skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As Richard Rusczyk (math competitor and now operator of the Art of Problem Solving website) says, "If ever you are by far the best, or the most interested, student in a classroom, then you should find another classroom."

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Resources/AoPS_R_A_Calcul...

He has other good ideas for smart students in his other articles.

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Resources/AoPS_R_Articles...
True but if you look at the DNSCurve website ( http://dnscurve.org/ ) he does state that it "is part of a larger project to encrypt and authenticate all Internet packets."
I love this article. Every little failure in school (failing to win first place in a competition, getting a B on a test) made me doubt my talent, and I started losing all belief in my ability when I started taking graduate-level classes in my field. I knew it was irrational and wrong, but for the previous decade of my life, working hard in school had been a reliable sign of a lack of talent. The kids who had a future in a subject breezed by and the kids at the bottom struggled. Now I was working hard, even struggling sometimes. Did I instantly abandon and unlearn a decade of programming? No. It was like the end of The Crying Game in slow motion, three years of discovering that where I thought there was some talent there was, instead, a disgusting, useless lump of flesh.

By the time I got to graduate school I was overwhelmed with a feeling of inevitable failure. I just couldn't stop thinking about failure. Every time I picked up my books I would think about how humiliating it was not to be good enough. I was actually doing acceptably well in my coursework, at one of the top PhD programs in the country, but it became impossible for me to even sit down and study for any length of time because I was so ashamed. I tried to talk myself into a more sensible attitude, but I just couldn't do it.

I have very few memories of the six months I spent living there. I didn't make any friends and can only recall the names of two people I met there: my advisor and one classmate who was friendly toward me. I remember my apartment and the office I shared. (I remember forcing myself to go to the office to study, and I remember sitting there wondering whether the other students could tell how stupid I was just by watching me.) I can remember a few of the places I went -- the zoo, a restaurant where I ate almost every day, a few movie theaters, a used bookstore -- but I don't really remember being there. I didn't use any drugs while I was there and rarely drank (since I had a policy of not drinking alone.) Yet I don't have any memories of specific times or events. I just remember being in my apartment, being at my desk at the office, feeling stupid, miserable, and worthless.

And so I dropped out and got a job in software. That was very lucky for me: I chose it because I thought it didn't require any real intelligence (which I was obviously lacking) but it turned out to be a good way to put my talent to work.

P.S. I normally post under a different name, but this is kind of a whiny sob story, and I'd rather just get it off my chest anonymously.

P.P.S. Now that I think about it, the only reason I remember my advisor's name is that I later saw him interviewed in a PBS documentary about a famous scientist he worked with.
The only one I can actually think of is QnX, all the rest of the successful Canadia IT companies that I know of are elsewhere, but then again of course I don't know even a small percentage of the Canadian IT business, in spite of having lived there for 5 years.

There's an OS that missed it's chance to displace windows by the way, lightyears ahead of the competition (still is in many ways).

They're huge in embedded systems.
Hmmm... Had a bit of a think about this one. We have some things that we could do with a hand on but don't have the time to do ourselves nor the budget to put out elsewhere. This stuff is mainly developing internal tools for our penetration testing team. If you're a Uni student looking to expand beyond a straight CS degree or go into pen testing or information security I can think of worse ways to spend your summer than helping a bunch of guys out with projects, probably wangling sponsorship for government clearance and getting to help out on real world pen tests - then of course if you do well there might be a job when you finish uni, or at least a set of industry references.

I agree that exploitation is wrong, but the key is to find something that pays you back in ways that will help you, and money isn't always the best way to get paid.
According to wikipedia, amphetamine was first synthesized in 1887, has been used since 1927. Its been almost 100 years.

Ritalin was synthesized in 1954. In use clinically for 50 years.

How's that for data? Pretty good, I'd say. It is well known that these chemicals at high levels eat people's souls, but do not do much physical damage. At clinical doses they're harmless. Some caution in kids for heart shenanigans. They're very well characterized.

