skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can also use Google Apps for your Domain to send emails. I even wrote a Rails plugin for doing just that:

http://github.com/openrain/action_mailer_tls

There may be an outgoing limit, but I've personally never encountered it.
1) We live in a plutocracy.

2) The Ivy League (along with the university system as a whole) is an important part of it.

If you accept these two things, and you're anything like me, this makes you angry. Ironically, if you asked someone who attends an Ivy, they'd probably tell you they're in favor of a classless society.
I hesitate to generalize from this, but it seemed to reach critical mass (and hockey stick like growth) when the first girl arrived.
C "macros" != Lisp macros.
US cuts off 'criminal' net firm
If you do go with Google Apps for your Domain, you can use the following script (in Ruby) to automatically configure the appropriate DNS entries on Slicehost:

http://github.com/postpostmodern/slicehost-dns/tree/master

Run it from the command line and it'll setup everything for you.
In the latest Ubuntu, mail setup is much easier. Might be worth checking out. It isn't fancy out of the box, but it might be good enough and you can iterate and extend later.

http://ubuntuserver.wordpress.com/2009/02/13/an-improved-mai...
Yale isn't nearly as bad as this guy claims. There're enough people who have plumbers as parents that it's easy enough to talk to anyone...
So is Warren Buffet. Both have very little to do with the web.
information visualization, visual analytic ... etc.

they are the HCI when done right, aesthetically and empirically; they will transform us into human cyborgs for the coming future
Lisp is more powerful than other languages because it has macros

It's a bit more complicated than that. The key idea is that programs are composed of lists. But that idea is tied to several others:

http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html
The Early Google Papers: Rajeev Motwani’s Contributions To Search
Public language changes are usually just trolling for the love of a community; it's like those public "converters" who go from one mainstream, often Abrahamic, religion to another.

The rest of us just rewrite the critical stuff in whatever that's the most efficient, and the non-critical stuff in whatever that's easiest.

Oh screw this! Guys, I just converted from Common Lisp to CSS! The cascade is like OOP inheritance, without the annoying CLOS multiple-inheritance and over-configurable multiple dispatch. It has keyword methods, :hover, :active, etc, I can even implement list processing with getElementById! Take that, you Lisp weenies!
It sounds like a losing proposition, but it isn't, necessarily. A record label can hook someone talented up with word-class producers, session musicians and recording facilities, as well as setting up collaborations with established artists.

Some people can produce a great song in their home studio, but many can't. Mariah Carey has a superb voice, for example, but as far as I know she doesn't play any instruments and her interest in technology is limited to playing video games. A 360 degree deal can be a good option for a performer armed with a decent manager. The teevee and the music industry likes to lump everyone together as 'artists' but the reality is that many excellent performers aren't especially creative and just happen to be lucky enough to do something well, without necessarily being driven to explore any new musical frontiers. for this kind a of person, a managed career makes vastly more financial sense because they don't have a big prospect of making money from licensing their own tunes.
List of WHO Essential Medicines (for developing economies)
Saturn deal is called a new business model
why downmod someone saying sad?

This circumstance and post is about someone passing which is sad.

Was it downmodded because it's just someone posting a quick expression of the circumstance and holds no value? It's a little snobbish here sometimes!
Rajeev Motwani memorial page
I know there have been a ton of topics about Rajeev lately, and I apologize for adding to it, but I thought people might want to leave comments on what seems to be a somewhat official memorial page.
Just to piggy bank onto your comment:

A start-up doesn't necessarily have to be a webapp or even in the technology space. I believe any new business that could disrupt the status quo in an industry to the benefit of customers could be called a startup. In it's early days, Dell was considered a startup because of its disruptive distribution system, not necessarily the technology.

I think the question should be more precise. What's an _internet_ startup and what's a webapp?
Wrong. According to the thread it's a kernel issue.
Maybe read your own links before spreading FUD?
You may want to re-read this notable post:

http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
The textbooks are also surrounded by bureaucracy and they sound like they were written by robots. Every emotion, opinion, or different view of an event is thrown out.

It's a good thing you've figured this out already, but boy is school going to be painful from now on. Everybody else is probably going to tell you otherwise, but perhaps you should consider a radical change in your education plans, especially if things just get worse. Maybe leaving in a couple of years and doing something more worthwhile, even if that just means going to college early. I know it sounds risky, and others reading this might even think I'm being irresponsible in telling you this. But I'd at least keep your options open.
This isn't a problem of the ivy leagues (or any college, the one I attend included). The problem is that society makes everyone think that they're the best at everything. Thinking "I couldn't possibly have anything to talk about with this 'common man'" is just an extension of this arrogance.

