skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The reason for emphasis on education in India is because for most families getting their children educated and a job is the least risk way to have a better life style. The author seems to conveniently forget that most Indian family cannot afford a computer, let alone one with internet. Even if their parent make it available to their children, that would have cost an arm and leg for them. The risk of not going to college and getting into business is something they cannot afford, because a failure in this case would follow them till death. The author seems to be of the view that others are narrow minded, while he himself is not able to see beyond his situation. Congrats for succeeding without a college degree, but do not go about belittling others (especially his teachers!), for they know the ground realities better. As kamaal said using the money from job to bootstrap is the best way for many youngsters from my generation at least.
This is the 'write everything in assembly' argument.

Productivity and prototyping gains that allow you to proof of concept, manufacture and sell small runs of (expensive) toys, enables large scale investment to manufacture more mature products.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with this approach, and, honestly, the 'big bang' approach of writing it all in C and producing 500,000 units before actually getting them out to anyone is extremely risky.

That's why hardware doesn't get investment.

Just look at kickstarter; great ideas popping up, people wanting them, people getting them.

If you only ever end up making 5000 units for your 5000 backers, so what? Great idea. Prototyped a thing. People who wanted one got one. Not a mass market thing? Ok. We're not not $4,000,000 in debt.

How terrible.
Yeah, I was joking. UTF-32 is a waste of 11 perfectly good bits[1], so you could just as well write each code point as 21 bits (0o0000000–0o7777777), and call it UTF-21. 24 bits (3 × 0x00–0x7F) would be fine too, but 21 is the smallest possible fixed-width Unicode encoding.

[1]: https://github.com/evincarofautumn/protodata
What's wrong with Betfair?
> For a lower middle class person such a failure means, the end of life. Full Stop! Because the debts will drown you till you reach your grave.

Debts? Does India not have limited-liability corporations? In rational countries, when your business idea fails, you just throw away the company and start another.
This Kid Cried When He Know Apple Upgrade iOS6
This video look so funny and so cool.. should be what it.. personally i can see this kid so cool..
Yale Professor: Fukushima will "threaten humanity for thousands of years"
http://memecrunch.com/image/51c88a54afa96f4d20000001.jpg
When you have a full time job and a family there is no other option. My progress is slow and painful. By the time I've found my place in documentation/text, found where I was stuck and then searched solution to a problem, I'm lucky if I get a few lines down. I'm miles ahead if where I was, and thousands of miles from where I want to be. If I had several more hours in a day it would be great. I trade sleep for code time occasionally, but if I do it too often health or job suffer.
Either one wants weak typing or strong typing, but one cannot have both. "most other traditional scripting languages" consists of Perl and PHP (not even (ba)sh/test, to which == is string comparison whereas -eq is integer comparison), while languages typically used on the backend together with JS/CS include Python, Ruby, Java, C#, and whatnot, none of which have such an error-prone feature.

> What did we win by losing an operator? Why obfuscate?

Type safety, and resistance against both bona fide errors and clueless developers. Sane defaults matter.
...Agencies go on their ‘use it or lose it’ shopping sprees
Whenever I see the "worse is better" meme, I know I'm in store for a criticism of some engineering decisions or other by someone who doesn't understand the decision criteria. (And often, someone who was pushing an alternate solution that failed because of this lack of understanding.) Engineering is more than just implementing theoretical work. It's about making tradeoffs in the real world.
Everyone is talking about the Internet of Things. I wonder when we're going to start talking about firewalls harm the Internet by breaking end-to-end connectivity.
Speaking as Pakistani in his early twenties, I can confirm that I get asked many of the same questions. I have a B.S. in Computer Science right now, but frequently get asked "When are you getting your MBA?" by family members. I hate how the question always implies that I will undoubtedly be pursuing one.
There's a government website that does this in the UK. immobilise.com.

