparisons on the web it is hard to assess whether I'm able to build what's in my head. The one that seems capable enough is written in a language I don't speak. I probably have to write my own solution or write a patch in a language I can at least partly understand due to my knowledge of other languages.

With the advent of JavaScript it has become even harder. Backbone? Ember? Angular? Use existing knowledge to write my backend or switch there to JavaScript too? Meteor? Express? Which build system, which module system, async helpers or not? Promises? How to tie everything together?

You could spend more time figuring that out than you spend time writing code...

* Anonymity and my lack of creativity. You need an username for everything. I have yet to find a bookmarking service that just requires my mail adress and a password. And what's with all the twitter and facebook authentication crap sites starting to pop up that don't even allow you to sign it without it...
100 kilotons of energy released along a several hundred kilometer long tube in the upper atmosphere, at altitudes of tens of kilometers poses much less of a threat to people who live on the surface of the Earth than if all that energy is released at once on the ground.
This whole article reads like it's written by someone who has never been inside a library. "it would be nice to have an original copy of those 3 aforementioned works in front of me to see if they list any copyright". If only there were institutions that have copies of obscure works like "Scientific American" that allowed people to peruse them for free.

Here's an animated, interactive visualization that looks like the Joy Division album cover, based on d3.js https://github.com/daliwali/unknown_pleasures
How 'Ender's Game' Went From Page to Screen
Google App Engine was almost a science project for the first few years, only supporting languages that Google used internally.

Python?
This is why I recommend my friends and family to buy macbooks. Not because of OS X, especially not because they are "faster" (CPU, HDD, GPU are quite slow for it's price), nor for the "pretty" factor. I do it because they are very, very reliable machines. What good is a 1500 euro HP with massive amounts of GPU power, when the battery sucks, the audio jack is broken, the screen won't stand up and some keys are loose...
More details on the raise reveal that it's actually not just from a stock sale - they're also issuing $450M in notes: http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2013/05/15/tesla...
Want the best home gaming experience? Learn it how
if you don't use the key-value datastore you give up a lot of the scaling advantages of appengine

I'm not sure what you mean by the key-value datastore. Do you mean memcache, or do you mean the HR datastore?
There is actually a paper about exactly this:

"Optimal Pivot Selection in Fast Weighted Median Search"

ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/78/6236322/06193457.pdf

It gives a formula for the optimal subset size to use to find the pivot and also does some optimization after the first partitioning step.
It would be bad karma to accept a $1 billion offer from Yahoo.

Previously Yahoo have made tree $1 billion offers, one to each of eBay, Google and Facebook. All where turned down, and for all it turned out to be the right ting to do[0].

0: http://www.inc.com/allison-fass/peter-thiel-mark-zuckerberg-...
Olamide ”Baddo Lee” And D’Banj ”Banga Lee” In Kill And Go Mode | See Photo
I figure it will take about 4000 casualties among the global elite (of about 80,000 people) to convince them to retreat. Somewhere around one spill per 20 will convince them that times have changed.

Unfortunately, we're probably looking at a battle kill ratio of 100:1, not because the good guys would be incompetent, but because the bad guys would have lots of guards and hired guns (who would count toward that 100). So that's 400,000 in battle.

The spinoff conflicts and general social mayhem and disruptions of service will add an order of magnitude to that. Most of the dead won't be killed in battle; they'll be people who can't get to hospitals in time because of roadblocks.

All-in, low millions seems likely. We really want to avoid that if possible. However, when you compare that to the number of people who die of health insurance in the US, or the casualty count of the 2003 War of Corporate Enrichment (in Iraq) it's not that extreme. It's still horrible and we still need to do everything we can as a generation to make sure that it doesn't happen, but it's not a x-risk (which our current corporate elite is).

I only support violence if it comes to us, as a second-strike matter-- I would much rather have the global corporate elite back off peacefully and no one get killed-- but U.S. health insurance (i.e. corporate murder-for-profit) is pretty damn close to the red line.
Thank you! I'm a guy and it makes me uncomfortable even watching some guy make a tasteless pass at a random woman. And regardless of what people believe, friendship is possible (and a far better prelude to other things if both parties desire).