I expressed some of the same concerns you did to my doctor when he first prescribed me amphetamine. He told me about his speed freak patients, and how they returned to normal after coming off.
This is absolutely correct. There always has to be more and harder stuff for kids to accomplish. If there's a ceiling, then smart kids will quickly hit the ceiling and then start measuring themselves by how much effort is required to stay there. That's the way it was at my school: all the honors/AP kids learned the same material, and in every class there were at least a couple of kids who got high As on most things. The only way to distinguish yourself was to do it without working hard, because you couldn't distinguish yourself by accomplishing more and harder things.
This is great, I like the core idea of solving the internet's "integrity epidemic" from the starting point of being easily deployable and usable (where things like DNNSEC and IPSec fail). This is the only way things will change... His thought at the end: "When we instead design secure, easy-to-use systems, sometimes they turn out to have perfectly acceptable performance!"
Of course they don't want you to deactivate your account. It's their business to try to retain their members/customers, just like every other company in the world. Now if they are pretending to deactivate your account but leaving it accessible to others, or other shenanigans, then we've something to talk about. But this? Big deal.
Playing with Erlang - I like its approach to errors and parallelization. Plus the idea of a functional language with Prolog-like pattern matching seemed like a cool idea.
Connecting people and trying to sell them things they might like is hardly evil.
Am I the only person that thinks the visualization is the smart part (and wonders why it's not the front page)?
It can, but not officially as far as I know. You can mod the XBox or buy a third party adapter to plug in a keyboard/mouse. Also, modding your XBox can get you banned from XBox live.
Thoughtful outsiders take on the US by Stephen Fry
A second order virtual machine with Falcon
St.Petersburg => Melbourne, AU for me.
They also can mistake business for productivity. For example, there's the classic joke (at least in the sys admin world) about breaking something about a month before reviews, then stay over the weekend to fix it. You will be the savior of the company and be rewarded in kind.

Really good work is hard to see sometimes because it doesn't look like work. If you had two teams, one just delivered on time on and on budget and the other spent a heroic month overdue fixing bugs and finally shipping over budget it might appear that the people on the second team are better. They work more and worked harder than the first team. You might even decide that the first team was given too large a budget and too much time, when in reality they paced themselves and had talented people who could give good estimates and were able to deliver on their promises.

YOU might not make that mistake, but I can guarantee that many managers would give greater rewards the team working overtime to fix (their own) bugs than the one that consistently delivers on time and on budget.

I think it has more to due with the culture believing that software is buggy and impossible to schedule, and rewarding people when faced with those things.
Sure - as you describe it, that sounds quite equitable.
I'd say the way you described unpaid internships, it is pretty much exploitation. The intern is doing essential and valuable work, and is producing value for the company. They should be compensated for it.

The fact that the system is set up to encourage people working for free is simply a setup for exploitation. A mild form of blackmail, if you will; "You'll never get ahead if you don't work for me for free". While an intern might not get paid very much, I think they should at least be able to cover living costs from their earnings.

Most internships I've seen tend to cover a good deal more than that, with pay starting in the ballpark of $20/hour.
They're set up as a real telecom, so they can create numbers for free, instead of having to buy them from another company.
How about letting me put my own referrer ID in it Mr. laszkozm-20 ;-)

Looks good to me (I like how it is succinct and not gawdy), hope it catches on. True suggestion would be to make the "get your own" link point to http://www.lkozma.net/bookbox/ instead of http://www.lkozma.net/bookbox/index.php?mx=8&id=0 because the latter has a bunch of books in the box already.
No-one's suggesting they're doing anything untoward. Just that what they're doing is interesting.
Encrypting and authenticating all Internet packets by adding application-level crypto to each and every protocol in use seems like a Sisyphean task to me. IPSec is more ambitious because it is lower in the protocol stack, but if you really want to encrypt all the traffic on the Internet, that seems like a more plausible approach to me.
Business with style.
Quick note about the spelling thing - I agree on the whole, but you should be aware that there are glaring exceptions. Right now I work a lot with architects, for example, and many of them are very smart and yet have disastrous spelling abilities.

Since I observed that there are smart people who can't spell, I've revised spelling ability down to "weak indicator" of stupidity or poor education. I.e., if someone spells poorly and has a few other things going against them, then the spelling will help decide the matter. But I would not make any rapid judgements on someone's intelligence based purely on their spelling/grammar.
All this helpful information from Valley insiders on how absolutely vital it is to be in Silicon Valley is starting to sound quite a bit like too much propaganda. I don't buy it. But then again, I'm not running a startup in the Valley or elsewhere, so how would I know. It seems reasonable to point out that this has all the hallmarks of self-serving propaganda, whether there is some truth to it or not.
Getting Started With BeepBeep
Whether an optimization is worth pursuing depends on the business requirements, how much the it costs to implement, and whether there are any additional gains beyond avoiding power, space, and personnel costs.

Simply picking an efficient (both for the developer, and in terms of implementation) language/platform can be enough to start with, and will help you avoid being boxed in later.
Verbal communication is just inherently different from communication through the written word.

We've all encountered teachers who lecture "as though they are reading from the textbook". It's the same information, so why should it matter?

I think it has to do with verbal communication being more about interacting with other people. When I see another person lecturing (live or through video), I find it easier to stay focused on what they are telling me. There are all these visual cues that add some extra hooks. And then, of course, the verbal ones. The accents, the pauses, the little jokes or references that are thrown in.