People don't unlearn to relate to people in good Colleges, they just never knew in the first place.

Edited to add: LOTS (if not most) of people at 'elite' Colleges know how to relate to 'average' people.
I'd say it depends on the person -- but if you want to withdraw from regular society, then you can.
You're welcome! And here I was half expecting chaos to ensue the next time I checked in :)
Either way, you have to make something people want. I'm reading Four Steps to the Epiphany now...hopefully it will successfully explain how to figure it out what it is that people want.
And next time we have a crash due to obvious human error, the question will be why we spend so much money on technology if it can't be used to save lives.

I'm not denying the observations made in the article - they could be well-founded, and such questions are worth exploring. At the same time, I can't help reading it partly as filler material, and partly as an excuse to bash Airbus (a fashionable choice in some parts of the media, because they're a state-funded enterprise and even worse, they're French).

I'm not carrying water for Airbus, they have had their share of problems. But it's rather unfair to point out that they also have a very good overall safety record. Of course, statistics are abstract whereas tragedies are very very personal.
Rajeev helped us out tremendously when we were starting out. Was going to touch base with him again soon, and was shocked to hear about this incident. Enormously sad.
Granted and point taken. "Evolved" is a subjective term in this context because no complex system ever "evolves" towards a goal, but rather the system changes over time due to the variations of the next generation that survive their current environmental variables.

There is still an interesting point to the article that speaks to how our current forms have been adapting over the last 10k years or so to agricultural civilization. We have experienced body and gene expression changes that allow us to better survive in our self-created environments, but we still have the legacy of our pre-agricultural survival adaptations that persist. The 4 impacted wisdom teeth in my head support that argument.
Postmodernism disrobed by Richard Dawkins
No by person. But most CS students either read the "automata book" or the "randomized algorithms". I enjoyed the books and respect him. I was hoping to be able to read his "approximation algorithms" when it is finished.

My emotion response to the news is "how come!". It is the same emotion response that I heard Daniel M. Lewin, founder Akamai, was on flight 11 in September 11, 2001.
The overwhelming consensus seems to be Google Apps. I did come across this whilst briefly looking into the problem. I will most likely go down this route, even though I am not afraid to setup and administer email, it is not my primary concern and would much rather offload that to a 3rd party.

thanks all!
I don't think he is saying sad because the guy died, he is saying sad, because his wikipedia page was non-existent until he died.
I can think of another reason why European explorers didn't see any maimed, weak, diseased or decrepit hunter-gatherers: they died.

Do I know if that's how it happened or not? No. But neither does the author.

Also, to say that "We are not de­signed for these (post-hunter-gatherer) foods" is to ignore any changes that may have occurred in the last 10 000 years or so.
Besides the lack of any reference to this supposed find, the author comes up with this gem:

"Ask any 10 year old boy if he could have any super power he wanted, chances are he would wish for super strength. I think it is ironic he would wish for ex actly that which we once were."

Or maybe this baseless assumption, along with the whole mentality behind this sort of thinking, comes from a very cultural glorification of some sort of physically strong "Uberman". Note how conveniently the grave also contained a female skeleton, giving us this supposedly perfect man-woman duo. And it's in Europe!
I don't think you know what he was writing about. High scalability was a language feature in this case.

Kernel doesn't provide an interface to send a message in an unified way to any of (decided during runtime) - local pid, local process name, process on another machine. Erlang VM does exactly that. Sure, you can implement everything yourself - along with process control, notifications, distributed database, live code reloading and put it inside kernel, but I doubt that's what you really want... Erlang provides all that stuff out of box using - yeah - unix system programming. If they spent more than a decade getting that right, why should anyone redo it from scratch?

His points:

- scalability (multi-master distributed database) - library feature

- fault tolerance (writing code as FSMs, ability to get information from remote nodes, notification about a node in a network going down) - language feature, not kernel

- load balancing (i.e. erlang's Distributed Named Process Groups) - language/library feature

You can of course deploy your own system of connection fault reporting, etc. But why do it, if erlang provides a node monitor and simply sends you a message when that node goes down?
Agreed. I mean faulty speed readings are obviously a critical problem.

But in infinity 9 cases it doesnt matter - there is an SOP to get round the issue and the plane makes it to the destination.

Similairly multiple electronics failure requiring manual control of the plane probably isnt definitely fatal to a flight (otherwise there would be much stricter faiilsafes, right? look at the eurofighter which has 7 failsafes for some of the core systems - because it phyiscally CANNOT be flown manually - astounding technology btw, but OT :D).