As an aside, I'd hate to be named Richard after reading that posting.
X-Y Monitor and Vector Generator
Why did someone leak this much information about a secret deal? Kara Swisher is an awesome reporter and the go-to for this kind of article, but whoever talked had a reason for doing so. One plausible guess; someone on Tumblr's board is trying to cement a second offer from another company. This article now names a price and a deadline.
This problem plagues most social networks, but at the end of the day, scale and proper scale management solves the brand problems you've mentioned.
I know it's probably a personal preference thing, but do you really need line numbers? I've never missed them. Even if I'm not jumping to a compile error (or grep result, etc) with M-g n, I can always go to a particular line with M-g g, or show what line the cursor is on with what-line. I've also got flymake next and previous warnings mapped to similar keys.
Am I right in thinking that the only thing stopping NFC working at greater distances is signal strength?

If so, presumably someone could make a targetted aerial which would allow functioning over greater distance (like the 'pringle can wifi' approach). If I understand correctly, you will still increase the distance with only one end using a directional antennae.

If so, couldn't someone walk through a crowd and skim passers-by fairly easily?
I think you are missing the point - the article proves (unless the author is flat out lying) that text chat through skype, which is claimed to be end-to-end encrypted, is not, as requests are being made to the URL.

It may currently be for innocent purposes (check URLs, thumbnails etc as you said). However the fact is that they can make these requests at all show that the encryption is not end-to-end, otherwise they wouldn't know the URL to make a request to at all! The request isn't being made from the client, the IP shows it comes from Microsoft's servers.

So, you're talking about voice, but this is proof that the textual chat connection that should be secure end-to-end is decrypted and routed through Microsoft's servers.
> Most existing PHP code is heavily dedicated to the use of SQL, and if you don't use the key-value datastore you give up a lot of the scaling advantages of appengine.

I find a lot of folks aren't aware of https://developers.google.com/cloud-sql/
How the FBI’s online wiretapping plan could get your computer hacked
There may be some insane parts contributing to the success but I can not even imagine a world in that all of them would contribute to the success.

PHP: a fractal of bad design [1] lists many - really many - broken things for which at least I am unable to see how the behavior could not cause headaches let alone contribute to the success of PHP. Go ahead and read it - it is long but entertaining.

[1] http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...
you are also ruling out HTTP auth, yes?
I've done hiring in the software space for a long time and I can virtually assure you if I saw your portfolio and your resume, even if your code was great, I would be very leery of hiring you. It will because I will assume you don't have the theoretical grounding that I want my employees to have. Having the paper doesn't assure me that you have it either, but not having it will make me think you don't.

You haven't mentioned any OS level programming you've done, or compilers, or graphics, or AI. No set or category theory, or complexity analysis or data structure analysis. These are all things that a basic CS graduate will have at least encountered (if their program is at all acceptable). It is entirely possible to learn these on your own but the more obvious way to learn them is to go where they teach them.

Further, you need to learn a big lesson that I learned at undergraduate. There are tons of people smarter than you. That isn't a bad thing, it's a good one. If you're the smartest person in the class (including the professor, TA's etc), get out of the class. Worst case scenario is that you realize that the early classes are too remedial for you and you get a professor to let you into the upper ones early. I and many of my friends did graduate level course work as undergraduates. If you can't be intellectually engaged at a major accredited university, you aren't trying.

That's not to say you can't be a good programmer without a degree. Some of the very best I know don't have a degree or not one in a computer field. But almost to a person, they feel the sting of that lack of intellectual grounding and wish they had done a degree in the subject.

All that said, the cost issue is a very real one. So working to mitigate your debt should also be a priority. I worked in the software field all the way through college. It's a field that allows for paid internships, and I even TA'd some classes as an undergraduate. Things are more expensive now than when I was in school so you will have to work harder at it than I did. Good Luck.
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