Just think of your favorite stand-up comedian. Compare reading a transcript of your favorite session to an audio recording of that same session to a video of that exact same session. You probably experience them all very differently.

So instead of comparing a text with a lecture, where both share the same subject matter, compare a text of the lecture with a video of the lecture. (Bonus points for comparing a text on paper with a video of some guy reading that paper aloud).
Tweetraising: The Potential For Charities On Twitter
The Retaliation Game
College-aged kids living in a shabby apartment. One's eating noodles and the other is typing on his laptop.

I bet it even smells like a startup.
By Design bugs
Oh ok, sorry about that. I've never owned a 54G, and saw it listed in the Linksys GPL page for source code downloads, so I figured all versions ran it. I guess just some of them do. Thanks for the info!
A new way to keep hydrogen: Plumage power
I believe that the author is ignoring the importance of libraries for commercial work when bemoaning the slow uptake of lessons learned in language research. Learning a new language does not take a long time in comparison to the amount of time required to learn the APIs necessary to be really productive.
Babies' names and the internet: Local yokels
Evolution and climate change: Survival of the less fit
I'm actually moving from a private school to a public school because of this.

I went back to school too soon after having a craniotomy to remove a brain tumor and didn't have the energy to get perfect grades. I'm not sure if I was impaired as a result of the surgery, or if I just realized, in light of it, that life is too short to spend too many nights worrying about what rounding algorithm/grading scale some professor uses.
Its a short term vs long term analysis. If you focus on the long term, programmers are cheaper. Short term, it is easier to throw more hardware at the problem. The part that makes it difficult to measure is estimating how fast it will run on the new hardware. Usually if you use good algorithms and data structures with an architecture that matches the problem, adding hardware will scale the performance. Mediocre programmers rarely can get this right unless they are lucky.
The reply from the restaurant owner would likely be:

1. You bought X, so you now own X, including all its waste products

2. Leaving things you own in places you don't, where other people have to dispose of them, is littering, a crime
So start a company. I (thought I) had an internship lined up for this summer too, it ended up falling through, so I ended up starting a new company.
If they wanted to lower textbook costs, they would not reorganize the chapters and re-release the books every 2 years.
This is all well and good but where do you actually get all this shit? Perhaps I'm too white and middle class but I don't have the first clue as to where to get any of this crap and I don't know anyone who's using it either.
(despite the elaborate caveat below, thank you for the detailed answer to my question; it seems like a very promising thing to try)

But if you treat the 10-minute homework as something not worthy of praise or mention, the child might feel cheated. Other kids are being praised for much less impressive efforts. I know I'm doing better than most in my class; why is this overlooked? Am I being penalized for my smarts? Perhaps I'm better off making the homework seem like a huge deal, and finishing it in two hours of seemingly herculean effort?

The parent may think it right to raise the bar as far as the child's aptitude allows, but the child won't necessarily feel this policy to be fair. And most children are naturally apt at gaming parental policies.
I wonder if it wasn't a coincidence that all the people who Facebook says will miss him are girls (well, and one restaurant)
I really wish Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and everyone else who controlled a decent portion of the net would all just agree to simultaneously put up snarky messages. What if the entire internet did break for IE6, all of the sudden? Given a long, fair warning--perhaps even a TV ad--it could be similar to the analog switchoff.
'is stupid'. Sorry :)
Not only is it their business to retain customers, I think they are also trying to retain your personal data.

I don't really know what their business plan will be, but I'm sure it won't involve normal users paying any money. So they have to make money off of me somehow, whether it is through targeted advertising or selling information to marketers. The current privacy policy allows them to give information from your profile to third parties as long as you cannot be personally identified.

So while I'm not saying they will do anything unethical, an inactive account is probably worth a lot more than a deactivated account.
It bothers me that they won't let you actually delete your account.
Well, one of the best research in compilers and languages, IMHO is applying static analysis and constraint solvers to practical systems (e.g. C) find bugs and/or automatically generate tests to find bugs:

http://www.stanford.edu/~engler/

Coverity is a startup from such research. The new Klee paper is a good read as well.
If you're in a position to fire, you're in a position to have some sort of responsibility for the success of the company. Don't view it as babysitting or coddling; an employee that is motivated and engaged will be more likely to exceed the goals that you set.

I don't have any emotional attachment to my employer, but I'm fiercely loyal to the individuals therein that have listened to, respected, and honestly considered my opinions. I feel a personal obligation to ensure that I meet those individuals' expectations.
Sorry, I'm hung up on your high ability to learn languages. If you only know a "smattering" of another language, how can you say you have a high ability to learn languages?
My point is just about the different between those using and those not - not the degree. In the long term, more powerful stimulants could prove less effective.

