skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most Australian undergraduate degrees are 3 years, and more focused than the American style, without the "gen ed" requirements. You can take things like Medicine and Law directly as undergraduate degrees - there's no "pre-med" here. For most you can optionally take a further year to do honors, often research-focused.

Ironically, Melbourne University, one of the most prestigious Australian universties, has recently been moving to an American-style system with more generalist degrees at the undergrad level (eg there's no undergrad medicine there anymore).
Stunt Kites: Your Source for Stunt Kites
Stunt kites, also known as sport or acrobatic kites, offer the pilot the ability to steer the kite and perform tricks. Two lines (at a fixed length) control the kite.The 2 flying lines are hooked up to handles or straps on one end and attached to the bridle of the kite on the opposite end of the line.
Tim Ferris goes into this, along with a lot of other interesting ideas, in his book "The 4-hour Work Week": http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/ The book is entertaining, but be sure to have your reality-check filter turned on.
If you look at the links on this wikipedia page you should find useful information. Aza Raskin has been working with command line interfaces and has done some interesting things with them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aza_Raskin
What is the way for stopping the copying, that you assert there certainly is?

If two people hand in the same essay in school, how do you know who actually wrote it? It is a judgment.

There is no way to make such a judgment without seriously violating the usefulness and the current M.O. of the internet.

I am not talking about what you think is fine or not fine I am talking about what is possible and actually happening.
How do colleges compete one against another?

They compete for new students / the parents of said students. The problem is even with all that competition schools don't grow and quickly grow and take over the market so students end up competing for them. Which is why schools focus on looking good from the outside and not really innovating in education.
Ask HN: Optimal algorithm for Bananagrams?
So a friend of mine brought Bananagrams over last night http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bananagrams and it got me thinking about what an optimal algorithm would be to solve your board. I couldn't convince myself I had an optimal answer so I thought we could brainstorm.
Ah! I guess I missed that.
His general reasoning (eBay's success was due to it being used as an entertainment product more than a purely commerce-driven product) was fresh enough to me, and got me thinking enough, that I didn't mind reading what was just a quick editorial instead of an academic paper on the subject.
I don't know any to precisely point to. But one area where commandline usability is of key interest is in mobile phone services operating on USSD.

I used to consult for a startup in India where number of users on USSD outnumber WAP. We used to constantly make a lot of tuning on the screens of the application and the workflow analysing the usage. I however don't have any papers or scholarly material to point.
Great! Let me filter is by part-of-speech. Just do a rough guess.

For example, I may only want VERB wordoids.

Also, you should measure how easy and unambiguous the SPELLING is.
Actually, my friend likens Steve Jobs to an abusive father.

His fans love him BECAUSE he punishes them, but then does something really nice to make it up.
paypal was acquired in 2002, he continued on at eBay for 3 weeks.

This is not evidence that he knows what he's talking about wrt why eBay is dying.

eBay's current pain has nothing to do with "fun" or "the rise of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook and the likes of YouTube", and everything to do with trying to become amazon (via ebayexpress) and google (via the never publicly mentioned K2 project).
Lots of bloggers I find do this, and it's highly annoying in my book. Sometimes getting filler information is good, if the blogger can intelligently pull out key points from another article when they're trying to drive a central point home. But, for the most part it's a practice I get frustrated with when I'm looking for actual articles to read and gain perspectivef rom.
Coding Horror: How to Motivate Programmers
If two people hand in the same essay in school, how do you know who actually wrote it? It is a judgment.

A judgment based on things like writing style analysis, which is pretty easy. I have blogs steal my posts wholesale pretty often, and most people stealing your writing do a really shitty job of it.

I am not talking about what you think is fine or not fine I am talking about what is possible and actually happening.

What is actually happening is that so far nobody gives a damn about writing enough to prevent blatant infringement. It's not an incredibly hard problem. Youtube is solving a much harder problem with their audio/video copyright issues, and while their solution isn't perfect it's certainly stopped me from using them to reliably find movies and songs. The music I do find there is the sort of stuff that's not popular enough for the band to care. If they did, those videos would be gone within hours.

Remember that there's a copyright on text just as there is on anything else. Nobody enforces their copyrights because so far there aren't particularly huge rip-offs that are costing writers money, but if somebody ever does create anything that's effectively leeching then suing him would be ridiculously easy, since on the Internet everything is archived and most things are stored with dates. You couldn't possibly steal one of my blog posts and get away with claiming it's yours, and so if I care enough to go after you you have no defense and have clearly broken the law.
Microsoft apparently has done a number of studies on Powershell usability, but I don't think they've published the results:

http://www.google.com/search?q=powershell+usability+study
Am I misreading something or is that exactly what swombat just said?
Typically, a dedicated box on your local network serving up an SVN system works.
Just reading that article made me cringe. He may be right, but I couldn't finish it to be sure.
I don't think that is so much of an issue here as submitting a fluff summary instead of going another click and submitting the link to the original article. I find that, for most part, summary articles link to the original. The only reason that I might submit the summary is if the comments are particularly good.

