skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The flag option suffices. The curators here do a good job of looking at all flagged submissions for whatever problem they present. You may not have heard that a submission that is flagged a defined number of times by users with power to flag will be autokilled, removing it from view of users who don't have "showdead" turned on.
If nothing else, anti-trust concerns could be enough to put a damper on things.

Then, there's a host of liability concerns ("Microsoft said it was okay").

That said, I think there is, and has been, plenty of room for improving application management in the Windows space.

One of the things that I appreciate about Ubuntu/CentOS is that I don't have to look for apps, nor even worry if I'm getting the correct version (usually :) ) I just select it, wait, and then start using it.

Windows really needs this kind of simplicity. It's too big a chunk of work for me to pull off (negotiating with Redmond would be an effort, all by itself), but coming up with a Windows "distribution" would be really cool. Something reasonably well-tested, with a means of easily selecting and installing apps which have also been tested.

(Edited to fix an incomplete sentence)
Integrating offline advertising into your marketing efforts
Yeah I did the same thing with my really old account, and just last week made a new account…
Cold air intake
If you are a car tuning lover, then you must check this website with his pictures and tuning guide. Carstyling, bodykits, suspension and engine tuning and much
more
++ for OpenGL bindings. OpenGL is one of the more expressive and creative tools someone can use while programming for fun.
My experience is that not every PhD obtained one to become a teacher. In fact, most of them teach due to the requirements of the university (during their almost-PhD years), as opposed to any burning desire to shape the next generation.
I believe the phrase he used was "materially correct". Which it was. User data that originated at last.fm was given to the RIAA. It's hard to say the original story was flat wrong.
How to be a Hacker (The Nigerian Way)
Wrong on a technicality, but not wrong enough. last.fm may not have directly handed anything over, but they unintentionally collaborated in handing it over, and then (I consider this the key point) they attempted to deny that the handover happened.
"I stopped doing black hat, because it backfired, I’ve seen spam everywhere I went in the net. Often I stumbled into my own sites, when searching for something. That bothered me a lot!"

Nice try, but somehow, I don't believe you. This just sounds like a new pitch.
Examples of classes I should not have had to take:

- Kinesiology (fancy term for "PE" and/or "Health"): they had their chance in high school. By college, most people know whether they're going to be "physical" or not. I had to take FOUR of these, each for only 1 hour of credit

- "Multi cultural studies": politically correct indoctrination course. By my observation, usually had the reverse effect of what was intended

- Political Science I & II: Just replace with a poli sci survey course. Interested students could take more as elective or major in it

- Economics and Accounting: Both of these classes are incredibly theoretical, dry, and boring - unless you happen to like the subjects, in which case you're probably majoring or minoring in them. Replace with ONE course about how not to screw up your personal financial life, since they can't be bothered to teach that in high school

- Physics I & II: I don't need two full semesters of physics. Again, just give me a survey course (that's all I'll remember anyway). The interested students can go on to learn more

- History I & II: We know, there's a lot of history to cover, but a whirlwind course would probably hold students' attentions more than two whole semesters

Oh, and, for Computer Scientists:

- The vast majority of people in computer science departments want to be programmers, NOT computer scientists. I recommend splitting this major into computer science and software engineering. Computer Science would be in the department of science and software engineering would be in the department of engineering. For software engineering students, I would collapse most of the computer science curriculum into one or two survey courses and use the rest of the time to teach solid, modern, software engineering concepts (configuration management, working in a team, requirements gathering, design patterns, methodologies, real-world programming, etc...)
There are over 4000 colleges and universities in the U.S, ranging from low cost community colleges to very expensive private schools. That's a lot of options for people looking for an education. New schools are still started, although not as often as before, and they are usually public schools. Still, to claim that the college market is uncompetitive makes no sense.
When I was in high school and college I worked for a local construction supply company unloading railroad cars of bulk and bagged stone 'by hand.' It was back breaking work to put it lightly.

But it contributed to my education in more ways than one.

Last summer I was asked by the same company to consult, advise and implement a complete conversion of their accounting and information management systems. I did and it went well. They paid me more for that work than I ever made working in the yard.

As much as I like working with my hands, I'd rather get paid for using my mind than for using my back.
Hi. My experience lies in Ruby and in JavaScript (these days) so I can see these worlds however close, differently. In Ruby I have all kinds of gimmicks that help with cutting the chase when that's what I want, but I also can make it a little harder when I am interested in something else, in experimenting with some other approach.

