skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At the time it was mostly just fun for me, sounds like the situation is the same for him. I think it's a balance, you want to pursue your interests to the point where they show your ability, but also deal with enough of the BS required to get into good schools (like studying for the SATs or getting good grades in HS classes).

College is a great idea because it's entirely possible his interests will change in school (I almost switched majors like 3 times) and for everything other than programming, college is still a prerequisite.

Edit: Oh when I was 17 I also thought applicants were super prepared and it was intimidating. In reality most kids at elite schools didn't have a scary level of preparation, and a lot of those kids with perfect resumes never got in. Admissions are still a mystery to me.
We only know those things that we know. The NSA must still have some secrets.
I don't care who digs it up if it's factual.
Is it possible to rush spring semester? I think I missed out on rushing fall this month. I guess my main concern is being hazed and dealing with all the negative stories I've heard. Are there any fraternities you recommend?
(This is probably fake but it's still worth a try.)
Wow, was away from the computer for a bit, came back and now all these great thoughts. I'm very genuinely grateful--thank you!
Java is a pretty boring language, it must be said. But that's what makes it so good for real world usage - its got a lot of library support and many issues tend to have been ironed out already. Couple of weeks ago I was using Selenium's WebDriver SDK with a Ruby client program. It failed in some obscure TCP/IP stack error coming out of the C Ruby implementation. Using a java client just worked.
If you like singing, your commute is an awesome time to practice. Make a mix of some challenging/fun sing-along songs and just go for it.

And like so many things, if you sing for an hour a day (30 minutes each way!) you will get a LOT better at it.
I know you're joking, but keep in mind that the metallic object that "polevaulted" into the Model S battery pack did so with ~25 tons of force. On this board, you're just going to get thrown off.
GTA V smashes several Guinness World Records
This article diversified what I thought a good designer was. I always thought that a designer should be able to find the right font, design, colour and icons for a project.

Looking further into it there are a lot more to consider and more important points such as UX and interaction. I agree that UX and interaction is important but didn't realise it is that highly rated.
Microsoft’s $7.2 Billion Nokia Bet Not Luring Apps
Protesters Adopt Highway to get Close to NSA Data Center
No need to use backticks, so you can implement it into your app without hating yourself.
Buying a pair of second hand programmers
messagepack+redis looks /very/ useful. thanks for the comment!
Thank you for the input. I tried to be more anonymous before, but I noticed myself dropping hints here and there. I guess that make is already too difficult. But I guess it doesn't hurt to try.
Just 7 minutes a day!
I want to see some intelligent discussion here! When I read the article, the first thing I did was to come to Hacker News to find the discussion.

So, anyone? :)
How many smartphone users will there be in the US?
Quite right. I wouldn't entrust my life to TrueCrypt, and hope nobody else would either.
Steam Dev Days Conf (Jan 15-16)
Even less if you don't talk much:

http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/prepaid-plans ($30/m for 5GB of 4G, unlimited text, 100 minutes)
Tiffany Necklace On Sale|Tiffany outlet
It is possible to make a legal argument that a Linux-specific device driver is in fact derivative of the Linux kernel code that it interacts with. If said argument is made, then no matter what the author of said code says, it may actually be forced to be GPL v2.

I am not a lawyer, and I have no real idea how likely said argument is to hold up in an actual court. It also seems unlikely that anyone would actually file a lawsuit about this sort of stuff. But if you want to be as careful as you can be, you won't go wrong if you use the GPL v2 on principle for a Linux device driver.

On this topic it is worth noting that Linus Torvalds has stated different seeming opinions at different times. In general as more and more of the Linux kernel has been made available to loadable modules, he's become less and less inclined towards the argument that they are not derivative works. See http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Kernel/proprietary-kernel-modules.... for a comparison of his views at two points in time. (I don't know his current views.)
fyi, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_von_Neumann_Whitman
The Linux kernel guys are an impressive bunch. I've helped but I'm not in their league. I did BitKeeper to help Linus. He's a great programmer, architect, and manager, and in ~25 years in the industry I've never met another guy with his skill set.

In spite of all the shit I've taken for the choices I have made, I'd do it all over again to help Linus. That guy is unique. I know you guys like him but I think few people really realize how unique he is. He's a big deal, I am not.
Ten Hacktivists Who Shook The Web
If the jobs were in the same place I would lean towards Hootesuite, but an internship is the perfect chance to checkout SF without overcommitting. I've worked in Vancouver before, but only visited SF. I just can't decide if living in SF is a good enough reason to base my decision off of.
What if it is just in a REALLY big orbit.