If there isn't something like this in the US then it's a great idea but I'm reluctant to believe that a commercial venture is the best way to build it.
what I do is plan my personal tasks in Clear (without a due date) and Brightpod (http://www.brightpod.com). Luckily, Brightpod has a pretty powerful calendar that helps me plan my tasks on a weekly basis.
This is more a question of address space. If I have 1 bit, I can address 2 things (0, 1). If I have 2 bits, I can address 4 things (00, 01, 10, 11). With 2 bits, you can also address 3 things, but then you are wasting precious bits, so it makes sense to try to fill up the address space available. Basically everything inside a computer is based in binary and is therefore held to some relationship with powers of 2. The way these addresses work in hardware is basically to go into a massive decoder that lights up the right bit and makes that bit available. If you don't use all your bits, you are basically wasting available logic circuitry. In most DRAM (which is what you think of usually talking about RAM), the capacitor is not the expensive part, the control circuits are, so if you waste control circuits, you are not making the best performance/cost proposition.
> I believe it said Roosevelt was advised against the wiretapping but went ahead with it anyway.

That case (wiretapping, advice against from Attorney General Robert Jackson) is different from the one tokenadult is referring to (intercepting telegrams, advice in favor from Assistant Solicitor General Charles Fahy).
Indian here but on the other side of this. Got MS, MBA, and currently thinking about Doctorate. May or may-not do a startup.
I just label my fields appropriately, and put a "skip to form" link (like a "skip to content" link). Other options exist like using media detection, or JavaScript (very few bots run JavaScript on pages. It slows down the process, and requires more smarts than a generic html parser)

No negative captcha will stand up to a targeted attack, but if you're not running a huge site, targeted attacks are very unlikely.
Total physical ram of the machine, ram modules or ram allocated by the software?

The first is not always power of two - a machine with 6GB of ram works just fine, the third - it is more convenient to allocate power of 2 sized blocks of ram because this makes the allocation algorithms faster.

The second - not sure but I suppose it is more convenient - while there may not be reasons while you cannot have 1023 Mbit block it makes no sense because everything else is based on the power of 2 in computers anyway.
The Texas Instruments CC3000 contains an embedded IPv4 stack, with no support for IPv6:

http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/cc3000.pdf

If you're trying to build the Internet of Everything with 40 billion devices, you're using the wrong equipment.
The obsolete stuff I studied at university almost 20 years ago:

Network and hierarchical (now called "NoSQL") DBs, the problems they caused and why they were replaced with Relational DBs.

Functional programming with a derivative of Haskell called Gofer

Parallel and distributed computing techniques (including stuff like SIMD, Message queues, Event driven programming). Wrote some Erlang.
Your "wenxun" account is not currently banned in any manner I can see, nor can I see any indication the thread was taken down.

If it was taken down at some point, it was corrected soon after. (I only know there are many mods, and not who they are...other than pg.)
OT: Isn't it sexcopter or what is the proper name?
To me the big story here is that Tessel apparently has a working JS->Lua-bytecode compiler.

Lua has by far the smallest, most portable, easy-to-integrate runtime of any embeddable language I am aware of. JavaScript has good implementations (V8, etc) but they are orders of magnitude larger, more complex, and imposing if you're linking them into your binary.

If this is truly a robust JS implementation, this means that there is now a tiny, easy-to-embed implementation of the programming language that powers the web. This could enable JavaScript to start making inroads in the "embedded language" space, and really become the language of both client and server.

If it can compile to LuaJIT bytecode also, it could also possibly be competitive in speed with other JS implementations, though some of that would depend on how efficient the resulting bytecode can be.

I think this would actually be a cool trend. Having a code-base that can run either in the browser or "natively" is a powerful approach. Though Lua is a cleaner language, JavaScript is a totally decent language if you use it right -- much better than a lot of people give it credit for. Hint: if you think JS sucks because of browser incompatibilities, what you really hate is bad implementations of the language, not the language itself.