And planes fly through bad storms and are hit by lightening almost daily with no risk.

The combination of loss of auto-pilot in a storm at an altitude that required precision flying - followed by the failure of one of the most crucial instruments involved in that failsafe process is obvioulsy the fault of statistics rather than negligence. In all the airbus planes that have flown for it to happen once is probably highly unlikely - but that doesnt mean it never happens. I mean the chance of winning the lottery is next to nothing - and yet people do :)

(that said I think we can give the article a bit more credence than the one the other day stating it could have been a meteorite strike or something :D)
We don't live in a plutocracy - there is a lot of economic mobility in America today (more than almost anywhere else at any other time). I won't bore you with anecdotal evidence (although I have plenty) but simply consider that the majority of millionaires in the US are self-made, first-generation wealth.

On top of that, even if there was low economic mobility, that doesn't necessarily mean we aren't living in a meritocracy. A huge part of intellect is determined by genetics, and a huge part of wealth is determined by intellect. Simply put, it makes sense that, on average, richer people would have smarter babies than poor people. There's also the fact that well educated parents tend to instill values in their children that extol education, hard work, etc.
The Postmodernism Generator link in the article seems to be broken. Here is a working URL:

http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

Information about the generator can be found at the bottom of the generated page.
> On the same note, I'm also interested in hearing thoughts about hacking education by reducing the number of years we spend in school

I did this. I attended college at Simon's Rock, a school that accepts students after their second or third year of high school. There are a few other schools with similar programs. In addition, I took the max workload every semester and graduated from college in 3 years, resulting in me starting my PhD at the age of 20.

Still, I feel I could have cut off another 2 years from high school.
Self-referrential to the words themselves, or to the meaning of the words?
Why does it make you angry? That is: what do you suggest be done, in general terms, in order for you to be less angry.
If you are interested in this you may also want to check out

Blackbird visual console:: http://www.gscottolson.com/blackbirdjs/

a simple way to log messages in JavaScript and an attractive console to view and filter them
It should be noted that wisdom teeth are generally thought to have been used to chew on tough vegetation, and therefore has little to do with the high meat diet this article tells us we used to have.
This is another crackpot, pseudo-scientific, poorly referenced, neo-luddite revisionist mess of untested hypothesis and outright speculation which is sure to find it's way back to my email inbox one day after being forwarded from a second cousins best friend.
New Nintendo DS Game -- Create Any Object You Can Think Of
It's a valid idea. It would be nice to see some population figures and see if they are any lower than any other groups of people who lived under similar conditions.
It doesn't make me angry. I'm not an envious person.

I enjoy what I am doing with my own life. I am satisfied with me challenges and proud of my accomplishments.

Why should I begrudge the good fortune of others? The universe has blessed me abundantly.

I simply wasn't born with the personality needed for enjoying class-warfare rhetoric. I find it a big turn-off.
Being from a solidly middle class family (my mother is an elementary school teacher) puts me at the 10th or 15th percentile by family income at Harvard. The Ivies are indeed institutions mainly for the wealthy and the super-wealthy.

I'm not sure that most people you ask at Harvard would favor a "classless society". A distressingly large percentage of them want to go join a financial consulting firm or hedge fund and make as much money as they can right out of school.
What's new in arc3?
There is at least one college which attempts to beat the arrogance out of you (see don rag), St. John's College. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Johns_College,_U.S.)

At the end of sophomore year, the tutors at the college decide whether you belong there. Hubris is probably a strong reason for kicking out a student, though over two years humility is strengthened in most.
Most (if not all?) of these are from graphic designers. They have to be creative for their own resume to show some of their qualifications.

I wonder how a programmer could present their resume to show their qualifications. Do you have examples of more technical resumes that manage to show that?
I know I certainly wish I found a community like Hacker News in high school. Or even earlier in college. It is advice like this which others are afraid to tell you. Even if it is crappy advice, at least it is a unique perspective compared to the brainwashed masses.
Thanks, I just had a "duh" moment. I read the post you linked to before I posted my own. I'm not so smart today.
"History Lesson" by Arthur C. Clarke (http://web.math.hr/~veky/T/T1/historylesson.txt)
Of course, that same dude probably did that a dozen times and got less positive reactions. Being a leader means having the guts to get rejected. If you carry on after rejection because you are driven by your own joy and not social feedback, you may start a movement. Don't expect this to happen on your first try.
Why do you need this? Google will accept mail via authenticated and encrypted SMTP so you can use standard tools to send your mail.
Hominids have been around for millions of years. Agriculture started 10,000 years ago but it wasn't until millennia after that until most of the human race lived in civilizations. So really, the effects of civilization on our biological evolution is negligible compared to the effects of hunting and gathering, isn't it?