What I find a little disgusting is when my "meta-programming" in Ruby starts doing things like when an exception occurs, it points to a line number slightly different than where it really is, or when the backtrace becomes all the more "hacked" with harder to understand things thrown in there. It serves to remind us that there are tradeoffs involved. Also there is the issue creating shareable modules and when you start hacking it away it can make it all the more harder to share. But it's more than fun, it does work, it's just that one can have mixed feelings because for ever cool finding or development, there can exist a little nuisance as well or something that you cannot quite do anymore because you deviated from mainstream...

I gotta go have lunch!

Be well.
Pros and Cons to Single Sign In
If it aint broke...

Honestly I think that's something to consider in the event of a decrease in quality. The current system is working fine at the moment.
Educational institutions aren't exactly the same as businesses. For instance, how many teenagers actually WANT to attend high school? Looking back I can honestly say I learned some important things in high school (but then again, I took every AP class available to me and then some).

Colleges and universities have an interesting niche to fill. A broad-based liberal arts education isn't just a tradition - it's actually a useful tool that can help with whatever your main task is in life. I am a computer scientist by trade and by degree. My degree taught me very little I wasn't already aware of as far as computer science is concerned. The most mind blowing thing was learning Scheme, which led me to learn CL, and start looking at other functional languages. However, my degree also taught me about art (very important for a CS person IMHO), literature, history, philosophy, biology, mathematics, physics, and more... I have hobbies outside of CS mostly because of my degree. Most importantly, I can draw inspiration from other disciplines, because I understand the basics of many disciplines.

Too many people expect colleges to provide only directly relevant instructional material. This is not what college is for. If you only want to learn a specific trade, go to trade school. College isn't going to get you a job, it isn't going to feel immediately useful, especially when you are young. I had the advantage of slowly getting a degree over 8 years while working full time. It was hard, and the first few years I whined like everyone else - but then I started to see how becoming more intellectual gave me a leg up in business and in CS.

Colleges don't give the students what they want, because most of them haven't a clue what they want or need to prosper in the long term. College isn't job training.
Forceful "PE" is pretty stupid, a person must come to the decision to work out on their own.
I use it to show that no language is selected and avoid boring error messages.
But may be I will add Klingon some day...
What we need is an adblockplus for black hat sites.
Do you mean that when I click "go", the wordoid-generating algorithm is kicked off during the request cycle? Have you considered generating the wordoids asynchronously (offline) and keeping an index of them and their metadata?
There were a lot of discussions in shareware community about Windows Marketplace, and how it would push every non-Digital River/eSellerate (they were payment providers in Marketplace) registration service out of business back in the days when Vista was known as Longhorn. People were preparing for crazy code signing "Design for Windows"-like schemes, because it seemed like Marketplace would be as big as AppStore today.

Well, Windows Marketplace failed. (I think there's still an icon for it in Windows Start menu?)
Am I the only person who actually wants a full and balanced education? I got enough advanced placement credit in high school to graduate with my CS degree in three years without any extra work, but I'm taking graduate courses and studying English instead. College isn't just vocational training, it's where you develop your interests and learn how to think. Honestly if all you want to do is learn how to hack well, you're better off not going to college at all.

I agree, at the end of the day Universities are businesses. But don't use that as an excuse to be lazy about your education. If you are proactive and motivated, you can get your money's worth out of your school.

The anti-college bias in the hacker community is really unfortunate, and ultimately it stems from a misunderstanding of what type of animal college actually is. I certainly agree that there are many talented people who do not need to go to or complete college. However there seems to be an assumption that it is the responsibly your college to stimulate your hacker ingenuity. Maybe that flew in your gifted classes in high school, but college is much more like the real world. In college it's your job to find your niche where you are intellectually simulated.

EDIT: And as for the complaining about general education requirements, you need to take a look at University of Chicago. They have the strictest general education requirements out of any college and it seems to work for them. On the other hand, if you really are against general education requirements, you should have picked your college better. A college like Amherst, for example, has zero graduation requirements (besides a raw number of hours). In any case, there is always a way to work the system. Find online courses that transfer and take them. Take a class at your local community college one night a week over the summer. And so on... At the very worst, accept the fact that your technical GPA probably needs padding anyway, and use GenEds to boost your GPA so you can get interviews.
Does RentACoder.com Work?
Disclaimer: most of what I'm about to say is second hand info. I'm a research postdoc, so teaching matters very little to me (all I need to do is show up). However, I know several people who did go through this process.

Current method: student evaluation. Treat it as a roughly equal mix of easiness, sympathy (1), clarity and charisma.

The best method would be to measure outcomes on standardized exams. However, in all cases I've seen, the teacher doesn't affect this very much. Very few places do this.

In practice, most teaching colleges hire mainly based on personal connections or random chance (whoever applied at the right time). So I didn't mean to imply that new entrants into the college market could do a good job of hiring teachers. Basically, they can do just as good a job as anyone else.