Of course another approach to achieve "one language" would be to have a Lua->JS compiler (or Lua->asm.js, or a Lua interpreter in asm.js). But Lua the language is a bit more of a moving target; to preserve cleanliness and orthogonality they sometimes break the language in non-backward-compatible ways.
I fail to see why it's more reasonable to prefer "long long" to "int64_t" just because the former existed for longer. It's not year 2000 today and C99's not a hot new thing not many compilers support. Or OpenBSD do have some policy that their kernel must be able to build with any C89-compliant compiler?
Being in the hardware business myself, I can only laud their attempt of simplifying and easing access. However their approach only solves a basic problem that already has been solved for quite a while (access, look at the likes of arduino, contiki os, rasperrypi). The much much harder and real problem is developing a coherent system for 'everything'/'the internet of things'. and others, particularly contiki, are much more advanced when it comes to knowledge, development state and commercialisation.
So in short: I want to see product before I am impressed. Other than that I see little novelty and a bad choice of programming language for embedded dev..
that's a real good list of events.
very few of my friends actively use twitter, it feels like there was a six month window there when many of them did, then instagram came onto the scene. It kind of felt like both services became mainstream (my friend base) at about the same time.
That meme "Javascript is basically Scheme with a C based syntax" has been refuted so many times it's not even funny. Does it have a metacircular evaluator? Is it homoiconic? Does it have macros? Seriously, read SICP or some other Lisp book. You have no idea what you are talking about.
How  To Make $1000 Per Month In College
MiniSat in your browser
Do these links work with the Baidu spiders?

Baidu doesn't seem to understand that an href to a mailto: is in an email not html namespace!
But why not use Lua itself then? It is a very elegant, beautifully consistent language. In a way, it is JavaScript Done Right.
Latest Trends and Demands in iPad App Development
If it has been tied to hangouts then it has been tied to g+ and their ridiculous policies, I hardly class it as a good alternative.
you have clearly never lived in india. you absolutely need a college degree to be even considered for most decent jobs.
The idea of a "computer security undergrad degree" is pretty silly; I'd expect it of a 2-year for-profit school like DeVry or maybe University of Phoenix, not a real 4-year school.

It's great to have some courses in various parts of computer security, but being a good developer is a better entre into appsec, and being a good CSE and thus going into networking (ideally, through a combination of vendor training and hands-on; it's more an ops thing than a pure architecture thing) is a better way into netsec. EE for hardware security. etc.

I don't actually know of any non-crappy schools with a "security degree".
Earthquake & Tsunami alert - Kermadec Islands New Zealand
Here's the talk:
http://www.haskellcast.com/episode/002-don-stewart-on-real-w...
I see college as a learning place. A place where you learn about everything but study topics. College is the place where I met my co-founder.

It is really a great place where you can meet new talented people, learn how to work in a team. Its a place where you can have fights, fall and learn again.

It is the place where you learn to present your Idea by presenting it among your friends first. They can help if you lack something. This kind of things are usually not very easy in the outside world. Because the outside world is busy competing with you.

You meet so many types of people that you learn to categories the people. What kind of people are A Grade and what kind are B grade. This helps you to when you will start hiring.

You say going to college is not worth it. Well another big problem with our thinking is that we think that college is just to learn the "courses". Well its not. Its a lot more than that. I am also a student in one of the most reputable colleges in India, but the way I think, learning is just a state of mind, place doesn't matter. I myself use to think that i have wasted my 4 years learning computer science, that I could have learnt all this in just a year and a half, but today as I am trying to build my startup, I understand that this all connect dots. Even I am not interested in grades at all, but i never stop working on my startup.