Something is illuminating it, so it must be remotely near a star, we cannot even image pluto like that.
It'll certainly be huge step forward -- I sometimes go to Japan, and it's hard to find pay phones these days, and they make me jump through a lot of hoops getting prepaid phone there, if that's even possible as a foreigner...
NSA Reforms Under Threat
Capitalism being what it is, no one is required to buy a PS4 or anything else that they do not want to (please do not take me into a rat hole about healthcare or other government mandated purchases). If the only source of water was to purchase it form a corporation that enslaved people I'd get your point, but we're talking about a PS4... it's a video game console... a PS4 does not matter that much if you really care about taking care of workers.
Talking about creation is one thing, but these religions bring a whole host of other things into play as well that you cannot ignore.

There is no evidence for any of the rest of it, no evidence of interference by gods, no evidence of any real communications either. So saying you think the universe was created by [a conscious entity?] a god is entirely different than saying that you believe in a particular religion and all its narratives and usually inherent contradictions.
It's hard to win bidding wars with nation states. It's even harder to make such victories matter: after all, they can always switch to doing security research and exploit development in-house.

Instead of trying that, we're catering to two groups of researchers:

1) Those who are not comfortable with the idea of selling weaponized exploits to the highest bidder for unspecified offensive purposes, and

2) Those who like to find bugs, but don't want to spend days or weeks to develop reliable, weaponized exploits for resale.

As it turns out, there are thousands of extremely prolific researchers who fall into these buckets; the number of "black market" players is much lower than that.

The reason why all of this matters is purely probabilistic: all this scrutiny limits the number of remaining vulnerabilities that can be leveraged for nefarious purposes, and limits the lifespan of any already-known 0-day bugs.

Now, having said all that, your comment is more applicable to vulnerability reward programs - which this isn't :-)
>>Those two are actually somewhat mutually exclusive. Either you believe that some kind of deity "uses" evolution as a tool, at which point people should ask themselves what the point of having gods is if they're not actually doing anything measurable at all.

That is the most basic methodological problem with Intelligent Design. The claim is that there are gaps where "intelligence" injects itself into the evolution of living things. The funny thing is, every gap is very well hidden and looks exactly like the result of evolutionary processes and builds on the same design patterns that have already been established.
Cardless ATMs allow you to get cash with your phone
That could be a short term challenge since Sprint is all CDMA and T-Mo is all GSM. Wouldn't have any short term benefits, but the long term could be big.
Agreed. Thank you for writing stuff I agree with.
I'm pretty sure they're just measuring the blackbody radiation it's giving off in the infrared spectrum. This thing is about half the mass necessary to ignite fusion and become a brown dwarf, and it's very young, so it's still got a lot of heat.
Not only is it not about how something looks, but design under this premise sets you back.

You are forced to make a conscious effort not to focus on looks to finally focus on how it works. You are better off without looks.

I've heard of a usability study that found people are afraid to interact with pretty websites. They prefer ones that look simpler. I wish I could find a reference and read it myself.
Any company that has suicide nets and barred up windows is breaking some serious humanitarian laws. Free labour aside, the bleak truth for many of these students who are going down the professional track is that their country's industry isn't large enough to offer most of them placements.

Despite being smart, hard working and well educated, many will have to go into manufacturing like this after they graduate. The article talks about Xi'an that's roughly in the centre of the country, a good distance away from the international East coast where the majority of the professional appointments are.
Just don't forget, sweatshops are better than no employment at all. Though it is bad that they exist, they are a sign of progress.
Internships are highly variable and your experience depends on the team you're on, your projects, your mentors, etc.

Assuming you have been offered to join roughly the same team/role at both companies, etc. etc., I would advise you to go with Zynga. Is Zynga as a company on the way down? Probably. But putting aside Zynga's poor product performance, Zynga remains a well-recognized/assessed engineering brand, whereas HootSuite is relative less of a brand. Zynga has plenty of challenging and interesting engineering problems for you to tackle. And as you've said yourself, having worked in Vancouver before, it's an opportunity to check out SF.
I've always wanted to try this any tips?
One man's forced labor is another's "real world work credits to finish your degree". This seems to be a storm in a teacup that will naturally play very well for historical reasons.
The same difficulties with identifying individual species today were faced by Darwin in the Origin of Species. That is in fact exactly what the title of the book refers to.

>>BTW: Earth does not orbit around sun. It orbits around center of gravity, which is not even inside Sun.

The center of gravity of the sun-earth system is most certainly inside the sun. If it wasn't, the sun would perceptively move as the earth orbited it.
Good Cultural Fit
Apple, Sony, and everyone still uses Foxconn to make their stuff and it appears no one has boycotted the client company's products over it. I think as it stands right now, it makes them money.

Of course morally, someone should fix it. However, the market hasn't created a financial incentive.
Consequences do exist, although it's still very minimal. This may prompt Sony to do something as significant as Apple's move though and actively audit the companies they work with -

In one case, Apple terminated its relationship with a
component maker after discovering 74 cases in which
underage workers were being employed. Apple also found
that an employment agency had forged documents to allow
children to work illegally at the supplier.