(1) Fun fact: my teaching evaluations went down about 40% after I stopped acting sympathetic and started writing my own tests.

"Sorry the test is so hard, I didn't write it. I'll try to help you pass it and see what I can do about a curve." -> good evaluations.

"Stop whining, i'll curve it if it's too hard. And yes, I do expect you to understand the concepts rather than just do mindless calculations." -> bad evaluations.

I could probably try harder to game the system, but I don't really want an academic job anymore.
How Facebook, MySpace and YouTube Killed eBay
I agree in a sane conversation, but it just seems like the sort of thing that TC would jump all over.
I thought upvoting should be that way: one upvotes submissions one deems interesting to the HN community as a whole - not to pick sites on an argument. Did I miss something?
to claim that the college market is uncompetitive makes no sense.

You've convinced me that to claim that the college market doesn't have a lot of participants makes no sense. But I don't think anyone was making that claim here. What would be good evidence that a college that wants to do something new and different (e.g., offer a three-year accredited degree at lower cost than a four-year degree) is in a strong competitive position in the current market? How do colleges compete one against another?
I was linked to a ripoff site today and it took me a couple of minutes to locate the original article - they didn't provide a backlink. I emailed them of course, but they clearly know and do this on purpose. Makes me sad.

We get a lot of people syndicating our blogs' content and have to get AOL legal to serve them with notices to take it down - that works, but not everyone has such resources at their disposal.
A subtle distinction, but I don't think it's "a misunderstanding of what type of animal college actually is," but rather a misunderstanding of what type of animal college could be. The onus is upon the student to ensure he fits his school, and vice versa.
I think the idea is giving people the opportunity to work out, even a bit of a nudge, might set them on the right track. It could, for example, be a 20-minute jog and then trying out a different sport every "class."
Economics and Accounting: Both of these classes are incredibly theoretical, dry, and boring

I'm surprised you encountered an economics course that wasn't interesting. I find economics endlessly fascinating, and have asked here on HN

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=415683

for recommendations about things to read on economics.
This problem is related to DRM. There is no way to stop people from making copies.
Apple hasn't cut out the middle-man so much as replacing him by ... Apple itself. They have become the super middle-man, not just for marketing but for distribution and conflict resolution and what have you.
That's an excellent point, and very true. College is a very fluid and malleable experience. I think it's my belief that people (including myself initially) often overestimate the responsibly of the school, or ignore their own responsibility. I didn't really address the responsibility of the school though, which should not be ignored completely.
I really wish this was available in Australia. All the alternatives are too messy and clunky, or don't hook into my bank easily.
One quite important factor that is easy to overlook is that a very significant number of people on the .eu side will not only do this 3-or-so-year bachelor's/licenciate/candidate degree, but also the additional 2-3 year master's degree. In many fields of study, Master's is the standard target, including the lower degree.
Or washing up and cleaning.
Yup, pretty much; if you have more than one vdev in a pool (mirror, RAIDZ, whatever), ZFS will stripe over them, varying what goes where depending on how fast it thinks they are.

I've heard reports of ZFS doing things like putting more data on one vdev because the disks underlying it had 16MB of cache and those in the other vdev only had 8MB; bit fancier than what you normally associate with RAID10.
Lots of conjectures flying around here with or without basis.

This site says they will have one:

http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/news/show/91276/steve-ballme...
Fingernails on Blackboard - Possible Explanation
How is Apple cutting the middle-man out? They are the middle-man!

And, Apple's strategy is also about a tight-knit contract with an OEM--itself. That's about as tightly-knit as it gets.
Bah, Tech Crunch did something I'm actually proud of.
The Disruption Talk
Oh and to post some actual code...

Definitely not _the_ most beautiful code I've written, but I still enjoy this little function for some reason. It's just pretty to me.

function addparams(query) {
return query.replace(/(&?)([^&=]+)=([^&]*)/g, function(m, amper, key, id) {
var val = document.getElementById(id).value;
return val.length > 0 ? amper + key + "=" + escape(val) : '';
});
}

All it does is take a query string template of sorts, grab the values to plug in, and then return an actual query string. For instance, if you had this on your page somewhere:

<input type="text" id="first" value="defaultfirst"/>
<input type="text" id="last" value="defaultlast"/>

Then we used it when doing some kind of ajax update. Assuming jQuery, (although that wasn't the case) something like this:

$.ajax({
url: "/path/to/page",
data: addparams("fn=first&ln=last")
});

Which would make an xhr GET request to:

/path/to/page?fn=defaultfirst&ln=defaultlast

Nothing remotely complicated or amazing like the regex that finds prime numbers or the 12 line quicksort, but I just think the function is aesthetically pleasing.
'you' can downvote submissions, but You (&I) cannot.