So, As I see it, college is like a big sand ground, where you can fall, again and again, and learn to fight. And all this without hurting yourself.
7Bit Hero and The Future of Music
I addressed this in my last paragraph. Lua is a nice language (and I use it myself) but it has downsides too. Noticeably it is a moving target that breaks backward compatibility. And I'm not sure what the state of the art is in terms of running Lua in the browser.
> The problem seems to be that if an insurance company is funding the defense then they have the same incentive to pay a settlement rather than fight that anyone else does

Unless more than one client of the insurance company might be on the hook for the patent. In which case, they'd simply have to figure out if it was worthwhile to fund one lawsuit to the end, in order to see if they could save money for the other client's policies.

Lets say that settling will cost $50,000 and taking the case to trial will cost $200,000 w/ a high likelihood of success. For a single company, the calculation is simple - settle, it's cheaper. But, if an insurance company is behind 5 companies that all might be sued for infringement, then it would make sense to fight at least one of the suits in order to try to save the settlement fees from the other four.
If it needs a constant supply of bigger idiots to keep growing...well, one needs a lot of capital coming in to provide the illusion of success. Investors are piling on because they see these amazing numbers from a shoe store and believe this company has found a new way to sucker people out of their money. And, they have...but, only new people who don't realize it's a scam. So, they need a ton of money to keep reaching new people.

Their investor, in a comment in a prior thread here at HN, claimed JustFab could offer such amazing deals(!) by foregoing advertising and new customer acquisition costs. But, I bet that's a tremendous lie. I bet they have to spend vastly more on marketing than most shoe stores, because they have to trick an ever growing pool of people into signing on for their bullshit VIP service or their growth will halt. Much like Groupon has tremendous customer acquisition costs, and a very high touch sales channel, JustFab is gonna have to figure out how to keep the funnel working, because old customers aren't going to be a thing they get to have.

I would give good odds on the following:

1. Their customer retention numbers are misrepresented. Probably not blatantly false, but certainly misleading by omission. Their funnel is so misleading as to make it impossible they are actually making people happy with their subscription service.

2. Their profit numbers required juggling of expenses to make it look good. As with Groupon, they're probably trying to pass off ongoing marketing expenses as one-time expenses. This would be a lie. But, it would not be the first time a venture-backed company lied.

3. Their investors are expecting a bigger fool to come along to relieve them of their stake long before the house of cards comes crashing down. They are probably right. It will probably be big, dumb, and slow money that is trying to look smart and agile. Unfortunately, big, dumb, and slow money is often money that most effects less wealthy folks.

Needless to say, I am not impressed with this company, its tactics, or its investors. It is a toxic culture that accepts this kind of shady dealings as "business as usual". This kind of thing shouldn't keep popping up every few months...investors should be ashamed of themselves for taking part in this. If the world were sane and just, they'd all lose their money, and a bit of their credibility. But, the world is not always sane or just. They'll probably make out like the bandits they are, just as the early investors in and founders of Groupon made a killing (while the last round of investors lost a fortune). Dishonesty pays off if the lie is big enough, it seems.
Hey, this is just one of the necessary steps towards Marvin the Paranoid Android, or perhaps the sentient door...
Buy the metal guy some headphones, and schedule scrum meetings at 1:30pm. Easy!
Both actually - that the practice is a scam and unethical, and that consumer protection actually counts for something in Germany.
He predicted eBook DRM in the 90s:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
This might be the end of startup bubble. Not that I'm a prophet but vc starting to take part in openly scam sites and dodgy business means something. From business point of view founder is a genius he made a business that is dodgy got ~80 million and dispersed responsibility. So he will never get into trouble.
Two comments:

1) I'm guessing (by reading between the lines) that you also haven't "been on the job market", and haven't been plausibly tempted to "jump ship" to any language-purist position?