If you really suspect foul play, Google for the key terms and see what comes up.

OTOH a list of bloggers to avoid, because they are most often just wrong would be useful. But maybe it's apparent after a couple of paragraphs.
I think you should start making boards based upon the AT90USB162 processor. USB capabable, cheap micros are increasingly important for new products.

Other than that, good work! I am a fan.
I've also never used rentacoder, but my observations, and the observations of others that I've heard leveled against it rarely stem from "the price is too good to be true".

Commonly the problem is that a client requests a specific attribute, let's say a local Win32 client, and the responses are almost all form letters that are clearly pitching the dev team's PHP/JSP/ASP experience: something clearly not useful for the client's needs. Can they do the job? Probably, in the same way the client could pick up a book on C++ development and figure it out himself.

Another thing I've seen that makes me doubt their success is the opposite extreme: clients give _hopelessly_ vague requirements ("I want a facebook-like service") and people come back with "We have a lot of experience with PHP, it will be $1234". How do they know how much time it will take to satisfy the client? They don't even really know what he wants! What are they going to do when they run over budget? As a customer, how can I be sure they'll fix things after they think they've done a fair amount of work for their quoted dollar amount?

Lastly, some other people have also seen problems and posted trolls to those sites, asking people to provide solutions to the halting problem or travelling salesman problems: obvious impossible problems to anyone with basic comp-sci understanding (I'm not formally comp-sci educated, so I don't want to sound like I'm coming from on-high here), but people will reply with bids for these programs! The general problem is a perception of a lack of quality, and the specific problem is RAC and other similar sites don't offer any easy way to verify that the coders in question meet any sort of quality bar.
I'd definitely use version control.

There's no reason you can't make quick updates with version control. You'll each have a copy of the whole site (maybe with test databases) on your dev machines, and should be able to make the update, test it on your dev machine, then commit the changes to the repository.
It is playful and (conceptually) simple, but that is not enough to make good design. The Google logo has a lot of problems. The biggest is that they chose a bad typeface for a logo. It's the kind of typeface you'd use to set a page of text; it's too spidery when used for just 6 big letters. Especially with dropshadows.

They also use nasty colors. With the yellow in particular they just couldn't win. To get enough contrast they had to make it a dark, dirty yellow. Whereas the green is shockingly bright-- which makes it look like different parts of the logo are in different light.

In sum: bad shapes and bad colors. Graphically, everything's bad about it.

(Yes, Google is a very successful company. But not because of their logo.)
One Scientist's Crusade to Rewrite Reputation Rules
I've noticed that various physical activities alter how I think.

Typing out comments in code prior to writing the code or tests (i.e. comment-driven development) helps me think better about what I want to do than simply sitting and musing inside my head. Maybe it's the typing, maybe it's being forced to actually find words for what I think I'm thinking.

Same goes for drawing stuff on a white board. The physical act of standing up, moving my arms, pacing around in front of the board, all seem to alter my thinking.

Finally, I seem to be better able to find stuff in my house if I move my fingers a lot while wandering around looking. Seems to help me focus.
Buro9 has a point though. Where else can I get hard-to-find used items? (article) " it was generally the entertainment and excitement of the chase that brought a buyer to eBay in the first place." Um, no...it was the prospect of getting something I want for cheap. Craigslist sometimes provides, but - at least here in the Bay Area - it's become hopeless for things like computer equipment, having been overrun by spammers from China, something CL seems disinclined to do anything about. Mind you, they are owned by eBay...
If you really suspect foul play, Google for the key terms and see what comes up.

The example I found is where the blogger quotes darn near the entire article, but without ANY outlink or mention of the original author's name. Blogging is easy if someone else writes all the content of the blog posts.

OTOH a list of bloggers to avoid, because they are most often just wrong would be useful.

I'd be happy read such a list to know what not to surf over to.
Useful Adobe Flash frameworks and graphical engines for developers
What one of my friends says is that he usually makes some change directly on the code on the server, click CTRL-S and I can just refresh the page to see what he did.

With Git, for example, you modify the code on your machine, then save it, that you have to commit and push. Or am I wrong?
> a money-making opportunity more than anything else

My lawyer friends complained that it is impossible to get a degree in less than the standard three years because of the way certain pre-requisite classes are scheduled. The influence of the American Board Association. Why? They said it was all for profit, no other reason.