If I recall, there is a certain user point threshold over which downvoting is enabled.
Firing it's founders out of a large cannon into the sun gets my vote, in a hypothetical sense.
The Richest Man (or Woman) in Town (slideshow)
How long until Yodlee pulls the plug on Mint? They provide Mint's account aggregation technology and now are shooting to be a competitor. Hmm...
Things I Think PG Monitors, But Probably Doesn't  
Just to be clear, PG probably doesn't monitor these things because it would be a little underhanded. At the same time, these metrics might be useful in some way when deciding whether to fund a person or not.

1.) noprocrast habits -- whether a user uses it, how long they set it for, and whether they used to override often when that option was available.

2.) The user's upvote/downvote ratio on his own comments.

3.) Most visited sites, by monitoring clicked links.

4.) Most upvoted user(s).
As far as I can see, few of these services are available outside of America. The only available service I know that downloads data from your online bank account is Yodlee (which Mint uses as a data provider). I haven't used Egg Money Manager, but I believe that has a windows only client that downloads your transactions on your own computer. Does anybody know what precisely is holding back these services from launching worldwide? I'd imagine they'd want to get a foothold in Europe as quickly as possible before somebody beats them to it. Is there a regulatory problem with providing this service?
Nostalgia is a basic human emotion
I don't think it's a technical issue, and we shouldn't take it into consideration. AIR/Flash vs. Silverlight is a lot like HD-DVD vs. BluRay, that is money.

Microsoft and Adobe make contracts with large content vendors such as New York Times to push their technology. This has nothing to do with technology by itself.
Yes, I have to second this. Almost 50% of adults diagnosed with ADD have a substance abuse problem by the time they get help for it, and something like 30% have major depressive disorder.

If you don't get actual medical help, there's a very good chance you will slip into either self-medication or major depression or both in the long run. Been there, done that, lost years of my life in the process. Learn from my life, please.
Well as the saying goes, there's three sides to every story. Yours, Mine and the truth

So just because you know someone involved in some stories, doesn't necessarily mean you're getting the whole truth either.

Arrington can grate me a lot of the time, some of his stories are overblown, a lot can be fairly interesting and he knows when to eat humble pie as required.

You may not like the man, but he writes what people want and he hits home runs more often than he strikes out.
You are somewhat right, but there are two faces in Apple being the super middle-man:
1) the good fact that it is "fair". The underdogs leave to them the same amount of money of the big brasses (30%). Any application starts the same, and you don't need special marketing effort to start up. At least, not the same effort you should have to start from scratch. You can use your time to have a better application, not to market it better. And I REALLY like this one.
2) the fact that they have the "last word" on what goes into the AppStore definitely stinks. No need to add to this. I can understand how this happens, but it stinks.

The fact is that me (and many thousand other) still prefer the reason (1) to the reason (2) and this is the success of AppStore.

Returning to "why Microsoft don't have it": because they don't need the indie developer and they will not upset the bigger brands to help a new market develops.
The competitor of Apple in the mobile space are trying to start their store (Nokia, RIM)... if Apple can start the AppStore for OS X (and it have the same success, things I don't know if possible), we will, probably, see the Microsoft Store for Windows... otherwise I don't think so...
Economist Cartoon: "Cyber Security" [pic]
All guilds, and physicians are a guild, hate anything that breaks the mystique.

Home schooling empirically works with non-professional instructors. Teach For America will take any warm body with a college degree and subject students to their care for a few years, without negative results. Private schools routinely outperform public schools, even with similar student pools.

But still, the guild controls education with an iron fist, because if you let non-guild teachers teach, then there will be total anarchy. Or if you paid guild teachers based on skill rather than age -- because, after all, the guild warrants that all guild members with ten years of continuous service at one guildhouse are exactly equivalent in skill in every way.
You sort of have a point, but it's not just about the top. Ending up with bad design (be it websites, airplanes, processes, packaging, whatever...) requires the complicity of and/or lack of political aptitude by the folks at the lower levels, "in the trenches" so to speak.

One can achieve good design even when the warring factions of management above you can't make it a priority. But it is much more difficult in such an organization, because you must often personally get buy-in from a diverse set of teams and then walk the line with management just right -- pull it off in a way that makes them all look brilliant without stepping on any toes. It can be done but it takes perseverance and political aptitude beyond what most big company employees are willing to commit to their jobs.
I'm interested in the author's perspective, but this piece seemed to end quite abruptly and failed to go into much detail about what the author believes happened to eBay. He states "In a futile effort to compete with Amazon and Google, eBay leadership essentially stripped whatever remaining fun existed out of its marketplace." - does anybody know what changes were made to remove the 'fun' out of the marketplace?