2) <cynical mode> Just because you haven't set up LinkedIn/FaceBook/Google+ profiles yourself, that doesn't mean they don't all have "shadow profiles" for you based of the social-graphs they've got where your colleagues/friends have "leaked" information about your existence to them and enabled them to infer skills/abilities from them… I don't _know_ that they sell data from "shadow profiles" to recruiters, but I do suspect there's enough money in tech recruitment to make it likely…
Oh yeah, Corkscrew! I used that many times! :)
This is really the meat of the issue. Nothing short of actually working alongside a person for a week or two will tell you what it's like to... well, actually work with them. People are nervous, friendly, energetic, and all manner of things at heightened states during the interview process. Most of the time this provides a good indication for who this person is but rarely it does not.

In those circumstances, when yes a fundamental mistake has been made, I believe that in theory it's best to end the relationship quickly, for both parties involved. In practice it's obviously not that easy or simple.

I've heard of companies instituting mandatory work days or even work weeks for prospective hires to vet how they will fit into the workplace. That sort of thing is attempting to solve the issue but how on earth do you convince anyone, especially someone already gainfully employed, to go through with that process? I suppose I'd do it for a company I absolutely, positively, had to go work for (very few if any)... realistically it seems hard to accomplish if not rude to request.

Ultimately I think the hiring process is one in which mistakes can happen. What's the most equitable way to resolve them when they do?
The fact that a formal engineering/MBA education isn't a prerequisite for business success is almost a tautology now, especially among software startups. So there is nothing new here.

There are some half-truths though:

> For some reasons, Indians just can’t deal with the fact that someone without pedigree can get somewhere in life.

- Airtel, India's largest telecom company, was started by Sunil Mittal, armed with just a Bachelor of Arts degree from a second-rung university.

- Reliance Industries, India's largest private conglomerate, was started by Dhirubhai Ambani, had no college degree.

- The Zee TV group, one of India's largest media and entertainment conglomerates, was started by Subhash Chandra, who dropped out of school after class 12.

- There are many more multi-billion dollar enterprises like Adani and Sobha, that were founded by entrepreneurs without college degrees.

- Quickheal, India's largest anti-virus company, was founded by Kailash Katkar, never studied after school.

- Maxx Mobile, one of the leading low-cost phone makers in India was founded by Ajay Agarwal, a class 9 dropout.

I could go on.

By insisting that Indians "just can't deal with entrepreneurs without pedigree", the author is at best being disingenuous, or at worst slaying a straw man only to elevate his own achievements.

Finally, the stereotyping in the linkbait title, "The Indian and his insatiable..." doesn't help. As others have already pointed out, people (not just Indians, but around the world) make career/education choices in response to the financial/cultural environment around them.

To the average middle-class parents who grew up dealing with scarcity, low incomes, corruption and limited opportunities, the "multi-national job" represents stability, meritocracy, global opportunities and a respectable income.

There really is no reason to belittle them for their choices.
VC's have been around in India since early 90's, may be late 80's.

But businesses are still stuck in the concept of loans. Its like you take a loan to buy your home(Or if I'm right its called mortgage in the US). Businesses pretty much run on loans. So things get super risky, when you factor in failure. Because lenders are expecting principle amount + interests in returns, and you have to often give some thing as a guarantee(for eg: a house, or a plot) which remains with the lender till you return the amount.

I think the trends are changing now. I heard a senior VC talk at a start up conference here in Bangalore. One of the main reasons why entrepreneurship never took off in India was because people had to deal with what-after-failure scenarios, and then it ends there. If the venture is too risky there is hardly any point trying.
> properly

There's a slippery word if ever I saw one. Does Java count? Python? C? You could make arguments for all, or none, of these depending on what "proper" is.
> Just what we need, more surveillance tech :(

This is more useful to the homeowner and corner gas station than to government installations which have the budget to install good cameras.
The Architecture of Mailinator
This is pretty cool. I like t ad use it since July. I would like to say kudos to author.
NSA will be all over stuff like this when it will happen. I can already see them saying "We've got to know what the terrorists are thinking, to protect the nation."
Are these biases made on both side of the edit war? Some of these articles seem to have pro-Israel bias and others anti-Israel.