Which might say something about lawyering in the U.S. - if they're trying to profit off their own future lawyers.
It's almost certainly defensive, probably because their investors want them to be "protectable". Startups tend not to sue their competitors.
In this case, Kodak evidently offered to store his pictures for free, then when he wanted them back because they were going to delete them, they did not make it easy to get out.

As a prospective customer, I pay attention to whether someone is going to try to get money from me for the privilege of no longer being their customer. It's not a good sign. I will probably just avoid being their customer in the first place.
You know -- he might actually be reading along.

Sorry you don't like the material. I've written over 500 blog articles in the last 4 years. Some suck, some don't. But I keep trying.

A little bit of kindness can go a long way, you know. If you don't like the article, don't upvote it. If you think it is off-topic, flag it.

But coming on here and trashing me is whacked. My articles may be bad, boring, crass, or whatever, but this site is better than that. Surely you have something better to do with your time than tearing up somebody else's work.
ehm, quicksilver?
Except trends flow from present undergrads to companies, not the other way around.
I guess I just assumed it applied to both then. I don't know.
I voted it up and did side with last.fm (at the time), because I never dreamt they could issue a denial like that and actually be lying, in spirit if not in letter. God am I naive sometimes.
Sitting together in silence is vastly different from sitting together with earphones plugged into one's ears. The first, you are immersed in the others' presence. The second, you are not having a shared experience.
So the answer is less education?

Does school attendance invariably result in "education"?

How might students gain what you and I could both agree is an education at less expense?
I guess I've been brainwashed through having Google's logo in my face since my youth, but I don't mind the colors or the spikiness of the font. It's vastly better than Yahoo's, anyway, which screams childishness in my face.
You're correct. But you should be able to test the code on your machine and make sure it's correct before committing it.

Your development machine should be able to run the same code as your server.

Making changes to the public site is a very bad practice. What if your code has errors in it?

Version control also keeps everyone up to date. Before making a change to the site you'll download the most up to date version from the repository, that way your local copy has everyones changes, with comments about what they've done.
Actually, you trashed yourself by writing that other article.

This time, as soon as I saw it was your blog, I clicked the back button. I didn't even remember exactly why, but I had it in the back of my mind as something I did not want to waste time on.

bravura's comment just reminded me of the actual incident.
Well, someone tipped off the media and got fired.

It is absolutely in TechCrunch's best interest to protect their sources or fewer of them will contact TechCrunch with tips because they're afraid of retribution.

If TC offers to protect them somewhat, then it helps mitigate the concern future whistle-blowers will have telling TechCrunch.

I think the other points in this thread about the law not protecting civil cases is interesting-- but I suspect TC is really just doing this to make future leak providers less fearful. "We'll stand behind you against your company if you give us the dirt."
Most Bizarre Programming Languages Ever Created
Well, working for free or deferred pay (if the film gets sold) is common at the bottom end of the business. So I'm prepared to accept that the labor outlay was $0, since in such cases there's an agreement that nobody is owed any money unless paydirt is hit. And equipment may be owned or borrowed - after all, I have 2 cameras that can shoot video, and a fast computer, so if I began shooting something lo-fi tomorrow I'm already equipped. But still.
Very interesting research.

A very explicit & clear observation: Playing Dumb charades: enact movie names or phrases. I find myself far more creative by the end of game. Out of the box thinking comes so naturally post that.
Uhh. No.

One of my best CS professors used to say: "Competition is for horses"

The _right_ way to motivate your hackers is to give them interesting stuff to do so that you can watch as they fall in love with the stuff they're doing and achieve inhuman-seeming goals fueled by caffeine and pure joy for their work.

Not some stupid motivational analogy from "a quality control manager in a hospital".
Ask HN: Please (re)review my new social learning site
Hi guys! I submitted my site for review here last week and got some amazing feedback. I have made a bunch of changes due to those suggestions combined with some user testing from www.usertesting.com.

I would really appreciate it if you guys could take a second look at it and give me a bit more feedback.

http://www.cafecourses.com
I love the "Hacker safe" and "trusted site" labels, which are served from the same domain! Nice touch.
Nope. Amazon changed from the "internet bookstore" to the "internet everything store," and they killed eBay by the simple step of requiring a credit card for sellers, and holding the money for 2 months, if I recall correctly. As a result, Amazon has never had a fraud problem of eBay's magnitude, and just feels "safer."

eBay changed from the "selling used stuff" place to the "overrun my wholesale resellers" place to the "overrun by scammers, don't buy anything over $20" place. Their reliance on PayPal may have hurt them.
The Society for Barefoot Living http://www.barefooters.org achieves the purity of mission that you cry out for.
Unfortunately, both systems are too easy to game by those who happen to be more unprofessional than average.