Apple reported both the supplier and the employment
agency to the local authorities, the company said in its
latest annual report on the conditions in its supply chain.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/26/technology/apple-labor-aud...
He lives in China.
The title makes this out to be worse than it actually is: SA didn't actually ban all software under permissive licenses, but requires the use of non-free software to complete its courses. Though I'm not extremely in-tune with SA politics/education, I can't imagine they have much money, making it all the stranger that they'd lock themselves into licensing with Microsoft instead of using free software.
It's someone's job to know. I knew a buyer at a major office supply company. The buyers' responsibilities included occasional visits to the factories where suppliers made the products that were bought and then put on sale in the stores. This particular company had standards that they held suppliers to. When a buyer found workers at a factory with duct tape on their mouths, people living in squalor in the "dormitories", child labor or any other nonsense it was not uncommon for those suppliers to be thrown out of the store if it was not corrected. This was for a few million dollars worth of back to school supplies.

There's no way someone enters into a multi-year, multi-million dollar contract for high end electronics without ever visiting the factory and knowing what goes on there. They know damn well what kind of conditions exist and chose to do business with the supplier anyway. If they didn't know then they're too stupid to have their job.
10. Practice gratitude – increase both happiness and life satisfaction

This is true. A lot of us ungrateful in life sometimes and we forgot the little things like family, friends and having some basic things we need in life to survive.
Look out Google: Disconnect says its no-track search tool is taking off
I won't comment on the merits of the subpoena itself, but I find it somewhat amusing that a company so focused on data[1] is arguing that it can't deal with "hundreds of thousands of separate records spanning millions of [Excel spreadsheet] cells."

According to this[2], Airbnb's "world-class" team has built some pretty impressive systems to deal with significantly greater amounts of data ("20 terabytes of new data created daily").

[1] http://gigaom.com/2013/07/29/airbnb-is-engineering-itself-in...

[2] http://www.bigdatarepublic.com/author.asp?section_id=2635&do...
The Cast of that 70's Show Reunites
That is my point exactly! As you stated, it is not designed to be used. I have huge respect for Jonathan Ives. Steve Jobs is quoted as saying "Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." I think Mr. Ives forgot about that when he was working on the Leica. And that is why I am surprised he let his name go on such a poor design
Pluto is tiny and cold. Big planets emit lots of infrared from internal heat. Jupiter still radiates more heat than it receives from the Sun (source: wikipedia)
In contrast, my win98SE desktop took 4'30" to boot back in the day. I know this because I decided to time it after yet-another-BSOD-while-gaming...
Trust me, I understand the cynicism, and we deserve every critical comment we received here. The good news is we can only get better. :) After the experience of Arturas and the iphone touchid fake $10k pledge, we all have to be on alert when money and publicity are involved.
XMPP Federation over Tor Hidden Services
Scientific Data Has Become So Complex We Need New Math to Deal With It
No, the $30 plan is a pre-paid plan. This new offering is only on the post-paid plans.
53% of Brits prefer Bing to Google in blind test
I am surprised no one has commented on this one. Task Warrior looks pretty impressive for a command line task management app. The one thing I need that Task Warrior, org-mode, Trello, and all of the rest, do not have is a way to schedule/plan my work... I over-commit BIG time, I need help understanding what I've committed to do and controlling that work. I've had great success w/ Scrum and tools like HP Agile Manager and Rally in a professional setting, but I need something w/ the same effectiveness for my personal work.
Just, please not on public transportation!
I used b-mobile in Japan for a pre-paid data-only SIM earlier this year. They will even mail the SIM to the airport so it is waiting for you when you arrive.
Speed of light says 3-5 hops will always be a bad thing and there's nothing we can do about it.
I've used T-Mobile for about 10 years total. I've also used Sprint for two years. I live in the city so my reception is pretty much identical to every other mobile service as long as I'm in the city. When I leave the city, T-Mobile is not as good as my friends who have Verizon, but then again they are frequently paying close to twice what I pay. I figure that if I can get good service 99% of the time while living in a city and deal with lesser service that 1% of the time I'm not in the city, that is a compromise that I'm glad to pay much less for.
You could always donate them - http://www.domains4good.org/

I haven't used it personally but seems like something worth checking out.
I highly recommend doing a 10-day silent vipassana course. You can find centers world wide at http://dhamma.org
They are free and are non-religious, and tremendously helpful.
If you have freedom of movement, then you can move to a place that has freedom of speech.

If you have freedom of speech, then you can grumble about being prohibited from traveling. But you are highly unlikely to have the influence to get the law changed.
Even in San Francisco, we can't use it everyday. We have ridden it in Seattle and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Ask HN: Prefab frameworks vs custom within your own open source projects?
I'm working on a large'ish open source platform which is meant to be heavily extensible via third-party modules.