Evolution leaves a lot of cruft behind. It never refactors. Humans have fantastic pectoral muscles because we evolved from brachiating primates, for instance. It's no coincidence that human children hang from monkey bars or that we can stretch our arms far overhead and support ourselves hanging from them.
Politicians Building Huge Followings on Twitter
I couldn't live without iterate, a very intuitive, lispy, simple, mostly "backwards compatible" replacement for Common Lisp's clunky, unlispy, ugly loop iteration facility.

http://common-lisp.net/project/iterate/doc/index.html

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/06_a.h...

In a language without macros, I'd be stuck with loop and curse every time I need to write some non-trivial iteration code. But thanks to macros, I can use this wonderful iteration facility as a library, and have great integration with CL, just like if it was part of the language.
I don't think it's a terribly larger percentage than at any other college. The guys at the other colleges just regret that they don't have the leg up on such a plan that Harvard would give them.
Oh, come on, guys. Those who read www.thedailywtf.com are well aware that a logical statement can be:

a) true

b) false

c) file not found
Self-made millionaires doesn't imply "a lot of economic mobility." The sad fact is that a tiny tiny percentage of those who grow up in poverty are able to push out of it. Instead of blaming the lack of "values that extol hard work", take a look around at broken households, broken schools, broken neighborhoods: high crime, high unemployment, etc. etc. For every story of a self-made millionaire, you can easily find dozens more who were just as smart and hard working, but were fucked by circumstance. When you're poor, any minor problem becomes catastrophic—a sick relative, losing your job, whatever—and makes you start again from scratch. Someone working two menial jobs straight out of high school to pay the rent month-to-month simply does not have the same economic opportunity as someone from an upper-middle-class family, who can go to college and grad school, etc.

> huge part of wealth is determined by intellect.

Ignoring the huge problems inherent in this idea of "intellect" as some quantifiable quality, this isn't close to true. Parent education and income is by far the biggest predictor of future success.

> richer people would have smarter babies than poor people.

Let's see your evidence, please.
I agree that there's a lot of economic mobility in America today compared to some other places and other times. I also agree that a huge part of intellect is determined by genetics, and a huge part of wealth is determined by intellect.

However, none of this means we don't live in a plutocracy.

Think about the people who exercise political power. Think of how so many people have made their money not through peaceful, economic activity, but through political activity, whether it takes the form of benefiting from direct subsidies, rent-seeking, central banking, corporatism, tax favoritism, licensing laws, or credentialism.

Hard as it is to accept, the word I chose was warranted.
I wish there was a neat way to keep all game-related code in a more approachable language than Erlang. It would be great to have the difficult bits of the server in Erlang, with the relatively simple game code being maintained in e.g. Java by programmers that don't need to be experts.
Could be. But a few years ago, 40% of the graduating class got jobs in finance. I find that a sickening indictment of our whole society and its priorities.
Same. For Slicehost this is pretty much a given ... why waste your resources on processing and storing email when you can offload it to google?
Great post Danielle, really enjoyed the read. I've been 2 years ahead since grade school, and a lot of your points hit home.
A distressingly large percentage of them want to go join a financial consulting firm or hedge fund and make as much money as they can right out of school.

Oh, I absolutely agree. But ask them directly and quite a few of them will still tell you, with a straight face, that they want a classless society.
"* sin, cos, tan, and log are finally available.

* lines splits a string into lines."

Are we supposed to think Arc is a pragmatic language for shipping production applications when the most fundamental parts of the standard library like that are still being added?
Leo Laporte loses it with Mike Arrington on the Gillmor Gang
There is a big difference between these two scenarios:

1) One group of people becomes enormously rich through some peaceful, economic means, while another group remains relatively poor.

2) One group of people uses oppressive political power to become rich, at the expense of another group, which remains poor.

My problem is with #2. If we were talking about #1, I'd be right there with you complaining about class warfare rhetoric.
We actually send mail through Google Apps and our rails help ticket system. Just got hit with a sending quota the other day. Didn't get a number, just that we sent too many.
Yet for some reason, the great majority of the world's network applications do fine without Erlang VM.

[Edit: keep in mind that his application was a poker game server when you re-read that article. "Even" in 2005, the technology to do that was available, without Erlang.]

I have more to say about this but I am afraid I will end up spending the rest of the day proving someone "wrong".

http://xkcd.com/386/