In the end, these sorts of systems are foisted on us by the paid bureaucrat-class that pays itself quite well for doing all that really hard work of managing academics. Figuring out whether someone is a hotshot scientist would mean reading his papers, and that's way too much work.
Q about ACL: Chapter 13: Exercise 3b
For this exercise in Graham's "ANSI Common Lisp", when I add declarations to the ray-tracer program, it actually runs slower. Can anyone explain to me why that is?

My code with declarations is available here: http://www.automatous-monk.com/lisp/aclp/chap13-exer03.html

I'm not sure, but I believe I was using SLIME when I did this exercise (it was a while ago).
The author actually gives a better and more general reason at the end: "eBay's bureaucratic and political MBA culture". No doubt that manifested itself in making the site less fun, but it also had a lot of other fatal effects, such as being a horrible place for good hackers.

eBay killed itself.
Yes, but it turns out it wasn't the auctions that people wanted; it was cheap and eclectic items. Many of the products they used to have a monopoly on (used video games, old comic books, dvds, cds) are available used on Amazon. Homemade crafts went to Etsy. I suppose eBay still has a hold on coins and antiques, but that's too small a niche.
Windows Marketplace used to sell third-party apps until 2008. Now it basically just points to store.microsoft.com
Oh, and buying used items on Amazon = predictable shipping charge. On eBay, you have to play "dodge the 99 cent item, $24,99 shipping charge cow patty" game.
Tiny, low power, low cost home server
I use Craiglist and Kijiji as well.
To hell with the idea stealers, I encounter them all the time. F%%%ing thieves.

But hey, for $65 million something can be arranged!
Well, it all depends. I would agree with the main premise - that a little friendly competition is motivational, but the operative words are - wait, that didn't come out right - "a little", and "friendly competition".

I trust my code to be optimal, or I know where it isn't and leave it at that, since I don't feel like / have time to tune it. If somebody fixes it I'm always interested to know how he did it in the former case, and I'm simply grateful in the latter case. And if I rewrite someone else's code for the better, I do feel good - not because I "beat" him, but because the code is better now. And isn't such a stepwise refinement a worthy goal?
Why is it evil? The reason they keep giving is a way it's ineffective.
1) the good fact that it is "fair".

I guess this is why Google maps got a "go" despite using undocumented APIs the regular developers of the AppStore are not allowed to use?

It's not a as level playing field as you think.
doesn't seem like something people would spend money on...all of this info seems readily and easily accessible already.

the name seems a bit childish.
Data.gov: Throwing Open Uncle Sam’s Data Mine
I like this site very much!

However, I'd consider it an advantage for Russian speakers to NOT have Russian on the list. As a speaker of another language also not on the list, I wouldn't want any automated competition on coming up with words with that basis. (My other language has been a gold mine for me. ;) )
"Nothing motivates like having another programmer tell you they're rewriting your code because it sucks."

Wrong. This doesn't motivate. It just pisses me off.
Knuth made TeX. What did Dijkstra make?
Microsoft Said to Be Unveiling New Search Engine
I find your approach to making money using search engine traffic interesting, as you're using your name and face for this, which is a bit unusual. However, I think it would be a bit easier for you if you also allowed people to comment on your microsites, thus gaining content.

It's a bit uncool to use this site as a keyword backlink though.
Do you suggest SVN over Git?
I agree, it isn't pure charity that motivates them, but nonetheless, it's a real gesture.
"...achieve inhuman-seeming goals fueled by caffeine and pure joy for their work..."

Exactly!

There's almost nothing that can motivate me when I'm "done for the day". Not deadlines, budgets, help, dinner, not even money.

OTOH, there's almost nothing that can get me to knock off for the day when I'm "in the zone". Just yesterday, someone spent 5 minutes showing me something that turned out to be the missing link in 3 different places in my app. Six hours later, I looked up and realized that everyone was gone and the lights were out. Six of the most fun hours in a long time. You can't engineer that into your workplace.
See also an earlier posting:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=623561
Clickable:
http://www.cafecourses.com
Hence the "(yet)".
Time is ripe for a new buy-sell marketplace.

No, I don't mean auctions.

No, craigslist is not what I meant.

Kijiji sounds too stupid even if it is good.

The long tail is rattling, can't you hear it?
Reference or tutorial?
Could do it yourself - https://www.arin.net/resources/request/bulkwhois.html
Somewhat related on the subject of motivation; the phenomenon in forums or mailing lists where a request for information leads to few, succinct answers, yet an inaccurate or inflammatory post on the same subject results in long, detailed, and often very useful refutations.
You're not missing anything, it's just a matter of trust. There are a lot of middlemen between you and your money, no matter the scenario. For online banking, these middlemen include the browser, your OS, and the underlying communication network. You have developed a trust relationship with those components. Mint wants to be another middleman, and that's why they're developing a brand known for security and trustworthiness.