On the one hand there are a lot of nice prefab JavaScript MV* frameworks out there, of which I have some experience with. If I expected to be the only person, or nearly the only person, writing code for this project I wouldn't hesitate to grab a pre-existing framework.

That said, in this particular circumstance I can think of a few potential downsides to choose a prefab framework:

1. Trying to keep up with versioning of a prefab framework sounds like a potential nightmare. I want to be able to focus primarily on features for the application/framework itself, and not be a slave to the version of JS framework that lies beneath the surface.

2. There is so much fragmentation within the JS framework space that whatever I choose would leave a majority of people unfamiliar with it (and possibly alienated). If I rolled my own for the project everyone would at least be on the same page.

3. Something as foundational as a MV* framework demands that you somewhat marry it. You can decouple all you want but swapping from Backbone.js to Angularjs (or vice-versa) is not a small task for anything non-trivial. The codebase for my project is large enough that whatever choices are made, will have to be lived with for some time. I really dislike the idea of marrying my own project's success or failure to any one prefab framework. (e.g., some new hotness comes out tomorrow and perceptually makes what the project uses look like yesterday's garbage - doesn't seem like it would be such an issue if the foundation was custom in the first place)

So roll-my-own MVC architecture, or would using a prefab framework within my project be less of hassle than I'm worried about?

Thank you in advance for any constructive experience/opinions!
Re the title: yes, and no. At first glance it seems alarmist, but if you take into account the wider implications (no exposure to free alternatives, extra cost to a population mired in poverty, and general lack of exposure to IT for large parts of the population), it's not too far from the truth.

Funding for the education department has been increased drastically over the last decade or so, but misappropriation of funds, mismanagement, corruption, ineptitude, geographical separation, lack of proper oversight, and just the sheer pressure on the system in terms of the amount of learners it needs to support means this is just another thing that reduces the value for the learners from tax money.
To be fair, Mono exists, and contains a free implementation of C#.
They absolutely know.

I awarded a Chinese factory with a low five figures contract and I know exactly how everything is processed and made. For billions of dollars or purchase orders, I am pretty sure you can expect at least the same level of service.
No, I think he's mad about the blatant corruption behind the decision. Our government does't even hide it anymore.
Well, not everyone can be a star.
It matters for numerical methods, which are frequently used in optimizations and simulations. A recent example: https://www.circuitlab.com/blog/2013/07/22/double-double-ple...

That's why many math packages (eg. Mathematica) provide arbitrary precision arithmetic.
ha, by the title I thought this was going to be about a 10-day silent vipassana meditation retreat - I just got back from one a few weeks ago. In case you're interested you can read more at http://dhamma.org
Do check out Vend (1) who are looking to change this paradigm.

Here are some thoughts.

The POS business is littered with devices that were designed for purpose by giant companies like NCR and IBM. Their primary customers were very large corporate retailers, the cost per unit and for development was prohibitively high and because these were giant corporate IT projects the results were awful for the end users.

At the lower end the retailers got those really basic electronic cash registers (ECRs)with lots of buttons and LCD displays showing numbers only. These were out of Japan mostly and usability was not a priority.

The biggest issue with these ECRs was that they were trying to solve too many end-user requirements, so they all sucked for all but the most simple transactions.

With the PC a bunch of DOS and then windows based retail POs systems emerged - mostly awful usability due to Windows and DOS. The best did made it very efficient for a particular industry. E.g. for service stations their systems were integrated with the pumps in the forecourt and a back office system, all of which likely linked to the oil company. But it all stalled for years until the cloud and iOS based systems came along.

Right now we are in a moment of rapid change, with the end-user experience becoming hugely better for both the customer and the retail assistant. Still plenty to come so watch this space.

(Source 4 years in Mobil Oil, 2 doing payments and POS projects, 2 in the field, and I'm an investor in Vend)

(1) http://vendhq.com/
Emperor Zuckerberg
s/Sidney/Sydney
I recently mentored two high-school interns at a Fortune 500 tech company. My goal was to give them a real experience in what it's like to work at a big company (code for I had no budget to woo them w/ fancy dinners, concerts, toys, etc.) and to give them real work. They built a useful mobile app. I gave them minimal supervision, directed and helped when I could... based on their feedback I think it was a huge success. I'm glad the company I work for considers interns as an opportunity to train up the next generation of great programmers, managers, and leaders, and practically realizes these people are their next employees. If I'd exploited them as menial labor (getting me coffee, processing mail, doing boring work) they'd lose out and my company would too. Perhaps China has a labor pool large enough to develop and exploit at the same time (that's sad if they do).
> " This may prompt Sony to do something as significant as Apple's move though..."

Where do they [or Apple] go if not Foxconn? Foxconn is huge. Moving production elsewhere, even outside of a major product launch, is likely in the realm of the infeasible.