One good reason to legalize stimulants is to let more people experiment with them. It would be great to know that taking amphetamine is actually a bad way to work in the long term.

Either way, I'm more excited about non-stimulant methods of increasing concentration. Stimulants seem zero sum, at best.
For Firefox, a Challenging Future Awaits
So what happens to the company at the end of the summer when you go back to school? Will you have enough time to run it, or will it sort of die off slowly?
You know, I'm thinking about buying the neo freerunner simply because I don't like the whole idea of "jailbreaking". Who knows what code is being executed on your phone? Who knows how it will be left? Will you be able to return it back to normal?

Of course, this is entirely my own opinion, but I'll be voting with my wallet, thanks.
Thanks, gaius.
How does industry make us smarter? And why judge people by "modern standards?" Doesn't that just beg the question?
I found this to be pretty interesting: Gus, The Beef Jerky King http://chrisblogs.typepad.com/chris_has_stepped_out/2007/09/...
Computer Science: "an Alzheimer's patient who has forgotten more than he knows."
Wikipedia Mobile Officially Launches
This is not much different from how Gmail invites were sold on eBay. While the invites themselves were no different from each other, auctioning helped the market find the 'fair' price.

Auction price will reflect the current supply and demand, affected by economic conditions and a million other factors. Remember that I proposing that people, not countries, sell their citizenship and move out to a country where they have bought new citizenships.
"running ruby" too.
The Hydrogen Myth
Article implies that was their parent's house...
people can and do naturally achieve extreme focus and flow

Yes, this is obvious, and I wasn't denying that at all. What is not obvious, and what there is no evidence for, is that these states are the same as what is achieved on stimulants. It is my own experience that they are very distintly different, and I would never refer to the effects of speed as "natural". The very fact that they are achieved in humans without use of stimulants should be a strong indication that the stimulants do not recreate the same effect. Lack of focus is not due to deficiency of Ritalin.

it's giving you more of an ability you already have and allowing you to control when you have it.

This is exactly what I am saying is not true. Taking speed does not do the same thing to your brain that your brain is ordinarily capable of doing to yourself. When you take speed, you're not making your brain function like one of a smarter person, no matter how much smarter you feel. Cognition is altered, not just enhanced, and I think it is a huge mistake to ignore that. We don't ignore it when talking about cocaine or any other illegal drugs that people report similarly positive effects from. Why are we so willing to ignore that distinction for these drugs?

There's nothing wrong with that as long as people are aware of what they're doing and it's reasonably safe to do so.

That people believe (as you do) that these drugs merely enhance existing brain function is a sign that people really aren't aware of what they are doing.
That part has yet to be seen. Hopefully, I'll have enough time to run my part, since I'm in it with 2 others.
The question is, though, do we trust the host (IPsec) or the application (application-level crypto)?

It would be great if there were an easy-to-use crypto API that one could just plug into ones apps. Sadly, it is not the case, yet.
I've never been able to focus adequately enough to do well in school. I'm finished with it now but I found my school years to be disapointing because of the lower grades which pretty much shut out any chance of doing undergraduate research or a chance at grad school -- ever. Students rolled their eyes when I asked a question, professors sighed and shuffled their papers at me when it was time to return exams. I always felt like I was being judged and looked down on during school years.

One possible explanation that I can't shake is that I never belonged in college or grad school anyways. At least it's over now.

Nowadays I get to look forward to being judged by my colleagues. Until I retire or die.
Twelve companies that are targeting early tech adopters
In defense of DHH & the Rails community
And "cucina" is a feminine noun, right?
> I'm talking about the garden-variety fantasy: Put your calling in a lockbox, go out and make a ton of money, and then come back to the lockbox to pick up your calling where you left it.

His researched book "What should I do with my life?" is interesting, in a college alumni notes kind of way, for picking up and opening to a random page and reading one of the 70 profiles (which are categorized). It's a great coffee table book for kindling conversations.

I liked the profile of the woman who was a top toner sales executive.
Facebook is probably using an algorithm that picks from among the friends that the user has interacted the most with. At least that's what I would do if I were implementing it. They already use such an algorithm internally to detect if your account is compromised (i.e., if the set of friends with whom you communicate changes sharply at some point.)

Given that Facebook might be doing this, it is likely that the top few friends would be of the opposite gender, in a heteronormative context. This intuitive expectation has been confirmed in research studies of social networks. e.g., http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jure/pubs/msn-www08.pdf ("people tend to converse more frequently and with longer durations with the opposite gender").

Perhaps pc can confirm/refute whether this is true in his case?